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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

should be madę save with the consent of the commonalty; and that the country should be defended out of the ordinary reven-ues of the crown: except in four ipecially enumerated cases the king was to impose nó new taxes, but was to live ofhis own. He was to be advised by a council [rad) comprising the archbishop and bishops, together with twelve lay magnates. But this body was not the king's council: it was, and was already called, the council of the reałm (ńhsrad). Though the king selected its lay members, they were in no sense his ministers; they held office, in all ordinary circumstances, for life; their ręsponsi-bility was not to him but to the community of the realm. And their most important function was to see to it that the king and his subjects observed the pledges which each had given to the other at the coronation; to act as mediators between mon-arch and people; to maintain the balance of the constitution. Upon the demise of the crown the royal authority reverted to them: in an electoral monarchy they occupied the position of a permanent residuary sovereign power.

It is here, then, in the council as the Land Law defined it, that the tradition of aristocratic constitutionalism takes its rise; and until late in the seventeenth century the heart of that tradition was what Swedish historians cali ‘council-constitu-tionalism’ (radskonstitutionalism) .⁶ In the century and a half which intervened between the Land Law and the accession of Gustav Vasa it acąuired increasing strength and consistency. In 1371 the council extorted from an alien king (Albert of Mecklenburg) the first of those Accession Gharters (konungafór-sdkran) which were designed to provide guarantees for the redress of grievańces, or explanatory glosses upon the generał formularies of the coronation oath. It deposed Erik of Pomerania in 1439 because he showed signs of trying to make himself an absolute ruler. It forced Christopher of Bayaria^ in the 14408, to admit its right to y-eto appointments and grants of fiefjs ; and the revised version of the Land Law which was issued in this reign⁷ contained for the first time a royal promise tomie !ivith the councilcounsel’ [med rads rade) - a formula destined to echo through the constitutional debate for centuries to come. In the 1430S the council secured the eustody and contro! of the great seal of the realm; and, at a time when the administratiyę machinery of the monarchy was still primitiye^ established its

ON ARISTOGRATIC CONSTITUTIONALISM

own chąnęery, with the bishop of Strangnas as permanent ex officio chancellor. It was already customary for the king to obtain the council’s assent to taxation, as a necessary prelimi-nary to approaching the provincial assemblies. The circum-stances of the Scandinavian Union, especially after 1440 - with an absentee king in Copenhagen, and a regent in Stockholm precariously maintaining a semi-independence - afforded poli-tical opportunities of which the council took fuli advantage; and in the 1470S and 1480S the pretensions of the magnates reached a climax._f In 1476 they tried to force Christian 1 to concede the right to legał rebełlion;⁸ in yB^jhey drew up, in the Recess of Kalmar, the most extreme statement of council-constitdlionallsuT^eyer to be formulated.⁹ It included the demandTtHat the council should have the right to judge between the king and his subjects; that councillors should be free to afford refuge on their manors (which they were to be allowed to fortify) to persons arraignecLby the king; that they should have control over their own membership, be recognized as sovereign authority in the king’s absence, and be ‘kingsover their own peasants’ - by which was meant that any fines imposed on such persons should go, not into the king’s pocket, but into the lord’s.

It is no wonder that Anders Schónberg, contemplating this document in the euphoric atmosphere of the autumn of 1772, should have exclaimed in horror that ‘if Anarchy could be established by Law, this should surely be called an anarchical jconstitution’.¹⁰ No king ever accepted the terms of the Rece^_ of Kalmar in toto; but its historical significance was very great. For two centuries it was a constitutional ideaT to 'which the , high nobility intermittently recurred, sometimes in curiously inappropriate circumstances.

Such was the basis of the aristocratic-constitutional tradition, as it came down to the Sweden of Gustav Vasa. It was in one important aspect an inter-Scandinavian tradition, common to the councils of all three realms; but it had also evident affinities to those ideas of a regimen politicum which were generally current in the fifteenth century. It commanded the support of an epis-copate fearful of royal interference in the processes of canonical election; and it was, ąuite obviously, a useful stalking-horse for the economic interests and political ambitions of the closely-interrelated cliąue of great landowners from whom the council

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