‘Please don’t let me interfere …’ Roger began.
The Minister waved the polite hesitation aside. ‘Believe me, Mr. Brook, ’tis mere selfishness out of my eagerness to hear the latest gossip from London, that makes me seek so early an opportunity to talk with you at leisure. I’ll be your debtor for giving me your company tomorrow. How long do you plan to remain with us in Copenhagen?’
‘In that, Sir, I should value your guidance. My mission is of so nebulous a character that any reasonable delay in my reaching the Russian capital may well be compensated for, if during it, I acquire a better knowledge of how to interpret such allusions to future policy as I may pick up when I am once established there. Yet I am naturally eager to reach my destination and set about the business on which I have been sent.’
‘I agree that a good understanding of the background against which you are to work should prove of great value to you; and I will give you a verbal survey of the Danish court tomorrow. I think too, that either through Monsieur la Houze or some other agency we must arrange for your presentation, so that you can see the leading personages here for yourself. But once you have made your bow there will be little point in your lingering here. Denmark now pursues a policy of strict neutrality, so Copenhagen has become something of a backwater and you would be more likely to learn of matters to your advantage in Stockholm.’
A servant now appeared with a pot of hot chocolate, and over it they talked of lighter matters for a quarter of an hour, then Roger took his leave;
He spent the rest of the day wandering about the Danish capital, and found to his relief that language presented no barriers to his enjoyment. All the better class of people whom he addressed, as also the shopkeepers and hackney-coachmen, spoke either fluent French or German; and he soon learned that few of the nobility even understood Danish, as it was then considered by them to be only the barbarous tongue of churls.
The Royal Palace of Christiansborg appeared to him vast in comparison with the smallness of the city, but such churches as he visited proved disappointing. Since the Reformation the Danes had adopted the strictest form of Calvinism, so their places of worship were bleakly puritanical. Such people of quality as he saw were richly dressed in the French fashion, but the bulk of the citizens wore sober black, and the tattered garments of the poorer people led him to judge that, as in France, the wealth of the country was most unevenly distributed. The food that was served to him at his own inn he found excellent, as, although plain, it was beautifully fresh and included a greater number of fish-dishes than he had seen before on one table.
On the Sunday the entire city assumed an air of intense sobriety. Every shop was shuttered, the cries of the street-vendors were stilled, and amusements of every kind were strictly prohibited. In consequence, he was glad when the time came for him to ride out again to Christiansholm. The air was crisp, but now that May had almost come a brave sun heightened the tender green of the gardens that he passed, and brought out the rich colours of their flowers.
At the Legation the tall, blue-eyed Scot received him kindly and they sat down to dinner à deux, Once more Roger noted the profusion of fish-dishes, including a delicious cold salmon; and, on his commenting on it, his host told him that, as Norway formed part of the Danish dominions, such salmon were to be had all through the season in Copenhagen for a few pence.
After they had dined, instead of remaining at table, they took their wine into the library and settled themselves comfortably at a table in a bay-window which had a lovely view across the garden to the Sound, where an armada of small yachts was rocking gently at anchor in Sabbath quiet.
Having filled Roger’s glass, Hugh Elliot said: ‘Now to business. To give you a picture of the people who control the destinies of Denmark I must go some way back. You will, no doubt, have noted the strictness with which Sunday is kept here. Well, ’tis a feast-day now to what it was when King Frederick V ascended the throne in 1746. Before his time the Court lived in almost unrelieved gloom, on weekdays as well as on the Sabbath, but he altered that, for the nobility at least. He was one of the most dissolute monarchs that ever lived, and was hardly surpassed in his excesses by his contemporary Louis XV. The Reformed Church here naturally regarded him as its worst enemy, but the Danish Kings are absolute. They have no Parliament, and neither the nobility nor the clergy has any legal means of opposing their wishes—so their word is law. In consequence King Frederick emancipated his upper-clases from their hair-shirts; and ever since his time the court has been to some extent lax in its morals, whereas the bulk of the people have continued to lead outwardly the most puritanical lives. Apart from his debaucheries he was by no means a bad King, and with the aid of his very able Prime Minister, Count Bernstorff, he brought a moderate prosperity to Denmark.’
‘That would be the uncle of the present Prime Minister, would it not?’ Roger asked.
‘Yes. And the nephew is as gifted as the uncle. Frederick V married twice. His first wife was Louisa the daughter of our King George II, and by her he had two children, Christian VII, the present ruler of Denmark, and Sophia Magdalena, who is now the wife of King Gustavus III of Sweden. For his second wife Frederick, in an evil hour, took Juliana Maria, the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. He died in 1776, and from that time this cunning, ambitious and ruthless German Princess has been the curse of the Royal House of Denmark.’
‘ ’Tis she who is known as the Queen Dowager, I take it.’
Elliot nodded. “The root of the trouble lies in the fact that she also had a son, Prince Frederick, and has never ceased her scheming to place him on the throne instead of his elder half-brother, Christian. She is, to the life, the wicked step-mother of fiction, and during Christian’s minority treated him with the utmost brutality. ’Tis said that she attempted to poison him, but, be that as it may, she certainly starved and beat him; denied him all proper education, and instead, by surrounding him with the most dissolute companions at an early age completely debauched him. In fact, she took every step she could devise to wreck his health so that he should die, or, failing that, grow up totally unfitted to be a ruler.’
‘ ’Tis to her treatment that his madness can be attributed, then?’
‘Undoubtedly. And she endeavoured to have him set aside on that account, in order that her own, stupid, deformed, horse-faced son, Frederick, could mount the throne. But in that she failed, since opposing interests in the Royal Council maintained that Christian was not mad enough to be deposed.’
‘What form does his madness take?’
‘The type of senseless and often violent pranks that one would expect from a warped and undeveloped brain. He is totally lacking in all dignity, or even cleanliness; guzzles his food like a pig and gives way to ungovernable tempers. He can converse with some degree of sly sense, but uses the most disgusting language, and his moods are entirely unpredictable. In the middle of a royal banquet he is quite liable suddenly to begin amusing himself by throwing the crockery at one of his guests, and ’tis no joke to be so picked upon, for his aim is uncannily accurate. He has defaced every statue and painting in the palace by throwing things at them, and often of a morning breaks two or three dozen panes of glass in the windows by casting the same number of pebbles at them from fifty paces.’
‘So ’twas to such a creature that King George’s youngest sister was sent as a bride!’ Roger interjected with disgust.
‘Yes. Poor little Caroline Matilda was scarce fifteen when she arrived here from England to be his Queen, but she soon grew to be a very lovely woman. She was unusually tall with the fairest of fair hair, a complexion of milk and roses, fine white teeth and large, expressive blue eyes. All Denmark fell in love with her, except, of course, Juliana Maria; whose hatred of the young sovereigns was intensified to fever pitch when Caroline Matilda gave Christian an heir—the present Crown Prince Frederick—thus forming a second obstacle to his step-uncle Frederick ever ascending the throne. As that ill-favoured youth was cordially disliked, Car
oline Matilde’s popularity knew no bounds for a year or two after the birth of her son; but it then began to suffer a sharp decline.’
Roger smiled. ‘Is this where the famous—or perhaps I should say infamous—Dr. Struensee enters upon the scene?’
‘You know the story?’ Elliot asked.
‘Only vaguely, as these events occurred some eighteen or nineteen years ago. I pray you continue the narrative.’
‘Struensee, then, was not only a bold, handsome fellow, and a devil with the women, but an extremely able German doctor and a political thinker of no small merit. After Christian’s son was born it was decided that the monarch should go abroad to see something of foreign courts. With him he took Count Holcke the most vicious of his favourites, and Dr. Struensee. They visited the Hague, London and Paris, spending some months in each; and in each the King indulged in the lowest forms of depravity. Holcke encouraged him in that and often took him straight from official receptions to sailors’ brothels in Amsterdam or down to the stews in Wapping. Struensee was too shrewd a man to interfere with the King’s pleasures, but it seems that he possessed the power of calming him during his fits of violence, and making him behave with reasonable restraint when in decent company. Moreover by the use of drugs he relieved the King’s headaches and eased his insomnia. By these means he made himself indispensable to his royal patient, so by the time they returned to Denmark Struensee had replaced Count Holcke and become prime favourite.
‘From that point Struensee’s rise to power was meteoric. You must remember that here the King is absolute, with no check of any kind upon his authority. He has but to sign a paper to alter the law, increase taxation, double or disband his army, and cause any of his subjects either to receive the highest honour, or to be tortured and put to death without trial. For Struensee, providing he kept the King amused with bawdy books and semi-drugged, it was easy to get the royal signature to any measure he desired. In the space of a few months he had banished all the old ministers and become himself the absolute ruler of Denmark.’
‘And the Queen’s lover,’ added Roger.
‘Yes. Although in fairness it must be said that she went more than halfway to meet him. But, with such a husband, who can blame her? Christians’ excesses on his tour had completed what those of his youth had began, and rendered him practically impotent; in addition he had given the unfortunate young woman a clap. The Herr Doktor cured her of it and took her husband’s place. Their liaison might have continued for years, bringing prolonged happiness to them both, had not Struensee’s political reforms earned him many enemies, and the open flaunting of the fact that they were living together provided the Queen Dowager with a lever for their undoing.’
‘What type of political reforms did he initiate?’
‘Many of them were excellent. He abolished torture in the prisons, gave freedom to the press, and ordained that whenever it was sought to inflict the penalties on a woman for loose living her seducer must be named in court and share her punishment if she was found guilty. You can imagine how this last aroused against him the hatred of the many mealy-mouthed hypocrites among the Calvinist burghers and clergy. ’Twas no longer safe for them to force their poor little serving-wenches in a corner, then later, when they were found to be with child, turn them on to the streets while lifting their own hands to Heaven in pious horror.
‘But the measure which brought him the greatest degree of unpopularity was the freeing of the serfs from their bondage. Up to Struensee’s time the peasants were the property of the nobles on whose estates they were born, and bound by law to remain on those estates as vassals from birth to death. He gave them their freedom, but the result proved almost disastrous for Denmark. These wretched, uncouth, brutalised creatures left the land and swarmed into the towns by the thousand. The fields remained uncultivated, which led to a severe famine, and the towns became subject to riots and rapine at the hands of starving mobs.’
‘Yet his reforms seem to have been in keeping with the spirit of the age.’
‘They were. His mistake was in pushing them through too quickly, and without due preparation or thought for their possible consequences. In the meantime Caroline Matilda had taken the bit between her teeth. She was still only twenty-two and with all the headstrong folly of youth gloried in her adultery. She encouraged the ladies of her court to follow her example in taking a lover, and turned the Palace into a haunt of Bacchanalian revelry. Still worse, as far as her public reputation was concerned, she took to painting her face, and when she went out hunting, wore leather small-clothes and rode astride like a man.’
‘I see no great wickedness in the last.’
Elliot laughed. ‘If you think of Denmark as England in Oliver Cromwell’s time you would, my friend. The townsfolk knew little of what went on inside the Palace, but when they saw her in such guise, they straightway were filled with righteous indignation, and abjured her as the Great Whore of Babylon. Unfortunately too, the chase was her passion; and for each of her three hunts, stag, hare and hawk, she made her courtiers wear a different uniform; light blue and silver for the first, green and bronze for the second, and crimson and gold for the third. Imagine the effect of parading such gay extravagance four or five days a week before the sober Danish burghers. Christian squandered a quarter of a million pounds on drink and women during his year abroad, but his subjects remained unaware of that; whereas they could see Matilda enjoying herself, and hated her for it.’
‘What of the King, though? Since he is not entirely mad, did he make no protest at having both his wife and his Kingdom taken from him?’
‘They let him continue to attend all the Court entertainments and used to take him out to hunt with them, but no one was allowed to speak to him without permission; and Struen-see employed a Count Brandt to sleep in the King’s antechamber and act as his keeper. At least, I should have said the ante-chamber of Struensee’s old room, for he had taken over the King’s apartments for himself and put Christian into his on the excuse of preventing him from having access to Matilda, so that she should not be subject to his fits of violence. That was Struensee’s crowning folly; since when the young Queen gave birth to a daughter in the summer of ’71 everybody knew that he must be the child’s father.’
‘Did the end come swiftly, then?’
‘Nay, not for another six months. In secret Juliana Maria had been gathering all Struensee’s most bitter enemies about her, and she selected Count Rantzau to take the lead in a conspiracy, the theoretical object of which was to restore the King’s liberty. Actually, of course, seeing that Struensee had been able to rule through him she meant to keep him captive and replace the Doctor by her son, Frederick, in the role of Regent. On the 16th of January ‘72 there was a court ball. Brandt was lured away from his post to spend the night with his mistress. In his absence Count Rantzau succeeded in penetrating to Christian’s chamber and persuading him to sign an order for the arrest of Struensee and the Queen. In the early hours of the morning both were apprehended. Struensee was taken to the town-citadel and Matilda was sent to the castle of Cronenbrug. They never saw one another again.’
Roger sighed. ‘Despite their guilt I cannot but feel sorry for them.’
‘I have more sympathy for her than him,’ Elliot rejoined slowly. ‘She behaved with splendid courage throughout and defied her enemies to the end, whereas he played the part of a poltroon. ’Tis true that they put him to the rack, but even so, his confession gave many salacious details of his intercourse with the Queen such as could not have been invented by his examiners, and showed by its tone that he had done his utmost to obtain leniency for himself by sacrificing her. Of course, it availed him nothing and he was executed with Count Brandt, who made a courageous end, whereas Struensee had to be dragged to the block.’
‘And the Queen?’
‘She was divorced, and Juliana exerted all the influence she could command to have her executed for treason; but my predecessor here, Colonel Sir Robert Murray Keith, threatened th
e Danes that Britain would go to war if she were harmed, and His Majesty rewarded his firmness by conferring on him the red ribbon of the Bath. Three English men-of-war were dispatched to convey her to King George’s Hanoverian dominions, and she lived in retirement in the castle of Zell there until her death three years later.’
‘So the Queen Dowager triumphed in the end?’
Elliot smiled. ‘For twelve years she realised her ambitions. At the time of Matilda’s divorce the Crown Prince was barely four years of age. During his minority Juliana Maria ruled through her loutish son, with her creature Guldberg as Prime Minister; but a just fate has dispossessed her of power in the end. The little Crown Prince Frederick grew up to loathe his uncle and step-grandmother, and he developed into a boy of great promise and resolution. While still quite young he entered into a secret correspondence with the exiled Count Bernstorff and between them they plotted a coup d’étât. Juliana Maria delayed his confirmation as long as possible, but when it had taken place he could no longer be denied a seat in the Privy Council. On his first appearance there, although only fifteen, he forced his imbecile father to sign a document empowering him to act as Regent, and to the effect that the King’s signature should no longer be valid unless countersigned by himself. His uncle and Guldberg were completely taken by surprise and found their power snatched from them before they could do a thing to prevent it.’
Roger smiled. ‘What an amazing feat, for a boy of that age to have carried through a bloodless revolution.’
‘It was indeed; but ’twas touch and go for a few days. I had been en poste here for two years then. I immediately offered the young Prince my support, and as there were several English ships in the harbour at the time nothing would have pleased me better than to lead their crews into action against the supporters of the Queen Dowager. But ’twas unnecessary. Juliana Maria and her son were so stunned that they lost all power of initiative. Count Bernstorff was recalled and the Crown Prince became King in all but name. That was four years ago this month, and poor Caroline Matilda’s son shows every sign of continuing to be a wise and talented ruler.’
The Shadow of Tyburn Tree Page 19