The Royal Physician's Visit

by Per Olov Enquist

  How horrifying. Did things truly have to be this way? Was it true that she herself, who lacked all fear and enjoyed wielding power and felt happy when she saw that they were afraid of her, that it was people like her who should have carried out the Danish revolution?

  No birds outside. Why were there no birds now that she needed them?

  He had told her a story about a young boy who had everything but who knew fear. But it was the other boy in the story who was the hero. The one who was evil, wicked, foolish, who lacked all fear; he was the victor.

  How could someone conquer the world if he was only good, and lacked the courage to be evil? How was it then possible to put a lever under the house of the world?

  Endless winter. Snow drifting across Øresund.

  When would it be over?

  Four years she had lived. Actually less. It began at the Royal Theater, when she decided to kiss him. Wasn’t that in the spring of 1770? That meant that she had lived only two years.

  How little time it took to grow up. How little time it took to die.

  Why was it Johann Friedrich Struensee whom she had to love so terribly when the good were doomed to fall and those who could not feel fear would triumph?

  “O, keep me innocent, make others great.”

  It was so infinitely long ago.

  3.

  The delegation of four accomplished nothing.

  Four days later Guldberg arrived.

  Guldberg came alone, signaled to the guards to wait outside, and sat down on a chair; he looked her in the eye, his gaze unwavering. No, this little man was no Rantzau, no cowardly traitor, he shouldn’t be underestimated, he was not someone to be toyed with. Before, she had thought of him as almost grotesque in his gray smallness; but he seemed to have changed; what was it that had changed? He was not insignificant. He was a deadly adversary, and she had underestimated him; now he sat in his chair and stared at her, unwavering. What was it about his eyes? People said that he never blinked, but wasn’t there something else? He talked to her quietly and calmly, coldly stating that Struensee had now confessed, as she had recently been told, and that the King now wished for a divorce and a confession from her was necessary.

  “No,” she said to him in an equally calm voice.

  “In that case,” he said, “Struensee has slandered Denmark’s Queen. And he must be punished more severely. We will be forced to condemn him to a slow death by crushing under the wheel.”

  He looked at her quite calmly.

  “You swine,” she said.“And what about the child?”

  “A price must always be paid,” he said.“Paid!”

  “And that means?”

  “That the bastard and spawn of a whore must be taken from you.”

  She knew she had to maintain her composure. The child’s life depended on it, and she had to stay calm and think clearly.

  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she said in her most controlled tone of voice, although it sounded to her shrill and quavering, “I don’t understand this desire for revenge. How was someone like you created? By God? Or by the Devil?”

  He gave her a long look.

  “Lechery has its price. And my task is to persuade you to sign a confession.”

  “But you didn’t answer me,” she said.

  “Do you truly want an answer?”

  “Yes. I truly do.”

  Then, very quietly, he pulled a book out of his pocket, pensively looked through it, turning the pages, and began to read. It was the Bible. He actually had a beautiful voice, she suddenly thought, but there was something horrible about his tranquility, his composure, and the text that he read aloud.“This,” he said,“is Isaiah, chapter thirty-four; shall I read part of it?” And he read: “For the Lord is enraged against all the nations, and furious against all their host, he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter. Their slain shall be cast out, and the stench of their corpses shall rise; the mountains shall flow with their blood. All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine, like leaves falling from the fig tree.” And he turned the page very slowly and meditatively, as if he were listening to the music of the words. Oh God, she thought, how could I ever have thought this man was insignificant? “For my sword has drunk its fill in the heavens; behold, it descends for judgment upon Edom, upon the people I have doomed. The Lord has a sword; it is sated with blood, it is gorged with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams, yes,” and his voice grew in strength and she couldn’t help staring at him with something like fascination, or terror, or both. “Their land shall be soaked with blood, and their soil made rich with fat. For the Lord has a day of vengeance, a year of recompense for the cause of Zion. And the streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch, and her soil into brimstone; her land shall become burning pitch. Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. … They shall name it No Kingdom There, and all its princes shall be nothing. Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. And wild beasts shall meet with hyenas, the satyr will cry to his fellow; yea, there shall the night hag alight and find for herself a resting place, yes,” he continued in the same calm, intense voice, “these are the words of the prophet, I read them only to give a background for the Lord’s words about the punishment that will strike those who seek impurity and corruption, impurity and corruption,” he repeated, steadfastly staring at her, and suddenly she saw his eyes, no, it wasn’t that they didn’t blink, but they were light colored, almost ice-blue, like a wolf’s, they were very pale and dangerous, and that was what had frightened everyone, not the fact that he didn’t blink, but that his eyes were as unbearably ice-blue as a wolf’s, and he continued in the same calm voice: “Now we come to the passage that the Dowager Queen, upon my advice, recommended be read in all the churches of the realm next Sunday, as an expression of thanksgiving that this country was not forced to share Edom’s fate, and I will read now from the Prophet Isaiah, chapter sixty-three.” And he cleared his throat, fixed his gaze on the open Bible, and read the text that the Danish people would hear on the following Sunday. “Who is this that comes from Edom, in crimsoned garments from Bozrah, he that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength? ‘It is I, announcing vindication, mighty to save.’ Why is thy apparel red, and thy garments like his that treads in the wine press? ‘I have trodden the wine press alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my raiment. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption has come. I looked, but there was no one to help; I was appalled, but there was no one to uphold; so my own arm brought me victory, and my wrath upheld me. I trod down the peoples in my anger, I made them drunk in my wrath, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.’”

  Then he stopped reading and looked up at her.

  “The wine treader,” she said, as if to herself.

  “I was asked a question,” said Guldberg. “And didn’t want to shun giving the answer. Now I have done it.”

  “Yes?” she whispered.

  “That’s why.”

  For a moment she thought, as she watched the wine treader reading slowly and methodically, that perhaps it was a wine treader that Struensee had needed at his side.

  Calm, quiet, with ice-blue wolf eyes, bloodstained garments, and with a temperament for the great game.

  She felt almost sick when this thought occurred to her. Struensee would never have been tempted by the idea. It was the fact that she herself was tempted that made her ill. Was she “the night hag”?

  Did she have a wine treader inside her?

  Never, she persuaded herself. Where would it all
end? Where would it end?

  In the end she signed.

  Nothing about the little girl’s birth. But about the adultery, and she wrote with a steady hand, with fury, though giving no details; she confessed in this matter, “to the same as Count Struensee has confessed.”

  She wrote with a steady hand, and so that he wouldn’t be slowly tortured to death because he had accused her of lying, and thus offended royal authority, and because she knew that his terror of this would be so great; but the only thing she could think of was : but the children, the children, and the boy is so big, but the little girl, whom I must nurse, and they’ll take her, and they will be surrounded by wolves, and what will happen, and little Louise, they’ll take them both from me, who will nurse her then, who will enfold her with love among these wine treaders?

  She signed. And she knew that she was no longer the bold girl who knew no fear. Fear had finally sought her out, fear had found her, and at last she knew what fear was.

  4.

  Keith, the British ambassador, was finally allowed to visit the imprisoned Queen.

  The problem had been elevated to a higher level. The great game had been initiated, although the great game did not concern the two imprisoned Counts, or the minor sinners who had been arrested at the same time. They were later released and banished and fell into disfavor or received small fiefs and were pardoned and provided with pensions.

  The minor sinners quietly disappeared.

  Reverdil, the cautious tutor, Christian’s tutor, nursemaid, and the boy’s beloved adviser for as long as advice could be given, was also banished. He was given a week’s house arrest but sat calmly and waited; conflicting dispatches arrived; finally an effusive and courteous expulsion order instructing him to seek his home country as soon as possible, and there find peace.

  He understood. Very slowly he traveled back from the center of the storm because, as he writes, he didn’t want to give the impression that he was fleeing. In this manner he disappeared from history, stage by stage, restrained in his flight, once more banished, gaunt and stooped, sorrowful and clear-sighted, with his once stubborn hopes still alive; he disappeared like a very slow sunset. This is a poor image, and yet it suits Élie Salomon François Reverdil. Perhaps he would have described it thus if he still availed himself of one of the images he loved to use, of slowness as virtue: the images of the cautious revolution, the slow retreats, about the dawn and dusk of the Enlightenment.

  The great game did not concern the minor characters.

  The great game concerned the little English whore, the little Princess, Denmark’s crowned Queen, the sister of George III, the enlightened woman on Denmark’s throne who was so esteemed by Tsarina Catherine of Russia; meaning the little, imprisoned, weeping, absolutely confused and furious Caroline Mathilde.

  This night hag. This demonic angel. Nevertheless she was the mother of two royal children, which gave her power.

  Guldberg’s analysis was crystal clear. They had won her confession of adultery. A divorce was necessary to prevent her, and her child, from claiming power. The ruling group surrounding Guldberg was now, he admitted, exactly as Struensee had been, completely dependent on the legitimacy of the mad King. God had given power. But Christian was still the finger of God that granted life, grace, and the spark of power to the one who possessed the strength to conquer the black void of power created by the King’s illness.

  The Royal Physician had visited this vacuum, and filled it. Now he was gone. Others would now visit the void.

  The situation was fundamentally unchanged,although reversed.

  The great game now concerned the Queen.

  Christian had acknowledged the little Princess as his own. To declare her a bastard child was an affront against him and would diminish his power to legitimize the new government. If the girl was a bastard, the mother might be permitted to keep her, and there would be no reason to keep the girl in Denmark. That must not happen. Neither would Christian be declared insane, for the same reason; then all power would revert to his legitimate son, and indirectly to Caroline Mathilde.

  Ergo the adultery had to be established. The divorce had to take place.

  The question was how the English monarch would react to this affront to his sister.

  There was a period of confusion: war or not? George III ordered a great naval squadron to be outfitted for an attack on Denmark if Caroline Mathilde’s rights were denied. Yet at the same time the British newspapers and pamphlets were publishing sections of Struensee’s confession. The freedom of the press in England was both admirable and notorious, and the amazing story of the German doctor and the little English Queen was irresistible.

  But war—over that?

  It appeared, as the weeks passed, more and more difficult to enter into a major war because of an insult to national pride. Caroline Mathilde’s sexual infidelity made public support uncertain. Many wars had been started for lesser and more peculiar reasons, but England was now hesitating.

  They settled on a compromise. The Queen would escape the planned life imprisonment at Aalborghus. The divorce would be accepted. The children would be taken from her. She would be exiled for life from Denmark and would be forced to take up voluntary but supervised residence at one of the British King’s palaces in his German possessions, in Celle, in Hannover.

  She would retain the title of Queen.

  In Helsingør harbor on May 27, 1772, a small British squadron arrived, consisting of two frigates and a shallop, a royal yacht.

  That same day the little girl was taken from her.

  They had told her the day before that she would have to give up the child on the following day; she had known about this for a long time, it was only the exact time that had been so anxiously uncertain. She wouldn’t leave the little girl in peace but constantly carried her around in her arms; the girl was now ten months old and could walk if someone held her hand. The girl was always good-natured, and the Queen refused to allow any of the ladies-in-waiting to tend to her during those last days. When the child grew tired of the rather simple games that the Queen devised to preoccupy her daughter, and thus herself, the task of getting dressed came to play an important role. It took on an almost manic quality, I have confessed everything that I did wrong if only I could keep the girl and God are you a wine treader I see how they’re coming with their bloody garments and these wolves will now take charge, but often her way of dressing and undressing the child, sometimes of necessity but often quite unnecessarily, was a form of ritual or invocation, in order to win forever the little girl’s favor. On the morning of May 27, when the Queen saw the three vessels lying at anchor in the harbor, she had already changed the little girl’s clothes ten times, for no reason whatsoever, and the protests of her ladies-in-waiting were met only with vehemence and outbursts of anger and tears.

  When the delegation from the new Danish government arrived, the Queen completely lost control. She shouted without restraint, refused to let go of the child, and only the firm exhortations of the delegation not to frighten the innocent little girl but display dignity and resolve made her stop her steady weeping, but this humiliation oh if only I were a wine treader at this moment but the girl.

  At last they succeeded in tearing the child away from her without harming either the girl or the Queen.

  Afterward she stood at the window, as usual, and seemed quite calm, staring south with an expressionless face, toward Copenhagen.

  Everything empty. No thoughts. Little Louise had been turned over to the pack of Danish wolves.

  5.

  On May 30, at six in the evening, the handover was carried out. Then the British officers came ashore, escorted by a bodyguard of armed British sailors, fifty men strong, to take Caroline Mathilde away.

  The encounter with the Danish military guard troops at Kronborg was quite extraordinary. The British officers did not greet the Danish guards in the customary fashion, they did not exchange a single word with the Danish courtiers or officers; inste
ad, they met them with coldness and the utmost contempt. They formed an honor guard around the Queen, greeting her with military courtesy, and a salvo of salutes was fired from the vessels.

  Down at the harbor she walked between rows of British soldiers standing in formation and presenting arms.

  Then she was escorted on board the British sloop and conveyed out to the frigate.

  The Queen was very calm and composed. She conversed in a friendly manner with her countrymen, who with their contempt for the Danish guard troops wished to show their repudiation of the manner in which she had been treated. They closed ranks around her with something that could not be described in military terms, but was perhaps love.

  No doubt they had decided that she was still their little girl. More or less. All descriptions of their behavior indicate this.

  She had been badly treated. They wanted to show the Danes their contempt.

  Calm and resolute, she walked between the rows of British sailors as they presented arms. No smiles, but no tears either. In this sense her departure from Denmark was unlike her arrival. Then she had wept, without knowing why. Now she did not weep, although she had reason to do so; but she had made up her mind.

  They escorted her away, with military honors, with contempt for those she was leaving, and with love. That was how the little English girl was taken home from her visit to Denmark.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE RIVER

  THE DAY OF Vengeance and the Wine Treader would come. But there was something about this very enticing idea that seemed wrong. Guldberg didn’t understand what it was. They had read the sermon text in the churches, with each interpretation more shocking than the last; Guldberg thought it proper that this had occurred; he had chosen the proper passage himself, and it was the right one, the Dowager Queen had agreed, the day of judgment and vengeance had come, I trod down the peoples in my anger, I made them drunk in my wrath, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth, these were the proper words, and justice would be done. Yet when he read the text to the little English whore it had been so appalling. Why had she looked at him in that way? She had brought the contagion of sin into the Danish kingdom, he was certain of that, she was the night hag, It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. And wild beasts shall meet with hyenas, the satyr will cry to his fellow; yea, there shall the night hag alight and find for herself a resting place, she deserved this, she knew that she was the night hag, and she had forced him to his knees at his bedside and her power was great, and Lord, how shall we protect ourselves from the contagion of sin?