The Queen's Lover (36 page)

Like Gustavus III and unlike his son, Gustav Adolf, I insisted on great elegance at my homes. I owned some fourteen carriages and sleighs and, when moving from one summer residence to another—from Lövstad to Ljung, for instance—used no fewer than twenty-six horses. A staff of twenty-four domestics ran the house Sophie and I inhabited in Stockholm, and I took pleasure in being reputed to have Sweden’s most magnificent table. I enjoyed entertaining groups of our most ancient nobility, continuing to shun the new burgher class that had gained much power in the last decade. As my chef Felix Berger has testified, notwithstanding my severe case of gout, fifteen courses were an absolute minimum at my dinners. I was perfectly capable of having a hundred persons for a lunch of oysters, and was admired by all for the
excellence of my chef’s inventions. This did not at all please my king. Stingy by nature and abstemious for political reasons, he was beginning to dislike me for entertaining so much more luxuriously than he, and for advising him to remain calm and prudent toward the beast Napoleon.

So here I was at the age of fifty, grand marshal of the kingdom: heading the regents’ council whenever the king went abroad; attending the Riksdag attired in the ermine cape worn only by the twelve men anointed with Sweden’s highest distinction, the Order of the Seraphim; as eagerly sought out by women as ever, equally pursued by noble ladies looking for wealthy son-in-laws; mildly flirting with the lovely Emelie De Geer; so heavily covered with medals that I had trouble, at times, rising from my chair; inhabiting my magnificent family palaces; listening to my beloved music; living with my handsome loving sister, whose attachment to me was as deep as mine to her. And yet notwithstanding all these honors, accolades, loyalties, I felt empty, utterly empty…with no purpose in mind beyond continuing to live an existence that I felt would grow increasingly vacuous, seeing that I was vain, self-centered, and morose.

On March 31, 1808, I discontinued keeping my
dagbok,
the journal I had begun to write at the tender age of fourteen. Could it be that I had lost much of my taste for life? I determined to devote myself all the more energetically to the memoir of my past times, my often glorious past loves, which I’m presenting in these pages.

Axel:

A KING’S AND
A PRINCE’S FALL

I
HAD INDEED
lost much taste for life. My increasing melancholia, an innate trait, might well have incited me to cease writing my diary; and my depressions were aggravated by the terrible condition of my country. Gustav IV Adolf—moody, impetuous, inconsistent, constantly countermanding his own orders—had dealt great blows to Sweden through his idiotic foreign policy. When France and Russia made peace through the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Gustav Adolf stubbornly continued his war against both France and Russia. Denmark, an ally of France’s, declared war on Sweden in 1808. Our king had earlier hoped for assistance from England, but it was then at war with Spain and could offer little help. When England finally did send a regiment of ten thousand men to Göteborg (I was there, attending a shareholders’ meeting of the East India Company), Gustav quarreled with the British general and refused his aid. Sweden thus became totally isolated, with enemies in the east, south, and west. By the end of 1808, Finland, which had been occupied by Sweden for decades, would be lost to Russia, which would also conquer the Swedish fortress of Sveaborg, Sweden’s largest military base. The Russian army advanced as far as Umeå, in northern Sweden. A bitter peace would be signed in 1809 at Frederikshavn, through which Sweden lost a third of her territory and a quarter of her
population, forfeiting to Russia not only Finland, but also the Åland Islands northeast of Stockholm.

The winter of 1808 was in every way catastrophic. It was the coldest in many decades, and wood was barely available, since it had habitually come from Finland. The extreme cold, and the pulmonary epidemics it caused, killed several dozen persons a day; thousands of workmen stayed home to avoid the freezing temperatures. Moreover, the king refused to call a meeting of the Riksdag, which his uncle, the Duke of Södermanland, and others of his closest aides had repeatedly asked him to do. Instead, to the dismay of the nation, he ordered a war tax five times larger than the previous taxation and decreed a large levying of troops. And although he had no military talent or experience whatever, he announced that he would henceforth be commander in chief of Sweden’s army. He did not have a chance to exercise these duties: in previous months a rebellion had been brewing among army officers; and in March 1809 Lieutenant Colonel Georg Adlersparre, the aggressively ambitious commander-in-chief of our troops on the Norwegian border, signed a private armistice with the Danish commander of southern Norway, and marched on Stockholm with the intent of forcing the king to sign an official peace treaty and call a Riksdag.

When the king heard of Adlersparre’s plans he hurriedly left the castle of Haga, some three miles from Stockholm, where I’d been visiting that day to celebrate the queen’s birthday. Leaving his wife and children in my care, he rushed to the capital with the intent of traveling on south to Scania, Sweden’s southernmost province, in hopes of rallying troops there. Arriving in Stockholm, he found menacing crowds in the courtyard that faced his palace. Two of the nation’s leading military men, Marshal Klingspor and General Adlercreutz, had assembled at the palace with other officials to convince the king to remain in Stockholm, and to convoke the Riksdag. Their pressure so exasperated Gustav Adolf that upon one particular argument with his dissenters he raised
his sword threateningly against the aging Count von Stedingk, one of his father’s closest friends, and had to be restrained.

The morning after the king’s return, Marshal Klingspor, delegated by his peers, went to see Gustav Adolf and again exhorted him to remain in the capital. The king, furious, shouted insults at him, and upon hearing the imprecations General Adlercreutz and yet another esteemed military leader, the aggressively ambitious Colonel Silfversparre, rushed into the room. When he saw them enter, the king accused them of treason and brandished his sword again. Silfversparre managed to restrain him, but the king’s personal guards arrived; while Adlercreutz conferred with them the king managed to escape, and was only caught after an antic chase through the palace corridors.

Upon more discussions with the monarch, who was now detained in his apartments and still adamantly refused to put an end to his war with Denmark, Adlercreutz and other high-ranking notables realized that their only recourse was to suggest that he resign. Silfversparre, who had been appointed to be the king’s guardian, took the situation in hand, and asked him to abdicate. Gustav Adolf accepted with surprising ease, and soon went into exile abroad with his wife and children. But who could take his place? The notables settled on Karl, Duke of Södermanland, Gustav Adolf’s uncle, and elected him provisional head of state. Even though this indolent, aging prince enjoyed living in his various country estates, lacked any political insight, and had no ambition whatever to rule, a few months later he was crowned as King Karl XIII. I played my habitual, preeminent part at the coronation ritual, and upon this occasion the king promoted me to the rank of general.

Karl XIII being childless and ailing, the next order of business, inevitably, was to decide on his successor. The choice of a crown prince was made all the more difficult by the fact that the Riksdag had voted, to my great dismay, to permanently ban Gustav Adolf’s descendants from the throne. (As head of the “Gustavian” party, the faction that wished for a
continuation of Gustavus’s lineage, I was incensed by that ruling, being in favor of Gustav Adolf’s young son, Gustav, being chosen as crown prince.) Shortly after the coronation, Adlersparre proposed that Prince Christian August of Augustenberg, viceroy and governor of Norway, a distant descendant of Swedish royalty, be named crown prince, and the Riksdag acceded to that suggestion. It was hoped that Christian August would enjoin Norway to unite with Sweden, an ambition of Gustavus’s that had never been realized. The new crown prince—he would be renamed Karl August to make his name sound less foreign—arrived in Sweden in January of 1809. He was officially welcomed at Göteborg by my brother, Fabian, chairman of the State Banking Commission; I welcomed him to Drottningholm Palace, upon which occasion I addressed him in French, as was habitual in the aristocracy. The prince replied that he knew Swedish and would prefer to speak it, which led to a bad start in our relations.

Crown Prince Karl August would not be popular with the nobility. Small and fat, very ugly, with a short, thick neck and a face heavily marked with smallpox, he habitually locked himself up in his study instead of frequenting salons or theaters. Always modestly, if not frugally, dressed, whenever he went out he visited welfare institutions, homes for the aged, orphanages. Nervous and melancholy, he never gave or attended court dinners, and spent most of his time doing good works. And although he was a heavy drinker—an addiction that would perhaps contribute to his early death—he had a pronounced aversion, much like Gustav Adolf, to most kinds of luxury. However unpopular with aristocrats, many of whom referred to him as “Prince of the Mob,” he grew to be greatly beloved by the citizenry, and by King Karl himself: his simple, affable manners led the public to look on him as their protector against the privileged few. It was soon clear to me that Karl August, with his distaste for aristocrats, would have little tolerance for our family, the foremost representatives of the Gustavian nobility; and
that like the public at large he would look on our formality and reserve as arrogance and cynicism. In fact Sophie and I would soon hear that Karl August described us, the Fersens, as “a survival from a bygone era, refined on the surface although fundamentally barbaric and unchristian.”
Gode Gud,
what a judgment! We indeed came from “a bygone era”, but in what sense, my sister and I wondered, could we be considered “barbaric”? It was clear that we were now looked on as outcasts.

Less than eighteen months after his arrival, on May 28, 1810, as he was reviewing troops in the southern province of Scania, Crown Prince Karl August suddenly grew unsteady on his saddle, and fell off his horse, unconscious. Notwithstanding the care offered by his physician, Dr. Rossi, who had been traveling with him, he died a half hour later. Rossi called in professors from the nearest city, Lund, who performed an autopsy, and diagnosed that the prince had died of apoplexy.

Stockholm’s citizens were grief-stricken by news of the popular prince’s death, and rumors instantly arose that he had been poisoned. “A bleak cloud hung over the capital,” as one witness put it; “all faces were desolate and somber…. It is as if everyone had lost a close relative, a dear friend.”

I was then at Löfstad, and upon hearing the news, I decided to stay there. According to the daily reports I received from friends, the doctors’ diagnosis of apoplexy did not appease the crowds, who seemed determined to believe that the crown prince had been poisoned. Mind you, accusations of poisoning all too frequently arose when eminent persons died premature deaths. Whenever a distinguished member of the Riksdag died, an autopsy was habitually ordered to decide whether there had been foul play. Karl XIII himself had feared that Danish officials had intended to poison him. Shortly before the crown prince arrived in Sweden, a member of the Riksdag had suggested that there was a Gustavian plot to poison him before he reached Stockholm. Moreover, Crown Prince Karl August had been in frail health long before he
arrived in Sweden, and suffered from vertigo. As soon as he settled in Stockholm his frequent illnesses incited many rumors of attempted poisonings. Such accusations focused on such Gustavian families as the de la Gardies, and on my old friend Armfelt. And upon the crown prince’s death they centered all the more onerously on us, the Fersens, because the de la Gardies and Armfelt had not been in Stockholm at the time of Karl August’s death.

I
WRITE THESE
reflections three weeks after the crown prince’s demise, on the evening of June 19, the eve of the ritual that will commemorate the reception of the prince’s body in Stockholm. In view of the hostility borne to the Fersens by the capital’s bourgeoisie, who control the Swedish press, it is inevitable that our own family would be suspected of having poisoned Karl August. My sister Sophie has been particularly singled out as a culprit. As a powerful, highly intelligent woman who is the closest lifelong friend of Queen Charlotte, Karl XIII’s wife, and is said to wield great influence over her, she is very unpopular among Stockholm’s citizens. As one prominent member of the Riksdag put it, Sophie stands “high on the lists of intrigue,” and the king himself recently described her as “a big devil.” Moreover, she had earlier been suspected of having plotted the murder of her husband, Count Piper, and of poisoning her lover, Evert Taube (I’ve already mentioned that absurd charge), because he was leaving her his considerable fortune.

It should also be noted that several of the king’s councilors are convinced of the Fersens’ guilt. King Karl XIII himself believes that the murderer of his “beloved son” came from the high nobility. Instead of letting Dr. Rossi’s diagnosis stand, he has sent two other eminent professors to Scania to inquire further into the cause of the crown prince’s death. These doctors, while confirming Rossi’s diagnosis of apoplexy, have criticized some of the methods employed by their colleague. The
rumors of foul play that are currently spreading through Stockholm have been amplified by the fact that Italians have always been looked on as specialists in poisons. And suspicions of the Fersens are all the more widespread because Dr. Rossi is a protégé of our family, who had procured him his position as court doctor.

Pamphlets, broadside, leaflets, have begun to circulate in the past weeks. “Papers scattered every night in the streets of the city are calling the Swedes to vengeance,” the French ambassador recently related; “accusations are being made against the Fersens and their friend the queen; the police are on constant guard.” One particular leaflet, addressed to “The People, Karl August’s Avengers,” calls for a general uprising in which “blood must flow.” Referring to our family palace, another pamphlet calls for revenge against “the highly distinguished monstrosities in Blasieholmen.” Yet another warns that “certain high and distinguished persons” intended to poison the crown prince, the first among whom was “the haughty Count Fersen” and his “unscrupulous” sister.