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On Aristocratic Constitutionalism in Swedish History, 1520-1720¹

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11 is just a hundred and twenty years sińce Anders Fryxell, goaded beyond endurance by the historiography of his day, was provoked into publishing the first of a senes of pamphlets entided On Anti-Aristocratic Prejudice in Swedish History.^la Fryxeil’s object was to enter a protest against the school of thought which subscribed to Geijer’s dictum that the history of Sweden is the history of her kings, and which saw the nobility as the viUain of the piece. And it must be conceded, even by those who do not think well of Fryxell, that his protest was essentially dignified and temperate. The ensuing academic fracas, alas, was neither the one nor the other, at least on Geijer’s side. But it did give rise to two vigorous and long-lived schools of historians, both of them happily still with us; and in the first decade of the present century their leamed wrangles became for a time part of the stuff of contemporary politics, in a manner famihar from the historiography of the French Revolution.² The controversy, among its other effects, helped to confirm Swedish historians in a habit which was already well established: tfie habit of viewing the constitutional history of their country, from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, ąs essentially a struggle between monarchy and aristocracy>-And until quite recently this view of the matter has passed almęst without ąuestion. In the last few years, however, there has been a tendency to see the problem

ON ARISTOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONALISM

in less clear-cut terms: monarchy and aristocracy, it is argued, had morę in common, were less absolutely opposed (even in the domain of political theory) than was allowed for in the older stereotypes.³ This is undoubtedly a salutary and overdue exercise in historical revision; but those who practise it can scarcely contend that they are doing morę than putting nuances and perspective into an historical picture which had hitherto been a trifle flat: the main outlines have not really been dis-turbed. There is no denying that for some four hundred years much of the inner tension of Swedish history is provided by the clash of crown and nobility; that the nobility did aspire to set bounds to the power of the monarchy, by devices which make it plausible to think of them as the proponents of something which may be very loosely termed a constitutional programme; and that the only altemative to that programme for long seemed to be a form of govemment which without any pejorative inten-tion can be called absolutism. Therejwas, certainly, an aristo-cratic constitutional tradition. It wdlbe the object of this lecture tóTrjrto gange the importance of that tradition within a limited period of Swedish history, and to view it, not from the point of view of the historian of political thought-on which ąuite enough has been written already⁴ - but with the morę pedes-trian and pragmatic purpose of attempting to determine its practical effectiveness. The ąuestion I ask myself, then, is this: what share has the aristocratic tradition in the establishment of a constitutionarr^ime in Sweden, and what^id~itcfó fluring these two ćenturies to secure those basie liberties of the subject which a constitutional regime is designęd to proyide?

The fundamental document in Swedishconstitutional history is Magnus Eriksson’s Land Law, drawn up about the year 1350.⁵ It was the first general cdde of law fer aU thc-Swedish ^royjnęes; but for our present purpose its importance lies rather in the fact that it also defined for the first time the law of the constitution. In this respect it had an influence upon Swedish history similar in kind to that exerted by Magna Carta upon the history of England. The Land Law laid it down thaŁdfremon-archy was to be elective, and that the king’s accession was to be conditional upofThiS acceptance of a coronation oath^ By that oath he undertook that no subject should suffer Wtss-of-life, lłberty or property save by due process of law; that no new law