They were the days of the Reformation, and Gustav would not have been human had he failed to see a way out of his money troubles by confiscating church property.  He had pawned the country’s trade to the merchants of Luebeck and there was nothing else left.  Naturally the church opposed him.  The King took the bull by the horns.  He called a meeting and told the people that he was sick of it all.  He had encouraged the Reformation for their good; now, if they did not stand by him, they might choose between him and his enemies.  The oldest priest arose at that and said that the church’s property was sacred.  The King asked if the rest of them thought the same way.  Only one voice was raised, and to say yes.

“Then,” said Gustav, “I don’t want to be your King any more.  If it does not rain, you blame me; if the sun does not shine, you do the same.  It is always so.  All of you want to be masters.  After all my trouble and labor for you, you would as lief see my head split with an axe, though none of you dare lay hold of the handle.  Give me back what I have spent in your service and I will go away and never come back.”  And go he did, to his castle, with half a dozen of his nearest friends.

They sat and looked at one another when he was gone, and then priests and nobles fell to arguing among themselves, all talking at once.  The plain people, the burghers and the peasants, listened awhile, but when they got no farther, let them know that if they couldn’t settle it, they, the people, would, and in a way that would give them little joy.  The upshot of it all was that messengers were sent to bring the King back.  He made them go three times, and when he came at last, it was as absolute master.  In the ordering of the kingdom that was made there, he became the head of the church as well as of the state.  Gustav’s pen was as sharp as his tongue.  When Hans Brask, the oldest prelate in the land, who had stood stoutly by the old regime, left the country and refused to come back, he wrote to him:  “As long as you might milk and shear your sheep, you staid by them.  When God spake and said you were to feed them, not to shear and slaughter them, you ran away.  Every honest man can judge if you have done well.”  Hard words to a good old man; but there were plenty of others who deserved them.  That was the end of the hierarchy in Sweden.

But not of the unruly peasants who had tasted the joys of king-making.  How kindly they took to the Reformation at the outset one can judge from the demand of some of them that the King should “burn or otherwise kill such as ate meat on Friday.”  They rose again and again, and would listen only to the argument of force.  When the Luebeckers pressed hard for the payment of old debts, and the treasury was empty as usual, King Gustav hit upon a new kind of revenue.  He demanded of every church in the land that it give up its biggest bell to the funds.  It was the last straw.  The Dalecarlians rose