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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

Swedish subject could be surę that the law would really be enforced.¹²⁹ As arch-bureaucrat he looked well after his own: his coadjutors were rewarded with leases of the reduced estates.¹⁸⁰ They were secure against arbitrary dismissal, which would have offended his sense of justice. But he expected from them his own standards of rectitude; and he did not always find them. The very men who had been his chief agents in the establishment of absolutism were themselves later investigated, and stripped of some of their morę questionable gains.¹³¹ To the embittered aristocracy, the obvious favour and real power enjoyed by upstarts in office must have looked very like that ‘rule of secretaries’ against which they had struggled for so long.

But the reality was very different. Charles’s financial methods might appear as a relapse into the techniąues of a bygone age, but his corps of administrators are the heralds of the Age of Liberty, and indeed of modern times. Monarchy and civil service were fused and blended in intimate collaboration, so that it might at times appear that the country was ruled by a syndicated sovereign; but as long as Charles lived the control of the machinę remained firmly in his hands. It was soon to be proved that when such control was wanting the bureaucracy was quite capable of managing the State on its own. For fifteen years Charles xn was to be absent on foreign soil; and in his absence the machinę ran as smoothly as ever — provided he let it alone. Towards the close of his life, however, his need for quick results and his contempt for the civil service mind led him to sanction an emergency-administration which challenged and partly superseded the old. Worst of all, Górtz’s financial measures, and especially his token-coinage, jeopardized (or seemed to jeopardize) their salaries; and this removed the very basis of their support of the regimeA³² At the time of Charles xn’s death the bureaucrats were ripe for revolt; and after it they were the main instruments in carrying through the revolu-tion of 1719-20. They killed the absolutism of which they had been both the creatorsand thecreatures.¹³³ And they survived to dominate the succeeding age, as they had dominated the former.

After 1720 the constitution may appear on paper to be a return to mixed monarchy,¹³⁴ with a strictly limited king, a rad with once morę a share of power, and with the weight of authority transferred to the Estates. But this is an illusion.¹³⁵

CHARLES XI

By 1720 the men who had been trying to put the constitution back upon the footing of 1634 (or perhaps of 1483) had been decisively defeated. The lower Estates would not suffer a return to the rule of the great families; the notion of an ephorate was emphatically rejected.¹³⁶ The monarchy was in fact now so powerless that it could be insulted with impunity and strength-ened only by a coup d’etat; the rad soon leamed to quail at the prospect of impeachment (licentiering); the Estates, whatever their disclaimers, were effectivelysovereign, and would presently expressly repudiate responsibility to their constituents. By 1756, in fact, they were in a position not much different from that of Charles xi in 1693, except that they probably bothered less about their responsibility to God; and they could have boasted, with as much propriety as any absolute monarch, l’etat, c’est nous. King and riksdag have changed places: the gamę goes on as before. And behind and around their authority, as around his, lay the massive, immortal pondus of the civil service, which had intervened decisively in 1719 and 1720 to secure victory, not for the rad, but for the riksdag. And they had taken this linę because they did not trust the magnates with control of appoint-ments in 1720 any morę than in 1680. Since the monarchy was now out of the ąuestion, they wanted that control to lie with the riksdag; which meant in fact with themselves.¹³⁷ For the bureaucracy by now interpenetrated the three upper Estates, and was dominant in the Nobility and Clergy.¹³⁸ In the Age of Liberty the attendance of office-holders at the riksdag was so numerous that it sometimes seriously interfered with the ordin-ary work of justice or administration, and could have disastrous effects on the army in wartime.¹³⁹ One surę sign of the relative insignificance of the rad was that nonę of the senior civil servants except the Chancery-President (responsible for foreign policy) might now be a member of that body: a development, incident-ally, which had been clearly foreshadowed in the i68os.¹⁴⁰ And was it not the senior civil service which in 1768 defeated the rad by a lightning strike, and so brought the Cap administration to the ground?¹⁴¹ Of course it was a highly political bureaucracy, as it was bound to be when so many ofits members sat in the riksdag; and appointments tended to be madę on party lines - hence the intolerable expanses of parliamentary time devoted to unedifying and degrading wrangles about

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