Kings-at-Arms

This was the second expedition against Norway that the King had undertaken since his return from Turkey, both in the dead of winter, to the astonishment of Europe; it seemed tha...

By the first day of October, Peter, after ravaging Ingria, found himself before Narva, swiftly bearing the thunders of his vengeance against his Northern rival, who, despite the...

The answer from Adrianople was to the effect that the Swedes were to leave Bender at all costs and that all who resisted were to be forcibly ejected, and, if need be, slain.

Peter held his councils in the Kremlin surrounded by the pomp of the old world and the new; the reforms that he had introduced with so fierce and imperious a violence had not as...

Augustus had promised to allow her to conduct secret negotiations with Karl; she was to travel as soon as possible to his camp, and through the influence of Count Piper, an anci...

When M. Pfingsten returned to Poland with the articles of peace that no amount of interviews with Count Piper had served to alter, he found his master once again in Varsovia, in...

Peter was still at Marli, superintending the building of his new capital which was rising out of the filled dykes and drained marshes of the desolate flats of the banks of the N...

A lady, haughty and fierce in her natural character, but schooled to at least the outward show of a cold patience by long years of training in submission to the wills of men, sa...

Seated on a low chair near him was Danilovitch Mentchikoff, who regarded him with an expression like that of a favorite dog who has been beaten, and who waits patiently until hi...

Having taken advantage of the accident of Karl to spread the news of his death, he summoned a convocation of the Polish nobles, and in the reaction occasioned by the belief in t...

Peter, with an army of 60,000 trained men, officered by Germans, obtained secretly from the Emperor of Austria, who was alarmed by the near approach of the terrible Swede, march...

Nearly four years after the battle of Poltava on a cold clear day of early spring the Pasha, who was governor of the Turkish province of Bender, turned sadly away, followed by h...

Karl, returning to his camp after having beaten one of the advanced detachments of the Czar’s army, was noticed by General Rehnsköld to be colorless as a man of stone, and when...

Laden with the plunder of Poland and Saxony, the spoils of their brilliant feats of arms, the Swedes, amid the January ice, marched on Grodno, the several parties of Muscovites...

Karl, having given a new King to Poland, and satisfied his somber pride by being an “incognito” spectator of the election of the man whose elevation he owed entirely to Sweden,...

The Czar Peter listened in silence to the news from Poland; he had appeared lately to have forgotten the war, and to have become entirely absorbed in the building of his new cit...

The short Russian summer was in the commencement of its glory; a clear sunshine penetrated the groves of beeches and firs, the thickets of lilac and senna plant, and shone on th...

She was in her beautiful chamber in the Palace at Dresden, seated on a low couch piled with cushions of shimmering brocade, holding in her long fair hand a letter from the Elector.

Karl, having sufficiently humiliated the Emperor and Augustus, and having firmly established Stanislaus on the uneasy throne of Poland, had no longer any need to prolong his sta...

“He seems like a child to me,” she answered, “and if,” she added, “you think so well of him, why do you come to bargain about him with a woman whom you think is a greedy adventu...

It was three months after his bitter failure when the King of Sweden had scattered his immense forces in a few hours, and he himself, coming with the reinforcements from Pskov,...

Karl was advancing on Grodno, and the affairs of Augustus looked daily more unfortunate; at the last moment he had wished to stop this journey of the Countess, and to send a for...

The unhappy Augustus went swiftly on the path of disaster; when Aurora von Königsmarck failed and returned making the best she could of a poor tale, the King-Elector appealed to...

“I think you have no idea of the confusion of my affairs--nor of their apparent hopelessness. I speak of them to you because you are the only person whom I can trust.”

In July of that year Karl XII totally defeated the Saxon troops and forced the passage of the Dwina, near Riga, at a point where the river was nearly a mile wide, making use of...

Count Piper stood looking thoughtfully at the King; he was wondering if the young man was sober enough to make it worth while speaking to him; he doubted this, and yet time was...

The nightingale had ceased to sing and there was no other living creature abroad; the swamps beyond the wood were devoid of life, the night sky had the lead-colored look of the...

Louis XIV had begun his reign by conquests perhaps as considerable, but his victories had been won by proxy; his cause was not so fine nor his behavior so remarkable, and his va...

Karl ran out, mounted and galloped, in company with three generals, towards his little camp. He was in time to see the 300 Swedes surrounded and overwhelmed by the Turks to whom...

Karl was conducted to Demotica, a little town some leagues from Adrianople; a few of his suite were allowed to be with him and the rest of the Swedes were kept in prison.

The army that had foiled and humbled him ever since Narva was no longer in existence; the terrible Karl was in exile, without allies and with nothing to rely on but the exhauste...

He was eighteen years of age, of a superb constitution, perfect health, and noble descent, absolute monarch of a prosperous and well-governed country, troubled by neither plots...

For the second time the horses drawing the King’s litter were killed--only three were left of the four-and-twenty guards who accompanied him. Other soldiers hurried up, and bega...

Karl was as the fight had left him; he had slept in his coat and top-boots, to the great amazement of the Turks, and received M. Fabrice seated on a divan covered with costly cu...

A freezing night in November, a cutting wind sweeping up from the Baltic, a sky so black with heavy clouds that not a star gleamed through, and the sentries on the walls of Stra...

“Presque toutes ses actions, jusqu’à celles de sa vie privée et amie, out été bien loin au delà du vraisemble. C’est peut-être le seul de tous les hommes, et jusqu’ici le seul d...