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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

parliameutaiism throughout the Age of Liberty - the method of esaminatian of written proceedings by a committee of the riksdag. At every meeting of the Diet after 1720 the Secret Committee or the Lesser Secret Deputation would comb the joumais of the rad, while the Proiokolb deputation¹⁴⁹ would sift the prooeedings of the Colleges, the High Courts, the provincial governors, and ai last (after 1760) even of the Collegium Mediom.¹⁵* They would estract ffom them phrases which could be twisted into a deviation from the prevailing constitu-tkmal orthodosy, would judge policies ex eventu, would censure ot wam the errant speaker or the ill-judging councillor, and in esireme cases of national disaster or political passion would lannch at the head of a member of the rad an impeachment (ticmńermg)¹⁵¹ which might result in at least temporary political rairn The system undoubtedly safeguarded the private Citizen against administrative oppressions and delays, and in the end it became a sword of Damocles over the head of every minister; but it was capable of abuse, and it was in fact abused, for party or personal ends - even to the extent of upsetting judgments of the courts. The Swedes of the eighteenth century easily became lachrymose at the mention of ‘our Noble Liberty⁹, much as Britons swelled with pride over the Glorious Revolution; but Swedish parliamentarism could at times encroach upon the liberties of the subject with a ferocity which would have staggered Wilkes or Junius. The monstrous proliferation of pariiamentary activities, the tyranny of such notorious occasional bodies as the Palmstiema Commission of 1760, stem directly from the action which Charles xi incited the Estates to take against the Regents: it was he who ‘nursed the pinion that impelled the Steel⁹, never suspecting that seventy-five years later the shaft might glance off the throne itself. As one looks at the riksdag in the i68os, the period of its abasement, one sees every-where seeds which were to shoot into rank luxuriance in the day ofits supremacy. It is now that procedurę begins to settle down into the bad habits which make the history of the riksdag in the eighteenth century so daunting to the researcher: the ever-mounting flood of paper; the pitiless verbosity, all faithfully reported uerbałim; the constant transmission of extracts from the minutes of one body for debate in another body; the habit of reading immense documents aloud for hours at a time (one

might almost be forgiven for concluding that the iiwention of printing was still unknown in the Sweden of Linnaeus); the expenditure of parliamentary time in examining the affairs of outside authorities, and in trwialities of a personal naturę - all this seems to begin under Charles xi. So do the organization of parliamentary pressure-groups, and the activities of those whom the eighteenth century would cali ‘operators⁵; and so too, alas, does the bribery of members of the Diet by foreign powers.¹⁵² These are not legacies for which posterity can feel much gratitude; but they are additional signs that Charles^ reign has as much in common with the age of Fersen as with that of Axel Oxenstieraa.

It is no easy matter to determine how much of the responsibility for the changes I have been describing is to be assigned to Charles himself. It does not seem that he had any deep insight into the constitutional issues and social problems of his day. His foreign policy has been likened to the instinctive reaction of the hedgehog that rolls itself into a bali as a defence against the outside world; and it is possible to diagnose his domestic policy as arising simply from a relentless determination to elear off the crown’s overdraft, and an exaggerated sensitiveness to any threat to his authority. He was ignorant of so much, so little able to deal with complex ideas, so dependent uponadvice, that he had necessarily to leave a good deal to ministers better eąuipped than himself. Dogged and often infłexible as he was, he could be influenced; for he had a streak of real humility which madę him respect men who were older and abler than himself: of which the authority of Johan Gyllenstierna, and the prestige of Rutger von Ascheberg, afford the best examples. Yet his violent temper, so easily aroused, as well as his obstinacy and honesty, madę him a difficult man to handle: easy to antagonize, impossible to drive. He was quick to resent anything like an affront; and his piety to his father’s memory had always to be reckoned with.¹⁵³ And though his ideas might be few and elementary, he knew what he believed, and also what he wanted; and on these things he would not compromise. Where the state’s interest was con-cemed, neither family affection, nor old friendship, nor gratitude for past services, availed to move him.¹⁵⁴ In his first instruction to the newly-created Estimates Office (.statskontoret) he gave an undertaking that he would not in his personal

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