Charles XIV John of Bernadotte

“ It has been said that Don John of Austria, the uncle and minister of the king of Spain, hoped to find in France a support against his rival, the king’s mother, who was upheld by the court at Vienna. Don John had caused the negotiations undertaken by the queen-mother for uniting the Catholic king with a daughter of the emperor to be broken off, and had solicited for Charles II the hand of Marie Louise of Orléans, a niece of Louis XIV and daughter of the duke of Orléans by his first wife Henrietta of England. ”

“ Charles XII. was now King of Sweden; Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia; George I., King of England; and the shameful regency had succeeded, in France, the reign of Louis XIV. For eighteen years a bloody war had been sweeping the plains of Poland, Russia and Sweden. Thousands had been torn to pieces by the enginery of war, and trampled beneath iron hoofs. Millions of women and children had been impoverished, beggared, and turned out houseless into the fields to moan and starve and die. The claims of humanity must ever yield to the requisitions of war. ”

“ The terror-stricken courtiers fled from the palace of Meudon, where the loathsome remains of the heir to the throne of France awaited burial. The corpse was hurried into a plain coffin, which was not even covered by the royal pall. Not a single mourning coach followed the only legitimate son of Louis XIV. to the grave. He had two sisters, the Princess of Conti and the Duchess of Bourbon Condé. Neither of them ventured to join the funeral procession of their only brother. He had three sons, Louis, Philip, and Charles. Philip was king of Spain. Louis and Charles were at home. ”

“ But by this time he was prematurely decrepit, and Bernadotte (see Charles XIV.) took over the government as soon as he landed in Sweden (1810) . By the union of 1814 Charles became the first king of Sweden and Norway. He married his cousin Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp (1759-1818) , but their only child, Carl Adolf, duke of Vermland, died in infancy (1798) . Charles XIII., who for eight years had been king only in title, died on the 5th of February 1818.
See Sveriges Historia vol. v. (Stockholm, 1884) ; Drottning Hedwig Charlottes Dagbokshandteckningar (Stockholm, 1898) ”

“ He rules on the very principles which he condemned in Charles I. The revolution ends in a military despotism.
If there was ever a usurpation, this was one. Liberty gave her last sigh on the remonstrance of Sir Harry Vane, and a military hero, by means of his army, stamps his iron heel on England. He dissolves the very body from which he received his own authority he refuses to have any check on his will; he imposes taxes without the consent of the people,--the very thing for which he took up arms against Charles I.; he reigns alone, on despotic principles, as absolute as Louis XIV. ”

“ But there were also two other claimants—the Duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV., whose claim rested in being the grandson of Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV., and sister of Charles II., and the Emperor of Germany, whose mother was the daughter of Philip III. The various European states looked with extreme jealousy on the claims of the Emperor of Germany and the Duke of Anjou, because they feared that the balance of power would be seriously disturbed if either an Austrian or a Bourbon prince became King of Spain. ”

“ The Congress of Vienna went one step further. It took Norway (which since the union of Calmar of the year 1397 had been united with Denmark) away from Denmark and gave it to Charles XIV of Sweden as a reward for his betrayal of Napoleon, who had set him up in the king business. This Swedish king, curiously enough, was a former French general by the name of Bernadotte, who had come to Sweden as one of Napoleon's adjutants, and had been invited to the throne of that good country when the last of the rulers of the house of Hollstein-Gottorp had died without leaving either son or daughter. ”

“ Although the Swedish government, amazed at Mörner’s effrontery, at once placed him under arrest on his return to Sweden, the candidature of Bernadotte gradually gained favour there, and, on the 21st of August 1810, he was elected crown-prince.
On the 2nd of November Bernadotte made his solemn entry into Stockholm, and on the 5th he received the homage of the estates and was adopted by Charles XIII. under the name of Charles John. The new crown-prince was very soon the most popular and the most powerful man in Sweden. ”

“ Nor were the courtiers less warm in their greetings than his majesty. The men hailed him as an agreeable companion; the ladies intimated he need not wholly abandon those tender diversions for which he had shown such natural talent and received such high reputation at the court of Louis XIV. He therefore promptly attached himself to the king, whose parties he invariably attended, and whose pleasures he continually devised; made friends with the most distinguished nobles, whom he charmed by the grace of his manner and extravagance of his entertainments ”

“ The only power capable of rendering effectual assistance to Holland, when menaced by Louis XIV., was England; but England was ruled by Charles II., and all he cared for were his pleasures and independence from parliamentary control. The French king easily induced him to break his alliance with the Dutch by a timely bribe, while, at the same time, he insured the neutrality of Spain, by inflaming the hereditary prejudices of the Spanish court against the Low Countries. ”

“ Philip demanded of his brother that his wife, Henrietta, the daughter of Charles I. of England, and the sister of Louis XIII., being of royal blood, should be allowed the privilege of taking an arm-chair in the saloons of the queen. The king made the following remarkable reply:
Remarks of Louis upon court etiquette.
"That can not be permitted. I beg of you not to persist in such a request. It was not I who established these distinctions. They existed long before you and I were born. It is for your interest that the dignity of the crown should neither be weakened or encroached upon. ”

“ A few non-royal princes, such as Armagnac, or Saint-Pol, or Brittany, remain and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard Dunois or the Constables Du Guesclin and Clisson, grow to greater prominence; it is clear that the old feudalism is giving place to a newer order, in which the aristocracy, from the King's brothers downwards, will group themselves around the throne, and begin the process which reaches its unhappy perfection under Louis XIV.
Directly after the expulsion of the English, troubles began between King Charles VII. and the Dauphin Louis ”

“ They upheld the absolutism of Louis XIV., and combated the English Revolution; they sent their spies and agents to England to undermine the throne of Elizabeth and build up the throne of Charles I. Every emancipating idea, in politics and in religion, they detested. There were many things in their system of education to be commended; they were good classical scholars, and taught Greek and Latin admirably; they cultivated the memory; they made study pleasing, but they did not develop genius. The order never produced a great philosopher ”

“ But for others, though professedly undertaken with a view only of anticipating hostile intentions, the development of which might possibly be reserved for a distant future, it is not easy to find a similar justification; and it may be feared that in more than one case governors-general, conscious of great abilities, have been too much inclined to adopt the pernicious maxim of Louis XIV., that the aggrandizement and extension of his dominions is the noblest object which a ruler of nations can have in view. ”

“ In the quarter of a century during which he kept the throne, Sweden and Norway, in the development of their resources, kept pace with the most prosperous nations of Europe.
Charles XIV. died in 1844, at the ripe age of eighty, and his son, Oscar I., succeeded. He was a man in sympathy with the new order of things, and gave the people immediately the reforms they had so long desired. His father had never succeeded in making himself a Swede, but lived a foreigner among his people till the last. ”

“ He inherits from Henry IV. those graces of the heart that are irresistible. He has received from Louis XIV. an intelligent love of the arts, a nobility of language, and that dignity that imposes respect while it seduces." All the journals chanted his praises. Seeing that the Constitutionnel itself, freed from censorship, rendered distinguished homage to legitimacy, he came to believe that principle invincible. He was called Charles the Loyal. At the Theatre-Francais, the line of Tartufe—
"Nous vivons sous un prince ennemi de la fraude"—
was greeted with a salvo of applause. ”

“ Your majesty has not even the right to give him a chateau.”
“How is that?”
“Yes, yes, your majesty is bound not to grant hospitality to King Charles, and to compel him to leave France even. It was on this account we forced him to quit you, and yet here he is again. Sire, I hope you will give your brother to understand that he cannot remain with us; that it is impossible he should be allowed to compromise us, or I myself——”
“Enough, my lord,” said Louis XIV, rising. “In refusing me a million, perhaps you may be right; your millions are your own. ”

“ Although a bigot and a persecutor, he had no real respect for honor or religion. There is hardly a character in history whom historians have more unanimously united in condemning. See the histories of Prescott, Motley and Froude.
Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain, was born at Versailles, Dec. 19, 1683, his father being the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XIV of France. In 1700 the Spanish crown was bequeathed to him by Charles II. He entered in 1701, and after a long struggle with Archduke Charles of Austria was left in possession of his throne by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. ”

“ The Tories now sought to bring to a close a war that had become so unpopular. Louis XIV was also suing for peace. Then in 1711 the Emperor Joseph died, and his brother the Archduke succeeded him as Charles VI. It was now useless to trouble further to support or oppose the claims of either candidate for the Spanish throne. Spain might as well be in the hands of a Frenchman as be assigned to the powerful Emperor. It would have been absurd, in short, for England to go on fighting for Charles. ”

“ On 5 February, 1818, he succeeded his adoptive father, and was crowned King of Sweden and Norway at both Stockholm and Drontheim. He was succeeded by his only son, Oscar, in 1844.
It is a curious fact that both the two kings born at Pau abjured their religions to obtain a crown. Henry IV abandoned Calvinism to become a Catholic and receive the crown of France; John Baptist Julius Bernadotte threw overboard such Catholicism as he had—a light cargo—and accepted Protestantism to obtain the crown of Sweden and Norway. ”

“ The tournament was given in honour of the queen’s birthday, and for several months beforehand the northern Courts had been apprised of it. The young king was to figure among the champions, and the queen, one of the handsomest women of her time, was to crown the victor and present to him in the presence of the whole Court the reward of his skill, which consisted of a scarf wholly embroidered by her own hands. Nothing had been left undone to invest this fête with all the prestige that formerly marked those of Louis XIV., the accounts of which had fairly astonished the whole of Europe. ”

“ In 1711 the Holy Roman Emperor died, as a result of which the archduke ascended the imperial throne as the Emperor Charles VI. This event proved to be decisive as affecting the war, for it made the candidacy of Charles for the Spanish crown almost as unwelcome as had been the earlier prospect of a Franco-Spanish union. Other factors contributed to make the former archduke’s allies desirous of peace, chief of which was that Louis XIV had been so thoroughly beaten that there was no longer any danger of his insisting on the rights of Philip V to the crown of France. ”

“ At the restoration of Charles II, Arundell, on paying 35,000l., was confirmed in all his family estates, many of which had been sold by the Commonwealth to one Humphrey Weld. On 7 March 1662-3 he was nominated master of the horse to the queen-mother, Henrietta Maria. In January 1668-9 he was summoned by Charles II, with other Roman catholic peers, to a secret council, and was commissioned to proceed to France to inform Louis XIV of the English king's desire to be reconciled to Roman Catholicism, and of his want of ready money. ”

“ All the linen he wears is from the deft needle of Mme. Narischkine; he not only accepts the workmanship, but he always forgets to refund to her the cost of the material. The charming favourite makes no secret of it. Louis XIV. frequently crops up in conversation in connection with his fêtes at Versailles. Our sovereigns would do well to imitate103 them. However artistically chased those candlesticks may be, Mlle. ”

“ T must be acknowledged that Louis XIV., in his amours more refined than his contemporary Charles II. of England, sought for mental gifts no less than personal charms, and, if caught at first by the eye and the lip, the bloom of the cheek and the lustre of the hair, could only be held by the surer and more exquisite fascination of a clear judgment and a lively wit. He was not content with a dumb Venus. Beauty was required to wear the robe of Pallas, and to borrow some, at least, of the magical spells of the Graces. ”