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Condition of the peasantry
in Finland. HISTORY OF THE SWEDES.
Reflections on the career
of Charles. [1599-
because the peasants of the nobles in Sweden were
pi’oprietors of their horses and nags, whereas such
peasants in Finland had no jiroperty at all, but
must be provided by their noble masters with all
that was necessary for tilling a farm in field and
meadow, and for seed-corn, so far as tliese might
expect any profit from their estates ’. Chai’les had
already in 1600 forbidden the nobility in Sweden
to exempt their peasants from the payment of their
share of general aids voted by the diet, to raise
larger amounts from their fiefs than the law per-
mitted, or make any encroachments on the rights
of the tax-paying peasants *. He now ordained,
" since the nobles of Finland could enjoy no greater
privileges than those of Sweden," that in every aid,
impost, or levy, the peasants of the Finnish nobles
should pay half the jjroportion of the peasants
assessed to the crown, and likewise bear their
sliare of the rents of justiciaries and judges of
Hundreds, as well as of the tithes. These had been
hitherto paid in Finland at pleasure. An ordinance
was now issued that two thirds, in Finland as in
Sweden, should be allotted to the crown. The
arbitrary power of the bailiffs in levying them was
limited *. Charles returned by a way which before
him no Swedish prince had trodden,
—north of the
gulf of Bothnia, on whose shores he chose out sites
for new towns.
Charles, who had for a long time before actually
ruled, possessed undivided power after Sigismund’s
flight. Could a government be grounded only on
what may be termed a factitious base, none had ever
been better prepared. But history shows that deter-
minate legal notions are still more important for
nations than for individuals. Rai’e are the examples
in which an encroachment on these has not left
enduring effects upon a nation. Sigismund had
been declared to have forfeited the crown. Yet
how long did Charles delay accepting a crown
abandoned by its owner, and so often proffei’ed to
him ! His scruples have been denominated hypo-
crisy, and if respect for the opinion of the world
deserve this name, we deny not that he shrank
from it. Yet it is but a superficial judgment of
him which overlooks the contest that glowed in his
own breast. No one had higher ideas of the
sanctity of the legal power of royalty. His own
wi-itings on the history of Sweden best prove this,
for their leading notion is, that the Swedes mostly
occasioned the misfortunes of their kings, and
thereby their own ^. In general he reproaches
them with unsteadiness, untrustworthiness, envy,
default of civic courage and virtue. " Their man-
ner is," he says,
" to fall all upon one, so that when
one of them comes into trouble, be it by his own
desert, or by violence and wrong done to him, then
is there none who can, or dare, or will help him,
but all creep into holes and corners, and help to
ruin one another ’." We should scarcely be apt to
believe that he who scared the council with the
name of Engelbert, styled that leader a right sedi-
3
Werwing, ii. 67.
* Mandate against extortion from the people, Linkoping,
Feb. 28, 1600.
5 Decree of Biiirneborg, Feb. 9, 1602. This malpractice of
the Finnish baililfs afterwards again provoked the indignation
of Charles :
" If we use them and other such thieves further,
60 may all the thousand devils use them," he writes to the
treasurers in Finland, Sept. 20, 1607. From his prohibitions
in Sweden we learn that the office of bailiff was sold.
tious fellow. Yet the fact is so. Charles might have
said with Elizabeth of England, whom he so mucli
admired ;
" Whoso lays hands on a prince’s sceptre,
grasps a fire-brand which must destroy him ;
for
him there is no grace *." Therefore he declared
thirty years before to John, in the outset of their
contention ;
" I am accused of having attacked the
majesty of the king, for which history shows that
neither brothers have spared one another, nor
parents their children." With this disposition it
was his destiny to fall at strife with two brothers
and a nephew .;
a feud of which the issue was to
decide not only who should bear the sceptre, but
whether it should remain in the house of Vasa or be
broken. That common responsibility which Gus-
tavus imposed upon his sons, was therefore in truth
Charles’s political religion. Throughout his whole
life he fought for the Swedish crown, seemingly
against his own famil3’, but really in its cause ;
and
he was himself, amid th.eso contrarieties, torn by
internal strife. With one hand battling against
Sigismund, and all the dangers which with him
threatened the country, with the other he struggled
inexorably, and quenched in their noblest blood
the factions which had dared to beleaguer the
throne of* Gustavus Vasa. We find not that in this
respect he ever doubted of his good right, or that
he repented for a moment what this after-world
lays most to his charge. On another side, again,
we find so much the more dubiety, which is
closely connected with his political faith. As
the son of Gustavus, and from his whole position,
he could not niisappreciate the value of power
bestowed by the voice of the people. But on the
same voice his whole family rested their liere-
ditary right. Against Sigismund, an outcast bj’
religion from the heritage of the father of his line,
Charles enforced the resolutions of the estates.
But there remained a child, whose weak arm out-
stretched between himself and the throne seems to
have excited in him deeper disquietude. Duke
John, Sigismund’s half-brother, was by the here-
ditary settlement, his claims being unforfeited,
next heir to the crown. Not only was the life of
this child held sacred by a hand otherwise so
bloodstained, but Charles fulfilled towards him all
the duties of a near kinsman. He is still uncertain
whether the young prince’s renunciation of his
pretensions, made at the age of fifteen, is valid, and
closes by acknowledging in his testament John’s
superior right,
"
provided that the estates of the
realm shall in no wise depart from their enacted
statutes." According to this, Sweden was without a
king at the death of Charles, and first received one in
Gustavus Adolphus, by a new election of the estates.
In this position Charles took no step forwards
without the sanction of the estates of the realm.
This concurrence was by no means agreeable to
them ;
for he vexed their members with incessant
diets to repeat to them ever the same tale. Diffi-
6
King Charles IX.’s Swedish Chronicle, extracted with
his own hand from the Chronicle of the archbishop Laurence
Peterson. Palmsk. Collec. Acta ad Hist. Car. IX. t. i. The
judgments following are the king’s own.
7 L. c. ii 208, 209.
8 Elizabeth to the French ambassador Beaumont, upon
occasion of Biron’s treason against Henry IV. Kauiner,
History of Europe from the end of the Fifteenth Century, ii.
607 ;
a work which at length does full justice to the great
Elizabeth.
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