He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems
that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford—Brasenose, as
I judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that
of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller,
certainly a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the
end. On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book. Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago,
had struck him as an interesting field. He must have alighted on some
old books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him
that there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden,
interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great
Swedish families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore, to
some persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the early
summer of 1863. Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his
residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some
_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collection
of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house
in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them. The manor-house, or _herrgård_, in question is to be called Råbäck
(pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is
one of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the
picture of it in Dahlenberg’s _Suecia antiqua et moderna_, engraved in
1694, shows it very much as the tourist may see it today. It was built
soon after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English
house of that period in respect of material—red-brick with stone
facings—and style. The man who built it was a scion of the great house
of De la Gardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is
the name by which I will designate them when mention of them becomes
necessary. They received Mr Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressed
him to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But,
preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing
in Swedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out
quite sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months. This arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the
manor-house of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a
park, and was protected—we should say grown up—with large old timber. Near it you found the walled garden, and then entered a close wood
fringing one of the small lakes with which the whole country is pitted. Then came the wall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll—a knob
of rock lightly covered with soil—and on the top of this stood the
church, fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to
English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and
galleries. In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily
painted, and with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been
adorned by a seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous
“Last Judgement”, full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships,
crying souls, and brown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung
from the roof; the pulpit was like a doll’s-house covered with little
painted wooden cherubs and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was
hinged to the preacher’s desk. Such sights as these may be seen in many
a church in Sweden now, but what distinguished this one was an addition
to the original building. At the eastern end of the north aisle the
builder of the manor-house had erected a mausoleum for himself and his
family. It was a largish eight-sided building, lighted by a series of
oval windows, and it had a domed roof, topped by a kind of
pumpkin-shaped object rising into a spire, a form in which Swedish
architects greatly delighted. The roof was of copper externally, and
was painted black, while the walls, in common with those of the church,
were staringly white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the
church. It had a portal and steps of its own on the northern side. Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than
three or four minutes bring you to the inn door. On the first day of his stay at Råbäck Mr Wraxall found the church door
open, and made those notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by
looking through the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble
effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament,
which made him very anxious to spend some time in investigation. The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of
just the kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence,
journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, very
carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque
detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable
man. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period
of distress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked
several châteaux and done some damage. The owner of Råbäck took a
leading part in supressing the trouble, and there was reference to
executions of ring-leaders and severe punishments inflicted with no
sparing hand. The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in the
house, and Mr Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his
day’s work. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that
the face impressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or
goodness; in fact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost
phenomenally ugly man. On this day Mr Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked back
in the late but still bright evening. “I must remember,” he writes, “to ask the sexton if he can let me into
the mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for
I saw him tonight standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or
unlocking the door.”

I find that early on the following day Mr Wraxall had some conversation
with his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he does
surprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was
reading were, at least in their beginning, the materials for the book
he was meditating, and that it was to have been one of those
quasi-journalistic productions which admit of the introduction of an
admixture of conversational matter. His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of Count
Magnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman’s
activity, and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or
not. He found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his
tenants came late to their work on the days which they owed to him as
Lord of the Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and
branded in the manor-house yard.