In the middle of the night, upon discovering that the king’s bedchamber was locked from the inside, the conspirators awakened his valet and made him open the door. Juliane Marie tried to tell Christian that they had come as friends, but was too overcome with emotion to make her point, so a coconspirator named Rantzau declared that they had come to liberate him, and by extension Denmark, from the clutches of Johann Struensee and the queen. But Christian refused to believe that his wife and best buddy meant the kingdom any harm, so the conspirators quickly invented a lie and told the confused sovereign that his wife was plotting against his life. Decrees were thrust in his face that compelled Christian to hand over control of the government to them. In the intriguers’ presence he was forced to sign the documents. But in a devastating flash of clarity the monarch acknowledged, “My God, this will cost streams of blood.”
Armed now with Christian’s signature, the conspirators, accompanied by a number of the palace guard, broke into Struensee’s lavishly decorated apartment and made straight for his bedchamber. He was permitted to dress, but because they feared his valet might help him escape, he could don only what was nearest at hand, which turned out to be the powder blue velvet ensemble he had worn to the masquerade ball.
Struensee and his governmental crony Enevold Brandt were arrested, bundled into carriages, and driven across the frozen ground to the fortress of Kastellet, where they were thrown into bare cells and shackled, hands and feet, to the wall. Meanwhile, back at Christiansborg, under duress Christian was busily signing arrest warrants for Struensee and Caroline Mathilde’s circle of advisers and ministers.
He penned an ungrammatical note to his wife:
Madam, I have found it necessary to send you to Kronborg, your conduct obliges me to it. I am very sorry, I am not the cause, and I hope you will sincerely repent.
Early the following morning, when the queen was awakened and told that Rantzau, one of the intriguers, waited for her in the antechamber to her bedroom, she immediately (and correctly) suspected the worst. She jumped out of bed and tore through the rooms searching for Struensee, repeatedly shouting, “Where is the Count?” After she finally paused for breath, she was handed her husband’s note.
When the guards tried to lay their hands on Caroline Mathilde, she endeavored to evade them by running around the room. If they got too close, she fought them off like a tigress. They called for backup. The foreign minister, Adolph Siegfried von der Osten, was brought in to make her see reason—explaining that she had to comply with her husband’s note and be taken into custody. Finally Caroline Mathilde agreed to be incarcerated on the proviso that her children could accompany her to prison, knowing that they were her safeguard. She was permitted to bring only her infant daughter (whom she was still breast-feeding); the crown prince had to remain in Christiansborg Palace. Although Christian had acknowledged paternity of little Princess Louise Augusta, no one believed it, nicknaming the child “la petite Struensee.”
By midmorning, the carriage transporting the queen, the baby Louise Augusta, and one lady-in-waiting reached Kronborg, a fortress bordered on three sides by the sea and moated on the fourth wall. At first Caroline Mathilde and her tiny entourage were incarcerated in the “Queen’s Chamber,” a tiny room with bars on the windows. They were later moved into the quarters occupied by Kronborg’s commandant, whose family was displaced to an outbuilding.
Struensee was replaced as de facto prime minister of Denmark by one of the conspirators, Ove Hegh Guldberg, the former tutor to Juliane Marie’s son, Hereditary Prince Frederik. Guldberg was eager to demonstrate the coup’s legitimacy, which he did by parading the hapless king in front of his subjects. But the cabal had to tackle the thorny issue of incarcerating Denmark’s queen. If the matter were treated as an affair of state, it would take on international significance and would be sure to rouse the ire of Britain, as Caroline Mathilde was George III’s sister and an English princess. The conspirators hoped to keep the whole event a personal matter—just one guy getting rid of an adulterous wife and her scheming lover. The last thing they wanted was war with Great Britain, the world’s preeminent naval superpower.
Fat chance of England brushing it aside as just a marital dustup.
Guldberg knew he required a better justification for a coup than the queen’s illicit affair with the king’s physician and privy cabinet minister. And he also needed actual proof that Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee had enjoyed a sexual relationship. Neither party was about to confess to it, and even if their servants tattled, their testimony would be worthless. An anonymous observer wrote, “As to the intimacy, the Queen had no confidants and Struensee was very close and reserved upon all points. The laws in Denmark too are very rigid as to the proofs required on that head: people of a low class are not admissible evidence, I believe, against a crowned head.”
So the new government forced Christian to copy a trumped-up document they had created, which stated that he had discovered a conspiracy intended to force him to resign and thereupon declare the queen the regent for their son, the crown prince. Guldberg’s staff deliberately leaked the false news, with predictable results—a backlash against immorality. Five brothels were destroyed by an angry mob, which then set upon the homes owned by known supporters of Struensee and the queen. Troops had to be brought in to quell the violence.
Fearful that the public animosity might very well turn on them and question their legitimacy to govern, and that Christian might at any time wonder what the heck was going on in his name and want his throne back, the conspirators gradually removed him from public view. They placed him under a permanent military guard, and turned him into the ultimate puppet, who was forced to sign whatever was placed in front of him.
While Guldberg and Christian’s stepmother, Juliane Marie, were pulling the king’s strings, it occurred to them that it had not been Caroline Mathilde’s lover, but the queen herself who had been the power behind the Danish throne.
It drove the conservative opposition mad that Caroline Mathilde had dared to shape her life and destiny according to her own rules—although, admittedly, they were unique. Like so many other princesses sent abroad to wed, she was supposed to have been a mere pawn in international affairs, but she didn’t know her place, because she refused to stay in the background or the bedroom.
The longer the queen remained incarcerated and unreachable at Kronborg (located at Helsingr, also known as Elsinore to those who are more familiar with Danish geography via Shakespearean tragedy), the angrier she became. On January 19, 1772, three women from her household were sent to keep her company and, more probably, to spy on her, since it was known that she actively disliked each of them.
Back in London, the British press was excited by the story of a beautiful young queen imprisoned in an inaccessible tower, the victim of a perfidious plot hatched by her Danish in-laws.
What would King George do? Would he be so embarrassed by his sister’s conduct that he would try to keep things as quiet as possible from his end—a near impossibility with a free press clamoring for information and scandal? Or, with the power to declare war without first applying to Parliament for permission, would he muster the royal navy?
The British ambassador’s secretary, Charles Ernst, traveled to London to deliver the news of Caroline Mathilde’s imprisonment to King George. By this time His Majesty was up to his eyeballs in wayward younger siblings, having heard his brother the Duke of Cumberland confess just six weeks earlier that he’d secretly wed a commoner. George would shortly learn that another brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had done the same.
But to insult one of his relations was to insult him as well, as far as the king of England was concerned. And as the head of the family he was honor- and duty-bound to do something about it. But what? And how would it be done? And if Caroline Mathilde were indeed an adulteress, George, who ate moral fiber for breakfast, could not more strongly condemn her conduct. He would never condone or excuse it, no matter who she was.
Dear Sister, I cannot omit taking the first opportunity of expressing the sorrow I feel that your enemies have so incited the King of Denmark as to remove you from his presence. You can never doubt of having a warm advocate in me whose advice if followed might have preserved you from misfortune….
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.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 30