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ES8AY8 IN 8WEDI8H HI8TORY

any case irrelevant to timcs of pcacc. The plain truth was, that in peace-time Sweden was too poor to be able to kcep large armies on foot for very long. If a sudden emergency compelled her to raise troops as a precautionary measure, the only escape from the financial strain seemed to be to move them with all speed into foreign territory. On purely financial grounds, mobilization probably entaiied war: Charles x had found it so, in 1655 and 1658; Charles xi was to find it so in 1674. The Swedish empire, moreover, was exceptionally vulnerable: it was widely scattercd, sundered by the sea, and dependent for survival on long Communications which might be cut by enemy action, or blocked for months on end by ice.⁷ In these conditions the most that could be done was to give the overseas territories a nucleus of troops which could perhaps hołd out until help should arrive from home; but even this was a strain upon available resources.⁸ If, then, Sweden was now to find the task of defending her empire almost beyond her capacity, what hope had she of maintaining herself in the position of a great power? What claim to be treated as the equal of France, and Austria, and the Dutch ? Was it conceivable that she should fili the leading part which the Westphalian settlement had assigned to her?

The ink was hardly dry upon the treaties of 1660 before these questions pressed upon the Regents. They were soon forced to halve the size of the army.⁹ And they found themselves driven to base their foreign policy on the maintenance of the balance of power, and the preservation of the status quo as it had been established in 1648 and 1659. If this could be done, if peace could be preserved, Sweden’s inabihty to compete with the great powers might perhaps go unobserved. But if it could not, national pride would compel participation: as Admirał Stenbock remarked, ‘when others arm, Sweden cannot sit stiir.¹⁰ In either event, they were forced to face the fact that even in peacetime they must look for foreign subsidies in order to be able to maintain the army and navy in a condition sufficiently respectable to render Sweden safe from attack.¹¹ But from the beginning it was a delusion to suppose that a policy of balance could be successfully pursued by a country already coming to be notorious as a subsidy-hunter. The financial carelessness and incompetence of the Regents, the

CHARLES XI

chronic exhaustion of the trcasury, put Sweden very much at the mercy of her paymasters. Balance was indced (pace Fahlborg!) a chimera, when pursued by a power as weak as Sweden already was: her pretensions, as has been wcll said, were contradicted by her impotencc.¹² She could no longer tip the scales in Europę, still less imposc her arbitrament. The experience of 1672-4 afforded no justification for the naive expectation that Louis xiv and the Emperor would mcekly regulate their conduct in conformity with Magnus de la Gardie’s view of the correct interpretation of the guarantee clause of the Peace of Westphalia. Only very sanguine statesmen, bemused by past glories, would have thought so. Had they so soon forgotten their own resentment at the proceedings of the Hague Con-certs?¹⁸ It may be freely admitted that those oldcr historians were mistaken who condemned the French alliance of 1672 as simply a financial gambie by a govemment at its wits’ end for money; it may even be conceded that it was possible for men to believe that the European balance had tipped so plainly towards the Emperor that Sweden’s alignment with France had some transient justification. But the policy of redressing the balance in France’s favour by the formation of a neutral błock in Germany had already been condemned in advance by its author: as recently as October 1671 de la Gardie had told the rdd that ‘he who opts for neutrality usually enjoys beneficium Polyphemi* ,¹⁴ Georg Landberg has rightly stigmatized their ‘lack of that grip upon reality without which even the most refined argumentation is yitiated’.¹⁵ By 1674, ™ &ct,- they had contrived to put themselves into a position where they could neither afford to be neutral, nor not to be neutral. In the end French blackmail, madę easy by de la Gardie’s laxness or incom-petence in drawing the terms of the subsidy-treaty, was able to drive them into just the sort of preparatory military movement which, in the existing financial stringency, was almost certain to escalate into war, however little they might desire it.¹⁶ Such a foreign policy is hardly susceptible of rehabilitation. The best that can be said for the Regents is that they did no morę than make the worst of a situation which was admittedly beset with formid-able difficulties. Yet throughout the period sińce 1661 it had been the height of their political ambition to play the part of mediator in Europę: in 1673 a member of the rdd even described

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