Gustaf V of Sweden
Gustaf V was king of Sweden from December 1907 to October 1950, forty-three years, the last Swedish king to try to govern and the first to accept that he could not. He came to the throne when the crown still chose its ministers and left it when the crown opened parliament and played tennis. The attempt was the courtyard speech of 6 February 1914, when thirty thousand farmers marched to the palace to demand more spending on the army and he answered them from the courtyard in a speech written by the explorer Sven Hedin that committed the crown to the defence programme the Liberal government of Staaff had refused. Staaff resigned and the king appointed a cabinet of his own. The constitutional quarrel was settled by the war, which made the defence programme and by the parliament of 1917, which made the Liberals and Social Democrats a majority he could not refuse. He never chose a government again. The neutrality was his in both wars. In the first the country traded with both sides. In the second, under the wartime coalition, it let the German troops transit to Norway by rail from 1940 to 1943 and sent iron ore to the Ruhr. He is said to have threatened to abdicate in 1941 rather than refuse the transit of the Engelbrecht division to Finland, and to have written to Hitler in 1941 congratulating him on the invasion of the Soviet Union, which the archives support. He is said to have written to him again in 1943 about the Danish Jews, which they also support. The country has argued about him since with both letters on the table. The reign was also the one in which Sweden became what it is. There were the universal suffrage of 1921, the Social Democratic governments from 1932, and the folkhem, the Saltsjöbaden agreement of 1938 between the unions and the employers. There were the Nobel prizes he handed out for forty years, and the tennis, which he played under the name Mr G into his eighties on the Riviera, and the Haijby affair, a blackmail over a homosexual liaison that the court paid for through the 1930s and the newspapers printed after his death. He was born at Drottningholm, the son of Oscar II. He married Victoria of Baden, whom he did not much like. He died at ninety-two at Drottningholm. His son Gustaf VI Adolf, sixty-seven, took a crown that did nothing. That was the arrangement he had made.
- Lived: 1858 CE – 1950 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: king, monarch
