During the first years after the coup d’état general satisfaction seemed to prevail throughout the country; the common people felt relieved of many unnecessary burdens, while the nobility, who had been so utterly routed, kept silent in the consciousness of their weakness. Many measures of reform, calculated to promote the national prosperity, were initiated by the personal agency of the King. The currency, which was in a deplorable condition, was put on a sounder basis; many benevolent institutions—hospitals, orphan asylums, poor-houses, etc.—were established; the public highways were improved; large canals connecting with the seacoast the mines of the kingdom (which were among its most important industries) were constructed; trade and industry were assisted according to the prevailing theories of those times; free trade, both at home and with foreign countries, was established; privileges and franchises which oppressed the people at large for the benefit of the few were abolished; both the criminal and the civil code of laws were revised and improved; strict impartiality in the application of laws and in the punishment of criminals was insisted upon; the torture, which up to that time had played an important part in criminal trials, was done away with, and a more humane treatment of convicts was introduced in prisons and penitentiaries. Gustavus was in this respect a disciple of Montesquieu and Beccaria. His great ambition was also to renew the ties of friendship and brotherhood between Finland and Sweden, and in order to do so, he personally visited Finland, and established there a number of valuable reforms which are gratefully remembered by that unfortunate country to the present day.
But highly commendable and worthy of admiration as the young King’s action was in these and many other respects, the defects of his character soon appeared, and gave his enemies an opportunity to undermine his work and his popularity. He lacked steadiness and firmness of purpose. He wanted to see and enjoy immediately the beneficent results of his reforms. Many of them were therefore abandoned before they had had time for full development; many very costly undertakings were discontinued because the King had either changed his mind or was tired of waiting. And then, he was extravagant in his personal expenses and in arranging grand court entertainments fashioned on the brilliant festivities of the French court at Versailles, which remained his model in all matters of court etiquette and royal display. Like Frederick the Great, to whom Gustavus the Third bears in many respects a striking resemblance, although he lacked the great Prussian’s military genius and wise frugality, he was fond of French literature and art, and made strenuous efforts to give them a supreme place in the educational institutions of the kingdom. The national genius of the Swedish people and language were consequently relegated to a secondary place. To make up for the unpopularity and protests which these efforts caused among the people, he devised a national costume for all the inhabitants; but in this attempt he failed entirely. The costume he had devised was copied from an ancient Spanish one, and utterly unsuitable for a northern country of short summers and severe winters. The King’s ordinances introducing these Spanish garments were openly disobeyed and laughed at. People began to look on him as a dreamer, and lost their respect for him.
But that which more than anything else hurt his popularity was the way in which he treated the liquor question. The mass of the Swedish people were strongly addicted to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors. The vice had assumed such proportions that measures of reform were urgently called for. But, with the usual impracticability of temperance reformers, Gustavus managed the matter so unskilfully that, instead of correcting the abuse, he made himself highly unpopular and aroused the most stubborn resistance to his reform policy. He had issued an edict prohibiting the manufacture and use of distilled liquors, but he found it impossible to enforce the edict: the peasants and farmers, who had been distilling their own whiskey, simply ignored it, while in a number of cities where distilleries were maintained for the manufacture and sale of the liquor, regular battles were fought between the police trying to suppress them, and the inhabitants enraged at the attempt to close them. Gustavus then repealed the edict and introduced a new system, which he hoped would at once diminish the vice of drunkenness and replenish his treasury, which was in a chronic state of exhaustion. He made the right of manufacturing and selling alcoholic liquors a crown monopoly, and established agencies for the sale of these liquors in all large and small cities and towns of the kingdom. But the peasants were not satisfied with this arrangement either. The whiskey they were to buy at the agencies was much dearer than their own home-distilled beverage; moreover, the towns and cities, at that time only thinly scattered over Sweden, were often so remote from the farms, and the roads leading to them were often in such an impassable condition that the purchase of whiskey was a difficult matter for the rural population. The clandestine and illicit manufacture of the beverage was carried on therefore as it had been before. But the very name of the King became odious to the people. They contemptuously called him “a crank, a visionary and a poet.” Writing poetry, in which Gustavus excelled, was in their eyes a symptom of folly and madness.
The hostility of the nobles and their rebellious spirit, which had been overawed and silenced for some years by the great personal popularity of the King, reappeared and gained ground with the disaffection of the people, and especially of the rural population. For a King like Gustavus the Third, ambitious and high-spirited, military glory had a tempting attraction, and he had commenced soon after his successful coup d’état to prepare for winning it. The army was in a really deplorable condition at the time of his accession to the throne, being entirely without artillery and deficient in equipment. Gustavus lost no time in remedying these defects. He modelled the Swedish army after the Prussian army as reorganized by Frederick the Great, which was then considered the finest and best equipped in Europe, and within two years he had made it, with its splendid personnel and its modern material, a formidable machine of war, which, under the leadership of a military genius, might have renewed the great days of Gustavus Adolphus or Charles the Twelfth. But it was the ambition of Gustavus the Third to command the army himself, and he was not a military genius. He declared war upon Russia, with the intention of recovering the lost provinces of Finland, and proceeded to Finland himself in order to take command of the invading army.
It was there that the first misfortune overtook him. After a few engagements,—rather skirmishes than battles,—in which the Swedes were victorious, the King decided to invest or take by assault the small fortress of Frederickshamm. It would have been better for him if he had marched directly upon Petersburg, which was not in a condition to resist an immediate attack of a superior army. If he had done so, very likely the Esths, first cousins of the Finns, and anxious to shake off the yoke of Russia, would have joined him and would have placed him in possession of the Russian borderland; but Gustavus frittered away the time and by his inactivity enabled the commanders of his own regiments (generally appointed from the ranks of the high nobility) to organize a conspiracy against him and virtually drive him from the field. Very likely bribed with Russian gold, they jointly issued a manifesto that Gustavus had violated the constitution of Sweden by declaring war upon Russia without the consent of the Reichsrath, and they were therefore not bound to obey him in this criminal undertaking. They also used their influence on the other officers and on the soldiers of their regiments, and made them rebellious against the King’s commands. In vain Gustavus implored them not to abandon him and the cause of their country; but they were deaf to his prayers and to his threats, and he left the army as a humiliated and disgraced commander.
Upon his return to Stockholm, he made a journey through Dalecarlia, the province in which his ancestor Gustavus Vasa had found the followers who raised him to the throne; he used his extraordinary eloquence so successfully that the people again rallied round him. They swore to stand by him in his struggle against Russia, and not to lay down arms until a peace honorable to Sweden could be secured. Gustavus then convened the Reichstag for the twenty-sixth of January, 1789, in order to get authority to continue the war and restore his kingly prerogatives, which by the revolt of the army had been so signally impaired. The nobility at last openly threw off the mask; but they were overpowered by the three other estates, who would rather strengthen the King’s authority than return to their former condition of bondage under the régime of a corrupt and arrogant nobility. The Reichstag therefore fully sustained the King’s action, taking the view that the offensive war against Russia was really a war of defence.
Sufficient appropriations were made to carry on the war to a successful end, and thirty prominent members of the nobility were indicted for treason and lèse majesté, and punished severely. At the same time an important revision of the constitution was made in the interest of the King, and, in spite of the violent protests of the nobility, his prerogatives were largely extended. The Reichsrath was entirely abolished, and the King authorized to declare war on other countries whenever war was deemed advisable to protect the interests of the country. He also obtained the absolute right to appoint all military and civil officers, while formerly many of these appointments had to be confirmed by the Reichsrath. After having thus secured the rights of the crown at home, Gustavus departed again for the seat of war, with new regiments and new commanders. Russia had also strengthened herself, and what might at first have been an easy undertaking, and might have led to a brilliant success, was now a very serious one, and one of very uncertain chances of success. It soon became evident that the results of the war would depend on the naval supremacy of either of the two powers, and all efforts were therefore directed on both sides toward strengthening their navies.
Several big naval battles were fought, and in all of them the King, who personally commanded his fleet, performed wonders of valor. The last of these battles was that of Swenskasund on the ninth of July, 1790; and the King, who fought with the bravery of despair because the fleet of the Russians was considerably superior in numbers to his own, won a brilliant victory. No less than fifty-nine Russian warships, carrying altogether six hundred and forty-three guns, fell into the hands of the Swedes. But even more than this great material success was the prestige which Gustavus derived from the victory. He was tired of the war, and he could now as a victorious hero offer terms of peace, honorable and advantageous to his country, instead of humbly accepting terms from Russia. On the fourteenth of August, 1790, a treaty of peace was concluded by which, while Sweden did not receive any territorial indemnity, she secured rights and trade privileges in the Baltic Sea which Russia until then had denied her. The honors of the war were therefore on Sweden’s side, and the King personally, for his unquestioned heroism, was entitled to a liberal share of them.
On the other hand, the results of the war were disastrous for the country, and the King was by his enemies, the nobility (who were more bitterly opposed to him than ever), held responsible for these disasters. The heavy expenditures for the war had necessitated extraordinary tax levies which were burdensome to the whole people, rich as well as poor, and these could not be abolished immediately on the termination of the war. The brilliant festivities, balls and entertainments, which greeted the King on his return to his capital, could not fully conceal the great distress and poverty of the people; but with that levity which was a conspicuous feature of his character and which gave him such a mental resemblance to Marie Antoinette, whom he greatly admired, he tried to forget in the intoxication of incessant amusements and pleasures the personal privations he had suffered during the war and the sorrows and wants of the nation. That this conduct, which he did not care to conceal from the public eye, irritated the people and filled many of those who had been his admirers with disgust and hatred may easily be imagined. But that by which he gave the greatest blow to his popularity was his active and over-zealous sympathy in the misfortunes of Louis the Sixteenth and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, and his efforts to release them from captivity and save them from death.
Gustavus showed his lack of political sagacity in estranging the very element upon which he had founded his autocratic power,—the great mass of the people. Their devotion had made it possible for him, not only to continue the war against Russia, but also to be more than a mere figure-head in the government of his kingdom. The support of the nobility he had lost beyond redemption. They hated him, and only hoped for opportunities to humiliate him. All efforts on his part to reconcile them failed. His true policy should have been to ingratiate himself still more with the people, relieve their burdens, make the laws and institutions more liberal, and carry out the promise he had made to them, that he wanted to be clothed with supreme power in order to make the nation more happy and the country more prosperous. But his character did not permit him to pursue this policy dictated by common-sense. The French Revolution had broken out, and the misfortunes of the French King and Queen enlisted his profound sympathy. He watched the progress of the revolution with eager interest, and when it became apparent that Louis could not master it, he formed the adventurous and fantastic plan of placing himself at the head of a large army, composed of contingents of all the European powers, and restoring absolute monarchy in France, as he had restored absolute monarchy in Sweden. In order to realize that dream which corresponded so well to his visionary, chivalrous, poetical temperament, he opened negotiations with Russia, Prussia, Austria, and especially with the French émigrés. These men had assembled in Germany and other countries waiting for an opportunity to return to France under the standards of some friendly power coming to the rescue of Louis the Sixteenth and monarchical institutions. Gustavus had tried his best to assist the French King in his flight from Paris. It was a Swedish carriage, with Swedish attendants, which was to convey Louis the Sixteenth and the royal family beyond the borders of France, and which was so abruptly stopped at Varennes. After this attempt at flight had failed, Gustavus saw no other means of saving the monarchy—not only in France, but throughout Europe—than by making war upon the Jacobins, stamping out the Revolution in the blood of its adherents, and seating Louis the Sixteenth in the full glory of absolutism once more on the throne. The execution of this plan, he imagined, would immortalize him, and would make him in effect the dictator of Europe.