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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

property.¹⁰⁴ He ruled through the traditional organs of local government: except perhaps in Livonia there was nothing even faintly resembling the intendants. His authority did not come to Mm by violence, nor were his subjects kept in order by a royal army divorced from the feelings of the nation: indeed, no force could have been less suited to support a tyranny than the army wMch he created, and nothing could be further from the truth than the remark of an English critic that ‘He has madę Soldiers of one half ofMs People, to keep t’other halfin good Order’.¹⁰⁵ In contrast with many of his European contemporaries, he was not afraid to encourage his peasantry in the frontier provinces to provide themselves with effective arms.¹⁰⁶ Unlike the absolut-ism of Louis xiv, his authority was based upon, and committed to, the pursuit of peace. Above all, Gharles’s absolutism was lfom beginning to end the creation of the riksdag. The Danish Estates by one convulsive action put the country into Frederick m’s hands, and thereafter they met no morę; the Swedish Estates established absolutism by successive decisions extending over thirteen years. Throughout the period from 1680 to 1693, the collaboration of king and riksdag was excep-tionally close; and the great columns upon which the regime rested - the reduktion, the indelningsverk, the confiscatory sen-tences on the Regents and rad - were all the Estates’ work. It was the old tactic of broadening the basis of responsibility by offloading as much as possible of it upon the riksdag: a tactic familiar from many earlier examples.¹⁰⁷ But it was also a linę of action which proceeded from a deep-rooted tradition, which held that constitutional changes, if they were to be valid, reąuired the assent of the people. In face of it, the last-ditch aristocratic constitutionalists, the high nobihty menaced or rooked by reduktion, protested, fell silent, and waited the opportunity of revenge; but the majority of the nation con-curred or collaborated in what was done, and an elite of fana-tical royalists and dynamie civil servants pressed on the work. Swedish absolutism was absolutism by consent of the many, by conviction of the few, and by acąuiescence of almost all. As long as Charles xi lived, it was generally popular: Lagerroth went so far as to write that ‘His whole government was a realization of his people’s innermost wishes’.¹⁰⁸ For they had reached that crux, so familiar in seventeenth-century

constitutional history, when men are prepared to forget about liberty for the sake of good government. The political and social crisis, it was recognized, demanded radical remedies.

It was, indeed, the social implications of the crisis which helped to distinguish it from similar transformations else-where. The revolution which Charles carried through marked the defeat not only of a political theory but of a social class. The proceedings against the Regents, entailing as they did the downfall of the rad also, dealt a shattering blow to the political power and financial resources of almost all of the relatively smali number of great families who for decades had provided the political leadership of the nation; and that blow was followed by the long-drawn hammering of the reduktion. In Sweden the nobility had never been the natural allies of the monarchy; and in thus basing national solvency upon the financial ruin of some of the richest of them Charles was taking fewer political risks than such a policy would have involved (for example) in France. In 1680 he was the ally, not of the defend-ers of priyilege, but of its assailants; but the very last use he was likely to make of his success was to imitate Louis xiv, and tamę the aristocracy by turning it into an ornamental class of court parasites. Impossible to imagine anything less like Versailles than the rude hunting-lodge in the forests at Kungsór, where the king went to ground away from the wits and the diplomats, and where he could shoot bears to his heart’s content in the intervals of checking the muster-rolls or testing the saddlery. Nor had he any particular wish that the great magnates should be shut out from major oflfice, once he had stripped them of their ill-gotten gains. For himself he had no strong dislike for the nobility as an order. But the same was not true of most of those that supported him. In Sweden the high nobility attracted to themselves all the odium which in other lands they shared with gabeleurSy traitants, monopolists and tax-farmers - social pests from whom Swedish society was blessedly free. Royalism in the ’eighties had very strong anti-aristocratic elements: the reduktion, after all, marked the conclusion of a ‘strife of Estates’ which had been raging intermittently for half a century. The Peasantry, as an Estate, had always been strongly royalist, and the coming of absolutism met with no objection from them: ‘better one king than many’.¹⁰⁹ Nor did their attitude change

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