te character: and there was one circumstance especially in
his favour, that he had been bred a Protestant, and might therefore be
expected to conform, without scruple, to the established church of
Sweden. But the chief recommendation was, without doubt, the belief of
the Swedish Diet that Bernadotte stood in the first rank of Napoleon's
favour.

Napoleon, however, had never forgiven Bernadotte for his refusal to act
on his side on the 18th Brumaire. He thenceforth considered this great
soldier of the Republic as one who might serve the Emperor well, because
in doing so he served France, but who looked to himself with none of
those feelings of personal devotion which could alone entitle a subject
to his favour. Bernadotte had been distinguished in the army before
Napoleon himself appeared on the great theatre of events; he could never
be classed with those who had earned all their distinction and
pre-eminence under the banners of the Emperor; he had an existence
separate and his own; he had stood aloof at the great and decisive
crisis of Napoleon's fate; he might be entrusted and employed
afterwards--he could never be loved. The proposal of the Diet,
therefore, was the reverse of agreeable to him whose favour it was
expressly designed to conciliate. Bernadotte, however, was powerful in
the esteem of a great party in the French army, as well as among the old
republicans of the state: to have interfered against him would have been
to kindle high wrath and hatred among all those officers who belonged
to the ante-Buonapartean period; and, on the other hand, to oppose the
free-will of the Swedes would have appeared extraordinary conduct indeed
on the part of a sovereign who studiously represented himself as owing
everything to the free-will of the French. Sweden, finally, was still an
independent state; and the events of the Peninsula were likely to
impress the Emperor with a lively sense of the dangers of exciting a
spirit of national aversion at the other extremity of Europe. Napoleon
consented to the acceptance of the proffered dignity by Bernadotte. The
Marshal was called on to sign a declaration, before he left Paris, that
he would never bear arms against France. He rejected this condition as
incompatible with the connexion which Napoleon himself had just
sanctioned him in forming with another state, and said he was sure the
suggestion came not from the Emperor, who knew what were the duties of a
sovereign, but from some