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EB8AY8 IN SWEDISH IIISTORY

thus thc sign of the crown’s victory, the solidity of the success was guaran tced by thc character and policy of the victor - by Gustav Vasa*8 intensc pcrsonal application to thc business of govcrnmcnt, and by his long-hcadcd caution in avoiding foreign advcntures. The first cnabled him to run the country with the assurancc and authority of an improving landlord; the second, by making it possible for him to retain in his hand the gains of the Reformation, left him at the end of his reign richer than any Swedish king bcfore or sińce. He may at times have behaved like a grccdy and ruthless tyrant; but at least he conformed to the Land Law’s reąuircment that the king should live of his own.

By 1560, thcn, the tradition of council-constitutionalism seemed as good as dead. Gustav Vasa’a Testament did indeed proyide for checks upon the king’s freedom of action;¹⁶ but they werc checks to be applied within the dynasty, by the royal dukes. And even these were swept away by Erik xiv.¹⁷ Erik’s absolutism was morę obvious, morę explicit and morę capricious than his father’s: his coronation-oath was so brief and so vague as to be almost perfunctory.¹⁸ He imported into Swedish king-ship the practices of Machiavelli¹⁹ and the high prerogative claims of the Roman Law. His rule borę with especial severity upon the high nobility; for his pathological suspiciousness led him to see, in the surviving members of the Sture family, rivals who were plotting to deprive him of his throne. These mor bid fcars, and his exalted notions of his royal rights, combined to produce the catastrophe of i^G^^ when Erik, doubling the parts of judge and executioner, murdered Nils Sture with his own hand, and forthwith lapsed into insanity.²⁰

It is probably as a direct outcome of these tragię ęvents that we must sec the vigorous and unexpectęd revival of aristocratic constitutionalism in the last three decades ofJhe century. The rising which led to Erik*s deposition in 1568 may very well have been no morę than the defensive reaction of an aristocracy which felt its neck endangered by Erik*s incalculable proceed-ings. But it was tlie beginning of a renewal of conscious poli-tical activity by the high nobility as a class. They were deeply wounded and disturbed by the advance to power of a kew class of royal secretarięs, often of mean extraction and few scruples. In the two decades afler 1570 they grew progressively morę

exasperated by the muddle and inefficiency which marked the rule of John m.²¹ They hankered for the good old days of liberał aristocratic privilege;²² and they were conscions of a reviving ambition to recover the dominant position in the State which they had lost sińce 1529. These sentiments were given a solid intellectual basis by the antiąuarian researches and widened reading of a new generation of nobles, who combined a passion for mediaeval precedents with a leaning to monarchomachist political theory. In the Hght of Duplessis-Momay, the Recess of Kalmar acąuired a fresh and topical relevance.

The leaders of this new generation were Erik Sparre and Hogenskild Bielke.^{2 3} Their ffrógramrhe had two aspects. On the one ixand~if^was a protest^ against lack of governance, a demand for order and efficiency, a plea for modern administra-tiye techniąues. Sparre wanted an administration which should be properly artićulated, speciahzed, regularly paid, and above all national, as oppósed to the domestic, cameral, ad hoę methods which hadjbeengood^enoughforthe first Vasas: his proposal to link the central administration to the fiye. great offices of State looks forward to the collegial structure of 1634.** "Oh the other hand it was an attempt to repair the damage to the con-stitutional cap.se which had been the conseąuehce of the Succes-sion Pact^pf 1 544. ^And this could be done only by estabhshing the doctrine that the change from electoral to hereditary monarchy had not absolved the king from his obligation to rule within the limits of the law.²⁵ The deposition of Erik xiv had given a severe jolt to the hereditary principle, and John iii, in a natural effort to redress the balance, had advaneed provocative claims to be an absolute monarch.²⁶ Sparre fought those claims, in theory and in practice. In practice, like so many reformers, he was at heart a conservative, wishing to restore rather than to innovate: his ideał was a return to monarchy under the Land Law as the fifteenth century had conceived it.²⁷ In theory he was attracted by the fashionable notion of a ‘nuKed monarchyliJand he śeems to have believed that the royal authority was derived from the people, not by a translatioy but by a concesńo.²⁶ The king, therefore, must rule with the consent of his subjects. But the difficulty was to define the body through whom that consent should be conveyed. At first Sparre had no doubt that it should be the riksdag: in his

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