570

Swedish victories.

Losses in Germany [1676-8

King, however, was determined not to quit Scania without a battle. At last, on the night of December 3, the vigilance of the Danes relaxed and they found themselves compelled to fight near Lund. A confused and desperate struggle ensued. Helmfelt and Charles, who fought like a hero of old, crushed the Danish left under King Christian, but rode so far in pursuit that their weary comrades of the centre and left were brought to the verge of destruction. Gyllenstierna and Feuquières fled from what seemed to be a lost battle, but the troops bravely stood their ground until the King cut his way back to them and gained a complete victory. Nearly half the combatants, 5000 Danes and 3000 Swedes, had fallen, and Charles captured 2000 men with the Danish camp and artillery.

The victory of Lund rescued the Swedes from a well-nigh desperate plight and led to the recovery of Helsingborg, Kristianopel, and Karlshamn. Above all, it made Charles XI the hero of the army and of the nation. Scania, however, was by no means regained. The Danes still held Landskrona and Kristianstad. No severity could stamp out the guerilla warfare. A victorious invasion by the Norwegians under Gyldenlöve assisted the Danes. In May, 1677, Christian took the field with 12,000 men, while the Swedes had less than half that number in the field. The strategy of Charles was still to march straight at the enemy, sword in hand; and, but for a mysterious error on the part of his opponent, he must have been crushed. When wiser counsels prevailed on both sides, the Danes found themselves masters of central and southern Scania; and in June and July the victories of Niels Juel off Femern and in the bay of Kjöge confirmed their command of their sea. But Malmö remained Swedish; its assailants fell out among themselves; a great assault failed; and at the end of June the Danes were compelled to abandon a siege which had cost them some 4000 men. These losses contributed greatly to give Charles the victory in a pitched battle near Landskrona (July 14), when, after eight hours' fighting, he drove the Danes from a field where. 3000 of their number had fallen. After this disaster, Christian was content to stand on the defensive near Landskrona, and actually detached some 5000 men to help the Great Elector in Pomerania and Rügen. In spite of the continual guerilla warfare and the dangerous incursions which Gyldenlöve and his Norwegians renewed in 1677 and 1678, the mainland had been saved by the victories of the Swedish King.

The campaigns of 1677 and 1678, however, for the time, cost Sweden the remnants of her dominions in Germany. The wonderful though unavailing defence of Stettin, the triumph of Königsmarck over the Danes in Rügen, and the stoical retreat of Horn from the borders of east Prussia to Riga, added lustre to the Swedish arms without checking the advance of the Great Elector. But the victories of Louis XIV in war and diplomacy atoned for the failure of his ally. Since the spring of 1677, negotiations for a general peace had been carried on at Nymegen. There Bengt Oxenstierna displayed a futile readiness to join with any

1679-80] Treaties of Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Lund 571

Power that could promise advantages to Sweden. While the ambassador offered to betray France, his master most obstinately insisted that the French should invade Germany in order to compel the restoration to Sweden of every acre that she had lost. The issue deeply wounded Charles XI. In February, 1679, France and Sweden made up their quarrel with the Emperor and the Empire, and Louis and Leopold undertook to mediate between the northern Powers. The former, acting as the self-constituted guardian of Sweden, at the same time made peace at Celle between Charles XI and the three Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes. The disgusted monarch, whose subsequent severe illness was attributed to chagrin, was powerless to resist, and next month averted a similar slight by coming to terms with the Bishop of Münster. The greatest boon, peace with the Great Elector, was however flung to Sweden by Louis XIV. At the end of June, 1679, by the Peace of Saint-Germain, she recovered all her possessions in Pomerania except a strip of territory on the right bank of the Oder.

Two months later, although Jens Juel and Gyllenstierna were negotiating in the cathedral at Lund, Louis dealt with Christian V as he had dealt with the Great Elector. By the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Denmark restored her conquests to Sweden and received only an insignificant sum of money in exchange. Finally, in October, the state of nominal war between Sweden on the one hand and Spain and the Dutch on the other was brought to an end.

The chances of war and politics had thus fixed the balance of power in Scandinavia where the great Gustavus, Oxenstierna, and Charles X had left it. For a moment indeed it seemed as though the ideal of abiding Scandinavian concord, which Griffenfeld had conceived and Gyllenstierna developed, might be realised. The formal Peace concluded between Denmark and Sweden at Lund was accompanied by an intimate commercial and military alliance. In the spring of 1680 a common coinage for the three Scandinavian kingdoms was decreed, and the new unity found expression in the marriage of Charles XI with Ulrica Eleonora, the pious sister of Christian V. The untimely death of Gyllenstierna in June, 1680, may therefore be regarded as a misfortune for Scandinavia as a whole. Gyllenstierna died at the moment when his ideas for both the international and the domestic policy of Sweden seemed likely to prevail. Although there was none to take his place as the architect of Scandinavian unity, the peace between the weary Danes and Swedes remained for two decades unbroken. Within the Swedish realm, moreover, men were groping their way towards a goal which his eyes had clearly seen. To make the King an autocrat, to arraign the Regents, to resume the alienated Crown lands, to restore order in the finances and to establish a territorial army - these had been to him means as valuable as the entente with Denmark towards the supreme purpose of making Sweden. strong and independent. During the War, especially at the Diet held at

572

Character of Charles XI

[1675-97

Halmstad early in 1678, demands for a new "Reduction" had been heard, and the Estates had laid before the King a statement of the faults and infirmities from which the constitution of the realm was suffering. At the same time every possible rival to the monarchy had been swept away by the War. La Gardie, the high nobility, and the Council were discredited or paralysed. War had made Charles XI virtually a dictator; and the nation, save perhaps a few great nobles, looked expectantly towards a King who might maintain the same ascendancy in times of peace.

No period illustrates better than the years 1675 to 1697 the truth that the history of Sweden has been the history of her Kings. It was Charles XI who transformed the Swedish Crown, created Charles XII and bequeathed them to each other. Having rescued the State by force of arms, he remoulded her by laws and administration. His heir he endowed with many of his own qualities, trained in his own school, and invested with the purple mantle of absolutism. Yet the personal life of the King who raised monarchy so high was that of a peasant. For months together he dwelt remote from his capital and inaccessible to all save a few Ministers and servants. The French ambassador, who more than once stalked the royal quarry to his lair, got little profit by intruding upon a Prince who rivalled Louis XIV in kingly pride. Charles delighted in feverish rides of from seventy to ninety miles in a day; and in his wide and sparsely peopled realm these could be performed almost in solitude. On the parade ground, where few words save those of command were needed, he gladly played his part, and was wont to hew asunder faulty harness with his own sword. But the usages and pleasures of society he detested; he was married on an obscure manor, and forbade all festivity at the birth of his first-born son. He preferred a written petition to an audience, and a midnight drive into Stockholm to torch-bearers and triumphal arches. Thus few of his contemporaries enjoyed an opportunity of penetrating his mind or estimating his capacity. To some he seemed a stupid, gullible tyrant; to others, the wise and resolute father of his people-and neither view can be pronounced wholly wrong.

In seeking the master-key to the history of the reign which the character of the King supplies, several facts seem clear. Unlike his father, Charles XI had not reached maturity when called upon to save the State. Before the War he was a backward youth whom de La Gardie kept in leading-strings. The shock of 1675 made him a man; the storms of 1676, a veteran. Thenceforward until 1693, when the death of his Queen banished all peace from his mind, he appears, while gaining experi ence of affairs, to have suffered from the corrupting influence of absolute power. Like all autocrats, he was liable to be imposed upon by flattery, but a puppet he never was. During the War he overruled his generals. From 1676 till 1680 he may have accepted Gyllenstierna as his tutor in politics; but it is idle to maintain that through all the developments

of

1675-97]

Charles XI and his advisers

573

the next seventeen years he had no fresh source of inspiration. He always believed himself to be master in his own realm, and the attitude of his later Ministers, Klas Fleming, Nils Bielke, and Bengt Oxenstierna, suggests that his belief was well founded. Hating diplomacy, he readily entrusted others with the conduct of foreign affairs, but only on condition that certain guiding principles should be carried out to his own satisfaction. Ignorant, of unattractive appearance, mediocre talent, and limited outlook on life, his unexampled political success was to prove how a firm will combined with simple honesty, courage, and common sense may constitute greatness in a king.

The

At the close of the War, Charles found the Council discredited, Sweden half-ruined, and himself the hope of the nation. Under these conditions he met the Estates at Stockholm in October, 1680. Diet of 1680, followed by that of 1682, was to effect nothing less than the transformation of Sweden from a limited to an absolute monarchy. This revolution appears to have been thought out beforehand, facilitated by the appointment of formidable nobles to posts overseas, and accomplished by parliamentary strategy. Feuquières observed that the Guards were quartered in Stockholm, while five or six thousand men, chiefly under Livonian or foreign officers, lay close at hand. The whole movement was directed by a King whose nature impelled him, in debate, in negotiation, and in war alike, to rush straight towards his unconcealed goal. Charles was indeed not destitute of advisers. Gyllenstierna, with his plans for an army of 80,000 men and an alliance with Denmark, had doubtless sowed fruitful seeds in his mind. Louis XIV had counselled him to remain in the background and merely to accept the profitable proposals of the Estates. Klas Fleming, as strenuous as the King in the public service and an able opponent of the high nobles, obeyed the royal command to act as president (Landtmarskalk) of the First Estate, and must have stood in relations of peculiar intimacy with his master. Hans Wachtmeister, the most conspicuous of a group of old comrades in war whom Charles always trusted, was regarded as expressing in his many and passionate speeches ideas at least acceptable to the King. It is difficult, however, to resist the conclusion that the victorious result must be ascribed to Charles himself, and that its secret lay, not in craft and astuteness, but in a will firm even to fanaticism, an unbounded sense of duty, and the irresistible logic of the situation.

The forms of deliberation indeed contributed much to the triumph of national need and popular resentment over wealth and privilege. The four Estates (nobles, clergy, burghers and peasants) met separately and corresponded with the King and with one another chiefly in writing and through formal embassies. Thus, although the nobles were ready to claim an authority not inferior to that of the three non-noble Estates combined, and although the peasants sometimes declared themselves incapable of forming any opinion on high politics, the Crown could

574

The Great Commission

[1675-80

normally make use of the unanimous votes of three Estates to overcome the reluctance of one. Even if this procedure were not practicable, a royal proposition could be laid before the four Estates severally and their answers severally received. From these four documents it was Charles' wont to distil a single answer in the sense desired by him and to return it to the Estates for signature, which no individual dared to refuse. In dealing with the First Estate, moreover, the Crown possessed the inestimable advantage of selecting its president. Not only did Klas Fleming act as both official channel and mediator between King and nobles, but it also lay in his power to prevent unacceptable motions from being put to the vote, or to withhold the shelter of the ballot from those who might have ventured to give a secret vote against the Crown. Dissensions between the members of the Council and the remainder of the high nobles, and others, far more acute and permanent, between the greater and the lesser nobles, helped to complete the ascendancy of the King.

Thus aided, the Crown obtained its ends with unprecedented thoroughness and speed. The familiar torpor of the executive, indeed, afforded no clue to the pace of the deliberative assembly of Sweden. The Council had been wont to break off for months together, and when it was nominally in session an attendance of two, or even of one, of the forty members was not unknown. Feuquières complained that to procure the transaction by it of a piece of business was as hard as to make two Popes and three Kings of Poland. Ten years after the death of Gyllenstierna, the correct basis on which to calculate his salary as ambassador was still in question. The Estates, on the other hand, unhampered by complex forms of procedure, anxious to return to their homes, confronted with simple questions to which their class interests suggested the answer, and in a sense presided over by the Crown, were ready to sanction the most weighty enactments in a few days. The King first asked for means to establish the independence of the State, and Hans Wachtmeister declared to his brother nobles that this could be accomplished without a new grant, if only the Regents were brought to book. A storm of conflicting passions was thus let loose; but within six days Charles and the Estates had decreed that those persons or their heirs who had been responsible for the government during the minority should be tried by a Great Commission. This body, which was appointed on October 26, 1680, and took the place of the Commission of enquiry appointed in 1675, consisted of nine members from each of the four Estates chosen by that Estate in concert with the Crown. The fortunes of 118 great Houses depended on its deliberations.

Immediately after the appointment of the Great Commission, the three non-noble Estates joined in petitioning the King for a new and more comprehensive Reduction. The tempest which this demand aroused would have cowed a monarch less resolute than Charles.

The whole