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Difficulties of the monarchy in Sweden

[1544-60 them. Only by fair words or show of force could the Crown secure the obedience of a province. Believing themselves defrauded if any intermediate authority was thrust between their sovereign and themselves, they obstructed the creation of adequate executive, judicial, and legislative organs of the State.

In general, however, the influence of the people lay on the side of the Vasa against the caste which formed the most dangerous rival of monarchy. The nobles, sons of the men who perished in the Blood-bath of 1520, were enriched with the spoils of the Church, and had not forgotten that the Hereditary Settlement of 1544 was a blow to aristocracy. They had acquiesced in the elevation of the Vasa, but they conceived themselves to be entitled both to curtail the powers of the Crown and to share in their exercise. Their ambition was to secure a position with regard to the King similar to that enjoyed by their peers in the Empire. They claimed that their performance of knight-service (Rusttjänst)—the maintenance of a prescribed number of mounted soldiers freed their estates from taxation and made them practically supreme over the districts in which they lived. To what extremes of lawlessness their pretensions might lead was seen when a bold noble annexed the lands and forests of the Crown, punished one of his bailiffs who had fled to Court, and, when another bailiff cut down a wood, proposed to hang him together with every peasant who had shared in the offence. The nobles possessed a monopoly of seats in the Råd, a small council out of which the Swedish Diet (Riksdag) grew, and which except in times of stress performed the ordinary functions of a National Assembly. The chief offices thus fell into their hands, and they protested strongly, and in the main successfully, against the employment of any officers of State whatsoever who were not of native and of gentle birth. They thus formed a check on progress when the King was competent, and a menace to the power of the Crown in the hands of a ruler unequal to defending it.

In the reign of Gustavus the danger from the nobles was latent, and the danger from the Church and people was averted by force. Erik was confronted in addition by danger from three great royal duchies, which was in great part created by his father. The testament of Gustavus, of which part received the sanction of the Estates in 1547 and the whole in 1560, provided his sons with appanages, and attempted by admonitions and regulations to secure their future co-operation for the good of the kingdom. The most weighty part of the testament was that by which the King conferred upon the three half-brothers of Erik rights of hereditary sovereignty over great portions of Sweden. John was confirmed in the authority over Åbo, Kumogård, Åland and Raseborg which he had already exercised for several years, and thus remained master of Finland. Charles received the greatest part of Södermanland and Nerike with Vermeland, the whole forming a broad

1560-2]

Erik XIV.

Constructive measures

161

belt across the kingdom. Magnus, who was older than Charles but weaker in mind, was to rule adjacent territories to the south, including some two-thirds of Östergötland. By whatever motives these dispositions were inspired-whether to save part at least of the realm from the sway of Erik, or to curb the nobles by the creation of a class of royal Dukes, or to indulge an affection for the younger sons which was stronger than statesmanship, or to satisfy their equitable claim to share in the family inheritance - the result was that Sweden was divided and its very independence placed in jeopardy for more than sixty years.

The death of Gustavus caused a crisis in which the decisive factor was the character of his successor. Erik possessed a full share of the ability with which the descendants of Gustavus were endowed. His political insight was not contemptible, while his political imagination was active. A child of the Renaissance, he took delight in composing verse and prose, in painting and music, in languages, in translating the classics and in studying the stars. But this tropical luxuriance, as Geijer finely suggests, was the product of subterranean fires. Erik was too ill-balanced to endure the stress of kingship. The extravagance with which he pressed his suit upon Elizabeth of England is well known. As Crown Prince he had delighted in the wild orgies of his Court at Kalmar, and he was already suspicious almost to the verge of madness.

For three years, however, the young King grappled vigorously with his task. The most momentous problem of policy was the establishment of a single sovereignty within the Swedish State. In April, 1561, Erik secured the concurrence of the Estates in a statute known from the scene of the Diet as the Articles of Arboga. By this enactment his brothers were compelled to renounce the dangerous prerogatives which the testament of Gustavus had conferred upon them. Dwellers in the duchies were to swear fealty to the King instead of to the Dukes, and the royal supremacy was established in matters of war and negotiation, taxation, appeals, the nomination of judges and of bishops, and the conferment of nobility and privilege. This weighty assertion of the power of the Crown was accompanied by the establishment of a royal Court of Appeal, which met one of the most pressing needs of the growing nation. A body of justices (Konungs Nämnd) was appointed, part to remain at Stockholm and part to go on circuit when required.

Having bridled the Dukes, Erik next endeavoured to regulate the status of the nobles, to whose support his triumph at Arboga was due. To add splendour and security to the Crown, he conferred upon his intimates the new dignities of Count and Baron, and endowed them with grants of royal revenues, which were moderate in amount but hereditary. He then set himself to correlate the duties and the privileges attendant upon noble birth. The scale of knight-service was fixed. in 1562 by the Upsala Constitution at the rate of one well-appointed horseman for every 300 marks of income from hereditary estates or

C. M. H. IV.

11

162

The Livonian question

[1561-3

200 marks from fiefs of the Crown. Manor-house and home-farm were not to be reckoned in, but every nobleman, however poor, must maintain a soldier, or lose caste and submit to ordinary taxation. The burden imposed by the Upsala Constitution was nominally less onerous by onehalf than that imposed by Gustavus in 1559; but Erik enforced his claims with such stringency as to annul this benefit and gradually to alienate the nobles.

Meanwhile the future both of the King and of his realm was being determined in Livonia. At this moment the struggle for predominance in the Baltic, a struggle vital to the Power which held both Stockholm and Åbo, entered the phase which within the compass of 160 years (1561-1721) was to bring to Sweden her glory, her empire, and her downfall. The Teutonic Order was moribund, and Erik, as heir to Sweden, and John, as lord of Finland, had united to oppose their father's policy of timid home-keeping and to secure for the Vasa dynasty a share in Esthonia and Livonia. During the summer of 1561 the Protestant town of Reval became Swedish; but at the end of November the Order made complete submission to Sigismund II of Poland. Sweden, it seemed, must either abandon her hopes of aggrandisement or prepare for war. Russia and Denmark however were also candidates for the prize, and Sigismund suggested a third solution which promised immediate peace at the hazard of future struggles. In July, 1561, he proposed an alliance of Sweden and Poland against Russia, to be cemented by the marriage of one of his sisters with Duke John. Erik seemed inclined to acquiesce in an arrangement which would have made his brother all but heir presumptive to the Polish Crown. In February, 1562, however, he forbade the match and proceeded to capture Pernau. John, after long hesitation, defied both the royal command and the Articles of Arboga. In October he married Catharine Jagello and received seven fortresses in Livonia as security for the repayment of money borrowed by Sigismund. Erik, who suspected his brother of treasonable intrigues in Sweden, summoned the Estates to Stockholm and procured from them a sentence of forfeiture and death against him (June 7, 1563). The Duke defended Åbo; but in August he was forced to surrender to an army of 10,000 men. Many of his servants were put to death, and he was imprisoned in the lonely fortress of Gripsholm. There he remained for four years, while the King and his low-born minister Göran Persson subjected Sweden to a reign of terror.

The downfall of John was accompanied by the progress of the Swedish arms in Livonia; but for both disasters Poland was amply avenged by Denmark, her new ally. The relations between Erik and Frederick II had grown steadily worse. The hereditary rivalry between the Scandinavian Kings was symbolised by the Three Crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, which each of them bore on his

1563-6]

The Northern Seven Years' War

163

escutcheon. It was now inflamed by the quest of empire on the eastern shore of the Baltic. Erik, who hoped to drive the Danes from the Scandinavian peninsula, toiled to win allies by way of marriage and wooed Elizabeth of England, Mary of Scotland, and Christina of Hesse-Cassel. The Danes on the other hand made use of their superiority at sea by intercepting the Swedish embassies and supplies, until in June, 1563, they were severely defeated off Bornholm by Jakob Bagge. The Emperor summoned a congress at Rostock, but strove in vain to preserve peace. In August the war known as the Northern Seven Years' War was formally declared by Denmark (1563–70).

Sweden was in great peril, for her rise had given offence to several Powers. Frederick secured the alliance of the Poles, of the Elector Augustus of Saxony, and of the men of Lübeck, who feared for their trade with Livonia and hoped much from the restoration of a Danish dynasty in Sweden. As against these diplomatic triumphs, Erik could only point to an agreement for seven years' peace with Russia. He failed either to develop the latent conflict of interest between the allies or to secure counter-alliances with their several enemies. He alienated the Emperor by slighting the Congress of Rostock, and lost the Hessian marriage by addressing a love-letter to Queen Elizabeth which was seized and dispatched to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel by the Danes. Then, with the consent of his Estates, he sued for the hand of Renée of Lorraine, only to affront all parties by a secret match with his mistress Karin Månsdotter, the offspring of a common soldier.

In the field the King's influence was even more disastrous than in the Cabinet. While the Swedish army was a national force which might soon be made formidable, Frederick was trusting to some 30,000 German mercenaries, a host which could not long be satisfied with the spoils of Småland and Västergötland. Erik and Persson, however, were not strategists but barbarians, and the war became a series of brutalities. Both armies devastated where they could not conquer, and not seldom put their prisoners to death. At home the Swedes gained no signal success and suffered several grave disasters. Chief of these was the loss of Elfsborg, whose fall in September, 1563, cut Sweden off from the North Sea. Such was the isolation of the kingdom that wine could not be procured for the administration of the Eucharist, and the King outraged the feelings of the hierarchy by authorising the consecration of water or water mixed with honey.

In September, 1565, however, a foothold on the western coast was regained by the capture of Varberg, while in Norway, in Livonia, and on the sea, wherever Erik was not, the dreary struggle was waged on equal terms. Klas Kristersson (Horn) proved himself a worthy successor to Jakob Bagge, until he succumbed to the plague in 1566. Gustavus, moreover, by his lifelong invective against "the Jutes," had made the war popular in Sweden. In March, 1566, the Estates protested that

164

Murder of the Sture

[1566-8 they were ready to sacrifice life, lands, and all that they had rather than submit to an adverse peace.

The year 1567, however, witnessed the collapse of Erik's position both at home and abroad; though he gained the Russian alliance by undertaking to surrender the wife of his brother John to her rejected suitor, Ivan the Terrible. The Tsar afterwards asserted that he had believed her to be a widow and had wished to restore her to Poland in safety. Erik could not advance even such excuses as these. His infamy profited him but little. The Russian alliance did not save the Swedes from disasters in Norway and Livonia, while at home misgovernment was becoming insupportable. Erik's capricious tyranny had not spared the high nobility, and he was conscious of their alienation from himself. Haunted by fears of treason, he suddenly struck at the great family of Sture, the kinsmen of his own half-brothers. In 1566 the young Nils Sture was condemned as a traitor. The King forced him to ride through the streets of Stockholm with a crown of straw upon his head, then pardoned him and entrusted him with a mission to Lorraine. Next, with another change of purpose, he caused Göran Persson to indict the Sture and many other nobles before the Estates at Upsala, and when Nils Sture returned from Lorraine, he flung him into prison. On May 22, 1567, however, the King expressly guaranteed his safety; but two days later he visited him in prison and stabbed him to death. The old Count Svante Sture, his son Erik, and two other lords were next dispatched by the soldiery, and the King's tutor, Beurreus, paid for his remonstrance with his life.

The royal assassin fled from Upsala and for some days wandered demented through the land. The interregnum attested both the weakness and the strength of the Vasa. No one arose, either to act for the King or to supplant him. John was in prison, Magnus had lost his reason, and Charles was still a boy. At this moment, moreover, the indicted nobles were found guilty of treason by the Estates. Within a month the King had recovered himself sufficiently to set about the work of conciliation, and he allowed Persson to be condemned to death. In the autumn, however, he became possessed by the belief that John had supplanted him in the kingship, and in a grotesque encounter the two brothers in turn did homage to each other.

Meanwhile the Danes were preparing to strike a blow of unusual severity. In a triumphant winter campaign Daniel Rantzau, "the Turenne of Denmark," swept through Småland and Östergötland, burned and pillaged more than 1400 homesteads, and took by surprise the camp of the defenders at Norrby. He crowned the bold enterprise by a masterly retreat, which encouraged Erik to give himself the airs of

a conqueror.

During the year 1568 the King steadily undermined his throne. He set John at liberty, restored Persson to favour, made Karin Månsdotter