When sweet Swedish buns commit regicide

You can die if you try to swallow a pocket bible. Or if you don’t urinate because of etiquette. Raising your chin proudly for the sake of tango and looking up at the ceiling isn’t really advisable either, as it’s possible you’ll be on the fifth floor dancing straight out the open, floor-to-ceiling window.

Anal sex with a horse is wrong on so many levels. Be forewarned, the garden snail you choked on a challenge could still retaliate eight years later. And even if your windows are shatterproof, you don’t necessarily have to risk it on the 24th floor of a skyscraper. Because if you throw it, it may not actually break, but it will pop out of the frame completely unscathed.

Welcome to the RIP LOL series of articles – deaths not so dignified, but all the more meaningless.

Today with…

… Adolf Friedrich!

Adolf Friedrich died as he had lived. Tired and phlegmatic, he must have slipped into the other realm.

In this world, that chubby king was not an excellent ruler. Not even mediocre. Actually, he wasn’t at all. After he came to the Swedish throne in 1751 at the instigation of the Russian Tsarina Elisabeth, he was not too eager to settle there, preferring instead to work at his lathe, making beautiful snuffboxes for his friends.

Here he lost himself in minute details, carved out a small wooden world and decorated it with his monogram. It was the last place where he personally wrote his name, according to the resolutions of the Reichstag, there was only a stamped imitation, a royal shadow of it. His permission was no longer needed. Neither in foreign policy nor in law.

In the era of freedom, the Swedish people had put themselves in the place of God, represented by the estates (nobility, priests, citizens, peasants) from then on they determined the royal sphere of power, which visibly shrunk into a miserable little room. And this is where our Adolf Friedrich went. Without murmurs, like his self-made boxes, he had become a mere jewel.

After all, his nature was not one to fill himself with power, he much preferred to do so with all kinds of culinary delicacies, and that became all the more evident as his belly grew more imposing. With the fat came the sluggishness, though it may have been there before. In any case, his eyes had always spoken of a kind of phlegmatic goodness, of a general benevolence he showed to everyone.

Adolf Friedrich’s heart was sincere, if sometimes out of aversion he harbored for any kind of effort.

His acclaimed restraint, his all-round humble appearance eventually fed on this inexhaustible source of comfort – the background was his favorite place, no one disturbed him there, there the king sat comfortably with his belly and his clothes, in keeping with his pomad character , which seemed just neat enough to make a living just above the sloppiness line.

His reading only lavishly illustrated books was often seen as stupid, but that would not only be wrong, it would also be highly unfair. Rather, it testified to a sense of beauty that Adolf Friedrich also demonstrated at the lathe, albeit in a much more bourgeois way. From that passion – as we dare to call it with some caution – for art arose a secretly accumulated collection of frivolous paintings, copper engravings and tapestries.

And while he was trying to expand it, his bubbly wife Luise Ulrike staged a coup. She was tired of this paralyzing, regal swoon. The Reichstag even started interfering in the education of their children!

She was not for nothing the sister of King Frederick II, the greatest ruler of the 18th century, who was about to wrest Silesia forever from Maria Theresa and make Prussia the fifth European superpower. This hot blood also flowed within her, urging her to do more than just accept parliamentary resolutions in silence.

And so she managed to gather friends around her. The first few select aristocrats soon grew into an entire court party that tried with all possible means to help the royal couple gain more power. But her plans for a coup – to finance which the Queen removed 44 diamonds from her crown and pawned them in Berlin – were discovered early on. It was 1756 when the heads of Luise Ulrike’s followers rolled and the queen received a solemn admonition from parliament.

From the dream of royal power! Only the pomp and circumstance was granted to the two in a royal manner. Commissioned by Luise Ulrike, the Drottningholm Palace Theater was built, on the stage on which the royal family loved to act, while the head of the same sat yawning in the front row.

And when Adolf Friedrich did not completely succumb to his laziness and stood completely still, he dined. Similarly on February 12, 1771, Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent.

He had purposely left the ball at Ulriksdal Castle early the night before so that he could fully absorb the impending banquet in his shameless opulence.

And indeed, the French chef had not promised too much. It started with oysters, followed by sauerkraut, beef with turnips, lobster, caviar and kippers (salted and smoked herring). And should the king ever, out of a certain laziness, get a mouthful of this fine fare down his throat, he could wash it down with copious amounts of champagne.

The “Hetvägg” (today Semlor) brought the feast to a glorious end. Derived from the German Heisswecke, the king’s favorite buns promised a dream of sweet milk buns, served warm, filled with almond paste. He surrendered to it no fewer than 14 times, then cried out and died.

The suddenness of his death gave rise to terrible suspicions. “Poison!”, “The king has been killed!” was shouted in the excitement that erupted. But who would want to poison this peaceful monarch? It had not emitted the slightest sign of danger, it was the purest physical impossibility that that stationary object could have vibrated even a molecule of air! Unless a diaper slipped silently from the royal bowels…

No, for the death of Adolf Friedrich “no other ingredients were needed than those with which the king overloaded a weak stomach during meals,” Count Adolf Ludvig Hamilton testified in court.

And the Swedish poet Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna soon demanded that the hetvägg finally be driven into exile, since they had committed regicide!