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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

his frecdom of action; not to allow Sweden to be bullied; abovc all, to keep the country out of another war - this, really, was the sum of his policy. ‘A war is soon begun,’ he wrote on one occasion, ‘but as to its ending-that is in God’s hands.’⁸⁰ Every cffort, then, must be madę to take the heat out of Sweden’s relations with other powers: Swedish historians who referred contumeliously to the Danes as ‘Jutes’, or called the Russians barbarians, would find their works censored in the interests of international good feeling.³¹ The ideał was still, as before, a European balance; but Charles and Oxenstierna, reacting against de la Gardie’s gallophil propensities, sought to achieve it through friendship with the maritime powers.³² The political conflicts of a later age are already taking shape; Nils Bielke’s contest with Bengt Oxenstierna foreshadows the clash of Hats and Caps. But the new alignment after 1680 did not affect the king’s resolve to keep out of the European struggle. It was not only that like Frederick William 1 of Prussia, a generation later, he could not bear to spoił his beautiful army by using it;⁸³ it was also that the work of domestic reform and rehabilitation was so important to him that he was not willing to jeopardize it by war unless Sweden’s vital interests were in-volved. If his alliances committed him as an auxiliary, it could usually be contrived that his contribution was too late.³⁴ The Anglo-Dutch blockade of France stung him for a moment into joining Denmark in a still-born armed neutrality which looks forward to the agreement of 1756;⁸⁵ and he did not hesitate to mobilize on behalf of Holstein-Gottorp, the geo-graphical situation of which madę it the strategie linchpin of the Swedish position in Germany.³⁶ But it is significant that in the end it was international action, at the congress of Al tona, that restored the duke of Holstein-Gottorp to his dominions; and no less significant that this time Sweden was able to mobilize with-out mobilization’s entailing war. Twenty years before, the Regents would have held it to be axiomatic that a peace policy of this kind could not possibly be pursued in safety without the aid of foreign subsidies. It was Charles xi’s achievement to prove that this idea was erroneous, to demonstrate that Sweden could live without a paymaster, maintain a first-class army in peacetime, and remain neutral at will, not only without danger, but with inereased international prestige. He thus solved

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CHARLES XI

perhaps the greatest political problem which his country had to confront in his time: the problem of how to abdicate gracefully from the status of a great power, without becoming either a puppet in the hands of the strong, or a mere carcase for the international vultures. For a generation Sweden had been drunk with victory and bloated with booty: Charles xi led her back intó the grey light of everyday existence, gave her policies appropriate to her resources and her real interests, eąuipped her to carry them out, and prepared for her a futurę of weight and dignity as a second-class power. He could not foresee that his son’s inflexible logie would shake the foundations he had laid, nor that domestic faction afterwards would compromise the freedom of action which he had won; but in the interval between those two aberrations we can recognize, in Arvid Horn, a statesman who in this respect has some claim to be considered his political legatee; and in a longer view it may not be fantastic to see in him the ancestor of ósten Unden. No doubt he underestimated the danger that threatened Sweden from the east: preoccupied with the threat of a Danish revenge, he postponed too long defensive measures against the Muscovite. But at least his policy was based upon recognition of the truth that the age of expansion was over; and if it had been followed by his successor it might well have madę possible an adjustment to international realities less violent and less painful than the experience which Sweden was to undergo in the next generation.

How, then, did Charles xi accomplish the feat which had baffled the political sagacity of the Regents ? How was he able to afford a first-class army in peacetime? By what financial conjuring did he contrive to exist without subsidies, and still balance his budget? The short answer is that the financial resources were provided mainly by that vast and ruthless resumption of afienated crown lands and revenues which goes by the name of the reduktion, and which effected a revolution in the power of the monarchy comparable with that which had resulted from the Reformation. Its fuli conseąuences, ad-mittedly, were not felt for a decade or so after 1680. Those who had advocated a reduktion in the expectation that it would make taxation unnecessary - and especially taxation of the nobility -soon found themselves disappointed.³⁷ The reform of army

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