DSCF0069

■

■ri fil

ESSAYS IN SWEDISII HISTORY

diplomats and travellers; thc fali of Fouąuct, Colbert’s harrying of dclinqucnt nobles and administrators, were useful examplcs to those who wished to bring the Rcgents to book.⁰⁵ And though tlicrc cannot be much in the suggestion that Charles ii’s dis-solution of his last parliament had some influence on Swedish eventSj there seems to be rather morę substance in the charge that Oxford doctrines of Divine Right had infected the clergy, both in Sweden and in Denmark.⁶⁶

Despite all these considerations, the relatively easy triumph of the crown was, and is, surprising. For in Sweden it was not, as in Denmark, a matter of the defeat of a class which stood for privilege alone, divorced from any intelligible constitutional cause; nor was it, as in Brandenburg, the overthrow of con-stitutionalism by a bargain between monarchy and aristo-cracy. In Sweden Charles xi struck down simultaneously a privileged order and a constitutional tradition; and that tradition was not, as in France, a tattered remnant from a bygone age. On the contrary, it appeared living and strong, rooted in centuries of history, never forgotten, and (if the past were any guide) surely not to be abandoned without a major struggle. It was perhaps natural enough that the country should ery out against the Regents, that the Diet of 1675 should insist on an investigation of their conduct, and that the Diet of 1680 should allow itself to be manoeuvred by the king into undertaking their trial. But it was another thing that their fali should involve the end of the political power of the rdd. From mediaeval times the rdd had been the watchdog of the constitu-tion, the custodian of the country’s liberties, the undying author-ity to whom sovereignty reverted in an interregnum. It stood as mediator between king and people; it had the duty of making surę that each fulfilled the pledges and discharged the duties owed to the other. The change from elective to hereditary monarchy in 1544 had not permanently obscured these duties and functions, and in the second half of the sixteenth century the rdd had stood forward again as the opponent of the absolut-ist tendencies of John iii and Sigismund. At Linkóping, in 1600, the demagogie tyranny of Charles ix had brought some of its boldest spokesmen to the błock. But the tradition of aristo-cratic constitutionalism as it had been propounded by Erik Sparre and Hogenskild Bielke,⁶⁷ firmly grounded in history

im

ant /I ifi»! f

i;

i U//W

f Ił f II

CHARLES XI

and law, looking back to Magnus Eriksson’s Land Law (ca. 1350) as its fundamental charter, and to the Recess of Kalmar (1483) as its ideał for the monarchy-was too vital to be up-rooted by a few executions. The Charter of 1611, the Form of Government of 1634, represented its engrafting upon the stock of monarchy. After 1611, the rdd stood, as always, for limited monarchy and constitutional guarantees; and if it also stood for privilege, that was true of constitutional oppositions everywhere, in the seventeenth century.⁶⁸ Its consciousness of its rdle as mediator, its conception of itself as an Estate of the realm, distinct from that of the nobility, had rather strengthened than otherwise; for the old concept of the mediator had been madę fashionable by Althusius under the name of the ephorate, and the old devices of control had become articulate in the new ideał of mixed monarchy.⁶⁹ After 1660 the power of the rdd was sufficiently impressive to make Magalotti surę that Sweden was a pure aristocracy disguised as a monarchy;⁷⁰ and in the early ’seventies it seemed to be striving to make good a novel claim to approve or veto royal appointments to the morę important offices.⁷¹ The opposition of the Estates, always suspicious of aristocratic influence in the disposal of jobs, had secured the rejection of this pretension; but the old anti-monarchical spirit was sufficiently alive to make credible the story later put about in Les Anecdotes de Sulde of the existence of a plan to set up an aristocratic republic.⁷²

The outbreak of war in 1674 was the turning-point in the fate of the rdd as it was in that of the former Regents. Wartime administration passed into the hands of the men who sur-rounded Charles xi in the field, while the rdd sat in Stockholm despatching dignified trivialities.⁷⁸ When the war ended they were politically isolated, discredited by their own internal feuds, distrusted alike by king and Estates. They were not consulted about the peace of 1679, nor about the negotiations with Denmark that followed it, though foreign policy had always been one of their main concerns; they were not consulted about the summoning of the Diet of 1680, though this too had been usual in the past. Indeed, the ąuestion was already presenting itself, whether the king was bound to con-sult them at all ? The Land Law, no doubt, bound him to rule with the advice of his council (med rdds rdde); but did it follow

241