King Eric XIV: The Mad Butcher Of Sweden D
if the gruesome tale of Eric the 14th of Sweden is anything to go by it was hard to be a 16th century King then again Eric was unhinged immoral and the perpetrator of one of the most infamous acts ever committed in Royal history in fact his incredibly bloody Reign was almost enough to justify his Infamous End Eric the 14th’s brutal rule ended in a coup and the Mad King walked happily into a cell unaware of the chilling fate ahead of him though Eric the 14th would soon earn a reputation as one of the maddest men in Sweden his Beginnings were tragic in another way entirely born on December 13th 1533 as the heir of King Gustav the and Queen Catherine of Sweden the boy got precious little time with his mother she passed away before he was even 2 years old maybe this explains his horrific rage later on in
life Eric was an eerily bright child who excelled at both languages and Mathematics particularly under one of his favorite tutors the radical thinker dianus berus but his relationship had a dark side although dianus was one of Eric’s biggest Defenders as we’ll see the king would later repay him with a brutal betrayal you’ll learn quickly that Eric was only loyal to exactly one person himself in 1559 he even threw his own sister Cecilia under the bus and in the worst way possible when Eric stumbled upon the unmarried cilia in bed with a man he promptly caused an enormous Scandal by telling everybody about it nearly ruining his sister in the process by all accounts Eric was a physically healthy good-looking man and his portraits show a flush complexion and close cropped reddish blonde hair he
also liked to grow his beard long as was the sty in Sweden at the time as he grew into a strapping young adult Eric began to develop an interest in women at 25 the Crown Prince wasted no time proving his manhood by picking the beautiful egda Pur daughter as His official mistress he even nicknamed her kitas which is Latin for love but despite all this Eric was far from a Bonafide ladies man when it came to choosing a royal bride Eric was more than just unlucky in love he was cursed the prince made a slew of marriage proposals to the greatest women rulers of his day including ranata of Lorraine and Mary Queen of Scots all of whom denied him but his most embarrassing moments were saved for his most famous Target like every other ruler of his day Eric desired the hand of Queen Elizabeth the aka the Virgin Queen a moniker that
probably tells you his attempted courtship ended in complete disaster Eric pursued Elizabeth for years while she strung him along then when he thought he almost had her he rushed into an act that he’d later regret in 1560 Eric was so sure that he was irresistible that he drew up ambitious plans to sail to England and convince Elizabeth in person but this came with a high price Eric dropped his poor mistress EG the pur doter in the process since he would have no need for her as a married man Eric’s treatment of agta gets even more flippant when you consider that the pair had two lovely children together Virginia and Constantia who were both barely toddlers at the time their dad went away but this was all to gain the affections of the Queen of England except that isn’t what ended up happening at all right before Eric was
due to Embark for Queen and Country he received some horrific news his father King Gustav I had passed and Prince Eric was now King Eric i1 14th of Sweden Eric immediately canel his date with Elizabeth and promptly set about making himself one of Sweden’s most hated rulers Eric’s first act as king definitively proved that Elizabeth I had dodged a bullet the young king gathered all the Swedish Nobles including his half Brothers John and Charles and promptly demoted them he didn’t want anyone else but him to gather too much power in the age of Eric but it proceeded to get far darker than that as soon as Eric became king he dealt his former mistress agda yet another unbearable cruelty for one even though his marriage plans fell through he still never brought her back to his bed but that wasn’t even the worst part
he then also accused agda of being an unfit mother and sent their daughters away to live with his sister Eric wasn’t off to a great start but in 1563 his courtiers started noticing even more unsettling behaviors from their ruler the King was turning violent paranoid and ever so slightly elogical about his Reign and his enemies in particular he began to believe all his nobles were plotting against him it was the seeds of what would become full-blown Insanity King Eric thought only of himself so it’s no surprise he wasn’t too fond of his half Brothers John and Charles that dislike soon turned to Bitter cruelty when John married an influential Noble woman without seeking his permission Eric grew paranoid about his brother’s power and quickly had him arrested for high treason somehow Eric had an even bigger
supposed Nemesis than his brother a man named Neel stur the heir of a powerful Swedish family why did Eric’s wrath land on St because he was crazy that’s why Neil and the rest of his clan had done almost nothing to their King yet that didn’t stop Eric from exacting a brutal Revenge first king Eric treated NEOS with erratic and atrocious punishments under trumped up charges for neglect of Duty the king sentenced stud to execution but not before treating him to several hours of torture in the dung then at the last minute he changed his mind and commuted the Fatal sentence to One very bizarre humiliation on June 15 1566 Eric the 14th forced his rival Neil St to drive through the streets of Stockholm in a broken down Carriage
while wearing a straw hat which is apparently the Swedish version of shame to make matters more undignified stud’s wounds were still openly bleeding but as we’ll see Eric wasn’t exactly appeased starting in 1565 Eric the 14th got a new love of his life and this one would change history one day Eric was Downing a few drinks with his court musician when he locked eyes with his beautiful serving wench the comely Karin man stauter the king quickly made Karen his sole mistress but she became so much more Eric had had Mistresses before but Caden was something else entirely he was so utterly overcome with passion for the humble maid that rumors flew around the court that kin was a witch or else that she had paid a witch to make a love potion for the king obviously no witchcraft was involved but
that doesn’t mean things didn’t get weird in other aspects though Infamous for his brutality King Eric I 14th could also be extravagantly generous and he said about his own personal My Fair Lady story with his new mistress he gave Cen an entirely new wardrobe servants and her own room at court he even taught her how to read and write yet the whole time the young girl was hiding some big baggage reportedly when Caden entered into the Royal relationship she wasn’t exactly a free agent she was already betrothed to an IGN named maximilan who she coldly but also wisely dumped the moment Eric started turning his attention on her well apparently maximilan didn’t get the message because he came back to haunt her one day while Karen was living the high life in the Royal Palace maximilan managed to sneak in and tried to
convince her to come back this turned out to be a fatal mistake according to one version of the story King Eric found him out and had the poor maximilan executed without a second thought in 1566 Eric was still apparently obsessed with finding a royal bride and decided his old enemy Neil stur could repent of his sins and help him out Eric sent Neil off as an official Bridal Envoy to ranata of Lorraine getting the poor man to do his wooing sure this sounds like a Reconciliation except Eric was actually lying through his teeth by this time Eric was already plotting to take a scandalous step he wanted to marry his upstart mistress kin not ranada and st’s Mission was just for show but this next part gets really unhinged Eric was paranoid his courtier
would try to stop the wedding and he yet again fixated on Neil’s as the scapegoat for his paranoia so the butcher King enacted his bloody vengeance in May 1567 the king’s obsession with Neil tragically coincided with a total mental breakdown just as Neils was returning from his fake Mission Eric detained him at Upsala Castle along with Neil’s father Sante and had a handful of other Nobles and essentially proclaimed that he could marry whomever he wanted Eric’s next actions have lived in infamy King Eric the the 14th’s behavior in the coming days and hours was more than just erratic it had obviously lost touch with all reality he wandered around the dungeons at Upsala castle at some points even begging the studis for forgiveness of his wrongs still he never made a move to
release them and then his second visit turned bloody a few hours after his repentant visit to Upsala castle and his prisoners King Eric the 14th marched in again and without warning un sheathed his dagger and stabbed Neil St in the chest or arm while the poor unsuspecting and above all innocent man was in his cell and then it got even more disturbing while Eric let one of his Lackey finish up the job on Neil the king then entered the patriarch santes stes cell and delivered an absolutely bone chilling speech while Sante was on his knees Eric rambled an illogical apology about how he now had to kill him too since the noble would never forgive him for his son’s death and seek revenge so after all this Bloodshed was King Eric the 14th done with his violent breakdown yet
nope before he left the castle he ordered his men to Massacre most of the remaining prisoners after all they also would never forgive him resulting in this domino effect of unforgivable Acts his guards obeyed but even this wasn’t enough to snap the Mad King out of it when he left the castle Eric happened to run into his old beloved tutor dianus berus who immediately started trying to calm down the unhinged Monarch it was a nice gesture but Eric’s following actions proved his Insanity The King thanked dionisius for his help by ordering his men to slay the tutor as well the aftermath of the so-called stude murders is just as chilling as the event itself when the dust settled five men lost their lives that day most unsettling of all though is that for a
brief time it was Sweden’s best kept secret the guards simply pretended the prisoners were still alive and continued to accept food from their family members and as for Eric in the delirium of his horrific acts that day Eric wandered into forest and disappeared for two entire days the Mad King of Sweden was nowhere to be found even as his courtiers both desperately searched for him and tried to keep his Royal sins Under Wraps on May 27th 1567 they finally found him when the Royal Court rediscovered their King he was in an even stranger State than when he started Not only was he still in the throws of his breakdown he was also also dressed as a peasant and had turned up in the tinely village of udala they took him back to Stockholm and his throne but it was far from a return to normaly when Eric installed himself back
at the Royal Palace still Bary as a belfree under a Regency he found his Halls eerily empty you see anyone with half a brain wanted absolutely nothing to do with their Mad King lest they experience one of his temper tantrums and find themselves 6 Feet Under instead the court had to bring in their secret weapon his mother now Eric’s real mother was long gone but he did have a close relationship with his stepmother Katherine stuk and the coures decided that she was their only hope they dispatched her from her home to Stockholm and Catherine became the first person to see Eric since his murder spree his response was heartbreaking reportedly the moment Eric set eyes on his stepmother he fell to his knees and started begging for mercy for his many many sins Catherine must have listened because she dled out repentance in the form of reparations the king had to pay the slain nobles’s families and promised
never to go near them ever again but Eric wasn’t done making foolish decisions the king might have been 100% insane at this point but that didn’t mean he forgot his beloved Karen man’s daughter in fact his obsession with Karen only seemed to grow in his lunacy and now that all the supposed naysayers were conveniently gone he married her in a secret ceremony on December 29th 1567 and then in an official one in 1568 but this two nearly became a bloodbath erratic lunatic or not Eric had one consistent MMO and in the leadup to his nuptials with cut in the king returned to thinking everyone is a conspirator he planned to have his hated half Brothers of for fear that they too would somehow try to prevent the marriage and he only spared them through a miraculous twist of fate his poor
bride to be kin had to stop Eric’s frater Side by warning his stepmother of her deranged Grooms plans very wisely the king’s siblings did not make an appearance at the wedding ceremony thereby keeping their heads but this turned out to be Eric’s fatal mistake according to court records King Eric had a brief period of recovery in 1568 and started taking over official Royal business once again but still his actions didn’t seem sane one day his personal secretary said something disparaging about a friend of his so Eric pierced the man with a fire iron and sent him to the [Music] Grave Eric did truly care about cin and spent mountains of money trying to legitimize her as his true Queen even though she was a peasant n it didn’t just backfire it blew up in his face the court scorned her wholeheartedly and the resentment grew in the end Eric’s
paranoia came true his marriage was the last straw in his ruin in a bizarre twist of fate Eric’s original mistress AGA pter somehow ended up back in his bed years after he dumped her the couple had another illegitimate child in 1564 at that point however it definitely wasn’t an exclusive Arrangement Eric had so many Lovers by then that the court nicknamed them the fro hoopen or the crowd of Mistresses although the court whispered ridiculous witchcraft rumors when it came to cutting men’s daughters hold on Eric these rumors weren’t necessarily that far-fetched the king actually had an obsession with the occult particularly astrology he’d initially grown suspicious of pearl Neil’s dud because his horoscope told him that a light-haired man would succeed him one of the most famous portraits of
Eric the 14th has a pretty embarrassing backstory one of the only fulllength depictions we have of him is a portrait Eric sent Queen Elizabeth the when he was trying to woo her portraying him as an incredible Bachelor worthy of her hand the entire time Eric was slowly unraveling his brothers John and Charles were watching from the sidelines and and waiting for their time to pounce well in 1568 mere months after The Royal Wedding they finally jumped the Nobles rebelled and put Jon in power meanwhile they threw Eric in a dungeon both King Eric and his poor Queen cin were detained together as they spent years on end in captivity while the government denounced the king as insane their treatment was horrific Eric and cin had two children in captivity together but the fr sick parents had to watch helplessly as the babes both perished in dismal conditions and more heartache was around the
corner as a prisoner King Eric I 14th was both too intelligent and too unhinged for his own good and he plotted at least one escape from his cell cleverly using cen’s lady in waiting it ended in tragedy all the same the new regime caught and executed the conspirators though Eric the 14th and his Queen got to keep their lives this time at least on June the 14th 1573 the once and former King Eric’s captors made him suffer one final indignity to prevent the king and cin from having any more children they separated the royal couple taking cutting to a different Castle as Eric the 14th wrote my wife has been taken from me he now had to live out the rest of his days in solitude on February 26th 1977 the attendants found King Eric the 14 of Sweden cold and unresponsive in the cell
he had called home for 7 years the government had faced one too many attempts to reinstate him and he had become too big of a threat to live but it wasn’t until scientists autopsy his body that we learned the full Dark Truth About The Mad King’s end in 1958 forensic specialist exhumed the king’s body to find out the secrets of his final moments they made a grim Discovery according to their findings conspirators had offed Eric with Arsenic and the substance ravaged his body until his last breath his supposed final meal a fatally spiked offering of pea soup if you enjoyed this video please consider giving us a thumbs up and subscribing to the channel for more great videos
