Gustav III

Gustav III came to the throne in 1771, into a Sweden where the crown had become an ornament — real power lay with a parliament of bickering factions, the so-called Age of Liberty. He ended it in a single afternoon. In 1772, in a bloodless coup carried off with a born actor's sense of timing, he won over the guards, arrested the council, and handed himself back the authority his predecessors had lost. He was, before anything else, a man of the theatre — and he had just directed his own.

What followed was a reign run like a production. He founded the Swedish Academy and the Royal Opera, gave the country the golden age of art and letters that still bears his name — the Gustavian — and built playhouses wherever he could. In 1781 he fitted a jewel-box theatre inside one of Gripsholm's round defensive towers: a gun-tower turned into a stage for sixty, his whole reign in a single gesture. His hand reached east as well. At Sveaborg, the great sea-fortress off Helsinki, it was Gustav III who designed the tomb of its builder Augustin Ehrensvärd — the bronze-helmed monument that stands in the courtyard to this day.

His absolutism made him enemies among the nobles he had pushed aside, and in the end the theatre-king met his end in a theatre. On 16 March 1792, at a masked ball at the Royal Opera — the house he had founded himself — a cashiered officer named Jacob Johan Anckarström stepped out of the costumed crowd and shot him in the back. He lingered thirteen days, and died. The crown passed to his son, Gustav IV Adolf — who would lose Finland, and then his crown, in the very castle whose theatre his father had built.