The emergence of parliamentary parties, and their swift maturing after 1740, was one of the most remarkable features of the Age of Liberty. Nowhere else in Europe, save in England, did a comparable development occur. It proved, indeed, but a short-lived episode; it left no permanent traces behind it; but while it lasted it imparted to the age a hectic quality which grew more intense as the regime neared the final catastrophe.

It has been said that the emergence of parties is an inevitable consequence of parliamentary government; that as soon as a legislature begins to decide important questions by voting, parties will be organised in order to secure a majority. But there was nothing inevitable in the appearance of parties in Sweden; and the Constitution of 1720 had been in operation for almost twenty years before they can be said to have begun to take shape. Swedish parties were born of personal ambitions and personal rancours: with differences of opinion on high political questions, with clashes arising from issues of principle, they had – at first – very little to do. No ancient controversies, constitutional or religious, provided them with historic roots; and though they came fairly soon to appeal to persons of differing types of temperament, they were not in origin the vehicle or expression of such differences. The first Swedish party was rather an artefact, a device imposed from above to forward the ends of its devisers.