Malin Lundell, Master student in Early Modern History and intern at Gustav’s Hand
Part 1 – The Notes
The 1767-1769 ‘diary’ of Gustav is not one filled with his innermost personal thoughts, but simply notes he took during council meetings he attended as crown prince.
As expected, it is filled with matters of state, various colonels, generals and majors asking for leaves on behalf of military men under their command, cattle diseases plaguing Skåne, and sumptuary laws surrounding the wearing of silks and half-silks.
One of the hot button issues of late April 1767 was the one of silks and who should be allowed to wear such fine materials. On the 29th, Gustav describes an “Important and long deliberation about the Council pages’ white silk stockings.” Here we might ask ourselves whether there was a sense of irony behind this comment and if we are given a rare a glimpse of Gustav’s own thoughts and opinions, since he would famously come to repeal all Swedish sumptuary laws during his own kingship.
When comparing the entries over the years, we can see a shift in the crown prince’s note taking. In the spring of 1767, one single meeting can easily cover 3-4 pages where every single point is recorded. In the autumn of 1769, the once so avid note taker Gustav is able to fit 3-4 separate meetings on a single page. Instead of detailed notes about matters of state, he simply writes “Several war matters” or “Several several domestic matters”, one single sentence per meeting. These council notes come to an end entirely soon after.
However, Gustav still found some use for this diary the following year. Some of its later contents are hard to make any sense of, but he seemed to have used it when planning spectacles, plays where the crown prince himself would of course be cast in the titular role. Here, in the 1770 production of Dormont de Belloy’s Gaston et Bayard.
Part 2 – The Drawings
As the old saying goes, a sure way to get to know a person is by looking at how they organise their diary.
To mark the passing of months, the crown prince, some 210 years before the post-it, drew images often covering a full page. These images vary in subject and size, but many of them show Gustav’s love for architecture and décor, picturing various types of stone works like sculptures, urns and even a marble gazebo.
Funnily enough, in 1767 he seems to have forgotten that the month of March has 31 days, mistaking the last Friday, the 27th, as the end of the month as draws a full-page image of a waterfall, writing “28 March Saturday 1767” and “29 March Sunday. 1767” at the bottom of the page. This page if followed by an additional 4 pages of notes from the meetings on Monday and Tuesday. Finally closing the month by drawing an urn and garland.
So, the point of this post is to give the reader a sense of what you can find in a ‘humble diary’ of council business if you look hard enough and if you feel like having a go at the last mystery pages yourself. The link to the diary is posted below!
F 478: “Gustav III:s egenhändiga skrifter : 4. Memoarer och bidrag till kungens egen historia. Dagbok 1767-1769”.
https://www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/view.jsf?pid=alvin-record%3A163413&dswid=-6444
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