Full text: The national Church of Sweden

§¢ 6.—THE NEW BISHOPS AND ARCHBISHOP. 201 
Recess of Vesterds. The king himself found it possible to 
prove his relationship to a number of families besides that 
of the Stures, and where he claimed he was naturally re- 
garded as having a strong case. Many of the inmates of 
the monasteries retired, more or less of their own free will, 
and many married. Nevertheless, the suppression of the 
monasteries went on with a comparative slowness, and the 
two Birgittine houses of Vadstena and Nédendal in Fin- 
land, and the Cistercian nunnery of Skokloster, south of 
Jonkoping, survived for a number of years after the death 
of Gustaf, though in a state of decaying animation. Of 
Vadstena we read that in 1544 the king issued a letter per- 
mitting the monks and nuns, if they wished it, to return to 
a secular life. {In the next year its chronicle ceased. 
“Yet” (says Anjou), ‘‘ there were still eighteen sisters 
left in the cloister in the beginning of King John’s reign, 
when, for a short time, it seems to have been again in 
bloom, until the stronger protestantism of Charles anni- 
hilated . . . in 1595 the last monastic establishment in 
Sweden ”’ (Anjou: E. T., 234-4). 
It should be added that a number of religious houses in 
Stockholm and other towns became hospitals under the 
government of the burgomaster and town council. 
Hans Brask was satisfied with having made his protest 
at Vesterds, and left the kingdom in the autumn of that 
fateful year. He met Johannes Magni at Dantzig, but 
they had no great love for one another, and were unable to 
devise means for stemming the tide. Brask never re- 
turned to Sweden, though he wrote many letters to his 
flock and to the king. His latter days were spent in the 
monastery of Landa, in the diocese of Gnesen, in Poland, 
where he died about 1538. Johannes, the archbishop- 
elect, passed the rest of his life in Poland and Italy, par- 
ticularly at Rome. He was confirmed and consecrated 
Archbishop of Upsala in 1533 (two years after the see was 
filled by Laurentius Petri) in the last year of Clement 
VIIL., and died at Rome in 1544. His two books, the 
History of the Kings of the Swedes and Goths and History
	        
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