Note (Back) — Chapter XXXI

628. Sweden in Earlier Modern Times.—During the centuries which intervened between the establishment of national independence under the leadership of Gustavus Vasa in 1523 and the end of the Napoleonic era, the political system of the kingdom of Sweden oscillated in a remarkable manner between absolutism and liberalism. The establishment of a national parliamentary assembly antedated the period of union with Denmark (1397-1523); for it was in 1359 that King Magnus, embarrassed by the unmanageableness of the nobility and obliged to fall back upon the support of the middle classes, summoned representatives of the towns to appear before the king along with the nobles and clergy, and thus constituted the first Swedish Riksdag. By an ordinance of Gustavus Adolphus in 1617, what had been a turbulent and ill-organized body was transformed into a well-ordered national assembly of four estates—the nobles, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasants—each of which met and deliberated regularly apart from the others. There was likewise a Rigsrad, or senate, which comprised originally a grand council representative of the semi-feudal landed aristocracy, but which by the seventeenth century had come to be essentially a bureaucracy occupying the chief offices of state at the pleasure of the crown. Under Gustavus Adolphus and his earlier successors, especially Charles XI. (1660-1697), however, the government took on the character of at least a semi-absolutism. The Rigsdag retained the right to be consulted upon important foreign and legislative questions, but the power of initiative was exercised by the sovereign alone. The Riksdag of 1680 admitted that the king was responsible for his acts only to God, and that between him and his people no intermediary was needed; and in 1682 the same body recognized as vested in the crown the right freely to interpret and amend the law.[802]