He became reigning duke in infancy, upon his father's death in 1702 at the Battle of Kliszów, co-ruling, however under guardianship till 1717, with his father's cousin King Frederick IV of Denmark in the Duchy of Holstein, a Holy Roman imperial fief, and the Duchy of Schleswig, a Danish fief, there as a vassal to the Danish-Norwegian king.

He was then placed in the care of his great-grandmother (his mother's paternal grandmother), Queen Dowager Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, who reportedly spoiled him terribly, resulting in making him passive and indolent.

Charles Frederick was in a tense relationship to his aunt Ulrika Eleonora, whose followers pointed him out to be too rude and arrogant and in lack of any sense of responsibility to be a suitable heir to the throne.

However, his aunt Ulrika Eleonora the Younger (1688–1741) managed to wrest the throne for herself, claiming that her elder sister had not "acquired the consent of the Parliamentary Estates" for her marriage to his father, according to laws of succession laid down in Norrköpings arvförening.

The duke's party asserted that the absolute monarchy in Sweden, which his grandfather King Charles XI had created, made that marriage clause irrelevant.

[1] Charles Frederick withdrew from Sweden, eventually settling in Russia, where in May 1725 he married Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna, elder daughter of Tsar Peter the Great.

The party made preparations and awaited the childless Ulrika Eleonora's death, but Charles Frederick died before his aunt and left his claims to his infant son.

Charles Frederick left for Hamburg, as the Gottorp ducal share in the duchies of German Holstein and Danish Schleswig had been occupied by Denmark since 1713.

Charles Frederick, then commander of the palace guard in St. Petersburg, attempted to secure his wife's succession to the Russian throne upon the death in 1727 of her mother, the Empress Catherine I of Russia.

Before a member of the family of Holstein-Gottorp was to sit on either the Swedish or the Russian throne, Duke Charles Frederick died in 1739 in Rohlfshagen,[2] today part of the town of Rümpel.