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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

gr&nts which formcr sovereigns had madę of lands in newly-conąuered territories, for Charles xi was resolved to make no sucli donations in futurę; and even if he were to change his mind they could not forget how he had revoked his pledged Word, overridden considerations of eąuity and charity, changed the tenns of tenure ex past facto, and declared the crown’s right untrammelled by any statute of limitations.⁴⁸ No one now was aiurious to engage in a speculation of which the terms were so uncertain. As the reduktion signified the crown’s renunciation of adyenture, so for the nobility it deprived adventure of all its savour.⁴*

Charles xi’s resolve to rehabilitate the finances and to rebuild the army on a sounder basis, his determination to tolerate no opposidon to reforms which he considered essential to the safety of Sweden, go far to explain his gradual assumption of absolute power in the years after 1680. It was a constitudonal upheaval which left an ineffaceable impression upon the history ofhis country. Within a few decades, no doubt, war and revolu-tion had swept the regime away, for the structure which he set up could not survive the strain which the distortions of his son placed upon it; but still it is true to say that after 1680 things were never quite the same again. To contemporaries, certainly, the changes of the *eighties appeared as a sudden and violent revolution. Yet there can be no doubt that it was less sudden than it seemed: the preconditions for absolutism existed in abundance, and some of them had been present for many years. At a moment of nadonal defeat and demoralization Charles xi had emerged as the leader and saviour of the State; and just as Frederick m of Denmark’s defence of Copenhagen in 1658-9 prepared the way for the coup of 1660, so Charles^ valour at Lund helped to establish his reputation in the popular imagina-tion. Military necessity sapped the capacity for resistance of the ordinary organs of constitutional control, much as it had done in Brandenburg twenty years earlier; and when the war was over the argument from security madę men morę ready to accept the need for a concentration of authority in a single hand: as the Danish Kongelov (lex regia) put it: ‘The morę power and authority a lord and king possesses, the safer are he and his subjects from the attacks of external foes.’⁶⁰

Certainly thcre had been no such security under the rule of the Regents and the rdd. After fourteen years of peace and prosperity the national finances were in disorder, the armed forces run down, the administration discredited. The diplomacy of de la Gardie had landed Sweden in a war which the Diet of 1672 had explicitly asked him to avoid. The Regents had been slack in pursuing Charles x’s partial reduktion, and they were accused with some justice of having feathered their own nests and neglected their duty. It was a period when morę and morę men were seeking a career in the service of the State, and such persons were sharply critical of a rigime which so mismanaged its affairs that public servants could not be certain that the crown would be able to pay their wages: this was one main reason why the demand for a reduktion was so strong and so widespread. In 1677 a ruined member of the rdd was trying to obtain six years’ arrears of the salary due to him, to supply his essential living-expenses; and three years earlier it had been noted as an extraordinary instance of favour that two of the king’s secretaries should have been paid their wages in fuli.⁶¹ Feeling was especially bitter among the lower nobility - men whose estates did not permit them to live as expensively as their social status reąuired, men who in the past had supple-mented their resources by service in the army, by booty taken in war, by donations from a grateful sovereign. Where now could they look for donations, when the crown lands were mostly alienated, and Charles x’s reduktion seemed to have stuck fast ? Where for booty, when the crown could no longer afford great Continental wars ? What prospects had they, if not in the civil service ? But here they found themselves competing against incomers who had done well out of the wars, against sons of the clergy who had entered the royal service rather than engage in the rat-race for benefices, against ambitious academics, against a new generation of purely Swedish financiers; and their chances were further diminished by the pre-emptive claim to the best posts put forward by the high nobility, and particularly by members of the rdd. Already by 1660 the grip of the great magnates upon the better posts had become so tight that one of them, at least, feared that the frustrations and discouragement of the lower nobility might lead to a diversion of their interests into other fields, and a mass flight from the