The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  It strikes me that many pivotal events in the life of Gustavus, who was so stagestruck, would be in some way related to the theater. In February 1771, the crown prince was at the Paris Opera, watching a performance of Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe, when a messenger appeared bearing the news that his father had died. Gustavus had much loved his gentle, indulgent parent. He hastened back to the Swedish embassy, where he remained in seclusion for the following four days, suffering great sorrow. Having been promised three hundred thousand livres by Louis XV to bolster his country’s faltering finances, he went home to prepare for the business of being a king.

  Soon after his coronation, it was announced that His Majesty Gustavus III had chosen Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoons as those times when his subjects could come to present their petitions and discuss their griefs with him personally. On the appointed hours the palace was thronged by crowds of every rank and age, and of both genders. The monarch listened with exemplary patience to the complaints of his humblest subjects. He bestowed favors as graciously as if he were receiving them. To some he offered money, to others he gave advice; every visitor was greeted with a friendly smile or a sympathetic word. The citizens were dazzled by their new monarch. To have seen the king and shaken his hand was looked on as the height of felicity, and he was lauded to the skies. My father, at the time, was still the head of the Hat faction, and he was immediately summoned by the king to open negotiations with the Caps. In June 1771 it was my privilege to see Gustavus, in full regalia and with the silver scepter of his ancestors in hand, formally open his first Riksdag, or parliament. His speech stirred deep emotions in those who heard it, all the more because everyone in attendance understood it: Gustavus felt close to his humbler subjects, and addressed the Riksdag in Swedish instead of French. It was the first time in more than a century that a Swedish king—and what an orator this one was—addressed a Riksdag from the throne in his native language.

  After a moving allusion to his father’s death, Gustavus proceeded to say: “Born and bred among you, I have learned to love my country from my earliest youth, and consider it the highest privilege to be born a Swede…to be the first citizen of a free people…. To rule over a happy people is my dearest desire, to govern a free people the highest aim of my ambition…. I have found that neither the pomp nor the magnificence of monarchy, neither the most prosperous economy, can ensure content or prosperity when a nation is not united. It rests with you, therefore, to become the happiest country in the world. Let this Riksdag remain forever memorable in our annals for the annulment of all party animosities, of all self-interested motives. I shall do all I can to reunite our diverging opinions, to reconcile your estranged affections, so that the nation may forever look back with gratitude on a parliament upon whose deliberations I now invoke the blessing of the Most High.”

  This encomium, delivered with the dramatic skill of a consummate actor, produced an extraordinary effect. If my own rigid, judgmental father was astonished and delighted by it, one can well imagine its impact on the entire assembly. It was unanimously decided, by all four estates, that the royal address should be printed in Swedish, German, and Finnish, and that a framed copy of it should be preserved on a wall of every parish in the realm. A translation of Gustavus’s speech even appeared in the Gazette de France and was admired by many Parisians. Gustavus’s reputation grew throughout Europe as he hired dozens of foreign and native architects to make Stockholm into an eminent cultural center. He built Stockholm’s first opera house and a score of new theaters throughout the capital; founded the Royal Ballet and the Royal Dramatic Theater, where some of his own plays were performed; and established the Swedish Academy. In 1772 he created a highly progressive constitution that forbade him from declaring war without the consent of the Riksdag. And in time he worked toward social reform as few Enlightenment rulers would. He abolished torture, annulled the death penalty for many crimes, offered far greater religious liberty to Catholics and Jews, and proclaimed a limited freedom of the press that was equaled, at that time, only by Great Britain’s. He was also a keen supporter of the American side in the 1776 War of Independence, writing about that conflict in the passage that follows:

  “This might well be America’s century. The new republic…may perhaps take advantage of Europe someday, in the same manner as Europe has taken advantage of America for two centuries. I can not but admire their courage and enthusiastically appreciate their daring.”

  On the military level of his own nation, one should note that it was Gustavus III who built up the Swedish fleet and made it into one of the three great naval forces in Europe, alongside France’s and Great Britain’s. It is all these political and cultural achievements that led his reign to be referred to as “the Gustavian age” and caused the arts he promoted to be known as “the Gustavian style.”

  But Gustavus had to struggle mightily with his parliament, the Riksdag, a combat that would have great consequences for the rest of his reign. I must explain that our parliament is not a liberal force, as it is in most other countries. On the contrary. Our Riksdag is composed of four estates—the aristocracy, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasantry. And the nobility then comprised a group of conservative nobles who much resented Gustavus’s liberal measures, and his foreign policy. The king was singularly apprehensive of the power and ambition of Catherine the Great of Russia. She would happily have gobbled up Sweden upon the slightest provocation, and was then preparing to invade Turkey, with which Sweden had signed a peace pact nearly half a century earlier. In the 1780s, Sweden’s principal ally was France, which was so weakened by its impending revolution that it could not possibly help Gustavus in any of his military ventures. Riding roughshod over his own constitution by not consulting the Riksdag, Gustavus engaged his navy in a naval battle with Russia in which both sides lost their most important ships, but which essentially favored Russia. Gustavus realized that the Russian capital, Saint Petersburg, could only be attacked by land. But he was prevented from engaging in any substantial conflict by a massive mutiny of Swedish officers, who refused to do battle because the king had not consulted the Riksdag concerning his naval engagement with Russia.

  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 bas
e 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.

  STRONGLY 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.<
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  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.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sophie:

  MY BROTHER AT WAR

  IT 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: