November 23, 2021 • 34 mins
Throughout history, there have been stories of royals going mad. But very few kings have committed murder in their fits of insanity.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Before we begin on the podcast today, just a quick
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we're over on Patreon, Patreon dot com, slash Noble Blood Tales,
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Right now, I'm going through the old c W show
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Rain episode by episode, So join the Patreon if that
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We had totes. They might have sold out, but all
that's very exciting. And then one more announcement, I am
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(01:08):
be really exciting. So, without further ado, here's the episode
m Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion
is advised. It was a spring morning when a stranger
(01:32):
appeared straggling out of the woods on the outskirts of
the small Swedish village of odin Sala. The man was filthy,
wearing peasant clothes that fit poorly. They looked borrowed or stolen. Still,
even though the man looked like a beggar, there was
something familiar in his countenance, his blue eyes, his long,
(01:55):
red blonde beard. A whisper carried itself through odin Sala
faster than a horse could run. This stranger wasn't a
vagabond or a peasant. He was King Eric the four,
the King of Sweden. Eric had been missing for three days,
ever since he ran off into the woods after what
(02:17):
had happened at Uppsala Castle. Had the King been raving
like a madman lost in the woods for three days straight,
or had he disguised himself as a peasant on purpose,
trying to invent a new life for himself. For years,
there had been rumors that the King's behavior was verging
(02:37):
on erratic that he was prone to mental instability. But
in May of fifteen sixty seven, those rumors would reach
a crisis point. King Eric would stain his soul with
murder and there would be no coming back for him.
Somehow word got to the capital that the king had
(02:58):
appeared in odin Sala, and the king was brought back
to Stockholm, where he was bathed, stripped out of his
rough peasant clothing, and redressed in the finery befitting of
a monarch. He still wasn't talking much sense. His servants
and advisers were scared to speak with him. Instead, they
brought in his stepmother and then his mistress to help
(03:21):
soothe him, to try to get him to explain what
had happened. All Eric could do was beg for forgiveness. Please,
please forgive me, he said, over and over again. Heads
of state caused people's deaths all the time. Wars are
fought in their names, sentences carried out for their justice,
(03:44):
but those deaths are indirect. In his madness, King Eric
would go one step further. He had imprisoned a group
of nobles, a powerful rival family, on largely false charges,
but merely containing them wouldn't soothe the nagging voice in
Eric's head, the paranoia and fear that had calcified into
(04:08):
a cancer. On May sixty seven, Eric went into the
cell where the nobleman Neil Store was being kept. Niels
was on his knees in prayer, already King. Eric raised
a dagger and stabbed him, and then Eric went to
(04:28):
the next cell over where Niel's father was imprisoned. Eric
raised the knife again and brought it down, whispering the
entire time, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I'm Danis Schwartz,
and this is noble blood. The trope of royal madness
(04:57):
is common and recurring, both in his dry and in
popular culture. Mad seems to be one of those words
that's used, like eccentric, to provide a euphemistic sheen to
mental illness when someone is wealthy or powerful. Princess Alexandra
of Bavaria believed she had swallowed a grand piano made
(05:19):
of glass, and that it remained intact inside her, threatening
to shatter at any moment. Charles the Fourth in France
was said to have suffered from the glass delusion as well,
believing that his own body parts were made of glass
instead of flesh. The stories of madness are seemingly endless,
and I've covered a fair share of them on this
(05:40):
podcast already. There's George the Third in England, who babbled
for days straight, Ludwig the Second in the hills of
southern Germany, who spoke to portraits as though they were
his dining companions, Carlotta, the ill fated Empress of Mexico,
and of course there's the Spanish princess known to popular
his story predominantly as Juana la Loca. Inbreeding is a
(06:05):
favorite armchair explanation for the prevalence of royal madness that
the family trees of Europe were so entangled that mental
illness as a genetic trait spun its away around royal
families the same way the prominent Habsburg chin did, or
the way hemophilia would after Queen Victoria. A few writers
(06:26):
throughout history have suggested that it actually might be the
pressures and privileges of being a royal itself that causes
a mind to teeter away from sanity. It's a theory,
and not a very scientific one, mind you, known as
Caesar madness, the notion that unchecked power could give rise
(06:46):
to paranoia and megalomania. But whatever the cause of the
madness to come, there weren't any clues that it would
emerge at all. When Eric was a young prince, Eric
was the oldest son of King Gustav the First, sometimes
known as Gustav Vasa in many ways. Gustavasa is considered
to be the father of modern Sweden. It was under
(07:09):
his authority that Sweden broke from the Catholic Church and
began to establish itself in earnest as a Protestant power.
Eric was an excellent student, a quick study in languages, history,
and math. His mother had died when he was still
an infant, and his father had two more sons, John
and Charles, by his second wife. Eric would be tutored
(07:34):
alongside his younger brother John, the pair of them wheedling
each other, trying to show off for their esteemed tutor,
the French Calvinist scholar Dionysus Bureaus. In addition to the
basic school subjects that one might have expected a young
prince to study, Eric also learned astrology, a fundamental tool
(07:55):
in any monarchs arsenal in the sixteenth century, when it
came to trying to predict the future. There was one
astrological prediction that's stuck with Eric for his entire life,
that he would be undone by a fair headed man.
A worrying prediction and also not a very specific one,
(08:18):
considering that our young prince was living in Sweden, where
fair headed men are pretty much a krona a dozen.
The sense that his crown might be taken away from
him was the central concern in Eric's life. One of
the most important things he could do in terms of
(08:39):
solidifying his power was making an advantageous marriage. Eric set
his sight on Queen Elizabeth, the first in England. His
requests for her hand in marriage were numerous. He started
before she even ascended to the throne, back when she
was just the sister of the Catholic Queen Mary, but
then he continued asking after Elizabeth became a Queen of
(09:03):
England in her own right. Eric sent multiple envoys to Elizabeth,
and he sent along a beautiful, full length portrait of
himself wearing a dashing orange outfit that I imagine he
believed would send Elizabeth swooning. After two unsuccessful ambassador missions
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to secure the marriage, Eric sent his younger half brother, John,
a Duke to England to plead his case in person.
Elizabeth had been stringing Eric along in the most polite terms,
never outright rejecting him, just in case his proposal might
serve a useful purpose when it came to leverage later on.
(09:45):
But eventually, even diplomatic Elizabeth had to be straightforward, writing
perhaps one of the most scorchingly devastating letters in history.
Translated from the Latin, it reads, A letter truly yours,
both in the writing and sentiment, was given to us
(10:05):
on December by your very dear brother, the Duke of Finland.
And while we perceive therefore in the zeal and love
of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in
part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene
Highness with the same kind of affection, And that indeed
(10:26):
does not happen because we doubt in any way of
your love and honor. But as often we have testified,
both in words and in writing, that we have never
yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.
We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that
(10:46):
you be pleased to set a limit to your love
that it advanced not beyond the laws of friendship for
the present, nor disregard them in the future. I have
always given both to your brother, who is a most
excellent prince and deservedly very dear to us, and also
to your ambassador. Likewise the same answer, with scarcely any
(11:10):
variation of the words, that we do not conceive in
our heart to take a husband, but highly commend the
single life, and hope that your serene Highness will not
longer spend time in waiting for us. Of course, Elizabeth
referring to herself as we and us is a prime
example of using the royal we. She's only referring to herself.
(11:33):
But even after this letter, Eric still wasn't deterred. He
decided to make the arrangements to go visit England in
person himself. Surely if Elizabeth saw him, his handsome long
beard in the Swedish style, his excellent fashion, surely then
she would understand just how excellent of a match the
(11:56):
pair of them would make. Luckily for Elizabeth, Eirik's plans
were curtailed. As he was making final arrangements to travel
to England, Eirik's father died, which meant that he Eirik
was now the king of Sweden. Eric took the regnal
(12:18):
name Eirik the fourteenth, even though there had not been
thirteen previous king Erik's of Sweden. He took that number
from the semi fictitious History of Sweden written by Olaus Magnus,
which traced the glorious Swedish monarchy back to Magog, the
grandson of Noah. So, as you can imagine, it's closer
(12:41):
to mythology than fact. But it's great pr not to
be just the seventh Eirik, as was more likely, but
the fourteenth merely the next in a long and illustrious lineage.
One of his first moves as the newly crowned King
Erik the fourteenth was to summon representatives of all of
(13:02):
the estates of Sweden together in a Riksdag, a legislative
body almost like a parliament. The purpose of Eric's political
move was simple, to curtail the authority of his two
half brothers, the royal Dukes, and to minimize the role
of the nobility altogether. Instead of surrounding himself with the
usual quadre of noblemen, Eric selected one man, a commoner
(13:27):
named Gore and person who would go on to become
his closest adviser, and some would argue the Machiolvellian political
presence behind Eric's entire reign. Eric had some reason to
be suspicious of noblemen. His half brother John had married
a Polish princess without Eric's permission, which gave John powerful leverage.
(13:49):
That was the sort of thing that could give someone
the power to overthrow Eric and to make matters worse
for the king. He was still unmarried, though he had
an number of illegitimate children by mistresses. Bastards did no
good when it came to having an heir to the throne.
It makes a monarch all the more unstable if he
(14:10):
can't establish a clear cut dynasty. Eric tried proposing not
just to Queen Elizabeth, but to princesses and queens all
over Europe, including to Elizabeth's rival and cousin, Mary, Queen
of Scots, all to no avail. The only woman that
Eric seemed to be able to establish any real relationship
(14:32):
with was a Swedish commoner, a woman named Karen Man's daughter.
Karen was the daughter of a corporal, and the way
the legend goes, she was selling nuts in a Christmas
marketplace when the king, strolling through town, saw her and
couldn't look away. The selling nuts in a marketplace story
(14:52):
is almost certainly fictitious. More grounded sources say that she
was a servant in the household of the king's face
ever at court musician, and that she was serving the
king as a waitress while he was drinking with his friend.
But however they met, the King was besotted. She became
the King's mistress and was granted a room at court,
(15:13):
a significant wardrobe and servants. It was a small scandal,
the King making such a show about a woman with
such little pedigree. She must be a witch, people said
around the palace. How else could you explain how entranced
the King seemed by her all of a sudden. According
to one story, Karen Man's daughter was actually engaged to
(15:36):
another man before she caught the king's eye. She wisely
dumped her fiancee, but he reappeared sneaking into the palace
after Karen was elevated to her new chambers. He begged
her to come run away with him. The ex fiancee
was caught and brought before the King, who sentenced him
to be executed. But even if Karen made the King
(16:04):
incredibly jealous, when they were together, she seemed to bring
out the best in him, calming him down, grounding him.
I've noticed that people tend to write about Eric like
he's King Kong. In one famous portrait of the King
and Karen, she's an angelic figure with long blonde hair,
wearing a white dress, leaning over Eric's right shoulder, while
(16:26):
the scheming Goren person hovers over the King's left shoulder,
a symbolic angel and devil of the King's decision making.
It was around this time, in fifteen sixty three that
the King's mental illness began to become more pronounced. He
would make arbitrary decisions, snap at people, become randomly violent,
(16:50):
and this period was marked by a profound paranoia that
the nobles were plotting against him, especially the nobles in
the powerful Steward family. The Store family patriarch was a
man named Savante Stenson Store. His wife, Martha, was the
sister of the King's second wife, the mother of Eric's
(17:11):
half brothers and apologies in advance for this incredibly confusing
family tree. Martha was also the aunt of the former
king's third wife, which, if you're constructing the mental map
in your head, means that, yes, the king married a
woman who died, married another woman who died, and then
(17:32):
married that second woman's niece. The details of the family
tree don't matter as much as the larger fact that
the Store family was powerful and deeply entrenched in Swedish nobility,
and Savante's oldest son, Niels, was their shining golden boy.
The golden boy part was literal. Niels had light blonde hair.
(17:55):
Eric had never forgotten the prediction that he would be
usurped by a blond man. He became convinced that it
was Niel's steward. In fifteen sixty six, Eric had Nail's
arrested and accused of treason for a vague and all
but made up claim that he was quote neglecting his
(18:15):
duties by not having some peasants properly working at the
fortress port of Verin. Niels was forced to stand trial
before the High Court, and with Gore on Person standing
as chief prosecutor, Niels was found guilty and sentenced to death.
(18:37):
Sentencing him to death sounds a little bit more dramatic
than it actually was. When Eric became king, he replaced
most of the nobles on the High Court with commoners
who were loyal to him, and of course he installed
his right hand man, Gore in Person as chief prosecutor.
In the five years between fifteen sixty two and fifteen
(18:58):
sixty seven, the High Court sentenced over three hundred people
to death, but almost every one of those sentences were commuted.
Torture was only allowed to be used on people who
were already sentenced to death, so that sentence was something
of a loophole. Sentencing someone to death meant that you
could torture them to get whatever information you wanted out
(19:21):
of them, and then you would naturally commute the sentence.
So Niels to her sentence of death was almost immediately
reduced to merely humiliation. Nils was forced to wear a
crown made of straw, and he was paraded through the
streets of Stockholm in a broken down carriage so that
passers by could shout and throw things at him. During
(19:44):
his procession, Nils was still bleeding from torture. The idea,
insofar as King Eric had an idea, was to so
humiliate Neil Store that no one would ever see Neil's
as a plausible rival again, and Nils would also sir
as an example to the other nobles who might want
to undermine the king. The idea backfired completely. Neil Store's
(20:08):
punishment only further reminded the nobles how irrational and arbitrary
the King could be. It united the nobles against him.
The king probably sensed that the Store family was whispering
and having secret meetings behind his back. At one point,
the King sent Neil Store post humiliation to try to
(20:29):
negotiate a marriage treaty with Princess Nada of Lorraine. Like
all of the kings would be marriages. It failed, but
the King got wind that maybe Nils had sabotaged him
on purpose, and so gathering evidence against the nobles. The
King announced that there was going to be a Reeks
dog in Upsala, which naturally all of the nobles would
(20:52):
have to attend. As they were making their way from
Stockholm to Upsala, Eric invited several prominent nobles to joy
in him at spart Show Castle. They came expecting to
be hosted by the King and his court. Instead, it
was in ambush. The nobles were arrested and tried before
(21:12):
the High Court. Those who fell for the trap were
Neil Store's brother Eric Store, Nils father Spante Store, Abraham
Sen Book, Stan Banner, Ivor Iverson, and Stan Ericsson. The
Reichstag was postponed. The ambush noblemen were sentenced to death
and sent to be imprisoned at Upsala Castle. A few
(21:35):
days later, Neil Store was arrested in Lorraine and brought
to Psala Castle to join his brother and father. The
delayed Reichstag eventually assembled, although for obvious reasons, it included
a smaller representative of nobles than normal. Eric was planning
(21:58):
on getting the Reichstag to discuss the sentencing of the
accused nobles, but when he stood up to speak before
the assembly, he realized he had lost the notes he
had prepared for his speech. Fumbling, he wasn't able to
speak at all. Meanwhile, Savante's wife, Martha, the sister of
the former queen, was desperate to try to figure out
(22:20):
how to get her family out of this terrible, unjust situation.
She and her daughter Anna came to Sparta to try
to get an audience with the king, but they were
turned away, not just rejected, but placed under house arrest
with guards in the nearby village. Martha kept trying to
figure out what was going on. She begged Karen Man's daughter,
(22:43):
the voice of reason in the King's ear, to intervene
on her behalf to ask the king to release the
stores who hadn't done anything wrong. Martha eventually made her
way Topsala Castle and met with Karen, who was able
to offer her reassurances that Eric promised her that he
wouldn't hurt the prisoners, but the king's promise didn't seem
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to mean much. The King began acting erratically, stalking up
and down the hallways of Upsala Castle where the prisoners
were being kept, sometimes seeming angry, sometimes apologizing. At one point,
the King entered Sponte's door's cell, where he fell to
his knees begging for Sponte's forgiveness. I promise, the King said,
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this will all be handled and there will be a
full reconciliation. There wasn't. On May twenty fourth, fifteen sixty seven,
in what might be characterized as a man estate, the
King ran into the chamber where they were keeping Niel's stour.
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The King had a dagger drawn when he saw Niels,
he shouted, so there thou art thou Trader. Allegedly, Niels
was reading a prayer book at the time. He had
only moments from when he saw the king coming at
him to proclaim his innocence to pray for forgiveness, but
the King ignored him. King Eric stabbed Nail's store until
(24:13):
he was dead. Eric's hand still shaking, still covered in blood,
but still gripping the knife. Eric stood and went next
door into the room where Spante's door Nails as father
was imprisoned. The King fell to his knees before the
man for the second time, while Spante slowly absorbed what
(24:33):
had happened, the shouting he had heard the king before him,
covered in blood the knife. I'm sorry, the King said,
I'm so sorry, but I can never expect to you
to be able to forgive me for killing your son,
And then before Svante could react, King Eric stabbed him
as well. Leaving the room, Eric let the bloody dagger
(24:57):
fall to his side, but he kept it in his hand.
He turned to the head guard, a royal provost marshal,
kill all of the other prisoners he ordered, except Harsten.
The guards obliged. Niels and Spante's store were already dead.
But the guards killed the remaining noblemen imprisoned in Upsala Castle.
(25:19):
Two men were spared, Sten Axelsson and Sten Ericsson, because
they were both named Sten, and none of the guards
were sure which of them the king had been referring to.
The king wandered outside the castle, still manic, covered in blood,
holding the dagger. His old tutor, Dionysus Barris, found him
(25:40):
and tried to calm the king down, but the king
was long gone. He shoved off his tutor. Kill him too,
he said to the guards, and they obliged. From there
the king wandered into the woods, where he disappeared for
three days, only to reappear later dressed as a peasant
in a nearby village. The guards at Uppsala were ordered
(26:06):
to keep the deaths a secret, and so they still
stood guard and still received food deliveries and gifts from
the prisoners families, as if there were still men in
the cells. It's likely that the Reichstag in session didn't
know on Ma when Gore in Person arranged for them
to sign to the fact the nobles had been traders
(26:27):
and should be sentenced to death, that they were all
already dead. Person was covering the king's tracks, retroactively turning
the murders into executions. After the king was brought back
to Stockholm, no one dared speak to him or hold
an audience with him. It was only the king's final stepmother,
(26:48):
his father's third wife, who was brave enough to approach him.
She was the first person to be granted an audience.
Upon seeing the dowager Queen, the cousin of several of
the men who had been killed, Eric fell to his
knees and wept. He begged her for forgiveness and began
working with her immediately on establishing some sort of settlement
(27:10):
for the families of the men. The two Stints who
had been spared were released, and Sfante's wife Martha soon
arrived to help negotiate the reconciliation. The king agreed that
there had been a quote venomous person who had advised
him to do the executions, meaning really they were all
(27:30):
the fault of gore on Person. That would be enough
later on for the senators who would later be appointed
to hold power. As Eric's faculties continued to slip, gore
on Person would be arrested and found guilty of percolation.
And perjury. Although the senators wouldn't execute him, they would
merely imprison him in case the king recovered his senses.
(27:53):
But for the time being, Eric was still the king,
and whether it was madness or love, he turned all
of his attention to his mistress, Karen Man's daughter, doing
everything he could to marry her legitimately and to legitimize
the two children that he already had by her, even
though she was a full commoner. The two were married
(28:16):
morganatically in secret December nine, fifteen sixty seven, and then
married officially in the next year. Karen had warned the
dowager Queen that Eric was planning on killing his two stepbrothers,
the Dukes, and perhaps wisely, they both stayed away from
the wedding, but Eric and his half brother John were
(28:36):
able to reconcile. Eric forgave him for any past transgressions
as long as he recognized that the marriage between the
King and Karen was fully legitimate, and as long as
John honored their son Gustavus as the next king. John agreed,
although I wonder if an eye roll was implicit the
(29:00):
King's attempts to legitimize his commoner wife, whom he elevated
to queen with the name Cuterina, Madnu's daughter would be
the final nail in the coffin of his reputation. Though
Karen was kind and I'm sure people liked her as
a person, she was a commoner, a bar wench. It
was as sure a sign of lunacy as anything the
(29:23):
King had done trying to pass her off as a
rightful queen. For her part, Karen seemed aware of the
tricky position that the king had put her in, and
she was more than aware of the public's feelings towards her.
In a letter to the King's sisters, her new sisters
in law, she referred to herself not as queen, but
(29:43):
as Eric's quote chosen queen language that couches herself with humility,
a phrase that seems to imply, yes, I also know
that this is a little out of the ordinary. After
the wedding, Eric issued a circular to be disturbed me
did among the people giving thinks that he had been
delivered from the assaults of the devil, saying, in short,
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that he was no longer mad. The problem with the writing, however,
was that madness was visible in every sentence. It was
finally time for his brothers to depose him, which they
did fairly easily. The king won two victories against the rebels,
but by September of fifteen sixty eight they captured Stockholm,
(30:30):
and King Eric surrendered both his crown and Gore in person.
John was declared to be King John the Third, and
he basically immediately ordered that Gore in person be executed
a very slow death by torture and then eventually beheading.
The former King Eric was imprisoned alongside his beloved commoner
(30:53):
wife Karen in a series of castles. The only known
portrait we have of Karen, the first commoner Queen of Sweden,
is from this period. It's a scribble of her that
the king did a sketch while in prison. Karen and
the King had two more children, who died as infants
in the terrible conditions of captivity. After that, the new
(31:16):
king kept Karen imprisoned separately to prevent her from having
more children who might become a threat to the new
royal line. In his diary, Eric wrote, they took my
wife from me. Eric spent two more years imprisoned alone
before he died in autopsy centuries later confirmed what had
(31:36):
long been rumored he had been poisoned by arsenic. According
to legend, the arsenic came in his final meal of
peace soup. In the end, it was a fair haired
man who deposed him. His brother John was blonde. That's
(31:59):
the sad story worry of Eric, King of Sweden. But
keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about
what happened to Karen Man's daughter and their children. After
the King's death, Karen Man's daughter was released from imprisonment.
(32:21):
No longer seen as any real threat, she was given
an estate in Finland where she was allowed to live
for the rest of her life, and she was well liked.
They're making friends, especially among the peasantry. When there would
be a peasant rebellion years later, they wouldn't plunder her estate.
Karen and Eric's daughter, SIGRed, became a lady in waiting
(32:42):
to the new King's daughter her cousin, and she would
eventually marry two Swedish noblemen. Karen and Eric's son, however,
would have a much more challenging life. Though secret had
been allowed to stay with Karen in prison, their son Gustavus,
was taken from her, sent to be educated by Jesuits
in Poland. There's only one confirmed meeting of Karen getting
(33:06):
to see her son again, in fifteen ninety five in Estonia.
Gustavus had become a Catholic. He didn't recognize his mother,
and he had forgotten how to speak Swedish. She only
knew it was her son at all because she recognized
his birthmarks. He was poor, wearing ragged clothes working as
(33:26):
a mercenary. Karen did her best to try to give
her son money to try to provide for him, to
try to persuade the Swedish king to allow her son
to return to his home country, but the government refused.
Gustavus was banished for life. It was too big of
a risk to have the son of a deposed king
in the country. Gustavus remained a vagabond, dying alone in
(33:51):
Central Russia in sixteen o seven. Noble Blood is a
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz.
Executive producers include Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
(34:14):
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(00:47):
company called common Grounds, and it's a pilgrimage where we're
talking about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, which I'm just like
absolutely thrilled to. There's a link in the episode description
if you're interested. I think there might still be a
few slots left. So if you're interested in joining me
and traveling throughout England and talking about Mary Shelley and
Frankenstein this spring, yeah, look into that. I think that'll
(01:08):
be really exciting. So, without further ado, here's the episode
m Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion
is advised. It was a spring morning when a stranger
(01:32):
appeared straggling out of the woods on the outskirts of
the small Swedish village of odin Sala. The man was filthy,
wearing peasant clothes that fit poorly. They looked borrowed or stolen. Still,
even though the man looked like a beggar, there was
something familiar in his countenance, his blue eyes, his long,
(01:55):
red blonde beard. A whisper carried itself through odin Sala
faster than a horse could run. This stranger wasn't a
vagabond or a peasant. He was King Eric the four,
the King of Sweden. Eric had been missing for three days,
ever since he ran off into the woods after what
(02:17):
had happened at Uppsala Castle. Had the King been raving
like a madman lost in the woods for three days straight,
or had he disguised himself as a peasant on purpose,
trying to invent a new life for himself. For years,
there had been rumors that the King's behavior was verging
(02:37):
on erratic that he was prone to mental instability. But
in May of fifteen sixty seven, those rumors would reach
a crisis point. King Eric would stain his soul with
murder and there would be no coming back for him.
Somehow word got to the capital that the king had
(02:58):
appeared in odin Sala, and the king was brought back
to Stockholm, where he was bathed, stripped out of his
rough peasant clothing, and redressed in the finery befitting of
a monarch. He still wasn't talking much sense. His servants
and advisers were scared to speak with him. Instead, they
brought in his stepmother and then his mistress to help
(03:21):
soothe him, to try to get him to explain what
had happened. All Eric could do was beg for forgiveness. Please,
please forgive me, he said, over and over again. Heads
of state caused people's deaths all the time. Wars are
fought in their names, sentences carried out for their justice,
(03:44):
but those deaths are indirect. In his madness, King Eric
would go one step further. He had imprisoned a group
of nobles, a powerful rival family, on largely false charges,
but merely containing them wouldn't soothe the nagging voice in
Eric's head, the paranoia and fear that had calcified into
(04:08):
a cancer. On May sixty seven, Eric went into the
cell where the nobleman Neil Store was being kept. Niels
was on his knees in prayer, already King. Eric raised
a dagger and stabbed him, and then Eric went to
(04:28):
the next cell over where Niel's father was imprisoned. Eric
raised the knife again and brought it down, whispering the
entire time, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I'm Danis Schwartz,
and this is noble blood. The trope of royal madness
(04:57):
is common and recurring, both in his dry and in
popular culture. Mad seems to be one of those words
that's used, like eccentric, to provide a euphemistic sheen to
mental illness when someone is wealthy or powerful. Princess Alexandra
of Bavaria believed she had swallowed a grand piano made
(05:19):
of glass, and that it remained intact inside her, threatening
to shatter at any moment. Charles the Fourth in France
was said to have suffered from the glass delusion as well,
believing that his own body parts were made of glass
instead of flesh. The stories of madness are seemingly endless,
and I've covered a fair share of them on this
(05:40):
podcast already. There's George the Third in England, who babbled
for days straight, Ludwig the Second in the hills of
southern Germany, who spoke to portraits as though they were
his dining companions, Carlotta, the ill fated Empress of Mexico,
and of course there's the Spanish princess known to popular
his story predominantly as Juana la Loca. Inbreeding is a
(06:05):
favorite armchair explanation for the prevalence of royal madness that
the family trees of Europe were so entangled that mental
illness as a genetic trait spun its away around royal
families the same way the prominent Habsburg chin did, or
the way hemophilia would after Queen Victoria. A few writers
(06:26):
throughout history have suggested that it actually might be the
pressures and privileges of being a royal itself that causes
a mind to teeter away from sanity. It's a theory,
and not a very scientific one, mind you, known as
Caesar madness, the notion that unchecked power could give rise
(06:46):
to paranoia and megalomania. But whatever the cause of the
madness to come, there weren't any clues that it would
emerge at all. When Eric was a young prince, Eric
was the oldest son of King Gustav the First, sometimes
known as Gustav Vasa in many ways. Gustavasa is considered
to be the father of modern Sweden. It was under
(07:09):
his authority that Sweden broke from the Catholic Church and
began to establish itself in earnest as a Protestant power.
Eric was an excellent student, a quick study in languages, history,
and math. His mother had died when he was still
an infant, and his father had two more sons, John
and Charles, by his second wife. Eric would be tutored
(07:34):
alongside his younger brother John, the pair of them wheedling
each other, trying to show off for their esteemed tutor,
the French Calvinist scholar Dionysus Bureaus. In addition to the
basic school subjects that one might have expected a young
prince to study, Eric also learned astrology, a fundamental tool
(07:55):
in any monarchs arsenal in the sixteenth century, when it
came to trying to predict the future. There was one
astrological prediction that's stuck with Eric for his entire life,
that he would be undone by a fair headed man.
A worrying prediction and also not a very specific one,
(08:18):
considering that our young prince was living in Sweden, where
fair headed men are pretty much a krona a dozen.
The sense that his crown might be taken away from
him was the central concern in Eric's life. One of
the most important things he could do in terms of
(08:39):
solidifying his power was making an advantageous marriage. Eric set
his sight on Queen Elizabeth, the first in England. His
requests for her hand in marriage were numerous. He started
before she even ascended to the throne, back when she
was just the sister of the Catholic Queen Mary, but
then he continued asking after Elizabeth became a Queen of
(09:03):
England in her own right. Eric sent multiple envoys to Elizabeth,
and he sent along a beautiful, full length portrait of
himself wearing a dashing orange outfit that I imagine he
believed would send Elizabeth swooning. After two unsuccessful ambassador missions
(09:23):
to secure the marriage, Eric sent his younger half brother, John,
a Duke to England to plead his case in person.
Elizabeth had been stringing Eric along in the most polite terms,
never outright rejecting him, just in case his proposal might
serve a useful purpose when it came to leverage later on.
(09:45):
But eventually, even diplomatic Elizabeth had to be straightforward, writing
perhaps one of the most scorchingly devastating letters in history.
Translated from the Latin, it reads, A letter truly yours,
both in the writing and sentiment, was given to us
(10:05):
on December by your very dear brother, the Duke of Finland.
And while we perceive therefore in the zeal and love
of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in
part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene
Highness with the same kind of affection, And that indeed
(10:26):
does not happen because we doubt in any way of
your love and honor. But as often we have testified,
both in words and in writing, that we have never
yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.
We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that
(10:46):
you be pleased to set a limit to your love
that it advanced not beyond the laws of friendship for
the present, nor disregard them in the future. I have
always given both to your brother, who is a most
excellent prince and deservedly very dear to us, and also
to your ambassador. Likewise the same answer, with scarcely any
(11:10):
variation of the words, that we do not conceive in
our heart to take a husband, but highly commend the
single life, and hope that your serene Highness will not
longer spend time in waiting for us. Of course, Elizabeth
referring to herself as we and us is a prime
example of using the royal we. She's only referring to herself.
(11:33):
But even after this letter, Eric still wasn't deterred. He
decided to make the arrangements to go visit England in
person himself. Surely if Elizabeth saw him, his handsome long
beard in the Swedish style, his excellent fashion, surely then
she would understand just how excellent of a match the
(11:56):
pair of them would make. Luckily for Elizabeth, Eirik's plans
were curtailed. As he was making final arrangements to travel
to England, Eirik's father died, which meant that he Eirik
was now the king of Sweden. Eric took the regnal
(12:18):
name Eirik the fourteenth, even though there had not been
thirteen previous king Erik's of Sweden. He took that number
from the semi fictitious History of Sweden written by Olaus Magnus,
which traced the glorious Swedish monarchy back to Magog, the
grandson of Noah. So, as you can imagine, it's closer
(12:41):
to mythology than fact. But it's great pr not to
be just the seventh Eirik, as was more likely, but
the fourteenth merely the next in a long and illustrious lineage.
One of his first moves as the newly crowned King
Erik the fourteenth was to summon representatives of all of
(13:02):
the estates of Sweden together in a Riksdag, a legislative
body almost like a parliament. The purpose of Eric's political
move was simple, to curtail the authority of his two
half brothers, the royal Dukes, and to minimize the role
of the nobility altogether. Instead of surrounding himself with the
usual quadre of noblemen, Eric selected one man, a commoner
(13:27):
named Gore and person who would go on to become
his closest adviser, and some would argue the Machiolvellian political
presence behind Eric's entire reign. Eric had some reason to
be suspicious of noblemen. His half brother John had married
a Polish princess without Eric's permission, which gave John powerful leverage.
(13:49):
That was the sort of thing that could give someone
the power to overthrow Eric and to make matters worse
for the king. He was still unmarried, though he had
an number of illegitimate children by mistresses. Bastards did no
good when it came to having an heir to the throne.
It makes a monarch all the more unstable if he
(14:10):
can't establish a clear cut dynasty. Eric tried proposing not
just to Queen Elizabeth, but to princesses and queens all
over Europe, including to Elizabeth's rival and cousin, Mary, Queen
of Scots, all to no avail. The only woman that
Eric seemed to be able to establish any real relationship
(14:32):
with was a Swedish commoner, a woman named Karen Man's daughter.
Karen was the daughter of a corporal, and the way
the legend goes, she was selling nuts in a Christmas
marketplace when the king, strolling through town, saw her and
couldn't look away. The selling nuts in a marketplace story
(14:52):
is almost certainly fictitious. More grounded sources say that she
was a servant in the household of the king's face
ever at court musician, and that she was serving the
king as a waitress while he was drinking with his friend.
But however they met, the King was besotted. She became
the King's mistress and was granted a room at court,
(15:13):
a significant wardrobe and servants. It was a small scandal,
the King making such a show about a woman with
such little pedigree. She must be a witch, people said
around the palace. How else could you explain how entranced
the King seemed by her all of a sudden. According
to one story, Karen Man's daughter was actually engaged to
(15:36):
another man before she caught the king's eye. She wisely
dumped her fiancee, but he reappeared sneaking into the palace
after Karen was elevated to her new chambers. He begged
her to come run away with him. The ex fiancee
was caught and brought before the King, who sentenced him
to be executed. But even if Karen made the King
(16:04):
incredibly jealous, when they were together, she seemed to bring
out the best in him, calming him down, grounding him.
I've noticed that people tend to write about Eric like
he's King Kong. In one famous portrait of the King
and Karen, she's an angelic figure with long blonde hair,
wearing a white dress, leaning over Eric's right shoulder, while
(16:26):
the scheming Goren person hovers over the King's left shoulder,
a symbolic angel and devil of the King's decision making.
It was around this time, in fifteen sixty three that
the King's mental illness began to become more pronounced. He
would make arbitrary decisions, snap at people, become randomly violent,
(16:50):
and this period was marked by a profound paranoia that
the nobles were plotting against him, especially the nobles in
the powerful Steward family. The Store family patriarch was a
man named Savante Stenson Store. His wife, Martha, was the
sister of the King's second wife, the mother of Eric's
(17:11):
half brothers and apologies in advance for this incredibly confusing
family tree. Martha was also the aunt of the former
king's third wife, which, if you're constructing the mental map
in your head, means that, yes, the king married a
woman who died, married another woman who died, and then
(17:32):
married that second woman's niece. The details of the family
tree don't matter as much as the larger fact that
the Store family was powerful and deeply entrenched in Swedish nobility,
and Savante's oldest son, Niels, was their shining golden boy.
The golden boy part was literal. Niels had light blonde hair.
(17:55):
Eric had never forgotten the prediction that he would be
usurped by a blond man. He became convinced that it
was Niel's steward. In fifteen sixty six, Eric had Nail's
arrested and accused of treason for a vague and all
but made up claim that he was quote neglecting his
(18:15):
duties by not having some peasants properly working at the
fortress port of Verin. Niels was forced to stand trial
before the High Court, and with Gore on Person standing
as chief prosecutor, Niels was found guilty and sentenced to death.
(18:37):
Sentencing him to death sounds a little bit more dramatic
than it actually was. When Eric became king, he replaced
most of the nobles on the High Court with commoners
who were loyal to him, and of course he installed
his right hand man, Gore in Person as chief prosecutor.
In the five years between fifteen sixty two and fifteen
(18:58):
sixty seven, the High Court sentenced over three hundred people
to death, but almost every one of those sentences were commuted.
Torture was only allowed to be used on people who
were already sentenced to death, so that sentence was something
of a loophole. Sentencing someone to death meant that you
could torture them to get whatever information you wanted out
(19:21):
of them, and then you would naturally commute the sentence.
So Niels to her sentence of death was almost immediately
reduced to merely humiliation. Nils was forced to wear a
crown made of straw, and he was paraded through the
streets of Stockholm in a broken down carriage so that
passers by could shout and throw things at him. During
(19:44):
his procession, Nils was still bleeding from torture. The idea,
insofar as King Eric had an idea, was to so
humiliate Neil Store that no one would ever see Neil's
as a plausible rival again, and Nils would also sir
as an example to the other nobles who might want
to undermine the king. The idea backfired completely. Neil Store's
(20:08):
punishment only further reminded the nobles how irrational and arbitrary
the King could be. It united the nobles against him.
The king probably sensed that the Store family was whispering
and having secret meetings behind his back. At one point,
the King sent Neil Store post humiliation to try to
(20:29):
negotiate a marriage treaty with Princess Nada of Lorraine. Like
all of the kings would be marriages. It failed, but
the King got wind that maybe Nils had sabotaged him
on purpose, and so gathering evidence against the nobles. The
King announced that there was going to be a Reeks
dog in Upsala, which naturally all of the nobles would
(20:52):
have to attend. As they were making their way from
Stockholm to Upsala, Eric invited several prominent nobles to joy
in him at spart Show Castle. They came expecting to
be hosted by the King and his court. Instead, it
was in ambush. The nobles were arrested and tried before
(21:12):
the High Court. Those who fell for the trap were
Neil Store's brother Eric Store, Nils father Spante Store, Abraham
Sen Book, Stan Banner, Ivor Iverson, and Stan Ericsson. The
Reichstag was postponed. The ambush noblemen were sentenced to death
and sent to be imprisoned at Upsala Castle. A few
(21:35):
days later, Neil Store was arrested in Lorraine and brought
to Psala Castle to join his brother and father. The
delayed Reichstag eventually assembled, although for obvious reasons, it included
a smaller representative of nobles than normal. Eric was planning
(21:58):
on getting the Reichstag to discuss the sentencing of the
accused nobles, but when he stood up to speak before
the assembly, he realized he had lost the notes he
had prepared for his speech. Fumbling, he wasn't able to
speak at all. Meanwhile, Savante's wife, Martha, the sister of
the former queen, was desperate to try to figure out
(22:20):
how to get her family out of this terrible, unjust situation.
She and her daughter Anna came to Sparta to try
to get an audience with the king, but they were
turned away, not just rejected, but placed under house arrest
with guards in the nearby village. Martha kept trying to
figure out what was going on. She begged Karen Man's daughter,
(22:43):
the voice of reason in the King's ear, to intervene
on her behalf to ask the king to release the
stores who hadn't done anything wrong. Martha eventually made her
way Topsala Castle and met with Karen, who was able
to offer her reassurances that Eric promised her that he
wouldn't hurt the prisoners, but the king's promise didn't seem
(23:04):
to mean much. The King began acting erratically, stalking up
and down the hallways of Upsala Castle where the prisoners
were being kept, sometimes seeming angry, sometimes apologizing. At one point,
the King entered Sponte's door's cell, where he fell to
his knees begging for Sponte's forgiveness. I promise, the King said,
(23:27):
this will all be handled and there will be a
full reconciliation. There wasn't. On May twenty fourth, fifteen sixty seven,
in what might be characterized as a man estate, the
King ran into the chamber where they were keeping Niel's stour.
(23:49):
The King had a dagger drawn when he saw Niels,
he shouted, so there thou art thou Trader. Allegedly, Niels
was reading a prayer book at the time. He had
only moments from when he saw the king coming at
him to proclaim his innocence to pray for forgiveness, but
the King ignored him. King Eric stabbed Nail's store until
(24:13):
he was dead. Eric's hand still shaking, still covered in blood,
but still gripping the knife. Eric stood and went next
door into the room where Spante's door Nails as father
was imprisoned. The King fell to his knees before the
man for the second time, while Spante slowly absorbed what
(24:33):
had happened, the shouting he had heard the king before him,
covered in blood the knife. I'm sorry, the King said,
I'm so sorry, but I can never expect to you
to be able to forgive me for killing your son,
And then before Svante could react, King Eric stabbed him
as well. Leaving the room, Eric let the bloody dagger
(24:57):
fall to his side, but he kept it in his hand.
He turned to the head guard, a royal provost marshal,
kill all of the other prisoners he ordered, except Harsten.
The guards obliged. Niels and Spante's store were already dead.
But the guards killed the remaining noblemen imprisoned in Upsala Castle.
(25:19):
Two men were spared, Sten Axelsson and Sten Ericsson, because
they were both named Sten, and none of the guards
were sure which of them the king had been referring to.
The king wandered outside the castle, still manic, covered in blood,
holding the dagger. His old tutor, Dionysus Barris, found him
(25:40):
and tried to calm the king down, but the king
was long gone. He shoved off his tutor. Kill him too,
he said to the guards, and they obliged. From there
the king wandered into the woods, where he disappeared for
three days, only to reappear later dressed as a peasant
in a nearby village. The guards at Uppsala were ordered
(26:06):
to keep the deaths a secret, and so they still
stood guard and still received food deliveries and gifts from
the prisoners families, as if there were still men in
the cells. It's likely that the Reichstag in session didn't
know on Ma when Gore in Person arranged for them
to sign to the fact the nobles had been traders
(26:27):
and should be sentenced to death, that they were all
already dead. Person was covering the king's tracks, retroactively turning
the murders into executions. After the king was brought back
to Stockholm, no one dared speak to him or hold
an audience with him. It was only the king's final stepmother,
(26:48):
his father's third wife, who was brave enough to approach him.
She was the first person to be granted an audience.
Upon seeing the dowager Queen, the cousin of several of
the men who had been killed, Eric fell to his
knees and wept. He begged her for forgiveness and began
working with her immediately on establishing some sort of settlement
(27:10):
for the families of the men. The two Stints who
had been spared were released, and Sfante's wife Martha soon
arrived to help negotiate the reconciliation. The king agreed that
there had been a quote venomous person who had advised
him to do the executions, meaning really they were all
(27:30):
the fault of gore on Person. That would be enough
later on for the senators who would later be appointed
to hold power. As Eric's faculties continued to slip, gore
on Person would be arrested and found guilty of percolation.
And perjury. Although the senators wouldn't execute him, they would
merely imprison him in case the king recovered his senses.
(27:53):
But for the time being, Eric was still the king,
and whether it was madness or love, he turned all
of his attention to his mistress, Karen Man's daughter, doing
everything he could to marry her legitimately and to legitimize
the two children that he already had by her, even
though she was a full commoner. The two were married
(28:16):
morganatically in secret December nine, fifteen sixty seven, and then
married officially in the next year. Karen had warned the
dowager Queen that Eric was planning on killing his two stepbrothers,
the Dukes, and perhaps wisely, they both stayed away from
the wedding, but Eric and his half brother John were
(28:36):
able to reconcile. Eric forgave him for any past transgressions
as long as he recognized that the marriage between the
King and Karen was fully legitimate, and as long as
John honored their son Gustavus as the next king. John agreed,
although I wonder if an eye roll was implicit the
(29:00):
King's attempts to legitimize his commoner wife, whom he elevated
to queen with the name Cuterina, Madnu's daughter would be
the final nail in the coffin of his reputation. Though
Karen was kind and I'm sure people liked her as
a person, she was a commoner, a bar wench. It
was as sure a sign of lunacy as anything the
(29:23):
King had done trying to pass her off as a
rightful queen. For her part, Karen seemed aware of the
tricky position that the king had put her in, and
she was more than aware of the public's feelings towards her.
In a letter to the King's sisters, her new sisters
in law, she referred to herself not as queen, but
(29:43):
as Eric's quote chosen queen language that couches herself with humility,
a phrase that seems to imply, yes, I also know
that this is a little out of the ordinary. After
the wedding, Eric issued a circular to be disturbed me
did among the people giving thinks that he had been
delivered from the assaults of the devil, saying, in short,
(30:07):
that he was no longer mad. The problem with the writing, however,
was that madness was visible in every sentence. It was
finally time for his brothers to depose him, which they
did fairly easily. The king won two victories against the rebels,
but by September of fifteen sixty eight they captured Stockholm,
(30:30):
and King Eric surrendered both his crown and Gore in person.
John was declared to be King John the Third, and
he basically immediately ordered that Gore in person be executed
a very slow death by torture and then eventually beheading.
The former King Eric was imprisoned alongside his beloved commoner
(30:53):
wife Karen in a series of castles. The only known
portrait we have of Karen, the first commoner Queen of Sweden,
is from this period. It's a scribble of her that
the king did a sketch while in prison. Karen and
the King had two more children, who died as infants
in the terrible conditions of captivity. After that, the new
(31:16):
king kept Karen imprisoned separately to prevent her from having
more children who might become a threat to the new
royal line. In his diary, Eric wrote, they took my
wife from me. Eric spent two more years imprisoned alone
before he died in autopsy centuries later confirmed what had
(31:36):
long been rumored he had been poisoned by arsenic. According
to legend, the arsenic came in his final meal of
peace soup. In the end, it was a fair haired
man who deposed him. His brother John was blonde. That's
(31:59):
the sad story worry of Eric, King of Sweden. But
keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about
what happened to Karen Man's daughter and their children. After
the King's death, Karen Man's daughter was released from imprisonment.
(32:21):
No longer seen as any real threat, she was given
an estate in Finland where she was allowed to live
for the rest of her life, and she was well liked.
They're making friends, especially among the peasantry. When there would
be a peasant rebellion years later, they wouldn't plunder her estate.
Karen and Eric's daughter, SIGRed, became a lady in waiting
(32:42):
to the new King's daughter her cousin, and she would
eventually marry two Swedish noblemen. Karen and Eric's son, however,
would have a much more challenging life. Though secret had
been allowed to stay with Karen in prison, their son Gustavus,
was taken from her, sent to be educated by Jesuits
in Poland. There's only one confirmed meeting of Karen getting
(33:06):
to see her son again, in fifteen ninety five in Estonia.
Gustavus had become a Catholic. He didn't recognize his mother,
and he had forgotten how to speak Swedish. She only
knew it was her son at all because she recognized
his birthmarks. He was poor, wearing ragged clothes working as
(33:26):
a mercenary. Karen did her best to try to give
her son money to try to provide for him, to
try to persuade the Swedish king to allow her son
to return to his home country, but the government refused.
Gustavus was banished for life. It was too big of
a risk to have the son of a deposed king
in the country. Gustavus remained a vagabond, dying alone in
(33:51):
Central Russia in sixteen o seven. Noble Blood is a
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz.
Executive producers include Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
(34:14):
The show is produced by rema il Keali and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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