Sex with the Queen (50 page)

When she refused to answer questions, she was told that if she did not do so, they would take her infant daughter from her. But still she sat imperturbable and said nothing.

One of her inquisitors said, “Your majesty having refused to acknowledge your guilt, it is my duty to inform you that Count Struensee has confessed to your having committed adultery.”88

“Impossible!” cried the queen. “And if he has, I deny it!”

They read her the confession, and she stated that it was a forgery.

But when she examined it, she recognized the signature of her lover and found herself horribly betrayed. She sank back and covered her face with her hands. Her interrogator continued,

“Madam, if this confession be true, no death can be cruel enough for such a monster.” When he told her that Struensee had already been condemned to die, the queen fainted. Her ladies revived her, and she tried to rise but found she lacked the strength. At length she whispered, “If I were to confess, would the King spare Struensee? Could I save his life?”

The commissioner replied, “Surely, Madam, that would be adduced in his favor, and thereby alter the situation. You have but to sign this,” and he pushed a confession in front of her. She hesitated but a moment, wondering if this were some trick, then suddenly resolved, she signed. The queen had to be carried back to her bed as the commissioners, their work done, collected 2 2 8

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their quills and papers, pushed their chairs back, and strode sat-isfied from the hall.

And so both Matilda and Struensee were convinced of each other’s treachery. Perhaps this blow was crueler than the loss of their exalted positions or the sorrows of prison. Betrayed by the one each loved best, that was the greatest agony.

At her trial, Matilda was given an experienced lawyer but was not permitted to testify in her own defense. Nor was she allowed to mention the king’s insanity or his apparent acquiescence in the affair. Her lawyer vociferously denied her guilt and claimed that her confession of adultery had been signed under duress.

But for ten days the king’s witnesses rattled off their stories of stained handkerchiefs, rumpled sheets, and footsteps in sprin-kled powder. Matilda brought not a single witness.

Matilda was found guilty and divorced from Christian.

Oddly, the decree which proclaimed her adultery also asserted the legitimacy of both her children. Declaring one child a bas-tard would cast doubts on the legitimacy of the other. Although Louise Augusta grew up the spitting image of Struensee, with a face of elegant angles and a feminine version of his bird-of-prey nose, in the eyes of the law she was the legitimate daughter of King Christian VII.

When Matilda’s lawyer returned to Kronborg to give her the sad tidings, she sighed and said, “I expected as much—but what will become of Struensee?” When the lawyer told her that Stru-ensee was fated for execution, she trembled and began to cry.

“Tell him,” she said, weeping, “that I forgive him for the wrong he has done me.”89

Christian, chafing under the tutelage of the wicked step-mother whom he had always hated, grew restive and rebellious.

She had taken away his dog, for one thing. And for another, she had done something with his wife. Christian kept asking her where Matilda was. The more irritated Juliana became at this question, the more often he peppered her with it. To pacify the people who were concerned that Christian had merely traded in one keeper for another, Juliana had him stand on the palace e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 2 9

balcony. But his expression was blank as if he did not know where he was. He neither bowed nor waved but stood stiffly until he was pulled in.

One day, asked to sign a paper, the king had a moment of clarity. “Christian VII, by the Grace of God King of Denmark,”

he wrote, “in company with Juliana Maria by the Grace of the Devil.”90

Despite his persistent questions, no one would tell the king the whereabouts of Matilda. One day, overhearing that she was imprisoned in Kronborg, Christian escaped from his apart-ments, ran to the royal stables, and called for a carriage. But just as he was stepping inside, he was captured and taken back to his rooms. His shrieks could be heard throughout the palace, and in between them he asked for Struensee.

Struensee was preparing himself for execution. He would not face death alone. Another prisoner, Count Enevold Brandt, was found guilty of treason. Brandt had been the king’s reluctant keeper and had once grown so exasperated with his lunatic charge that he had thrashed him soundly. Now he was to pay the price for raising his hand against his king, though his greatest offense was his friendship and support of Struensee. The execu-tions of Struensee and Brandt were set for April 28, 1772. To show her joy at the executions, the night before, Juliana made Christian and the entire court attend a gala opera performance and a palace feast.

The scaffold was twenty-seven feet high so that with the aid of a telescope Juliana could see the executions and grisly dismem-berments from her window in the tower of Christiansborg Palace. Years later, when Juliana insisted on staying in that tiny room instead of the state apartments, she explained, “These rooms are dearer to me than my most splendid apartments, for from the windows I saw the remains of my bitterest foes exposed upon the wheel.”91

Dressed in the rose-colored breeches and blue velvet coat he had worn at that last masked ball, Struensee mounted the scaf-fold and waded through Brandt’s blood. Brandt’s hand had been chopped off before his beheading, the very hand that had dared 2 3 0

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strike a king. “Now for the fat one!” Juliana shrieked from her tower with glee.92 Kneeling in the gore, Struensee placed his right hand—the hand that had dared defile a queen—on a small block. When the executioner struck off his hand, Struensee popped up and writhed in convulsions, blood spurting from the stump. The executioner’s assistant had to push his head onto the block for the fatal blow. And when it struck, the virtuous old queen yelped for joy.

Juliana’s only regret, she told her friends, was that Matilda had not joined the others on the scaffold. She could not see Matilda’s hand and head struck off, her body split from throat to groin, her intestines pulled out and nailed to a wheel, her limbs severed and nailed next to her intestines, her head jammed on a pike and left to rot in a field beyond the city. That would have made for a perfect day indeed.

Aside from Juliana, there was no cheering from the fifty thousand spectators as Struensee’s head was lopped off. Sud-denly Struensee was the martyr, the folk hero, the visionary who had led Denmark into the modern world. Dowager Queen Ju-liana was the despised dictator. In the weeks following the execu-tion, the Danish people resented her wholesale dissolution of Struensee’s laws, and riots broke out in the streets of Copen-hagen. To quell the tumult, Juliana was forced to reinstate some of his edicts.

Unaware of the execution, Christian wailed for Matilda and Struensee. When the king was told firmly that Struensee was dead—as a result of his own signature on the death warrant—and Matilda had been divorced for adultery, Christian began to cry and asked for them again. He sobbed that Matilda was still his wife and could not be kept from him.

When the English ambassador visited Matilda and told her of her lover’s execution, she fainted, and upon being revived, sat numbly in her chair for several hours, a bloodless marble statue of a queen, unmoving, unfeeling. But after her initial shock and grief, there were practical considerations to attend to. Matilda needed to find a place to live in refined disgrace. With the Dan-ish people clamoring in the streets for Matilda to replace Juliana e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 3 1

as queen regent, the old queen was suddenly eager for the young queen to leave Danish soil.

Matilda assumed that she would return home to a quiet life in England, back to digging in her garden, perhaps, with friendly faces, English faces, around her. When Queen Charlotte refused to have an adulteress living on her territory, contaminating the purity of her young daughters, George decided to keep his sister in his German dominion of Hanover. And so Matilda heard that she would be going to Celle, to a palace that had remained empty for nearly seventy years since the death of Sophia Dorothea’s fa-ther in 1704.

Matilda was eager to leave the chilled ramparts of Kronborg.

For weeks her eyes were fixed on the gray and gloomy sea, looking for the English ship that would take her away from the country she now despised. Finally, three ships were spotted. But Matilda’s elation was tempered by the knowledge that she must part with her daughter, Louise Augusta. This child, now ac-knowledged as a Danish princess, was property of the Crown.

She would have a privileged life, but no mother.

For three days Matilda spent every moment playing with her daughter. But she could not bring herself to say that final farewell. At the hour of departure, she kept kissing the child good-bye, then turned around to pick her up and kiss her again.

The little girl cooed, thinking it a delightful game. But Matilda knew it was unlikely that she would ever see her daughter again, that the child may very well be raised to despise her mother’s memory. Finally forced to leave, Matilda cried, “Let me go. Now I have nothing! Nothing!”93 She staggered down the hall, outside the castle, and onto the ship, and the ship’s cannon, proudly an-nouncing the boarding of a royal princess of Britain, drowned out her piteous sobs.

On her sad journey, Matilda had no idea of the growing sup-port for her in three nations. Many British subjects despised George III for abandoning his sister, a victim of jackals at an evil court. Heedless of her adultery, the Danes angled to get her back to replace the wicked Juliana as regent. The German town of Celle offered her a festive welcome as if she were still a queen.

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