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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

that he was bound to seek advice if he felt that he did not need it? And was the rdd entitled to offer advice unasked? When such ąuestions as these were in the air, it showed a certain lack of realism for members of the rdd to be talking of the Recess of Kalmar - the most extreme expression of the political preten-sions of the mediaeval magnate-class.⁷⁴ Already the rdd had been put in the dock with the Regents, to answer for past mistakes; and they now added a mistake there was no retriey-ing. They gave Charles unsolicited advice against proceeding with the reduktion, and they declined corporate responsibility for past errors on the ground that they were an Estate of the realm, which could not be indicted en bloc.⁷⁵

The king saw his chance and took it. He addressed to the riksdag an enąuiry, in which he asked them whether the Form of Govemment was binding upon a king of fuli age; whether the obligation to rule with the advice of his council (med rads rade) implied that he could not rule without it; and whether the rdd was in fact an Estate of the realm. The answers he received were in his fayour on every point. The king, they assured him, was bound by the Land Law, and not by the Form of Govern-ment, which he was free to alter; consultation with the rdd was at his own discretion; its claim to be an Estate, as also its pretension to act as an ephorate, was explicitly condemned; and the king was declared responsible only to God.⁷⁶ It was a reply which brought to a close three centuries of constitutional controversy; it was the end of monarchia mixła in Sweden ; it was a bloodless Linkóping.⁷⁷ In 1682 the official title of the rdd was changed from riksrad (council of State) to kungligt rdd (king’s council), Charles explaining that the older name might suggest some distinction between the service of the king and the seryice of the State.⁷⁸ And though this particular change lasted only as long as the absolutism lasted, the diminution in the power and constitutional authority of the rdd proved in fact definitive and irreversible. In vain did the constitution-makers of 1719 explain that ⁽with the advice of his council’ meant ‘not without, still less against’:⁷⁹ semantics could not put the rdd back in the position it had occupied in the Age of Greatness. Henceforward the members of the rdd would be ministers - servants of the king, or of the Estates, as it might happen - but for all their ermined hats and velvet robes, their

CHARLES XI

grave eloąuence, composed countenances, and traditional senatorial dignity, they would never be what they had been in the period of Charles xi’s minority.⁸⁰

If the utter occlusion of the rdd, and its meek acceptance of its fate, were sufficiently surprising, what happened to the riksdag was scarcely less so. Since 1634 all the signs had seemed to point to a futurę in which the riksdag would gradually take over the function of a constitutional regulator which the rdd had hitherto discharged.⁸¹ Two long minorities had done much to ripen adolescent parliamentarism to self-conscious maturity: in 1660 the first Estate was claiming for the Diet something like a pouvoir constituant.⁸² And even in the years sińce Charles’s majority they had shown no lack of enterprise.

In 1675 they had taken the initiative in demanding investiga-tion of the Regents’ actions; they had claimed the unheard-of right to scrutinize the minutes of the rdd; they had insisted upon the appropriation of supply.⁸³ At Halmstad in 1678 they had presented the crown with a comprehensive programme of domestić reforms.⁸⁴ Yet now they tumbled over each other to throw away the gains of the last half-century. To loaded ąuestions from the king about the interpretation of the law and the extent of the royal prerogative they sent answers ever morę yielding, couched in language ever morę servile. By their answer of 1680⁸⁵ they in effect declared the king irresponsible before the law. Parliamentary free speech they abandoned without a struggle;⁸⁶ the king was suffered to remodel and conflate the resolutions of the several Estates to suit himself;⁸⁷ his right to legislate on generał matters (and not only on economic affairs, which had always been reserved to him) was half-conceded, and tacitly acąuiesced in.⁸⁸ When in 1686 Charles promulgated an Ecclesiastical Law without consulting them, they madę no objection. With the coming of indelnings-verket, as we have seen, their control of troop-raising (and hence of foreign policy) came to an end: no doubt they madę the less difficulty about it, because they knew how pacific that foreign policy now was. Only the right to grant or withhold taxes remained, and even that was compromised in 1689.⁸⁹ Now it is true that the Estates had scarcely ever taken advantage of their tax-granting power to extort concessions from the monarchy: when they did so in 1675 their purpose was essentially to defend

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