Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (3 page)

Louis' sixteen-year-old niece in particular was obsessed with Franklin. Monsieur Franklin this, Monsieur Franklin that, on and on, day after day, until the king was driven to distraction. At
last Louis decided upon a way of putting an end to it.

In the 1770s, lavatories were rare. (The palace at Versailles had none. 700 rooms and no
lavatories.) The common people disposed of their body wastes somewhat casually; people of
means had what were called chamber pots, similar to the commodes used today by many elderlypeople. The contents of the chamber pot, after the person of means evacuated his or her bowels, would be disposed of by servants.

On her seventeenth birthday, Louis XVI's niece was presented with a remarkable gift
from her uncle: a chamber pot crafted of silver, with the face of Benjamin Franklin etched into the bottom of the bowl.

 

After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchs of Europe and/or their representatives met in
Vienna
to decide the post-war settlement (boundaries, territorial exchanges, dynastic
restorations, etc.). It became very clear as the Congress of Vienna proceeded that a major rift was
developing between the two Western powers,
Britain
and
France
, and the three Eastern powers,
Prussia
,
Austria
, and
Russia
. The
King of Prussia
, Frederick William III, suggested to Russian
Tsar Alexander I and Austrian Emperor Francis I that they confer privately to coordinate strategy.
The three drove out of
Vienna
into the Vienna Woods in an open carriage driven by a coachman.
No other servants accompanied them and, inasmuch as they all spoke French, also no translators. But the horse bolted after being stung by a wasp and began galloping madly off despite the coachman's attempt to
regain control. Soon the carriage struck a ditch and overturned. The coachman was killed and the three monarchs were deposited unceremoniously into a large puddle of mud and manure.

As they struggled to pull themselves out of the muck, they saw a peasant driving his hay wagon slowly up the road. Francis walked in front of the slowly moving wagon and ordered the
peasant to stop. "Drive us back to Vienna," he commanded.

The peasant asked, "For how much money?"

The Emperor was angered at being expected to pay his own subject for obedience. "Do
you know who I am?" he bellowed. "Do you know who my companions are?"

"No," the peasant said simply.

"I am your lord Francis, Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, and Apostolic King of
Hungary! These two men are the King of Prussia and the Tsar of All the
Russias
!" The peasant allowed his
gaze to drift over the three filthy, muck-encrusted figures before him, and then, laughing, drove
away. Francis was now outraged. "How dare you disobey me! You will be punished for this!
What is your name?"

The peasant called back over his shoulder, "I'm His Holiness the Pope."

 

When he became Emperor of the French in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte began thinking in
terms of founding a dynasty. Up until that point he had been essentially a military dictator
(which was what First Consul of the
French
Republic
really was), and military dictatorship is not
a hereditary office. But a monarch needs an heir. He and his wife Josephine had no children of
their own, so he decided to divorce her and marry someone younger and of child-bearing age. He
selected an Austrian princess, Maria Louisa von Hapsburg, the daughter of the Emperor Francis
I. She promptly presented him with a son whom History knows variously as the King of Rome,
Napoleon II, and the Duke of
Reichstadt
. (History knows Maria Louisa as Marie Louise.)

What makes this marriage interesting is the dynastic connection it effected. Remember, Napoleon's rise to power was only possible because the French Revolution had overthrown the monarchy and had sent King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Marie Antoinette was herself an Austrian princess (Maria Antonia), daughter of the great Austro-
Hungarian Queen Maria Theresa; her grandson, Marie Antoinette's nephew, was Emperor Francis; and
thus Francis' daughter, Napoleon's bride, was the grand-niece of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

Thus it was that, with no sense of propriety, not of mention irony, Napoleon thereafter began referring to Louis as his uncle and Marie Antoinette as his aunt!

 

Ludwig Van Beethoven was the first major composer able to avoid being dependent upon
a royal or noble patron. Considering his attitude toward monarchs, this was probably a good thing. Once, when conducting a private concert for King Frederick William II of
Prussia
and his guests, he repeatedly stopped the chamber orchestra when the audience began talking during the performance. At last the king grew annoyed and demanded that the composer continue to
conduct without interruption. Beethoven's response was that he would only do so if the audience
paid attention. When Frederick William angrily reminded Beethoven that he was addressing a king, the composer replied, "Bah! Any lump of coal can be a king. There is only one Beethoven."

 

From 1867 until 1908, the Chinese Empire was under the
de facto
rule of a woman named Tzu-
Hsi
(modern
romanization
:
Cixi
), commonly referred to as the Empress Dowager.
Beginning as a teenaged concubine of the Emperor
Xianfeng
, she began ruling through her son
as regent in 1867 and continued through her nephew and grandson until her death in 1908. Her
impact upon a China in desperate need of reform, an impact which was largely negative, can be illustrated by the following anecdote: In 1900 the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreign outbreak, led
to an alliance of eight nations (the European powers, the USA, and Japan) that then invaded China, captured Peking (Beijing), and took the Forbidden City. The Chinese armed forces, the navy in particular, were helpless against the invasion. The navy had been scheduled for modernization, but this had not occurred, because the Empress Dowager took the funds which had been designated for ship construction and with it ordered the construction of one single ship,
which she named the "Boat of Purity and Ease." It was placed in the gardens of the
Imperial
Summer
Palace
. The boat was made of stone.

 

As noted in the introduction, History is often more exciting than fiction. The story of
Gustavus
Vasa
, the founder of modern
Sweden
, illustrates this quite well.

Sweden had been united with Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in the Danish-dominated medieval Union of Kalmar, but in 1513 the Swedes revolted against the Danes. The Danes won, and on November 4, 1520, Christian II of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland was crowned King of
Sweden in the cathedral in Uppsala. Christian had offered the Swedish rebels amnesty as a
condition of their surrender; one week after his coronation, he ordered the beheading of seventy
of the nobles who had rebelled. More nobles were arrested and executed the next day, and
spectators who expressed shock and sympathy were themselves immediately seized and killed.
The property and estates of all the dead were confiscated by the crown.

The Swedes refer to these events as the "Stockholm Bath of Blood," and whatever vestigial willingness to accept union with Denmark still existed was drowned in it. The son of one of the murdered nobles, imprisoned by the order of Christian II, was a young man named
Gustavus
Vasa
. He contrived to escape his captivity, and made his way to the German city of
Lübeck
, one of Denmark's commercial rivals, where he talked the city fathers into giving him
money and lending him a ship. He got back to Sweden and spent the next few months wandering around in disguise, hiding with friends in remote villages, often narrowly avoiding capture by the Danish occupying forces. He resolved to begin to organize what today would be called a national liberation movement.

He rode north to his own province of
Dalecarlia
, resolved to organize there, from the hardy yeomanry, the beginnings of an army that might free Sweden from the Danes. Traveling icy roads, he sought rest in the home of a former schoolmate. This friend gave him every hospitality, and then went off to notify the pro-Danish forces that the escaped hostage could now be caught; but the friend's wife warned
Gustavus
to flee. Riding onward twenty miles, he found asylum with a priest who hid him for a week.
Moving thirty miles farther, he tried to rouse the town of
Rattvik
to revolt; but its people had not yet heard, and would not believe, the story of the Bath of Blood.
Vasa
rode over frozen meadows twenty-five miles north to Mora, and again pleaded for a revolutionary uprising, but the peasants
listened in skeptical apathy. Friendless and for the moment hopeless,
Gustavus
turned his horse
to the west, resigned to seeking asylum in Norway.

But furtive exile was unnecessary. The people of Mora received confirmation of the
Stockholm massacre, and they rose as one man in support of
Vasa
and in defiance of the Danes.
This small force was the nucleus of a larger one, for as word spread throughout Sweden of both
the massacre and the uprising, the ranks of his rebel force were swelled by men from all parts of
the country. The Swedes captured the city of Uppsala, and the Danes, taken unawares by the sudden rebellion, lost province after province to
Vasa's
forces, which in May of 1523 laid siege to
Stockholm. Christian II was unable to send reinforcements to aid his occupying army because he
was facing a rebellion in Denmark as well. He had attempted to destroy the power of the Danish nobility, but he had overestimated his own power, and underestimated theirs. With his army tied
down at home by the revolt of the nobles, he could spare nothing but his navy for the Swedish conflict. The navy received orders to harass the Swedish coast, but
Vasa
again persuaded the city fathers of
Lübeck
to come to his aid. The Germans sent him ten warships, with which he destroyed the Danish fleet
. Facing defeat in Sweden, at war with the military alliance of the commercial cities of the North Sea (the
Hansiatic
League), and unable to
suppress the rebellion in Denmark, Christian fled the country in 1523.

On June 7, 1523, the Swedish diet proclaimed the twenty-seven-year-old
Gustavus
Vasa
king as
Gustavus
I. His dynasty, the House of
Vasa
, ruled Sweden for the next three hundred
years.

 

But dynasties do sometimes go extinct, and the House of
Vasa
was no exception.
History is filled with little ironies, among which must certainly be included the history of the
House of Bernadotte. Jean
Baptiste
Jules Bernadotte was a French marshal in the service of Napoleonic France, and when a candidate was needed for the succession to the throne of
Sweden
, Napoleon suggested Bernadotte.

The elderly King Charles XIII of Sweden and his Queen were childless and bereft of close relations, so there was no heir to the Swedish throne. To avoid internal conflict over the
succession, not to mention the possibility of Russian mischief, Charles asked Napoleon, then
at the height of his power and influence, to nominate someone for the elderly royal couple to adopt. Bernadotte was a perfect choice. From the standpoint of the Swedes, an experienced and respected military figure would be a fine king.

And from the standpoint of Napoleon, he would be killing three birds with one stone. Bird number one: Sweden was a neutral power not under French control (as were neither Russia, an unreliable ally, nor Britain, an avowed enemy; Napoleon controlled everything else). Putting a French general on the Swedish throne would tie Sweden to France.

Bird number two: Napoleon and Bernadotte disliked each other, and the marshal was frequently on the verge of
insubordination. Napoleon had even stripped him of his command in 1806 for disobeying orders.
The farther away he was from Paris, the better.

Bird number three: Napoleon had arranged the
marriage of Bernadotte to
Désirée
Clary, who had been engaged to Napoleon until he dumped
her for Josephine. But
Désirée's
sister subsequently married Napoleon's brother Joseph, so she
was constantly present at court and at family gatherings, and was thus a constant embarrassment to the emperor. (In addition, her
behavior was extremely erratic; modern assessment suggests she may have been bipolar.) Again,
the farther away from Paris ...

So Bernadotte married
Désirée
and was adopted by Charles XIII. He thus became crown prince of Sweden, and his wife became crown princess. This situation led to three somewhat ironic developments.