Introduction

On Monday 27 April 1789, the artisan journeymen of Stockholm demonstrated through the Old Town. They had most likely spent the night, not with their masters as they should have, but in hostelries, drunk and up to no good. At about half past eleven in the morning, they occupied the Riddarhustorget outside the House of the Nobility, where they continued their uproar until four o'clock in the afternoon, ‘at which time a heavy downpour, combined with the flexed batons of the police officers, helped to disperse the drunken mob’.

It was the last day on which parliament was in session. The four estates represented in it – the peasants, the middle class, the clergy and the nobility – assembled in different places in the city. The artisan journeymen provided a hostile audience for the heated deliberations of the nobility. The king, the enlightened despot Gustavus III, needed a great deal of money for the war he was waging against Russia and Catherine II. Would the nobility concede to the king's appropriation demand to a coming parliament for the foreseeable future, or refuse to commit itself for more than two years?

The artisan journeymen had gone to the House of the Nobility (Riddarhuset) to frighten the nobles into obeying the king. It is hardly surprising, then, that fearing for their safety, many noblemen had ‘under their cloaks hidden sabres and loaded pistols’ when they sought to clear a path through the crowd to the meeting. They must have been prepared for the possibility that the artisans might mobilise in support of the king and the war, otherwise they would not have taken the trouble to arm themselves. However, they do appear to have been taken by surprise when, in the midst of their deliberations, the king suddenly entered the hall to the accompaniment of highspirited cheering from the masses outside. The nobility thus not only had to try and elude the clamorous crowd, it also had to resist Gustavus III's theatrical and autocratic arts of persuasion.

The nobility failed, the king celebrated yet another of his fateful despotic triumphs, and the war could be continued.