A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654 Vol II (of 2), by Ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke. Published by Charles Morton, revised by Henry Reeve, 1855.
A record of the negotiations of the treaty between Queen Christina’s Sweden and Oliver Cromwell’s England. You can read more about the treaty at the British Embassy in Sweden.
From the British Embassy in Sweden:
The Treaty was negotiated in Uppsala by a Puritan lawyer, Bulstrode Whitelocke, who was sent as English Ambassador to Sweden in 1653/54.
There is, even today, dispute about Whitelocke’s character and achievement. By some accounts he was a classic Vicar of Bray, bending to every political wind. He prospered under Charles I; held the Great Seal of the Commonwealth under Cromwell - making him the equivalent of Lord Chancellor; and then survived the Restoration, managing to get himself included in the Act of Pardon and Oblivion (without which he would have been hanged, and his property confiscated). Thomas Carlyle, writing in the 1840s, considered Whitelocke not just a trimmer, but a bore, objecting even to the occasional “poetic friskiness” in Whitelocke’s diaries “as if the hippopotamus should show a tendency to dance”.
Others — and notably his fullest modern biographer, Ruth Spalding — are inclined rather to praise Whitelocke’s learning, energy, intelligence and independence of character. Certainly the diary he kept of his Embassy to Sweden is a fascinating document, and one of the fullest existing accounts of that period.
I haven’t been able to get Volume I yet, but this work stands very well on its own. There are diplomatic machinations, a wedding, an account of the abdication of Queen Christina, and a shipwreck!
I found it quite readable, though sometimes a bit heavy-handed with the Calvinism.
Thanks to Louise Pryor for post-processing this text!