Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (39 page)

King Christian’s lucidity continued to diminish throughout 1771. In April, he had another manic episode, hurling everything within reach off a palace balcony—books, sheet music, dolls, a fire poker. Because he was the sovereign, unlike other mentally unstable Danes, he was never forcibly restrained or formally confined. By the summer his depression, his schizophrenic moods, and his paranoid delusions had all increased, and he spoke of committing murder and/or suicide. In rare moments of clarity, Christian would pathetically admit that he was confused, lost, and could not seem to quiet the voices inside his head. Sometimes he almost seemed to know what was going on with his wife, informing his former tutor Elie Reverdil one day during a picnic that the queen was sleeping with the king of Prussia—and identifying Johann Struensee as Frederick the Great.

Caroline Mathilde was (incorrectly) depicted, even by the British envoy Robert Gunning’s network of informers, as an innocent, caught in her lover’s egalitarian web. Yet the ambassador knew full well that she was an active and willing partner in all of the reforms. The bitter Gunning refused to regard Struensee through the queen’s eyes, incapable of acknowledging her admiration for his intelligence and the world vision they shared. “It is a universal matter of wonder, how he has managed to gain so entire an ascendancy over their Danish Majesties.”

The fact that the royals didn’t behave as such—meaning regally—was jarring and unnerving to the people. Their lifestyle, though
opulent, was—in Reverdil’s opinion—common. Reverdil was stunned by the way Caroline Mathilde, Johann Struensee, and their courtiers conducted themselves like a bunch of
petits bourgeois
.

The queen admitted to her maids that she envied their ability to marry the men they loved. She behaved as though she and Struensee were spouses, even though he was (shockingly, since much of his position depended upon her) unfaithful to her. In the physician’s disingenuous words, “The happiness of a human consists in the freedom to express his desires.” But Caroline Mathilde still adored him, endured his infidelity, walked out in public with him, dined with him, and had no shame about flaunting their relationship. According to the new British ambassador Robert Murray Keith (who replaced Gunning), Her Majesty’s “partiality for Count Struensee seemed to gather strength from opposition.”

In July 1771, twenty-year-old Caroline Mathilde bore Johann Struensee a daughter, Princess Louise Augusta. He remained at the queen’s bedside during the birth, stroking her hair, holding her hand, soothing her during the contractions, and supporting her neck, while a male
accoucheur
delivered the baby. The queen looked into Struensee’s eyes throughout the ordeal. When the proud papa left the room, Caroline Mathilde requested her purse, took out his portrait, and gazed lovingly and longingly at the image.

On July 22, the day of the little princess’s christening, both Struensee and his friend Enevold Brandt were ennobled, becoming counts, fueling the rumors that the physician was Louise Augusta’s father. Although only the king could bestow a title, most people assumed that the elevation of Struensee had been the queen’s idea. The previous week, Christian had made Struensee a privy cabinet minister, stating (in an edict ghostwritten by the physician himself) that “all orders which I may give him orally shall be drawn up by him in accordance with my meaning, and he shall lay them before me for signature, or issue them in my name.”

But the ambitious lovers had taken on far too much. The kingdom was not ready for such reforms; nor were the Danes prepared to accept the scenario of a commoner (with the foreign-born queen at his side and in his bed) as the crazy king’s puppeteer. Struensee’s improvements were perceived as too draconian. For example, he fired
the entire staffs of all public departments without any pension or other compensation. Not only did it impoverish the workers, but it won him numerous enemies. Once the civil servants were gone, the doctor either assumed the reins of power himself or replaced the fired employees with his own cronies. The new hires were invariably fellow Germans who often lacked the necessary governmental experience of their predecessors. The bitter icing on the pastry was that Struensee didn’t even speak Danish, instead conducting all business in his native tongue.

Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee enjoyed their new government and taste of power very briefly. Within months, unpaid Norwegian dockyard workers who had been hired to build a fleet to repel pirates marched on the palace of Hirschholm to deliver a petition to the king. Weavers protested the closure of the silk factories. Although Struensee remained convinced that everything he was doing was for the welfare of the state, fearing an insurrection the royal family decamped to their nearby estate of Sophienberg.

During the autumn of 1771, Struensee’s enemies began to coalesce. They found sympathetic ears in King Christian’s forty-two-year-old stepmother, Juliane Marie, and her eighteen-year-old son, Hereditary Prince Frederik (not to be confused with little Crown Prince Frederik, the son of Christian and Caroline Mathilde), who had been ostentatiously excluded from the nuclear royal family. It took very little convincing to get Juliane Marie to become the titular head of the conspiracy to oust Struensee.

The cabal met for the first time on January 13, 1772. Atop the agenda in their plans for a coup was to separate the malleable Christian from his wife and her paramour. They chose to strike on the night of January 16, because the trio would be focused on the masquerade presented in the Royal Theatre.

In the middle of the night, upon discovering that the king’s bedchamber was locked from the inside, the conspirators awakened his valet and made him open the door. Juliane Marie tried to tell Christian that they had come as friends, but was too overcome with emotion to make her point, so a coconspirator named Rantzau declared that they had come to liberate him, and by extension Denmark, from the clutches of Johann Struensee and the queen. But
Christian refused to believe that his wife and best buddy meant the kingdom any harm, so the conspirators quickly invented a lie and told the confused sovereign that his wife was plotting against his life. Decrees were thrust in his face that compelled Christian to hand over control of the government to them. In the intriguers’ presence he was forced to sign the documents. But in a devastating flash of clarity the monarch acknowledged, “My God, this will cost streams of blood.”

Armed now with Christian’s signature, the conspirators, accompanied by a number of the palace guard, broke into Struensee’s lavishly decorated apartment and made straight for his bedchamber. He was permitted to dress, but because they feared his valet might help him escape, he could don only what was nearest at hand, which turned out to be the powder blue velvet ensemble he had worn to the masquerade ball.

Struensee and his governmental crony Enevold Brandt were arrested, bundled into carriages, and driven across the frozen ground to the fortress of Kastellet, where they were thrown into bare cells and shackled, hands and feet, to the wall. Meanwhile, back at Christiansborg, under duress Christian was busily signing arrest warrants for Struensee and Caroline Mathilde’s circle of advisers and ministers.

He penned an ungrammatical note to his wife:

Madam, 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.

Early the following morning, when the queen was awakened and told that Rantzau, one of the intriguers, waited for her in the antechamber to her bedroom, she immediately (and correctly) suspected the worst. She jumped out of bed and tore through the rooms searching for Struensee, repeatedly shouting, “Where is the Count?” After she finally paused for breath, she was handed her husband’s note.

When the guards tried to lay their hands on Caroline Mathilde, she endeavored to evade them by running around the room. If they got too close, she fought them off like a tigress. They called for backup. The foreign minister, Adolph Siegfried von der Osten, was brought in to make her see reason—explaining that she had to comply
with her husband’s note and be taken into custody. Finally Caroline Mathilde agreed to be incarcerated on the proviso that her children could accompany her to prison, knowing that they were her safeguard. She was permitted to bring only her infant daughter (whom she was still breast-feeding); the crown prince had to remain in Christiansborg Palace. Although Christian had acknowledged paternity of little Princess Louise Augusta, no one believed it, nicknaming the child “
la petite
Struensee.”

By midmorning, the carriage transporting the queen, the baby Louise Augusta, and one lady-in-waiting reached Kronborg, a fortress bordered on three sides by the sea and moated on the fourth wall. At first Caroline Mathilde and her tiny entourage were incarcerated in the “Queen’s Chamber,” a tiny room with bars on the windows. They were later moved into the quarters occupied by Kronborg’s commandant, whose family was displaced to an outbuilding.

Struensee was replaced as de facto prime minister of Denmark by one of the conspirators, Ove Hegh Guldberg, the former tutor to Juliane Marie’s son, Hereditary Prince Frederik. Guldberg was eager to demonstrate the coup’s legitimacy, which he did by parading the hapless king in front of his subjects. But the cabal had to tackle the thorny issue of incarcerating Denmark’s queen. If the matter were treated as an affair of state, it would take on international significance and would be sure to rouse the ire of Britain, as Caroline Mathilde was George III’s sister and an English princess. The conspirators hoped to keep the whole event a personal matter—just one guy getting rid of an adulterous wife and her scheming lover. The last thing they wanted was war with Great Britain, the world’s preeminent naval superpower.

Fat chance of England brushing it aside as just a marital dustup.

Guldberg knew he required a better justification for a coup than the queen’s illicit affair with the king’s physician and privy cabinet minister. And he also needed actual proof that Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee had enjoyed a sexual relationship. Neither party was about to confess to it, and even if their servants tattled, their testimony would be worthless. An anonymous observer wrote, “As to the intimacy, the Queen had no confidants and Struensee was very close and reserved upon all points. The laws in Denmark too are
very rigid as to the proofs required on that head: people of a low class are not admissible evidence, I believe, against a crowned head.”

So the new government forced Christian to copy a trumped-up document they had created, which stated that he had discovered a conspiracy intended to force him to resign and thereupon declare the queen the regent for their son, the crown prince. Guldberg’s staff deliberately leaked the false news, with predictable results—a backlash against immorality. Five brothels were destroyed by an angry mob, which then set upon the homes owned by known supporters of Struensee and the queen. Troops had to be brought in to quell the violence.

Fearful that the public animosity might very well turn on
them
and question
their
legitimacy to govern, and that Christian might at any time wonder what the heck was going on in his name and want his throne back, the conspirators gradually removed him from public view. They placed him under a permanent military guard, and turned him into the ultimate puppet, who was forced to sign whatever was placed in front of him.

While Guldberg and Christian’s stepmother, Juliane Marie, were pulling the king’s strings, it occurred to them that it had not been Caroline Mathilde’s lover, but the queen herself who had been the power behind the Danish throne.

It drove the conservative opposition mad that Caroline Mathilde had dared to shape her life and destiny according to her own rules—although, admittedly, they were unique. Like so many other princesses sent abroad to wed, she was supposed to have been a mere pawn in international affairs, but she didn’t know her place, because she refused to stay in the background or the bedroom.

The longer the queen remained incarcerated and unreachable at Kronborg (located at Helsingr, also known as Elsinore to those who are more familiar with Danish geography via Shakespearean tragedy), the angrier she became. On January 19, 1772, three women from her household were sent to keep her company and, more probably, to spy on her, since it was known that she actively disliked each of them.

Back in London, the British press was excited by the story of a
beautiful young queen imprisoned in an inaccessible tower, the victim of a perfidious plot hatched by her Danish in-laws.

What would King George do? Would he be so embarrassed by his sister’s conduct that he would try to keep things as quiet as possible from his end—a near impossibility with a free press clamoring for information and scandal? Or, with the power to declare war without first applying to Parliament for permission, would he muster the royal navy?

The British ambassador’s secretary, Charles Ernst, traveled to London to deliver the news of Caroline Mathilde’s imprisonment to King George. By this time His Majesty was up to his eyeballs in wayward younger siblings, having heard his brother the Duke of Cumberland confess just six weeks earlier that he’d secretly wed a commoner. George would shortly learn that another brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had done the same.

But to insult one of his relations was to insult him as well, as far as the king of England was concerned. And as the head of the family he was honor- and duty-bound to do something about it. But what? And how would it be done? And if Caroline Mathilde were indeed an adulteress, George, who ate moral fiber for breakfast, could not more strongly condemn her conduct. He would never condone or excuse it, no matter who she was.

He sent her a letter that chided her, while simultaneously assuring her of his support.

Dear Sister, I cannot omit taking the first opportunity of expressing the sorrow I feel that your enemies have so incited the King of Denmark as to remove you from his presence. You can never doubt of having a warm advocate in me whose advice if followed might have preserved you from misfortune….