NILS DACKE - THE CATHOLIC CHIEFTAIN OF THE PEASANTS

Author: Hans Hellström
Year: 2009
Publisher: Veritas Förlag
Language: Swedish

Nils Dacke, the Smolandian yeoman who lead a peasant uprising against Swedish King Gustav Vasa in 1542, is a name known to all who graduated from primary school in Sweden. He was an ambitious upstart, murderer, thief, rapist, and blasphemer who wreaked havoc and caused misery and ordeal wherever he and his bands of seditious brutes showed their faces.

Or was he?

An old but largely verifiable truth is that history is written by the victors. Unfortunately for him, Nils Dacke was not one of them. I was therefore intrigued by historian and theologian Hans Hellström’s “Nils Dacke – Den katolske bondehövdingen (not available in English but a rough translation would be “Nils Dacke – the Catholic Chieftain of the Peasants”) found in the Catholic Bookshop in Stockholm. Perhaps reading about the man from the perspective of the losing side would broaden my horizons.

It is worth mentioning that “Nils Dacke – Den katolske bondehövdingen” is not altogether a book. In fact, it is barely an essay. With its modest dimensions of a mere 50 pages, it rather qualifies as a pamphlet. Consequently, the room for a profound analysis and detailed argumentation just is not there. The author had previously published a similar booklet, also quite short, on the same topic. I do regret that there does not seem to be enough material about Nils Dacke to fill a full-sized biography, but I understand why this is. For the same reason he has historically been portrayed as a vile and nasty character, whatever approbatory records were made of him during his lifetime they must have been destroyed by Gustav Vasa’s sheriffs once the uprising had been quashed. In compliance with His Majesty’s demands, it seems Nils Dacke was summarily referred to history as a despicable person and a traitor, and I imagine it was highly inadvisable to challenge that view for centuries to come.

 Though of minute proportions, “Nils Dacke – Den katolske bondehövdingen” does offer a partial contextualisation of Nils Dacke and the uprising he lead that serves to better understand both the man and the reasons for his actions. Hellström reminds the reader that the Swedish nation-state in the 16^th century was not nearly as well-defined as it is today and that the Smolandian farmers felt more akin to their Danish counterparts across a porous border than they did to their ruler in Stockholm. We are also reminded that King Gustav Vasa’s decision to nationalise the Swedish churches and convents and seize their assets did not go over well in many parts of Sweden. The reformation was in fact not finalised until 1600, i.e.  45 years after Nils Dacke’s resistance movement and almost 75 years after the reformation began.

According to Hellström, the trigger for the Smolandian dismay was the dual shock of a ban on trading with Denmark and the change in the liturgy. He quotes from historical letters where Gustav Vasa’s subjects implore him to allow them to remain by their traditional faith and to practice Catholicism as they were used to. There are also sources that bear witness to the outcry when the King’s sheriffs packed up the chalices, codexes, and artwork from the local churches and shipped it all off to the royal court.

Hellström’s argument is that the economical hardship imposed on the Smolandians by Gustav Vasa, which is commonly cited as the most accepted underlying reason for the unrest, was only part of the story and that Nils Dacke was in fact a devout Roman Catholic Christian whose faith and fidelity to the true church were as important as the desire for coin in his decision to lead the good men of Smolandia into battle against a ruler who from their perspective must have been perceived as a usurper.     

Sadly, the pamphlet is much too brief and, I surmise, the source material too scattered and fragmented to make a strong case in favour of Nils Dacke’s noble intents, but it is certainly sufficient to demonstrate that reality is often more complex than political propaganda may want us to appreciate.