Louisa Ulrika of Prussia - The Failed Royal Revolution of 1756

The Failed Royal Revolution of 1756

Queen Louisa Ulrika strongly dominated her husband and the court, and she would likely had been the real ruler during her husband's reign if the Swedish monarchy had not been stripped of its power in 1718 and 1720; at this point, the king was a mere decoration and Sweden was a monarchy only in name. This greatly displeased the queen, herself born in an absolute monarchy. She could not understand nor condone the parliament. For her, it was not acceptable for a royal person to have to receive peasants in the royal salons, as she was forced to do with the peasant's representatives from the parliament. She was further enraged when the parliament forced the king to give up his claims on the throne of Holstein-Gottorp, and arranged the marriage between her son Gustav to Sofia Magdalena of Denmark, when she herself had preferred a German princess. She was enraged when the parliamentaristic C.F.Scheffer was appointed her son's educator. In 1755, the parliament decided that, if the king refused to sign the laws issued by the government, a stamp would be used instead.

To display her contempt, she humiliated the parliament's representatives by using the etiquette of the royal court; she stopped their carriages at the Palace gates, forced them to wait for hours while she let those who arrived before them be received, and let them sit on small little low stools before her to make them lose their dignity.

In the three months following her coronation, Louisa Ulrika removed the diamonds from the crown and replaced them with glass. She gathered followers among the aristocracy to plan a coup d'état to overthrow the government, dissolve the parliament and reinstate absolute monarchy in Sweden. Her followers were called Hovpartiet (English: "The royal court party"), and they were noblemen in opposition to the parliament for personal reasons, wishing for rewards from the queen after a successful coup. In the court theatres, the French theatre troupe and the Italian opera company performed plays hinting that the king should taken control over his kingdom

To finance the coup, the Queen pawned the jewelry she had been given as a wedding gift by the state, as well as some of the crown jewels belonging to the state, among them 44 diamonds she had placed in the Queen's Crown, which she pawned in Berlin to borrow money. The lady-in-waiting of the Queen, Ulrika Strömfelt, informed the government that parts of the crown jewels were missing. For this act, she was later to receive the honorary title Ständernas dotter (English:"Daughter of the Parliament") and a pension of $2000. The government demanded to inspect the crown jewels, as it was the property of the state. The Queen refused, as she did not recognise any right of the government to inspect anything. In parallel, the king was taken ill, and the government retreated to allow him to recover, giving the queen time to provide the diamonds back for the inspection. At the same time, weapons and bullets were being made. The plan was to hire criminals to cause chaos on the streets: the royalist officers would then block the streets, the royalists would be armed and the King would enter the square to "resume control", after which the public would "celebrate him as the saviour from the parliament"

The plans were often discussed at the pub of the royalist Ernst Angel. Angel was the illegitimate son of Maximilian of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), the brother of king Frederick I of Sweden, which he often pointed out. The 21 June 1756, the police heard Angel talk about the plans of a royal revolution while he was drunk. He was arrested and interrogated, and the next day, the arrests of the noblemen begun. When the royal couple entered Stockholm after a stay at from Drottninghom Palace that night the streets where filled with the military. The whole conspiracy against the parliament was discovered. The parliament voted for a death sentence for four of the involved noblemen, who were decapitated on Riddarholmstorget in Stockholm in front of thousands of spectators, outside the royal palace, and three days later, Ernst Angel and three more were decapitated. Several others where sentenced to prison, whipping, exile and the pillory, and by being banned from seats in the parliament.

The Queen, who was the instigator behind all this, received a strong note from the parliament communicated by the archbishop, who forced her to write a letter of confession and regret. The archbishop reported, that he thought he had seen "tears of rage and sorrow" in her eyes. She herself wrote that she had tried to display: "all the coldness, all the contempt possible to make in a demonstration", and she regretted nothing but that her revolution had failed. The king had a statement read to him saying that he would be deposed if the queen ever attempted something similar again.