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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

pamphlet Pro Lege Rege et Grege (1587) hc clearly recognized this.²⁰ But the Stures and Gustav Vasa had shown how easily the Estatcs could be captured and used by a skilful and unscrupu-lous ruler; and Erik xiv, very recently, had employed them as a weapon against his aristocratic enemies. The experience of the 1590S was to provide ample confirmation of these dis-ąuieting examples; and already by 1594 Sparre seems to have been doubtful whether the riksdag could be trusted to uphold the rule of law against the crown.⁸⁰ Duke Charles of Sóderman-land was reviving, with terrifying and sinister virtuosity, the tumultuary parliamentarism of Sten Sture; and his crude, emotivc eloąuence could sway the Estates as might best suit with his obscure ambitions. Since this was so, Sparre had no option but to fali back on the safeguard provided by ‘the leading personages of the realm’ [de fomamsta)³¹ - to stand fast, that is, upon the Land Law’s remedy: the council, rather_ tjian the riksdag, must be the watchdog of the constitution. Thus, once again, political necessity forced the council party into a position in which the popular representative element in the constitution was divorced from its obvious leaders. It was a misfortune which henceforward was to weaken the cause for which Sparre stood.

The political confusion of the 1590S brought to the front another difficulty closely related to that of defining consent. This was the problem of the proper body to apply sanctions, if sanctions should be needed. With whom, in the last resort, lay the right of rebellion ? In the terminology which Althusius was shortly to popularize, who were the ephors? Sparre seems to have eąuated the ephorate with the council. But there were other candidates for inclusion: the episcopate, for instance, and above all the royal dukes. The ąuestion became of importance after 1595, when Duke Charles, backed by the church and the ‘grey multitude’, began a course of opposition to King Sigis-mund which eventually led to that monarch’s deposition. It is easy to see that Charles was exploiting Protestant panie and class animosities for his own purposes: the religious crisis, at least, was largely factitious.⁸² What was at stake was, in the first place, constitutional propriety, and in the second, the rule of law itself. And on this the council rightly refused to com-promise. They declined to violate their oath of loyalty to their sovereign by following the duke into rebellion: the ephorate, in

ON ARISTOCRATIC GONSTITUTIONALISM

fact, refused to revolt. But by taking this linę they offered their adversary a chance to un-Whig them, and Charles was not the man to miss it. It was easy to represent Sparre and his friends as the supporters of popish despotism; it was scarcely less easy to enlist the riksdag to override the reluctant ephors. The real constitutionalism of the council was over-trumped by the sham constitutionalism of the duke. He was able to contend that the riksdag had inherited the functions of those electoral assemblies which in the Middle Ages had been charged with the task of ‘taking and breaking’ kings; that in them inhered the right to doom Sigismund from his kingdom, if they thought proper.³³ At Linkóping, in 1600, this theoretical dispute was settled in a severely practical manner: the heads of Erik Sparre and three of his colleagues fell to the axe of the executioner, and the shouts of Hen Omnes summoned Charles to a throne which was declared vacant. It was a political murder worthy of Henry vm.

The blood shed at Linkóping, like Erik’s killing of the Stures, poisoned the monarchy’s relations with the high aristocracy; and Charles^ propaganda found it expedient to take the linę that the council had sought to compass the extinction of the Vasa dynasty in order to revive elective monarchy, or even to set up an aristocratic republic. The young Gustav Adolf was brought up to believe that Sparre and his friends had aimed at a constitution which would have given them a status equiva-lent to that of the Electors in the Empire.³⁴ There was just enough of truth in this to make it credible; and henceforth such accusations would be among the standard weapons in the royal-ist armoury. Erik xiv in his day had found the explanation for his repeated matrimonial failures in the sinister intrigues of the aristocracy;³⁶ John and Charles had blamed their fraternal ąuarrels upon the deliberate fomentation of the council.³⁶ In Christina’s time Axel Oxenstierna would be suspected of aiming at a Polish republic,⁸⁷ and Magnus de la Gardie accused of trying to prevent the queen’s marriage.³⁸ Thirty years after that Johan Gyllenstierna’s enemies asserted that it was his object to ensure the extinction of the dynasty by involving Charles xi in war, debauchery and political follies;³⁹ and when Charles xn fell in the trenches before Fredrikshald the suspicion of a murder instigated by factious interests long persisted.⁴⁰ Tales such as these did not lack believers; and this is perhaps

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