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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

but from the thrcat - rcal or prospective - of subjection to an overwhelmingly powerful aristocracy. What was the Recess of Kalmar to them? To which of them, save to a few bishops, was it of any concern who was included in the ephorate, and who not? It was not until the Age of Liberty that the ordinary mcmbcr of the riksdag came to feel vividly the relevance of political theory to political life, and was ready to translate the speculations of the study into the parrot-cries of the clubs; for only then did ‘constitutionalism’ chime in with the real needs and aspirations of the pays legał. The crown, on the other hand, seemed to have its feet much morę firmly planted in the com-mon earth. It offered not only protection, but the hope of better days: the abhorred ‘rule of secretaries’, from Joran Persson to Johan Hoghusen, opened a career to ambition and ability; the king, far morę than the nobility (though they had their clients too) was favourable to social mobility. How sharp the contrast between the new men around Charles xi, and the narrow, socially exclusive circle of great council-families which he over-threw! That circle had indeed been widening a little, especially after 1660; but the same smali handful of names recurs, decade after decade, century after century: Brahe, Bonde, Bielke, Baner, de la Gardie, Fleming, Oxenstierna, Sparre, Posse, Tott; ringing the changes on office in endless variety, yet always essen-tially the same, like some genealogical treble-bob-major. When Gustav Bonde was called to the council in 1727, he was the twentieth member of his family, in unbroken succession, to sit in that body.¹⁰⁶

A sceptic might at this point feel justified in doubting whether the aristocracy had any truły constitutional programme at all, in the sense of a commitment to the defence or expansion of fundamenta! liberties. They had indeed programmes of administra-tive reform; they reacted appropriately to lack of government. But mainly (it might be urged) they saw things through the medium of the interests of their class. The men who opposed John m and Charles ix in the name of the ideał polity of the fifteenth century may have been deluding themselves; but that is no reason why they should be permitted to delude posterity. The political arrangements of the age of Christian 1, which they represented as being based on a respect for law, were arrangements devised to secure the almost total immunity of the

ON ARISTOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONALISM

Nobility from the burdens of society. From the beginning it had been a main weakness of council-constitutionalism that its pro-gramme was so obviously explicable as a scheme to advance the interests of a narrow cliąue of great magnates. It was an expla-nation which did them less than justice; but there was a core of truth in it. The constitutional struggles of the fifteenth century were but one facet of a fierce competition for fiefś, for the right to dispose of fiefs, and for the solid economic advantages which could be a conseąuence of fief-holding. A century later, when fiefs in the old style were no morę than a poignant memory lingering in the minds of an aristocracy which felt obscurely that it had been denied its reward for existing, Erik Sparre and his associates hoped to find, in the revenue-assign-ments and wages [fórlaningar and bestallningar) which were now the return for govemment service, some compensation for the fiefs which were no longer given to them; and hence they demanded a monopoly of high office. It was a nostalgia for the withered blooms of privilege, rather than a passion for constitutional rights, that inspired Hogenskild Bielketo rummagein the archives and the muniment-rooms; and even Erik Sparre’s morę sophisticated political theory was in part a cloak for class-advantage.¹⁰⁷ They importuned the monarchy for morę gener-ous privileges on two main grounds. The first ground was that they sought no morę than the recovery of their prescriptive rights, as those rights had existed in the fifteenth century; and to this argument Erik Sparre himself provided a succinct reply, when he said, in rebuttal of royal pretensions, ‘We should look not so much to what was done here aforetime, but rather to what ought to be done.’¹⁰⁸ The second ground was that their acceptance of the Succession Pact of 1544 gave them a claim upon the crown’s gratitude.¹⁰⁹ It was a claim which had no chance of being admitted, sińce the Vasas on their side always argued that the Succession Pact really was to be looked upon as a kind of testimonial from a grateful people.¹¹⁰ To Erik Sparre, however, the Pact was an implied contract; and in terms of that contract the crown was bound to give the Nobility better privileges, wider immunities, and a monopoly of office. But this was an argument which knocked the bottom out of their claim to be a constitutional opposition; for it implicitly admitted that in 1544 they had sold their constitutional birthright

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