The Swedish noble family whose head, Karl Knutsson Bonde, was three times elected King of Sweden as the national candidate against the Kalmar Union.
The Bondes were an established Swedish noble family, and Karl Knutsson rose through the offices of the realm to become Marshal of Sweden and the leading figure of the aristocratic party that resented Danish control of the Kalmar Union. When the Union king Christopher of Bavaria died without an heir in 1448, the Swedish council chose Karl Knutsson as king, in the same season that the Danes chose Christian of Oldenburg — setting the two men against each other for the northern crowns.
His kingship was therefore national and factional from the start: he was the candidate of Swedes who wanted a king of their own rather than a distant Union monarch.
Charles VIII was crowned King of Sweden in 1448 and briefly King of Norway in 1449, but he could not hold Norway against Christian I, and in 1457 a rebellion led by the archbishop and magnates drove him into exile. Restored in 1464, he was deposed again within a year, and returned a third time in 1467 to reign until his death in 1470.
The repeated depositions reflected how far real power lay with the great nobles and the Church: Charles depended on shifting factions, and when they turned against him the crown slipped away — only for the anti-Danish cause to bring him back.
Charles VIII’s turbulent reigns embodied the long Swedish resistance to the Kalmar Union that would culminate, two generations later, in Gustav Vasa’s final break with Denmark in 1523. He died in 1470, and leadership of the national party passed to the regents of the Sture family who governed Sweden in the decades that followed.
No other Bonde wore the crown, making the house a single-reign royal line — but one that stood for the idea of an independent Swedish kingship at a time when the Union seemed to threaten it.