There is no need to labour the contrast between Eugene de
Beauharnais, always upright, loyal and a man of moral principle, and
Bernadotte, who could switch religions and political principles like a
change of clothes when it suited him. The new King Charles XIV of
Sweden was the ex-Jacobin who had once had 'death to all kings' tattooed
on his arm. When Bernadotte later, predictably, proved treacherous as
King of Sweden, Napoleon reflected ruefully that there were three
occasions when he should have had Bernadotte shot and spared him each
time because of Desiree. His own explanation for letting this ingrate have
a throne was as follows: 'I was seduced by the glory of seeing a Marshal of
France become a king; a woman in whom I was interested as queen, and
my godson, a prince royal.'
Yet Bernadotte was only the most spectacular disappointment of the
nest of incompetents and schemers who formed the inner circle of
Bonaparte's extended family. Lucien continued to resist all pressure to
give up his wife and finally decided to make a new life in the U.S.A. He
and his family had barely left France than they were captured by a British
warship and taken to England. There the ruling elite made a point of
lionizing him, for sheer propaganda advantage; what more signal proof of
Bonaparte's tyranny could there be than that his own brother had fled
from it? Lucien remained under very comfortable house arrest until 1814
at Ludlow and Thorn grove in W orcestershire. In terms of their own
propaganda this was of course sheer illogicality on the part of the British
elite: had they really thought Lucien was a refugee from egregious
tyranny, they would surely have turned him loose to make trouble in
Europe.
Louis Bonaparte's public career came to a humiliating close when
Napoleon annexed Holland and fo rced him to abdicate the throne, while
leaving him his income and honorary title. This was the chance Hortense
de Beauharnais was looking for; deprived of the title of Qu een, she no
longer saw the need to put up with her sexually peculiar husband. In the
late summer of 1810 she joined her mother on a leisurely trip in Savoy
and took the comte de Flahaut as a lover.
In Westphalia the useless Jerome felt himself to be on shifting sands
but was uncertain whether the blow that would displace him would come
from his brother or his subjects. There could be no doubting his
unpopularity, since his kingdom was bowed down by taxation and united
in loathing of the decadent court, the reckless rakes, libertines and
adventuresses that swarmed there, and the Corsican playboy who had
been set over them as monarch. Jerome kept three horses permanently
saddled and waiting in the courtyard, with three spares, in case he needed
marcin
(Marcin)
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