On the morning of 17 March 1792, the day following the attempt upon the life of Gustavus III, two pistols and a dagger were discovered lying on the floor of the Stockholm Opera House. Gunsmiths and cutlers of the city were summoned to identify the weapons. The maker of the pistols declared he had repaired them for Captain Ankarström; the cutler recognized the dagger, wrought at that officer’s behest. When the guards came to arrest him, Ankarström surrendered without resistance and acknowledged having fired upon the King. His first regret, he declared, was that he had failed to kill him.
In the confession preserved by Borrow, Ankarström professed the firm belief that he had delivered his country from a tyrant. He related his colloquies with Count Horn: both men deplored the political condition of the realm and agreed that the King’s death might alter the form of government. Ankarström further alleged a trial for lèse-majesté initiated against him by the Crown; by his account, he had been sentenced the preceding year to twenty years’ imprisonment, a penalty he exhibited as a rank grievance. He coupled this personal resentment to a doctrine of civic obligation, contending that the monarch had forfeited his right to rule.
In his political apology, Ankarström reached back to the reforms he attributed to the King. He represented the Act of Safety of 1789 as a breach of the Constitution of 1772, recalled the imprisoned members of the Diet, and denounced the taxes, the public debt, and the war. These charges were his own, drawn from the statement he penned to justify his deed; Borrow does not establish them as an independent finding of fact. They demonstrate, nevertheless, the rhetoric he had fashioned: in his eyes, a personal quarrel was transmuted into the right to act on behalf of his fellow citizens.
The earliest design had been to seize Gustavus III by night at his villa in Haga. Horn and Ankarström reconnoitred the approaches, the surrounding woods, and the park, but found the residence too heavily guarded. The abduction was abandoned; the assassination was not. Count Ribbing was subsequently privy to the plot and joined them. They sought an occasion where a crowd would furnish cover: a theatrical performance or a masquerade. Horn and Ankarström attended a spectacle on 16 January, and returned two days later; the King did not use the passage where they lay in wait. At the masked ball appointed for the night of 19–20 January, the assembly proved too sparse. Following the King’s journey to the Diet of Gävle and his return to Stockholm, they watched for him at another masquerade on 2 March, yet held their hand. The ball of 9 March was deferred by a week owing to the rigours of the cold. It took place on 16 March, the date of the crime.
As the design expanded, the secret grew ever harder to keep. Ribbing claimed to have enlisted Liljehorn, an army officer and major in the King’s Life Guards, who reportedly promised the support of his regiment and the artillery should a revolution become feasible. He was also said to have sounded General Pechlin. The confession notes that the multiplying circle of confederates rendered swift action imperative: the more widely the secret passed from hand to hand, the greater the peril of betrayal. On the eve of the ball, the conspirators discussed their disguises and sought to swell the numbers in attendance. This very circumstance altered the nature of the undertaking. The scheme of a swift stroke amidst the masks had come to depend upon men of unequal resolve and divided allegiance.
Horn accompanied Ankarström to his quarters to load the pistols. The confession records the singular charge rammed into the barrels: a round bullet, a square leaden slug, eleven small shot, and seven nails. Ankarström also took a dagger. When the King entered the saloon, leaning upon the arm of his grand equerry, Baron Essen, the assassin slipped between the monarch and his retinue. Stationing himself behind a piece of stage scenery, on the side where the King’s back was turned, he fired at such close quarters that the muzzle grazed the domino. Then occurred the incident he had not foreseen narrating as a failure of nerve: the King did not fall, the dagger was drawn, but sudden terror caused the assassin to drop both weapons. The ensuing panic offered him protection. He cried “Fire!” as the rest of the company took up the cry.
The King was carried from the hall. Ankarström still possessed a weapon he had intended to reserve for his own person, and sought to rid himself of it prior to being searched. The doors were bolted; the guests were compelled to unmask, submit to examination, and inscribe their names. Notwithstanding this vigil, he returned home undisturbed. After the crime, Ankarström at first denied having any accomplices. It was only when shown letters addressed to Horn and objects discovered during the perquisition that he acknowledged the other conspirators.
The authorities did not try a solitary gunman. They prosecuted all whom the confession, the correspondence, or witness testimony connected to the plot, according to their degrees of guilt. Counts Horn and Ribbing were sentenced to be stripped of their nobility, declared infamous, to have their right hands struck off, and to be beheaded and quartered. Liljehorn and Ehrensvärd were likewise condemned to death; other prisoners received sentences of degradation, imprisonment, or forfeiture of office. Here Borrow records a decisive intervention by Gustavus III himself. Upon his deathbed, the King reportedly adjured his brother, the Regent, that none save his murderer should suffer capital punishment for his death. The Regent affirmed he had pledged his word to obey. The capital sentences of Horn, Ribbing, Liljehorn, and Ehrensvärd were commuted to perpetual banishment, with loss of nobility and the interdiction ever to return to Sweden; other penalties remained in force. The King’s posthumous clemency brought no reconciliation: it merely cast out from the realm the very men who had professed to save it.
Ankarström was excluded from this royal mercy. Borrow describes three successive days of exposure upon the pillory and public whipping, followed by the severance of his hand, decapitation, and the quartering of his body. On the first day, Ankarström harangued the multitude and endured the ordeal with fortitude; on the following days, his resolution faltered. The clergyman who attended him attested to his contrition and his pleas for divine pardon. The political confession had defended regicide in the name of the fatherland; the clergyman’s account reveals a condemned man imploring the mercy of God. Ankarström was put to death.