It is rather misleading to call this comparatively humble shrine the Westminster Abbey of the land that holds the Cathedral of Upsala and so many other glorious fanes. Instead of one of the grandest minsters on the earth, echoing several times a day with Christian praise, it is a somewhat commonplace church whose silence is broken only by the chatter of tourists, save on the anniversary of some hero's death or when another monarch has entered upon his last sleep. Nevertheless there is a deep and haunting interest in this last earthly resting-place of so many who have helped to shape the world.
Close to this church is a fine statue by Fogelberg to Birger Jarl.
The Storkyrka, or great church of St. Nicholas, has been Classicised without. It is better so, for with the great palace forcing Classic standards on the city, Gothic must look out of place, however much better its general lines would have suited the untamed site and the ancient traditions of Stockholm. Pastor here 1543-52 was the famous Olavus Petri[125] who, with his brother, Laurentius, Archbishop of Upsala, did much to shape the Swedish Reformation. Messenius' Rhyme-Chronicle tells us:
On Master Olof's wedding day
Our Lutherdom had made such way
That mass in Swedish first was sung.
So all men followed their own tongue.
For so had Master Olof seen
How things at Wittenberg had been;
There first at Carlstadt's marriage feast
Was German mass sung by a priest.
Chancellor of the kingdom he had been in earlier days (1532), but so much of an idealist was Olof that he desired public penance to be exacted from all who complained of the weather! This did not suit the sternly practical king, Gustaf Vasa, who dismissed him with the observation that he was as fit to be chancellor as an ass to play the lute, or a kicking cow to spin silk.
In the Storkyrka[126] had been crowned in 1520 the last sovereign of united Scandinavia, Christian II., a Dane of the Oldenburg line. Not by any means a bad king on the whole (p. [143]), he had nevertheless by some inscrutable mental process got it into his head that the destruction of the leading men of Sweden would benefit that country and help to consolidate his own power. So during the very festivities that followed the coronation, no other specific charge being handy, he availed himself of the one complaint that can never fail, and on a trumped-up charge connected with religion, he caused many of the nobles and most honoured men of Sweden to be executed in the market-place of the capital. But the effect of the fatal Blood Bath of Stockholm, on November 8, 1520, was far other than the monarch planned. A deliverer for the wronged nation rose up in the son of one of those who perished.
An outlaw fugitive, Gustaf Vasa had several very narrow escapes from the machinations of Danish spies, but the peasants of Dalekarlia were sufficiently sympathetic to shield him, though at the risk of their lives. They had no very particular grievances and merely desired to live in peace; to his first patriotic harangue they listened in irritating silence. So, sick at heart and weary of body, the hero was plodding through the snow to seek a secure retreat for himself among the remote mountains of Norway. He heard himself hotly followed, but, looking round, was joyed to see not pursuing Danes, but penitent dalesmen. They had heard of the Blood Bath and of many other acts of cruelty and had come to agree with Gustaf. They now asked no more than to be led against the forces of the tyrant king. "For our country we will fight like men," they cried. "Come back, Gustaf, and be our chief."
And with them he returned to found one of the most brilliant lines of sovereigns that Europe ever knew. The Danes could make little stand before the enthusiastic fury of the rising Swedes; one of their own leaders declared that the devil himself could not subdue a people who lived by drinking water and eating bread baked from the bark of trees, and in 1523 Gustaf entered Stockholm as king, and knelt in thanksgiving before the same altar that had witnessed the coronation of the tyrant only three years before. His spirit broods over the city to-day, before the Hall of Knights and in the Northern Museum his colossal statue stands.
But it was to a capital in ruin that he came, and only three hundred families were camping amidst its broken walls. So serious did conditions seem to the new king that he ordered every other town in Sweden to pay Stockholm a tax of ten stout burghers, compensation to be sought from neighbouring farms. The natural forces of these town-extending times have, in Sweden as elsewhere, made such legislation more than superfluous to-day. Though on the very edge of the forest modern Stockholm is in some districts over-crowded, underhoused.