The Charm of Scandinavia

by Francis E. Clark; Sydney Clark

The Royal Palace, Stockholm.

But Charles XI never lived to see the plans carried out. He died after the work had been well begun, and when the scaffoldings surrounded the palace on every side. The work of reconstruction was of course interrupted while the king’s body was lying in state, but just before the funeral procession moved out of the palace a fire broke out, and the whole edifice was destroyed, save the great walls, which are standing to this day. With extreme difficulty the king’s body was saved and carried into the royal stables, where his grandson, a lad fifteen years of age, who was destined to become Charles XII, one of the most famous kings of Sweden, had taken refuge.

A picture in the National Museum makes the scene live over again: the old queen, frightened by the double catastrophe; the boy king, helping his frightened grandmother down the steps, while the tongues of fire leap out at them from behind; the courtiers in hot haste carrying the coffin of the old king, while the little princesses look on with childish interest, scarcely realizing the gravity of the situation.

Again the great architect had to go to work on his task, so sadly interrupted. For thirty years it was pursued, during the days of Sweden’s greatest poverty, and only in 1754, nearly sixty years after Tessin began his work of rebuilding, was it completed, and nearly thirty years after the death of the master builder.

The palace has at least the merit of commodiousness, for we are told that “when King Oscar celebrated his Jubilee in 1897, all his guests, including more than twenty princes and half as many princesses, belonging to all the thrones of Europe, were lodged there with their numerous suites.”

But your republican soul, Judicia, will be more interested in some of the other buildings of Stockholm, perhaps even in the hideous excrescence which towers up above the roofs of the houses, and which shows us where the telephone exchange is situated, to which ten thousand wires, more or less (I did not count them), converge. I should think, however, that it would require at least ten thousand wires to satisfy the rapacious demands of the Stockholmers for telephone service. Every hotel room, even in the modest hostelries, has one, and most of them have two telephones, a city telephone and a long-distance one.

In every little park and open space are two telephone booths, for long and short distances. Stockholm, with a population about the twentieth part of greater London, has nearly twice as many telephones as the British metropolis, and the service is always prompt, cheap, and obliging.

Then there is the great Lift, a conspicuous feature of Old Stockholm, which hoists passengers in a jiffy from the level of the Baltic to the heights of the old town. That, too, would interest you, Judicia, for I remember your strenuous objections to hill-climbing.

To turn from structures, useful but hideous, to one more beautiful, and, shall I say, less useful? there is the Riksdag, a modern building of very handsome and generous proportions, where the law-makers of Sweden assemble, and where, I suppose, rival parties fire hot shot at one another as freely as they do in Washington or London. Every year the Swedish parliament meets in the middle of January and closes its sessions on the fifteenth of May, and this is the one place which the king may not enter, as one of the guardians of the Riksdag proudly informed me. Both houses of Parliament go to him, but he may not return to them. At the opening of Parliament, the legislators assemble in the palace, where the king addresses them, and the medieval ceremony connected with this function is worth telling you about.

After prayers and a special sermon in the cathedral relating to the duties of legislation (a religious custom that reminds us of the old Election Day Sermon of the good State of Massachusetts, a custom now unhappily abolished), the members of the upper and lower houses march into a great hall in the palace, the speakers of the two houses leading the way, and take their seats on either side of the throne. This throne is of solid silver, on a raised platform, and on either side of it are seats for the princes and members of the royal family. The queen and princesses sit in the gallery, surrounded by members of the court. “All sorts and conditions of men are represented—bishops and country clergymen, provincial governors and landed noblemen, freehold peasants, rural schoolmasters, university dons, and industrial kings.”