Source:
Christina, Queen of Sweden, pages 124 to 143, by Francis William Bain, 1890; original at the University of Connecticut Library
The account:
CHAPTER IV.
TO the well-known theory of Bolingbroke, and those attempted revivals of his principles in modern times which may be briefly described as the "monarch and multitude" constitutional ideal, hostile critics have objected that, apart from the abstract value of the remedy proposed, it did not fit the facts it sought to meet. But were it possible for such a patriot king as Bolingbroke dreamed of to exist in flesh and blood, of all times and places[,] that which would have suited him best was Sweden in 1650, when a middle class did not practically exist, and only a close and oppressive Venetian oligarchy stood between the monarch and a down-trodden people.
As we have seen, Christina's confirmation, on her accession in 1644, on all the acts of the Regents, and her refusal to resume the alienated Crown lands, had aroused great discontent; this burst forth with violence, as soon as the termination of the war threw the Swedes back upon themselves. The centre of the question lay in this alienation of the Crown lands; with this is intimately connected the general social condition and the mutual relations of nobles and commons; all evils being greatly enhanced by the extreme exhaustion of the country and the finances owing to the long war.
To appreciate the situation[,] it is necessary to glance at the internal condition of Sweden, and the causes which led to the bad state of affairs. It must be carefully observed, however, that the prevailing aristocratic tendency was by no means peculiar to Sweden, but formed a part of that which was going on at the time throughout Europe. "There has never", says Ranke, "been a time more favourable to the aristocracy than the middle of the seventeenth century, when throughout the whole extent of the Spanish monarchy that power, which preceding kings had withdrawn from the high nobility, had again fallen into their hands; when the constitution of England acquired, amidst the most perilous conflicts and struggles, that aristocratic character which it retains even to our own times; when the French parliaments persuaded themselves that they could perform a part similar to that taken by the English Houses; when the nobility acquired a decided predominance through all the German territories — one here and there excepted, where some courageous prince overpowered all efforts for independence; when the Estates of Sweden attempted to impose insufferable restraints on the sovereign authority, and the Polish nobility attained to unfettered autonomy. The same spirit was now becoming prevalent in Rome."
This universal tendency was not unnoticed by the statesmen of that age; the troubles in France and England were marked with apprehension by Christina, who knew the state of her own country, and feared the influence of example. Already in February, 1647, she writes to Salvius: "I foresee there will be plenty for me to attend to here, so I pray for a peace." And it was especially on this account she distrusted the Chancellor, who was said to be so much in favour of the Republican form of government that he spoke of it and praised it openly. Chanut says of him that though he blamed the barbarity of the execution of Charles I., yet he admired and praised the designs and tendency of the Parliament. "I tell you", said Christina to Whitelocke in 1653, speaking of Oliver Cromwell, "under secrecy, that my Chancellor would formerly have been so in Sweden when I was young, but could not attain unto it; but if he was my enemy, yet I should say that he is a wise and gallant man."
In Sweden the nobility had always been strong. It was their temporary depression by the tyranny of Christian II. and his "blood bath of Stockholm" that enabled Gustavus Vasa to unite with the people and establish himself. Charles IX. made it his especial aim to destroy their power, but Gustavus Adolphus, partly through his desire of conciliating them as a basis for his own power, partly by the combined influence of his continued absence in war, and the aristocratic tendency of his new system of nobility of office, greatly increased their preponderance. Under him and the Regency the nobles added to their enormous social influence that of political power; by the form of government, as already shown, the whole administration of the State was placed in their hands. Socially they were omnipotent. They could only be judged by their peers; their property could not pass, by sale or otherwise, into the hands of the Crown; they were untaxed; no taxes could even be imposed on the peasants in their domains without their consent; they had their own courts of justice; they might trade with their own wares free of toll. They stood shoulder to shoulder for their own interests against King and Commons, equally jealous of "new men" and the citizen class; by a marriage with a woman of this class[,] a noble lost his rights. They alone benefited by the war, not only because its burdens did not fall on them, nor again because they acquired glory and huge sums in its conduct, but because they took advantage of the necessities of the State to purchase, often for merely nominal values, those Crown lands which the King had to sell to get money; for only the nobility might purchase these lands, and thus, having no competitors, they bought them frequently for next to nothing at all. All this power they abused and increased enormously by reckless neglect or open defiance of the law, and grinding of the peasants.
Upon this unfortunate class fell the whole weight of the war. Taxes, conscriptions, exactions of all kinds were not the worst; the impossibility of redress and the savage opposition of the nobles laid upon them the last straw. Things grew so bad that numbers left their homes; whole districts were evacuated, and the land lay untilled; agriculture was fast being ruined. Beyond all, they resented the alienation of the Crown lands; they complained that by the change of masters the free yeoman became a slave; for the nobles used their power to annihilate every vestige of personal right in their tenant. Instead of holding direct of the Crown, he now depended on the arbitrary will of the noble to whom he fell; even in cases where legally certain rights remained to him, his master used every means of persuasion or intimidation by force or fraud to reduce him to complete dependence. The nobles even made a boast of this altered relation. "We are all subjects of the Crown", said the High Steward Count Brahé, in the Diet of 1650, "we immediately, the peasants mediately." Not only the Crown lands, but the Crown rents of the tax-paying peasants were alienated; and "as there were not wanting persons to maintain that all liability to land tax had its origin in the Crown's primary right of property in the soil, wherefore the transfer of the rents must bring with it a silent transfer of the soil itself", the one way was as good as the other. The soil was rapidly becoming vested in the nobility; the old complaint of Pliny, Latifundia perdidere Italiam, was becoming applicable also to Sweden. In 1624, the peasants even threatened in certain districts to murder the nobles, and drive away the King.
The alienation of Crown lands arose out of the financial difficulties. Gustavus Adolphus, always pressed for money, could find none; the lower orders were completely exhausted; no further imposts could be laid upon them without danger of a revolt: the occupation of certain monopolies, such as salt, by the Crown, was insufficient and temporary; no resource remained but the Crown lands: these were mortgaged, sold, and given away with reckless extravagance. Under the Regency the practice was continued and greatly increased. The ownership of large estates had indeed something to be said on its side: a greater capital could be employed upon the land; yet the entire want of consideration on the part of the nobles rendered this advantage trifling in comparison with the counterbalancing evils. There can be no doubt that they aimed at doing what had already taken place in Denmark, and gaining a complete preponderance in the State: they proved this well by their subsequent action during the minority of Charles IX. We cannot acquit Oxenstiern of the blame, that he made no thoroughgoing attempt to set himself against the evil; but he seems to have been of that school of statesmen who devote their genius wholly to the welfare of the State as a whole, in its foreign relations, rather than in its domestic condition: and yet this was certainly not for want of insight.
Against the lack of income was to be set the enormous expenditure of the State. The necessary outlay for the war was greatly increased by the superfluous number of officers and the enormous pay of the State officials. It is worth while to particularise here. The five Regents had each 18,000 thalers a year; the Admiral in addition, as he had to keep open table, 500 th. a week; every senator 6,000 th. a year, with 500 th. a month for table expenses. Further, most of them had some governorship, which brought him in a large sum; any who had not, received instead 600 th. a year. And this only for the Senate! It was the same with ambassadors. John Oxenstiern received at the Congress 50 th. a day while alone, and 100 th. when the three plenipotentiaries were together. "What wonder", says Grauert, "that at Christina's accession the State chest was so empty that the ordinary necessaries could no longer be paid for, and credit was gone!"
This, however, was not all. The higher officers in the army always received disproportionately huge sums; further, there was endless mismanagement and peculation among the officials. A certain councillor of the Exchequer, for instance, one Hanson, who had amassed great wealth, and was ennobled in 1641, was condemned to death in 1642 for great malversations, his patent of nobility being torn up. How powerful his accomplices were, and, let us add, how prevalent the crime, appears from this: that they induced the young Queen to beg for his life; but the case was too glaring.
It must always be remembered in Christina's favour that she found the financial condition desperate and did not make it so. Her thoughtless profusion certainly added to the difficulties, but was infinitely far from creating them. That the catastrophe occurred in 1650, during her reign, proves this absolutely; it was the discharge of the accumulated evils of fifty years. Hence the extreme necessity for peace, which yet, when it came, for the moment added to the distress. And she endeavoured to ameliorate the condition of the down-trodden peasants in various ways, before the outbreak in 1650. She provided by law that they should be paid for the lodging and horses which they had previously been obliged to supply to the nobles gratis, when they were travelling through the country. She endeavoured to promote emigration to America in her newly-established colony, by granting privileges to settlers. And she caused a committee to examine the laws and rectify as far as possible existing anomalies and abuses in accordance with the principles of equity. One of the complaints of the oppressed Fourth Estate referred specially to the abuse of justice, the private prisons and tortures, used against them by the nobility. The torture in trials, hitherto resorted to, was abolished by her.
In 1650, the wretched state of things described was enhanced by bad harvests and famine. The loud clamours of the peasantry against the nobles, and their angry demand that the Crown estates should be reclaimed, were accompanied by another complication which gave them a powerful support. Certain privileges of the nobles had given special offence to the clergy; in particular, the tithes, from which in respect of their manors the nobility was exempted, and the right of patronage in parishes; the nobles in a pastoral district could elect the minister, and, in spite of certain limiting conditions, "no priest could be forced upon a noble against his will:" the nobles had their own chapels, and their own chaplain, and "would not go to church." This caused the ecclesiastical order to unite with the people, by whom they were much esteemed, and over whom they had great influence. But within this order there was no cohesion; the bishops, whose position in relation to the inferior clergy was analogous to that of the old nobility towards the "new men", were seen to abandon their class, and side with the aristocratic party.
Already, in 1649, there had been presages of that which was to come. While the peasants renewed their murmuring against the nobles, the clergy raised their complaints as to the abuse of patronage and the non-payment of tithes. The nobility treated these claims with insolent arrogance. They "demanded the maintenance of their right of patronage unimpaired." The Queen replied that the nobility were bound, unless furnished with a legal excuse, to attend the churches; otherwise, from the number of chaplains, the land would be overstocked with clergy who were not wanted, so that they would be eventually compelled, to the dishonour of the realm and degradation of the order, to settle in farms and become peasants, and be employed by the nobility like others of their slaves. In opposition to the prospect of the civil service appointments being open to the sons of priests, if capable, the nobles petitioned that persons of their own order might be employed in her Majesty's Chancery. "They regarded the first offices in the State as their patrimony." The Queen sharply answered, "Offices were no hereditary estates." Things began to look very black: seditious pamphlets and satirical pasquinades were circulated. "I see", wrote the Chancellor, "that Europe and the whole world is disturbed; there seems to be at hand a great controversio rerum."
The fulness of time and the stir caused by her coronation brought things to a crisis in 1650. On October 3rd the three lower orders presented to her their "Protestation as to the restitution of Crown Estates." In this, after enumerating the grounds of their discontent, they demand that all Crown lands shall be resumed and that it shall be declared illegal to sell such lands for the future.
The nobles endeavoured to excite the hostility of the Queen against the Orders, by pleading that this petition was an attack on the royal prerogative. But although Christina was firmly determined not to resume any lands, either bought with money or given away by herself, and regarded such an act as mere confiscation, her sympathies were entirely for the petitioners. "She approved greatly of the protest of the Orders, as being a salutary measure, recommending them most earnestly to be constant in their purpose, and repeatedly ejaculating, 'Now or never'", says Terserus, the energetic and resolute spokesman of the lower clergy, deserted by their bishops. It was entirely owing to her tact and sympathetic mediation that some great social convulsion was prevented, for "there was every prospect of civil war, to which not only the country people, but the burghers were much inclined; some of the most wealthy nobles thought of flight." There was fighting in the streets of Stockholm; Oxenstiern is said to have sat in his room, expecting every time the door opened that some one would come in to assassinate him.
How difficult a position Christina was in will be realised if we recollect that at this moment her Coronation was placing her in intimate personal connection with those very men whom, as nobles, she was politically opposed to; and this made it almost impossible entirely to break with them. Still, it is to be remembered that, throughout the danger, she was never unpopular with the people; it was not her, but the nobles, they hated. One of the seditious pamphlets, entitled 'Spectacles for Princes', exemplifies their attitude; in it she is warned to open her eyes to the designs of the aristocracy, who are aiming at ruining her and enslaving the people. No intimidation on their part could induce her, however, to consent to resume the Crown lands; but she did what she could in their behalf. She promised both the clergy and the peasants her protection, and issued decrees confirming the privileges of the former, and directing that the nobles should abstain from oppressing their peasants. She found a certain support against the old aristocracy in those "new" men whom she raised in large numbers to the nobility during her reign, but she could not do much against them; they were too strong. The burgher class were appeased in some degree by a reduction of the salt tax; and the dexterous conciliation of the clergy by the Queen at length after a split of six weeks reunited them to their bishops. When the Estates had remained assembled for the unprecedented time of four months, they separated, their animosities allayed, not satisfied; and the temporary pacification was only effected by the clergy signing the protest, the nobles refusing to make the slightest concessions. How little they cared for expostulations is seen in their demand of the Queen that an example should be made of the boldest among their denunciators in the Diet; when this was refused, they next asked her to address a sharp reprimand to the orders that had ventured to oppose them. No aristocracy has ever shown so sublime an unconsciousness that power has its duties, as the Swedish; they continued in their blind infatuation till retribution came under Charles XI. Christina scouted their request; she went further, and publicly declared, with regard to the contemptuous epithet "ill-born" they applied to the lower Orders, that no others should be understood by the word than those who had degenerated from their birth by the neglect of virtue, and stained their descent by sloth and baseness; and that all who were of legitimate birth and respectable ancestry, whether nobles or clergy, burghers or peasants, should neither be called "ill-born", nor excluded from any station of honour in their native country.
And here appears the only insoluble problem in Christina's career. How was it that, while she had the genius to appreciate the evil state of the people and the courage to take their part against the nobles, while in all other ways she laboured unwearyingly for the good of the State and neglected her own health in its service, she could yet indulge in such reckless extravagance, in the matter of Crown lands, as threw all her predecessors into the shade. For such is the fact. The budget of the Treasury in 1645 shows a deficit of nearly a million; that of 1654, one of nearly four millions: for, while the debts increased a million and a half, the Crown claims decreased by more than a million. The proportion between the alienation of Crown lands by Gustavus Adolphus, the Regents, and Christina is as 1, 2, and 4: "the registers of her reign are filled with deeds of sale, infeudations, letters of nobility, tokens of grace, and gifts of every sort. She had brilliant merits to reward, sometimes ancient wrongs to redress, and the care which she devoted to old or wounded soldiers deserves all praise." We shall presently see the lavish generosity with which she rewarded men of learning; and not only these; her donations to Magnus de la Gardie reach the incredible: he is said to have obtained from her landed estates alone to the value of 80,000 rix dollars per annum. We may, if we like, partly explain the deficit stated above by referring to the Coronation expenses; we may consider that the bulk of her gifts were to newly-created nobles, in order to support herself against the old aristocracy. But it remains after all not to be palliated. The fact remains that, though frugal herself to an extraordinary degree, she was possessed by a mania for squandering which is a great blot on her administration. It was the sole point in which she resembled her mother. She seems to have considered it only natural to give without stint to anybody at any moment; nay, more: she remained throughout her life completely unconscious that there was any reason why she should not: it never occurred to her that money came to an end. Even to Count Magnus, the gulf into which she threw so much, she complained, with obvious surprise, that she had not money enough to keep up her Court. She exactly illustrates the remark of the Roman satirist, that women never calculate accounts. But, on the other hand, the cause of the wretched condition of the country during her reign is by no means to be found in her lavishness, which was, after all, temporary; the evil lay deeper: in the misery produced by the war, and the oppression of the nobles. The popular instinct was truer. When Christina returned to Sweden in after years, it was not in the people, but in the governing classes, nobles and clergy, who feared for themselves and their religion, that she found her bitter enemies.
Thus then for the present the storm blew over. Christina now turned herself to the carrying out of her plan. In spite of all obstacles, she had continually increased her own power, and made two steps towards her design of substituting Charles upon the throne. She now prepared to advance still further.
The apparent calm of the Queen, and her continued expenditure, induced observers to suppose that she had some extraordinary means at her command of solving the difficulties: it was conjectured that she was nourishing the design of abdicating in favour of the Prince: it was noticed that she began to show more favour to the Chancellor and his party than heretofore, which augured a desire to stand well with everybody on quitting the helm of State: this suspicion was strengthened by her announced intention of making a voyage to the islands of Gothland and Oeland, places suited, it was thought, for her residence after her abdication. In the meantime Charles was in an ambiguous position. If he manifested any desire to take part in the government, it might easily be misinterpreted; at the same time, what must have been his secret emotions at the thought of waiting so long for his accession as Christina's youth might give him to infer! But, on the other hand, the state of the kingdom and her extravagant procedure must have dulled his desire to take charge of the State at such a moment, and given him fears for the future. Yet his present dexterity, when contrasted with the real ambition of his character as it was afterwards displayed, proved him to have at least one of the qualities of greatness: the power of biding his time. He lived retired on the island of Oeland, spending his time in building, hunting, and kindred pursuits; paying at the same time court to everybody; occasionally writing to remind the Queen of his marriage proposals, though he began to see his hopes were herein not destined to be realised.
The Queen's design was penetrated first by Chanut, who hastened to try and dissuade her from it. The Court of France was by no means anxious to see her replaced on the Swedish throne by the warlike Charles, whom it distrusted. In spite of his representations, however, Christina remained inflexible, showing to Chanut good reasons why to retreat now was impossible. She next communicated it to the Prince, who feared she might be testing him, and thought it best to endeavour to dissuade her from her intention. Christina finally (in October) disclosed it to the Grand Marshal and the Chancellor, telling them to bid the Prince come and make his preparations for assuming the government. In reply, he bade them do all they could to turn her from her purpose, and continue a reign so beneficial to the country; he never wished for himself to be anything but her dutiful subject. In spite of all remonstrances, however, the Queen, on October 26, 1651, declared in full Senate her determination to resign the Crown in favour of the Prince, and retire into private life. She told them that[,] after mature reflection on a point of such importance[,] she could find no better means than this of providing for the safety of the State and the repose of the people, who wished to see the succession secured by the birth of heirs to the throne; as she was firmly resolved never to marry, the Prince being once declared king would be obliged to take a wife, and the children born to him would deliver the nation from the fear it had of the evils usually accompanying the elections of kings. The Senators vainly endeavoured to bend her will by representing to her that God had given them a queen, and that as long as God preserved her life[,] they would acknowledge no one else; they laid stress, not unreasonably, on the exhausted state of the finances, and the additional cost of another coronation and the marriage of the Prince. Finding her inflexible, however, it was determined to postpone further consideration to the approaching Diet in February next.
In November, notwithstanding, the Senators and the delegates of the Estates made a final effort to overcome her resistance. They went in a body to her, Oxenstiern himself acting as spokesman. His eloquent appeal, directed to touching her heart rather than changing her mind, had a great effect upon her; she agreed to revoke her determination, upon the condition that nothing more was said to her on the subject of marriage. This was accepted; all, including Prince Charles, testifying their satisfaction at the change. Her birthday, on which she gave a feast, with games, tournaments, balls, and amusements, afforded an opportunity of giving vent to the general rejoicing (which was by no means feigned, for the nobles feared Charles becoming king); nevertheless she told Chanut, that, though she had not been able to refuse this satisfaction to her subjects, she had not so firmly renounced her plan as to leave it impossible that she should one day return to it.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Axel Oxenstierna.
Above: Karl Gustav.
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