Time for my chapter, then!
From
"The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Empire", (1997, Caroline University Press, Karlskrona).
On January 12th 1712, a one-eyed German nobleman stepped off a frigate in the old capital of Stockholm. His name was Georg Heinrich von Görtz, and he had come to the newly founded capital of Charles XI in the capacity of Minister to the Swedish court for the small Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp, ruled by Swedish king's son-in-law, Frederick IV [1]. Though he didn't have a drop of Swedish blood in his veins, and though he spoke the Swedish language with a very distinct accent, in less than a decade, he was to rise to become the second most powerful man in the realm.
Like so many great men and women in history, Görtz' rise would come about from the curious advantage of being an outsider at a time when an establishment was suffering a great crisis. Charles XI manifold wars, in particular the recent Great Baltic War that had been fought to grant the Polish crown to the Swedish king's candidate Stanisław I Leszczyński, had left the realm in terrible financial peril, and none of Charles XI:s advisers seemed capable of prescribing the right medicine needed to cure Sweden of her maladies. Görtz, having received his education in and served in a court on what the Swedes ignorantly referred to as "the Continent" [2], was thus presented with the opportunity to bring in a fresh point-of-view.
To acquire liquid funds, the Holsteiner minister begun by proposing that the Crown were to issue government bonds, a novel scheme for raising money that had only recently been invented by the Bank of England [3] and which thitherto had remained untried in Sweden. The maturity was set at four years with an interest at six percent, the security guaranteed in "Sweden's Realm's Subjects and Settler's movable and immovable property", and a new tax was to be introduced, the
procurement fee, to finance the repayments. Anticipating that the yet war-torn Sweden to a large extent would be lacking in investors willing to take the risks associated with these novelities, Görtz stressed the need for the Crown to look for the bulk of the buyers overseas, mainly in the Great Britain, France and the Dutch Republic.
While this started to bring in more cash for the Crown, Charles XI soon concluded that the inflow wasn't sufficient to help fund the constructing of his new capital as fast as he desired, and so, coercive measures were soon introduced to get the bonds into domestic circulation as well. Poorhouses, schools and churches were ordered to hand in their liquid funds to the Crown in exchange for government bonds, and mines were forced to purchase bonds for considerable amounts if they wished to maintain their minting privileges. [4]
However, the scheme for raising money that Görtz is probably best remembered for is his (in)famous emergency coins. Though despised at the time, many economists in the 20th century have praised Görtz for his ingenuity, calling it centuries ahead of its time. In order to pay the Crown's massive debts, a policy of minting new coins whose nominal value was larger than their actual value as metal was introduced. This was considered very dangerous at the time, and Görtz was well aware of the risks associated with the policy. Sweden wasn't a stranger to the perils of inflation: Stockholms Banco had in 1661 become the first European central bank to print banknotes, and had in 1664 also become the first European central bank to collapse due to printing too many banknotes. Nonetheless, the king allowed himself to become persuaded, and followed the Holsteiner's advice.
The effects of this advice was to prove tremendously fruitful for the Crown, and when Charles XI called the first Riksdag to Karlskrona in 1715, Georg Heinrich von Görtz was in the possession of great political capital. Nonetheless, the person with the greatest political support was of course the King himself. The realm was at peace with all its neighbours, larger than it had ever been, and beginning to recover from the effects of almost a century of costly wars of conquest. Charles XI had managed to obtain the
blanc cheque of royal absolutism
de facto at the Riksdag of 1682, but it had never formally been codified into law. The King's great objective for this new Riksdag was to update the Constitution of 1634 to this effect.
Behind the scenes, Charles XI relied almost completely on the advice of Görtz who was to become the unofficial author of the new constitutional framework. The last legal fictions affirming the Riksdag as a rubber stamp assembly were now officially removed, rendering the Riksdag to merely act as advisers to the king without any formal powers at all. It was decreed that the Riksdag was to assemble and give advice on the monarch's request, and
only on the monarch's request, that any other attempt at a national meeting was to be considered rebellious and that all formal powers that has formerly been granted to the Riksdag was now transferred to a new body known as the
Procurement Committee (Upphandlingsutskottet), whose members were all to be appointed by the King.
The institution of the Procurement Committee can be seen as the pinnacle of the governmental reforms that had taken place during the last decades. As early as 1680, Charles XI had in a move to prevent the centralization of power around a single government minister abolished the office of Realm Chancellor that had existed since Medieval times. By the constitution of 1715, the King was automatically made President of the Procurement Committee, and he was to execute the powers of this office vigorously throughout the rest of his reign. However, the means for the eventual centralization of power around a government minister (which some Evolutionary Historians [5] consider inevitable) were at the same time laid down in the constitution in the office of Realm Secretary (
Rikssekreterare), which functioned as second-in-command in the Procurement Committee. The inaugural holder of the office would of course be the most trusted Baron von Görtz.
At the same time, the Realm Council (
Riksrådet) which up to that point had functioned as the "cabinet" of government would in effect be abolished in a devious way. The Constitution of 1715 merely added a novel clause that said that it was up to his Majesty's pleasure to decide the number of Realm Councillors the kingdom was to have. Having been granted this power, Charles XI conveniently decided that for his purposes, zero seemed a reasonable number. [6]
Though a modern reader might learn of these events with revulsion, it is worth to note that at the time, the only people to protest were members of the nobility. Traditionally, Swedish history had been marked by informal political alliances between the King and the peasantry against the nobility, and since the Riksdag of the Estates had historically been dominated by the nobility, most people in the lower classes greeted the news of their feudal overlords' having been made politically irrelevant with celebration.
On November 11, 1715, Charles XI dissolved the Riksdag. It was to be the final Riksdag of his reign, and the last Riksdag that Sweden were to see for many decades to come...
[1] In OTL, Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp died in battle in 1702 fighting in the wars of Charles XII. Seeing Charles XI didn't die in cancer in TTL, there was no need for the Holsteiner duke to die a soldier's premature death at the age of thirty, and so he's still alive here.
[2] They still do this in OTL for some reason. Strange, seeing the Scandinavian peninsula by any reasonable definition is part of the Eurasian continent.
[3] In 1693, to fund the War of the Grand Alliance, to be specific.
[4] Pretty much all of this happened in OTL as well, only that there was still a war raging at the time, making it very difficult for Görtz to have the liberty to look for many investors overseas.
[5] Evolutionary History appear to be this timeline's terminology for what we would call historicism, the notion that the development of history inevitably moves towards a particular end. See for example Whig historiography which holds that society will inevitably evolve towards liberal democracy or Marxian historiography which holds that society will inevitably evolve towards a socialist society following a violent revolution.
[6] If you think this seems comically absurd and implausible, do note that Gustav III of Sweden in OTL managed to abolish the Realm Council
in exactly the same way in the late 18th century, working against a far more antagonistic and powerful Riksdag.