It was not only the historians who devised the term ‘The Age of Liberty’ to describe the period in Swedish history which lies between 1719 and 1772. Swedish contemporaries used it also, for they felt it to be appropriate to their circumstances. The great majority of the political nation exulted in the liberty which the Constitution of 1720 was considered to have given to them; they treasured that constitution as a precious national monument; they believed it to be of unique excellence. In 1759 the Swedish Church altered a form of prayer so that it ended ‘To the Honour of Thy Holy Name, and the safeguarding of each and all of us in our blessed Liberty’. In 1766 a Swedish politician remarked that the constitution could not have been improved upon, ‘though it had been writ by angels’. He was not alone in his opinion: Voltaire pronounced Sweden to be ‘the freest country in the world’; Mably called the Swedish constitution ‘that masterpiece of modern legislation’; for Rousseau it was ‘an example of perfection’.

In Sweden in 1719, no less than in England in 1689, politicians were forced to have recourse to constitutional fictions in order to secure a settlement: in England a supposititious abdication; in Sweden, the fiction that the Diet of 1719 was a continuation of that of 1713–14, and thus required no royal summons in order to meet. In each case the upshot was the accession of a ruler who held the throne by parliamentary title. But in both countries an attempt was made to disguise the violence of the change by the pretence that what had happened was really the restoration of a historic constitutional situation: