The murder of Gustav III explained
Part 3: Why the nobility formed a conspiracy against the king
Gustav III was shot at the Royal Opera House in 1792, he died on March 29 of blood poisoning because the doctors of the time could not give him the treatment he needed. Today he had survived.
But what was the chain of events that led to the murder of the king?
As we touched on earlier, a dissatisfaction with Gustav III had grown for a long time, important here was the coup in 1772 when Gustav abandoned the party system and put his own men in important positions. But Sweden had still loyally obeyed his various whims.
In the spring of 1788, Sweden prepared for war against Russia.
But in Finland there was strong opposition to going to war. The officers believed that Gustav had committed a crime against the constitution and they began to conspire behind the king's back, planning to arrest the king when he arrived in Finland in the summer of 1788.
The king had no formal legal right to start a war on his own without the approval of the Riksdag. The Finnish officers then committed what must be considered treason when they themselves contacted the Russian empress Catherine the Great with a peace proposal.
Gustav's move towards the officers was to demand from them an assurance of loyalty. Their response was to start the association "Anjala" which stood in opposition to the king's policies. Gustav saw this as treason and had the officers arrested and several of them sentenced to death.
The vast majority were later pardoned, all but one who was allowed to serve as an example of what happens to traitors. Colonel Hästesko was executed in the middle of today's Östermalmstorg in Stockholm in 1790, in front of the Stockholm inhabitants.
A former captain in the army, nobleman Jacob Johan Anckarström, stood in the audience and watched as Hästesko was executed.
Then and there he decided to assassinate Gustav III.
That a single man's hatred could turn into a conspiracy to kill the king, with several participants and tha. the knowledge of the plans was extensive, was due to a law that the king pushed through the Riksdag called the Association and Security Act of 1789.
That act gave the king powers to start wars on his own, but also gave the peasantry and the bourgeoisie various advantages, something that the nobility did not get. The king had pushed through by threatening the nobility with violence and gathered a large crowd of angry Stockholmers who threatened to storm the noble palace if the nobility did not agree to vote yes to the law.
Jacob Johan Anckarström, who wanted to assassinate the king, now came into contact with other conspirators who hated king Gustav III, among them nobleman Carl Fredrik Pechlin, who was one of the nobles threatened by the mob in 1789 and whose political life had been destroyed by the king's coup d'état in 1772.
At the beginning of 1792, Pechlin and the noblemen Clas Fredrik Horn and Adolph Ribbing met with Anckarström and began to make plans for how the king would be murdered.
But the plans were widely known, so well known that a nobleman wrote a letter to the king warning him to attend the masquerade ball on March 16, 1792. The king did not want to believe it was true and ignored all warnings. And on the evening of March 16, he was shot in the Royal Opera House.