Gustaf V country of citizenship Sweden
Early life
Gustaf V was born in Drottningholm Palace in Ekerö, Stockholm County, the son of Prince Oscar and Princess Sofia of Nassau. At birth Gustaf was created Duke of Värmland.  Upon his father's accession to the throne in 1872, Gustaf became crown prince of both Sweden and Norway. On 8 December 1907, he succeeded his father on the Swedish throne.
On 20 September 1881 he married Princess Victoria of Baden in Karlsruhe, Germany.Public life
When he ascended the throne, Gustaf V was, at least on paper, a near-autocrat.  The 1809 Instrument of Government made the king both head of state and head of government, and ministers were solely responsible to him.  However, his father had been forced to accept a government chosen by the majority in Parliament in 1905. Since then, prime ministers had been de facto required to have the confidence of the Riksdag to stay in office.
Early in his reign, in 1910, Gustaf V refused to grant clemency to the convicted murderer Johan Alfred Ander, who thus became the last person to be executed in Sweden.
At first, Gustaf V seemed to be willing to accept parliamentary rule.  After the Liberals won a massive landslide in 1911, Gustaf appointed Liberal leader Karl Staaff as Prime Minister. However, during the runup to World War I, the elites objected to Staaff's defence policy. In February 1914, a large crowd of farmers gathered at the royal palace and demanded that the country's defences be strengthened.  In his reply, the so-called Courtyard Speech—which was actually written by explorer Sven Hedin, an ardent conservative—Gustaf promised to strengthen the country's defences.  Staaff was outraged, telling the king that parliamentary rule called for the Crown to stay out of partisan politics.  He was also angered that he had not been consulted in advance of the speech.  However, Gustaf retorted that he still had the right to "communicate freely with the Swedish people." The Staaff government resigned in protest, and Gustaf appointed a government of civil servants headed by Hjalmar Hammarskjöld (father of future UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld) in its place.
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