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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

what they conceived to be the crown’s interests, by exposing the delinąuencies of the former Regents. The king’s right to raise money in an emergency had always been tacitly accepted and the issue implidt in Hampden’s case was scarcely even raised. The great social and constitutional crisis of 1650 had demonstrated that the lower Estates, so far from using the crown’s necessities to secure parliamentary control of expendi-ture or policy, were concemed to get a reduktion (as the Estates of Brandenburg also were)⁹⁰ in order that henceforward the monarch might be enabled to live without parliamentary grants at all: the constitutional opportunity (as it seems to us) was allowed to slip; constitutional progress was secondary to the social struggle.⁹¹ But though the riksdag had thus shown no great amdety to enforce its control of taxation, it had hitherto been vigilant to maintain the position that every new levy of conscripts was a grani, and a grant which by this time only the riksdag was competent to make. Yet this too they now sur-rendered.⁹² The ąuarrels between the Nobility and the non-noble Estates put the king in a position where both appealed to him as arbiter. A błock of King’s Friends terrorized their opponents by delations, threats of royal displeasure, and organized parliamentary uproar.⁹³ There seemed no limit to the concessions the Estates were prepared to make. They passed an extraordinary act for expunging from their own records (and later extended it to the minutes of the rad) every expression which might seem to impugn in the slightest degree the sover-eignty of the king: sińce the dead could not recant, they were to be for ever silenced.⁹⁴ And at last, in 1693, they voted a declara-tion which defined absolutism in the broadest and most un-compromising terms: Charles xi, they resolved, ‘is by God, Naturę, and the crown’s high hereditary right. . . an absolute sovereign king, whose commands are binding upon all, and who is responsible to no one on earth for his actions, but has power and might at his pleasure, as a Christian king, to rule and govem his kmgdom⁵.⁹⁵

The absolutism thus established obviously had features in common with other absolutist regimes on the continent. The in-sistence on Divine Right; theextreme doctrine of raison d³ etat; the interference with munidpal, as well as parliamentary liberties; the attempt to impose uniformity upon provincial institutions,

in Livonia and in Skane, and to codify the law; the sim-ster extension of the Roman law doctrine of Ike-majeste so that it became (as Fatkul⁹⁸ found) a high crime and mis-demeanour even to speak against the redukłum⁹⁷ - all these had parallels elsewhere. But when that turbulent priest Jakob Boethius denounced it in 1704 as ‘a damned French system’⁹⁸ he was wide of the mark indeed. For Charles xfs absolutism was throughout permeated by a consistent, if somewhat literal-minded, respect for the law: indeed, it was based upon an interpretation of Magnus Eriksson’s Land Law, though admittedly an interpretation which was unconventional and probably unhistorical. He did not hesitate to take advantage of legał andquarianism. He occasionally put pressure on the courts." But on the whole Charles xi was content to take for the State the uttermost farthing that the law allowed, but not one farthing over. His regime knew nothing of esocatwns: the common law was good enough for the state’s servants, and woe betide the official who tried to strain it in the crown’s favour. The dvil service was repeatedly reminded that it was their duty to refuse obedience to Ulegał orders.¹⁰⁰ Charles by no means considered himself, as did his brother of Denmark, absolved from the obligation to conform to the law:

Although [he wrote] we can in certain cases be said to be above the law, in that we have the power and right to alter, declare or moder-ate the law when some evident reasonableness or indispensable necessity demands and permits it; yet without such cause, and in the ordinary processes established by us, to make any alteration, or to esteem ourselves so above the law that we should not be willing to permit our subjects to enjoy and use it to their defence and security -that is something quite alien to our kingly office, and incompatible with our subjects* well-being.¹⁰¹

Or again, when it was suggested that he confirm a disputed will:

The crown needs not to confirm the will, if it is in order, for then the law itself confirms it; but if it is not in order, the crown’s confirmation cannot make it so.¹⁰*

He would never have decided legał cases according to his own private notions, as Frederick m did; nor conferred an acad-emic degree by prerogative action.¹⁰³ He did not claim, as Louis xiv seemed to claim, an ultimate right to his subjects*

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