Charles XII of Sweden - Death

Death

In 1718 Charles once more invaded Norway. The main force consisting of 40,000 men laid siege to the strong fortress of Fredriksten, overlooking the border town of Fredrikshald. While inspecting trenches close to the perimeter of the fortress on 11 December (30 November Old Style), 1718, Charles was killed by a projectile. The shot penetrated the right side of his skull and exited out of the left, destroying most of his brain in the process. The invasion was abandoned, and Charles' body was brought across the border. Another army corps under Carl Gustaf Armfeldt marched against Trondheim with 10,000 men, but had to make a retreat, during which many of the 5,800 remaining men perished in a severe winter storm.

The exact circumstances around Charles' death are unclear. Despite multiple investigations of the battlefield, Charles' skull and his clothes, it is not known where he was hit exactly, and whether the shot came from the ranks of the enemy or from his own men. A popular but unproven theory is that the murder was an act of conspiracy made by his sister's (Ulrika Eleonora) husband, Fredrik, who was crowned Fredrik I.It is believed that the murder was committed by Fredrik’s aide-de-camp, André Sicre, who confessed to the murder during a state of delirium brought about by a fever and later recanted the statement.

There are several theories as to how Charles died that night, though none can be given with any certainty; although there were many people around the king at the time of his death, there were no witnesses at the actual moment of death. The most likely theory is that Charles was killed by enemy, having been within easy reach of the Danish guns and could have been hit by grapeshot or a sniper’s bullet. Other possibilities are more sinister; one claim says that the enemy guns were not firing at the time, and that his killer could have been one of his Swedish enemies. Suspects in this claim ranged from a nearby soldier who was supposedly trying to put an end to the war, and Charles’ own brother-in-law, who took the throne as Frederick I of Sweden. It was also possible that a plot to kill was hatched by wealthy Swedes who would profit from Frederick’s abolition of Charles’ 17% tax on capital that he had intended to introduce.

Another odd account of Charles’ death comes from Finnish writer, Carl Nordling, who states that the king’s surgeon, Melchior Neumann, dreamed that the king had told him in a dream that he was not shot from the fortress but from “one who came creeping”. The body has been exhumed on three occasions to ascertain the cause of death; in 1746, 1859 and 1917. The 1859 exhumation found that the wound was in accordance with a shot from the Danish fort while the other two analyses found that he had been murdered.

The most far-fetched explanation of Charles’ death comes from a folklorist Barbro Klein, who put together a thoroughly researched paper on his hypothesis in 1971. The theory all starts with a fragment of metal that was brought into the museum at Varberg in May 1932 by a master smith named Carl Andersson. Anderson handed over a “two half-spheres of brass filled with lead and soldered together into a ball, with a protruding loop that testified to its former use as a button” and it had been found in a gravel pit near his home in 1924. One side looked to have been flattened by an impact with something hard.

According to Klein, this fits perfectly in with the Swedish folklore that Charles’ magical protection, (in contemporary times, he was rumoured to be of such strong breed and character that he was bullet proof) had been broken by a killer who shot him with the king’s own coat button. Furthermore, a soldier was said to have found the bullet, brought it home and bragged about it to a local priest, who warned him that the killers might come after him. He threw it into the gravel pit that Andersson found it in a century later. The kulknappen or bullet-button story is further corroborated by other evidence; the soldier who found the bullet and brought it home was called “Nordstierna”, which really was the name of a veteran of the Northern War who worked in a farm at Deragard where the bullet was recovered from the gravel pit. The second piece of evidence is that this bullet is a very close match to the size of the bullet hole in Charles’ hat. The third and most compelling piece of evidence is the fact that traces of DNA on the bullet came from someone with a DNA sequence possessed by only 1% of the Swedish population. An analysis of the blood sample from Charles’ gloves puts him in that 1% bracket.

Charles was succeeded to the Swedish throne by his sister, Ulrika Eleonora. As Palatinate-Zweibrücken required a male heir, Charles was succeeded as ruler there by his cousin Gustav Leopold. Georg Heinrich von Görtz, Charles' minister, was beheaded in 1719.