m based more or less on
the consent of the governed. Its background was the long struggle for
independent national existence in which the country had become involved
by its voluntary federation with Denmark and Norway about the end of the
fourteenth century. That Struggle--made necessary by the insistence of
one sovereign after another on regarding Sweden as a Danish province
rather than as an autonomous part of a united Scandinavia--had reached a
sort of climax, a final moment of utter blackness just before the dawn,
when, at Stockholm in 1520, the Danish king, known ever afterward as
Christian the Tyrant, commanded the arbitrary execution of about eighty
of Sweden's most representative men.

Until within a few months of that event, named by the horror-stricken
people "the blood-bath of Stockholm," the young Gustaf Eriksson Vasa had
been a prisoner in Denmark, sent there as a hostage of Swedish loyalty.
Having obtained his freedom by flight, he made his way to the inland
province of Dalecarlia, where most of the previous movements on behalf
of national liberty had originated, and having cleared the country of
foreign invaders, chiefly by the help of an aroused peasantry that had
never known the yoke of serfdom, he was elected king at a Riksdag held
in the little city of Straengnaes, not far from Stockholm, in 1523.

Straengnaes was a cathedral city and had for several years previous been
notorious for the Lutheran leanings of its clergy. After the death of
its bishop as one of the victims of King; Christian, its temporary head
had been the archdeacon, the ambitious and learned Lars Andersson--or
Laurentius Andreae, as, in accordance with the Latinizing tendency
of the time, he was more frequently named. One of its canons was Olof
Pedersson--also known as Olaus Petri, and more commonly as Master Olof
(Master being the vernacular for Magister, which was the equivalent
of our modern Doctor)--who, during two years spent in studies at the
University of Wittenberg, had been in personal contact with Luther, and
who had become fired with an aspiration to carry the Reformation into
his native country. By recent historians Master Olof has been described
as of a "naively humble nature," rather melancholy in temperament,
but endowed with a gift for irony, and capable of fiery outbursts when
deeply stirred. At Straengnaes he had been preaching the new faith more
openly and more effectively than any one else, and he had found a pupi