The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Silfversparre then accompanied Axel to the back room of the tavern. With what foul riffraff is our city filled! Drinkers in that space also insulted him and our entire family, and, breaking their promise, began to strike him with their canes and umbrellas. “You will die before midnight tonight,” several yelled at him. “The Piper woman and two others will die!” “I see that it will soon be my final hour,” my brother is heard to have moaned as he followed Silfversparre down the stairs. Oh my darling Axel, why, why were we so hated? The canes and umbrellas were significant—the attacks on Axel had not been initiated by the poor of the city, but by citizens of the burgher class, which so detested us. One witness would later describe the marauders assaulting Axel as “part of that middle class, which, more than the lower class, envies aristocrats and sees them as criminals.”

  As Silfversparre and my weak, stumbling brother descended the stairs, part of the tavern crowd followed them, tearing out Axel’s earrings and tufts of his hair. My poor Axel staggered under the assaults, fell on the stairs, was picked up again, and finally reached the door sill of the tavern, where he was met by a clamorous mob, which had grown far rougher. He who had so loved uniforms and ceremonial dress was now barefoot, his trousers torn, his shirts stripped from him. But the Order of the Seraphim was still suspended, on a ribbon, around his neck. As he reached the ground floor, members of the crowd demanded that he take it off. “The king gave it to me; only the king can take it away,” Axel whispered, barely able to speak. The riffraff violently pulled off the decoration and tore it to shreds. Silfversparre was also attacked, struck on his cheek. It was at this crucial moment that Silfversparre went off to the palace to find his horse. In this melee, my cherished Axel found himself alone, covered with blood, wounds all over his head and trunk, still being struck by powerful blows.

  A major general, von Vegesad, tried to protect him from the mob by placing him against a wall, behind his horse. “Save me,” Axel beseeched him. But the terrified animal, rearing and bucking, pried loose. Two other officers courageously came to his aid, and lifted him up. “Help me, boys,” Axel pleaded. The young men led him toward Riddarhus, across the street from the tavern. The square in front of it being filled with a mob, they managed to take my brother to the city hall next door, and placed him in the guardhouse, which they barricaded. Axel fell into a chair and asked for a drink of water, promising large rewards to whoever could bring him to safety. But he barely had time to finish the water, for the door of the guardhouse gave way and a band of men assaulted him. So this is the way my beloved brother met his end: he was dragged out unto the courtyard of city hall, next to Riddarhus, the building where my family had met for generations to discuss the destiny of our country, and there he was kicked and stampeded to death by the barbarous crowd. The final blow was given by the villain Tandefelt, who jumped on his chest and crushed his rib cage.

  Even after my brother’s death, the mob continued to kick and desecrate his corpse. Only when Silfversparre returned on his horse, aghast at the sight of Axel’s body (he had wished to humiliate my brother, but mightn’t have wanted to go further), did the crowd begin to disperse. Shreds of Axel’s hair and clothing were carried away by hundreds of citizens. Of his tattered garments only one sock and a belt remained intact. A few hours later his body was dumped into a wooden coffin and placed in a police watch room, where crowds queued up for hours to see his mutilated corpse. Fragments of his clothing and strands of his hair, so my witnesses reported, were being sold for astronomical prices in Stockholm’s streets.

  We were offered one kind gesture. A young man who described himself as a mason brought Axel’s gold watch to Silfversparre, saying that he was “not a thief,” but simply one of the avengers of Karl August’s death. This watch was the very one Marie Antoinette had given my brother in 1792—on its enameled surface were carved their initials, “A and F.” Axel had worn it faithfully ever since. Only when I was told this story did I realize that my brother had died on the nineteenth anniversary, to the day, of the flight to Varennes, a venture undertaken to save the life of his great love.

  IT WAS TEN AT NIGHT. I, Sophie, was at home in Blasieholmen, in the company of a few friends and of my seven-months-pregnant daughter, when news was brought to me of my adored brother’s death.

  I don’t need to linger much on my sorrow, for my passion for my brother has been amply documented in these pages. I shall only say that I was flooded by memories of our shared childhood, our shared youth: the way we raced home from church to devour the X-shaped saffron buns traditional to that holiday. Painting the sign of the cross on our foreheads and on our cattle’s noses on Maundy Thursday. Walking down the streets of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan in the full daylight of June midnights, our arms around each other’s waist. Standing by Axel as he painted his exquisite watercolors of the lake at our estate in Löfstad.

  However, I barely had time to give vent to my grief, or to summon more memories, for those loved ones who surrounded me urged me to seek a safe hiding place. “All Fersens will be persecuted,” so the advice went. “Protect yourself!” I first sought asylum at the residence of our foreign minister. Through tornadoes of rain and wind I then fled, disguised as a peasant woman, to Vaxholm Fortress, a prison in which I sought protective custody. I remained there for many weeks. Queen Charlotte herself was suspected by citizens because of her close friendship with our family, and for a long time was prepared to flee from Haga. The crowd continued to be restive until the following month, when the crown prince was finally buried in Riddarholm Church.

  I hardly need to say how much grief and shock there was among our friends and acquaintances. “That His Excellency Fersen was innocent, I am convinced, and for several reasons,” the chief master of ceremonies at the court, L. von Hausswolff, wrote about Axel. “Primo, he was a good and honest man. Secundo, he was too proud and haughty to involve himself in any plan against the crown prince, which would disgrace himself and his entire family. Tertio, he was too indolent to think of anything that might change his way of life. This man was thus the victim of circumstances that only the future will reveal.”

  “Our cannibals exceed the Parisian monsters,” exclaimed Axel’s comrade Gustav Armfelt, who had been abroad at the time of my brother’s death, and soon thereafter moved to Russia. “Where were the troops, for heaven’s sake? However haughty he was, that Axel von Fersen, so honest, so amicable, was sacrificed to popular furor—this is an enigma that only time will solve.”

  Yes, where were the troops, as the grieving Armfelt put it? The “enigma” was easily resolved by me, and by anyone who was familiar with the nature of Karl XIII’s court. The king’s closest advisers had everything to fear from the Gustavian faction led by my brother, which desired Gustav IV Adolf’s young son, Gustav, to be crown prince. Adlercreutz and Klingspor themselves had participated in the arrest of Gustav IV Adolf, and Silfversparre himself had led him to prison. The king, sick and aged, was much influenced by these acolytes, and they had easily swayed him against all Gustavians, of whom my brother was the most prominent member.

  Queen Charlotte and I lobbied relentlessly for an inquest that would rehabilitate Axel and prove his innocence. Our wishes were finally granted. An inquisition was begun a few weeks after his death. In November of that year our supreme court formally absolved my brother and all the Fersens of any culpability in the death of the crown prince, ruling that Gustav Adolf had died a natural death.

  Queen Charlotte and I were still not satisfied. We wished a ceremony to be held at Riddarholm Church, where members of the royal family and high officials had traditionally had their memorial services. At first Karl XIII hesitated to extend this honor to Axel. But by August 1810 the Riksdag, faithful to the tradition of inviting foreign dignitaries into the Swedish royal family, had elected a new crown prince, the forty-seven-year-old French general Bernadotte. The Riksdag had wished the country to be led by an eminent military leader because of the constant threat of a war with Russia, and Bernadott
e fitted the bill perfectly. He was an illustrious hero of Napoleon’s wars who had led his troops with particular valor at Austerlitz. Bernadotte secured Bonaparte’s permission to become crown prince of Sweden. Eager to unify the country, “Karl Johan” Bernadotte—so he was renamed—was all too happy to begin his tenure in the Swedish royal family with a gesture of reconciliation toward a family as distinguished as the Fersens; and he prevailed upon the king to have Axel’s memorial held at Riddarholm.

  THE STEWARD OF OUR ESTATE at Steninge had come to claim Axel’s body the morning after his death. It had been embalmed and placed in a small garden pavilion, with the plan of burying him later in our family vault. But there again Stockholm citizens, constantly doing all they could to oppose the nobility, had run afoul of our wishes. A few days before the scheduled burial two officials arrived from the capital, forbidding our family to proceed because Stockholm’s denizens looked on Axel’s corpse as having been “stolen” from them—the mob at Riddarhus Square had condemned it to the gallows hill. So the body continued to remain in the garden pavilion while Fabian and I, wishing to reemphasize Axel’s innocence, lobbied King Karl to have him buried at Riddarholm with the full ritual due a grand marshal and Knight of the Seraphim. With the continuing support of Queen Charlotte and of Bernadotte, who allayed the king’s fear of further public disturbances, our cause prevailed. And in December Axel was reburied in Riddarholm Church, with the kind of ceremonial pageantry that would have delighted him. In his eulogy at the funeral, Bishop Gustaf Murray spoke of Axel as “the undeserving victim of a misled public’s bloodthirsty frenzy.”

  As for the pavilion in Steninge, it was converted into a little brick chapel of Romanesque Gothic style, sheltered by a great oak, which bore the following inscription:

  “Here were kept for four months the mortal remains of Count AXEL VON FERSEN, Grand Marshal of the Kingdom of Sweden, while the powers that ended his days refused to let him rest in the tomb of his ancestors. May Truth recalled by time protect in History his memory and render justice to his virtue….”

  I wished to pay further tribute to that remarkable man, my brother. So the year after his death I erected a monument in his memory in the park of our estate in Lövstad. Its inscription reads as follows:

  COUNT AXEL VON FERSEN

  GRAND MARSHAL OF SWEDEN

  CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF UPPSALA,

  GENERAL OF THE CAVALRY

  KNIGHT AND COMMANDER OF THE PRINCIPAL ORDERS OF THE KINGDOM

  BORN SEPTEMBER 4, 1755

  HE WHO WISHED TO COMBAT ANARCHY AND POPULAR FUROR

  WAS ITS VICTIM

  ON JUNE 20 1810.

  LET HIS INNOCENCE BE ACKNOWLEDGED!

  LET INNOCENTS BE AVENGED!

  HIS MEMORY PRESERVES GLORY AND TRUTH.

  Blessed are you when you are reviled and persecuted, and all kinds

  of evil are said against you…. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad,

  for great is your reward in Heaven.

  Matthew, Ch. 5, Verse II.

  AUTHOR’S EPILOGUE

  Sweden had long had the reputation of being an orderly, law-abiding society, and Fersen’s assassination may have shocked the nation more than any event in nineteenth-century Swedish history. It caused a wave of fear that Sweden stood on the brink of a violent revolution. It occasioned a pronounced swing to the right in the nation’s political life—within two years freedom of the press, for instance, grew extremely limited. Among liberals, Karl XIII was much criticized for his callous indifference to Fersen’s fate; and Fersen’s murder led to a national longing for a monarch who would be far more vigorous and skilled than Karl (such a ruler would readily be found in Bernadotte).

  News of Fersen’s end also consternated the rest of Europe. It is Napoleon Bonaparte, this time, who may have had the last word. Upon hearing of Axel’s demise he declared to the Swedish ambassador: “Count von Fersen’s assassination was perpetuated with the acquiescence, might I even say the assent, of your government…Be on your guard!”

  Sophie Piper survived her brother by six years, dying in Lövstad in 1816.

  Axel’s brother, Fabian, died in 1818. Fabian’s younger son, Gustaf Hans, who died in 1839, would be the last male member of the Fersen clan.

  Bernadotte ascended the Swedish throne in 1818, upon the death of Karl XIII, and took on the name Karl XIV Johan. He proved to be a most popular and effective monarch, and reigned until his death in 1848.

  After being exiled, Gustav IV Adolf traveled restlessly throughout Europe for some decades and died in Saint Gallen, Switzerland, in 1837.

  The Comte de Provence ruled France as Louis XVIII from 1814 until his death in 1824, except for the interruption of Bonaparte’s Hundred Days (1815), during which the former emperor attempted to regain control over the nation.

  Provence’s younger brother, Comte d’ Artois, reigned as Charles X from 1824 to 1830, and became increasingly hated for his ultra reactionary politics. The last Bourbon king of France, he was deposed in 1830, sought exile in London and then in Prague, and died in 1836 during a trip to Italy. He was succeeded by the far more liberal Duc d’Orléans, who ruled as King Louis-Philippe.

  Fersen’s friend Gustav Armfelt expired in 1814 in Tsarkoye Selo, having moved to Russia and taken on Russian nationality a year after his friend’s death.

  Fersen’s hopes that Marie Antoinette’s son Louis-Charles, the last dauphin of France, was his child, came to naught. Recent DNA studies have proved that Louis-Charles was the son of Louis XVI.

  MARIE ANTOINETTE’S CORRESPONDENCE with Fersen has its own dramatic history. After Fersen’s death, all of his archives were preserved by Sophie’s progeny—his nephews and grand-nephews. One of them, Baron Klinckowström, published the whole of his correspondence with the queen in 1877. This edition provoked great consternation among historians, for many passages of these letters had been censored, replaced by rows of dotted lines. Baron Klinckowström refused to publish the originals, pretending that the obliterated passages revealed political secrets that would displease the king of Sweden. This explanation was manifestly disingenuous, for the obliterated passages mostly occurred at the very beginnings and ends of the letters, intimating that they concerned the expression of tender, intimate emotions. Continuing to refuse communicating the original letters, Fersen’s grand-nephew, Klinckowström, pretended that he had burned them.

  More than a century later, in 1982, Marie Antoinette scholars were surprised and relieved to hear that the letters that had been believed destroyed in fact existed. The Klinckowström family had put them up at auction at Christie’s, in London, and they were bought by France’s National Archives, where they remain to this day. However, the most sophisticated current techniques of decoding the originals, or bringing to light the phrases written in invisible ink, have failed. One single missive of Marie Antoinette’s escaped the prudish Baron Klinckowström’s vandalism. It is the one dated June 29, 1791, written shortly after her return from the Varennes venture, which begins with the phrase “I can only tell you that I love you,” and ends with the words “Adieu, the most beloved and loving of men. I kiss you with all my heart.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a historical novel. The major events and personages cited in it are authentic. All correspondence between Axel von Fersen and his lovers, relatives, and friends, and all of Fersen’s journal entries, are directly quoted from manuscripts—many of them published—that are preserved in French and Swedish institutions.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My foremost debt is to Ann Godoff, my cherished editor and publisher, who has given me invaluable guidance throughout the writing of this book. Gratitude also to my treasured agent, Lynn Nesbit, whose enthusiasm has ever been a source of inspiration and encouragement. And my thanks to Lindsay Whalen of The Penguin Press for her precious help in the manuscript’s editing.

  I am most grateful to Gary Tinterow for introducing me to the former Swedish Consul General in New York, the
Honorable Ulf Hjertonsson; he generously presented me to those friends of his in Stockholm who could help me with my Fersen project. My appreciation to Sigrid and Kai Falkman, to Goran Berg, and to Christina Oldfelt Ekéus and Rolf Ekéus for their warm hospitality. My particular gratitude to Michael Sohlman, who found me the best possible guide to all places and issues relating to Axel von Fersen—the esteemed author Malte Persson, whom I also thank from the bottom of my heart. And my appreciation to the staff of Stockholm’s Royal Archives, where Fersen’s journals are kept, for their unfailing amiability and thoughtfulness.

  I equally want to acknowledge my debt to Caroline Weber, who offered me precious advice concerning all that related to Queen Marie Antoinette; to Jonathan Fasman, who gave the manuscript a dedicated reading; to Stephana Bottom Webb, whose large collection of books on the French Queen—generously loaned to me for over two years—was a treasure trove; to Haley Hogan, for her meticulous research assistance; to Lillian Lovitt, Carol Haxo, Celia Britch, Karen Farrell, and Johanna Snyers for helping me to keep body and soul together, year in and year out; and to my male trinity, my late husband, Cleve Gray, and my sons Thaddeus and Luke, whose love and support have been my life’s greatest blessing.