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entrusted to him. We find that in the year 1597 he is
elected a member of a Commission appointed to fix the
duties on imported wines,1 and in 1593 he is one of the
four prominent citizens who, in company of the nobles of
the kingdom and of the Magistrates of the town, received
King Sigismund and his young wife on their entrance into
Stockholm.1 2 Sad to say, the end of his life was clouded.
Men of his position do not usually escape calumny, and
conspiracies were in the air. Did not the Liibeckers some
forty years previously conspire with some German settlers
to blow King Gustaf up by placing a cask of gunpowder
under the Royal seat in the church ? “ Perhaps this man
also ”—so his enemies argued; and the consequence was
that in 1599, on the 16th of July, there appeared before
the Magistrates one Erich Jörensoun, who accused Blasius
of secretly conspiring with the unruly element at home
and with the enemies of Sweden abroad. The charge
mainly rested on the contents of a certain slip of paper
enclosed in a letter. Blasius indignantly denied the
crime, and brought forward witnesses, who proved that
the whole letter-affair was concocted by four soldiers when
imprisoned in the tower of the castle in order to extort
money from him.3
But the great trial of his life was not business-anxiety,
not the ill-will of his enemies, but the infidelity of his
wife, whom he accuses before the court of “ lösaktighet,”
as the old minute-books call it, in other words of a loose
and adulterous life.4 The trial must have been the
cause celebre of the day. It is intensely modern. But
as this book does not aim at interesting by its piquancy,
1 See Stad’s Embetsbok.
2 Staffs Tankebok of that date. Rådhus Arkivet.
3 Tankebok of 1599, p. 59. R. A.
4 Ibid, and 1600, pp. 142-58.
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