The Queen's Lover (7 page)

Although he had far more support from them than from the nobility, the lower estates also presented Gustavus with difficulties. The peasants resented him for having taken away their right to distill their own liquor; the Lutheran clergy was distressed by his policy of religious tolerance. After numerous confrontations with the Riksdag, in the summer of 1772, a few months after acceding to the throne, Gustavus staged a canny coup d’état against the estates that much strengthened the power of the Crown. On an August evening all the officers whom he thought he could trust received secret instructions to assemble the following morning in the great square facing the arsenal. The following day at noon, he met with his escort of several hundred high-ranking officers and addressed them thus: “If you follow me, just like your ancestors followed Gustavus Adolphus, then I will risk my life and blood for you and the salvation of the fatherland!” A young officer called out: “We’re willing to sacrifice both blood and life in Your Majesty’s service!” The king then had his officers take a new oath that absolved them from their allegiance to the Riksdag and bound them solely to his will. Meanwhile, the members of the Privy Council had been arrested and the fleet secured. When, at the end of the day, the king made a tour of the city, he was everywhere received by enthused crowds, which hailed him as a liberator.

A few days hence, having assembled the estates at his palace, the king took his seat on the throne and delivered a philippic that berated the estates for their license and venality, and that would be viewed as another masterpiece of Swedish oratory. He accused them of having
degraded the nation by “inciting hatred, inciting hatred to grow into revenge, inciting revenge to become persecution…. The ambition and lust for glory of a few people has damaged the realm,” he continued, “…and the result of this has been the suffering of the people. To establish their own power base has been the estates’ sole goal, often at the cost of other citizens and always at the cost of the nation.” I was not a witness to this particular event, but I much doubt if Gustavus would have so readily met his political goals if he had not been one of the century’s great orators—a gift inevitably linked to his devotion to the stage.

S
TRONGLY ASSOCIATED WITH
Gustavus’s sense of drama was his love of fashion. He took a passionate interest in women’s clothes, noticing the smallest details of their costumes—the rosettes on ladies’ slippers, the facings of their jackets. In the afternoons, after the business of cabinet meetings was over, he amused himself by drawing designs for new courtiers’ vestments, most of them eccentric—I particularly remember black satin trousers trimmed with red ribbons, matched with a black-and-red hooded jacket, which made their wearers look like lobsters. Or else he embroidered bodices and belts for ladies of the court. To make himself taller, the king himself wore shoes with bright red high heels made for him in France.

Yet notwithstanding his fascination with their clothes, Gustavus had shied away from women and never displayed any interest in them. The only woman who had ever influenced him was his mother; and some members of his court soon began to sense that he might be homosexual. Alas for Crown Prince Gustavus, when he had turned twenty the issue of marriage had inevitably arisen. The bride imposed upon him by the Riksdag and his powerful courtiers was Sophia Magdalena, a daughter of Frederick V of Denmark and a granddaughter, on her mother’s side,
of George II of England. This princess could not have been more ill-suited to Gustavus. Pleasant-looking but not beautiful, diminutive in height, very pious, very shy, she loathed opera, theater, and all forms of dramatic art, and talked to me about her husband’s artistic proclivities as being whimsical or profane. She did captivate many at the court, however, through her sweetness and generosity, even though her mother-in-law’s entourage did everything they could to make her miserable. Every one of her moves was watched by the queen mother’s spies. Oh, what a witch, what a harridan, that woman was; I’ve never met the likes of her! Queen Ulrica and her retinue did not even allow Sophia Magdalena to retain any of her Danish maids. They snubbed her for not taking part in theatricals, ridiculed her for not wearing rouge, called her stingy for refusing to gamble. And for years they teased her heartlessly about the fact that she was still a virgin.

For Gustavus had loathed the very notion of wedlock. He had been forced into his marriage by sheer public pressure, and had no plans whatever for consummating it. The couple had married in 1766. In the following decade Gustavus lived in palaces other than his wife’s for a year or two at a time, not seeing or even talking to her, spending most of his time with his favorite, Gustav Armfelt. Predictably, eleven years went by without Sophia Magdalena showing any signs of pregnancy. Upon my scolding Gustavus about the indifference with which he treated his spouse, the crown prince turned on me in an unusually hostile and petulant manner and replied that his aversion to her was based on “the boredom that follows her wherever she goes.” But his situation grew increasingly problematical in 1777, when he became king: Gustavus then began to worry about the continuation of Sweden’s royal lineage. Meanwhile, his wife had grown increasingly shy and distant because of her husband’s absences and the hostility incited by her scheming mother-in-law.

What to do? Enter one Munck, the king’s first equerry, a young man
of great physical power and tenacity, and of immense devotion to the king. Gustavus had a singular idea: he decided to engage Munck in the task of consummating his marriage and producing an heir. At first Munck demurred. According to one version of the episode, Munck helped the king to undress, led him to the queen’s bedchamber, and withdrew to a nearby room; but twenty minutes later he was rejoined by the king. The astonished Munck asked his master what had come to pass, and upon the king’s remaining silent and shamefaced, Munck wasted no more words. He picked him up as if he were a baby and carried him to the royal bedchamber, locked all its doors, and didn’t return to fetch the king until five in the morning. This comedy was repeated for six consecutive nights, until Munck realized that Gustavus was totally paralyzed by the notion of making love to a woman.

It then became easier for Gustavus to persuade Munck that it was his, Munck’s, citizenly duty to cohabit with the queen in order to produce a royal heir. Munck accepted the assignment, and within a few months, eureka! Queen Sophia Magdalena finally displayed signs of pregnancy. A healthy male heir, Gustav Adolf, was born in 1778, another one, Karl Gustav, who would live less than a year, in 1782. Ignorant of the intrigue devised by the king and his amiable conspirator, the nation rejoiced at the birth of Crown Prince Gustav Adolf. Meanwhile the king also married off his own personal favorite, Gustav Armfelt, to a cousin of mine, a de la Gardie, assuaging the court’s concern pertaining to the sexual proclivities of Armfelt, who was actually an ardent womanizer.

Oh, Gustavus, how difficult it was to tactfully, amiably resist your own advances to me! How fearful I was of losing your treasured friendship, the joys of your warmth and generosity, the charm of your enlightened conversation and wit! You were thirty, and I twenty-one, when this confrontation came to pass, and you were sensitive enough, even then, to realize the degree to which I adored women, and to remain my close friend.

I
RETURN TO THE ACTIVITIES
of my own youth. In the spring of 1773, the year of Gustavus’s accession to the throne, I had been sent abroad with my tutor—I was eighteen—to begin my grand tour. I had first gone to Italy to be introduced to Maria Carolina, queen of Naples, sister of the then Dauphine Marie Antoinette. Naples had one of the most superb theaters in Europe, the San Carlo, with its six floors of loges and an excellent group of musicians whose singing delighted me. In this city I was also received by the British ambassador, Sir Alexander Hamilton (soon to be linked with the notorious Emma), a man of immense culture and a gifted archaeologist whose collection of Etruscan vases he would offer to the British Museum. I then voyaged on to Piedmont. Apart from the fine museum of Turin, which I visited assiduously and which owned a particularly fine collection of Bronzinos and Parmigianos, I found Piedmont’s atmosphere to be very coarse. I may be considered priggish for saying that the Piedmonteses’ conversation is shockingly lewd, and that they talk to women in language that French grenadiers would be ashamed to use with prostitutes. It was while in Turin that I learned of Gustavus’s coup d’état. Without a drop of blood being shed, he had rid himself of the Riksdag’s stranglehold on the country! Voltaire celebrated him in these verses:
“Jeune et digne héritier du grand nom de Gustave Sauveur d’un peuple libre et roi d’un peuple brave.”

Having finally arrived in Paris in November of 1773, I met the woman to whom I attribute my sexual awakening, the Marquise de Blacas. Ah,
chère
Marguerite, what shall I remember best of your wondrous body, of the ecstasies you taught me? The long dark head of hair that swept across my chest as you lay on top of me, your milky thighs weaving about my waist as you displayed your superb mastery of the male body? The great bushy twat I loved to bury my head in, making my tongue as delicate as a cat’s as it gamboled about your orifice? The
full round nipples I bit as you hovered over me, withdrawing from my penis in a slow gentle motion, then thrusting it back into yourself with great violence, whispering
“Oui, oui, comme ça mon chéri, comme ça,”
this not only addressed to me but also to some god of carnal love who was clearly your friend? Or those moments when I simply stared at you as you lay naked on your divan, looking at me with your sly, mocking gaze, hand held in mock modesty over your bush, reminding me, oh so gloriously, of Titian’s
Venus,
needing only a black servant with a parasol, a white pup scampering at your feet, to become a replica of that masterpiece? Or else those times when I lay on top of you, mouthing your shoulders, neck, breasts, sliding slowly into you as if to erase every inner wrinkle of your silken path? All this and heaven too you taught me, dear professor of desire, as you turned the shy young Swede into a sexual athlete—one who henceforth tried not to display his swaggering confidence.

But it is at the very height of our gamboling that I went to that opera ball and met the chaste young woman who would become my life’s central passion. Few men have known as well as I the discrete difference between profane and sacred love.

Sophie:

MY BROTHER AT WAR

I
T WAS HARD FOR ME
to understand why my gentle brother would ever desire to take part in armed conflict, would ever be able to aim his rifle at another human being. But since his adolescence he’d aspired to be a soldier and experience battle, and he also tended to be very anti-British. In 1778 France decided to side with America’s rebellious colonists; great numbers of distinguished French citizens—most notably the twenty-four-year-old Marquis de Lafayette and his brother-in-law the Vicomte de Noailles—crossed the ocean to join America’s colonists in their struggle for independence from Great Britain. The example of such illustrious men influenced thousands of Europeans to volunteer in that war, and my brother was one of the very first to enlist in the French Expeditionary Force. By order of the king, this force could not exceed five thousand, and it is a sign of France’s enthusiasm for the American cause that thousands of citizens eager to join the conflict were turned down.

But was Axel’s decision to fight in the Revolutionary War solely dictated by his martial ambitions and his admiration for the American cause? Could it be that it also had to do with the queen’s tender feelings for him, which she was expressing with increasing candor? I believe that all three factors contributed to his resolve to engage in the conflict.
Here is what Ambassador Creutz had to say about their relationship in a letter to our monarch, Gustavus III:

“I must let Your Majesty know that the young Count von Fersen was held in such high esteem by the queen that a few at court were made uneasy by the evidence of her regard for him. I confess that I myself saw too much clear proof of her penchant for the count to doubt it. Young Count von Fersen’s conduct in this case was admirable for its modesty and moderation, as displayed by his decision to go to America. By taking his distance he prevents all danger. Truly, to surmount temptations in this manner takes a strength of character far beyond his years. During his last days at court the queen could barely take her eyes off him, and grew tearful each time she spoke to him.”

Count Creutz is very accurate in his esteem for my brother’s conduct. Axel was as prudent and discreet in his relations with the queen as he had been with the young Duchess of Södermanland, and the various other women who had been enamored of him. It is his ambition, I believe, as much as his delicacy of character, that has always led him to scrupulously avoid the least taint of scandal. Upon learning that Axel was leaving for America, one of the queen’s more impolitic ladies-in-waiting, the Duchesse de Fitz-James, had the effrontery to address him thus: “Well, sir, is this the way you abandon your conquest?” His reply was a model of tact. “If I had made one, I would not abandon it,” he answered. “I leave as a free man, and, unfortunately, without any regrets.” Indeed, I do believe that his enthusiasm for joining the war prevailed over any chagrin that his separation from the queen might have caused him.