Livonia, and carried his victorious army across the Russian frontier. Ivan on his deathbed had counselled his son Feodor to make peace with Sweden, whose warlike tactics the Russians had learnt to respect, but Johan refused to agree to any terms, and thus entailed upon his kingdom during the rest of his reign a costly and destructive war.

PART II.

RELIGIOUS TROUBLES IN SWEDEN.

Sigismund, 1592-1599.-After great opposition, the Polish. Estates consented, on the death of Johan, to let their king Sigismund return to Sweden to assume the crown, and voted a sum of 200,000 gulden in order that he might accomplish the journey with the state befitting his rank. After a tedious and stormy voyage from Dantzic, where Klas Fleming, the powerful governor of Finland, met him with a squadron of Swedish vessels, Sigismund and his queen reached Stockholm in September 1593, attended by a brilliant retinue of Polish gentlemen, and accompanied by the Papal legate, Mala-Spina. Duke Karl stood ready on the castle bridge to welcome the young king, and by his side was Abraham Angermannus, the newlyelected Lutheran primate of Sweden, whose former zealous opposition to Johan's liturgy made his appearance as unwelcome to the king and his friends as the sight of a Romish prelate was to the Swedes. Differences soon broke out between the uncle and nephew, and the duke, returning in haste to his own dominions, left the council to manage as they best could with the king, who rarely called them to his presence, and kept himself almost entirely to the society of his Polish friends and Jesuit admirers. Some of the Swedish nobles, as Klas Fleming, Axel Lejonhufvud, and others, who were at feud with Duke Karl, attended his court, and a few even professed their adhesion to the king's religion; but the mass of the people looked with vexation and distrust at the Roman Catholic ceremonials which were introduced into some of the churches of

Stockholm; and on the occasion of a solemn mass for the repose of the soul of the late king, the Swedes and Poles came to blows, and blood was shed within the church. Foreign Jesuits and Swedish Lutherans preached against each other in the different pulpits of the capital, and while Sigismund refused to ratify the resolutions of Upsala, or to confirm the election of Angermannus as primate of Sweden, the Council insisted upon these points as the condition on which alone they would grant supplies for the king's coronation, and the Estates assembled at Upsala forbade the Papal legate to take part in any public ceremonial, and threatened the Jesuits with death, if they entered within the cathedral doors. Sigismund replied defiantly that the Estates would have to learn the difference between an hereditary and an elective crown, and that his conscience forbade him to change his religion. As the monarch of an hereditary kingdom, professing a different faith from his own, he would not however molest that faith, he said, till he knew what the States would do to secure the liberty of those who believed the same as he did.

In the spring of 1594 Sigismund met the Estates at Upsala, and was crowned with much ceremony in the cathedral church, but not until he had been forced by his uncle and the Council to sign a charter, confirming the religious liberty that had been secured by the Assembly at Upsala in the previous year. Sigismund, with his habitual weakness and insincerity, agreed to everything demanded of him at Upsala, yet almost as soon as he reached Stockholm he began to evade all the obligations which he had assumed. Catholic schools and churches were opened, the Protestant services were interfered with, and the safety of those who attended them was so much endangered as to make it necessary to go armed to church. No redress could be obtained from the king, who, after appointing Catholic governors over every province, returned to Poland. There everything was in disorder, for the Polish nobles, regarding themselves as all of equal rank, refused obedience to the officers appointed to maintain the laws. The Council at Stockholm in the meanwhile declared that no Swedish king could govern from abroad, and that unless Sigismund returned to Sweden without delay, a regent must be named to act for him. Thus urged, the

king reluctantly appointed his uncle to govern in concert with the Council of State, but at the same time he sent secret orders to Klas Fleming and all the Catholic provincial governors not to obey his government. Duke Karl, disregarding their opposition, continued to conduct public affairs with great vigour, and in 1595 he settled a favourable peace with Russia, by which Esthonia and Narva were secured to Sweden, while Kexholm and some other spots on the confines of Finland were to be given back to the Russian Czar. Klas Fleming, whose troopers were quartered at Kexholm, and who liked war from the excuse it afforded him of keeping up an army in Finland, evaded the surrender of this place, and his men and the Duke's forces soon fell into hostilities, which only ended with the death of Klas in 1597, when the territory was surrendered to Russia.

Karl as Regent.-The duke and the Council did not long go on in unity, and before the surrender of Kexholm there had been an open rupture between them, and Karl had appealed to the general diet, and been at once named by them Governor-General of Sweden, and all his acts approved of and confirmed. From that moment he appeared as the representative of the bondar and lower landowners of the kingdom, while the higher nobles, whose excessive power he tried to crush, were compelled either to submit or to leave the kingdom, and carry their grievances to the Polish court. By his tact and abilities the Duke broke down all opposition, and after having effectually suppressed the rebellion of the peasantry in Finland, known as the War of Clubs (Klubbekriget), and rooted out Catholicism, he found himself strong enough to meet and overcome the Polish army which Sigismund, in 1598, brought to Sweden for the purpose of compelling him to resign his power. At Stängebro, near Linköping, the rival forces met, and after a fierce engagement the royal army was completely routed, and Sigismund was forced to agree to the terms proposed by his uncle, who insisted upon the disbanding and dismissal of his Polish troops, the surrender of all the disaffected Swedish nobles who had taken refuge in Poland, and the summons, within a period of four months, of a diet of the Estates of Sweden, by whose decision the future government of the kingdom was to be regulated. As soon as Sigismund found himself

safe out of his uncle's hands, he left the country in haste, and returned to Poland, leaving his friends to fight and suffer in his cause, without supporting them with the strong armament which he had promised to send for their relief as soon as he reached his Polish kingdom.

In the following year, 1600, the Council and Estates of Sweden sent envoys to Poland, demanding the immediate return of Sigismund, in default of which they declared him to have forfeited the Swedish throne, and requiring that in that case he should send his son Vladislav to Sweden, within a period of six months, to be brought up in the Lutheran faith, in preparation of his future acceptance as their king. During this interval the duke advanced with an army into Finland, where Sigismund had powerful friends among the great nobles, and in a short campaign reduced the province to complete submission, avenging the enmity which the nobility had shown towards him by the summary execution, on a charge of treason, of twenty-nine of their leaders, who were brought to the scaffold in Karl's presence at Abo, and put to death with a cruelty that reminds one of the narrative of Christian II.'s Blood Bath at Stockholm. As Sigismund had taken no notice of the demands of the Council and Estates of the Realm, he and his heirs were declared to have no further claims on the allegiance of the Swedish people, and the rights of Duke Johan of Ostgotland, as the younger son of the late King Johan, were taken into consideration; but when that prince declined to be brought forward as a candidate for the throne, no obstacle stood any longer in the way of the succession of Duke Karl, who, however, was not proclaimed king until the diet met at Norköping in 1604. Sigismund, in the meanwhile, continued till his death in 1632 to reign over Poland, whose national credit and prosperity were severely injured by his incapacity for government and his bigoted intolerance. He left two sons, Vladislav and John Kasimir, both of whom became in turn kings of Poland.