in my household—the Swedish, Anglo-Scottish, and Jewish. My mother’s sister Irma had traveled to Berlin in 1933 and during her visit there she understood what the future in Hitler’s Germany held for Jews. I have no memories of my Aunt Irma talking to my parents about the signs of impending catastrophe that were plain for anyone to see in Berlin, but I do know that both of my parents were deeply affected by and fearful of what Irma told them.
I don’t recall my mother often speaking of her lost family in later years after the war, but the importance of keeping their memories alive was understood. If we did not remember, who would? Many years later when I was an adult, I wrote to the German Federal Archives (or Bundesarchiv) seeking information about my mother’s family. In due time I received a reply in the form of a list. There were my mother’s family’s names, one after the other, each name followed by categorized listings for “Deportation,” “Date of Death,” and “Place of Death.” From that document, I learned that almost all of them lost their lives in one of three concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Dachau, and Auschwitz. What was accomplished by my obtaining this chilling and meticulously recorded postmortem? The finality and validity of those names, those details cataloged with such clinical precision. To have that small reckoning, to see each name, each year, each place. So that they are not forgotten.
On my father’s side, several branches of our family originated in Scotland, including the Setons and the Erskines. They were an esteemed set. The Highland Seton Clan boasted a royal connection by virtue of Alexander, Lord Seton, who married the sister of King Robert the Bruce. The Gyllenhammars are also kin to the Bruce-allied Clan Erskine, whose noble origins dated back to the thirteenth century, and whose fortunes failed in the eighteenth century with the fallout caused by John Erskine’s participation in the Jacobite uprising. One of the disgraced Erskines was sent to Gothenburg to learn a trade, and he settled there for a number of years. He seems to have found Gothenburg dull enough to merit his founding a private billiards club there, and the club has withstood the test of time. Two hundred fifty years later, it is still possible to shoot pool in the Royal Bachelor’s Club or to enjoy a drink in the Large Club Room where Erskine’s portrait hangs over the fireplace.
George Seton found his way from Scotland to Sweden as well, settling near Stockholm in the eighteenth century. Seton apparently wished to live like a king, as he bought the royal Ekolsund Castle from King Gustav III in 1785, and from that time forward the castle was occupied by Setons for the next 125 years. In hindsight it is interesting that so many of our Scottish ancestors lived so nearby in Sweden. But it is our direct line of descent from the old Swedish Gyllenhammar line—and its origins in war, patriotic service, and monarchical recognition—that remains the best documented and known to me.
Our ancestral family patriarch Mans Andersson was born in the early seventeenth century at a time when Sweden was reaching the apex of an unprecedented era of political and military power. This time period is often referred to as the stormaktstid, a Swedish word that translates as the “age of great power.” Young King Gustav II Adolph, enthroned in 1611 when he was just fifteen years old, was an outspoken Protestant with a passion for education and a military prowess that would be viewed historically as a form of genius. The Golden King (as he was called) had no personal or political motivation to take up the gauntlet of the Thirty Years’ War—a series of regional conflicts in which virtually every major power in Europe had a stake. But the conflicts pitted Catholics against Protestants, and the Golden King was deeply concerned about the fate of the Protestant population in present-day Germany, who faced possible eradication without the intervention of a powerful ally.
Sweden’s empire at the time was comprised of a large stretch of coastland forming a horseshoe around the Baltic Sea, and included present-day Finland, parts of Denmark and Norway, and northern Germany, making Sweden the preeminent power in Europe. King Gustav had nothing to gain by lending the power of a Swedish alliance to the German Protestants, and no motivation to do so other than the agitation of his own conscience. Sweden’s Lutheran church was under no threat. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had established the principle cuius regio, eius religio—whose realm, his religion. Quite simply, a prevailing ruler would dictate the religion over the dominion in his control. Catholic ruler, Catholic state. Protestant ruler, Lutheran state. But it applied only to Lutheran Protestantism. The Calvinists of the Habsburg-ruled Kingdom of Bohemia were unprotected by this realm-religion principle.
Upholding his fabled moral code, the Golden King chose in 1632 to put his life at risk and personally led an army to Bohemia to fight on behalf of the Protestants. The well-beloved King Gustav and his forces prevailed, and he won the battle, but at the cost of his own life—making it the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. The Thirty Years’ War came to a close fifteen years later, and the remaining hostilities that would ebb and flow for the latter half of the century in northern Europe were largely a prolonged wrangle over territory.
The regional tug-of-war between Denmark and Sweden dates back to the fourteenth century, when the Kalmar Union bound Sweden to both Norway and the dominant nation of Denmark. In 1523, the self-declared King Gustav declared Sweden’s independence and severed its ties with the Holy Roman Empire, and by extension with Catholicism. The remaining Danish southern provinces of the Scandinavian peninsula were ceded to Sweden in 1658, as part of a territorial acquisition dictated by the Treaty of Roskilde. For peasants like Mans Andersson, who were the latest in a long line of ancestors living and farming in or near the Scania region, it is likely that their sense of loyalty to Denmark-Norway was not necessarily so quickly forgotten, and that some continued to consider themselves more Danish than Swedish. Just five months before Mans Andersson and his son Jonas answered the call to join the Swedish fleet in the Battle of Oresund, the inhabitants of Bornholm, a small island some eighty miles west of the Danish Coast, successfully revolted against the Swedish Crown, returning the territory to Danish rule. Considering these recent events, it is easier to understand why the willingness of men like Mans and Jonas Andersson to join the Swedish naval fight at Oresund engendered real gratitude from the Crown.
The saltwater Strait of Oresund separates Sweden from Denmark and provides a crucial connective passage between the Baltic Sea to the Kattegat Strait and the Atlantic Ocean. This maritime Atlantic-Baltic conduit is the sine qua non of strategic positions in the Baltic regions and was (and today still is) one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, heavily trafficked with vessels laden with grain, iron, copper, timber, tar, hemp, and furs. From any standpoint—military, economic, or political—unhindered access to the Oresund was imperative. Any force that obtained sole control of the strait effectively wielded the ultimate power and authority in all regional matters of trade and travel. It was therefore in the interest of every prevailing European power to prevent any single nation-state from ever controlling both the north and south coasts of the Oresund again. If each coast were controlled by a different nation-state, it lessened the chances that the passage would be politically leveraged or weaponized. The Treaty of Roskilde transferred ownership of the southern Scandinavian peninsula from Denmark to Sweden. The local resident may have been unhappy about their sudden and compulsory allegiance to the Swedish Crown, but the powers of continental Europe would have found the prospect of a Swedish Scania more palatable and less threatening that that of a Danish Scania.
So the tangled web of centuries of shifting alliances and hostilities continued to play themselves out between Sweden and Denmark, and in the fall of 1658 the subject of dispute was control of the Strait of Oresund. Under the command of Lord High Admiral Carl Gustaf Wrangel, the Swedish fleet’s mission was simple—support their army’s siege of Copenhagen by blocking Denmark’s access to naval resupply and trade vessels. Denmark’s occasional ally, the Dutch United Provinces, sent a squadron of their own to engage the Swedish ships. Denmark badly needed this assistance. The Dutch ships were in a position to take advantage of strong northern winds, but those same winds effectively prohibited Denmark’s seven warships from leaving their Copenhagen port, leaving the Swedes and the Dutch to duke it out alone.
The Dutch painter Willem van de Velde witnessed the ensuing clash and documented what he saw in his painting The Battle of the Sound. I know nothing of the details of Mans Andersson’s onboard role, nor do I know how he met his death. But van de Velde’s painting gives a very vivid sense of what the battle was like. In the monochrome rendering, a sixty-gun Swedish warship is in the foreground firing upon a Dutch vessel,