The Lost Queen: The Tragedy of a Royal Marriage

by Norah Lofts

  “Struensee was then in Altona.”

  “You know what I mean. Some other obliging friend. Frankly I never believed Christian to be capable.”

  “Why not? The village idiot usually has a large family.”

  He was eighteen now and had largely outgrown his deformity. It increased her bitterness to think that between him and the throne stood an idiot and a child of dubious paternity. Perhaps he was beginning to feel the bitterness, too; he had become less and less agreeable lately.

  The serfs whom Struensee had freed felt that nothing, not even a Queen’s favor was too good for him; but they were not yet accustomed to freedom and had no way of making their opinion felt.

  The great nobles—all landowners—were, with few exceptions, virulently opposed to the man who had come so far and so fast, and done too much too quickly. A man who took other people’s property would do anything. But—and here was the difficulty—there was a tradition of fanatical devotion to the monarchy and one hesitated to believe that the King was a cuckold, the Queen a trollop. Still, one must bear in mind that she was English and that many of Struensee’s reforms were on English pattern. Every lady who had been persuasive in bed, every gentleman who had yielded an argument between the sheets, was bound to be a little suspicious.

  The most salacious and venomous talk went on at the middle level amongst those who had lost profitable offices and sinecures and monopolies. It pleased them to think that the man who had hurt them in the name of reform was badly in need of reformation himself. He’d spent his days making laws and his nights breaking the seventh commandment; He’d ordered the streets of Copenhagen to be cleaned up, what about the Palace?

  In Brunswick, Augusta, without much difficulty, believed the worst.

  In England the Princess Dowager knew that if she believed it she would simply turn her face to the wall and die. So she refused to believe it; and went out and about more than usual, holding her head high, defying rumor.

  Caroline spent the summer at Hirscholm, the prettiest of the royal residences. Freddy and Tammi, at three and a half were old enough to begin to ride. They had identical ponies and Caroline, now bulky and slow, conscientiously divided her time between the two, dealing with one while a groom attended the other. She was fond of Tammi who had charm of his own and who called her Mamma, but she was secretly gratified by Freddy’s more fearless attitude. My son is my son. This was especially evident when it came to giving the ponies their titbits, held out on a flat palm. Tammi was inclined to flinch away; then the pony would nudge him. Once it pushed him over. The Crown Prince of Denmark said, “Freddy do,” and offered the crust. Caroline wondered whether it would be against Johann’s rule about absolutely equal treatment for both boys if presently she gave her son the little cockade with the magical bone in it. Not that there was anything in charms, of course; and she could make Tammi a cockade similar in every respect but one.

  Despite the warm weather and her increasing discomfort, to which the stitch in her side contributed, she hoped that this baby would be a little late. The masquerade had been staged in November; let me hold together until early August and thus defeat them all.

  But on July 7, just as the groom had led the two ponies away and she was walking back toward the steps, at the top of which Alice sat sewing, the first pang struck. She bent over and it passed. When she reached Alice she released her clasp on the two plump, hot, leather-scented little hands and said, “See to them...I think I...” Leaning forward a little she made what speed she could into the cool palace.

  “You stay here,” Alice said to the little boys, indicating the stretch of terrace. “If you move or get into mischief, I’ll give you something to remember.”

  They knew what that meant. Alice was the most potent person in their lives. Alice openly accepted, for Caroline’s sake, all Struensee’s rules; some were good, and these she observed, some were daft, and these she ignored. No rewards, no punishments; so how could a child learn? Freddy and Tammi had both felt the weight of her thin hard hand and knew what she would give them to remember if they moved, or got into mischief. They began to turn somersaults.

  This time it was almost too easy; she was hardly undressed and onto her bed before she was a mother again. This time a daughter; this time a child of love, beautiful from the first, plump, compact, pink and white, born with a good head of hair and slaty blue eyes.

  Everything now depended upon Christian’s attitude.

  They came to the mouth of his burrow and said, “Your Majesty is a father again. This time a daughter.”

  He said, “Indeed, indeed.”

  Heer Reventil shouted into the cave, “Would Your Majesty care to see the child?”

  “If you say so.” His good head had a whole list of things that could be said without causing any trouble or pain. This was one of them.

  Little fragments of memory remained to him like old brittle leaves of autumns long ago. There had been a baby, ugly; this was different and he granted the difference with the one word, “Pretty.”

  His Majesty’s visit to his daughter and his remark that was pretty was duly reported in the press. One paper did venture to print a caricature of the scene, but the thing was little too subtle to make much impact.

  Caroline lay in her bed and made plans for her daughter whose life should be so very different from her own. Any suitor for the hand of the Princess of Denmark would have to come and be inspected; would ride, dance, talk; and girl herself should say “This one.”

  Yet she was not wholly emancipated; when she looked into the future she thought of George’s first-born, Prince Wales. He was now nine years old—just the right difference, said to be so handsome that they called him Prince Florizel, and intelligent and high-spirited as well. And what a wonderful thing it would be if, to the England that she had left so unwillingly and still yearned for, she could one day make gift of a queen, beautiful to look at and well brought up, and with a fresh strain of blood in her veins.

  She lay there, feeding the child, dreaming her dreams; this time she was up and well again within a fortnight.

  There was still the little hurdle of the christening; and here Heer Reventil came into his own.

  “I am well aware,” he said to Struensee, “that with the medical men and with the general public, anything that cannot be proved by rule of thumb is dismissed as superstition. But I can say with absolute certainty that if His Majesty is to be present at and take part in this christening ceremony, the moon must be consulted.” He produced a little black book.

  “This is not a diary in the accepted sense, Count Struensee. It is a chart. See for yourself.”

  Struensee took it and read, “Moon almost full; bad day”; “Full moon; very bad day. Peppo needed”; Moon waning, better day; went to concert, seemed to enjoy it. Well behaved”; “Moon at nadir; almost rational; talked of old times.”

  “There is more in this than meets the eye. Count Struensee,” Heer Reventil said. “I first noticed it with his lessons and suspected that lunatic was not a chance word.”

  “I know that people who plant seeds claim that those planted in the dark of the moon wax with it and outstrip those set a fortnight earlier, when it was on the wane. I always meant to test it out for myself, with radishes...but I never had time,” Struensee said. He looked again at the little book; the writing was small, but clear as print and the pattern emerged; ridiculous, inexplicable by any medical reasoning, but plain.

  Heer Reventil said earnestly, “I have thought about this a great deal. Most of us are ruled by the sun. Who is not happier, more generous and more cheerful when the sun shines, and more dismal and bad-tempered on a dull day? Who is not more timid in the dark? A thought that is only a thought at three in the afternoon can strike a deadly blow to the heart at three o’clock in the morning. You admit that. You are a doctor; did you ever ask yourself why so many people die at or around that hour.”

  “I never asked myself why, but it is true. Four out of five deaths occur b
etween midnight and sunrise.”

  “Because,” Heer Reventil said earnestly, “most people are ruled by the sun, which has a twenty-four-hour cycle. These others, the lost people, subject to the moon, suffer greater variations, the moon being variable and the sun constant. I, personally, am very sorry for these lost ones, the moon people.”

  Taking a step backward into the dark ages, Struensee said, “Could you then, Heer Reventil, suggest a good date for Her Royal Highness’ christening? Their Majesties have agreed upon the names. His mother’s, Louise, and her mother’s Augusta.”

  And when had that been agreed, Heer Reventil wondered. So far as he knew...No matter. What mattered was that he was being consulted, his theory about the moon and lunatics had not been scorned, his importance had not been underrated.

  “May I have back my book? I dated every page. Let me see now.” He ruffled the pages and chose the date. The King’s behavior on the occasion appeared to confirm the theory and to justify the choice.

  COPENHAGEN; WINTER 1771—1772

  Despite the lack of new dresses in the latest Paris styles and the limitation upon the number of courses to be served at any one meal, Copenhagen was gay again that winter. The baby princess was given a splendid christening, quite as splendid as her brother’s had been. Some critics carped and said that was unusual in the case of a second child, and a female; was it an attempt to make up to the child for the suspicion and the talk? This attitude did not, however, prevent those who held it from enjoying the festivities; and the King, thanks to Heer Reventil’s little book, was able to appear, not only at the christening of the child whom he thus accepted as his daughter, Princess of Denmark, Duchess of Holstein-Augustembourge, but at two or three immediately subsequent functions.

  Then came the wedding of Amalia von Dannecker to Count Holmstrupp. Her old father, resigned now to what he had thought of as a mésalliance, came creaking into Copenhagen—bringing his own feather bed—and managed to make an entirely original contribution to the political opinion in the capital.

  Hitherto those few landowners who had not been opposed! to the liberation of the serfs had been hotheaded young idealists, prone to talk about freedom and liberty and the ; rights of man: but old von Dannecker struck a practical note.

  “The man’s a genius,” he said, meaning Struensee. “Rent is the answer. Whenever I tried to collect my just dues, the fellow who owed me most had two broken legs or an arm in a sling; he had five starving children and his woman was in the straw with a sixth. The pig was dead, a fox had taken the geese. I could have whipped the fellow, but what would that have put in my pocket? And I am a merciful man. I was steadily being ruined; I’ve been ruined for twenty years. Day labor—look back on how that was done. I swear that every time my day-laborers turned up, the ox was on three legs, the plough was broken, the scythe without a handle and the men either broken-backed or coughing their lungs up. But rent—rent is a different matter; they like paying rent. You may laugh, but this is true. There’s a widow on my place, six children; she’s lived at my expense this last seven years. She never paid so much as a potato—what do the fools do, plant them upside down? I never had the heart...being a merciful man. In the ordinary way her oldest would be in the army now; as it was, he came along with the rent, the day before it was due as a matter of fact, but of course they can’t count.”

  He was perhaps the first and most willing welcomer of the new order; but whether one liked it or not, there was proof that a clogged moribund economy was moving. Struensee’ abolition of the laws that snatched a boy into the army as soon as he was big enough to be useful was not without effect. Boys had endless reserves of energy; they would work on the family holding—now rented—and then rush out to work for pay, doing the work formerly done by laggard, grudging serf labor, Also prosperous serfs—and there were some—formerly afraid to show any sign of prosperity, because of the dues, men who had hidden their little hoards under the hearthstone or the mattress, now felt free to take out money which had been out of circulation, sometimes for generations, and buy new tools, better stock animals, and for their wives real gold rings to replace those of base metal that had served for as long as forty years. Denmark was experiencing a mild economic boom.

  Struensee had always said that his reforms would not be the ruin of the country, but its making. Caroline was so glad for his sake, and for the sake of people like that poor woman harnessed to a plough. He was the savior, not only of her life and sanity by giving her back her child, by giving her the inestimable gift of love; he was saving Denmark, too.

  Juliana the Queen Mother, who had come from Fredensberg for the christening of the baby who was her step-grandchild, stayed on. There was a ballet, an opera, a concert. The reopening of her salon was warmly welcomed.

  Of the day of the Holmstrupp wedding Heer Reventil wrote “A disastrous day!” And the moon had nothing to do with it; by Heer Reventil’s calendar the King should have been as capable on this day as he had been at the christening of his daughter; a bit somnambulant, vacant-looking if you came close, which few people were allowed to do, but well-behaved, quiet, withdrawn.

  But by some strange chance it had not been that way at all. And the ridiculous thing was that the day had started rather well. Any uninformed person seeing His Majesty at breakfast would have believed him to be completely normal, a young man whose slow speech and movement could be attributed to a lethargic nature and gathering weight. But within an hour he proceeded to go mad—if an already demented person could be said to go mad. He became noisy and violent, talking loudly and somewhat incoherently about women as black as crows, women with hair like the beards of old men, and how the two could be confused. “But he should be warned. Hurry, hurry. Send Axel on a good horse. He must be told. I loved him—he never loved me—but he was my one true friend. I am King of Denmark, I will not have him ruined as I was. All this about two heads; nobody believes me, but it is true. I made mine come together; she didn’t even try. Is that fair? Knut must be told.” Christian glared at Heer Reventil and said, “If nobody else will dare to, I will. I’ll do it now.”

  In no time at all Peppo’s muscular services were required. Then Christian wept and tried to pour into Heer Reventil’s shrinking ears an account of his love for that one true friend who had never even been grateful. He seemed to sense that Knut had gone forever and began to speak of him as if he were dead—which, so far as the King and Court and Copenhagen were concerned, he might as well have been. Knut, having obtained exactly what he wanted, wealth, property, the Order of Matilda and a well-connected wife, retired with his spoils. He intended to make Vidborg the most prosperous place in Denmark and to enjoy life. Let Brandt be First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Something more than a desire for private life activated Knut. Like his forefathers, like William Smith, he could sense bad weather brewing.

  Caroline did not sense bad weather, but she sometimes had a little superstitious feeling that such happiness could not last. She had, in effect three children, the two little boys, romping and growing like puppies, the new baby in the grand state cradle thriving, every day more beautiful. The dangerous corner had been safely rounded, and the fact that there had been danger had done the seemingly impossible, welded her and Johann even closer together. Now that his most revolutionary law was passed and seen to be working, he was more completely hers. He had only one more major reform to make, something to do with the activities of lawyers. The pressure to which he had been subject, the need to do everything quickly, was easing off; he excused himself from Court functions less frequently; he came down the spiral staircase more often.

  When she felt her happiness threatened, the thing she feared was that something might happen to him; a collapse from overworking, overloving; or something deadly caught in the pursuit of his work, half-medical, half-political. His campaign to clean up Copenhagen and make it the healthiest city in Europe took him into some insalubrious places: he had only to hear of some seafaring man carried from a ship sufferi
ng from some exotic disease and off he’d go, dropping everything, in order to investigate, to see for himself that the quarantine rules which he had initiated were observed.

  “You don’t know,” she once said to him, “what I suffer for fear something might happen to you.”

  “I do. Darling, from the moment that you told me you were pregnant, I went through that mill. Knowing what had happened before. You should have no fear for me. A doctor who has not succumbed to this that or the other by the time he is thirty is likely to live out his full span. You must not worry.”

  There had been a time when hurried and busied and on occasion, weary, he had asked himself whether a man could not have too much of love. He had learned the answer to that. There was the work, which must be done; the ends that must be reached; and for a while, a year perhaps, he had in a way grudged the time, the energy which—nobody to blame for this but himself—had been diverted. He was wiser now; a man however busy, however devoted to crusades, needed the soft, secret place where nothing else mattered, except to be himself, and to be accepted as himself. He had set himself a course, and as he ran it, he had been tempted by the forbidden fruit in a weak moment; and found it, not as his father would have said, a dead sea apple, but sweet and satisfying and completely his own.

  A few days before Christmas Louise-Augusta fell ill and developed a rash. Johann said it was measles and that the boys would certainly catch it; just as well to get it over and done with, since the disease was apt to be accompanied by complications later in life. Neither of the other children, however, showed any sign of indisposition, and this, and the fact that the baby’s rash disappeared very suddenly and completely, confirmed Caroline’s suspicion that the baby had actually suffered an attack of Grandfather’s Stripes. But the illness had already been announced as measles and since no one wished to come into contact with a woman who was suckling and nursing a child with that complaint, Caroline had a completely private and very happy Christmas in the nursery. She also missed, but did not mind missing, the festivities with which the year 1772 was ushered in.