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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

They too aspired to office, and resented the predominant share of it that went to the nobility. The Recess of Kalmar had long ago insisted that no ‘base-bom⁵ (uanbordig) person be placed over the head of a nobleman; the Postulała Nobilium of 1594 had rei tera ted the demand; as recently as 1612 Gustav Adolf’s Privileges had contained a clause of similar tenor;⁷⁵ but in 1650 the non-noble Estates forced the Nobility to take refuge in shufBing equivocations and semantic gymnastics in an attempt to esplain that the phrase had no derogatory implications.⁷⁶ For Erik Sparre, uanbordig meant Johan Henriksson; in the Prndleges of 1612 it meant Nils Ghesnecopherus or Erik Góransson Tegel; in 1650 it meant a whole new middle class, angriły knocking at the gates of power. The wars did indeed bring promotion, in the field and at home, to many men of non-noble origin. A few of them—Johan Skytte and Johan Adler Salvius, for instance — even fought their way up, with royal patronage, to membership of the council itself. But the prospect of office was clouded, first by the attempts of the high nobility to pre-empt the best places, and secondly by the progressive impoverishment of the crown, which was the con-seąuenceofits alienation of lands and revenues into noble hands. This meant, only too often, that the king could not pay his ser-vants* wages.⁷⁷ The Peasantry, for their part, complained that ahenations and donations were depressing them into servitude; the Cłeigy and Burghers feared that the social and economic preponderance of the Nobility might lead to a constitutional revolution in which crown and commons would alike be reduced to political insignificance.⁷⁸ In the light of these discon-tents and apprehensions it is not difficult to understand why, in 1680, the lower Estates and the serving nobility should have united to support Charles xi in carrying through a reduktion, nor why the riksdag in the years that followed should have allowed itself to sink into complaisant inertia, preferring the order and security of absolutism to the distracted finances and social discrimination of liberty.

It was only slowly that the council came to realize the implications of these changes. It still felt itself to be the bearer of a great historie mission: indeed, in the i66os and 1670S it pushed its constitutional pretensions with unwonted vigour. In Clas Ralamb it fbund a leader who persordfied the old tradition morę forcefully and morę eloąuently than any man sińce the death of Erik Sparre: for him, at least, the Recess of Kalmar still had morę than an antiąuarian interest.⁷⁹ There had been a persist-ent undercurrent of antagonism between council and regents even in Oxenstiema’s time, though the great chancellor had usually been able to impose his authority to prevent its emerg-ence into the open. After 1660 Magnus de la Gardie, less able and less surę of himself, was hard put to it to preserve even a semblance of harmony. In this situation the council remem-bered again its duty to be jealous of theprerogative,now for the time being in the regents’ care: it remembered too its claim to a voice in the disposal of offices.⁸⁰ When the time came for Charles xi to give his Accession Charter, it madę a last effort to impose limitations on the monarchy in the spirit of 1611. The attempt failed. For the Estates had taken the part of the regents against the council in the ’sixties, precisely because the regents represented the prerogative; and they insisted on an innocuous Charter in 1672 precisely because they feared a persistence of council influence - and especially of influence on appointments — after the minority was over. The council, in fact, was now fighting on two fronts; the one facing the crown, the other facing the Estates. Its fate was to be distrusted by both sides. The monarchists waited their opportunity to throw off the council’s constitutional tutelage. The Estates disliked it as the citadel of the high aristocracy; blamed it for the fiasco in foreign policy, the ruinous flnances, and the disasters of the war against Brandenburg; and sharpened their knives against the day of reckoning. That day came in 1680. But to the very last the council preserved its historie constitutional position; to the very last it fought a tenacious rearguard action against advanc-ing absolutism; and from the last ditch of conciliar resistance the trumpets of 1483 still sounded flatly upon the echo-less air.⁸¹

The years after 1680 seemed to close a long historical per-spective. The council was stripped of its political authority, and became, for the first time in its history, the king’s council; its claim to be a mediator between king and people, its morę recent pretension to be an Estate in itself,⁸² were both explicitly rejected; the great offices of State were left unfilled; the high aristocracy was ruined by political prosecutions and the opera-tion of the redukłion; a new ‘rule of secretaries’ seemed to revive