THE STURE MURDERS
In 1567, King Erik XIV went on a bloody rampage, but what was the story behind this tale of madness and murder?
On 24 May 1567, a king crept from his opulent chambers and made his way through the magniicent castle that was his home, a knife clutched in his hand. Hours later, six people lay dead, among them three members of one of Sweden’s most noble families and the deranged monarch’s loyal tutor. It was a day that changed the life of Erik XIV of Sweden, and the country he ruled, forever.
Erik was born in 1533 to Gustav I, the King of Sweden, and Catherine of Saxe-Lauenburg, who died when her son was still in infancy. As heir to the throne Erik proved a popular and intelligent young man, but he was always wilful. He knew his own mind on all matters, even attempting without any success to court the future Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Unsurprisingly, when he came to the throne in 1560, Erik had big plans for the land he had inherited.
In Erik’s ambitious expansion plans, he saw Sweden as a superpower, dominating the Scandinavian and Baltic states. Although he didn’t live to see his ambitions become a reality, the policies that Erik put in place were in fact instrumental in cementing the Swedish crown’s dominance for years after his death. At home, Erik’s domestic upheavals were to prove controversial and he came into conlict with the ruling classes of Sweden, including members of his own family.
Erik’s plans to expand the reach of Sweden’s territory were not achievable unless he was willing to go to war, and Erik conirmed his reputation as an iron isted leader by leading his troops from the front. Established protocol in Sweden was for a Privy Council made up nobles to assume control of the country in the absence of the king, but the suspicious Erik didn’t like this idea at all. Instead, he dismissed the Privy Councillors and awarded controlling powers to his most trusted advisor and long-time secretary, Jöran Persson. Not content with this radical move, he dismissed all nobles who held positions in the high court and gave Persson the ofice of senior prosecutor too. This meant that Erik and Persson, who had once been his father’s secretary too, now held sole sway over the nation and between them, they went to war on the nobility.
Of course, war didn’t come cheap. As the country’scoffers began to feel the strain of paying for his pricey military forays, Erik turned to the nobility to meet the cost. Why should they, they asked, when he had dismissed them from ofice without a moment’s thought? Always suspicious, Erik convinced himself that the reluctant courtiers were unwilling to part with their cash not because they were disgruntled with their treatment, but because they were traitors. Hundreds of people were dragged into the torture chambers of Sweden’s castles to face interrogation, with over 300 people sentenced to death in just ive years. Although most of these sentences were never carried out, the damage to the king’s reputation was immense.
Among those sentenced to death was one man whom Erik loathed above all others. He was Nils Svantesson Sture and though he had been loyal to the king and fought tirelessly on his behalf, Erik was convinced that Sture’s intentions were evil. The suspicious monarch often looked to astrologers for guidance and when one warned of evil inluences close to the throne who intended to snatch the crown, Erik’s eye settled on Sture.
Could this be the man, he wondered, who might shake his hand while stabbing him in the back?
Eventually, Erik’s paranoia about Sture became so overwhelming and consuming that he had the loyal courtier arrested for his imagined conspiracy to usurp the Swedish throne. Sture might have fought for his country, Erik pointed out, but he had been wounded and in the view of the increasing mentally deranged king, this was enough to raise a question mark over his loyalty. At worst the wounding might have been deliberate. At best, Sture was not it for duty but either way, he was not about to depose the king.
Sture became just the latest in a long line of nobles to be sentenced to death. In fact, death sentences were normal in Sweden in the 1560s, as torture could only be used on those who had already received a sentence of execution. Although the majority of those who were due to die saw their punishments commuted, Erik’s personal and entirely unreasonable hatred of Sture no doubt led the unfortunate noble to believe that he wouldn’t be quite so fortunate. In fact, he was in for a surprise and Erik did indeed reduce the sentence of death for Sture’s imagined transgressions down to one of public humiliation. The inluential, wealthy and powerful Sture was dragged from his prison and sat upon the back of a horse that had seen better days, a crown made of straw placed upon his head. This pitiful mockery of a king was then driven through the streets of Stockholm, the nation’s capital, before a crowd of thousands.
And then, out of nowhere, it seemed to be business as usual. Sture had no sooner endured his public humiliation than he was once again a trusted courtier of the king. Erik dispatched Sture off to Lorraine, where he was under instructions to discuss a possible marriage between the paranoid king and Princess Renata. The marriage never came to pass, but on the eve of Sture’s departure from Sweden, events took place that would change the path of his life and cut it devastatingly short.
Sture attended a farewell party that was thrown on his behalf by a group of disenfranchised nobles. What was discussed has been lost to history but Erik was certain that the attendees were formulating a conspiracy against him. He was particularly concerned to learn that Sture’s father, Svante Sture, had been present, for in his tormented mind this meant that both the old and young generations were ranked against him. It was a conspiracy that he had to cut off before it went any further.
With no wife, Erik had no heir and he was certain now that he had made a mistake in entrusting his marriage negotiations to Sture. After all, if Sture intended to stage a coup and claim the throne, the last thing he would want was an heir to complicate matters. Once Erik heard that the marriage negotiations in Lorraine had stalled, he thought it far more likely that Sture had deliberately scuppered them to protect his own ambitions.
While Sture was making his unsuccessful representations on behalf of Erik, the king was busy sanctioning yet more torture, this time of members of the royal household. One of the unfortunate victims was his own former loyal page, Gustaf Ribbing. At the height of his interrogation, when he was subject to the worst tortures of the royal dungeons, Ribbing was asked if Sture was conspiring against the king and, unsurprisingly, he said yes.
In fact, he said yes to every name that was suggested and added a few more for good measure. Among the list of supposed conspirators was Sture’s father and brother, as well as an assortment of other attendees at that ill-fated party. One by one they were dragged in to face interrogation and forced to confess to plots that existed only in the king’s fevered mind. When Sture returned from his failed mission to Lorraine, he found a prison cell waiting for him once more. Nils Svantesson Sture’s luck had finally run out.
The uproar from the ruling classes was immense and in May 1567, Erik summoned a meeting of the Riksdag of the Estates, Sweden’s ruling government body, to settle the conspiracies and the fate of the conspirators once and for all. Erik, it seemed, had had a change of heart.
Unbeknownst to some of those who had been invited to attend negotiations, they had been named as traitors by Gustaf Ribbing. As they made their way to the Riksdag with the hope of finally putting an end to the paranoia that had seized the court, they received invitations to rest and replenish themselves at Svarsjö Castle. There was no suggestion of any plot or punishment and perhaps they really believed that the mentally unstable king was enjoying a period of sanity.
On their arrival at Svarsjö Castle, the nobles discovered that they had been tricked. Rather than a friendly reception, they were placed under arrest and put on trial. Among those arrested were the imprisoned Sture’s father and brother, as well as others who were believed to be in conspiratorial league with the Sture family. Some of those who had received invites were fortunate to hear of the arrests before they arrived at the castle and they promptly changed their plans, narrowly avoiding a very gruesome fate.
The six nobles arrested on arrival at Svartsjö Castle were put on trial for a variety of charges relating to the supposed conspiracy against the king. The proof was a collection of circumstantial evidence, confessions extracted under torture and plain, old-fashioned gossip. Was there any truth in them? Who knows, but given the king’s by now out-of-control paranoia, that hardly mattered anyway. No evidence existed that would clear the names of the arrested men, and even if it had, it’s probably safe to say that Erik would not have been interested in hearing it. As far as he was concerned, these nobles were out to get him. Unsurprisingly, those who had been dragged along to face a trial were all sentenced to death. This time, however, it seemed highly likely that the sentence would be carried out.
When Sture’s mother, Martha Leijonhufvud, heard that her husband and two of her sons had been arrested, she and her daughter, Anne, hastened to Svartsjö. Here, Martha begged to be given an audience with Erik and tried to reach him via his mistress, Karin Månsdotter. Karin knew better than to get involved, and Martha and Anne were taken into custody, though they weren’t oficially arrested. Their status was grey at best, however, and when the prisoners were moved to Uppsala where the Riksdag would conirm the sentence of death, Martha and Anne were also taken with them.
It was at this point that a situation that was already bizarre turned downright crazy. Standing before the Riksdag on 16 May 1567, Erik XIV was clearly not a well man and his mental instability was obvious to all. He was seized by an attack of anxiety and, instead of giving a speech regarding the situation, collapsed in a nervous heap. Just one week later he wrote a letter to Svante Sture in which he conirmed that the charges of treason were to be set aside; the Sture family were forgiven once more. The king begged Svante Sture for forgiveness, kneeling before him to apologise.
By this point, of course, Sture had already been sentenced to death and spared twice, so he probably believed that freedom was just around the corner. It would be an easy mistake to make. Erik was like a spoiled child, always acting on emotional impulse and regretting it, never sure what he actually wanted.
Ironically, of course, all of this had the consequence of making his worst paranoid fantasies come true, and by now the country was turning against him.
Of course, as Erik’s fragile mental foundations crumbled away like chalk, those periods of mercy became shorter and shorter and though Sture had been pardoned, he remained in the king’s custody. Until he walked free from the dungeons, his life was in danger.
Finding the king in a deeply agitated state, his advisors prevailed upon him to take some time out and calm himself. While strolling in the grounds on 24 May however, he received word that his half-brother, John, had mustered a rebellion and intended to usurp the Swedish crown. The few threads of sanity that Erik XIV clung to now snapped. Faced with the loss of his throne, he was plunged into a white-hot rage. He returned to the castle, sought out Sture and stabbed him, leaving him for dead on the loor of his cell. Telling one of the jailers to inish the job, the murderous monarch next visited Svante, Sture’s father and once again fell to his knees, begging for forgiveness. Chillingly though, he told Svante that he would have to die too, for he could hardly be expected to forgive his son’s killer.
With horrifying calmness, Erik rose to his feet and left the room, making his way to the castle entrance. Here he told the guards to kill every prisoner and spare only the noble named Sten. Following his orders to the letter, they inished off Sture and his brother, Erik, as well as their father, Svante. Another pair of imprisoned nobles, Abraham Stenbock and Ivar Ivarsson also died that day on the order of the king. Two other prisoners named Sten Banér and Sten Eriksson were held in the castle that day. Faced with the men and an order to spare someone named Sten, the guards daren’t risk killing the wrong prisoner, so both survived.
And what of the king, who had vanished into the horizon? It was left to Erik’s tutor, Dionysius Beurreus, to muster a search party of guards and go out in search of his former pupil. A few days after the murder they tracked down the monarch, his sanity utterly shattered, roaming naked in the woods beside the castle. Seeing the search party, Erik issued an order to his guards to kill Beurreus and though the king was mad, he was still the king, so the guards complied and ran the tutor through. As Erik disappeared into the shelter of the trees, the court went into damage limitation. The murders were kept secret and each day food was taken down to the prisoners who lay dead, while their friends and families were still permitted to deliver messages for them.
On 27 May, three days after the murders, Erik was wandering in rags. He was returned to Stockholm where he met with his stepmother, Queen Dowager Catherine Stenbock. He confessed, and it was left to the queen to agree compensation for the bereaved families, as well as a posthumous pardon for the victims. Thanks to the machinations of Persson, the murders were legally recognised as executions, so Erik faced no punishment.
For the next six months, Erik was in a state of insanity and the country was ruled by the Privy Council. Though the king married Karin, when he recovered his sanity in 1567, Erik’s sentence was dismissed and he returned to power. He even committed another murder, stabbing his secretary, Mårten Helsing. Erik’s days were numbered and in 1568 he finally fell to a coup led by his half-brother, years until one of the murderous king’s enemies finally got to him. Erik XIV died after eating soup tainted with arsenic in 1577, his insanity finally at an end.
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Just how does a king deal with a romantic rival?
Karin Månsdotter became Erik’s mistress in 1565 and they eventually married two years later, but the king wasn’t his queen’s first love. Gossip and popular myth had it that one of her admirers in particular met a murderous end indeed.
Before her days as a royal mistress, Karin was rumoured to have enjoyed a relationship with a soldier named Maximilian. In fact, that affair was so serious that it resulted in a betrothal.
Of course, that engagement had to end when Karin became the official mistress of the monarch.
Although officially the affair was over, Karin wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to Maximilian and when he was found secreted in the palace, Erik was unsurprisingly furious. rumours spread that he had the unfortunate man murdered and cast into the icy Swedish waters, never to be seen again.
Karin, however, escaped censure from her royal lover and though she married him at the height of his madness, she was always popular at court. although she alone seemed able to calm him in his worst moments, she could do nothing to prevent the Sture murders, yet she remained utterly faithful and devoted to her love.
When Erik’s brothers mounted a coup that dethroned him, it was Karin who appealed for mercy on her husband’s behalf. his crimes were too great, of course, and she was thrown into prison alongside him while the couple’s children, Sigrid and Gustav, joined them later. Life in jail for the couple was difficult and Karin was sure that her husband was appraised of all his wrongdoings, frequently berating him for the crimes that had seen them denied their freedom. they were allowed to remain together and Karin actually gave birth to two children during her imprisonment, both of whom died.
Karin and the children were taken from the prison in 1573 and placed under house arrest. Following Erik’s death four years later, his wife and offspring were finally given their freedom.
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Even at the height of his paranoia, there was one man Erik trusted.
No matter how deep his madness and how rampant his paranoia, Erik XIV always trusted one man above all others. that man was Jöran Persson, who joined the court in 1555 as secretary to Erik’s father. he was smart, cunning and nobody was in the least bit surprised when he maintained his position once Erik became king.
During Erik’s absences from the kingdom, Persson enjoyed unparalleled powers and influence in Sweden. he decided on the sentencing of prisoners, presided over their executions and became deeply unpopular among the noble classes as well as the public.
A 21st century history of Sweden named Persson as “colossally repulsive” and he sat at the head of a network of spies who seemed to exist purely to fuel Erik’s overwhelming paranoia. The intelligence that came to him was interpreted by Persson before being passed to the king and, as a result of reports made by these spies, over two hundred people were tried and put to death. It was Persson who had the audacity to convince the Privy Council that the Sture murders were actually executions. he gave an eloquent argument to the nobles who formed the council, and by the end of it, they were under no doubt that the victims were guilty of treason. therefore, they were due to be executed anyway: Erik and his guards had merely saved the state the trouble.
With his love of astrology and rumours of witchcraft attached to both Persson and his mother, the king’s advisor become a dark and feared figure in Sweden. as long as Erik reigned he seemed untouchable, yet when the mad king fell, Persson’s enemies were finally able to strike.
Persson was tried for his role in the suppression of the noble classes and found guilty by a court of those self same nobles. He died in September 1568 in front of a crowd of thousands who gathered to watch him being broken on the wheel and beheaded. Sentenced to die along her son, Persson’s mother fatally flung herself beneath the hooves of a horse, robbing the executioner of another victim.
By Catherine Curzon in "History of Royals", UK, issue 16, June 2017, excerpts pp.54-59. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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