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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

longer sat in the first Estate, and the distinctions of rank within that Estate had been emphasized by its division into three classes, voting separately. In theory, the council was still an essential constituent part of any riksdag; in fact, a cleavage was opening between them.⁶³ After 1634, indeed, the council is almost as likely to be the target of constitutionalist opposition as to be its spearhead. The political theorists of the day ex-pressed the situadon when they urged - as Archbishop Paulinus urged - that the ephorate must be understood to include all the Estates; and the claim was even put forward that during a minority the summa majestas inhered not in the council but in the ńksdag.⁶* In the middle decades of the century, indeed, it was the riksdag rather than the council that tended to set the pace of constitutional advance. In the 1640S they began to put forward a claim to a share in the appointment of ministers -a claim which won limited acceptance when the jus improbandi et approbandi was conceded to them for the period of Charles xi’s minority.⁶⁵ In 1650 the three lower Estates, with the connivance and encouragement of the queen, successfully asserted the right to the initiative.⁶⁶ On the death of Charles x the ńksdag implicitly rejected the counciFs right to be the custodian of the immortal regnum and the ultimate depositary of sovereign power. It refused to be bound by the provisions of Charles x’s will, and thus pronounced against the implied theory that the realm was a kind of royal property which could be madę the subject of private testamentary dispositions. It resolved that the regents should be responsible to ‘God, H.M., and all the Estates of the Realm"'⁶¹ and that the Form of Govem-ment, with the Additamentum which modified it, should have force only during the minority: it thus ruled out the possibility of any permanent oligarchical regime,⁶⁸ At the same time the Additamentum secured (at least on paper) the principle of trien-nial diets.⁶⁹ Fifteen years later, in 1675, the principle of redress before supply was effectively asserted for the first time; a demand for appropriation of supply was conceded; and the crown accepted the concept of ministerial responsibility, to be brought home by parliamentary scrutiny of the minutes of council and govemment offices.⁷⁰ There was even some talk, in 1678, of refusing to dissolve until grievances had been redressed.⁷¹

ON ARISTOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONALISM

In most of these ąuestions the leading part had been taken by the first Estate,⁷² and it might well have seemed that as the old type of council-constitutionalism declined, a new type of aristo-cratic constitutionahsm was growing up in its place. But any chance there might have been of the Nobility^s emerging as a body of Whiggish parliamentarians was scotched by social tensions and economic struggles, both within the Estate of Nobles, and between the Nobles and the lower Estates. By the second ąuarter of the seventeenth century there had emerged within the nobility an imprecise but real linę of division between the haves and the have-nots: on the one hand the great council families, now taking their ease in the best jobs (and often pluralists and sinecurists into the bargain), together with their allies and connections among the new men who had recendy risen to the top, and won a title and a fortunę out of the wars of Germany; on the other hand the mass of middling and lesser nobles, often of good old family, who were edged out in the scuffle for offices, and who bitterly resented the magnates’ vir-tual monopoly of all the most eligible employments - the morę so, sińce to them the wages of office were often a necessity rather than a bonus.⁷³ It was a typical court-country situation; but it differed from some of its analogues in that the court party was not led by the king, and that the country party was prepared to fling itself into the king’s arms in order to gain its objectives. And it was against the council, especially, that the resentment of the hungry place-hunters was directed; for it was the council that openly maintained a policy of job-reservation for its mem-bers and their offspring.⁷⁴ Thus, apart from purely political developments, economic and social maladjustments madę nonsense of any hopes that the council might retain its position as leader of the anti-absolutist cause. The mass of the aristocracy was not prepared to curb the prerogative of a monarchy which offered the best chance of righting its social grievances. When set against the prospect of a secure if modest income in the civil service or the army, the declamation of constitutional theorists such as Clas Ralamb madę litde appeal; aurea libertas had few attractions for those to whom it might mean liberty to live in penury.

If the lesser nobility were thus driven to connive at absolut-ism, the same was still morę true for the three lower Estates.