DSCF0078

ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

expenditure exceed the budget they laid down; and he kept his promise.¹⁵⁵ As late as 1687 the Exchequer could with impunity venture on sharp criticism of his decisions, for he recognized that they proceeded from zeal for his service;¹⁶⁶ but there was never any ąuestion but that he was master. Already in 1677 he was capable of overriding the unanimous objections of his naval experts by insisting on the experiment of wintering the fleet in the Blekinge skerries.¹⁶⁷ If he left the prosecution of the Regents mostly to the Great Commission and its successors,¹⁵⁸ he inter-vened personally on numerous occasions to steer the course of the reduktion. Even on foreign affairs no step could be taken without him, no despatch opened save in his presence.¹⁶⁹ Historians cannot agree upon whether the proceedings at the Diet of 1680 were the result of a deliberate plan for the establishment of absolutism;¹⁶⁰ and they differ upon the extent to which Charles really guided the course of events thereafter. But the guess may be hazarded that the tendency to reduce his share in the revolution has been carried too far. Policy, in the last resort, was his, if only by reason of his choice of ministers and his maintenance of them in office; and upon administration his influence was continuous and astringent. His intelligence may have been of the military variety; but his force of character was a major factor in politics.

To a king such as Gustav m, Charles xi seemed but an ignominious representative of royalty, who soiled his hands in business best left to underlings, and had no notion of spending money on buildings or the arts, as a good king should. This ungendemanly parsimony was grievous also to his contem-poraries,¹⁶¹ and his shabby clothes, familiar manners, and crude sense of humour repelled the fastidious. Louis xiv dined grandly in public; Charles xi ate one-course meals privately at his mother’s house to spare his own pocket.¹⁶² There are moments when, in his paternalistic view of kingship, his wary determina-tion to see for himself, his greed for money - or rather, for the security that money can buy - he recalls the great figurę of Gustav Vasa; and certainly his rebukes to the negligent or the peccant at times sound like authentic echoes of the fulminating Vasa style.¹⁶⁸ If Gustav Vasa ran Sweden as though it were his own manor, Charles xi ran it as if it were a quartermaster’s Stores. But while Gustav Vasa was a man whose very faults and

III iii

111 llpf n III

IM

I 1 \' ! i I Jl i I , Ili I \'h ł 1*1 ' i *

CHARLES XI

failings were touched with elemental grandeur, there was undeniably something ignoble about Charles: as Anders Schón-berg temperately put it, ‘It is not easy for posterity to see him in all respects as a great man.’^{1 2 3}®⁴ Yet there was something noble about him too: his integrity, his determination to do his best, his strong if narrow piety, his warm devotion to his subjects, his genuine goodness. It was this that moved Geijer to write that ‘he was not only the first man in his kingdom, but also the best’.¹®^{5 6} Some of his remarks about his job have a disarming and touching simplicity: ‘It is fidelity and righteousness that I have pledged to my subjects, not intelligence or wisdom’;¹⁶® or again, ‘I do not knowingly do wrong if I can help it’.¹®⁷ Not for him the untroubled self-assurance which found the metier du roi ‘delicious’. But though he shunned embarrassing inter-course with those who were morę intelligent, morę polished, and morę articulate than himself, and though ceremoniał dress sat awkwardly upon him except when he was on horseback, he had the Vasas’ knack of getting on terms with the common man: as ‘King Greycloak’ (Kung Grakappd) he is the hero of many a local legend.

259

1

have tried in this lecture to suggest that the reign of Charles

2

xi, so drab in appearance, so difficult of access to the foreigner,

3

was a period when something of real conseąuence was happen

4

ing. The Swedish peasant was for ever delivered from the threat

5

of servitude. The bureaucracy moved into the central position

6

in Swedish society. The finances, the administration, the army,

7

the navy, all underwent constructive reform. And Sweden was taught (though the lesson took some time to learn) how to live as a second-rate power. But it was also, of course, a period of destruction, when much that was old and venerable was swept away. The ideals of the rać/-constitutionalists were blasted. The high aristocracy’s grip upon the State was loosened, and they were stripped of the rewards of generations of public service. In 1680 Sweden was still a society in which great peaks of wealth and power towered high above the ordinary man. By 1697 a ruthless process of attrition had ground them down into a smoother and morę glaciated landscape. It was the first step towards the egalitarian society of modern Sweden. The men of the Age of Liberty, looking back at Charles xi’s years of peace