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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

was recruited. But by 1520 thcrc was set over against it another political trend, morę modern, morę broadly based, and as the event proved morę powerful: the trend to a hereditary monarchy, emancipated from the restraints of election-pledgeg, centralizing rather than provincial in emphasis, domain-acquiring rather than fief-granting. etałiste in its attitude to the church, prepared to hamess an instinctive xenophobia and stand forth as leader of a ‘national’ cause. And, not least, prepared to look for political support outside the circle of the high aristocracy and the upper ichetons of the church — to the miners of Dalama, the burghers of Stockholm, the lesser nobility and the ecclesiastical careerists - and to seek legał sanction for its actions not so much in the approval of the council as in the backing of a relatively new body, the riksdag, In the last half-century of the Scandinavian Union the regents (ńksfórest&ndare) of the Sture family all at one time or another cultivated these allies. Sten Sture the younger, especially, sought their support in the pursuit of his dynastie ambitions. His method was to unitę the Estates in a formal act of conjuration, in which he and they swore to stand together, ‘one for all, and all for one’, and so to leave his aristocratic rivals in the position of being dissid-ents from something that could be represented to be a national front.¹¹ The constitutional łssue thus became entangled in the controversy over the continuance or rupture of the Union. But this aspect of the question was not essential to it. What was essential, was the confrontation of antagonistic political ideals: on the one hand limited monarchy under oligarchical control, on the other popular absolutism. The Stures had in fact posed the great question which was to dominate Sweden’s domestic history for the next two centuries. They had established that tradition of demagogie kingship which was to endure until j 789;¹² they had forged the long-lasting alliance between king and Estates. As long as that alliance subsisted, no victory for constitutional principles could be otherwise than precarious and fragile. The way forward to a modem constitutional rłgime could henceforth lie only along one of two roads: either the coimdl and the aristocracy must be able to enlist the riksdag in support of their prpgramme; or the riksdag itself must maturę suffiriently to fight the battle of liberty on its own account, without regard to the magnates’ leadership. The constitutional

ON ARISTOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONALISM

history of the Vasa period is the record of Sweden’* failure to advance in either direction.

2

Gustav Vasa was the political heir of Sten Sture, inheriting his ambitions, employing his tactics, succeeding where he had failed. His reign seemed to mark the finał defeat of aristocratic constitutionalism; which did, in fact, go underground for morę than forty years, The great council families had been hard hit by Christian ifs ‘Blood-bath of Stockholm’; the council itself was weakened by the exclusion of the episcopate after 1527; while the king, immensely strengthened by the plunder of the church, was able to resume the great fiefś, amass a vast accu-mulation of manors in his own hands, and rule the country through his bailiffs. The royal pledges imposed by the Land Law were robustly brushed aside whenever the king found it inconvenient to adhere to them; the council ceased altogetherto act as regulator of the constitutional machinę; the king fbłłowed its adsdcje, or ignored it. as he thought proper.¹³ Even the ultima rafia of rebellion availed nothing against a monarch with money to buy guns and mercenaries. When Gustav Vasa felt the need to provide his actions with an emphatic stamp of legahty - as in J527, or 1544, or 1560 - it was to the ńksdag rather than to the council that he tumed to ohiain it; and the Estates on their side madę no difficulty about throwing an occasional and transparent veil over what had iajfact becomefe patemal absolufism. A dedsiye moment came in 1544, when the king, fresh from his triumph over the most serious rebellion of the reign, secured their acceptance of the Succession Pact (arofórening).¹¹ This was, indeed, one of the great tuming-points of Swedish history. By transforming Sweden into a hereditary monarchy (as the Stures and the Oldenburga had both failed to do) Gustav Vasa des-troyed the very basis upon which aristocratic constitutionalism rested; for in fifteenth-century Sweden hereditary monarchy had generally been taken to imply unlimited monarchy.¹* Henceforward, it seemed, there could be no pledges esacted as a condition of accession, no Charter estorted to reinforce those pledges. The battle which the council had fought all through the fifteenth century seemed lost. And if the Succession Pact was

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