Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  CAROLINE MATHILDE

  1751–1775

  QUEEN OF DENMARK: 1766–1772 (BANISHED)

  As king of England, George III, who acceded to the throne in 1760, had the authority, if not also the obligation, to unite his younger siblings in marriages that would be strategically advantageous for Great Britain. Princess Caroline Matilda was the prettiest of George’s sisters—the youngest child of Augusta, Princess Dowager of Wales, and Frederick, Prince of Wales—born only four months after their father died.

  Even as a little girl, Caroline Matilda was made aware that no royal child could marry for love. If you wanted to stay home, then you remained a spinster. Otherwise you were sent off to another land, ostensibly forever, to cement a diplomatic alliance with a foreign entity. Caroline Matilda had known since 1765 of her connubial destiny—to wed Christian, the Crown Prince of Denmark. Walter Titley, the British envoy to Copenhagen, made sure to emphasize Christian’s handsome, if slightly fey, looks as well as his many other fine qualities.

  “To an amiable and manly countenance, a graceful and distinguishing figure, he joins an address full of dignity and at the same time extremely affable,” observed the assistant British envoy William Cosby, who described the young crown prince with effusion after visiting Copenhagen in the spring of 1764. When he wasn’t terrorized by his own fears, the small, slight, tow-haired prince was witty and charming. The problem with Christian was that he would probably be diagnosed today as a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic. Nowadays he’d be medicated to quiet the demons in his head and modify his masochism, fetishism, and other behaviors deemed outside the norm.

  His mother, Queen Louise, the youngest daughter of George II of England and Caroline of Anspach (making Christian and Caroline Matilda cousins), died when Christian was only two. His father, King Frederick, consoled himself with alcohol and took a second wife, a daughter of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Juliane Marie. Christian’s stepmother wasn’t cruel to him, but she wasn’t exactly maternal. After her own son, Prince Frederik, was born in 1753, she focused all her energy and her love on her biological child.

  When Christian was six he was given his own household, and his head was crammed with mathematics and theology by his strict and humorless tutor, Count Dietlev Reventlow. The prince was a sensitive and intelligent boy but was never nurtured, and consequently began to dwell inside his mind, where his phobias grew and multiplied.

  At the age of eleven in 1760, he got a new tutor, Elie Salomon François Reverdil, who realized that he had a very strange kid on his hands. Out of the blue Christian would unbutton his breeches, yank up his shirt, and press against his abdominals, telling his tutor that he was intent on achieving a perfect body. He believed that if he could make himself physically invincible, he could overpower his demons.

  Sixteen days before Christian’s seventeenth birthday, on January 13, 1766, Frederick of Denmark died, his body bloated with booze and dropsy. Christian was now king of Denmark, Norway, of the Goths and the Wends; Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, and the Dittmarsches; Count of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst.

  He sounded like a good match for Caroline Matilda on paper, but the truth was far from the reality. Although many European royals considered debauchery practically an expression of noblesse oblige, Christian’s behavior was over the top. He frequented the tawdriest brothels and hung out with roustabouts, engaging in street brawls and other violent activities. He practiced self-mutilation and liked to be physically dominated by his whores. But his ministers moved up the wedding date on the assumption that wedlock would domesticate him.

  On the evening of October 1, 1766, Caroline Matilda was married to King Christian VII in a proxy ceremony in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the secretary of state officiated. The bride was in tears throughout the entire ordeal, although Lady Mary Coke observed that she looked “very pretty in the midst of her sorrow.”

  The new bride, who had yet to meet her groom, was still sobbing as she was conducted to the carriage that would convey her to the royal yacht at Harwich. Although she was now a queen, she was also just a sheltered teen who had never before left her homeland. She confessed to seasickness on the journey.

  The Danes had refused to allow their new queen to bring even one English lady-in-waiting with her to Denmark. All that Caroline Matilda brought aboard the ship was her trousseau and a letter from her brother the king. In it, George exhorted her to take comfort in God’s guidance and warned her against expecting too much from her marriage, yet urged her to use her influence with her new husband to further British interests with the Danes.

  A contemporary, Elizabeth Carter, summing up not just Caroline Matilda’s fate, but that of all royal brides, wrote, “The poor Queen of Demark is gone out alone into the wide world; not a creature she knows to attend her any further than Altona [a city on Denmark’s southern border]. It is worse than dying; for die she must to all she has ever seen or known; but then it is only dying out of one bad world into another just like it, and where she is to have cares and fears, and dangers and sorrows, that will all yet be new to her.”

  At Altona, she left her English life entirely behind. German was the official language of the Danish court; from then on she would speak German or French, using English only in letters to her family. Even her name changed from the English to the Danish spelling, from Caroline Matilda to Caroline Mathilde.

  Christian and Caroline Mathilde were wed on November 8, 1766, at Christiansborg Palace, the center of government and the most massive of Denmark’s palaces. The queen looked plump and rosy, more zaftig than her slender groom, who was dressed in a silver suit.

  Unfortunately, once they embarked on their married life, Christian saw no reason to be nice to his fifteen-year-old wife or to include her in his regular activities. She dared not confide in her brother how horribly lonely she was, telling him instead that she passed her time going to the theater drawn in sleighs across the snow, and hosting masquerades. But her real curiosity was politics, and she yearned for an active role in governance.

  Although the sovereigns lived apart at Christianborg, the king at least recognized his dynastic responsibility to beget an heir. In early May 1767, the sixteen-year-old queen became pregnant. But Christian, in awe of his wife’s strong personality, continued to hang around with libidinous lowlifes, surrounding himself with a raucous, decidedly unregal entourage. While she was pregnant, he took a mistress, the notorious prostitute Stvlet-Cathrine (“Boots-Catherine”), who’d earned the sobriquet either because her mother was a bootmaker or because she had especially dainty feet. Her father was reputed to be Prince George-Ludwig of Brunswick-Bevern.

  But Christian’s ministers deplored the liaison, and before too long they convinced him to pension her off. On January 6, 1768, he signed a document kicking Cathrine out of Copenhagen and packing her off to a cushy retirement.

  The ministers had hoped that Caroline Mathilde would become a stabilizing influence on him, but she had thus far been incapable of wooing him away from the dark side. The delicate and diminutive Christian, who hated to be king, had a profound death wish—the only way he knew his sentence as king of Denmark could end. He was enamored of violent games that often involved bondage and masochistic fantasies. He would ask to be tied to a chair and, pretending to be a convicted criminal, would beg for torture. Fearing they might actually injure their employer, his servants would whack at him with a roll of paper. After dismissing his mistress, he took to producing plays in which he would perform many of the roles, including the part of Orosmane in Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre, which required him to perform an onstage murder and then to commit suicide. His ministers continued to be nervous about his state of mind and his penchant for violence.

  After a difficult pregnancy, compounded by her husband’s utter indifference toward her, Caroline Mathilde gave birth to an heir, Crown Prince Frederik, on January 28, 1768. The queen followed the new fashion among aristocrats, embracing Rousseau’s philosophy of naturalis
m by breast-feeding her infant. Meanwhile, Christian made a state visit to England without her in 1768, living it up riotously on the docks and in the brothels of London when he wasn’t under the watchful gaze of his royal brother-in-law. He also enjoyed all the entertainments George III planned for him, in no hurry to return to Copenhagen. Avid to escape his regal responsibilities, he even suggested to his new physician-in-ordinary, a German named Johann Struensee, that the two of them run off together and join the army. The ambitious Struensee came to believe that the only way to tire Christian’s mind and keep the demons at bay was by exhausting his body, so he prescribed strenuous physical exercise, such as horseback riding.

  With such a husband, it was no surprise that Caroline Mathilde’s head might be turned by a viable alternative. Her romantic trajectory somewhat mimics that of Sophia Dorothea of Celle in that her extramarital affair also resulted in the loss of her children as well as her freedom. A princess of the Hanoverian dynasty by birth, Caroline Mathilde would even end up in Celle, a Hanoverian dominion. She died there of scarlet fever at the age of twenty-three, having experienced the marriage from hell, then found true love and held the kingdom of Denmark in the palm of her hand, only to lose it all within the span of a few brief years.

  CAROLINE MATHILDE AND

  JOHANN FRIEDRICH STRUENSEE (1737–1772)

  The son of a prominent Lutheran minister and grandson of a doctor who had been the physician-in-ordinary to Christian’s grandfather, King Christian VI of Denmark, Johann Struensee was born in 1737 in Halle, a small town in northern Germany. Johann, who possessed the inquiring mind and temperament of a child of the Enlightenment, was among the first generation of doctors to view the mind and body as complementary entities. He understood that the infirmities of one could intensely affect the other, and that a patient’s emotions could have a profound impact on his state of being. And he quickly realized that Christian had a bunch of screws loose upstairs.

  Struensee began his medical practice in Altona in 1758. He was charming, tall, blond, broad-shouldered, and handsome, with soft, voluptuous lips, an aquiline nose, and, as one contemporary put it, a “merry look” in his sensitive and intelligent blue eyes. He wore his own hair in preference to wigs, in full, symmetrical curls on either side of his head, tied with a black ribbon. Sometimes he powdered it; sometimes he left it blond. His clientele included members of the nobility who helped him gain his royal appointment.

  Ten years later, at the age of thirty-one, Struensee was appointed temporary physician-in-ordinary to King Christian VII while he was traveling throughout Europe. But he may not have been the perfect chaperone for such an unstable person. A contemporary writer later said of the atheistic doctor that he “carried freedom of thinking as far as any man…deficient in both…morality and religion.”

  Johann Struensee had arrived at court at the perfect time, because the sovereign had been looking for someone who would stay up all night with him and help chase the demons out of his head. In January 1769, Struensee’s position was made permanent, and he gave up his private medical practice in Altona.

  During his first few months in Copenhagen, Struensee shored up his position as the king’s personal physician, making friends with the other doctors at court. He did not have political ambitions at the time, or if he did, they were carefully masked.

  As Christian became more incapacitated mentally, he spent increasingly more time in his own apartments, behind closed doors with Struensee. Observers noticed that if the king and queen happened to see each other in one of Christianborg’s numerous hallways, they would pass each other in a sullen, stately silence. It was common knowledge that the royal couple was living entirely separate lives.

  In May 1769, Christian appointed Struensee to the rank of state councilor, which allowed him to attend official functions. With the eye of an astute student, the physician began to take note of how the kingdom was governed. While he was always in the company of the king, he had also observed that Caroline Mathilde was determined to despise anyone who had her husband’s confidence. Consequently, he endeavored to remain cordial to the queen, so that she would not mistake him for an enemy.

  That autumn, Christian’s mental and emotional condition deteriorated even further, and he became openly hostile toward his wife. Only eighteen years old, and hopelessly depressed by the painful awareness that this was how she would be forced to spend the rest of her life, Caroline Mathilde retreated from society.

  After observing Struensee’s increasing influence on Christian, the British envoy to Denmark became alarmed at the notion of a power behind the throne. “…[T]he mainspring…of all the present intrigues is discovered to be another person, of whom it cannot easily be determined whether his talents are more formidable, his principles more relaxed, or his address more seducing. These qualities, combined with almost constant attendance on the King, have contributed to give him the most alarming ascendancy over His Majesty…. [I]t becomes hard to judge whether it be less easy to remove him or more dangerous to suffer his continuance.”

  But Struensee’s manipulating behind the scenes had already borne fruit, and he had gained another influential fan: the queen. When she fell ill during the summer of 1769, he was the physician she asked to attend her. And in early November she sought his advice regarding her melancholia. One consultation led to another, and soon he was visiting her quarters alone and unchaperoned by her servants. A sympathetic ear and a handsome shoulder didn’t hurt, and Caroline Mathilde soon fell in love with him. In January 1770, she managed to secure him lodgings in the palace at Christianborg. By February, he was making regular nocturnal pilgrimages through the corridors and back stairs to her bedchamber. Their romance became hot and heady, their exhilaration fueled by the element of danger. It was a capital crime to sleep with the queen of Denmark.

  One thing that made their royal affair so unusual was the vast difference in their social stations. Struensee was a commoner, far beneath the blue-blooded Caroline Mathilde. Her choice of a man of the people reflected her general disdain and disregard for court etiquette.

  According to one of her contemporaries, Caroline Mathilde was “not only clever, but had a good mind.” She knew that Struensee had swiftly gained her husband’s trust, and that he could levy this influence with him to increase her own political clout. Now she desired an active role in ruling the king. Craving an entrée into the mannish sphere of politics, which she believed to be her due as queen of Denmark, she began to dress the part in coats and breeches, and took up riding astride.

  At first Caroline Mathilde tried to keep her adulterous romance under wraps. But after two of her chambermaids began to suspect something, they enlisted the aid of Her Majesty’s lady-in-waiting Anna Petersen and began to gather evidence against their mistress. They asked a maid to sprinkle powder on the floor outside the queen’s bedchamber; the following morning, large footprints—too large to belong to the king’s dainty feet—were discovered in the powder. White powder marks were also found on the carpet inside Caroline Mathilde’s bedroom. Her ladies knew that the king never visited her rooms that way.

  They also put wax in the keyhole. When they found a lump of it on the floor outside her room they knew that she had unlocked her door to admit someone in the middle of the night. The maids also found Her Majesty’s sheets rumpled and stained, with similar smears on the towels. And the enthusiastic lovers didn’t confine themselves to the bed. The chambermaids also reported stains on the queen’s upholstered sofas that “modesty” forbade “them to mention.”

  When the maids confronted the queen, she told them to go get Struensee (who, of course, didn’t confirm anything). After he departed she scolded them for making such bold accusations about their sovereign. But the maids held firm, and then presented their evidence. At this, Caroline Mathilde realized they had ensnared her. Seeing no way out beyond bargaining, she asked them whether they believed that the gossip about her romance would die down if she and Struensee saw each other less frequent
ly. The attendants agreed that Johann should shorten the duration of his visits to her rooms. But after a couple of weeks the lovers were back to their usual all-night stands.

  Unfortunately, the queen was reckless enough to admit to her maids that the doctor was good for her; he understood her, and he “had such a good mind.” But taking her maids into her confidence hardly won their sympathy, so she issued a new set of rules governing her household staff: Maidservants and ladies-in-waiting were to remain in their rooms until she rang for them.

  By now, grateful to the physician for inoculating the two-and-a-half-year-old crown prince against smallpox after an epidemic had broken out in Copenhagen, Christian had elevated Struensee to the rank of Conseiller des Conferences, as well as reader to the king. It was a very controversial move; inoculation had been championed by Voltaire, so it was equated with godless, radical thought, not to mention the French.

  By early 1770, Struensee had become the king’s keeper. Christian’s ability to think rationally and coherently was diminishing by the day. Sometimes he told the physician he was a changeling; on other occasions he would insist that his father was really an English nobleman, or that his birth was a mystery that would be revealed in the fullness of time—but in any event, he was advancing toward a happier state of mind. Once he attained it he would leave Copenhagen forever, for the real world—a world in which he had committed multiple murders and had been fed large quantities of opium so that he would forget his complicity in these numerous deaths.