Enevoldsarveregeringsakten og Kongeloven FORFATNINGSSPØRGSMÅLET I DANMARK FRA OKTOBER 1660 TIL NOVEMBER 1665

Resumé

The Royal Decree of 10 January 1661 (ensvoldsarveregeringsakten, literally: Act concerning absolute and hereditary government), introducing absolute monarchy in Denmark, has hitherto been viewed as the outcome of a gradual and increasingly radical process in which the endless discussions of the Estates- General on financing the army decisively affected the King's resolve to secure for himself the power of absolute monarchy. When the King received the oaths of fealty 18 October 1660, he promised to establish a »form and manner af government«. Historians have understood this as a promise to replace the traditional coronation charters with a written constitution. The January Decree in this interpretation is seen as a necessary step towards the final fulfilment of the promise with the promulgation of Lex Regia in 1665.

The January Decree was, however, complete in itself requiring only the detailed regulations regarding hereditary succession and regency, later provided by Lex Regia. Indeed, the January decree reflects an extremist conception of the state based on absolute and hereditary monarchy, which in several respects is at odds with Lex Regia. Viewed from another angle, the January Decree was merely the official manifestation of an absolutist and dynastic concept of the State. This can be documented by an anlysis of two drafts of the decree, in which the manner of conceiving the state and the way of thinking about related concepts are fully thought through and set out no later than a few days prior to the supplementary oaths of fealty on 15 November 1660.

An examination of contemporaneous terminology shows, moreover, that the King's promise af of establishing a "from of government" cannot be construed as a promise to issue a written constitution, since the term "form of government" in context must be a designation for an ordinance concerning regency, subsidiarily an ordinance of empowerment for the administration. By using this term Frederik 111 averted the wish on the part of the Estates General to replace the coronation charters with a constitutional law (a reces). When this is put into context with the German newsletter of 27 October and the Latin letters of notification of 18 October, it seems reasonable and probable to assume that the King and his closest advisors entertained from the very beginning the ideas that publicly emerged in the Decree of 10 January 1661.

The constitutional development from the January decree to the Lex Regia turns out to be the result of a clash between a radically absolutist, dynastic idea and real life conditions for the exercise of power. The outcome represents in several aspects a crucial break with the radical absolutist and dynastic concept of the state embodied in the January decree. The Lex Regia took the form of a binding law rather than a testament, and it contained formal constitutional stipulations. That it ended up with these restraints, was due, on the one hand, to the desire - vigorously supported by the Chancellery in Gliickstadt - of preserving the unity and stability of the the Danish Crown Lands, and, on the other hand, to the desire of protecting the personal power of the monarch against the very bureaucracy that flowed from the monarchy's increased influence in societal affairs. The fact that the Lex Regia was kept secret can be interpreted as a manifestation of realpolitik necessitated by the gap between absolutism's theory and practice. The gap was due, among other things, to the bureaucracy's successful resistance to an extreme and thus arbitrary form of absolutism.

Translated by Michael Wolfe