Revenge at Elsinore

By John O'Donnell

In 1517, Sweden is on the brink of declaring independence from Denmark, and Martin Luther has posted on a church door in distant Saxony incendiary views that will soon set Europe afire. Sweden's arch-patriot Hemming Gadh has arranged the coincidence. The Danish king Hamlet is plotting to kidnap and deliver Luther to Rome and the stake in exchange for Vatican support of Denmark's depredations upon Sweden. Gadh knows that the monk's heresy is the key to his country's liberation. Sweden must keep Luther alive and encourage his schismatic diatribe.

To fulfill that mission, Gadh engages young Magnus Vasabrother of Sweden's future kingas protector and confidant of the controversial theologian. Disguised as a Norwegian student named Horatio, Magnus enrolls at Wittenberg's university. There he encounters the Danish king's dissolute son Prince Hamlet and embarks upon adventures that will determine not only Sweden's fate but Europe's future. Meanwhile, Gadh, Horatio's mentor and Sweden's master counterspy, has embedded himself at Elsinore as the evil king's chancellor Polonius. When King Hamlet's atrocities culminate in the infamous Bloodbath of Stockholm, Gadh and MagnusPolonius and Horatioswear revenge upon the Dane, his bastard son and their kingdom.

Gadh summons Magnus to Elsinore, where Horatio falls in love with Queen Gertrude, recognizes the recently deceased king's brother Claudius as a great and kind ruler, witnesses Polonius's death at the prince's hand, and finallywhen called upon to duel the Black Prince to the deathfinds his path between patriotism and romantic love, obedience and autonomy, vengeance and forgiveness.

Skillfully written, entertainingly intelligent and historically authentic, Revenge At Elsinore mesmerizes readers with a vibrant romantic adventure that also provides the key that unlocks mysteries that have puzzled Shakespearean scholars for centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504977029

John O'Donnell

He grew up in La Jolla with his Royal Family. Princess Ashley, Princess Tamsin, and Prince or King Kalen as Prince or King John Michael O’Donnell Jr. Their father John Brian O’Donnell 3rd raised them from youth to be reclusive and hard to find. They like potatoes and enjoy Gaelic football. Amongst their favorite things are Blarney stone, four leaf clovers and a Guinness beer. The prince of Ireland enjoys talking to family on twitter and doing things on Twitter to enhance the world; Facebook is where he publishes notes to get books going and ideas going especially pertaining to space. The author is an expert in Piano playing, a terrorist hunter with notoriety, an expert shot having shot a moving hummingbird with a carbine, an inventor, a contractor, and comes from a famous line of Generals.

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© 2016 John O’Donnell. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/19/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7703-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7701-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7702-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901772

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Foreword To The Second Edition (2023)

Revenge At Elsinore

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

For my mother,

Mae Rita Dugan O’Donnell (1907-1982),

who brought me my first books,

with gratitude and love

The creaky mechanisms by which the authorities sought to regulate the press left plenty of room for the sharper wits of creative writers to fashion invisible or semi-visible means of reconfiguring the political orthodoxies of the period.

Colin Burrow, The Sixteenth Century, Cambridge Companion to English Literature.

"Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,

With windlasses and assays of bias

By indirections find directions out."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 1.

"Yet he that can endure

To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord,

Does conquer him that did his master conquer,

And earns a place i’ th’ story."

William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene 13.

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION (2023)

Ten years ago, I lucked upon a manuscript whose subsequent publication, some now say, changed the course of Shakespearean scholarship, that vast academic industry.

Such was neither my intent nor expectation. Nor my area of expertise. I had arrived in Stockholm as a young American historian researching the role of Sweden’s intervention in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. In the National Library, I found the first clue to an unsought puzzle. I came across a collection of Martin Luther’s pamphlets, one of which suggested in faded marginalia that Luther had lived for a time in Sweden. This was news to me—and, as far as I knew—to recorded history.

Vowing to concentrate on the objectives of my grant-funded research, I nevertheless pursued the intriguing hint in casual cool downs following day-long archival workouts. I justified this dereliction of duty with the conceit that I was studying context, deep background. After all, the Thirty Years’ War began as a religious battle that Luther had ignited a century earlier. He shortly became a distraction to me; causing trouble still.

Upon discovery of the second clue, digression became obsession; my project’s periphery suddenly became its pivot. How could it not? How else would a tenure-tracked assistant professor react to holding in his hands a copy of one of Luther’s most incendiary tracts inscribed in his unmistakable scrawl to a Danish king named Claudius, a persona known to the world only as a fictive character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet ?

This autographed dedication arrested me. Even if mythical Claudius proved real, the second clue’s discovery was implausible. Most of Sweden’s pre-Renaissance bibliographic spoils of wars were lost in the terrible 1697 fire in Tre Kroner, the royal palace. My summer assaults on Sweden’s rich archival collections in search of another clue has been amply detailed in the 2015 foreword to the first edition of this work. Here it suffices simply to note my discovery of a blackened iron box containing a brittle, vellum-wrapped manuscript that not only challenged Swedish historiography but also reoriented actors and audiences to the true inspiration of Shakespeare’s greatest play. Now known as The Horatio Manuscript, the following work has lately been acknowledged by several daring literary historians as the Ur-Hamlet—the hitherto undiscovered but long suspected third source of Shakespeare’s famous drama, the key that unlocked the closet of inconsistencies that had long plagued its interpretation.

In retrospect I realize that what began as a desultory pursuit and ended in ardent engagement was sparked by schoolboy fascination with the dark prince. I had read the play perhaps a half-dozen times before I first saw it performed. Inferring action from text and motivation from words, I came to know the unstaged Prince Hamlet as a solipsistic brat of royal privilege who spewed venom on his court, callously insulted everyone he encountered, played cruelly upon the courtesan Ophelia, slew her father with not an ounce of regret, cast her off and caused her suicide, killed her brother, heartlessly arranged the deaths of two boyhood chums who had come to Elsinore with no motive but to cheer him up and then bragged about the deed, pitilessly excoriated his devoted mother, murdered an estimable and duly elected monarch whom his mother loved and married, watched her death throes, and ended his life inches from her arms with no words of concern for her, begging only in his last breath for his sole friend Horatio to sing his unwarranted praises to posterity.

And all because he saw a ghost and believed its testimony? That made no sense to me. The ghost was an invented—even if shared—apparition that provided the nasty coveter of his father’s throne a preternatural justification to engage in murderous rampage prompted by his vaulted egoism and unearned ambition.

In my third undergraduate year, I took a Shakespeare course and was dismayed to learn that my innocent interpretation of Hamlet defied two centuries of smug scholarship. Unconvinced but nevertheless intimidated, and with a term paper due within the week, I confessed my confusion to the course’s instructor. She rose from behind her desk, closed her office door, returned to her chair, and inclined me toward an eventual academic career by encouraging me to express my views in writing.

Make your case, she said, and you’ll win a good grade—or not. No big deal. Two years from now your law-school professors won’t notice it. Were I to publish a paper along the same lines, I’d be denied full professorship. Big bad deal. Beyond the pious cant of academic freedom, we professors inhabit little islands of orthodoxy. You can do what I can’t. Give it a shot.

Time was short; I agreed. Good for you, Emil, she replied. "Now, as you must cite sources, you’ll need some footnotes. Problem is, only one scholar ever got Hamlet right. He was a Spanish diplomat, and he wasn’t an academic when he wrote his little heresy. You won’t find it in the library. Here, take my copy of his monograph—and an extra week. No penalty. An ‘incomplete’ if you don’t return it. It’s out-of-print."

I read Salvador de Madariaga’s slender, convincing diatribe and needed no extension. I learned that the German and English Romantics, inspired by the exquisite sensitivity of the soliloquies Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet’s part, ignored the play’s obvious action and portrayed the prince as a noble, tragic hero. Later, Victorians saw Hamlet as a consummate English gentleman; by definition, someone incapable of bad conduct. Generations of actors played the role accordingly, and scholars followed suit. For at least two centuries, all tried hard and ridiculously to explain the foul mouth and evil deeds of Prince Hamlet, the obviously brutal egoist who had regard for no one save himself, indifferent to everything but his subjective impulses.

Madariaga fortified the untutored view of Hamlet and Hamlet that I carried to Stockholm. But I did not venture there to study the historicity of Shakespeare’s plays. That is, not until I opened the iron box and unwrapped the alleged memoir of Magnus Eriksson Vasa, bafflingly written in English. He was brother to Sweden’s King Gustav and declared dead long before he could possibly have written the story I confronted. And yet the tale’s chronology adhered remarkably to evidences of modern Scandinavian historiography; events verified not just to the year but often to the very day.

More puzzled than I was as a naive college junior, I flew back home for the fall teaching semester with a copy of the manuscript and a determination to publish it. Frankly I was ambitious to lay priority claim to my discovery but too timid to acknowledge its unverified authenticity. Was the manuscript written in Swedish early on and later translated? Or was it fabricated after the play’s production? Did Shakespeare—a notorious literary borrower—put a memoirist’s fine phrases in the mouths of his various characters, or did some later author borrow them from Shakespeare’s drama to forge a feigned tale? I was no literary historian. My forthcoming monograph on the Thirty Years’ War would be my key to tenure, and I hesitated to jeopardize my fragile academic career by attaching my name to what might later prove to be a hoax. The foreword to the first edition was therefore written anonymously.

At first The Horatio Manuscript was roundly assailed by Shakespeare scholars but eventually validated by experts from several unexpected disciplines. Etymologists, examining word usage and orthography, strongly suggested that the manuscript was real and written no later than 1560, the year of Gustav Vasa’s death. Remarkably, a noted historian of technology from the University of Pennsylvania traveled to Sweden to examine the yellowed paper on which the original text was written. He authenticated it as once-white paper produced in the mills of John Spielman, Queen Elizabeth’s German-born jeweler, who held a monopoly on this high-quality product at the time Shakespeare penned Hamlet. In the wake of such strong circumstantial evidence, my new tasks were to identify the author of The Horatio Manuscript and to explain how the Bard acquired it.

When I found the answers two years ago, the incontrovertible evidence impelled my publisher and me to re-issue the memoir with a foreword that no longer begs uncourageous anonymity. I have changed the title, provided chapter breaks, and modernized a few dozen archaisms. This new edition is being released on the 500th anniversary of the very day of the death of the historical Hamlet.

The incontrovertible evidence? It was my discovery of an authenticated, extensive epistolary journal written from London in 1601 by Brigitta Magnusdotter Vasa to her daughter Kristina in Sweden. It was Brigitta who persuaded the Bard to embed her father’s tale in his Hamlet. She was for a time Shakespeare’s lover; in fact, the Black Lady of his sonnets. But this is another tale, and it deserves its own foreword.

S. Emil Andersson, PhD

University of Wisconsin at Madison

23 June 2023

REVENGE AT ELSINORE

Gadh’s last words to me were Live long. My mentor wished me more time than was given him to exact revenge. He would never have anticipated my expiring so comfortably. He might now be turning in his grave in surprise to learn that I lay dying in a canopied down-filled rope bed in Amsterdam, had I not exhumed his corpse the day after his burial in Elsinore.

When Hemming Gadh long ago died in my arms, run through by a careless sword, he was known to the northern world as Polonius. I, Magnus Eriksson Vasa, then called Horatio, lived long enough to earn revenge’s dubious consolations.

What remains of me revisits this, my memoir, one last time before consigning it to my loving daughter Brigitta. She has watched vainglory, power and prejudice warp the pointed shaft of history into crooked hooks of half-truth. She knows that my honest untold tale has already been scarred by hired scriveners. She fears my story will gather dust unless it gathers speed, and therefore bends toward England, whose tongue waxes eloquent across the globe, to find there a playwright to shape this account into dramatic history. Though I bow to her conviction that drame is the modern mold for opinion’s shape, I distrust both dramatists and chroniclers. It is as easy to bend the past to poetry as to politics. But I must leave it.

When Gadh died, he was the oldest man I knew. I am older now than he was then. In my youth, I was brother to a hero who would become a king, lover of a queen who would forsake her throne, protector of a monk who set the world on fire, and mortal foe of the black prince of Denmark. Once proximate to power, I rule only these pages. They tell a tale that needs telling. It begins on Lake Mälar and ends in Elsinore.

I

In winter’s dawn, if you ski westward across Lake Mälar’s hardened top, you will see no horizon. Heaven and earth are one. But if you spot some distant form, it will distinguish ice from air. At first you cannot tell whether the object is moving toward you or away or frozen still. One chill November morn some three score years ago—it was 1517, to be exact—my elder brother Gustav sledged out from Stockholm to intercept me. His purpose separated my heaven from my earth forever.

I had been vigorously puffing for nearly two hours when his pair of Gotland ponies overtook me. I glided to a stop and they halted heads to head with me, nearly nostrils to nostrils, as though challenging my exertions with copious, crystalline exhalations. The holder of their reins scarcely breathed.

So, Gustav, are you taking your exercise beneath reindeer skins this morn? He let out a laugh that roused a skein of herring gulls to heckle me. He joined their chorus. Little brother, your arms punish ski-poles; mine own swing battle-axes. Let mine rest while yours play, so that when I fight you will be fit to flee.

He leaped from his sledge and embraced me with show of joy and impress of might. Though I tiptoed atop my skis, his nose touched my forehead, his mustachio tickled my cheeks, and his ample beard brushed snow from my slender whiskers. With powerful hands he grasped my shoulders, forced my heels back onto my skis, and froze me with his steely blue gaze. Eric Johansson wishes to see us.

Wherefore? I inquired, aware that the reason had to be politic. Otherwise, Gustav would have said, Father wishes to see us.

"Herr Sten has called an urgent meeting of the Riksdag to resolve the fate of Stäket. As you and I are members of his court, we have been invited to bear witness. Our sire shall vote with Sten on our family’s behalf. If our mighty regent succeeds in having the fortress razed, we will have struck a great blow for Sweden’s independence."

If our viceroy succeeds, the Church will excommunicate him and place Sweden under papal interdict.

Yes, little brother, Gustav sighed. And beyond such tender theology, the Dane’s mercenaries will attack us ferociously. Unlike you, I shy more from cannon ball than papal bull. Let’s hope the archbishop will be buried beneath Stäket’s ruins.

A practical fellow, my brother usually seized the salient point. I am more roundwise and so shall come back shortly to describe the importance of Stäket to Sweden’s fortunes. The fortress’s lord, Gustav Trolle, Archbishop of Uppsala, was an incorrigible unionist; that is, an apostle of the Union of Kalmar and therefore a slave to Denmark. The union was an antiquated triumviry of Sweden, Norway and Denmark rendered specious by Denmark’s haughty hegemony. I am reluctant to admit that Trolle was an irreconcilable foe of the Stures and Vasas for fear the gentle reader will think my opinion swerves on a bias when I contend that he was an obstinate, evil man.

He descended from an ancient and powerful Swedish dynasty jealous of the Stures’ political ascendancy. Trolle’s father Eric, bearing no scruples, had none to pass on to his son. Gustav Trolle was therefore born unscrupulous. No aspect of character or temperament bade him acknowledge force of principle or pangs of conscience. He was ‘the new man,’ a rare breed, a person who lived for himself alone and cared not a mastiff’s snot for anyone else, neither liege nor kin. In my life I have met only one other person so constituted. But I shall speak anon of Prince Hamlet.

I shall speak little more of Trolle. Though he would betray his country, engrieve my soul and set in motion the events herein recounted, I never encountered the devil after he committed his most grievous crime. As pervasive as miasma and elusive as a demon’s winged shadow, he remained my invisible, stalking nemesis. To end this story with his end at my vengeful hand would merely fulfill a dramatist’s dream. I possess no story-teller’s craft and will not alter history to tell a good tale. Having led a life of deception, I vow to write a historian’s truth. When you are your own honest historian, truth oft becomes disappointment’s champion.

Trolle I reckoned at the time a traitor to our country but understood little of his path to treachery. My father and brother seemed adamant about his fate, and I was always subservient to them. Thus I attempted encouragement: Then it is a great day, Gustav. Let’s wish Sten Sture success and prepare for the onslaughts of Denmark and Rome.

Gustav little noticed my declamation. He was distracted by an erupting sound and grasped my hands in his mighty claws before I heard it. From the south, the deep ice of Mälaren groaned. An unheavenly tempest rumbled toward us, under us, and finally, finally beyond us northward in blessed diminution. There is no sound like it in the places I’ve since known: cracks of invisible aquatic lightening; shivering claps of thunder beneath your feet; rippled popping of the lake’s frozen backbone broken upon the wheel of our cruel earth’s arc. Then the emptiness of silence.

I looked at Gustav and understood that he knew. Our foundations, like our hopes, can melt like rime or like a battered bridge crumble and fall. Thank the gods, Gustav roared with relief. Mälaren’s ice has supported great armies. Campaigns have been waged upon frozen water. Little brother, there will be battles more. Danger strikes atop the ice, not below it.

Still, brother, the ice’s groan can make you feel small.

Come, Magnus. I think you as fragile as agile. Put your skis in my rig and I’ll not loose you on the lake where you love being lost. I submitted and we turned about wordless toward Stockholm.

Unsettled, I searched for the source of my discomfort. I found it in memory. One winter’s dusk long ago, as I was skiing eastward across Mälaren, a storm arose and the horizon faltered. I was but ten years and had lost my way on the ice. Silvered grayness enveloped heaven and earth, and I felt bound to neither.

To this day I cannot fathom how I reckoned my saving course through that blizzard. When I gained home at Reavsnaes, teeth grinding, limbs ashiver, I was taken to my brick-warmed bed and given glögg and gingerbread. When I awoke, I understood by the way my family regarded me that I had come of age. I awakened to my stern father’s gentle voice. Magnus, we must fit you with longer skis.

Dear Father, we should be furnished with shorter winters.

Perhaps you will arrange it, he said with a laugh that marked his relief at my recovery and reassured me of rebound. It seems that you attempted to shorten your winter by venturing southward. Avoid that mistake. The Danes will disdain your venture and the university at Uppsala will be disappointed to learn of your demise.

Its faculty expects me to read there in two years’ time.

By then, dear son, you will have thawed. For now we joyously celebrate your homecoming. Softly my father placed his thumb and forefinger on the sides of his tongue, a gesture that from childhood I recalled as his signal for me to sleep, his moistened prelude to a candlewick’s snuff. I did not want to let go of his soothing presence.

Pray tell me, Father, why on a winter’s eve, when rush candles and hearth fires should signal my turnabout, there is no light in Stockholm to guide a snow-blind Swede. Father slowly withdrew his hand from the candlestick and freighted his answer with more weight than my frivolous query warranted.

Magnus he said, a Swede keeps his light inside. Perhaps cold affects our disposition. Or it may be that our temperament dictates our place. I fancy it a philosophical tangle. But of this we shall talk another time. Take rest.

Father.

Yes?

The glögg was good. I closed my eyes and did not hear the candle hiss asleep.

Months later Gustav revealed to me that my tardy return had caused the household great alarm. He wished me to feel guilty, embarrassed by untoward consequences of my habitual exercises. I told him that I did not recall being saved by search parties but by my stamina and wits. I did not mention luck. I have never forgotten his dismissive, paradoxical reply: Had you not wits and stamina, my little snow champer, why would you be worth a search party?

That reply, I realized, was the lingering source of my discomfort as we sledded toward Stockholm. When I found it, I broached my grievance. Gus, I ventured, using a diminutive of his ancestral name, one which he despised and I invoked whenever he scratched me with axe-sharp edges of his jests. Yes, Mas, he countered with a familiar groan. I am no dastard, I said. He whipped the ponies.

Why, you fight like the devil. I have seen you at practice. You are an excellent swordsman—in mock combat. Your endurance, your speed of thrust and parry exceed my own. But an athlete will not a warrior make. You grapple well. But can you kill?

My brother’s banal delivery of that question stunned me. If I fought at your side, I would slay to save your life. Or save my skin at the cost of an antagonist’s throat.

In battle, Mas, such temporizing will suspend your thrust for the instant it takes an opponent to gut you. To fight and live, you must thirst to kill. I dream of being the first to delve a blow, the last to receive one.

I confess I have not that thirst.

Then you cannot fight at my side.

You cannot say that, I protested.

Oh, shut tight. You shall fight—for cause and kin. But not in my skirmishes or in my way.

In your way? Do you mean ‘in your manner,’ or are you suggesting I am an obstacle to you?

Come, he chided. Of our father’s seven children, four remain. With Johan’s death, you and I are the only men folk. We can ill afford to be captured or killed at once. A fortnight ago I was nearly seized in the clash at Vädla as we drove the Danish fleet from Swedish waters. He raised his voice and pitch. What if we were together captured there?

Gus, be calm. You screech like a hawk owl on a wolverine.

Then let me impart an owl’s wisdom, little brother, he shouted, then calmed. If we become captives, you become the superfluous prince. Festive Danes will open your back with a red-hot blade. They will take slow, sportive turns inserting their gauntleted hands into your body to break off your ribs one by one until, screaming, you beg to die. And they will make me watch. Your death would be calculated to edify me. Your demise would increase my ransom. Father would not be pleased.

Brother, I sometimes wish that your descriptive powers were duller.

As I wish your imagination sharper. Again there was quiet. At last I asked, What shall I do?

He reined in the team so to tame the wind so to speak more softly. He wielded his voice as formidably as his axe. Magnus, a man should do everything he can for himself. But no man can do all for something larger. Each of us must follow his star.

That was too poetic and I suppressed my laughter. Now it was my turn to jest with my brother, if only to ward off the chill of his candor. Our regent’s wife had recently advanced astrology as an occupation of court. I could not resist chiding Gustav for his subservience to fashion. Stars? Big brother, stars? Despite our aunt’s enthusiasm, do you think that Sten Sture plans his campaigns in accord with his wife’s notice that Scorpio houses Saturn or that Mercury and Mars are opposed?

Let us hope those planets are never opposed. You, Mas, are as mercurial as I am martial. We must be in conjunction to succeed. Do you not believe in fate?

I only know that if I keep watch on the way the world turns, I can pick any star to guide me home.

And well you can when skies are clear and skis are waxed. But I happen to know that even your beady little eyes cannot pierce clouds. He knew he had hit me. Our fates have become beclouded, Magnus. If we are to pursue this poetical fancy, I must ask you a question.

Ask it.

"Can you pick a star to guide you away from home?"

Whereto?

Wherever you must go.

It depends upon the destination, I stammered.

Gustav smiled victory. Then I think you have acknowledged that familiar stars take you only to familiar places. My stars take me to unreckoned regions. Mark you your safe destinations while I pursue perilous destiny.

The ice cracked again. But you have many stars to follow. I said this not to flatter my brother but rather to deny constriction of my own fate. I was six years younger than Gustav and loath to acknowledge than either of us walked a fixed path.

Nah, he replied. Unlike you, I have been briefly schooled. You know I speak passable German and read some Latin. But I prefer my mother’s tongue and shall use it to rally our countrymen when my time comes. It was not the first time Gustav had spoken to me about his ambition to champion a common weal of Swedes. I do not believe he shared such thoughts with anyone but me, and I never asked him how he expected a Vasa to inherit the regency. Sten Sture had a son, though a child, and another on way. Although the regency was elective, perpetuated power came as naturally to ruling clans as did deference among electors. Dynasty seemed simply a political form of destiny.

I begrudged not my brother his dream but found irksome his exclusionary claim to it. Though I never dreamt of command, I aspired to valor. The pathway to both crossed the battlefield, and I sometimes felt that Gustav would not have me march with him for fear I would find in the test of courage a taste for command. Despite my regiment of exercises, Gus had persuaded Father that pen fit my hand better than sword. According to his prevailing arguments, I would compense our family for his brief schooling by charging into libraries instead of battlefields.

Why, Gus, do you not let me follow you?

Because, Mas, I do not possess your gifts.

Nonsense, I countered. You can read and I can fight. My gifts and yours need not compete.

Our gifts comport. I’m your warrior and you’re my scholar. It is what is. You knew languages before they were taught you. You have excelled at Uppsala. Your memory is near flawless.

You puff at me, Gus.

I puff you up. When I was lately at Herr Sten’s court, Hemming Gadh himself acknowledged that you reminded him of his youth when he studied at Rostock.

The great excommunicant said that?

In truth. To Father. If I thought my brother spoke truth, not cajolery, I might have puffed up like a courting pigeon. Hemming Gadh was Sten Sture’s councilor, lawman, and secretary to the Riksdag, our council of magnates. There was no Swede more sage. As principal envoy to Lübeck, he turned the Hansa merchants against the Danes, no eased trick. Ambassador to the Vatican for two decades, he understood the machinations of the Church as no one else. Never reluctant to put down law books to take up sword, he oft led soldiers in Sweden’s defense. He lived the lives of nine great men at once. Father once quipped, There is not yet a Swedish throne, but Gadh is the power behind it.

Hemming Gadh had sold many of his offices and lived therefrom more lavishly than his liege. But he had kept his ecclesiastical credential—the Bishopric of Linkoping—in prudential deference to the power of the pontiff. That is, until the pope excommunicated him and gave his vicarage to Trolle. How Gadh accommodated that damning pontificate was a mystery. One could never discern his inner state by observing his demeanor. I often wondered if he begrudged Trolle his mitre. Might such a grudge have prejudiced his advice to Herr Sten and provoked our confrontation with Trolle at Stäket? I asked my brother.

The year you lost yourself upon this ice, Gustav explained, Bishop Hemming found himself in Rome.

Wherefore?

He had gone there to complain of Denmark’s insults, to try to stave off such a crisis as we now confront. When he could not obtain the Church’s favor for Sweden, he endeavored to secure its neutrality.

How so?

‘How so?’ ‘Wherefore?’ Mas, snap shut your beak and let me expound.

Holding my younger and therefore less active tongue, I learned that Gadh had spent two years petitioning the Curia to no avail. Rome favored the Danish king. Unlike Sweden, Denmark was anchored to the continent and thus had vested interest in the prosperity of the Holy Roman Empire and its emperor, the pope’s puppet. Danish control of the north countries would enlarge the Church’s sphere. The Curia offered Gadh an archbishopric, consolation for his unanswered cause, in return for his promise to bend Sweden to the Church’s urge to dominate the north. When Gadh spurned the bribe, Pope Leo damned him.

As our excommunicant was preparing to depart Rome, he espied Gustav Trolle at the Vatican pleading Denmark’s cause. Sten Sture had just been elected regent, the office Trolle’s father Eric had coveted. Eric retaliated against Herr Sten by sending his son to Rome as Sweden’s Judas Iscariot. Gustav Trolle persuaded Pope Leo that, were he invested as Archbishop of Uppsala, and thus the leader of Sweden’s council of magnates, he would deliver Sweden to the Danish crown in return for fiefs and a percentage of the indulgence grants that the Church had begun to sell to timid souls haunted by purgatorial fears.

Papa Leone delighted in the prospect. To him who once exulted, How much we and our family have profited by the legend of Christ, our provinces were virgin territories. The Union of Kalmar promised his family and faith expanded fortune, but only if the crown rested on the head of a Dane. When Kristian—whom we came to call King Hamlet—ascended to the Danish throne in 1513 and asserted his illegitimate claim to the Swedish crown, we could read our predicament in the tyrant’s swagger.

It was not a good year for Sweden. The Vatican and the Danish king joined hands. Kristian took a Hapsburg by proxy as his queen. Not yet fourteen, Isabelle was the sister of the Burgundian ruler Charles, whom Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian backed as his successor. This was a stroke for Denmark and a blow to Sweden.

By 1515, Trolle was Archbishop of Sweden, ensconced at Stäket. Ever since the Viking wars, the Church considered Stäket the archbishop’s estate; its northward regions, its demesne. Herr Sten understood that, should an adversary occupy that strategic isle, things might not go well for Sweden. The island fortress guarded the waterway to Uppsala and Sigtuna. Our riksföreståndare tried to make magnates see that it belonged to Sweden. He argued that no representative of heaven should possess an earthly army four-hundred strong to defend such a spot for purposes potentially adverse to Sweden’s interests. At first, the nobility heeded not his arguments.

Rebuffed, Sten Sture attempted to conciliate the implacable Trolles, to palliate the new archbishop’s ancient animosity. Nothing availed. Possessed of Sweden’s highest ecclesiastical office and fortified at Stäket, Trolle met every offer with contempt. He refused Sten Sture’s summons to council and fulminated against him, urging the lords to welcome Kristian as their ruler. In truth, many nobles suspected Herr Sten of regal ambition and preferred a remote king. Swedish sovereignty threatened their sway; distant reign enlarged their license. They were correct in their selfish assessments but misguided in thinking that their true interests coincided with Denmark’s.

The nobility needed to make a choice, and Herr Stern procured their persuasion. He traversed the country, rallying unprivileged countrymen. He convinced miners of the fiercely independent mountain people of Dalarna, fishermen of Skåne eviscerated more foully than their catches by Danish depredations upon their schools of herring, merchants exhausted by the high price of German salt, peasants exorbitantly taxed to support Danish wars. He stirred such a pride in the Swedish soul and promised such a purchase in a Swede’s pocketbook that reluctant magnates abandoned their opposition and joined peasants and freeholders in swearing him fealty. The alternative was civil war. We could either provoke Denmark or fight amongst ourselves.

A hard choice. Swedes and Danes were commingled by marriage and property. Herr Sten’s wife, our dear aunt and astrology enthusiast Kristina Gyllenstierna, counted among the highest nobility in Sweden, and yet she descended from Danish appointees to our country. The choice was hard indeed. I said so to Gus, whose response was unequivocal: When the Kalmar Union began to dissolve, Erik Gyldenstierne, Kristina’s grandfather, had a choice to make. He sided with Sweden. The time has finally come for a hundred such choices. Each commingled noble clan will have to choose which fiefs to defend with its honor; their sons, which country to defend with their lives.

And why now finally?

Gustav slacked the reins and shouted speed to the team as we approached the citadel. He glanced at me and said, I retrieved you from your luckly lake’s top to afford you an answer. Gustav always had enigmatic answers.

Six years later in 1523, the year he sought my death, five clerics and five times as many proxied laymen offered him Sweden’s crown. No one was surprised that he took it, and those who remonstrated died.

*     *     *

We entered Tre Kroner, the regent’s castle, through its western gate. Years later, after I had acquainted myself with the mountaintop citadels of Germany and the moated fortresses of Denmark, I would smile to recall the ease with which we could glide even in perilous times into our archipelagic compromise of stronghold and chateau. One needed not scale jagged peaks in order to damage Sweden’s heartland. The massive eastern parapets of the Stures’ slott were buttressed against assaults from the Baltic. But from the south and west, The Three Crowns easily availed itself of the quarrelsome intercourse of Swedes.

Gustav and I were escorted from the gatehouse to our family’s chambers. These accommodations were not walled rooms but mere billets inside the inner ward’s secondary hall. Herr Sten hung tapestries as partitions to accommodate magnates, suitors and foreign ambassadors. Each enclosure’s dimensions could thus be tailored to fit the regard Herr Sten held for its guests. The number of tapestries that surrounded each party furnished an arithmetic of aspiration, a geometry of privilege. As a child I considered those numbers measures of virtue. To this day I recall