ANNALS OF WAR_ 1700-1815 A.D.

HISTORY OF SWEDEN FROM THE VIKING AGE TO 1697

The Viking expeditions against England began about the end of the eighth century. In a.d. 793 the Irish monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, off the north coast of England, was suddenly raided; the monks were slain or taken prisoner, the monastery was plundered, and the invaders quickly made off again. The fate of Lindisfarne was shared during the succeeding years by many other English monasteries. Nearly all the British coasts were harried by lightning raids. The Viking expeditions had begun. The causes of this avalanche which swept over Europe from about the year a.d. 800 have been much discussed. It was at this time that Norway and Denmark were being welded into united kingdoms; the will of one predominated, and rather than bow to that, many of the chieftains and deposed petty kings went into voluntary exile. Their love of freedom and thirst for adventure drove them to seek other fields of activity.

After the first attacks on England made towards the close of the eighth century, the Vikings turned for a time principally against Ireland, and, from 830, against France. They sailed up the rivers, levied tribute, murdered and plundered. In the end the French king had nothing for it but to bestow on Vikings from Denmark and the present south of Sweden a district round the lower Seine of which they had virtually taken possession. Thus was founded in the year 911 the Duchy of Normandy, whence in 1066 William the Conqueror, descendant of the Vikings, started on the famous expedition that was to set him on the English throne and introduce Norman social customs into England.

After repeated attacks on England from 840 to 860, the Northmen established themselves firmly during the decade 860-70 round the mouths of the Fen rivers and the Humber. From these bases they then pursued the line of action that finally resulted in the conquest of the north-east of England from the Thames to the Tyne, and its constitution, under the name of the ‘Danelaw’, as an independent Viking kingdom, based entirely on Scandinavian institutions. Alfred the Great succeeded in stemming the tide of Scandinavian invasions, and during the first part of the tenth century his successors were able, mainly by peaceful means, to recover the districts that had been colonized by the Northmen.

Towards the end of the tenth century, however, the storm broke out afresh. In the year 991 a Viking fleet appeared, numbering no less than 390 ships, under the leadership of the three most renowned chieftains of the North, one a Swede, one a Dane, and one a Norwegian. In the mighty conflict which now ensued, the Northmen were victorious, and the Anglo-Saxon king made the fatal decision to buy himself free. The first so-called Danegelt—10,000 pounds— was paid. Their success spurred them on to enterprises on a larger and larger scale, until finally the Danish king, Sven Tveskagg, resolved not to rest until he had subdued the whole of England. In the end, after a tremendous struggle, he stood at his death (1014) the lord of England. The mantle that he let fall was taken up by his son Knut, who was expelled from England for a year or more, but returned and, with the support of the Swedish king, Olof Skottkonung, established himself as ruler of the land. England and Sweden would seem thus for a time, 1020-30, to have been united under the same ruler.

By the middle of this century a Swedish Empire, founded by the Vikings, seems to have been growing up round the Baltic, although traces of it are now only faintly discernible. This was the starting-point for the coining great expansion by which the Swedes were to become the founders of the Russian Empire.

In an old Russian chronicle, which is generally ascribed to a monk of the name of Nestor, it is related how in the year 859 the Varangians or Varjags—that is Nestor’s name for the Northmen—came from over the sea and demanded tribute. In 862 they were driven out, and the inhabitants of the country determined to rule themselves. But law and order were trampled under foot, civil strife broke out, and they decided to seek for themselves a prince who would administer justice for them. So they went over the sea to the ‘Rus’ and said to them: ‘Our land is great and fertile, but there is no order in it. Come and govern it and reign over us.’ Three brothers were then elected, among them Rurik, who established himself in Novgorod and became lord of all Russia. Some of his men left him, however, to move down to Constantinople; but on the way they passed Kiev, and of this town they took possession and ruled in it thereafter.

Such is Nestor’s account of the foundation of the Russian Empire. On the death of Rurik at the end of the ninth century, these two kingdoms were merged into one, and formed the foundation of the Russian Empire. Russia, destined to be a world-power, and for centuries the bitterest enemy of Sweden, was thus by origin a Swedish colony.

One ancient story describes how a mighty Viking fleet made its way down the Black Sea, with sails billowing under the strong wind. It was Oleg, ruler of the Varangian kingdom, on his way to battle with the Emperor of eastern Rome. He reached the Bosporus, disembarked his army, and moved forward, harrying and plundering, towards Constantinople. But neither on this nor on subsequent occasions was Constantinople to fall a prey to the Northmen. The attacks were repulsed. Instead of conquest, large numbers of Scandinavians began to enter the service of the Emperor, who surrounded himself with a bodyguard of ‘Varings’, and the troop grew by degrees to be the Emperor’s strongest support and a factor which contributed for centuries in no mean degree to the maintenance of the Byzantine Empire.

The story runs that a monk of the name of Ansgar, of the monastery of Korvey in Westphalia, was exhorted by Louis the Pious, Emperor of Rome and King of the Franks, to go to Svealand and preach Christianity there. In the year 829 Ansgar set forth on his long journey. Ansgar, after a laborious pilgrimage, reached the coast of Ostergotland. From there he continued by sea, and at length he sailed round into Lake Malar, to the island on which Birka is situated.

Birka was at this time a rich and important trading centre in the kingdom. Ansgar was well received, and the king of Svealand granted him permission to preach the gospel. He remained for a year and a half in Birka, and established there the first Christian congregation of Sweden.

Soon after 850 Ansgar, now Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, visited Birka again. After his death in 865 his work was not followed up; the power of expansion of the German Church was exhausted.

During the latter part of the tenth century Sweden was ruled by the powerful king, Erik Segersall. His nephew, the Viking leader, Styrbjorn Starke, gathered against him with Danish help a fleet, and a tremendous battle took place on the banks of the Fyris at Uppsala, lasting for three days. Styrbjorn’s army was defeated. The moment was come for King Erik to wreak vengeance on the Danes. He collected an army, ‘innumerable as the sea sand,’ and moved with it against Denmark. There he drove out Sven Tveskagg, who had only recently come to the throne, made himself lord of the land, and ruled until his death. Then Sven Tveskagg became king in Denmark once more; and he and the new king of Sweden, Olof Skottkonung, formed an alliance against the ruler of Norway, the renowned warrior, Olof Tryggvesson. They attacked the Norwegian king at Svolder. The king of Norway defended himself valiantly, but at length he was defeated.

On the death of Sven, Norway threw off her dependence on Denmark, and Olof Haraldson, became king there. He formed an alliance with the ruler of the Swedes, Anund Jakob, son of Olof Skottkonung, and fought against Knut the Great, king of England and Denmark, but without success. He lost his crown to Knut and fell in the year 1030. But Knut’s empire fell to pieces at his death, and Norway became an independent kingdom again.

An old legend relates how Olof Skottkonung, asked the English king Ethelred II send someone to Sweden to preach Christianity there. Sigfrid, archbishop of York, set out for the heathen land, where he baptized King Olof, and Sigfrid continued long to labour for the Christian faith in Sweden.

About the time at which Christianity was triumphing in Sweden, the old royal dynasty died out in Uppsala; the dynasty that had traced its descent from the gods themselves, and under whose leadership the power of Svea had grown up and the kingdom of Sweden been forged. The markets which had hitherto stood open to the Vikings in their struggle for expansion were now closing, and the moral attitude that had lain behind their warlike exploits was undermined by Christianity with its proclamation of peace.

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

1060-1250

When the old Uppsala dynasty died out, the throne was mounted by King Stenkil, a zealous partisan of the new Christian teaching, a christianissimus rex. He is said to have died ‘at the time of the great invasions of England’, thus probably about 1066, the year of William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings.

It seems probable that King Sverker the Elder, who, after violent civil strife, mounted the throne of Sweden about the year 1130, reigning till 1156, had been influenced by the religious ideals which pass under the name of Gregorianism and which assert the supremacy of the Church over the State. We know also that during the reign of Sverker an English-born Papal Legate, Nicholas Breakspear, afterwards Pope under the name of Adrian IV, who had come to Scandinavia to arrange the affairs of the Church, visited Sweden.

There are two dates of outstanding importance in the earlier church history of Sweden. One is the year 1164, when a Cistercian monk, who had gone on an embassy to Pope Alexander III, was consecrated first Bishop of Uppsala in the cathedral of Sens in northern France.

The other date at which we must pause is the year 1200, when the Church of Sweden received its first great charter. This was in the days of King Sverker the Younger, who was the son of Karl Sverkersson, and reigned 1196-1210. Thus the Church of Sweden won for itself a free and powerful position in opposition to the State, and this it preserved down to the end of the Middle Ages.

While the Church was thus occupied in laying the foundations of its power, violent struggles were raging round it for the temporal power in Sweden. After Sverker the Elder, who was murdered by one of his servants on his way to Mass on Christmas morning, 1156, came Erik Jedvardsson, the founder of the Erik dynasty.  His most remarkable exploit was a crusade against Finland, the south-western parts of which had from time immemorial been inhabited by a Swedish population. Erik died a martyr’s death: he was attacked during Divine Service at Uppsala on Ascension Day, 1160, by a Danish prince, and fell in the struggle. From the spot on which his blood had flowed a spring gushed up. .

By the close of the twelfth century the pulse of development quickened. Knut Eriksson, 1173-96, son of Erik the Holy and slayer of Karl Sverkersson, was at the helm. He sought and found contact with Germany, through the rising city of Lubeck, and it was he who introduced the German element into Swedish culture and Swedish commerce. The Sweden of Knut Eriksson is brighter in colour than that of his predecessors. Nor was the legacy that Knut Eriksson left behind him to be altogether wasted.

In the thirteenth century the two dynasties of Sverker and Erik died out and a new era began under one of the most remarkable royal families in Swedish history, the Folkung dynasty.

THE FOLKUNG PERIOD

1250-1364

Tradition tells that, in the early heathen days, there dwelt in the fertile province of Ostergotland a well-to-do yeoman farmer named Folke Filbyter. His sons inherited his wealth and power. As early as the reign of Knut Eriksson, we find one of them established in the highest office of the realm below the king, and towards the end of the decade 1240-50, this was bestowed on another member of the house, Birger, known  history under the name of Birger Jarl. He had first come to the fore as councillor to Erik Eriksson, 1222-50, the last representative of the Erik dynasty, after whose death his family elected his son Valdemar as king. Valdemar was still a minor, so that Birger remained the actual ruler of the country until his death.

Other proud memories are also associated with the name of Birger Jarl, for Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, is Birger Jarl’s town. In 1288 we read that, in the course of a few years, it had grown to be one of the most populous towns in Sweden.

During the earlier Middle Ages the Swedes had subjugated certain districts in the west and south-west of Finland, and tradition has it that English missionaries played a substantial part in the conversion of these districts, foremost among them being Saint Henry, who is said to have been Bishop of Uppsala for a short time, and who became the founder of the Finnish Church. During the first half of the thirteenth century the Christian population was hard beset by heathen Finnish tribes, and the Russian government in Novgorod adopted a threatening attitude. Then Birger Jarl intervened. In the year 1249 he crossed over to Finland and, by a rapid victory and conquest of the land of the Tavastians, laid a solid foundation for Swedish dominion there. The greater part of Finland was thereby incorporated in the cultural hemisphere of western Europe. Sweden had assumed her role in the history of the world as guardian of the eastern boundary of the European sphere of culture, and as defender of that culture against Asiatic barbarism.

But the thoughts of the ambitious Jarl roamed in other directions as well. He drew up pacts with Lubeck and Hamburg. Germans poured into the country, and the medieval culture of Sweden became permeated with Low-German elements, of which the language still bears traces.

Birger Jarl died in 1266, and his son Valdemar succeeded him. He was not long, however, to remain in power. Disputes soon arose between him and his brothers, the foremost of whom was named Magnus. In 1274 he was deposed, and Magnus was elected king in his stead. Magnus was a good and, one might add, a wise king, one of the best representatives of the Folkung dynasty.

In 1279 Magnus promulgated the famous Statute of Alsno, granting freedom from taxation for all who provided military service on horseback. which resulted in the rise of a privileged class, which very soon linked itself with the old influential families to form a single class of nobles.

It had been the custom from earliest times for the king to summon the chief men of every province to assist him in the deliberation of important matters. King Magnus, doubtless emulating foreign examples, now made of these assemblies a fixed institution, which was for centuries to play an extremely important part in the history of Sweden, contributing greatly during the next two centuries towards the unification of the kingdom.

Magnus Ladulas died in 1290. As his eldest son Birger, who had already been appointed his successor, was still a minor, the government was carried on by a council of regency under the leadership of Torgils Knutsson. The Lord High Constable continued in all essentials the general policy of the earlier Folkungs.

Fired by great visions of a Swedish Empire on either side of the Gulf of Finland, and Swedish control of the important trade routes to Russia, Torgils Knutsson launched a campaign against the Russians 1293-1300. He subdued eastern Finland, but that, in spite of valiant efforts, was all he could accomplish.

The son of Magnus Ladulas, King Birger Magnusson (1290-1319), in 1298 attained his majority. It was still the Lord High Constable who actually ruled; and his power soon came to be distasteful to the king’s brothers, the Dukes Erik and Valdemar. Conflicts arose, but the Dukes had to give way. In 1305 the brothers proceeded. The coup was successful; the Lord High Constable was surprised and taken prisoner, and in the dark December night he was led away to the place of execution outside Stockholm.

The next ten years were occupied with confused struggles between King Birger and his brothers. In the end the Dukes Erik and Valdemar were in 1317 imprisoned in Nykoping Castle, and were probably done to death in their cells. King Birger was then driven from the country and fled to Gotland, where he died in 1321. Two years previously, in 1319, Duke Erik’s infant son Magnus had been crowned king, and, as he had also just inherited the crown of Norway, a personal union had now arisen between Norway and Sweden.

Magnus Eriksson (1319-63) was only three years old on his accession to the throne, and a regency had at first to be appointed, composed of all the foremost men of the land. The power of the aristocracy increased, and when Magnus in 1332 himself took over the government, he found himself confronted by a class of nobles whose influence threatened to overshadow that of the crown itself.

King Magnus has gone down to posterity as a personality at once dark and insignificant. It was Magnus’s misfortune that his path was crossed by men of far more unscrupulous and reckless dispositions and of far sterner stuff than he; and in the struggle against these he met his destruction.

The year 1348 was a year of mourning in Europe. The plague, the Black Death, had come. From England it spread to Norway and thence to Sweden. The years of the plague form the sombre background to the last years of the reign of Magnus Eriksson.

In 1343, the Norwegian nobility, discontented with his rule, compelled him to abdicate in favour of his younger son Hakan. The personal union between Sweden and Norway had thus collapsed.

Then, during the decade 1350-60, one blow followed after another. In 1356 Magnus’s eldest son, Erik, took half the kingdom. Erik died shortly afterwards, but  new and still more dangerous enemies appeared: Duke Albrekt of Mecklenburg, Magnus’s crafty brother-in-law, and King Valdemar Atterdag of Denmark.

Valdemar was in every respect the opposite of Magnus. He followed the vicissitudes of the civil war in Sweden with close attention; and suddenly by cunning and deceit he wrested not only Skane but also Halland and Blekinge out of Magnus’s hands. That was in 1360. The following year Valdemar sailed into the Baltic with a large fleet, captured the island of Oland, off the south-east coast of Sweden, and then steered his course towards Gotland, which ever since the days of Magnus Ladulas had owed fealty and tribute to the Swedish king.

King Magnus was now approaching his fall. In the year of the sack of Visby, 1361, he was taken prisoner and his son Hakan, the ruler of Norway, was elected king in his stead. Then, as a reconciliation shortly took place between Hakan and his father, the nobles called in Duke Albrekt of Mecklenburg, and in 1364 elected his son Albrekt, the nephew of King Magnus, as king. Magnus made a fresh attempt to recover his crown, but was captured once more, and now had to pass six long years in prison. After his release he betook himself to Norway, where he was drowned in 1374. Thus ended the Saga of the Folkungs in Sweden.

Before going on, it is necessary to make some reference to a personality which to a large extent directed the policy of the aristocratic party during the struggles against King Magnus. This was Saint Birgitta or Saint Bridget, beyond all comparison the most remarkable woman of medieval Sweden.

Birgitta, the founder of the Order of Sain Bridget, came of one of the foremost families in the land. At the age of thirteen she was married to the son of one of her father’s friends, and in 1343 her husband suddenly died.  This remarkable woman had already been at the court during the lifetime of her husband. She appealed to the king for financial aid, and Magnus promised her a bountiful donation, of which, however, he only paid a small part. Birgitta was disappointed and her holiest feelings outraged. Magnus fell into disfavour with her, and when in the decade 1350-60 he launched his anti-aristocratic and anti-hierarchical policy, Birgitta’s hatred towards him burst into full flame. From 1350 onwards she resided in Rome, partly with the object of persuading the Pope to sanction the rules she had drawn up for her proposed Order, partly that she might the better play her chosen role of world-reformer on the grand scale, and above all that she might work on the Holy Father to leave Avignon and return to Rome. But she did not forget her motherland, and Kang Magnus was by no means quit of her. Her revelations contain commentaries on all the great questions of the day and interpretations of God’s will in all that occurred; and whenever Sweden comes under discussion, Magnus is made the subject of the grossest calumnies and the most violent attacks, culminating in a great plan of insurrection by which the nobles were to depose him and elect as king in his stead a near kinsman of Birgitta’s. For such was the will of God—and such was Birgitta, the prophetess from the North.

THE PERIOD OF DISSOLUTION

1364-1389

Few kings in the whole succession of Swedish sovereigns have left a worse reputation behind them than Albrekt of Mecklenburg, who reigned from 1364 to 1389. Albrekt’s rule was certainly disastrous for Sweden. One of the worst evils was that a swarm of German knights followed in his tracks, ruthless plunderers who seized large estates and then embarked on a system of unscrupulous extortion. Many Swedish noblemen followed their example, and the whole age is characterized by cynical covetousness. The voice of righteousness was silenced.

Out of the confused throng of adventurers and plunderers there emerged one figure, one of the most famous and notorious in the history of Sweden. During the decade 1360-70, while supporting the cause of Albrekt, Bo Jonsson Grip laid the foundations of his position as the most powerful man in Sweden. He died in 1386, while still at the height of his activities. It is only of recent years that there has been any real understanding of Bo Jonsson’s work. He concentrated his power systematically round the shores of the Baltic. His fiefs comprised Finland, Norrland, large tracts of Svealand, the coast south of Stockholm as far as Kalmar, and large inland districts in Ostergotland, Smaland, and Vastergotland; the result was that he became in the end the real ruler.

One late summer day in the year 1386 the bells of the monastery church of Vadstena proclaimed that the mightiest man in the kingdom of Sweden, the Chancellor Bo Jonsson Grip, had been laid in his last resting-place. Bo Jonsson’s death brought about the downfall of King Albrekt. He had grown tired of playing his part of puppet king, and felt that the moment had come for action. But the nobles were on their guard; they appealed for help to Margareta, widow of the Norwegian king Hakan, who since 1387 had been reigning sovereign in Denmark, and since 1388 in Norway as well. She answered the summons, and in 1388 she was acknowledged ‘Sovereign Lady and Ruler’ in Sweden. She took up the struggle against Albrekt. The decisive battle was fought in February 1389, close to the town of Falkoping. It ended with the complete rout of Albrekt, and left Margareta mistress of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden: a Scandinavian union had begun.

QUEEN MARGARETA AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE UNION

1389-1521

Margareta was the daughter of Valdemar Atterdag, and much of her statecraft she had learnt from him. Valdemar had united the Danish territories; Margareta, in establishing her power, first in Norway and then in Sweden, was simply continuing his policy of expansion. She had hereditary rights not only in Denmark, but also, as wife of the Folkung, King Hakan Magnusson, in Norway; and the Folkungs maintained that Norway and Sweden were one. This claim was taken up by Margareta, and so the circle closed.

In the summer of 1397 the nobles met in the flourishing commercial town of Kalmar, and from this meeting the Union received its name—the Kalmar Union. Here a young kinsman of Margareta’s, Erik of Pomerania, was crowned king of all three Scandinavian kingdoms, and the general conditions of the Union were laid down. One thing is certain, that Margareta, whose aim was the creation of a united kingdom of Scandinavia, a fusion of the three states, was not satisfied with the results. It has been said that Queen Margareta’s aim with the Union was to create a Greater Denmark; and under her administration the Union did undeniably acquire something of that character. It was Denmark, naturally, that provided her chief support. The power of the nobles was checked and they could no longer offer any serious resistance. Margareta set them at nought and filled the government posts principally with Danes and Germans, whom she placed in all the most important fiefs, as lords in all the chief castles, and even in the bishops’ sees. Thus Denmark became under Margareta’s regime the head of the Union, while Sweden and Norway seemed relegated to the position of dependencies.

In the year 1400 an English delegation sought audience with Queen Margareta. It was from Henry IV, who had conceived the idea that Erik of Pomerania, head of the three Scandinavian kingdoms, might make a suitable match for his daughter Philippa. This matrimonial scheme concealed other plans. What he really wanted was an alliance between England and Scandinavia, directed against France. Margareta rejected the king’s overtures with great firmness. But she had nothing against the marriage in itself, and in 1405 King Erik celebrated his nuptials with the English princess.

Years passed. In 1412 Queen Margareta died suddenly, her work by no means finished. Much remained to be done. It was a great inheritance that she left to Erik of Pomerania, but one full of difficulties and responsibilities.

Erik of Pomerania. Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson. The birth of Swedish nationalism.  The Origin of the Riksdag

Erik of Pomerania, Margareta’s successor, is described by contemporaries as the perfect courtier, winning and gallant in manner. At least, that is how he appeared at the beginning of his reign. Later the picture changed. In the closing scene of his life we find him the broken lord of Visborg Castle in Gotland, with nothing left of the gallant dash that had captivated the ladies of the Imperial Court of Vienna. For Erik, after being king of all Scandinavia, had become a robber-king of the sea, a freebooter of the Baltic, and a terror to all peaceable merchants.

Thus Erik alienated the hearts of the people of Sweden. It was the peasants who now came forward in open opposition against the rule of Denmark, taking their own fate and that of Sweden in their hands. This took place under the leadership of one of the noblest figures in all the history of Sweden, the mine-owner from Dalecarlia, Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson.

Engelbrekt’s achievement in the history of Sweden was that he actually destroyed the Union, gathered the whole people in arms to defend their national liberty, and created guarantees for future security by stirring Swedish patriotism to life.

In 1434 the storm broke. Engelbrekt, who had personally conveyed the complaints of the Dalecarlians to the king without receiving any satisfactory answer, gave the signal for action. Heralds traversed the whole length and breadth of Dalecarlia; the men assembled, and the march began. The war of liberation had started.

The movement swept on like a hurricane. The land resounded with the tramp of peasants; fortresses were razed to the ground; bailiffs were flung out. The central provinces of Sweden were quickly liberated, and Engelbrekt turned his attention southwards. Everywhere as he advanced fresh troops of peasants flocked to join him, and after a time even some of the nobles began to find their way, one by one, to his camp. The aristocracy, which at first had watched the tidal wave distrustfully as it rose and rushed past, was swept along with the current. Engelbrekt became the virtual lord of the land. In three months the work of liberation was completed.

That was the first stage. Then followed Engelbrekt’s struggle to secure and maintain the position he had won. King Erik, allegiance to whom the Council, under compulsion from Engelbrekt, had renounced, resumed the offensive. He journeyed up to Stockholm, and by the extreme tact which he displayed in his negotiations with the Council, he broke the national front. His gracious amenity drew the aristocracy back to his side, and in November 1434 an armistice was declared, the terms of which were that the dispute between King Erik and his subjects should be decided by a Union Court in the following autumn. In this the lords acquiesced, deserting the cause of Engelbrekt.

It was now that Engelbrekt made his great counterstroke. In January 1435 he called a meeting, in the town of Arboga, not merely of bishops and nobles, but also of citizens and peasants. At this meeting, which from its composition has been called the first ‘Riksdag’ or parliament of Sweden, a new constitution was drawn up; Engelbrekt was elected Governor of Sweden, and similar governors, subordinate to him, were appointed in all the different provinces.

The year 1435 must be regarded as one of the most important dates in the history of Sweden, since in that year a Riksdag, or assembly representative of all classes in the kingdom, was convened, just as in 1265 England had her first representative parliament.

He had just completed a fresh war of liberation when, on April 27,1436, he was murdered on an island in Lake Hjalmar.

The Struggle for the Union, Karl Knutsson.  The Stures.

The latter part of the fifteenth century boasted a large number of unusually distinguished personalities. First in the series came Karl Knutsson Bonde, Engelbrekt’s successor as champion of the cause of national liberty and unity.

The personality of Karl Knutsson is a riddle that has never been successfully solved. The figure has appealed to the romantic instincts making his exit from the history of Sweden almost as a Scandinavian Don Quixote.

Karl Knutsson stands out as the man who fulfilled, perhaps even who retrieved, the work of Engelbrekt. His first act was to crush a popular rising, led by men who had stood very close to Engelbrekt and who claimed to be his only rightful successors—claims which were silenced on the block; and for Karl, who in 1438 had made himself Protector the road now seemed clear. But the governing aristocracy of Sweden was not minded to witness his final triumph. In 1441 they called in Kristofer of Bavaria, now king in Denmark since the deposition of Erik, and Karl was obliged to submit. The Union was restored, the aristocratic programme had triumphed. Karl retired to Finland and, establishing himself in Viborg Castle, devoted himself to the administration of that country.

Kristofer wore the crown for seven years; he died suddenly in 1448. Then Karl Knutsson reappeared on the scene and was elected king

The foremost of Karl Knutsson’s opponents was Jons Bengtsson Oxenstiema, archbishop of Uppsala. Jons Bengtsson was both aristocrat and prelate, and it was in this double capacity that he took up arms against Karl Knutsson. Fighting thus for family, class, and church, he fought with an implacability that made any attempt at reconciliation impossible.

In 1449 Karl Knutsson had been elected king of Norway, reviving the old Folkung idea of a union between Norway and Sweden; but the next year the Norwegian Council had transferred the crown to his rival, the Danish King Kristian of Oldenburg. This was the beginning of the double-fronted war of the years 1450-60. Karl conducted the war with considerable spirit, but his fate was sealed when, in 1457, Jons Bengtsson, who had been the life and soul of the intrigues against him, raised the standard of revolt. Karl was exiled and fled to Danzig, and Kristian was anointed king. The Union had been restored once more.

By 1463 Sweden had wearied of the Danish king, who pleased neither peasantry nor nobility. Jons Bengtsson came into conflict with him, even suffering imprisonment; and in 1464 an insurrection broke out, under the leadership of the young bishop Kettil Vasa of Linkoping—another bishop with sword and armour. Karl Knutsson was recalled and mounted the throne once more, reigning for a few short months, after which he was driven out by Jons Bengtsson, who now assumed the position of Protector. Two more years went by. They called in Karl Knutsson again, who mounted the throne for a third time. Jons Bengtsson gathered his forces for a last resistance against his old enemy, but was vanquished and died soon afterwards in exile. This time Karl ruled until his death in 1470, when he bequeathed his position as leader of the national party, to his nephew, Sten Sture the Elder.

In the autumn of 1471 the Danish King Kristian was defeated in a famous battle outside Stockholm by the Protector, Sten Sture. This Battle of Brunkeberg established a spirit of national consciousness which was of invaluable assistance to the Protector during the years which followed.

Sten Sture’s career began along democratic lines, and continued as it had begun.  The fundamental principle underlying his foreign policy was simple. It amounted apparently to nothing more than this: the postponement until the last possible moment of any decision on the question that still continued to dominate all foreign politics—the question of the Union.

The Danish kings had by no means abandoned their claim to the throne of Sweden; it had been asserted by Kristian I until his death in 1481, and after that by his son Hans. Sten Sture contrived, however, with amazing dexterity to keep the question open. The question simply was whether it could be kept up until the whole idea of Union, without any conclusive settlement, should disappear from the political horizon. This was not to be. Men were to come up who would thwart Sten Sture’s designs. The foremost of these was the archbishop of the kingdom of Svea, Jakob Ulfsson. The foundation of Uppsala University in 1477 was one of Jakob Ulfsson’s greatest achievements. In addition he was an aristocrat with a strong sense of the rights of the aristocracy.  Before the Battle of Brunkeberg, the archbishop had made peaceful advances to King Kristian. But when the battle came and victory fell to Sten Sture, he adapted himself rapidly to the new situation. He had no occasion to complain of Sten; he assisted him in the task of government with a good conscience and with considerable personal profit. But as time passed and Sten Sture, in the consciousness of greater and greater power, began to assert himself more forcibly; as the regime took on a more pronouncedly democratic and national character, Jakob Ulfsson gradually assumed a more reserved attitude. He kept his hands free for the formation of new alliances, and, when the old question of the Union was once more mooted by the Danes, he changed his front.

In 1483 an agreement was drawn up in Kalmar between King Hans and the Swedish governing aristocracy, by which Hans was recognized as king in Sweden, on condition that he handed over practically all power to the Council, and guaranteed the privileges of the Church in their widest extension. The agreement contained all that Jakob Ulfsson had been labouring for, and for him there was no longer any choice: Sten Sture must go.

It looked as though the Protector had been driven back to the wall. But he had not yet said his last word. He very soon found an excuse for postponing fulfilment of the promises given at Kalmar, and with the powerful support of the peasants he continued to rule. This policy, however, was ultimately to bring about his downfall. In 1495 a war broke out with Russia, and Sten found himself compelled to fight for his existence on two fronts: against Moscow, and against Denmark and her Swedish allies. The climax was reached in 1497, when at a tempestuous meeting in Stockholm Sten Sture was deposed from the Protectorate. He appealed to the populace and embarked on a civil war, attacking the archbishop and his followers with great ruthlessness; but in the end he was forced to submit. On October 11, 1497, King Hans entered Stockholm, and shortly afterwards ascended the throne.

But this was not the end of Sten Sture. In 1501 he seized power again, rebelling against, and driving out, King Hans. The Protector now had at his side his former opponent, Svante Sture, who was to be his successor in his high office. And beside him there was another man whose name is indissolubly connected with the critical period we are just approaching: Doctor Hemming Gadh.

Hemming Gadh had already been in Sten Sture’s service for about twenty years. In 1479 he had been sent to the Curia at Rome on a diplomatic mission, and had remained in the Papal city until the end of the century as Sten Sture’s delegate. It was an important post he occupied, for many of the political threads of the time met at the Curia, and in the struggle between Sweden and Denmark this was one of the danger spots.

Sten Sture did not long survive his expulsion of King Hans, as he died in 1503.

The next Protector was Svante Sture. King Hans resumed the struggle for his lost crown, and that the national resistance was carried on with so much spirit as it was, must be attributed ultimately to the magnificent leadership of Hemming Gadh. He was the life and soul of the Swedish party; he was, in spite of personal reverses, always at hand, with all the charm of his bizarre personality and all his burning patriotism, to encourage, inspire, and direct. He acted as Svante Sture’s councillor in everything, he personally conducted the siege of Kalmar Castle from 1506 to 1509, and he served as ambassador to Lubeck in 1510-12, when his eloquence persuaded the council of the Hansa city to intervene on the side of the Swedes against the Danes.

Suddenly, in 1512, Svante Sture died, just after he had fought his way through a storm of opposition that met him at an assembly in the autumn of 1511. His successor was his barely twenty-year-old son, Sten Sture the Younger.

For the first years of his rule, the Protector employed his diplomatic gifts in consolidating his position. A period of calm development seemed to lie before him, through which he would be able gradually to realize his plans without encountering any serious obstacles. But then an event occurred which ruled a heavy line through all such calculations. Archbishop Gustav Trolle stepped on the scene.

Gustav Trolle entered the political arena as a newly ordained archbishop in the year 1515, fully armed and in fighting trim. He sowed dissension and tore open wounds that by this time were almost healed, and behind him stood the king of Denmark, the renaissance prince Kristian II.

Open war broke out in 1516 when Sten Sture began investing the archbishop’s fortress of Stake, not far from Stockholm; and the situation soon became critical for Trolle. King Kristian attempted indeed to come to his relief, but the Danish army was defeated in an engagement just outside Stockholm in 1517. After that, Sten Sture struck the decisive blow. At a Riksdag in Stockholm in 1517, Trolle was deposed,.

The deposition of Gustav Trolle was a sensational measure. None of the earlier Stures would have dared to treat the Church with such high-handed aggressiveness. But actually it was no more than a consistent application of the principle that Sten Sture the Younger had been asserting throughout the whole conflict, namely that he intended to respect the Church and its privileges only in so far as was compatible with the interests of the State. This national principle involved a new conception of the State. It was opposed to the position of the Church as a State within the State, it incorporated even the hierarchy in the secular social system as a body which must, in political questions, bend to the requirements of the State for the good of the population in general. This resolution of the Riksdag of 1517 marked the first step towards the detachment of Sweden from the mighty organization of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1518 the Danish army was for the second time defeated outside Stockholm. In 1520 the Danes made a fresh attack and a battle was fought on the ice of Lake Asunden, close to the town of Bogesund in Vastergotland, which battle determined the course of events for the following years—or, one might say, the whole future of Sweden.

The Sture party melted away, the Danish army advanced through the land, conquering by force of arms wherever the population did not voluntarily submit. In the end only Stockholm still held out, under the leadership of Sten Sture’s widow, Kristina Gyllenstierna. Her valiant defence of the capital and her heroic struggle to preserve her husband’s work forms one of the grandest and most beautiful features of this tragic epilogue to the Swedish Middle Ages. But in the end she had to abandon resistance. An agreement was drawn up, by which King Kristian granted an amnesty for all that had taken place during the war, above all for all aggression against the Church. The city gates were opened, and all Sweden was in the hands of the king of Denmark. This was in September 1520.

Then in November of the same year came the closing scene of the Sture period, the massacre of Stockholm—an atrocity unequalled in the annals of political crime. Little is known with any certainty of what really took place at the dark discussions in Stockholm Castle those frightful November days. But it is known that Gustav Trolle, restored now to his archiepiscopal dignity, had appealed to the king for retribution for all he had suffered at the hands of the Sture party. It is also known that a court of justice was set up and that Trolle declared Sten and his followers to have proved themselves guilty of open heresy. About midday on the same day that the verdicts of heresy were pronounced, the citizens saw the executions beginning. First, two bishops were led out into the market-place, and after them a number of councillors and members of the higher nobility. All of them had to lay their heads on the block. Then came the turn of the citizens of Stockholm. Some forty of them at least were beheaded on this and the following days, and their fate was shared by many others. ‘Everywhere was sighing, murder and death,’ writes an eyewitness. ‘There was no escape from the drawn swords and the brutal men.’

The massacre was not confined to Stockholm. In every part of the land the Danish executioners carried out their duties with the same merciless precision. Children of later generations, who pause before the gravestones of these victims, can read on one of them the name of Hemming Gadh. One day in December 1520, his head too had fallen beneath the executioner’s axe outside the castle of Raseborg in Finland. He took a secret with him to the grave—the mystery of why he, for decades the chief supporter of the Stures, the leader of the struggle for nationalism and its compelling and inspiring force, should now have joined King Kristian’s men and become a deserter and a renegade.

GUSTAV VASA

1521-1560

One day about the close of the year 1520, a young man stood at a desolate spot on the border between Sweden and Norway, scanning anxiously the inhospitable wastes through which his way seemed to lie. He was a fugitive, and his story was a strange one. Gustav Eriksson, son of an Uppland nobleman and member of one of the foremost families in the kingdom, later from its coat of arms called Vasa, had come at an early age to the court of Sten Sture the Younger. There he had been trained in the use of arms and brought up to cherish the ideal of a free people and a king of native birth; he had listened while the wise old Hemming Gadh told tales of life out in the big world, of the treacherous deeds of the Danes and the worldly ways of the prelates. Later he had gone forth to battle and in 1518 had been the Swedish standard-bearer in a fight in which the Danish invaders were hurled back with broken and bleeding heads. Shortly afterwards he had been delivered up as a hostage to King Kristian and treacherously carried off as a prisoner to Denmark; but he had contrived to escape, and had made his way, disguised as a cattle­driver, to Lubeck, whence he had succeeded in crossing to Sweden in May 1520. Vainly had he struggled in the southern parts of the country to stir the people to resistance against the toils that were being drawn closer and closer round them; he had had to turn northwards, friendless and alone; and in his ancestral home in Sodermanland, in which he had taken refuge, had heard the news of the Massacre of Stockholm. His own father was one of the victims whose head had fallen beneath the axe. So he set forth again, this time with Dalecarlia as his goal, to appeal in the spirit of Engelbrtkt and of the Stures to the people who for nearly a century had represented the heart and soul of the Swedish nation. In peasant dress, with axe on shoulder, Gustav began his pilgrimage. That is why we find Gustav Eriksson, as the year 1520 was drawing to its close, standing at the boundary of the kingdom. He had failed. Nothing seemed left for him but flight; a step that would doubtless have removed him from the history, as well as from the country of Sweden.

Two years passed. A wave of insurrection swept over the country; the Danes were driven out, the people of Sweden made themselves free once more, and on June 6,1523, at a Riksdag in Strangnas, Gustav Eriksson Vasa was elected king.

In 1523 King Kristian was driven from the Danish throne. This event had important consequences for Sweden. The new king of Denmark dropped the Danish claims to suzerainty over Sweden, and at a meeting at Malmo, 1524, he recognized the conditions of affairs de facto. The old feud over the question of Union or no Union was at an end. Sweden was free to strike out on new paths. The government of the nation rested in the hands of a man who was firmly determined to pull everything down and build it up afresh from the very foundations. That he succeeded was due most of all to his own strength. But he received assistance from mighty forces, the effects of which were being felt at this time all over Europe, foremost among them being that spiritual revolution which goes under the name of the Reformation.

At that time, Master Olof, the great figure of the Swedish Reformation, had begun his preaching. To the citizens of Stockholm he proclaimed the message of freedom set forth in the Lutheran doctrines—freedom from the dominion of the Priest, from the supremacy of the Pope, from oppressive obligations of all kinds; and, above all, the possibility for every private individual of winning this spiritual free­dom and obtaining salvation without intermediaries, through faith and reliance upon God’s grace alone.

Master Olof—or, to give him his right name, Olaus Petri, shares with Gustav Vasa the honour of having laid the foundations of modern Sweden. The fundamental principles of his reformation were borrowed direct from the head-quarters of the German movement.

All this time the new faith was winning ground. As late as 1527 the greater part of the Swedish people had still scarcely heard of the Lutheran teachings. But in Stockholm the voice of Master Olof was rising.

Gustav Vasa, whose treasury was empty, pressed for a decision that would place the vast wealth of the Church at his disposal, compel the people to gather round him, and put an end to the insurrections which had now broken out in Dalecarlia on two separate occasions, in 1525 and in 1527. Gustav propounded his schemes and appealed to the Riksdag for support. Bishop Brask and Ture Jonsson, lawman of Vastergotland, who led the nobility against the king, declined on behalf of their Estates. Then the king played his trump card. He abdicated, and after a stem and bitter castigatory speech, retired from the proceedings, to pass his time in ‘singing and merriment’. The crisis had come— and Gustav triumphed. The so-called ‘Vasteras recess’ ruled that the surplus wealth of bishops, cathedrals, and monasteries should be confiscated to assist the State in its financial troubles. The nobility were to regain a large proportion of their property which had fallen into the hands of the Church, and finally the ‘pure word of God’ was to be preached throughout the kingdom. Besides this, the so-called ‘Vasteras ordinantia’ were drawn up, establishing the Church on the meagre footing it was to have in the new order of things. In reality the king was now its overlord. Its temporal power had been destroyed, its liberty had been taken from it, and it had been separated from Rome.

In 1528 three Swedish bishops, who had hitherto functioned only as electi, were consecrated without Papal sanction. The ceremony was performed by a prelate who had himself received confirmation and consecration at the hands of the Pope in Rome. In this way the apostolic succession was preserved in Sweden.

Gustav’s attitude towards the rest of Europe was determined, particularly during the earlier part of his reign, by his position as supplanter of Kristian II, and as a Protestant, reforming monarch. These circumstances forced him into opposition against the Emperor Charles V, and made natural an approach to France.

In Sweden the heir-apparent, Erik, eldest son of Gustav Vasa, proud and ambitious, handsome and stately, was dreaming dreams which would, if realized, have united the destinies of the peoples of England and Sweden. He whose constant care it was to increase his ‘dignity and high estate’, had seen in a marriage with Elizabeth, the young queen of England, a highly attractive means of acquiring increased splendour. The queen rejected the proposal.

On September 29, 1560, Gustav Vasa died.

ERIK XIV

1560-1569

Erik XIV began his reign by crushing the power of the dukes, his brothers, at a Riksdag held in Arboga in April, 1561. An early achievement was the acquisition of Reval with the province of Estonia, the corner-stone of Sweden’s Baltic dominion. He waged war against Denmark with a threefold object: to destroy the old Danish hegemony of the North, to secure Sweden against the danger of isolation, and to give her opportunity for fuller expansion in connexion with her new Baltic acquisitions.

Erik XIV has been placed in the category of Renaissance princes. In the circle of suitors which aspired to the hand of Queen Elizabeth there was none who could outshine him.

When in the spring of 1561 he had made himself lord of Reval and the surrounding districts of Estonia, he was involving himself in a century-long struggle for the mastery of Europe. The circumstances in which the Order of Teutonic Knights had grown up in Livonia had long since ceased to exist. Under the new conditions, in the midst of strong principalities and expanding national states, its survival was no longer possible. Neighbouring countries were waiting in readiness to fling themselves on the prey; Russia, Denmark, Poland had all made clear their intentions to participate. The aspirations of Russia in particular were a serious menace to Sweden. If the Tsar had once acquired a firm foothold on the southern shores of the Baltic, he would have been in a far better position to attack Sweden than ever before. Danish dominion in Estonia, on the other hand, would have strengthened the position of Denmark in the Scandinavian balance of power; so that Erik’s prompt intervention must be regarded as particularly well inspired. The consequences of this intervention were a breach with Denmark in 1563, as well as with Erik’s brother, Duke Johan of Finland, who in 1562 had married the Polish princess Katarina Jogellonica, sister of the king of Poland, and who was planning to establish an independent Finnish-Baltic kingdom. These plans were, however, frustrated by Erik, and Johan was thrown into prison.

In 1563 war with Denmark broke out. The hatred between the two countries which had resulted from the confused struggles of the period of union, had not abated. Gustav Vasa had preserved throughout his life a deep distrust of the Danes, and Erik had inherited it. He commenced military operations with the firm intention of putting an end to the danger from Denmark, and of making Sweden the leading power in Scandinavia. But he met with severe reverses from the very first. Alvsborg, the only Swedish harbour and fortress on the North Sea, was captured by the Danes, and when Lubeck and Poland entered the war on the Danish side, the country was in imminent danger of being hemmed in all round. From 1565 onwards a Swedish fleet dominated the Baltic for the first time for centuries, and for the first time aggressive war­fare was carried on against Denmark with a certain measure of success.

Erik was at least as domineering as his father and still prouder; but he possessed none of his imperturbable personality. His anxiety to assert his position found expression not only in a rigorous administration, but also in acts of aggression and violence dictated by morbid suspicions. He heard dark whispers of plots to remove him from the throne. His spies brought in reports of mysterious conversations, obscure insinuations, expressions of contempt and discontent; the message of the stars to him was that he would be over­thrown by a fair-haired man, and he went in mortal terror that his brother Johan would escape from prison and wreak vengeance on him. But there was another man, too, on whom his suspicions, nourished from various sources, fell— Nils Sture, a member of the family that had once led the destinies of Sweden, won the love of the people, and justified the high position it held in the life of the nation. Nils Sture had therefore to share the fate that had overtaken so many others. He was summoned before the King’s Jury to answer an accusation which, of recent years, had come to acquire a terrifying sound: neglect of duty. He was condemned to death, but was reprieved and exposed publicly to a humiliating ordeal of the most ruthless description. This happened in the year 1566, and formed the prelude to the frightful events of the year which followed.

Nils Sture’s prosecutor before the jury had been Joran Persson, one of the leading forces in the royal government. Joran Persson was a sombre figure and has left a dark reputation behind him. ‘Colossally repulsive,’ he has been called. Tradition tells that it was he who spurred Erik on to bloody deeds, he was the evil genius in the Royal Castle at Stockholm, whose fanaticism, ruthlessness, and vindictiveness surrounded the monarch with an atmosphere of terror. This much at least is certain, that the part he played was a prominent one, and that he exercised a very strong influence on Erik.

It was about 1565 that another figure made its appearance by the side of Erik—the figure of a woman. It is related that he was wandering one day through the market square of Stockholm, when his eye fell upon a young girl of singular beauty, selling nuts at a stall. He stopped, entranced, went up to the girl, took her away from her trade, and gave her a good education at court. Thus Karin Mansdotter entered his life. She became his mistress, and finally he gave her the place by his side which he had once intended for Queen Elizabeth of England.

Karin Minsdotter made her first appearance at court as serving-maid to a man called Gert Kantor, a court singer who also kept a public-house. Karin could hardly have been the innocent young girl tradition has painted. Without Karin Mansdotter, Erik’s life would have been poorer and more desolate.

In the spring of 1567 the crisis came. Several members of the higher nobility were imprisoned and brought to trial. King Erik in an outburst of insanity with his own hands murdered Nils Sture in his dungeon, and had four other distinguished noblemen slain by the guards.

The sequel can be dealt with briefly. In the summer of 1568 the standard of revolt was raised. The king’s brothers, the Dukes Johan, now at liberty, and Karl, stood at the head of the movement. By September all was over. Stockholm opened her gates to the dukes’ supporters, and Erik had to surrender. Shortly before this Joran Persson had met with a terrible death.

Erik never recovered his liberty. He died in prison in 1577. probably poisoned at the instigation of his brother, King Johan.

JOHAN III, SIGISMUND, AND KARL IX

1569-1611

Johan’s reign was anything but insignificant. Johan is the first Swedish king whose policy can be said to have been European in the real sense of the word. His interests embraced the whole system of European States, they stretched as far as southern Italy. He carried on negotiations with the Emperor, with Philip II of Spain, with the Pope. He was on friendly terms with the kings of Poland, and he waged war on the Tsar of Russia. What Johan wanted was to draw Sweden into the centre of continental politics. This ambition, however, came to nothing. It was in the eastern corner of Europe that his most important political achievements lay.

In 1570 Johan brought the Scandinavian Seven Years War to an end. The Peace of Stettin involved heavy sacrifices for Sweden. She had to relinquish the northerly provinces of Jamtland and Haijedalen; she recovered indeed her only port on the North Sea, Alvsborg, but had to pay in indemnity what was, by the standards of the time, an enormous sum. The financial situation was not improved when Johan was forced into a war with Russia to defend the Swedish province on the other side of the Baltic. This time Poland was not ranged against Sweden, for Johan by his marriage with Katerina Jagellonica had become brother-in-law to the Polish king, Sigismund August, with whom he had also formed bonds of friendship. These friendly relations with Poland continued also under Stefan Bathori, who even joined his military forces with Johan’s in common cause against the Tsar. This offensive warfare against Russia was one of Johan’s most valuable achievements. Estonia, originally acquired by King Erik, was during these desperate struggles attached all the more firmly to the Crown of Sweden; and in addition large tracts of Ingria came under Swedish rule. The campaign in ‘Balticum’, though of little interest in its details, became an important link in the chain of events which led finally to the consolidation of a Swedish ‘Empire of the Baltic’.

The Swedish Reformation had left the question of doctrine still undetermined. He dreamt of establishing a universal, a ‘catholic’ church, based on the Roman Catholic services and the general principles of the Christian religion, i.e. Roman Catholic doctrines but with certain modifications. His labours bore fruit in a Liturgy, completed in 1576, the celebrated 'Red Book’, by which the Catholic Mass was to be reintroduced into Sweden in all its magnificence, and Swedish churches filled once more with the scent of swinging censers and the melody of chorales.

Weighty negotiations took place at Johan’s court during the years 1576-80. Papal emissaries presented themselves; first the Norwegian, Laurentius Nicolai, and then one of the most skilful diplomats of the Curia, the Secretary General of the Order of Jesuits, Antonio Possevino. These had long audiences with the king, in which they discussed in detail the question of a church union, while at the same time another traveller from afar, the Spaniard Eraso, ambassador of Philip II of Spain, was formulating a different project: an alliance between Johan, the Emperor, and Spain. On the basis of a religious agreement to be made in a spirit of compromise, Sweden was to enter into a military pact with the powers that were fighting in the cause of the Counter-Reformation. In this way she was to gain security against external dangers, and in return was to supply the king of Spain with manned ships to assist him in his struggles against the rebellious Netherlands, which on the other side were supported with ships and money by Elizabeth of England. These negotiations form a strange intermezzo in the history of Sweden, an episode which might easily, if only a few small concessions had been made, have had important results. But neither the religious nor the political consultations led to anything. Sweden never came again under the authority of the Pope, and she never became the ally of Philip of Spain. Johan had in both cases his own convictions, which he could not abandon. Thus, on the one hand, he alienated Rome, and on the other, he alienated his own people, who had watched with horror the approach of the armed forces of the Counter-Reformation.

When Johan died in 1592 he was a beaten man.

King Johan had a son, Sigismund, whom his mother made a Catholic, while his father made him a king of Poland. When Stefan Bathori died in 1586, Johan, who had himself once been an aspirant to the Polish throne, flung himself with energy into the struggle for the succession, in support of the candidature of his son. It was not mere ambition that drove him on; his action was based upon well-considered political motives. By a personal union between Sweden and Poland, a great northern power would be created and a firm wall built up against the Russian Empire. His plans met with success. In the late summer of 1587 news came that Sigismund had been elected king of Poland.

But before long, he asked himself whether it had really been wise, after all, to establish Sigismund in Poland. So Johan formed a fresh decision: Sigismund must abdicate and return to Sweden. The Swedish councillors, however, frustrated this plan, and there followed a period of internal crisis in Sweden, the results of which were far-reaching. The rift between the Crown and the higher nobility, noticeable already during the reign of Erik, assumed the form of open warfare. A new generation of nobles had grown up. The Crown, said the foremost spokesman of this group, the learned and distinguished Erik Sparre, is legally restricted by the agreement between sovereign and people—in the case of Sweden, by the Union of Inheritance of 1544, in which the people renounced indeed their ancient right to appoint their own king, but not their other rights and liberties. Sparre’s ideal was the constitutional form of government, in which political power should be legally divided and therefore legally restricted; he fought, it has been said, for a permanent balance between the rights of the prince and the liberties of the Estates. The conflict between the autocratic Vasa king and the upholders of constitutional ideals was a violent one. Johan himself did not live to see the end of it—this was Reserved for his brother Karl, who forced the higher nobility to its knees, but even then did not succeed in destroying its constitutional ideals.

Duke Karl, the youngest son of Gustav Vasa and the one who most closely resembled his father, had entered early upon political life. He had taken a leading part in the insurrections against King Erik, and had found himself in conflict also with Johan. He had disapproved of the latter’s religious policy, and his strongly ruled dukedom had become a refuge for persecuted opponents of the Liturgy. In the struggles between Johan and the Council, we find him on the side of the former, but after Johan’s death he made peace with the councillors. The seriousness of the political situation made internal unity imperative. With Sweden under a Catholic ruler and in personal union with a powerful Catholic kingdom, the religion of the country, her freedom of conscience, and her political independence, were at stake. A serious crisis was impending.

While Sigismund was fingering his rosary and Malaspina whispering wise counsels in his ear, the people of Sweden  were arraying themselves in the heavy but sure armour of the Lutheran faith.

The Convention of Uppsala of the year 1593 takes its place in the annals not merely of Sweden, but of the world. By the resolution which was passed at that meeting, Sweden placed herself definitely in the fighting ranks of Lutheran orthodoxy.

The Convention was attended by Duke Karl and the leading men of the realm, and above all, by the guardians of the faith, the clergy, 300 in number. These made their declaration unanimously: the Holy Scriptures, as interpreted by the three symbols and in that work of Luther and Melanchthon, the Confession of Augsburg, must be regarded as the only guiding line for the Christian. Unanimously the clergy promised to defend this declaration to the death. The president summed up the importance of the occasion in the words: ‘Now Sweden is become one man, and all of us have one Lord and God.’

Civil war was at the gates. A conflict had begun which had its roots in international as well as national conditions, a conflict between Protestants and Catholics, between Sweden and Poland, between the king and the nobility, between Duke Karl and the king, and finally between the nobility and Duke Karl.

In reality it was the nobles who brought matters to a head. Sigismund relied on righteousness, and Karl on the sword and the executioner’s axe. It was with Karl that the final victory lay.

That was in 1594. But by the following year, Duke Karl had decided that this state of things was absolutely incompatible with the best interests of either himself or the country. From the king and the nobility he turned to the people. He summoned a general Riksdag. This was in itself an unconstitutional measure, for no one but the king had the right to summon the Riksdag. Karl had already set out on the path of insurrection.

The sequel is to be found in three outstanding events: the Soderkoping Riksdag, the Battle of Stangebro, and the Massacre of Linkoping.

At the Soderkoping Riksdag, in the autumn of 1595, the duke appeared before the representatives of the people. He carried them with him, or forced them to follow him; he was declared Protector, and entered into an alliance with the Estates, it being further declared that all who failed to join this alliance, that is to say, to submit to the heavy hand of the duke, should be regarded as traitors to the realm. When Karl, as the climax of his great speech to the commonalty in the market-place, put the question whether they were willing to ‘stand all for one, and one for all’, they shouted back: ‘Yea, yea, gracious lord.’ Karl had won half the battle.

Three years passed, and in 1598 the decisive battle took place at Stangebro outside Linkoping. The royal troops were completely routed, and the cause of Sigismund was lost

The meeting of the Riksdag in Soderkoping had resulted in open warfare between the duke and the king, and later also between Duke Karl and the higher nobility. As the duke’s policy assumed a more ruthless character, the nobles began to waver; it was, after all, to Sigismund that they had sworn fealty. Karl on his side had knitted the bonds between himself and the Commons still closer at a Riksdag in Arboga in 1597, assuming at the same time an attitude definitely hostile to the nobility. Most of the councillors retired from this Riksdag. One after another they were beginning to leave the country, and to visit the king in Poland. Then war had broken out. Sigismund invaded the country in 1598 with a mixed army of Scottish, German, and Polish mercenaries. The end came at Stangebro, and there the councillors who had sided with the king surrendered, to meet their fate at the Massacre of Linkoping.

Sigismund was given one last chance of recovering his crown on certain stipulated conditions. He refused. He, the champion of the Roman Catholic Church, must have all or nothing. He sailed back to Poland, and his mother­land never saw him again.

In Sweden vengeance fell heavy on all who had fought or intrigued on the side of the king. The inquisition began in Stockholm, and passed thence to other towns and fortresses, and from Sweden proper to Finland, which had been severely ravaged by the so-called ‘Club War’ of the winter of 1596-7—a peasant rising directed against Sigismund’s supporter, Kias Fleming, the Governor of Finland. Gallows lined the path of the duke. Swiftly and effectively, ruthlessly and brutally, the last traces of resistance were swept away. No pardon was given. The house was to be ‘empty, swept, and garnished.

Sigismund’s deposition followed at a Riksdag in Stockholm in the summer of 1599, when the Estates renounced faith and allegiance to him. He had broken his oath, he had put foreign armies in the field against his own country; he had forfeited his rights. But his son, it was stipulated, should be recognized as king, provided he was sent over within one year to Sweden to receive a Swedish and Evangelical education.

There remained the trial of the imprisoned councillors. This came in the year 1600, in the month of February, at a Riksdag in Linkoping. Never before, said one of the accused, had such a trial taken place in Sweden. Duke Karl himself appeared as accuser, and it was in reality he himself, and not the Estates, terrorized as they were into submission, who passed sentence. He charged the councillors with attempting his own life and honour, and with acting treacherously towards him and their country. When they reminded him that he had promised them trial before foreign, impartial judges, they were silenced. When they read speeches of defence they were rejected. The death-sentences came as no surprise to them.

Karl was a tyrant who, during the sessions of the Riksdag, kept soldiers and judges as well as the Estates well under his command. At the same time he was also a great ruler and politician. He belonged to the elite of contemporary statesmen and can well stand comparison with, for example, Henry IV of France.

Karl was a leader of the people, who needed the people quite as much as the people needed him. But when he took up their cause it was not from any motives of philanthropy or pity; his estimate of humanity was too low for that. He despised the people of Sweden, whose history seemed to him for the most part a long story of mutual hatred, warfare, and quarrels, the root and cause of all the ‘misfortunes and lamentations of the Swedes’. He despised his fellow-men, and above all those who were in his service.

When Sigismund returned to Poland after the Battle of Stangebro, it was with the firm intention that Sweden should hear of him again. He had not renounced his claim to its throne, nor had he abandoned hope of re-establishing the power of the Catholic Church there. So a fresh war broke out, which was to continue, with interruptions, for more than half a century. Karl assumed the offensive, leading his army in the year 1600 out of Estonia into Livonia, and in the following years violent, though indecisive, actions took place. By the Peace of Teusina in 1595, which had concluded Johan III’s Russian war, the Tsar had recognized Estonia as a Swedish province, and a definite boundary had been established for the first time between northern Finland and Russia. The solution of the boundary question in the east, and the establishment, after protracted and hazardous struggles, of the first province in ‘Balticum’, warded off the once imminent danger of isolation. These were some important results of the Swedish sixteenth-century policy. Karl now threw down the gauntlet to Poland, but his plans were not designed for conquest. He occupied Livonia because he wanted to force Sigismund to renounce his claim to the Swedish throne, and for this purpose he needed a hostage. But he had no intention of retaining Livonia. His aim was to secure peace on conditions that would safeguard Swedish independence.

The conflict with Poland derived its peculiar acuteness from the disturbances which were just then convulsing the Russian Empire. Both Swedes and Poles were eager to intervene in the struggles going on round the Russian throne. For Sweden this meant the opening up of dazzling prospects. In 1608 a young Swedish general and nobleman, Jakob De la Gardie, entered into an agreement with the Tsar promising him armed support against his rivals, in return for which Sweden was to receive a valuable boundary district. But the Tsar was overthrown, and the agreement came to nothing. De la Gardie then, in 1611, invaded Russia again and compelled the city of Novgorod to proclaim the king of Sweden as its protector and to promise to support the candidature of one of his sons for the throne of Russia. Union, or at any rate a very close association between Sweden and the Russian Empire, was thus in view. The plan sounds fantastic, and was doubtless regarded as such by Karl. In any case the dreams of the young general came to nothing. The Romanovs in 1613 put an end to all Swedish and Polish designs on the Russian throne.

About this time serious tidings began to arrive from the Continent. The confused guerrilla warfare of the later sixteenth century between Protestantism and Catholicism seemed on the point of breaking out into a massed conflict of enormous proportions. Protestants and Catholics had organized themselves into two opposing camps, and were watching each other closely. In 1608 the Protestant league had been formed, in 1609 the Catholic. Following upon these, Karl IX of Sweden in 1610 put forward a great plan: the Protestant coalition was to be extended beyond the boundaries of Germany, and a great anti-Catholic union was to be formed, directed against both Spain and Poland. He sent ambassadors to Holland, England, and France; but his overtures met with no response. Henry IV of France was no admirer of his, otherwise we should have expected him to have been most willing to co-operate; and the knife of Ravaillac very shortly afterwards put an end to his career. James I of England hesitated. His difficulty was that he was brother-in-law to the king of Denmark, with whom Karl’s relations were extremely strained. The plan had been launched at an unfortunate moment, and it was doomed to failure. Karl’s attention was, however, soon taken up with a war with Denmark.

The ruler of Denmark and Norway at this time was a merry and active monarch. Kristian IV was not the man to say no, if an opportunity should present itself of laying Sweden once more under Danish feet. Peace had prevailed between the two countries ever since 1570; but the old rivalry was by no means forgotten, and new causes of dissension had been added to the old. The tension was greatly increased when Karl IX claimed the right to tax the Lapps in the remote northerly districts by the Arctic Ocean, where the boundary was extremely vague. Denmark could not permit this. In February, 1611, she declared war. Kalmar, one of ‘the keys of the realm’, fell into Danish hands, and Alvsborg, which before the foundation of Gothenburg constituted Sweden’s only port on the North Sea, was also taken. The Swedish mainland now lay open to attack. On its way through Norway an auxiliary troop from Scotland, led by Alexander Ramsay, was annihilated by the mou­taineers, and soon the Danish fleet ventured even into the archipelago of Stockholm itself.

Karl saw no more than the beginnings of this struggle. He died in October 1611. He had ploughed deeply, and the ground was ready for fresh seed.

GUSTAV II ADOLF

1611-1632

From the very beginning of his reign Gustav Adolf appears to have been planning the continuance of his father’s unfinished campaign on the Catholic-Polish front. With this end in view, he concluded peace with Denmark in 1613, hoping shortly to come to terms with Russia as well. The Danish war had been a severe trial for him and his people. It had been waged on Swedish soil, and had cost Sweden dear. The Peace of Knared, which concluded it, had to be bought on hard terms. In spite of British pressure on Denmark, Sweden had to abandon Karl IX’s claims on Finmark and, in ransom for Alvsborg, pay the, for that time, enormous sum of one million riksdaler. The fortress was not restored to Sweden until 1619.

There were also various important issues in the East, which had been left still undecided at the death of Karl IX. Gustav Adolf put an end to the fantastic setting himself or his brother Karl Filip on the throne of the Tsars.

The Russian was not, he resolved, to be let off unless his wings had been somewhat clipped and his demands curtailed. In view of the danger that Russians and Poles might join hands against a common foe, Gustav Adolf was finally induced somewhat to abate his pretensions. In 1617 peace was concluded at Stolbova through the mediation of John Merick, the ambassador of the English king, James I; and it represented a very definite triumph for Swedish diplomacy. Of her conquests made during the war, Sweden was to retain Eastern Carelia, that is the province of Keksholm, and the whole of Ingria. She had obtained what she had so long been striving for—a connecting link between her possessions to the north and south of the Gulf of Finland, and thus the control of the most important trade-route between Russia and western Europe. In future the Moscovite would hardly, the king hoped, dare to jump that ‘brook’—the wide Lake of Ladoga on the eastern border of Finland

This agreement between Sweden and Russia was reached just on the eve of the outbreak of the great European up­heaval which goes by the name of the Thirty Years War.

One day in May, 1618, some incensed Bohemians threw certain dignitaries of the Empire out of a window in Prague; and with that began a great war, a struggle for human souls and for the mastery of the world. Englishmen and Scots crossed in large numbers to the Continent to fight for Fredrik, the deposed Elector Palatine king of Bohemia, and his consort, the daughter of James I; to win honour and booty, and to learn the art of warfare. We find among them such men as Carleton, Cunningham, James Hamilton, Mackay, Seton, and Alexander Leslie, the celebrated liberator of Stralsund; and Colonel Robert Monro, a valiant Cavalier more careful of his honour than his life, a reckless condottiere who performed many exploit on German soil, slew many Catholics, emptied many a goblet of fine Rhenish wine, and who, moreover, attained a certain celebrity through the account he wrote of his life and adventures in the German wars. His book was published in London in 1637 and, though laboriously composed, is none the less in its way a very remarkable document; at any rate, it is well worth recalling Monro’s description of his royal chief, the king of Sweden.

In the eyes of Monro, Gustav Adolf was the king of Captains and the Captains of kings.  Such was Gustav Adolf in the eyes of one of his soldiers. The portrait may be supplemented by the words of his foremost adviser and close friend, Axel Oxenstiern: ‘In all the world there is not now his equal among kings.. .. With right he may bear among us the name of the wise and great Gustav Adolf, the father of the fatherland, whose like has not ruled in Sweden; as is not only known to us, but to which also foreign nations, enemies and friends, must bear testimony.’

The Swedish Church, with which his life-achievement is so intimately connected, was the object of his tireless interest. It was guarded jealously against Jesuits and Papal designs, and was enclosed within a barricade of legal measures, foremost among which was the religious Statute of 1617 with its ‘Draconian’ decrees. Any one discovered in communication with Kang Sigismund or his followers was to be put to death; anyone who reverted from the Evangelical faith to Catholicism was to suffer exile, and any one spreading Catholic propaganda was to be treated as a sedition maker. This enactment was an expression of the tension that characterized the whole period, and the drastic measures to which it gave rise.

On the king’s invitation and with his encouragement large numbers of foreigners now began to migrate to Sweden, settling, among other places, in the recently founded Goteborg. These foreigners, many of them Englishmen and Scots—whose descendants are still trace­able in such family names as Fleetwood, Hamilton, Douglas, and many others—brought capital into the country, and in addition, practical knowledge, technical skill, and enterprise. Foremost among them was the Fleming, Louis de Geer, who was naturalized as a Swede in 1627 and raised to the peerage in 1641. He was a giant in his sphere, a pioneer in the Swedish iron industry, the great purveyor of arms to the Swedish troops, and the great money-lender to the Swedish crown. He has won for himself lasting fame.

The Sweden of Gustav Adolf was full of life and creative force. The sword and the Bible, the merchant-ship and the plough, were the factors that built it up; while above them, uniting, inspiring, and protecting, was the Crown. Gustav Adolf threw wide open the window to the world. He and his followers went forth to battle for the cause of Sweden and of Protestantism. He himself was left behind on the battle-field, but those who survived the war returned home as lords and heroes.

It was in the late summer of 1621 that Gustav Adolf resumed his father’s offensive against Poland. He started with a boldly conceived and brilliant campaign. A month’s investment of Riga, the capital of Livonia, during which the inhabitants became familiar with the sound of Swedish cannons, convinced them of the superiority of the Swedish warriors, among whom was the Scot, Colonel James Seton. After the capitulation, Gustav Adolf made his entry into the town, confirmed its privileges, and constituted it a Swedish possession.

From Riga the Swedish Empire spread out. In the year 1625 Dorpat was captured and the Poles were expelled from the whole of Livonia. Gustav Adolf did not occupy this province merely for the sake of conquest. He did not originally intend to retain it, any more than his father had done before him. Like his father, he desired it as a hostage with which to extract from his cousin on the Polish throne a definite renunciation of his claim to the crown of Sweden.

The branch of the Vasa family that he was combating in Poland was closely associated with both Vienna and Rome. Gustav Adolf was fully aware that, when he led his army into the field against the king of Poland, he was declaring war simultaneously on the Emperor and on Rome. In 1626 he launched his attack on West Prussia, then belonging to Poland. Elbing surrendered to the Scot, Colonel Cunningham, and after three campaigns lasting from 1627 t0 1629, the whole province was occupied by the Swedes. Could they now acquire command of the mouths of the Vistula, Pregel, and Njemen—the trade routes to the Polish mainland—Poland would, like Russia after the loss of the mouths of the Neva and Dvina, be shut out from the Baltic and ‘held by the throat’. Gustav Adolf, brought nearer to the continental battle-fields, now cherished plans of drawing all Protestant Europe into an alliance and then hurling his troops from Prussia against the Emperor. The war against Poland was a minor action on the extreme flank, between Protestantism and the forces of armed and, just at this time, triumphant Catholicism.

Contemporary Europe, hearing the din of battle in Livonia and Prussia, watched Gustav’s movements with amazement and speculated as to his plans. Most intent of all was the commander-in-chief of the Imperial armies, Wallenstein. He, who had passed from victory to victory, who had harried and plundered and conquered, who had beaten the Danish king Kristian to his knees, who had dreamt of putting an Imperial fleet on the Baltic to bear down on Sweden, and who finally could boast of the title of ‘General of the Oceanic and Baltic waters’, was irritated by this cheerful and invulnerable monarch who had entered as a fresh and unknown factor into a problem which was otherwise just nearing its solution. He questioned the stars as to Gustav Adolf’s destiny, and the answer he received was not comforting. He would never, he was told, be able to vanquish the Swedes. He thus came to regard the king of Sweden as his most dangerous opponent, and made it his chief object to keep him occupied in Poland, until he himself should have had time to conquer northern Germany and render Denmark helpless and harmless.

Threatened in this way, Protestant Europe, disintegrated and perplexed, gathered together to discuss ways and means of averting the threatened catastrophe.

In France the celebrated Cardinal Richelieu had in 1624 seized the reigns of power and begun spinning his threads for the destruction of the House of Habsburg. His first step was an approach to the Netherlands. Previously in 1617 a Swedish envoy, Johan Skytte, had sought to interest King James of England in a general alliance of Protestant states. Now the king broke off his strange negotiations with Spain, and began to look round for Protestant allies to help his son-in-law to recover his throne. In the summer of 1624 an English embassy arrived in the North. The Swedish court was visited by Sir James Spens, the Danish by Robert Anstruther; and during the ensuing discussions, in which Georg Wilhelm, elector of Brandenburg, Gustav Adolf’s brother-in-law, also took part, the king of Sweden disclosed a great plan. He declared himself willing to invade northern Germany; but only on condition that he received adequate support from the other powers, and above all that he was given supreme command of the military operations. The plan, not unnaturally, fell through.

The king of Denmark, however, Kristian IV, proved more accommodating. He was spurred on by ambition and by a constant fear that he would be forestalled by Gustav Adolf. He succeeded in supplanting the Swedish king in the esteem of the English, just as he also contrived to win the ear of the Dutch, notwithstanding the fact that an alliance with the rebellious republic had been since 1614 one of the corner-stones of Gustav Adolf’s political system.

Co-operation between the two northern kings (as recommended by the English envoy at The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton) came to nothing. King Kristian concluded a single-handed agreement with the English and the Dutch, and set forth to battle as the champion of Protestant Europe. He was promptly vanquished and almost completely routed 1625-7. And the juggernaut of the Counter-Reformation rolled on along the northern coast of Germany. In England rumours spread that the Spanish fleet was to anchor in the Sound and in the Belts, thus cutting off all trade between the West and the Baltic.

War between Sweden and the Emperor now appeared inevitable. Outpost skirmishes took place. Wallenstein sent auxiliary troops to assist Poland. Gustav Adolf sent an expedition in 1628 to relieve the hard-beset Stralsund, the port of the Oder, thereby checking the advance of Wallenstein. In the following year the Scandinavian monarchs met in a little rectory on the boundary between the two kingdoms. But they were unable to come to terms, and thereupon the ways of Denmark and Sweden parted. The leadership of the North passed definitely over from Denmark to Sweden.

Wallenstein concluded peace with Denmark in 1629, only to find some months later, to his deep mortification, that Sweden had settled her differences with Poland. After three years’ blockade of the Russian harbours the Poles could offer no further resistance. Through the mediation of England and France, which were impressed by the rising star of Gustav Adolf, a truce was concluded for six years between the two neighbours. During this period Sweden was to retain Livonia, which had come to be felt more and more as a natural and valuable complement to her other possessions south of the Baltic, and to receive the rich customs-revenues from the Prussian harbours from Kurland up to Danzig. These Prussian acquisitions were organized as a province under the Governor-Generalship of Axel Oxenstierna. Wherever hostile feeling against the Emperor could be suspected Sweden set herself by diplomatic means to procure co-militants. At Constantinople she en­deavoured, in collaboration with England, to frustrate the re-establishment of peace between the Emperor and the Porte. None of these efforts were, however, successful, and Gustav Adolf had finally to enter into war without allies. But the confidence of his people gave him strength. In the autumn of 1629 Sweden decided to take part in the German war—the most important decision ever taken by a Swedish Council. In May 1630 the king took leave of his people, and, on June 17, set out with his army and fleet to rescue Liberty and Protestantism south of the Baltic. On June 24, in a violent thunderstorm, he reached the Pomeranian coast unmolested, and the army immediately began to entrench itself.

By the peace of Stolbova and the truce with Poland Sweden had acquired command of the rivers Neva, Dvina, Njemen, and Vistula. New river routes—the best means of transport at that time—had still to be secured. Stettin soon fell and Gustav Adolf was thereby afforded free access to central Germany along the Oder. In December 1630 he chased the Imperial troops out of Pomerania, which henceforth became the ‘bulwark of Sweden’, and shortly afterwards his position, still somewhat unsafe, was considerably strengthened by the downfall (through French instigation) of Wallenstein and by the alliance with France at Barwalde, January 1631. France pledged herself to pay for five years an annual subsidy of 400,000 liksdaler to Sweden, while Gustav Adolf promised to respect the Catholic faith during the coming campaigns. Thus Sweden gained a valuable ally without being deprived of her own liberty of action.

This diplomatic success soon bore fruit. Magdeburg, the firm bulwark of Protestantism, declared herself openly on the side of Gustav Adolf. This town was of first-rate strategic importance as the key of the Elbe and a gate to the prosperous provinces in the west. But this fact was also understood by Tilly, Wallenstein’s successor as Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial army. It now became urgent for him to cut off the Swedes from western Germany and to make Magdeburg the base of operations for the continuance of his campaign. In the spring of 1631 he began the siege of Magdeburg.

Gustav Adolf, who had meanwhile captured Frankfort on the Oder, could only reach Magdeburg by marching through the Protestant States of Brandenburg and Saxony. By threats he forced Georg Wilhelm, elector of Brandenburg, to give free pass to the Swedish troops. But Johan Georg of Saxony refused point-blank, and no Swedish reinforcements were able to reach Magdeburg. In May 1631 it was stormed, burned, and looted by the wild Croats of Tilly and Pappenheim.

Further Swedish advance was thus momentarily checked. Gustav Adolf now made his head-quarters at the junction of the Elbe and the Havel, and in this impregnable position he quietly waited for the moment when Saxony would turn to him for aid. He did not have to wait long. In August Tilly, who wished to prevent the Swedes from getting any help, forced his way into Saxony. Johan Georg called for help, and Gustav Adolf at once stepped forward. After a formal alliance the two princes advanced together. At Breitenfeld (near Leipzig) their armies stopped to occupy a favourable position, and on September 7 the battle opened which was to decide the fate of Protestantism. Tilly pre­ferred not to leave his safe position on the hill opposite the Allies, but Pappenheim and his cavalry, unable to restrain their warlike spirits, swept down on the Swedish right wing. Meeting with murderous fire, they turned round to attack the Swedish flank. Gustav Adolf was, however, too quick for them. Instantly his second line wheeled round and created a new line at right angles to the first one before Pappenheim had time to make a renewed attack. Every time he stormed, his cavalry was thrown back, and at last it fled in wild disorder. With the remnants of his army Tilly now turned against the Saxon troops. These, more fit for parade than real war, ‘fled in companies’ at his second charge. Left to themselves, the Swedes now had to fight against the overwhelming enemy. Cool and self-possessed, Gustav Hom at the head of the decimated left wing met the thundering attacks. Meanwhile the king and the right wing, supported by Sir John Hepburn (another Scottish warrior), stormed the hill where Tilly’s guns were placed and turned them round upon the enemy. Then, in spite of Tilly’s exhortations, his troops dissolved in mad flight. Gustav Adolf’s new tactics had won the day.

The battle of Breitenfeld definitely broke the force of the Counter-Reformation, and saved the Protestant faith. Sweden, which only a few decades previously had had to struggle for her national existence, stepped forth as a power of European importance; her ‘Era of Greatness’ had begun.

Before following up his victory—one of the greatest in history—with an attack on Vienna itself, Gustav Adolf decided to turn towards the South to liberate the millions of oppressed and suffering Protestants there. Having command of the Elbe route he marched through the woods of Thuringia, down the verdant valley of the Main, along that row of ecclesiastical States which he jocularly christened the ‘Pfaffengasse’. Here he was hailed as the long-expected deliverer from Catholic oppression. Erfurt and Wurzburg surrendered without resistance. At Mainz the king, in spite of superior Spanish forces, crossed the river and, within three days, made a triumphal entry into the ‘golden city of the Rhine’. Here he settled down for the winter, gathering round him a brilliant assembly of princes and ambassadors from all parts of Europe. Never, the great German scholar, Gustav Droysen, states, had a German Emperor a prouder court; its brilliance was further enhanced by the presence of Gustav Adolf’s consort, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, and of Axel Oxenstierna. The great Cardinal Richelieu of France even began to mistrust the growing strength of his northern ally. By extending Swedish dominion to—and across—the Rhine (that old sphere of French influence) Gustav Adolf might, Richelieu feared, upset the balance of the Empire and break up the Catholic League, which to him was a useful counterpoise, not only to the House of Habsburg but also to an all too powerful Protestantism.

What, then, were now the plans of Gustav Adolf? It appears that he aspired to nothing less than uniting the Protestants of Germany into one strong ‘Evangelical body’, governed by Sweden. The latter was to become a member of the Empire and receive Pomerania as a reward for all her sacrifices. A counterforce would in this way be established against the political and spiritual encroachments of the Habsburgs. By the conquest of Denmark and Norway one vast Scandinavian realm dominating the Baltic coasts would further be created. The desire of Gustav Adolf was also to erect in Germany a strong northern State like Brandenburg. Through the marriage of the young Fredrik Wilhelm, later known as ‘the Great Elector’, and Kristina, Gustav Adolf’s daughter, Sweden and Brandenburg could be closely united, and Fredrik Wilhelm might perhaps even succeed his future father-in-law as king of Sweden.

In the spring of 1632 the Swedish army resumed its triumphal march. In Nuremberg Gustaf Adolf was greeted with indescribable enthusiasm. Ulm joined him and secured as Commander the Scot, Patrick Ruthven. From Nuremberg the king turned farther southwards and, after a masterly passage at the crossing of the Lech, entered Augsburg, the birthplace of Protestantism. The severe persecutions, which the Protestants of this town had undergone, made them greet the king with even more fervour than had been displayed in Nuremberg. But thoughts of revenge were far from the mind of Gustav Adolf. ‘God wants voluntary obeisance,’ he declared; nobody’s conscience was to be forced. In May 1632, one year after the burning of Magdeburg, he entered Munich, the capital of Catholic Bavaria. Gustav Adolf was now at the height of his fame. The conquest of Pomerania, the victory of Breitenfeld, the glorious march to Mainz, the crossing of the Lech, and the entry into Munich, all seemed a chain of miracles to Protestants and Catholics alike.

But in the summer of 1632 Wallenstein was again appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial army, Tilly having been fatally wounded at the Lech. The reappearance of this sinister figure frustrated the king’s design to march on Vienna in order to dictate peace terms to the Emperor, and made it of vital importance to protect central and northern Germany. The king hurriedly recrossed the Danube and entrenched himself outside Nuremberg. Here Wallenstein, who aimed at blockading the main road to the North, also built a huge fortified camp. For two months the hostile armies lay passively watching each other, trying to cut off each other’s supplies. At last, reduced by hunger and disease, the Swedes effected the storming of Wallenstein’s steep entrenchments, but they were thrown back. Leaving a strong garrison in Nuremberg, Gustav Adolf consequently resolved to strike camp. Once again he moved southward in order to carry out his original scheme and to make the enemy follow suit. But Wallenstein saw through this manoeuvre and invaded Saxony in order to break the alliance between the Elector and Sweden.

On hearing of this, Gustav Adolf quickly returned. He could not afford to jeopardize his connexions with the Baltic coast, where, in addition, some Scotch auxiliary troops had been left, commanded by the Marquess of Hamilton and Alexander Leslie. Hoping to surprise Wallenstein alone (Pappenheim had been sent away to reconnoitre on his own behalf) Gustav Adolf, after forced marches, on November 5 reached the small town of Lutzen, where Wallenstein was stationed with his main force, ready for winter quarters. Next day, at dawn, these two great captains of the period were facing each other in decisive battle. Slowly the dense November fog dispersed. At the head of his right wing Gustav Adolf went to attack. The tremendous volleys from the Imperial musketeers, hidden in the trenches along the road between the two armies, could not stop the Swedes. Soon the Imperial troops were forced to retire. But they received reinforcements, and the Swedish centre began to totter. Galloping from regiment to regiment the king exhorted them to stand by. He rode so fast that his own men had difficulty in following him. Again the fog descended, and the king, separated from his army, was dragged into the very thickest of the battle. A bullet smashed his left arm. Trying to leave the field he was again fired at and fell, dying, from his horse. In vain Leublfing, his faithful page, tried to save him. Fearing the approach of the Swedish cavalry some Croats killed the king by a shot through his face.

Gustav Adolf’s horse, galloping with an empty saddle along the Swedish lines, brought the disastrous news to his army. Despair, and a wild desire for revenge, aroused the troops, and with a fury never seen before the Swedish lines again thundered forward. Panic seized Wallenstein’s squadrons, but at this moment the signals of the returning Pappenheim were heard. The Swedes had to retreat, but as Pappenheim was killed shortly after, his men threw away their arms and fled. After a new and brilliantly executed attack by the Swedes Wallenstein had to sound a retreat. The Swedish army remained complete master of the field, but victory was indeed bought at a heavy price. The darkness and the exhaustion of the troops prevented all further pursuit. Wallenstein withdrew from Saxony to Bohemia in order to guard the Imperial dominions.

‘Thus’, wrote the Englishman, George Fleetwood, then in the service of the Swedish army and present at the battle of Lutzen, ‘Gustav Adolf, this victorious prince, celebrated a victory even in his death.’ The battle of Lutzen dealt the death-blow to his great plans already mentioned; but Gustav Adolf’s achievement stands nevertheless among the most magnificent in history, and the splendour which surrounded his personality lives on.

KRISTINA

1632-1654

The years rolled on, and still the war continued. The leaders and people of Sweden were fighting along an advanced front to preserve the work of Gustav Adolf, to secure the position and influence of Sweden in international politics, and to win fresh territories in compensation for the sacrifices, in the form of money and human lives, which had been demanded of them in the course of the campaigns. The religious and idealistic aims tended to disappear.

Greed of gain showed more and more cynically through the negotiations of diplomats and the smoke of the battlefields. Previously the Swedes had fought for human souls, and incidentally had won gold and treasure; now they adopted unblushingly the principle of ‘each for himself’. The instincts of the soldier of fortune triumphed.

After Gustav’s death the Swedish throne was ascended by his daughter Kristina, a little girl six years old, and the reins of government were held by Axel Oxenstierna.

After the death of Gustav Adolf there came a period of ‘no little confusion’ to Sweden. To Axel Oxenstierna belongs the credit of having brought order into this confusion and of having marked out the policy which, even through violent controversy, was to lead ultimately to an honourable peace.

Axel Oxenstierna had been the steward of the royal acquisitions. He had been governor of Prussia, and had made this new province a very profitable concern. From his post in Prussia he had been called to Mainz when the king held court there in the winter of 1631-2, and on the death of Gustav Adolf he was appointed supreme Swedish legate in Germany, endowed with extraordinary power and authority. He became absolute lord and ruler over the huge territories which Sweden had occupied during the war. In 1633 at Heilbronn he induced the Protestant Estates in the south­west of Germany to form an alliance with Sweden, with the object of obtaining an easy peace and reasonable compensation. He became the head of the alliance, supported by a Council. At the same time he renewed the subsidy treaty with Richelieu. The latter, lacking efficient troops of his own, hoped by hurling the Swedes at Vienna to get that long-coveted possession—Alsace.

Gustav Adolf had trained a school of generals who ranked among the greatest of their time: Hom and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Baner and Torstensson. Until the day when the bullet at Lützen struck down the man who was on the point of altering the whole face of Europe, these generals had been accustomed to victories and triumphal progress. Now they had to accustom themselves to reverses and defeats. For the immediate future, the Swedish armies on the Rhine and the Danube continued, indeed, to be on the whole successful; but it was none the less apparent that the uniting and inspiring force, the spear-point of the blue- and-yellow phalanx, was gone. In the spring of 1634 came the sensational news that Wallenstein had been murdered by a band of Scottish and Irish condottieri. And six months later the apprehensive Swedish Council received a fresh bulletin: the Swedish army under Hom and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar had sustained a crashing defeat at Nordlingen (in Bavaria) by the Imperial troops advancing from Bohemia. Sweden had received her first really serious set­back. The Heilbronn alliance was dissolved. Saxony concluded a separate peace with the Emperor, and her Elector arrogantly declared that the Swedes would do best to evacuate Germany as quickly as possible. The same year brought yet another hard blow. The six years’ truce with Poland expired. To resume hostilities with this power was out of the question; Sweden was obliged to make terms. She bought an extension of the truce, but she bought it at a price. She had to relinquish the Prussian conquests of Gustav Adolf, forfeiting in this way the custom revenues which had in large part financed the campaign in Germany. The situation seemed desperate.

At this juncture France came forward. Richelieu took in the situation and made his calculations with his usual mastery. He decided to intervene in the struggle, and so in 1635 concluded an agreement with the Swedish chancellor to make common cause against the Emperor, and common negotiations for peace or truce.

The French armies began to move. Richelieu had money, and soldiers flocked to his standard, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar among them. French armies tried to replace the Swedish in the Rhine districts and southern Germany. Through the death of Duke Bernhard (1638) France be­came at last the possessor of Alsace. Two years previously Oxenstierna had left Germany to assume the government at home.

The Swedish Council was consumed with anxiety. It clamoured for peace, arguing that it would be best to retire from the field before the final catastrophe came.  But Field-Marshal Johan Baner, who found himself in 1635 at the head of the only remaining Swedish army in Germany, thought otherwise. Baner was the typical Seventeenth-century soldier of the exuberant, baroque style, boisterous and none too refined, a pillager and destroyer, but at the same time an inspired general, quick, bold, and efficacious. He regarded the war not only as a way of discharging his duty towards his country, but also as a glorious adventure, in which the evening drinking­bouts counted for as much as the shocks of battle. Baner is the foremost figure in the Swedish campaigns of 1635-41, when the hoofs of Swedish cavalry rang out on the roads of northern and southern Germany, and Swedish cannons thundered before invested towns and fortresses. He checked the ignominious expulsion of the Swedes from Germany, and brought glory once more to their arms. Swift advances, brilliant victories such as Wittstock, 1636, and Chemnitz, 1639, alternate in his heroic saga with desperate predicaments when all seemed lost. But he emerged smiling from traps and dangers to greet another victory with unruffled confidence.

Baner, who died in 1641, was replaced as commander-in-chief by Lennart Torstensson, more humane, milder than his predecessor in his treatment of occupied territories, but his equal as a general. It was Torstensson’s celebrated forced marches and his brilliant victories that determined the course of events for the next few years. He defeated the Imperial armies at the second battle of Breitenfeld, 1642, and then penetrated into Moravia and Bohemia. But his advance was checked, and shortly afterwards he received orders from his government to turn his forces against Denmark. ,

Ever since Kristian IV, the Danes had followed the successes and reverses of Swedish arms and Swedish diplomacy with ill- concealed envy. They were only awaiting an opportunity to put a spoke in the wheel of these generals and statesmen who had snatched the hegemony of the North from Denmark, and they did everything in their power to oppose the Swedish cause in Germany. Just at this time a general peace congress was about to be convened, and the Danes saw their opportunity: they offered their services as mediators. The order to Torstensson, which reached him in September 1643, was the drastic answer of the Swedish government to this manoeuvre.

The attack, or rather the invasion, was made with lightning rapidity. In December Torstensson was in Holstein, a month later he had occupied Jutland. The toils tightened round King Kristian. Torstensson crossed over to Ftinen, while another Swedish army broke into Skane, to be transported by help of the fleet to Zealand. The Danes prepared to defend themselves. Naval engagements followed, the Swedish fleet was placed in a very precarious position in Kiel Bay, but made its escape, and in the autumn of 1644 a Danish squadron was pursued and wrecked off Fehmarn. Then Axel Oxenstierna stepped on the scene and brought off his masterpiece, the Peace of Bromsebro, 1645, by which Denmark ceded to Sweden Jamtland and Harjedalen, Gotland and Osel, with Halland for thirty years, and granted in addition complete exemption from the commercial dues in the Sound.

The Chancellor returned to Stockholm, where he received from his queen the title of count, while gracious recognitions and tokens of gratitude were showered upon him. Six months previously Kristina herself had assumed the responsibilities of government. Axel Oxenstierna succeeded, however, in maintaining his dominant position and in holding dissentient wills together.

In 1648 the trumpets of peace sounded. The Thirty Years War was at an end.

The Peace of Westphalia is the supreme triumph in the history of Swedish diplomacy. It confirmed Sweden in the powerful position she had been building up, with heavy sacrifices and tremendous efforts, ever since the latter part of the sixteenth century. She now dominated the Baltic. She had become a member of the German Empire, and stood in that capacity as the foremost defender of the Protestant faith. In the Peace of Westphalia many of Gustav Adolf’s most cherished dreams came true.

A few years after, in the late autumn of 1653, an English emissary arrived in Sweden. Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Keeper of the Great Seal, had been sent by Oliver Cromwell, who had just become Protector, to the court of Kristina to negotiate for the formation of an alliance against Denmark and Holland. The English gentleman had hesitated considerably before undertaking the journey, but he had overcome his scruples, and arrived in Gothenburg in December 1653, with a suite of no fewer than 100 persons.

The Chancellor showed himself well versed in English politics. He expressed his admiration for Cromwell, though he was at no pains to conceal his doubts as to the stability of his regime. Negotiations proceeded rather slowly, and it was not until April 1654 that Whitelocke’s agreement was drawn up. It contained no clauses of a definitely political nature. It was simply a generally phrased contract of friendship and commerce.

Queen Kristina had one day confided a secret to the English ambassador: she intended to abdicate. Whitelocke had tried to dissuade her, but in vain.

Kristina stood firmly by her decision. She turned her back on authority, throne, and country, at the same time as she renounced her Protestant faith and became a Catholic.

The Protestant world was amazed and shocked; Rome exulted. Some people have considered that her desire to embrace the Catholic faith constituted the only real motive for her abdication—for the law of the land did not permit her to go on ruling, once she had adopted a religion other than that of the State. Others, again, assert that her abdication sprang from her lack of belief in her own ability to fulfil the duties of the Crown. In either case she was sincere. It was a courageous act. No doubt she could reckon on the ovations of the Catholic world and on attracting the atten­tion of the whole of Europe, but she had also to be prepared for the desertion of those who had hitherto bowed in loyal reverence before her. Whitelocke had pointed this out to her, and she had replied: “I look upon such things as these as the course of this world, and shall expect such scorns and be prepared to condemn them”

One day in the spring of 1654 Whitelocke, looking out from his window in Uppsala, caught sight of the heir apparent, Karl Gustav, whom Kristina in 1650 had induced the Estates to acknowledge as heir to the throne, entering the town to witness the queen’s formal abdication, and to be crowned himself as king of Sweden.

In 1654, she left the land over which she had reigned for nearly twenty-two years. At Innsbruck she renounced the Protestant faith. Clad in a simple, black dress she crossed the floor of the chapel royal and knelt before the high altar. The text of the sermon was: 'Hearken, O daughter, and incline thine ear: forget also thine own people and thy father’s house.’ Magnificent celebrations followed. The road to Rome lay clear. There, in the centre of the arts and sciences and of the Catholic faith, she lived for many years, honoured and admired. She died in 1689, and was buried in St. Peter’s.

The throne she had vacated was occupied by a man who was destined to play a greater part in the history of Europe.

KARL X GUSTAV

1654-1660

Karl X Gustav accomplished two great things for Sweden: he inaugurated the great social and economical reforms that were necessary if the Swedish Empire was to acquire a stable foundation, and he gave the country the natural boundaries in the south and the control over the gates of the Baltic, that were essential to the healthy and full development of Sweden proper.

In December 1654, important conferences had taken place in the Council. It had been urged unanimously that Sweden should invade Poland with an armed force. The king was not present in person, but he was represented by his chancellor, Erik, the son of Axel Oxenstierna, who had died in 1654, weighed down by sorrow, deeply wounded by Kristina’s open neglect, and crushed by her abdication. Erik Oxenstierna was not long to survive his father. He followed his lord and master to Poland, where, after performing many valuable diplomatic services, he died in 1656.

Holland, about this time, definitely broke with Sweden. The merchants of The Hague did not welcome Sweden as a Great Power. They feared obstacles for their Baltic maritime commerce. As against this, England appeared on the horizon as a possible ally. Kristina had never had much sympathy for the men who had Charles I’s blood on their consciences, and would have preferred to unite all the monarchs of Europe in a common crusade against the regicides. But Cromwell’s influence was rising, and political foresight won the day. She recognized the republican government, and the sequel was Whitelocke’s embassy. Economic considerations were all in favour of a rapprochement between the two countries. England was the greatest importer of Sweden’s wood and iron, her two principal exports, and the Swedes were as anxious to sell as the English to buy.

With Brandenburg, on the other hand, where greed and ambition were rife, relations were somewhat strained. In this country the seed of a future Great Power lay buried.

Fredrik Wilhelm, dreaming dreams of greatness, was none too well disposed towards Sweden since her seizure of Hither Pomerania, which he himself coveted.

In the summer of 1655 Karl Gustav was preparing to invade Poland. His first reason for this was that the Vasas in Poland had not yet relinquished their claims on the Swedish Crown. They had, in fact, expostulated with Kristina because on her abdication it had passed over to a 'strange family’. Another and more important reason was to be sought in the general situation of eastern Europe. Poland had fallen into a state of disintegration. Anarchy there had become worse than ever, and Russia was casting longing eyes on Polish territories. In 1654 the Cossacks placed themselves under Russian protection. Poland protested. The Tsar took up the challenge, and things began to look threatening for his western neighbours. The Russian problem had turned up again for Sweden, and in these circumstances she could not remain inactive. The situation had much in common with that which had confronted Erik XIV when he occupied Estonia. Karl Gustav determined to anticipate the Tsar by invading Poland himself.

The Swedish armies crossed the Polish frontier, and the first step in one of the greatest adventures of Swedish history was taken.

Karl Gustav had learnt much in the school of Torstensson. Lightning moves were his strong point, as they had been Torstensson’s. In the course of a few months he occupied the greater part of Poland. His advance turned into a triumphal progress.

Sweden was once more led towards the evolution of great plans. The king’s original intention had been simply to reconquer that province of Prussia which had once before been a member of the Swedish Empire. But after his brilliant initial successes, which struck all Europe with amazement, he began to sketch out still more daring plans. It has been said that he aimed at effecting a partition of Poland. This was actually only an alternative in his system —a system, indeed, which varied according as the clouds gathered or lifted over the battlefields. His most cherished ambition was to revive the old union between Sweden and Poland, and set the dual crown on his own head. Later he also cast glances northwards. A conquest of the Dano-Norwegian kingdom appeared as a possibility. Gradually in Karl Gustav’s ambitious mind the plan took shape of forming a Scandinavian-Baltic Empire, which would command the Sound and embrace the whole of the Baltic in a wide circle. He was filled with a wild joy, this fat and heavy man, as he sat among his generals over the tankards and the wine-cups. The possibilities seemed to him limitless, and at times like this, when the wine had loosened his tongue and given wings to his thoughts, his speech inclined to become bombastic. He was a man to gamble with Fortune. He believed himself strong enough to hold her constant.

Bells were ringing in the churches and monasteries of Poland. Conferences were being held in Polish castles. The men in the villages were donning their armour; Poland was rising in revolt. The invaders, the godless, plundering Swedes, should be driven from the land. The reaction had come.

Karl Gustav marched on a zigzag course through the country. But fortune followed him no longer. His soldiers fell by the wayside. Disease ravaged his army. His dreams of a Swedish-Polish Empire faded slowly out.

Everywhere in Europe couriers were hastening from court to court. Karl Gustav had been tampering with almost all the inflammable substances in contemporary Europe. The Elector of Brandenburg, as ruthless as the Swedish monarch, had been following his movements with tense interest, and selling him supplies as dearly as he could. The Emperor began to make his preparations. Denmark believed that an opportunity was approaching for avenging the Peace of Bromsebro. And behind Denmark the sails of the great Dutch fleet were coming into sight. Cromwell alone had rejoiced at the Swedish successes. For him the Swedes were Protestants, and Karl Gustav had in him the makings of a second Gustav Adolf. So far as Cromwell was concerned the Swedes were welcome to extend their power right across to the Caspian Sea.

In July 1656 the Swedish armies, reinforced by the Brandenburgian, encountered the Poles at Warsaw. It took Karl Gustav three days to wrest the victory from the hands of his opponents; but his triumph was a brilliant one. His fame spread all over Europe. But what was the use of one victory when the flame of rebellion was still flickering over the whole countryside?

The Russian hordes pressed over the Livonian frontier, for the Tsar had greatly resented Karl Gustav’s interference in the affairs of Poland. The Elector at once seized the opportunity of appropriating East Prussia. The Emperor lost no time in declaring war, and Denmark followed his example.

The Swedish army was rapidly withdrawn from Poland, and set in motion against Denmark. Karl Gustav made a forced march along the southern coast of the Baltic, and in three weeks’ time his troops were in Holstein. They were not much to look at, these Swedish soldiers, stained with powder, mud-splashed, ragged; but they were veterans. It was an army of picked troops that now took possession of Jutland.

The cold was intense. The Belt, which only a few days before was open water, became frozen over. It was then that Karl Gustav had one of his boldest and most brilliant inspirations. His army should cross the newly frozen Belt and secure a victory by an almost incredible stratagem, while the Danes, taken in the rear, would be ready to accept almost any terms of peace.

His generals demurred. ‘The risk, Your Majesty...’ But the quartermaster, Erik Dahlbergh, who had investigated the state of the ice, staked his life on the success of the enterprise. The crossing began, first over the Little Belt, then over the Great Belt, troop after troop, regiment after regiment, until the whole Swedish army stood in battle array on the Island of Zealand. The world was dumbfounded. The Danes were caught in a trap. Peace was concluded, and by the Treaty of Roskilde, February 1658, the king of Denmark agreed to hand over to Sweden Skane, the pearl of his kingdom, Halland, Blekinge, Bohuslan, and Bornholm, together with the province of Trondheim in Norway.

The days were past when the only Swedish port on the North Sea was Alvsborg. Now she was mistress of the Sound. A wedge had been driven through Norway, which seemed ready to fall at any moment like ripe fruit into the hands of the victor. The idea of a united Scandinavia rose up once more.

England had acted as mediator at the peace-making. Cromwell had entertained hopes of turning the Swedish forces against the Emperor and of forming a great Protestant alliance against the Catholic powers. On January 25, 1658, he had delivered a great speech to his Parliament on the foreign situation, the burden of which was that the cause of Protestantism was in danger, and that immediate action must be taken. No one save the king of Sweden had courage enough to stand up against the powers of Catholicism. ‘Who is there’, Cromwell exclaimed, ‘that holdeth up his head to oppose this great design? A poor Prince!

But Cromwell’s appeal to the most sacred interests of the English nation, his glowing representation of Karl Gustav as a martyr suffering for his faith, was all in vain. Parliament would not listen. And while Cromwell and the whole circle of European countries were wondering what Karl Gustav was going to do, once peace was concluded, Karl Gustav did what no one could have dreamt of. He invaded Denmark for a second time. Denmark was no longer to be an independent State.

It was a brutal attack, but to the Swedish king it seemed absolutely imperative. The Danes had made difficulties when Karl Gustav, after the Peace of Roskilde, pressed them to enter into alliance with Sweden. At the same time their intimacy with Holland was increasing. It was only natural to assume that, with Holland to help them, they would seize the first opportunity of violating the Peace of Roskilde. Karl Gustav still had various other enemies with whom he had not yet settled his account. It seemed to him necessary first of all to dispose of the Danish business.

In August 1658 the Swedish army stood before Copenhagen. But the attack on the Danish capital failed. The Danes defended themselves heroically. They set fire to the suburbs of the town in order to check the Swedish onslaught, and Karl Gustav let the favourable moment pass, the right use of which might have made Denmark a Swedish province. Instead of storming Copenhagen he began to invest it. This proved a fatal mistake. Kronborg was indeed captured, whereby the Swedes acquired complete control of the mouth of the Sound. But this was of little avail. In October the Dutch fleet appeared in the Sound and offered battle, and one of the most celebrated sea-fights of the time took place. The Dutchman, de Witt, was pitted against the Swede, Karl Gustav Wrangel. The Dutchman fell, but after six hours of furious fighting his countrymen gained their objective: they broke through the Swedish line, and Copenhagen was saved.

The last act had begun. In February 1659 Karl Gustav attempted what he ought to have done much sooner, namely to storm Copenhagen. He failed. That was the turning-point. The newly acquired territories began to grow restive. The province of Trondheim was recovered by the Danes. The enemy crossed over to Funen, and the Swedish army was beaten at Nyborg. Karl Gustav left Denmark. He called the Estates to a Riksdag in Gothenburg; but in February 1660, at the early age of thirty-eight, he fell ill and suddenly died.

KARL XI

1660-1697

It was the dawn of a new era for the people of Sweden. Once more a warrior king had been snatched away in the midst of his activities, and once more a council of regency had to be appointed to carry on the government until such time as the young king, the son of Karl Gustav, should have attained years of discretion.

Once more the nobility enjoyed a golden age. Karl X Gustav had provided in his will that the government of the country should be placed in the hands of a body consisting of the five high State functionaries, the queen-mother, Hedwig Eleonora, and his own brother, Duke Adolf Johan. The terms of the will were not exactly followed. Adolf Johan was excluded. He could not, it was said, be considered a Swedish nobleman, and had therefore no right to occupy a position in the government. The queen, however, was allowed to retain her place. The government included, furthermore, two high officials. One was the Provost­Marshal, Per Brahe, formerly the highly meritorious governor of Finland, a member of the higher aristocracy, the richest man in Sweden, and the lord of Visingso, where he ruled as a prince over his subjects. The other was the Chancellor, Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, Queen Kristina’s one-time favourite; he, too, immeasurably rich, a man of magnificent appearance—certainly the handsomest man in Europe, a foreigner remarked—French by education and bearing, too airily optimistic ever to become a statesman of importance, a spendthrift, a grand seigneur, and an enthusiastic patron of the arts and sciences.

As a first step peace was concluded, first of all with Poland, at the monastery of Oliva, near Danzig. The king of Poland now withdrew all claims on the Swedish Crown, and formally ceded Livonia to Sweden. Thus the struggle between Sweden and Poland, which had been raging ever since the beginning of the century, came to an end. In this peace were included also the Emperor and Brandenburg. With Denmark a treaty was drawn up in Copenhagen in the same year, 1660. Sweden relinquished Bornholm and the province of Trondheim, but retained everything else she had gained at the treaty of Roskilde. Finally an agreement was reached with Russia in 1661 on a basis of status quo.

Karl Gustav’s exploits were thus wound up with good general result. But it soon began to be apparent that the members of the government and of the Council by no means saw eye to eye as to the best method of promoting national interests, power, and prosperity. The great question was, whether to refrain from further participation in large-scale wars and to concentrate on the consolidation of what was already won, taking economy as the guiding principle; or whether to continue along the well-known paths, trusting in good fortune and Swedish arms, and persisting in the same lavish expenditure.

It must be admitted that the foreign policy of the regency lacked the great leading ideas which had inspired the activities of Gustav Adolf and of Karl Gustav. It had difficulty in holding a steady course, disturbed as it was by the unrest in Europe, and at the same time attracted by the generous offers of subsidy, now of one Great Power, now of another. In 1665 a treaty of friendship and commerce was concluded with England. In 1668 Sweden joined with England and Holland to form the Triple Alliance against France. This pleased the anti-French faction in the Council, but De la Gardie, lover of all things French, was mightily displeased. He set himself to work for a revival of the old alliance with France, and French diplomats strove towards the same end. In the year 1670 mysterious negotiations took place in Dover. Charles II, yielding to French pressure and promises, ranged himself on the side of France, and the Triple Alliance broke up. In 1671 Louis XIV dispatched to Sweden one of his most experienced diplomats, Pomponne, later to be his foreign minister, who induced the Swedish government to assign a force of 16,000 men to assist France against hostile German princes. In recompense for this, Sweden was to receive 400,000 crowns a year in time of peace, and 600,000 in time of war.

When war came it revealed a grim and terrible reality. It exchanged the fantasies of the golden years for inexorable fact, frivolity for deadly earnest. The wealth ebbed out of the pockets of the nobles, and was sucked up in the Crown budget.

In the year 1672 Karl XI assumed direct control of the government. Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie remained as Chancellor and retained also his dominating influence, dreaming dreams of greatness, hoping to become a second Mazarin. The Council was to be pushed on one side, and the king—that is to say, his first minister—was to become absolute.

Over in Europe the storm was gathering. Louis XIV had sent his army to overrun Holland, the hated merchant­state, which seemed as if it were now about to be crushed under his heavy hand. But the war did not go as he had reckoned. Holland defended herself bravely and successfully with her ramparts and flooded fields. The Emperor and Brandenburg came to her relief. France was isolated. In these conditions French diplomats were anxious to hold Sweden to her promise of 1672. French gold was flowing into the Swedish court. The military party became aggressive, and Karl XI had nothing to say against a conflict with Brandenburg. In 1674 Sweden entered the war.

There is no need to enter into a detailed account of the dreary wars of 1674-80, in which the Swedes were opposed by the Emperor, Brandenburg, Holland, and Denmark, the last having as usual seized the opportunity for avenging old scores. The war was conducted by land and sea. The reputation of Karl Gustav Wrangel, the famous old field­marshal, suffered considerably from his defeat at Fehrbellin in Brandenburg in 1675 by the troops of the Elector. The same year the Swedish fleet suffered a serious reverse in an engagement with the Danish fleet off the southern coast of Gland; and then followed a terrible period, when Karl was faced with the alternatives of either abandoning Skane to the Danes, or risking a desperate attack on them. He chose the latter course; and in December 1676 one of the bloodiest battles in the history of Sweden took place outside Lund, the Swedes emerging victorious. Karl was able to record in his diary: ‘The 4th (December), which was a Monday, we had with the help of God a happy victory over the Danes, when they were completely routed at Lund. For this be God sincerely praised, honoured and thanked.’ These few words indicated that the situation was saved.

The war continued for a few more years, bringing little glory to Sweden. The task of peace-making was begun and ended. At Saint-Germain, the French monarch, with a munificent gesture of protection, signed a peace-treaty with Brandenburg on behalf of Sweden. It was a peace humiliating in form, though easy as to terms. Sweden ceded to Brandenburg her possessions in Further Pomerania. In the same year, 1679, peace was concluded with the King of Denmark, who had to content himself with monetary reparations.

Then came the hour of reckoning for those who had led Sweden into this war.

An autocracy was established. De la Gardie had already lost all his influence long before the visitation began. Younger men had stepped into his place, among them the talented and zealous Erik Lindschold, and Johan Gyllenstierna, the latter one of the really great men of seventeenth-century Sweden, a ruthless character of brutal strength, a genius inspired with revolutionary ideas. His policy was to restore the ruined finances of the country by a comprehensive confiscation, with the means thus acquired to organize a strong military force, and then to embark upon an independent foreign policy without reliance upon foreign subsidies. Johan Gyllenstierna died in 1680 and was consequently never able to carry out his great work of reformation; but it was his ideas that inspired the social revolution of 1680-90.

The guiding principles of foreign policy developed by Johan Gyllenstiema had been: liberation from French guardianship, alliance with Denmark-Norway, a new interest in the East. His Scandinavian dreams were to be realized in the alliance which was formed in 1679-80, shortly after the conclusion of peace, between Sweden and Denmark.

Karl XI was no foreign politician. On the death of Gyllenstierna he entrusted the conduct of foreign affairs to Bengt Oxenstierna, a skilful and accomplished diplomat, and indicated his royal will with the one word: peace. And as the royal word had now become law, peace it was. Oxenstierna held firmly to this principle. Otherwise he did not leave much standing of Gyllenstierna’s work. He separated Sweden once more from Denmark, and inaugurated a high-flown policy, aimed mainly at opposing France. In 1681 he drew up the guarantee-pact with Holland, a defensive treaty intended to safeguard the sanctity of the Peaces of Westphalia and Nimeguen. As Denmark and Brandenburg were at this time being drawn over to the side of France, both the Emperor and Spain joined the alliance.

When France in 1688 resumed the struggle for the realization of traditional French ambitions, Karl sent troops on a few occasions to assist her opponents. Among other things he supported the landing of William of Orange in England. Swedish troops served in the Netherlands in 1690-1 and marched to the upper Rhine in fulfilment of Karl’s treaty with the Emperor. But his friendly relations with the sea powers were disturbed by their aggressions on Swedish trade. France’s siren-song made itself heard once more, and Oxenstierna had a hard fight to maintain his ideas in the face of a pro-French faction in the Council. Karl clung, however, to his principles of peace and neutrality, and had the satisfaction of receiving on his death-bed a request from the militant powers for Swedish mediation at the approaching peace conference at Ryswick.

Karl XI was not an attractive personality, but he inspired respect. His greatness lay in the strength of his will. His royal achievement was not of a glorious nature. It had the grey colour, as also the strength and hardness, of granite.