Previous Message
The Bernadottes married well and the current king is not only the heir of the line from Carl XIV Johan (=Jean Baptiste Bernadotte), he is also the heir general of Gustav IV. So even though the Bernadottes replaced the previous Holstein-Gottorp-Vasa line they managed to become the heirs of that line by the marriage of Gustav V to Victoria of Baden.
Yes, but by the time the Gustaf and Victoria marriage took place, the Bernadottes had become well-established on the European royal marriage market. Look at the previous generation: King Gustaf V's parents were King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway and Princess Sophie of Nassau-Weilburg. Oscar II's predecessor on the throne was his older brother, King Carl XV, who had married Princess Louise of the Netherlands.
Both brothers, of course, were sons of King Oscar I, whose parents were the common-born King Carl XIV Johan and Queen Desideria. I don't know if there were attempts to arrange a marriage between him and a princess from an established dynasty. It's easy to understand why other European houses would have been somewhat wary of an alliance with the house of Bernadotte, as of 1823. So it was poetic justice that his bride on the occasion was a half-royal princess of Leuchtenberg, member of a house not officially listed in the first two sections of the ALMANACH DE GOTHA.
"As for the Leuchtenbergs they did marry well:
A Queen of Portugal
A Grandduchess of Russia
An Emperor of Brazil
A king of Sweden and Denmark
A Sovereign Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen
A Duke of Urach
no doubt the result of their mother being a Bavarian princess and their father a respected man even though he was Napoleon's stepson. Previous Message
As the old maxim goes: if a creature looks like a duck and moves like a duck, it IS (for all practical purposes) a duck. King Maximilian I treated Eugène de Beauharnais as a prince, even giving him a place of honor in the Bavarian royal court -- and, of course, consenting to a marriage with his daughter Auguste. This fact became the basis for the other European dynasties accepting the Leuchtenbergs as a *royal* house, whose members could be deemed *equal* for intermarriage.
Like I said, the Beauharnais family was the opposite of the Bernadotte family, which WAS legally royal, once enthroned. It's just that they initially had a hard time in getting perceived to be thus. As it was, marriage to the well-connected Joséphine (who was perceived to be royal, if not officially so) meant that the children of King Oscar I would be thought of as fully royal, by other European dynasties. Of course, at the time there was no way he could have married commoner Miss Nobody, anyway (the wording of the Swedish constitution had it that a dynast could not marry "a private man's daughter").
Message Thread | This response ↓
« Back to index