Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden
Gustaf VI Adolf was king of Sweden from October 1950 to September 1973, the archaeologist who came to the throne at sixty-seven after a crown princedom of forty-three years and reigned for twenty-three over a monarchy he agreed to have stripped of its last powers, on the understanding that his grandson would inherit what was left. He was a scholar. He was a member of the Swedish academy of letters, an honorary fellow of the British Academy, a digger at Asine in Greece in the 1920s and in Italy and Cyprus after, whose collection of Chinese ceramics is the museum of Far Eastern antiquities in Stockholm, and who read Chinese porcelain marks better than most curators. The reign was conducted accordingly, with the king opening parliament in January and handing out the Nobel prizes in December and otherwise in the garden at Sofiero, which he had made one of the great rhododendron gardens of Europe. The constitutional change was the Torekov compromise of 1971, by which the parties agreed that the king should keep the title and the ceremony and lose the last formal powers, the chairing of the cabinet, the appointment of the prime minister, the command of the forces, which the instrument of government of 1974 wrote into law the year after he died. He accepted it, the Social Democrats having made it plain that the alternative was a republic on his death. The compromise was that Sweden would keep the crown for his grandson, Carl Gustaf, whose father, the king's elder son, had died in an air crash at Copenhagen in 1947, and who was twenty-seven when he succeeded. The years were Erlander's. He was the prime minister for twenty-three years. The country was the welfare state at its height, which the king, who liked Erlander, presided over without a word in public that anyone recorded. That was the point of him. He was born in Stockholm. He married Margaret of Connaught, the British princess, who died in 1920, and then a Mountbatten, the sister of the earl, who was queen until 1965. He died at Helsingborg in September 1973, at ninety, of pneumonia, in the week of the general election that the Social Democrats nearly lost. It was postponed a day for him.
- Lived: 1882 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: king, archaeologist, monarch
