emy, should be torn down and
their materials used to repair the city walls. All matters of creed they
were willing to leave to the bishops and prelates, but asked that a
disputation on these subjects might be had in presence of
representatives of the people. The king should have authority to
increase his revenue in the way that seemed to him most fitting. The
king might take the bishops' castles till his own could be rebuilt. The
proper disposition of the Church incomes they were content to leave to
the king and his Cabinet.[164]

One cannot but be startled by the revolutionary tendency of these
replies. Never before had such a thing been dreamt of as the surrender
of all the bishops' castles to the crown. Gustavus must have been
bewildered by his own audacity. Within four days the diet that had come
together puffed up by a consciousness of its own magnificence, had sunk
into a position of absolute servility. Things had been granted by the
delegates which, when the diet opened, Gustavus had not even dared to
ask. The very mode in which the votes were taken and the acts were
passed, shows how completely everybody answered to the monarch's nod.
Instead of the answers being submitted to a general vote, they were laid
before the Cabinet to be passed upon by them. In defiance of every
precedent, the Cabinet usurped the right to clothe the diet's sentiment
in language of their own. The result was a decree promulgated in the
diet's name and celebrated in Swedish history as the Vesteras Recess. By
this decree the delegates asserted, every one of them, that they would
do their utmost to punish all conspiracies against the king. They
declared, moreover, that as the royal incomes were but meagre, the
monasteries and churches must come to the relief, and, to prevent all
danger, no bishop should keep up a larger retinue than the king allowed.
All bishops and cathedrals, with their chapters, must hand over to the
king all income not absolutely necessary for their support. Since many
monasteries were dilapidated and their lands were lying waste, an
officer must be appointed by the crown to keep them up and hand over all
their rents not needed for that purpose to the crown. The nobility were
declared entitled to all property that had passed from their ancestors
to the Church since 1454. Finally, Gustavus was ordered to summon the
two factions in the Church to hold a disputation in presence of the
diet, and the members promised to quell