Behind the Palace Doors (27 page)

Almost as soon as the new queen of Denmark arrived in Copenhagen, she was abandoned by her husband, who had planned a special vacation for himself. “I fear that I shall not go with the King this spring to Holstein,” Caroline Mathilde
wrote to her brother King George. “He seems to think there is no occasion to be troubled with me. He told it to me when I had not been here longer than a week. I wish it was in my power to write more openly to you but you know it is not my fault.”

Despite being saddled with a lunatic husband who cared nothing for her, the young queen was determined to forge her way in her adopted country and make it her own. Within a few months of arriving, “she took great pains to learn the Danish language and in a short time she spoke it with a fluency that greatly flattered her subjects,” reported the courtier Otto von Falkenskjold. Still, she was isolated at court, only politely tolerated by her in-laws, and unable to communicate effectively with her own family, as her letters were often intercepted or heavily edited.

King Christian was reluctantly coaxed into his wife’s bed, and by May 1767, Caroline Mathilde was pregnant. Having done his duty, the king took off again, this time into the arms of his mistress, a courtesan known as Catherine of the Bootees because of her dainty feet. Not content with a discreet affair, Christian flaunted his adulterous relationship by bringing his mistress to Christiansborg Palace and showing her off. Because he was an absolute monarch who ruled without a governing body, such as Parliament, to curb his powers, no one could stop him from demeaning his wife with this outrageous insult. Louise von Plessen, head of the queen’s household and her close confidante, reported to the king’s chief minister, Count Bernstorff, the effect Christian’s behavior had on Caroline Mathilde: “Her mind is too good and fine not to be deeply hurt by the lack of tenderness and politeness with which she is being treated.”

Hurt was eclipsed by anger when the king arbitrarily dismissed Madame von Plessen. Then, after the birth of their son, Crown Prince Frederick, Christian announced he was
leaving—without his wife—on an extended journey, including a visit to her homeland. Caroline Mathilde was not happy; her brother King George, even less so. “You know very well that the whole of it
is very disagreeable to me
,” the English king wrote emphatically to one of his ministers. Christian went anyway, made a complete nuisance of himself, then capped his unwelcome stay with a thorough trashing of St. James’s Palace. Left alone in Denmark, meanwhile, Caroline Mathilde remained quietly dutiful. Soon enough, though, her passions would explode.

Among King Christian’s retinue of physicians was Johann Friedrich Struensee, a charismatic young German steeped in Enlightenment principles and brimming with ambition, who quickly gained the king’s complete trust. He had, the British ambassador reported ruefully, “the most alarming ascendency over His Majesty.” Before long, the queen was smitten as well. And in defiance of all danger, not to mention propriety, she and the handsome physician started sleeping together.

“Their intimacy showed that they loved each other, searched for each other and were happy when they found one another,” Struensee’s friend Enevold Brandt later said, adding, “their love showed in a way that can be noticed but not described.”

The affair was indeed noticed. The cramped Danish court left little room for secrecy, and the couple made little effort to hide the affair anyway. As if to symbolize their forbidden love, Struensee bought the queen a pair of red embroidered silk stockings, which she took to wearing every day. They were, she said, her “ties of feeling.”

Immersed as he was in his own world of delusion, King Christian either didn’t know about the affair or didn’t care. He was just happy to abdicate his responsibilities, ceding increasing amounts of government control to his physician and friend.
Thus, with the queen by his side, Struensee emerged as Denmark’s de facto monarch, a prime minister with absolute powers and an ambitious agenda: to reshape Danish society into a better reflection of his Enlightenment values.

The first order of business was to grant complete freedom of the press in September 1770, which, historian Stella Tillyard wrote, “created at a single stroke the most liberal climate for opinion anywhere in Europe.” More drastic reforms soon followed. “In not much more than a year,” Tillyard continued, “the thirty-three-year-old doctor from Halle had grown from being the king’s physician and friend into the lover and confidant of the queen and then the unchallenged ruler of a country where all decrees issued by the king had the immediate force of law.… [I]n its swiftness and completeness, his was a rise to power unparalleled anywhere in Europe. The malady of the king and the love of the queen had placed a nation in his hands.”

Struensee’s rapid rise to power coincided with a notable change in Caroline Mathilde. The once sad, neglected wife now asserted herself boldly as a lover. Struensee’s power was hers as well, and it was reflected in a large portrait of the queen commissioned in 1770. Dressed in the uniform of the Royal Danish Lifeguards, Caroline Mathilde looks positively masculine with sword, boots, and spurs—a declaration of sorts that
she
was now the font of royal authority, not the king.

Yet despite the domineering statement being made in the portrait (which apparently turned on the masochistic King Christian), Caroline Mathilde was also happy to simply be Struensee’s wife in all but name. She lived with him in quiet domesticity at the country palace of Hirschholm, bearing him a daughter there, while Christian literally smashed things elsewhere. It was an odd arrangement, which Struensee and Caroline Mathilde marked by commissioning a trio of matching oval portraits—one of each of them and a third of the king.
“This court has not the most distant relationship to any other under the sun,” reported one British observer. But the idyll at Hirschholm was not destined to last.

Struensee rattled many among the establishment who felt his reforms were far too radical and undermined the very pillars of Danish society. “A malignant leveler,” the British ambassador called him, echoing the sentiments of a growing opposition. A plot soon emerged among the disgruntled to destroy Struensee, gain control of the king, then rule through him as
they
saw fit. Christian’s stepmother, the dowager queen Juliane Marie, as well as his half brother Frederick, were recruited by the plotters to give their cause a degree of royal authority.

“The Almighty has chosen [you] to be the instrument by which your brother the king… [may] be fortified on his throne,” Juliane Marie wrote to her son, Prince Frederick. “Be not horrified at the danger you should meet with.”

In the early-morning hours of January 17, 1772, the conspirators crept through Christiansborg Palace and into the king’s bedchamber. Startled out of his sleep, the paranoid monarch began to scream in terror. “My son, Your Majesty,” Juliane Marie said soothingly, “we are not here as enemies, but as your true friends.” After some time, Christian was coaxed into signing two orders: one ceding control of the kingdom to the dowager queen and her son Frederick; the other ordering the arrests of Struensee and Caroline Mathilde. “My God,” the king said in a moment of lucidity, “this will cost streams of blood.”

Struensee, asleep in his chamber, was arrested first, along with his friend and confidant Enevold Brandt. Both men were hustled out of the palace and taken by carriage to a fortress prison at the edge of Copenhagen. There they were shackled and chained, bound hand to foot and then to the wall of their respective cells. Unfathomable horrors awaited them.

Caroline Mathilde was taken next. “Madame,” Christian
had written in a prepared note, “I have found it necessary to send you to Kronborg, your conduct obliges me to it. I am very sorry. I am not the cause, and I hope you will sincerely repent.” It was actually Juliane Marie who had insisted that the queen be taken to the remote fortress-castle of Kronborg,
^‡
where she would be far away from the king and thus unable to influence him in any way—especially back under Struensee’s spell. That, the queen dowager recognized, would have doomed them all.

Caroline Mathilde’s thoughts immediately turned to Struensee when they came for her that freezing cold January morning. She leapt out of bed and ran into the hallway. “Where’s the count?” she cried, hoping he would hear her. “Where’s the count?” The queen was then handed the note King Christian had written and, now fully aware of what was in store for her, fought ferociously against her captors. Foreign minister Adolph Sigfried von der Osten, who had switched sides and joined the new regime, managed to persuade the furious queen that resistance was futile and that she had no choice but to follow the king’s command. Caroline Mathilde reluctantly agreed, but only if her children could accompany her. There was no way the leaders of the revolt would ever give her Crown Prince Frederick, but the baby Princess Louise they allowed to go. It was commonly believed that the child was Struensee’s, not the king’s, so the girl mattered little to the new regime. She would mean everything to the captive queen.

As Caroline languished with her daughter at Kronborg, George III received the news of his sister’s fate. The new government in Denmark had every reason to fear the king’s reaction, as Britain could crush them militarily. Nevertheless, the Danish leaders were determined to proceed against the queen
and remove her from her high station by divorcing her from Christian. “God, goodness, and the justice of our cause” were on their side, Osten assured Juliane Marie. And the king was in their pocket. They had him write to Caroline Mathilde’s mother, rather than King George, in an attempt to emphasize that the queen’s arrest was a family matter, not a matter of state. The British king played along with the pretense, while he secretly prepared for war.

Meanwhile, just over a month after his arrest, Struensee was unchained and taken before a group of commissioners, who questioned him relentlessly about all manner of his dealings. The once all-powerful regent (in all but name) remained steadfast throughout the inquisition and conceded nothing—until the end—when he was asked directly about his relationship with the queen. Then he broke, admitting that things “had gone as far as they could between people of two sexes.” The next day he provided all the explicit details of the affair. It was a remarkable confession—not only damning but bewildering as well.

“His courage, I am assured, forsook him upon hearing from the Commission that the queen was no longer at Copenhagen which he did not know before,” wrote the British diplomat Ralph Woodford. “Yet I cannot believe him wretch enough to have done a thing infamously aggravating his own guilt.”

What made Struensee confess so readily? Had he been tortured, as many suspected? Or did he have another motive? The answer remains elusive. What is certain is that Caroline Mathilde, confronted with her lover’s signed admission, and the promise of leniency for both of them if she, too, acknowledged the adulterous relationship, signed a confession as well—and immediately regretted it.

The new regime was triumphant and wrote to King George in King Christian’s name: “Your Majesty will see that the Queen, far from contradicting Struensee, has confirmed his
confession by her own admission and by her signature. After having replied in the affirmative to the questions, she has agreed to a divorce and to a dissolution of our marriage.”

The queen, however, was not quite as compliant as the letter sent to King George suggested. Indeed, she retracted her confession within a few days of signing it and stubbornly declared her innocence. She also questioned the validity of Struensee’s confession, insisting that he had been tricked—or worse. “They also caught me unawares,” she told Peter Udall, the lawyer assigned to her, “then I signed everything they wanted.”

Despite the queen’s protests, divorce was now inevitable. And King George would have little choice but to accept it. The king’s minister Lord Suffolk wrote to the British ambassador in Denmark conceding as much after receiving Caroline Mathilde’s confession: “I must frankly tell you that His Majesty’s justice cannot be so warped, even by his fraternal affection, as to deny that, supposing this to be a true state of the case, the King of Denmark has a right to sue for the dissolution of the marriage.”

What the British king would not tolerate was the planned removal of his sister to the Danish city of Aalborg, where, he feared, she might be conveniently killed. He wanted her out of Denmark entirely, and was prepared to force the issue militarily. In the end it was agreed that Caroline Mathilde would be sent to the German town of Celle, within King George’s Hanoverian domains. Though she would be deprived of both of her children, it was a fate far more agreeable than what awaited Struensee.

Having committed what the court of commissioners called “a certain atrocious crime, at the bare recital of which human nature shudders, and which the faltering tongue seems unwilling to repeat,” the queen’s lover was condemned to a barbaric death, one far more representative of savage medieval justice than of eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The sentence declared that Struensee “has forfeited his honour, his life and his estates;
that he shall be degraded from his dignity as Count, and all other dignities conferred upon him; that his Coat of Arms which he has as Count, shall be broken by the executioner; that his right hand, and afterward his head shall be cut off while alive; and that his body shall be quartered and laid upon the wheel, but his head and hand shall be stuck upon a pole.”
^§
On April 28, 1772, upon a scaffold erected for the occasion outside Copenhagen’s eastern gate, the ghastly sentence was carried out. And not without a hitch: Part of Struensee’s chin was left on the block when the executioner botched the decapitation. The corpse were then chopped into quarters, while the offending genitalia were hacked off and tacked up beside the other dismembered pieces—the sharpest, most symbolic penalty possible for one who had dared sleep with the queen.