The Queen's Lover by Francine Du Plessix Gray Page A

throughout Europe as he hired dozens of foreign and native architects to make Stockholm into an eminent cultural center. He built Stockholm’s first opera house and a score of new theaters throughout the capital; founded the Royal Ballet and the Royal Dramatic Theater, where some of his own plays were performed; and established the Swedish Academy. In 1772 he created a highly progressive constitution that forbade him from declaring war without the consent of the Riksdag. And in time he worked toward social reform as few Enlightenment rulers would. He abolished torture, annulled the deathpenalty for many crimes, offered far greater religious liberty to Catholics and Jews, and proclaimed a limited freedom of the press that was equaled, at that time, only by Great Britain’s. He was also a keen supporter of the American side in the 1776 War of Independence, writing about that conflict in the passage that follows:
    “This might well be America’s century. The new republic…may perhaps take advantage of Europe someday, in the same manner as Europe has taken advantage of America for two centuries. I can not but admire their courage and enthusiastically appreciate their daring.”
    On the military level of his own nation, one should note that it was Gustavus III who built up the Swedish fleet and made it into one of the three great naval forces in Europe, alongside France’s and Great Britain’s. It is all these political and cultural achievements that led his reign to be referred to as “the Gustavian age” and caused the arts he promoted to be known as “the Gustavian style.”
    But Gustavus had to struggle mightily with his parliament, the Riksdag, a combat that would have great consequences for the rest of his reign. I must explain that our parliament is not a liberal force, as it is in most other countries. On the contrary. Our Riksdag is composed of four estates—the aristocracy, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasantry. And the nobility then comprised a group of conservative nobles who much resented Gustavus’s liberal measures, and his foreign policy. The king was singularly apprehensive of the power and ambition of Catherine the Great of Russia. She would happily have gobbled up Sweden upon the slightest provocation, and was then preparing to invade Turkey, with which Sweden had signed a peace pact nearly half a century earlier. In the 1780s, Sweden’s principal ally was France, which was so weakened by its impending revolution that it could not possibly help Gustavus in any of his military ventures. Riding roughshod over his own constitution by not consulting the Riksdag, Gustavus engaged his navy in a naval battle with Russia in which both sides lost their mostimportant ships, but which essentially favored Russia. Gustavus realized that the Russian capital, Saint Petersburg, could only be attacked by land. But he was prevented from engaging in any substantial conflict by a massive mutiny of Swedish officers, who refused to do battle because the king had not consulted the Riksdag concerning his naval engagement with Russia.
    Although he had far more support from them than from the nobility, the lower estates also presented Gustavus with difficulties. The peasants resented him for having taken away their right to distill their own liquor; the Lutheran clergy was distressed by his policy of religious tolerance. After numerous confrontations with the Riksdag, in the summer of 1772, a few months after acceding to the throne, Gustavus staged a canny coup d’état against the estates that much strengthened the power of the Crown. On an August evening all the officers whom he thought he could trust received secret instructions to assemble the following morning in the great square facing the arsenal. The following day at noon, he met with his escort of several hundred high-ranking officers and addressed them thus: “If you follow me, just like your ancestors followed Gustavus Adolphus, then I will risk my life and