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126 RImlland!n HISTORY OF THE SWEDES. "chaTacteT [1524-1543.
" Ye would wish to be far better scholars than
we, and many good men besides," he writes to the
commonalty of Upland 1, " and hold much more
fast by the traitorous abuses of the old bishops
and papists, than by the word and gospel of
the living God. Far be this thought from you !
Tend your households, fields and meadows, wives
and children, kine and sheep ; but set to us no
bound in government and religion. Since it
be-hoveth us as a Christian monarch, for God’s sake
and for righteousness, conformably to all natural
reason, to appoint ordinances and rules for you; so
that if ye would not look to have wrath and
chastisement from us, ye should be obedient to our
royal commandment, as well in temporal matters
as in religion."
The king had employed the nobles as auxiliaries
against the hierarchy. He had confirmed their
charter of privileges in the year 1526, and invited
them by the Westeras Recess to participate in the
reduct ion of ecclesiastical property. The alliance was
soon found to be burdensome, and by a decree of
1538 he forbade any one to lay hands on the
possessions of the Church until the party had proved his
right before the king himself. Meanwhile the
permission, once given, had been used by the nobility in
such a manner as to excite highly the discontent of
the people. " Thou and thy like," wrote the royal
censor to the councillor of state, George
Gyllensti-erna " live as there were neither law nor rule in
the land;" and to the baronage: " To strip churches,
convents, and prebends of estates, manors, and
chattels, thereto are all full willing and ready, and
after such a fashion is every man a Christian and
evangelical." The insurrection which had broken
out in Scania during the Lubecine war was directed
particularly against the nobles. Soon the spirit of
revolt spread to the adjacent Swedish provinces,
and so early as 1537 troubles arose in Smaland, in
which the peasants were heard to threaten, " that
they would slay their lords and root out the whole
body 3." Rigorous measures stilled the tumult for
the moment, but the disaffection continued, and in
1542 rebellion was general in Smaland. Nils Dacke,
a peasant who had been forced to flee into the
woods for homicide, was the ringleader. His band
at times numbered 10,000 men, and he defied with
success the whole power of Gustavus, " because,"
so runs one complaint, " the peasants will not come
forth into the open field after the fair custom of
war, but when the household-men (the term at this
time for the regular soldiery) set upon them, then
do they like the wolf, and hug the forest with all
haste again." The rising spread from parish to
parish, or more correctly, from wood to wood,
through West and East-Gothland, upwards as far
as Sodermanland. First there come secretly
emissaries in the night time—it is stated in a relation to
the king 4—who press followers in the name of the
1 Letter to the peasantry at the fair of Disting, 1540, in
the Registry of the Archives.
2 Dated at Gripsliolm, March 5, 1538.
3 Tegel 2, 92.
4 In what manner the rabble of traitors made their
progress from Smaland. Registry of the Archives for 1543.
5 Herrehycklare, fawners on lords; lord-losels. T.
common weal and the advancement of Christianity.
Then if the priest of the parish be married, his
house is straightway plundered ; the same is done
to rich landowners and yeomen, who are called
lick-lords5. In this wise they make the greater
number partakers of their knavery, and ever go
forward, spying out all roads and paths, not seeking
the clear fields, but holding by the forest. All that
belongs to the gentry is forthwith ruined, none
dares to ask after it, and all who are in livery are
accounted for thralls to the great. They say, that
they mean no ill to traffickers, but only to lords’ men
and retainers, pretending that they wish again to
build up Christianity, to abolish the Swedish mass,
and bring all things back to their old condition.
The royal bailiffs were killed, the manor-houses
plundered, and the crown was offered to Suanto
Sture, who now, as in the former attempt of the
same kind, remained true to his sovereign. In vain
the king tendered the insurgents his pardon if they
would return to obedience. From the complaints
of grievances to which these transactions gave rise,
it would seem that the king’s bailiffs and the bax-ons
had pei-petrated vax-ious outrages, which he sought
to excuse on the plea that they had been committed
without his knowledge. " Ye reave and rend from
the needy wretches of peasants—he writes to his
officers—all that they have, sometimes for a small
matter, and then it ensues, they being completely
impovexushed, that no other resource is left them,
but to run fx’onx house, home, wife and child, and
betake themselves to the fox*est-thieves." There
were moreover some of the king’s own economical
x-egulatioixs which had pressed with peculiar severity
upon the population of this region. Old px’iests
fanned the flames of disturbance, lifted up their
hands and anathematized the king in the churches.
A truce was concluded with the royal approbation,
but within a short time it was broken. Dacke
ruled with absolute sway in Smaland and the isle of
Oeland. The Swedish x’efugees, duke Albert of
Mecklenbui’g, the palsgrave Frederic, who
ennobled the rebel leadex-, the emperor Charles V.
himself, by his chaxicellor Granvella, entered into
communication with the revolted peasants There
wex*e momeixts during these disorders in which
Gustavxis despaired of his owix crown and of the
public safety. At length, in the summer of 1543,
they wex-e suppressed. Abandoned by all, Dacke
wandered a vagabond in the forests of Blekinge,
and was finally, according to the most genei-al
account (for some make him to have escaped to
Germany), overtaken by his pursuers iix these wilds,
and shot dead with an axTow 7. Thus ended the
fiercest insurrection which Gustavus had to brave.
It was also the last. Upper Sweden remained
faithful to him, and the Dalecax-lians voluntarily marched
to his aid.
6 See the emperor’s warrant (dated Barcelona, October 23,
1542,) for Granvella to repair to Sweden, or to exchange
written communications with the factious ; and his letter to
the peasants of Smaland in Hvitfeldt under the year 1542.
7 Messenius (Scondia v. 96) says, that the real Dacke
escaped to Germany, again ventured to Sweden in king
John’s reign, and died of the plague at Stockholm in 1580.
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