Nobody expected Arthur to ever become monarch of Sweden, certainly not Scandinavia. His name if anything testify to that. The third son of Gustav IV and II Adolf of Sweden, Arthur was born when his father was yet only Grand Prince of Finland. Though by all accounts a highly inept warrior, Prince Gustav Adolf idolized his namesake, Gustav II Adolf, and so after much pleading and begging with his father, he was finally allowed to travel south and fight in the Napoleonic Wars during the latter stages of the grand conflict. Though never really in danger, Grand Prince Gustav Adolf got to meet with many of the great generals and commanders in the war, and took a particular liking to the Anglo-Irish general Arthur Wellesley. Having named his second son Charles Frederick after two of his heros (the Swedish King Chalres XII and the Prussian King Frederick II), Gustav Adolf named his third son Arthur in Wellesley's honour. Seeing he was never expected to become king, Arthur could be given a name outside the general template of Swedish kingly names (which usually tended to be either Charles or Gustav). In celebration of the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Arthur was given the dukedom of the recently liberated province of Scania.
Growing up, Arthur was a timid and sickly boy. He lacked his oldest brother Gustav's talent for military and political affairs, as well as much interest in the matter. While his second oldest brother Charles Frederick quickly learned to appreciate the glamour and prestige of being a son of a European monarch, especially when it was uncoupled from the burden of responsibility of being the heir to the throne, by taking to alcohol, gambling and debauchery, Arthur had no such interests, instead preferring to spend his time with the arts (an interest he kept up with, throughout his life indulging in amateur painting).
But unfortunately things changed. Gustav died in battle in the War of the Long Winter in 1831, and Charles Frederick was killed in a duel on a field outside of Vienna in 1834, and so, as the only remaining son of King Gustav IV and II Adolf of Sweden and Norway, he became the heir to a realm that was making a surprising recovery from a century of ignobility and humiliation. The Swedish government under the direction of Chancery President Magnus Björnstjerna immediately put at the top of its agenda the task of finding the 19-year old Arthur a suitable wife. Sweden had in the past two centuries found its succession run out of heirs two times, and they were weary of the prospects of importing a foreign king again. After intense negotiations with the Danish government, it was finally decided that Prince Arthur was to marry his second cousin Frederica, the eldest daughter of King Christian VIII of Denmark. This marriage would turn out to be quite popular in both Sweden and Denmark, and provided a boost to the already growing pan-Scandinavian sentiment in the Age of Remembrance.
Arthur's father, the King, was already by now a very depressed man, isolating himself in Drottningholm Palace and taking less and less interest in the politics of his realm. When Arthur reached the age of 21 in 1836, Gustav VI and II Adolf attempted to abdicate the throne, but his ministers and his wife managed to dissuade him, arguing that it would send a message of weakness to foreign powers, as well as worry the general population. A compromise was eventually reached, however, whereby the King was permitted to transfer much of his formal powers to his son who was given the title of Regent, and heading a Regency Council.
The next couple of years would turn out to be quite eventful to young Arthur, who had to be given a quick and intense education into the subjects a King of Sweden had to master. He travelled widely across his realm, inspecting iron road and canal constructions. In 1844, his father died, and he succeeded to the throne.
Though generally disinterested in politics, it is generally agreed that Arthur basically possessed liberal sensibilities, preferring the dovish Caps over the hawkish Hats. Unfortunately to him, therefore, just a three years after his taking the throne the Hats won a landslide victory in 1847, returning to power after having been in the wilderness for 15 years. In the Expedition for Foreign Affairs at the College of the Chancery the Hat leadership placed a man as Minister of State who would turn out to be the most enthusiastically warmongering Hat that party had ever produced: Henrik Johan Palmstierna. Within a few years, the death of the Chancery President handed this man the premiership of Sweden and Norway.
Arthur did not like Palmstierna at all, but he could hardly dismiss the popular leader of the Hats. An irony therefore that Palmstierna, by unilaterally invading Prussia to aid the Danes during the Schleswig-Holstein War against the King's wishes, probably did more than anyone else to warm the Danes to the idea of doing away with Salic Law and make Frederica heir to the Danish throne, a move that would eventually culminate in Nordic Reunification.
In 1862, Arthur was given the honour to host the Kalmar Conference, the brainchild of the Danish Conseil President Nicolas Andersen, in which Nordic Reunification was formally established. After several constitutional conventions in the same city, in 1867, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were finally merged into the federal constitutional monarchy of the Nordic Empire, and he and his wife were declared kejsare och kejsarinna över Norden, commonly translated Emperor and Empress Across the North. The choice to make Arthur Emperor rather than King had an interesting semantic-constitutional reason.
It was generally decided upon that seeing that Denmark and Sweden had to be seen as equal in dignity, it would be impossible to make Arthur the monarch of the new realm and not Frederica, and vice versa. However, having Arthur and Frederica be King and Queen-Regent was neither an option. A law issued by King Magnus (IV) Eriksson in the 14th century known as Konungabalken decreed that Sweden may not have more than a single king at once. Though this law had come about in a time when it was not unusual for Sweden to have rival kings fighting for power to clarify that only one of them could be considered the true and legitimate king, it had in the early 18th century been cited by Ribbing and Horn to prevent Ulrika Eleonora from making her husband her Co-Monarch as William and Mary had been in England. Establishing by precedent that a Queen-Regent was a King as far as Swedish law was concerned, a co-monarchy seemed a constitutional impossibility.[1]
However, the Hats pointed out at the Kalmar Constitutional Convention, the law only specified that Sweden may not have more than one King at the same time. The law did not say anything about how many Emperors that Sweden may have at the same time. Satisfied with this, Kejsardömet Norden was born.[2]
Arthur would live for another 13 years, ruling with his wife over the new nation. Unfortunately, his poor constitution would eventually get the better of him. Visiting Narvik with other members of the Imperial Family in early 1881, he got sick in pneumonia and died in Jukkasjärvi on the 15th of January.
His final (and some would say, most lasting) contribution to his country was his approval of a minor departmental reform in the Nordic government. Since the 17th century, civil administration in Sweden had been divided not among departments under a single central government, but had been divided among Royal Colleges (kungliga kollegii) which theoretically speaking were independent from one another.[3] During the early 18th century, Michael Fleetwood, during his time as President of the College of Mountains had founded the Expedition for Iron Roads and Engineering Arts to help aid technological development in the mining industry, and about at the same time Bror Cederström at the College of War had founded the Expedition for Explosives. Over time, the Expedition for Iron Roads and Engineering Arts had been partitioned into the Expedition for Iron Roads and the Expedition for Engineering Arts. Thanks to the premiership of Palmstierna, these expeditions had received a significant boost in funding, fundings that had continued to increase up to and beyond Nordic Reunification and these royal colleges becoming imperial ones. By 1878, the Expedition for Engineering Arts and the Expedition for Explosives were taking up significant fractions of both the College of War's and the College of Mountain's and arguments were raised that these expeditions be merged, seeing there was increasing overlaps between their functions. This would be not in the form of an Expedition headed by a Secretary of State answering under a Minister of State at a particular one of the empire's colleges, but rather that it be made a new college of its own, with the same control of its funding and directorship that other colleges had. In November of 1880, Arthur approved of the merger, thereby creating the world's first true Ministry for Science. And so it was that in May of 1881, the Nordic Empire could finally unveil its most recent ministry, one with the official name of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. The ICST would in the next three decades come to play an immense role in Nordic history...
[1] This is OTL. In fact, Ulrika Eleonora wasn't crowned Queen but King of Sweden, despite her gender, just to hammer home this point. As far as I have been able to determine, this particular provision of Konungabalken has never been overturned by any modern constitution, and so, it would appear, it is still unconstitutional for Sweden to be a co-monarchy.
[2] In this timeline, though English-language works refer to the nation as the "Nordic Empire", in the empire itself, it is known plainly as Norden, rather than kejsardömet Norden or det nordiska imperiet.
[3] This independence of the "departments" was quite a problem in the Age of Liberty, along with the fact that the heads of the "departments" sat for life. In modern parlance, it was like if the "Prime Minister" could not fire his "Finance Minister" or his "Defence Minister".
Growing up, Arthur was a timid and sickly boy. He lacked his oldest brother Gustav's talent for military and political affairs, as well as much interest in the matter. While his second oldest brother Charles Frederick quickly learned to appreciate the glamour and prestige of being a son of a European monarch, especially when it was uncoupled from the burden of responsibility of being the heir to the throne, by taking to alcohol, gambling and debauchery, Arthur had no such interests, instead preferring to spend his time with the arts (an interest he kept up with, throughout his life indulging in amateur painting).
But unfortunately things changed. Gustav died in battle in the War of the Long Winter in 1831, and Charles Frederick was killed in a duel on a field outside of Vienna in 1834, and so, as the only remaining son of King Gustav IV and II Adolf of Sweden and Norway, he became the heir to a realm that was making a surprising recovery from a century of ignobility and humiliation. The Swedish government under the direction of Chancery President Magnus Björnstjerna immediately put at the top of its agenda the task of finding the 19-year old Arthur a suitable wife. Sweden had in the past two centuries found its succession run out of heirs two times, and they were weary of the prospects of importing a foreign king again. After intense negotiations with the Danish government, it was finally decided that Prince Arthur was to marry his second cousin Frederica, the eldest daughter of King Christian VIII of Denmark. This marriage would turn out to be quite popular in both Sweden and Denmark, and provided a boost to the already growing pan-Scandinavian sentiment in the Age of Remembrance.
Arthur's father, the King, was already by now a very depressed man, isolating himself in Drottningholm Palace and taking less and less interest in the politics of his realm. When Arthur reached the age of 21 in 1836, Gustav VI and II Adolf attempted to abdicate the throne, but his ministers and his wife managed to dissuade him, arguing that it would send a message of weakness to foreign powers, as well as worry the general population. A compromise was eventually reached, however, whereby the King was permitted to transfer much of his formal powers to his son who was given the title of Regent, and heading a Regency Council.
The next couple of years would turn out to be quite eventful to young Arthur, who had to be given a quick and intense education into the subjects a King of Sweden had to master. He travelled widely across his realm, inspecting iron road and canal constructions. In 1844, his father died, and he succeeded to the throne.
Though generally disinterested in politics, it is generally agreed that Arthur basically possessed liberal sensibilities, preferring the dovish Caps over the hawkish Hats. Unfortunately to him, therefore, just a three years after his taking the throne the Hats won a landslide victory in 1847, returning to power after having been in the wilderness for 15 years. In the Expedition for Foreign Affairs at the College of the Chancery the Hat leadership placed a man as Minister of State who would turn out to be the most enthusiastically warmongering Hat that party had ever produced: Henrik Johan Palmstierna. Within a few years, the death of the Chancery President handed this man the premiership of Sweden and Norway.
Arthur did not like Palmstierna at all, but he could hardly dismiss the popular leader of the Hats. An irony therefore that Palmstierna, by unilaterally invading Prussia to aid the Danes during the Schleswig-Holstein War against the King's wishes, probably did more than anyone else to warm the Danes to the idea of doing away with Salic Law and make Frederica heir to the Danish throne, a move that would eventually culminate in Nordic Reunification.
In 1862, Arthur was given the honour to host the Kalmar Conference, the brainchild of the Danish Conseil President Nicolas Andersen, in which Nordic Reunification was formally established. After several constitutional conventions in the same city, in 1867, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were finally merged into the federal constitutional monarchy of the Nordic Empire, and he and his wife were declared kejsare och kejsarinna över Norden, commonly translated Emperor and Empress Across the North. The choice to make Arthur Emperor rather than King had an interesting semantic-constitutional reason.
It was generally decided upon that seeing that Denmark and Sweden had to be seen as equal in dignity, it would be impossible to make Arthur the monarch of the new realm and not Frederica, and vice versa. However, having Arthur and Frederica be King and Queen-Regent was neither an option. A law issued by King Magnus (IV) Eriksson in the 14th century known as Konungabalken decreed that Sweden may not have more than a single king at once. Though this law had come about in a time when it was not unusual for Sweden to have rival kings fighting for power to clarify that only one of them could be considered the true and legitimate king, it had in the early 18th century been cited by Ribbing and Horn to prevent Ulrika Eleonora from making her husband her Co-Monarch as William and Mary had been in England. Establishing by precedent that a Queen-Regent was a King as far as Swedish law was concerned, a co-monarchy seemed a constitutional impossibility.[1]
However, the Hats pointed out at the Kalmar Constitutional Convention, the law only specified that Sweden may not have more than one King at the same time. The law did not say anything about how many Emperors that Sweden may have at the same time. Satisfied with this, Kejsardömet Norden was born.[2]
Arthur would live for another 13 years, ruling with his wife over the new nation. Unfortunately, his poor constitution would eventually get the better of him. Visiting Narvik with other members of the Imperial Family in early 1881, he got sick in pneumonia and died in Jukkasjärvi on the 15th of January.
His final (and some would say, most lasting) contribution to his country was his approval of a minor departmental reform in the Nordic government. Since the 17th century, civil administration in Sweden had been divided not among departments under a single central government, but had been divided among Royal Colleges (kungliga kollegii) which theoretically speaking were independent from one another.[3] During the early 18th century, Michael Fleetwood, during his time as President of the College of Mountains had founded the Expedition for Iron Roads and Engineering Arts to help aid technological development in the mining industry, and about at the same time Bror Cederström at the College of War had founded the Expedition for Explosives. Over time, the Expedition for Iron Roads and Engineering Arts had been partitioned into the Expedition for Iron Roads and the Expedition for Engineering Arts. Thanks to the premiership of Palmstierna, these expeditions had received a significant boost in funding, fundings that had continued to increase up to and beyond Nordic Reunification and these royal colleges becoming imperial ones. By 1878, the Expedition for Engineering Arts and the Expedition for Explosives were taking up significant fractions of both the College of War's and the College of Mountain's and arguments were raised that these expeditions be merged, seeing there was increasing overlaps between their functions. This would be not in the form of an Expedition headed by a Secretary of State answering under a Minister of State at a particular one of the empire's colleges, but rather that it be made a new college of its own, with the same control of its funding and directorship that other colleges had. In November of 1880, Arthur approved of the merger, thereby creating the world's first true Ministry for Science. And so it was that in May of 1881, the Nordic Empire could finally unveil its most recent ministry, one with the official name of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. The ICST would in the next three decades come to play an immense role in Nordic history...
[1] This is OTL. In fact, Ulrika Eleonora wasn't crowned Queen but King of Sweden, despite her gender, just to hammer home this point. As far as I have been able to determine, this particular provision of Konungabalken has never been overturned by any modern constitution, and so, it would appear, it is still unconstitutional for Sweden to be a co-monarchy.
[2] In this timeline, though English-language works refer to the nation as the "Nordic Empire", in the empire itself, it is known plainly as Norden, rather than kejsardömet Norden or det nordiska imperiet.
[3] This independence of the "departments" was quite a problem in the Age of Liberty, along with the fact that the heads of the "departments" sat for life. In modern parlance, it was like if the "Prime Minister" could not fire his "Finance Minister" or his "Defence Minister".
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