The relationship between aristocracy and monarchy is the main theme of European political history in the century before the French Revolution. It is most apparent in France where the ability of the privileged orders, entrenched in the various parlements, to retard royal reform helped to bring the monarchy to its knees. Arthur Young, a keen observer of the early days of the Revolution, believed that the consequence of that upheaval would be a great extension of aristocratic influence. But the relationship was of crucial importance in many other countries. In Sweden, the absolutism of Charles XII was replaced by aristocratic supremacy until Gustav III, in his coup d'état of 1772, regained power by playing off the privileged against the non-privileged orders. Frederick IV of Denmark warned his successor in 1730 against aristocratic pretensions and the most dramatic episode in Danish eighteenth-century history, the rise and fall of Struensee, was essentially a confrontation between reforming monarchy and resistant nobility. In Russia, Prussia and Austria, the power of the nobility was a serious check upon the monarchy. Though Catherine the Great is still sometimes placed in the textbook category of enlightened despot, her reign has also been described as ‘the golden age of the Russian nobility’. Frederick the Great, often presented as the epitome of enlightened despotism, was careful not to challenge aristocratic power directly. Joseph II in the Habsburg dominions was less careful and the result was that he finished in 1790 a broken and defeated man: ‘He had to face the fact’, wrote Ernst Wangermann, ‘that the continuing functioning of his monarchy, enlightened or otherwise, fundamentally depended upon the cooperation of the privileged classes.’