returning the territory to Danish rule. Considering these recent events, it is easier to understand why the willingness of men like Mans and Jonas Andersson to join the Swedish naval fight at Oresund engendered real gratitude from the Crown.
The saltwater Strait of Oresund separates Sweden from Denmark and provides a crucial connective passage between the Baltic Sea to the Kattegat Strait and the Atlantic Ocean. This maritime Atlantic-Baltic conduit is the sine qua non of strategic positions in the Baltic regions and was (and today still is) one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, heavily trafficked with vessels laden with grain, iron, copper, timber, tar, hemp, and furs. From any standpoint—military, economic, or political—unhindered access to the Oresund was imperative. Any force that obtained sole control of the strait effectively wielded the ultimate power and authority in all regional matters of trade and travel. It was therefore in the interest of every prevailing European power to prevent any single nation-state from ever controlling both the north and south coasts of the Oresund again. If each coast were controlled by a different nation-state, it lessened the chances that the passage would be politically leveraged or weaponized. The Treaty of Roskilde transferred ownership of the southern Scandinavian peninsula from Denmark to Sweden. The local resident may have been unhappy about their sudden and compulsory allegiance to the Swedish Crown, but the powers of continental Europe would have found the prospect of a Swedish Scania more palatable and less threatening that that of a Danish Scania.
So the tangled web of centuries of shifting alliances and hostilities continued to play themselves out between Sweden and Denmark, and in the fall of 1658 the subject of dispute was control of the Strait of Oresund. Under the command of Lord High Admiral Carl Gustaf Wrangel, the Swedish fleet’s mission was simple—support their army’s siege of Copenhagen by blocking Denmark’s access to naval resupply and trade vessels. Denmark’s occasional ally, the Dutch United Provinces, sent a squadron of their own to engage the Swedish ships. Denmark badly needed this assistance. The Dutch ships were in a position to take advantage of strong northern winds, but those same winds effectively prohibited Denmark’s seven warships from leaving their Copenhagen port, leaving the Swedes and the Dutch to duke it out alone.
The Dutch painter Willem van de Velde witnessed the ensuing clash and documented what he saw in his painting The Battle of the Sound. I know nothing of the details of Mans Andersson’s onboard role, nor do I know how he met his death. But van de Velde’s painting gives a very vivid sense of what the battle was like. In the monochrome rendering, a sixty-gun Swedish warship is in the foreground firing upon a Dutch vessel, identified as the Dutch commander’s warship Eendracht. Off its starboard side, a smaller ship is sinking; tiny figures are visible as they leap into the water and wave to an overcrowded lifeboat. Tall-masted ships fill the field of view in every direction, the horizon papered with overlapping sails as thick columns of smoke from firing cannons and burning boats rise into the sky. In the distance, the rounded turrets of Kronborg Castle are visible on the Danish coast. The scene looks chaotic and loud, and the violence occurring in close quarters—to the men on board one ship firing on another, the destruction and carnage would be immediately audible and visible on a very human level.
The powerful currents surging through the sound severely limited the ships’ maneuverability, and the fighting was fierce and at very close range. Four Swedish ships were captured, and the Dutch successfully drove the remainder of the fleet from the sound. Of Sweden’s 6,000 men, over 400 were dead, 650 wounded, and hundreds captured. Among the Swedish casualties was Mans Andersson, officially listed as a captain from the province of Smaland’s Jonkoping regiment, along with one of his sons. A second son, Jonas, survived the battle, and returned home to his family with the heavy heart of one who has paid the price of warfare with his dearest blood, but who has also gained something highly prized by his kinsmen—honor.
Like most residents in southern Sweden’s Smaland, Andersson’s family were peasant farmers who settled on the floodplains of fertile soil and arable land when the Scandinavian glacier retreated to the north circa 11,000 BC. The earliest settlers were hunters and fishers who soon evolved to cultivate farming skills and animal husbandry. By the sixteenth century Sweden had been a primarily agricultural region for centuries, and the Andersson family would have been accustomed to the area’s periodic crop failures and long harsh winters. Life for landed peasant families like the Anderssons was physically challenging, particularly in the grain-harvesting months of August and September when families could expect to work twenty-hour days. In the community of village and extended families, the Andersson family would have made the winter hours more passable by communal meals, fireside conversation, and the consumption of aquavit—homemade grain or potato-based alcohol vilified by one Swedish king as the ruination of the Swedish people. Seventeenth-century Smaland is also notable as the region in which Swedish witch mania first erupted—from 1668 to 1676—fifteen years before the infamous Salem witch trials in America’s Massachusetts.
In Scanian peasant culture of that time, personal honor was valued above all other qualities, and loss of one’s honorable reputation could result in ostracization from community—a punishment that was nothing less than the severance of a lifeline. In the sixteenth century, the Swedish King Gustav Vasa had ended compulsory military conscription, so that “the native peasantry may sit at home, tend their fields and meadows, feed their wives and children, and no longer go out to get themselves killed.” By Mans Andersson’s lifetime, the Golden King had devised new rules of conscription, and King Charles X Gustav made it clear that more was needed and expected of peasant families. When Denmark declared war on Sweden in 1657, county governors received word from the Swedish Council alerting them of the imminent war and asking them to do their part in bolstering the courage of their constituents and encouraging them to actively partake in the defense of the fatherland. In instances where King Charles X Gustav specifically requested that a county governor muster the unit of volunteers, the response was negotiated and agreed upon by the peasants themselves. But after many successive calls for volunteer soldiers, numbers and patience were growing thin. When a new request for the mustering of volunteer soldiers reached counties in the autumn of 1658, the Crown met with somewhat more resistance and found many fewer men stepping forward to answer the call. For that reason, the willing participation of men from families such as that of Mans Andersson was especially appreciated by the Crown.
In recognition of the honor and sacrifice of Mans Andersson’s service and death in the Battle of the Sound, he was posthumously knighted as Adliga ätter (untitled nobility) and introduced at the Riddarhuset—the Swedish House of Nobility—in 1668. With a family’s ennoblement, the Crown also presented them with a new name, and from that time onward the recipient would cease using the patronymic system and instead pass the noble surname down to each successive generation. These names were generally crafted to impart an imposing or admirable air—the one bestowed upon Andersson and his descendants at the Riddarhuset was Gyllenhammar—which translates as golden battle axe. A perusal of a list of 2,350 numbered noble family names produces eighty-one surnames with the golden prefix “gyllen,” including Gyllenpistol (golden gun), Gyllensvard (golden sword), Gyllengranat (golden grenade), Gyllenskold (golden skull), and the impressive if nautically dubious Gyllenskepp (golden ship). Other popular prefixes of the time were Silfver (silver) and the Germanic Adler and Ehren—meaning eagle and honor respectively.
In my childhood, there was little novelty in our name, and I felt no compunction to live up to the golden battle axe family standard. The Gyllenhammar lineage of nobility was a historical fact, but not a source of self-importance—on the contrary, my father was a very modest man who had no patience for ostentation or self-aggrandizing of any kind. My father was an insurance company executive, and my mother a pianist. I had one sibling—my sister, Anne, who was four and a half years my senior. We lived in a comfortable flat in Gothenburg, the rooms often filled with piano music as my mother played and practiced daily.
As young children, my sister and I were encouraged to be intellectually curious and to speak our minds—ours was the sort of family that preferred lively discourse at the dinner table over silence. Some of my earliest memories are of that sense of unease I associate with my Aunt Irma’s warnings about the atmosphere in Berlin.
