A soldier as dashing in appearance as Murat, as brave as Ney, as eagle-eyed as Masséna. At the time this biography was written, over half of Europe’s reigning monarchs numbered among their ancestors the Gascon Sergeant Bernadotte. Jean Bernadotte served as King Louis XVI’s Regiment of Marines. In the ranks of nobility, Bernadotte was the most complex personality of all Napoleon’s marshals. A staunch Jacobin, Bernadotte convinced himself that he should be King of France; though an undoubted hero, he nonetheless narrowly missed some of the famous battles. He was a political intriguer, but he was willing to accept a walk-on part in the major drama of a restless decade. His personal life was equally full of anomalies, not least that strange mutual loyalty which preserved a marriage to Napoleon’s first love, Desirée Clary, through a dozen years of separation. Bernadotte was in France while Napoleon fought in Italy. From there Palmer writes of his struggles with the Consul, Emperor and generalissimo, of the battles of Austerlitz and Wagram, and of Leipzig where, as the elected Crown Prince of Sweden, he fought against his old chief. He then became the King of Sweden under the title Carl XIV Johan. Alan Palmer’s detailed portrait was the first comprehensive English biography in over half a century, and draws from a great deal of contemporary research by French and Swedish biographers. ‘A fine piece of narrative history, a combination of suspense and scholarship which actually makes you wonder will he make it?’ ANTONIA FRASER’S BOOK OF THE YEAR, Sunday Times ‘Alan Palmer has done justice to [the] epic events with a lively, vivid narrative, written with the appropriate style and panache’ LAWRENCE JAMES, The Times ‘A superb account of the 1812 campaign and its aftermath’ Observer Alan Palmer was Head of the History Department at Highgate School from 1953 to 1969, when he gave up his post to concentrate on historical writing and research. He has written some thirty narrative histories, historical reference books or biographies. In 1980 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.