Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (40 page)

He then exhorted her to trust in God. But with Caroline Mathilde so remotely confined, it’s doubtful the letter ever reached her.

Britain opened secret negotiations with Denmark on behalf of Caroline Mathilde as “a daughter of England.” In the meantime, as George just as secretly readied a fleet to invade Denmark,
Ambassador Keith was instructed to do everything in his power to prevent Christian from divorcing Caroline Mathilde. If proceedings were commenced anyway, George also secretly intended to kick the crap out of Denmark.

Although he was prepared to take the field as his baby sister’s champion, what George failed to realize, or accept, was that Caroline Mathilde had no love for her motherland; she didn’t think of herself as a daughter of England. She was queen of Denmark and intended to stay that way.

On Danish shores, Guldberg’s government assembled a commission of inquiry called the Inkvisitionkommissionen that would interview the incarcerated parties and determine how to proceed depending on the answers given by the prisoners.

As it became clearer to Guldberg that Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee had not conspired against the king, the new prime minister had to focus instead on the charge of adultery. Unsurprisingly, the Inkvisitionkommissionen decided to play dirty. On February 20, 1772, filthy, bearded, and bedraggled, Johann Struensee was dragged from his cell and interrogated. Throughout his entire incarceration and inquisition, he had no idea where his lover was. Unaware that she was also imprisoned, he assumed she was still at the palace in Copenhagen.

The commission posed 238 questions to Johann Struensee over the course of the next two days, and he persisted in denying a sexual relationship with the queen. But finally he broke. To the 239th question, he conceded that he and Caroline Mathilde “had gone as far as they could between people of two sexes.”

The commissioners persisted, looking for specifics. Struensee answered in the affirmative to each of their queries, except he did not concede that he and the queen enjoyed relations during the royal family’s trip to Holstein in 1770—when he knew full well that Louise Augusta was conceived. Instead, he admitted that it was entirely possible that the king had spent at least a full night with his wife, thereby skirting the issue of the girl’s paternity so that she would remain a princess.

Struensee refused to sign a confession of any crime whatsoever. Nevertheless, a document dated February 2, 1772, was presented to
Caroline Mathilde with his signature at the bottom. She refused to believe it, insisting that it was a forgery.

And yet Struensee’s testimony included descriptions of their passionate encounters amid rumpled bed linens, semen-stained sofas, and other furniture so soiled with their bodily fluids that they needed to be reupholstered. He mentioned the handkerchief he secretly carried as a love token, besmirched with his semen and her blood. He even admitted—shock, horror—that he and the queen made love totally and unabashedly naked, as opposed to the sort of perfunctory copulation that occurred beneath raised nightshirts.

Meanwhile, Guldberg insisted to King George and his emissaries that His Britannic Majesty’s sister had brought the whole situation upon herself, and that she alone was responsible for her state.

And the English press, referring to Caroline Mathilde not by name but only as the queen of Denmark, swallowed the truth of her lover’s “confession” and took bets as to what her fate would be—divorce, exile, or execution.

On March 9, she received a visit from four men associated with the new government and the Inkvisitionkommissionen. The queen had no advocate or attorney and still had no contact with the outside world. The delegation read her forty-six pages of testimony about her romance with Struensee, taken from members of her household staff and given by her lover under extreme duress.

Offered the chance to admit to the affair, Caroline Mathilde vehemently denied the relationship and insisted that the commission had no authority to question her. She further maintained that the confession she was told was Struensee’s was a forgery.

Then the commissioners played their trump card and showed her the physician’s signature on the back of the purported confession. Faced with this evidence, Caroline Mathilde was induced to sign her own confession admitting to an adulterous liaison with Johann Struensee.

Divorce proceedings commenced on March 13 with the creation of the Skilsmissekommissionen, the divorce commission. King Christian was not permitted to be present at the trial, because no one knew what might come out of his mouth. If in a lucid moment he were to comprehend what was going on, he might even change his mind
about divorcing his wife, which would have been disastrous for the new government.

Peter Uldall, Caroline Mathilde’s court-appointed advocate, was convinced that the queen had been duped by strong, corrupt, and clever men, and that the poor woman had been a victim of their machinations. He couldn’t possibly wrap his brain around the idea that she was an intelligent and passionate female who had taken full command of her own life. When he went to interview her at Kronborg and was shocked to find himself confronted by an angry and contentious woman, his chivalrously misogynistic fantasies were utterly demolished.

In Uldall’s presence, Caroline Mathilde retracted her confession of adultery and refused to believe that Struensee had confessed as well. According to the naive Uldall, “I tried to raise her pride by telling her how much he had done wrong against her. It seemed to have some effect, and would have had more if she had known to the full his cowardice, but she always returned to this; he must have been forced.”

As for her relationship with her husband, the queen admitted to Uldall, “I always feared that he would sacrifice me if somebody put evil in him against me.”

Uldall presented Caroline Mathilde’s verbatim statement before the Skilsmissekommissionen: “If I have possibly acted incautiously, my age, my sex and my rank must excuse me. I never believed myself exposed to suspicion, and, even though my confession appears to confirm my guilt, I know myself to be perfectly innocent. I understand that the law requires me to be tried: my consort has granted me this and I hope he will, through the mouths of his judges, acknowledge that I have not made myself unworthy of him.” For someone privy to the actual relationship between the queen and Christian, or to his mental illness, they could have read between the lines for a master stroke of legalese.

Fully aware that a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, Caroline Mathilde was nonetheless desperate to hang on to her children, although she realized it would be a long shot to win custody of her son, the crown prince. She then begged to keep Louise Augusta,
insisting to Uldall, “I must have her with me. I will declare that she does not have anything to do with that family. Can I not then keep her?” At this outburst, the queen’s lawyer delicately reminded her that if she made such a claim it would be an admission of her adultery.

After the divorce degree was pronounced, Christian, of all people, was the one who had a fit, destroying his wife’s property and then falling into an even more profound depression.

The English were still threatening war if the Danes continued to incarcerate Caroline Mathilde after the divorce. So she was exiled to the Hanoverian duchy of Celle, which was also a dominion of George III.

Johann Struensee and his crony Enevold Brandt were sentenced to death—Struensee for a number of crimes, including adultery with the queen. Brandt received the sentence for abetting the affair and for embezzling royal funds.

They were executed on the morning of April 28, 1772. Each man first lost an arm to the ax, followed by their respective heads. Then the victims were stripped naked, quartered, and their entrails were scooped out and tossed into a cart. Owing to the nature of his crime, Struensee also had his genitals hacked off. The quartered bodies were chained to carts to be pecked at by birds and ogled by curious onlookers with strong stomachs. The heads were then displayed on a pair of pikes with the hands, nailed below.

Forced to leave baby Louise Augusta behind at Elsinore, a very angry Caroline Mathilde boarded a boat for Germany. Meanwhile, Britain’s ambassador to Denmark, Lord Keith, burned every one of his papers that was pertinent to the whole sordid business. Back in London all relevant documents were consigned to the flames as well.

On May 1, George III wrote to his sister at the retreat of Göhrde in Celle to advise her that he had “ordered…that every sort of Honour should be showed to you.” But the moralist in him, knowing what stuck in her craw the most, sadistically rubbed it in:

The parting with your children is a distress in which all who have any feeling must greatly sympathise with you, but, dear
sister, this would have equally attended your remaining prisoner in Denmark, and must be looked upon as the natural consequence of the whole transaction.

On October 20, 1772, the exiled Danish queen finally arrived at the moated castle that from then on would be her home. She could hold court, but only according to strict etiquette, and not in her previous egalitarian manner.

Caroline Mathilde pretended that everything was rosy and that she was enjoying herself, but she was desperate to return to Denmark and to assert her right to the throne. She began to gather a collection of sympathetic minds (among them Struensee’s brother, who had been exiled to Oldenbourg), even as she insisted to her brother that her concerns were maternal and not political. Despite her ability to hold court, play music, and entertain, her every move was watched by King George’s informers and reported to him.

In 1774, an ambitious, adventurous British subject named Nathaniel William Wraxall decided he would be Caroline Mathilde’s white knight. He became involved with the Danish ex-pats in an (eventually unsuccessful) plot to overthrow Guldberg’s government and restore the exiled queen to the Danish throne. King George’s reaction was cryptic. Unwilling to incriminate himself in any way he wrote to his sister:

…I shall not only not prevent your going but support I hope [those] who have been accessory to it. But from what I have declared I cannot either enter further into the affair or be entrusted with the plans on which they mean to act….

Unfortunately, a triumphant return to Denmark was not in the cards. On the night of May 10, 1775, Caroline Mathilde fell victim to a scarlet fever epidemic. She was only twenty-three years old. Her corpse was interred in the crypt at Celle where the bodies of the duchy’s dukes were buried. Conspiracy theories later abounded. It was variously rumored that she had been poisoned or that she suffered from porphyria, the same disease that ultimately felled George
III, or that someone else had been buried in her stead and she had emigrated to America.

In accordance with her wishes, Caroline Mathilde’s personal papers were burned. But back in Denmark, her children kept her memory alive. Sixteen-year-old Crown Prince Frederik was awarded a seat on the Council of State in 1784, and immediately dissolved Guldberg’s government with a writ that had been signed by—you guessed it—King Christian VII. Frederik was proclaimed regent on his father’s behalf, and when Christian died in 1808, the crown prince became Frederik VI. He married his cousin Maria Sophie of Hesse-Kassel, dying in 1839 with no living male heirs.

Princess Louise Augusta, who was an infant when she was taken from her mother and only four years old at her death, grew up to be impetuous and romantic, just like Caroline Mathilde, and as much a fan of political reform. She supported the French Revolution and adored Napoleon.

Louise Augusta’s daughter married a grandson of Christian’s stepmother, Juliane Marie. Upon the death of King Frederik VI, the crown passed to the husband of Louise Augusta’s daughter, making the granddaughter of Johann Struensee and Caroline Mathilde the queen of Denmark.

M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE

1755–1793

Q
UEEN
OF
F
RANCE:
1774–1792

M
arie Antoinette was the fifteenth of sixteen children born to the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and her husband, Francis of Lorraine. France and Austria had been enemies for 950 years, and the union of the youngest Hapsburg archduchess and the heir to the Bourbon throne was intended to checkmate encroachments on the Austrian empire by Maria Theresa’s closest neighbors and greatest enemies, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia. The children’s marriage was hardly a love match; it was an international alliance that had been years in the making, originally the brainchild of the French king’s late mistress Madame de Pompadour and his foreign minister the duc de Choiseul.

Marie Antoinette was not yet eleven years old in 1766 when negotiations for her hand began in earnest. Pompadour was dead by then, but Louis XV had given Choiseul his blessing. Unfortunately, the prospective dauphine required a substantial makeover before the French would formalize their offer. Beginning in 1768, an army of stylists and tutors descended on Vienna. A French dentist subjected her to an eighteenth-century form of orthodontia. A famed Parisian coiffeur reconfigured her hairline, which the Bourbons had deemed “
trop bombé
”—too prominent. Lessons in French, elocution, dance, and the walk unique to the ladies of the court, known as the Versailles Glide, came next. And then, when the adolescent archduchess’s academic education was judged to be lacking, a preceptor was engaged to cram her head with the history of France and its royal families. After she got her first period in February 1770, the two
courts exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Now the little girl was ripe to become a bride.

Marie Antoinette was married to Louis Auguste by proxy in Vienna on April 19, 1770. Two days later, only fourteen years old, she left her homeland forever. On May 16, she wed the fifteen-year-old dauphin in the chapel at Versailles.

What happened on their wedding night was immortalized by the dauphin in his hunting journal with a single word:
rien
. Nothing—although the reference was really a notation that the bridegroom had not killed any woodland creatures that day because he’d not gone hunting. Not only was Louis Auguste shy and uncomfortable around his new bride, but he may have suffered from a mild deformity of the penis known as phimosis, where the foreskin is too tight to retract. This condition (which also afflicted Peter, the husband of Catherine the Great) made intercourse, and even an erection, painful.