The Rift Between Monarchy and Nobility

Abstract

On his accession in 1844, King Oscar I wanted to be a more progressive monarch than his father Charles XIV John, but still keep personal royal power intact. One way to mark his more modern stance was by changing his court. Already a few weeks after the old king’s death, newspapers reported that the new king would retain only a minimal court. One reported that ‘the new royal court is said to have already abolished some costly ceremonies incompatible with old Swedish seriousness, and it will also have far fewer attendants than the old court’. Newspapers were hopeful about rumours of a new direction, eschewing the conservative rule and style of the late king. It was said of King Oscar that ‘Higher court offices and Gentlemen of the Chamber in Waiting will not be appointed at his new court, and only Court Marshals and Gentlemen of the Chamber actually in service will be retained’. The king, according to these reports, would also cease the custom of making decisions in his bedchamber or before Cabinet meetings. It was even rumoured that King Oscar would decline to be crowned. The reports were a mixture of wishful thinking and political reality. Oscar’s more modern credentials had been signalled when he was crown prince in several ways. He wrote about prison reform. On occasion he had dressed down (in 1839, a Lady of the Palace noted with displeasure that he had appeared in the royal box at the opera in a civilian coat—‘this sign of the evil of the time struck everyone who was used to see HRH in military uniform here and in other public places, but times change’). An aristocrat wrote of Oscar in 1845, ‘I wonder if he doesn’t want to play Louis Philippe’.