Negotiations were set on foot between Duke John and the unhappy king. The former requested an interview with his brother, and this took place on October 9 at Wantholm, or, according to some authorities, at Knappforssen, in Wermeland.[501] The brothers met under an oak tree, which is still called the King’s Oak. They had a second interview shortly after at Swarhjo. Erick, who was perpetually haunted by the thought that the murders which he had ordered had deprived him of the crown, fell at his brother’s feet and hailed him king. From this time he considered himself a dependent on his brother and spoke sometimes as if he were king and sometimes as if he were a captive. He appeared, at the beginning of 1569, before the States assembled as a high court of justice, and there energetically defended himself, sparing no one, and least of all, the nobility. When John interrupted him by telling him that he was out of his mind, he replied, ‘I have only once been out of my mind, and that was when I released thee from prison.’ He was deprived of the crown on the ground that he had lost his reason, and was sentenced to perpetual confinement, but with royal treatment. [Sidenote: His Treatment In Prison.] Duke John had now reached the summit of his ambition. He set himself to win over adherents, so that no one might be tempted to call to mind the fact that his throne was usurped. He was amiable and obliging alike to the nobles, the ecclesiastics, and the people; and the popularity which he enjoyed seemed daily to increase. ‘Certainly,’ people said, ‘he means loyally to carry out the will of his father.’[502] But the joy and the popularity did not last long. It was soon perceived that he was giving full play to his hatred of Erick, whom he called his most deadly enemy. He spared his life, indeed, at the entreaty of the queen, widow of the late king, but he made him suffer all the horrors of the most rigorous imprisonment. The unhappy prince had to endure in his own body shameful treatment at the hands of his keepers and of those whom he had displeased in the course of his reign. One day a man more mad and more cruel than himself, Olaf Gustavsson, had a violent altercation with him in the prison, and left him lying in his blood. ‘God knows,’ wrote Erick to his brother John (March 1, 1569), ‘what inhuman tortures I am forced to endure—hunger and cold, infection and darkness, blows and wounds. Deliver me from this misery by banishment. The world is surely large enough to allow of the hatred between brothers being mitigated by the distance of places and of countries.’[503] But nothing could appease his enemy, his brother. At first he had allowed him to see his wife and his children, which was a great pleasure to the unhappy man; but this consolation was afterwards refused him. They gave him neither paper nor ink, and in the long hours of his captivity he used to write with water blackened with charcoal on the margins of the books which he was permitted to read.