King of Sweden (1161–1167) of the House of Sverker, who took the throne after the fall of the usurper Magnus Henriksson and founded the archbishopric of Uppsala before being killed by Knut Eriksson.
Charles VII Sverkersson was king of Sweden from 1161 to 1167, a ruler of the House of Sverker during the violent alternation of the crown between his family and the rival House of Erik. He came to the throne after the brief usurpation of Magnus Henriksson, the killer of St Eric, whom Charles overthrew.
His reign saw an important consolidation of the Swedish Church: in 1164 the archbishopric of Uppsala was founded, giving Sweden its own metropolitan see, independent of Lund. But the feud between the royal houses was unrelenting, and in 1167 Charles was surprised and killed on the island of Visingsö by the forces of Knut Eriksson, the son of St Eric, who seized the throne in his place.
Charles was born about 1130, a son of Sverker I, the king who had taken the Swedish throne after the extinction of the Stenkil dynasty and founded the House of Sverker. When Sverker I was murdered in 1156, the crown passed not to Charles but to Eric — later St Eric — of the rival house, and then, after Eric's murder in 1160, to the usurper Magnus Henriksson.
Charles gathered the strength of his family and struck back, defeating and killing Magnus Henriksson in 1161 to take the throne as king.
Charles VII is remembered as an able and pious king caught in the merciless dynastic feud of his age. The most substantial of the earlier Sverker kings, he showed genuine statecraft in his dealings with the Church, and his seal and charters mark him as a ruler consciously building the dignity and institutions of the Swedish monarchy.
Yet his reign was lived under the constant shadow of the vendetta between his house and the sons of St Eric, and it is the violence of that feud, as much as his own qualities, that defines him. He had won his crown by killing a usurper and lost it, and his life, to the vengeance of a rival dynasty. He appears as a capable king whose real achievements — above all the Uppsala archbishopric — were framed by a struggle for survival he ultimately lost.
The lasting achievement of Charles's reign was ecclesiastical. In 1164, through negotiation with the papacy and the archbishop of Lund, the see of Uppsala was raised to an archbishopric — the metropolitan church of a now self-standing Swedish province, a milestone in the making of the Swedish kingdom and Church. Charles was the first Swedish king whose royal seal survives.
Politically, however, he could not escape the feud. The House of Erik, and above all Knut Eriksson, son of the murdered St Eric, pursued the throne relentlessly. In 1167 Knut's men caught Charles on the royal island of Visingsö and killed him.
Charles VII was killed on Visingsö on 12 April 1167. His young son Sverker, later Sverker II, was carried to safety in Denmark, and the throne passed to his killer, Knut Eriksson, continuing the alternation of the crown between the two houses.
Charles VII is remembered as one of the more effective kings of the Sverker-Erik era and as the founder of the archbishopric of Uppsala, a decisive step in the organisation of the Swedish Church and kingdom. His murder, like those before and after it, exemplifies the deadly rhythm of the Swedish civil-war era, in which the crown swung between the houses of Sverker and Erik by way of the battlefield and the assassin.