3-046-956 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The late Charles XV., King of Sweden and Norway, 1872. The king died aged only 46. 'The mother of the late King was Josephine Beauharnais, daughter of the Duke of Leuchtenberg, and cousin to Napoleon III...The late King...was an accomplished man, with a taste for literature and the fine arts; he was author of some poems, which are rather above mediocrity, and he had some skill as a landscape-painter. His behaviour as a Constitutional Monarch was free from reproach; but his partiality for the Danish cause against the Germans, in the war of 1864, was, perhaps, too openly expressed. He had long cherished, with the late King Frederick of Denmark, a design of uniting the three Scandinavian kingdoms, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, by the intermarriage of their Royal families...A reform due to the personal initiation of the King is the abolition of the punishment of death. In October, 1868, the King refused to sign a death warrant, and declared that he would sign no more in future; so that if capital punishment was not abolished by law it should be in fact in his kingdom...The late Sovereign had a Civil List of £78,700 as King of Sweden, and £32,000 more as King of Norway'. From "Illustrated London News", 1872.