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ESSAYS IN 8WEDI8H HI8TORY

It might appcar, then, that the tangible achievemcnts of aristocratic constitutionalism were scarccly proportionatc to the pother that has bcen madę about it. At best the king was kcpt firmly pegged to the letter of the Land Law. But it was one of the difficulties of those who sought to set bounds to the king’g power that the Land Law, unshakably embedded as it was in the fabric of the constitution, was drawn in antiąue terms which no longer had relevance to existing conditions, or were at best vague. In regard to extraordinary taxation, for instance, it stipulated for the consent of each province, given through a body consisting of the bishop, the lagman_t and a jury of six nobles and six peasants. By the second hałf of the sixteenth century such bodics had long sińce ceased to meet. One of the purposes of Charles ix’s proposed revisionof the Land Law was to remove this antique anomaly and bring the law into conformity with cxisting constitutional practice." It was still common ground that taxation and legislation reąuired popular consent of some sort; but nobody now was certain of precisely what sort. Until th&jiksdag estąblishcd an undisputed claim to be the only organ through which that consent was to be given - and it can hardly be said to have done this much before. 1660 — the constitutional situation was in this respect remarkably fluid: hence the use, in the Charter of 1611 and the Form of Government of 1634, of such imprecise formularies as ‘the consent of those whom it concerns’.¹⁰⁰ The king was left with a wide area for manoeuvre: as late as Charles x’s time he negotiated with provincial gatherings, as well as with the riksdag,¹⁰¹ The prerogative was admitted to be elastic; and perhaps one reason for the long continuance of this situation was that it was never outrageously abused. Few kings in this period were sufficiently arbitrary or tyrannical to provoke much popular support for a constitutional movement. Apart from Erik xiv, who was mentally ill, nonę was a really intolerable ruler. When John iii boasted that he intended to rule absolutely ‘hereafter as heretofore’,¹⁰² it was not a threat to make anyone’s blood run hot or cold. Sigis-mund’s ‘tyranny* was a political myth propagated by his cnemies; Charles ix^,s —like Gustav Vasa’s —was a shrewd trading upon his political indispensability. The absolutism of Charles xi after 1680 was always kept carefully within the letter of the law, and in any case had the nation behind it. And even

Charles xn - the most despotic of them all - provoked no serious discontent until his desperate finał years. The monarchy did indecd lay very heavy burdens on the Swedish people. But it is impossible to be blind to the fact that, on the whole, it was popular. And it was popular because it was personal and paternal - the very ąualities which were threatened by Erik Sparrc’s plans for a civil service which should be national, rather than a haphazard collection of royal servants. The crown was the common man’s refuge, his ally, his safeguard against injusticc and oppression; and this concept of monarchy per-sisted until far into the eighteenth century, as the popularity of Adolf Frederick and the support for Gustav m make elear. As supreme dispenser of justice, the king must be accessible to those of his subjects who might need his aid. All good kings were so: it is ironical to find the council remonstrating with John m because of his slackness in this regard.¹⁰³ The burden which this accessibility imposed was one main reason for the creation of the supreme court in 1614,.¹⁰⁴ To ‘go to the king’ (ałiga till kungs) was a precious last resort for those who were exposed to the violence of the strong, or who found their simplicity ensnared in the meshes of the law. And what drove thenLto the king, often enough, was the greed or oppression of the nobility -and not least of that high nobility which provided council-constitutionalism with its leaders The nableman had his private manorial codę (gardsratt), and his manorial prison top; alleging that the long intervals between sessions of the ordinary courts madę these adjuncts to agriculture a necessity.¹⁰⁵ When sessions-time at last came round, the peasant might well feel that his chances were not much improved, for the nobleman would probably preside, in person or by deputy, in the county court (haradsting). The lord’s power of designating his peasants for the militia enabled him to discipline his tenants; his acąuisi-tion, by alienation from the crown, of the right tp the fiscal contributions of tax-peasants, threatened them (if they were tardy in payment) with the loss of their rights of ownership. The townsman resented noble encroachments upon municipal privileges; the clergy, drawn largely from the peasantry, sym-pathized with the peasant’s plight. To all the lower Estates the main danger to Liberty, by the middle of the seventeenth century, came not from the unconstitutional actions of the king,

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