Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven

This revisionist historical study of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the famous Swedish scientist and visionary, places him in the international political and diplomatic context that developed in the wake of the Williamite “Glorious Revolution” and Hanoverian Succession in Britain, which had an unusually intense and long-lasting impact on Sweden. In 1714, when the Elector of Hanover became King George I of Britain, he set his new kingdom on a collision course with Sweden, for he was determined to occupy the Swedish possessions of Verden and Bremen, which would give Hanover an outlet to the North Sea. From his prison camp in Turkey, the Swedish warrior king, Charles XII, began to shift his foreign policy away from Hanoverian England and to support a Franco-Jacobite diplomatic and military agenda. Charles’s most trusted diplomats undertook serious negotiations with the Jacobites, supporters of James III, the exiled Stuart claimant to the British throne. After Charles’s escape from Turkey, he was supported by Swedenborg’s family and political allies, who undertook various pro-Jacobite projects. However, the participation of Emanuel Swedenborg in these events virtually disappeared from history, as later “Whig-Protestant historiography” steadily minimized and even suppressed the role of Lutheran Sweden in the Stuarts’ campaign—a role that continued throughout Swedenborg’s lifetime.