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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

better provided, certainly, than at any time sińce the death of Gustav Adolf. This was in striking contrast with developments in Denmark, where Frederick m’s coup had been followed by virtual bankruptcy, and by emergency measures which included considerable alienations of crown land; so that by the end of the century the share of lands in private hands had risen by nearly 20 per cent.¹¹⁹ In Copenhagen, absolutism meant financial weakness; in Stockholm, it meant financial strength. By 1697 Charles had reduced the national debt from 44 million daler s.m. to 11 million, and had nearly two million put away in the vaults to meet an emergency.¹²⁰ He was conseąuently able not only to free himself from dependence on the foreigner but also to pay his servants: not handsomely, indeed, as he often lamented;¹²¹ but adeąuately and above all regularly. The famous estimates of 1696 laid down peacetime scales which served Swedish statesmen as the norm for recurrent expenditure until as late as 1809.¹²²

As Lagerroth noted,¹²³ this was the fulfilment of a pro-gramme which had originally emanated from the constitution-alists of the rad, in protest against the personal and ad hoc administrative pracdces of the earlier Vasas, and it was ironical that it should now be put into effect by the monarch who had struck down that party for ever. From the time of John m the high nobility had demanded the right to serve the State, and therefore demanded also that service be regularly organ-ized and properly paid. In the early seventeenth century they had captured the administration; and this, among other reasons, had prevented the sale of offices by the crown, which would have been intolerable to a class concerned to assert and preserve a monopoly of senior posts.¹²⁴ But now that monopoly was for ever ended. The lesser nobility had broken through the barriers, their status was henceforth guaranteed by the Table of Ranks, their wages assured by the solvency of the crown. The Professional civil servants, no less than the king, emerged victorious in 1680. And one conseąuence of the comparative impoverishment of the high nobility was to drive morę of them than ever to seek a livelihood in the service of the State.

Thus the absolutism which Charles established was not only a theocratic, but a bureaucratic absolutism. The nomination of Jakob Gyllenborg, a typical bureaucrat, as Marshal of the

CHARLES XI

Nobility in 1693, was symptomatic of the new age.¹²⁵ Hence-forth Sweden was to be essentially a bureaucracy; and perhaps a ‘meritocracy’ too. The power of making appointments had been wrested from the hands of the magnate-class, and trans-ferred to those of a monarch whom the bureaucrats could trust, because he was in so many respects one of themselves.^12fl Office would now be open to all nobles, Iow or high, and increasingly to all commoners also;¹²⁷ it would provide the short cut to enhanced social status, the avenue to ennoblement - which indeed came to be almost automatic upon attainment of a certain grade, and was accorded the morę readily because the crown no longer recognized any obligation to provide a peer with an estate capable of supporting his dignity. Office became a sound investment; sińce with the ending of royal donations (which formerly had served in lieu of pension) office-holders were driven to evolve the ackord- system, whereby they were able to sell their offices to their successors.¹²⁸ The primitive and highly personal methods of administration of all the monarchs from Gustav Vasa to Charles ix had meant that in Sweden offices were unusually slow to go ‘out of court’: hence the long persistence of the phenomenon known in Swedish history as ‘the rule of secretaries’. But the reign of Charles xi sees the virtual completion of the slow process of evolution which changed the office-holder from a royal instrument into a servant of the State. The king was, no doubt, vividly conscious of the personal relationship between himself as master and his ministers as seryants; but he would have been the first to acknowledge that both they and he were the servants of the country: the main difference between them, perhaps, being that he had been appointed to his office by God. Certainly he attended to his duties with the regularity and conscientiousness of the dedicated civil servant. Plodding, accurate, a slave to detail, wedded to routine, too godfearing and too concerned for his subjects’ welfare ever to be a tyrant, yet too careful of the state’s interests to find magnanimity easy, he had all the gritty ąualities of a Joseph h without his intellectual powers or his civilized graces. Unmoved by the hope of glory or the attractions of polite society, ubiąuitously vigilant, he struggled ceaselessly ągainst disorder, apathy and corruption. And with success: for the first time (as Emil Hildebrand remarked) the

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