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12. JOHN III. AND THE LITURGY. 239
sovereigns who led the various alterations in religion in
England and Sweden.
In England Henry s strength forced changes which fol
lowed his own changes of mind, as Gustaf tried to force
changes in Sweden. Under Edward VI. Calvinism for a
few years was in the ascendant. In Mary Romanism for a
short period violently triumphed. In Elizabeth we had a
moderate and politic ruler of the Church, who may also be
compared to Gustaf. The latter would have liked to be
like Henry, but he wr
as forced by circumstances to be like
Elizabeth. In his bonhomie, his perseverance, his know
ledge of the temper of his people, and in his politic treat
ment of the Church he was more like the two great Tudor
sovereigns than any other Swedish king, and he also
resembled them in the length of his reign. In Eric
Sweden had a man of Calvinistic education and sym
pathies, who had little force of character to carry out what
he may have personally desired. In John, Sweden had a
man who set himself to reconcile Catholicism and Pro
testantism in the spirit of Laud and the English High
Churchmen. Both in the character of his policy and in
the fact of his marriage to a Roman Catholic and its conse
quences, he reminds us more of our own Charles I. than
of any other of our sovereigns. In Sigismund, son of
John, it had a convinced Roman Catholic, who, like James
II. of England, lost his crown for his religion. In Charles
IX. it had another semi-Calvinist, who, like William of
Orange a century later, knew how to subordinate his own
prejudices, not from weakness, but from policy, to the
needs of the government of a country to rule which he was
called by a revolution.
John was, as I have said, of the school of Cassander, who
desired to find a via media between Romanism and
Lutheranism. In this he was fortified by his patristic
studies, and by the example of Ferdinand in Germany and
Elizabeth In England. Probably next to Cassander s
Consultation on the Articles controverted between
Catholics and Protestants, the proposals made by the
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