A Sympathetic Description of Sigismund Vasa

I am reading Michael Roberts' wonderful book, The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden, 1523-1611, and wanted to share his description of Sigismund III of Poland and Sweden, son of Johan III of Sweden and his Polish-born consort, Katarzyna Jagiellonka. I think this is one of the best, most balanced descriptions of the fascinating, tragic, often disparaged King Sigismund, a devout Catholic doomed to lose his Swedish throne and his homeland to his ambitious, fiercely Protestant uncle, Duke Karl of Södermanland.

Sigismund was something of a sport upon the family stock: if one had not known he was a Vasa one would have said he was a Habsburg. He was the only member of his family for three generations to be blessed with an equable temper; perhaps also the only one not to be cursed with the sin of ambition. His Polish subjects, who found him heavy going and disliked the German atmosphere at his court, inquired irritably 'who is this dumb devil that they have sent us from Sweden?' and coined the famous phrase, 'Tria T fecerunt nostro Regi vae: Taciturnitas, Tarditas, Tenacitas'. He had his father's pride and melancholy; he inherited the aesthetic interests of both his parents, and was himself (to the contempt of his Polish subjects) a painter of talent; but he lacked the Vasas' gift of words and their ability to come to terms with the common man. Stiff and withdrawn, he had none of the easy affabilities and trivial insincerites which smooth human relationships. Probably he did not miss them. The dominant interest in his life was his religion: the core of his character was a profound seriousness and a fundamental integrity. In the last resort he could contemplate the loss of two kingdoms, provided that he were assured of gaining the kingdom of Heaven. The calm certainty of his faith distressed and irritated his Jesuit advisers, who like also to keep their powder dry: as Malaspina complained, he was too inclined to trust to the righteousness of his cause and leave the rest to God, accepting consequent failure with pious resignation as one more cross which it was his duty to bear. Slow he often was, and vacillating too; diffident of his own judgment, prone to accept bad advice. But he was a good man in a sense in which none other of the early Vasas can be called so; and a good man beset with cruel difficulties. He was, finally, one of those who seem born to be unlucky-not least in having to confront, in his uncle Karl, a master of the baser arts of politics.

To listen to a stirring Polish song about the ultimate civil war between Sigismund and Karl, and watch a short video evoking the struggle, click here.