A Young King and an Empty Treasury
Gustavus was still a young man of twenty-seven. He lacked the tall, slender build of northerners, but like the Vikings he had a strong frame and a ruddy face that spoke of vigor and health. His long, yellowish beard gave him a kingly dignity out of keeping with his age. His pleasing manner made him fit for a king, and even the Church he was destined to suppress and break did not deny his piety and clean life. He took up the duties of the crown with a persistence that sometimes mixed with harshness and overreach, though we must remember that Sweden's disordered state when he took charge justified severity and despotism. In the course of war and bloodshed thousands of peasants had left their fields unsown, miners had stopped work, war had ruined towns, the country's currency had lost its value, the treasury was empty, and the country's leaders had been left dead in their own blood by the Danish occupiers. The surviving great families regarded Gustav as an upstart and were unhappy with his rule. They hatched plots to depose him, but he foiled them with full force. The Danes still held Finland, then part of Sweden, and Søren Norby, a Danish admiral, ruled the strategically important island of Gotland. The merchants of Lübeck pressed him to repay the loan they had made. (One word in the source for the great families is garbled; I have rendered it from context.)
Every government needs money to keep the armed force that backs it and the men who lead that force. But in Vasa's Sweden taxes declined, because those able to pay were strong enough to defy the state. Vasa was forced to debase Sweden's currency, but its value rose again and the country's finances went from bad to worse. Only one class in Sweden was wealthy, and that was the clergy. Gustav, who believed the Church should rescue the people and the state of Sweden from poverty with its vast property, turned to the clergy. In 1523 the king wrote to Hans Brask, Bishop of Linköping, asking him to contribute 5,000 gulden to the treasury. The bishop gave in, protesting. Vasa then asked the monasteries and churches of Sweden to lend the state at once all the cash and precious metals not urgently needed for worship, and he published the list of sums he wanted. When the Church did not answer the king's request as expected, Vasa began to wonder whether he should not, like the rulers of Germany, confiscate Church property for the state. He still remembered that most senior churchmen had opposed the revolution and backed Christian II's rule over Sweden.
Olaus Petri and the Reforming Ideas
In 1519 Olaus Petri, the son of a Swedish ironworks manager, returned home after years of study at Wittenberg and, as deacon of the cathedral school at Strängnäs, began to spread ideas that the Roman Catholic Church counted as heresy. He called purgatory a fable, said that Christ's followers should offer their prayers only for themselves and confess their sins to him, and held that teaching the Bible in religious assemblies is better than performing the Mass. Luther's writings spread through Sweden. Brask urged the king to ban the sale of Luther's works. The king replied that "impartial experts have not found Luther's writings false." Apparently he wanted to bargain with the Church by protecting heresy.
Pope Adrian VI made matters worse by recalling his legate Johannes Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala, and handing the post to Gustav Trolle, an enemy of the Swedish revolution. (The book's wording here is unclear; I give it as it stands.) In 1524 Vasa sent the papal court a letter that angered Henry VIII at the time and later pleased him. In summary, it said: if our Holy Father cares for the peace of our country, he will please us by confirming the position of his legate; following the pope's wishes, we shall then undertake to reform the Church and religion; but if his holiness, ignoring the dignity and peace of our subjects, backs the criminal band of Archbishop Trolle, we shall send his legate back to Rome and, by the authority our crown gives us, take the government of the Church into our own hands.
Adrian's death, and the fights of Pope Clement VII with Luther, Charles V and Francis I, let Vasa reform the Swedish Church without interference. He made Olaus Petri pastor of St. Nicholas' church in Stockholm; gave the chair of theology at Uppsala to Olaus's brother Laurentius Petri; and appointed another Swedish reformer, Laurentius Andreae, as archdeacon of the capital's cathedral. At an assembly held under the king's chairmanship in Stockholm cathedral, Olaus Petri argued for Luther's ideas against Peter Galle (27 December 1524). The king declared Olaus the winner, and he was not surprised when Olaus married in 1525, four months before Luther. Bishop Brask, angered at the breach of clerical celibacy, asked the king to excommunicate Petri. Gustav replied that Olaus deserved reproof if he had done wrong, but that it was strange to count marriage, which God allows, as sin, and that one should not excommunicate anyone even for immorality and other forbidden sins. Instead of excommunicating Petri, the king set him and his brother to translate the Bible into Swedish. In Sweden, as elsewhere, translating the Bible into the local language advanced and spread the language and transformed the national religion.
The Diet of Västerås, 1527
Like most rulers, Gustav thought anything useful to the country or to his own rule justified. He therefore gave bishoprics to bishops who agreed with his aims and confiscated monastery lands, and because he had to give part of these lands to nobles, he pretended he was returning to their rightful owners what the Church had taken from them by leading them astray. Pope Clement VII was distressed that Swedish clergy were marrying, giving the people both bread and wine at the Lord's Supper, had forgotten extreme unction and had changed the Mass, and he asked the king to stay faithful to the Roman Catholic Church. But Gustav had gone too far to turn back, and a return to the old faith would have wrecked his treasury. So he called the Diet of Västerås (1527) and declared his full support for religious reform.
The Diet was a historic assembly in its makeup and results. It brought together four bishops, four canons, fifteen members of Parliament, a hundred and twenty-nine nobles, thirty-two townsmen, fourteen representatives of the miners and a hundred and four representatives of the peasants, which made it one of the most complete assemblies of the sixteenth century. The king's chancellor put a revolutionary proposal to the Diet, saying the state was so short of funds that it could not go on even if it handed over most of its own property to the government. Bishop Hans Brask, who pressed his views to the last moment, declared that the pope had ordered the clergy to protect Church property. The Diet endorsed the pope's view. Gustav, who had staked everything, announced that if that was the view of the Diet and the nation he would abdicate and leave Sweden. After three days of debate the townsmen and peasants supported the king, and the nobles, who had their eyes on Church property, joined them. The Diet, realizing that Vasa was dearer to Sweden than any pope, finally accepted his proposal.
The Diet decreed that all monasteries become the king's fiefs, though the monks might go on using them; that all endowments given to the Church by the nobles since 1454 be returned to their heirs; that the bishops hand their palaces to the king; that no bishop be appointed by the pope; that the clergy give the state all revenue not needed for worship; that spoken confession of sins be abandoned; and that priests preach only from the Bible. More than anywhere else, the Reformation in Sweden made religion national and set the state above the Church.
The Father of Modern Sweden
For thirty-three years (the book later says thirty-seven) Vasa wrestled with Sweden's disordered and critical state, and to the end of his life he ruled the country with power, but with good intent. He saw that only a strong, centralized government could put Sweden in order and bring it success, and to achieve this he could not stop at every step to seek the advice of a consultative body. Under his encouragement and leadership iron mining in the northern ore fields expanded; industry flourished; trade treaties with England, France, Denmark and Russia opened new markets for Swedish goods; foreign products flowed into Sweden; and he breathed new life into a civilization that the simplicity of unlettered peasants had stunted before Vasa. Sweden had never known such prosperity.
Gustav fought several wars, crushed four rebellions and married three times in turn. His first wife bore Eric XIV, who succeeded his father; his second bore five sons and five daughters; and his third, who married the fifty-six-year-old king at sixteen, outlived Vasa by sixty years. Gustav had Parliament recognize his sons as heirs to the Swedish throne and restrict inheritance of the crown to males. Sweden endured his despotism because it saw that order and calm are the beginning of freedom. Vasa ruled Sweden for thirty-seven years, and after his death (29 September 1560) he was buried with great ceremony in Uppsala cathedral. He took away the individual freedom the Swedes deserved. But he freed his nation from religious and political domination by foreigners and created a situation under which the Swedish nation made striking progress in economy, letters and art. He was rightly the father of modern Sweden.