DSCF0039

ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

for a mess of pottage. If they did so, it was by no means the only example of such a bargain. The success of Charles ix, for instance, was based upon his ability to bribe the aristocracy to forgo constitutional principles in return for donations, enfeoff-ments and wages.¹¹¹ On the accession of Charles x in 1654 Oxenstierna was quite prepared to strike a bargain with him on terms which would have sacrificed constitutional principle for class interest and private ambition: the king was to be let off with a vague and innocuous Accession Charter, and in return was to give a guarantee against a reduktion, and sanction administrative arrangements which would have given to the chancery - Oxenstierna^,s own department - a primacy over its rivals.¹¹² In 1686, when Charles xi’s indelningsuerk seemed likely to diminish the aristocracy’s tied labour force, they tried to wreck the scheme by offering to throw overboard all the constitutional checks upon troop-raising which had been slowly built up in the preceding half-century.¹¹³ The revival of aristocratic constitutionalism in the closing decades of the sixteenth century may seem to the historians of political thought to be important for the theories, domestic or imported, which lay behind it; but what gave it its cutting edge was indignation at the crown’s calculated neglect to provide the high aristocracy with suitably juicy substitutes for the fiefs which they had lost.¹¹⁴ If it came to a puli between private interest and public principle, in fact, the Swedish aristocracy was by no means always to be relied on to choose the latter. Charles ix may have been hitting below the belt when he played on class hatreds to defeat Erik Sparre; but he would scarcely have succeeded unless the aristocracy’s con-duct had madę his accusations plausible. The Postulała Nobilium, after all, was not only a constitutional programme: it included a demand that the peasants of the nobility should be withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, and abandoned to the justice of their lords.¹¹⁵ For an old-fashioned patriarchal magnate such as Per Brahe the elder, this no doubt implied no morę than a recognition of the good old Nordic custom of paternal correction (husaga); but two generations later it might mean riding the wooden horse, or other imported refinements of Teutonic culture;¹¹⁸ and in the 1640S a younger Per Brahe would protest that it was insulting to refer to the nobility as ‘subjects’.¹¹⁷ The crisis at the time of Gustay Adolf’s accession

ON ARISTOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONALISM

was not only, or even mainly, a constitutional crisis: it was a crisis which turned on the demands, the sufferings and the wrongs of a dominant and resentful class; and the privileges which Gustav Adolf was forced to concede to them in 1612 proved a good deal morę durable than the Charter which he granted in 1611. How should such a class feel strongly about illegal taxation, when they were to so great an extent exempt from paying it ? Why should they seek to restrain an aggressive foreign policy? They were likely to be its main beneficiariesl¹¹⁸ As to free speech, they were against it, at least in their social inferiors; as to illegal punishments, they were themselves among the chief offenders. The Land Law’s ban upon the em-ployment of foreigners was no morę than the principle of the closed shop, common to half the aristocracies of Continental Europę. And the first Estate’s claim to a votum deciswum - later to be justified on the ground that they alone were their own constituents — was a standing threat to the development of a healthy parliamentary system.¹¹⁹

But this is too simple and superficial a judgment. One of the salient characteristics of Swedish history, and one which links it most closely to our own, is the pertinacity and success with which the Swedish people have maintained the concept of the rule of law. And of that concept the Swedish aristocracy, from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, were the most effective custodians. Sweden had no long legał tradition stretching far back into the Middle Ages; no Year Books, no Inns of Court; until the middle of the seventeenth century there was no class of professional lawyers and advocates at all; until the setting up of Svea Hovratt in 1614 no judge-made law, no regular record of decided cases, no treasury of legał precedents.¹²⁰ The law-beąring class was the nobility. who served the_community ąs a matteT~of course in^he capacity of proyincial or coująty-court }udgeip{lagrndn or hdradshóvdingar) . The legał antiąuarianism of Coke or Spelman is represented in Sweden by the researches and collections of Erik Sparre and Hogenskild Bielke. It was no accident that in the greatest and most protracted civil suit of the sixteenth century - the case of the Gyllenstierna estate - it was just these two who appeared as pleaders for the main parties to the cause.¹²¹ It was no accident, either, that when Svea Hovrałt was instituted, all the judges, and half the assessors, were

41