Struensee had stewed in the town of Altona for over a decade, tending to the poor, seducing women, and dreaming of adventure. “If my lady patronesses will only contrive to get me to Copenhagen, then I will carry all before me,” he once proclaimed.68
Settled into the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, Struensee mixed potions to cure Christian’s hangovers, a surefire way of winning his devotion. His sensible conversation had a calming effect on the king’s nervous excitement. Modest and humble, Struensee won over courtiers who saw him as no threat to the existing power structure. Those who chose to look more deeply, however, would have seen that his quiet demeanor curbed a fierce raw power waiting to explode.
When the king sank into a weeping depression, too incapacitated to leave his bed, even the birth of Matilda’s healthy son, Prince Frederick, could not rouse him. Christian’s official doctors were helpless, and his ministers feared that if the populace discovered the king’s mental state, the result would be rebellion, possibly civil war. As a last resort, a courtier suggested that Dr. Struensee, who had stayed quietly in the background at the palace, try to effect a cure. And the German’s ministrations— fresh air and exercise, less alcohol, a healthful diet combined with his own calming manner—worked wonders. But Struensee knew the improvement was temporary and that Christian would swing wildly between excitable good spirits and black despondency until he descended into irrevocable madness.
In October 1769 Matilda came down with an alarming illness which was probably venereal disease, bestowed upon her by her husband from a syphilis-riddled whore. She sank into a deep depression and wished for death. Given the delicate nature of her ailment, the queen was unwilling to undergo a physical examination. Bedridden, she moaned pitifully in her pain. Weeks passed until even Christian was concerned enough to insist that she consult Dr. Struensee, who had proved invaluable in curing his own illness.
The first consultation lasted two hours, during which the doctor won Matilda’s respect and admiration. Self-confident and sensible, Struensee listened intently to the queen and coaxed her from her apathy. She commanded him to visit her the next day and again the next. Sometimes she would call for him three or four times a day, with each visit lasting one or two hours. All the while he would sit next to her bed respectfully and talk calmly to her. Suddenly, in the midst of the insanity and cruelty that oppressed her, the queen had found a friend. More than that, she was falling in love.
Struensee knew that depression was a worse enemy than the queen’s physical discomfort. “Your Majesty does not require medicine so much as exercise, fresh air and distraction,” he advised.69 He suggested that Matilda go riding, a sport rarely pursued by Danish ladies. The queen had never sat on a horse in her life but quickly became a fearless horsewoman.
She also took up the shocking exercise of walking. Danish ladies didn’t walk. They were carried in sedan chairs or rolled about in carriages. Suddenly Matilda was seen walking through Copenhagen visiting her charities. The result was a striking improvement in her appearance. She had gained weight from lounging around on palace sofas and in palace beds. Now she shed the extra poundage, and her skin glowed with radiant good health.
Once Matilda had regained her health and her friendship with Struensee seemed firm, he began the next phase of his plan—to reconcile her to the king and convince her to become politically active. He dolefully informed her that Christian had few days of sanity left and would soon fall into an abyss of madness from which he would not return. Power would be grabbed by someone at court, and it might very well be Matilda’s enemies, Dowager Queen Juliana, for instance, and her cabal of scheming ministers. Before Christian plunged into total insanity, Matilda should grasp the reins of power for the good of Denmark.
By May of 1770 Matilda was spending several hours a day with her doctor and often dismissed her ladies when he arrived. One day that month, Struensee told Reverdil, he was reading to Matilda in her boudoir, laid the book aside, and began to make love to her. The queen was not unwilling. We can picture her, subjected to the spastic embraces of a cackling syphilitic imbecile, giving herself to this strong intelligent ox of a man. How she must have melted as she inhaled the aroma of his skin, felt the strength of his powerful arms.
Finally, this was love. Finally, this was sex. Finally, this was happiness. Ripened into womanhood, Matilda was no longer a whining girl miserable with her husband. The man whom she had hoped to love, to rule with, had become a sick child needing to be cared for, petted, calmed. Warmed by her love for Struensee, Matilda could afford to be generous to her nervous fretting poodle of a husband.
Curiously, as soon as his wife betrayed him, Christian became quite fond of her and even fonder of Struensee. Perhaps in the sane corners of a predominantly mad mind, Christian wanted Matilda to find the happiness he could not provide. He even confided to a shocked Reverdil that he was quite happy about his wife’s love affair with Struensee who so completely fulfilled her needs.
The king’s health declined precariously; at the age of twenty Christian looked like a withered old man of seventy. Even his lust shrank away with the last vestiges of sanity. He made his dog, Gourmand, a councilor and granted him a salary paid from the royal treasury. But perhaps this last act was not so very mad. Gourmand was the only councilor who did not spy, plot, or intrigue against his master.
Christian was only comfortable in the company of Matilda and Struensee and became uneasy when they left him. As these two took government control away from him, Christian was delighted to find that no one wanted to talk politics to him anymore; no one made him attend boring council meetings. He could live unmolested in his own world of twisted fantasies. He loved to sign papers, however, flourishing his quill pen as if it were a saber and attacking the document with great gusto. In his mind, in the act of signing his royal name Christian was the equal of his idol, Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Matilda was so happy in her love for Struensee, with her husband’s approval and even encouragement, that she did not bother to hide the affair. Reverdil lamented, “This princess hardly took her eyes off him, insisted on his presence at all gatherings, and allowed him, publicly, to take liberties which would have ruined the reputation of any ordinary woman, such as riding in her coach and walking alone with her in the gardens and woods.”70 For her, it was an innocent relationship, the kind of marriage she had longed for. And by having an affair she was, after all, only imitating her mother.
When the German princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha found herself not queen of England, as she had imagined, but the widowed Princess of Wales, she lived a retired life at Kew Palace with her eight children. Family friend and adviser John Stuart, marquess of Bute, was in almost constant attendance, often in locked rooms with the princess dowager. A handsome man known for his shapely calves wrapped in white silk stockings—that benchmark of eighteenth-century male beauty—Lord Bute seemed to conduct his love affair openly, coming and going from Kew as he pleased.
Moreover, Catherine the Great of Russia had lovers. But Matilda failed to see the crucial differences—her mother had been a widow living in quiet retirement; Empress Catherine was the most powerful woman in the world in her own right. Matilda lacked the political insignificance of the one and the political might of the other.
Sometimes the odd trio of king, queen, and queen’s lover would walk together or ride in a carriage, Matilda and Struensee engaged in deep conversation, Christian never interrupting, never understanding, only happy to be with his friends and protectors. Struensee dined with the royal couple in their private apartments several times a week. Soon he was given his own apartments in all the royal palaces and a large salary.
So far Struensee’s role at court had been to look after the health of the king, queen, and crown prince. But now Matilda appointed him official reader and private secretary to the king, which automatically made him a councilor.
The nobility, noticing the foreign doctor’s sudden rise, began to feel threatened even as Struens
ee removed his mask of affected humility. “Had he but been of the nobility!” lamented the compassionate Reverdil. “But Struensee, physician, reader… and thus of the second rank, was not yet a high Court official.”71 And therein lay the rub for many at court. A native nobleman making love to the queen might have been tolerated. A parvenu foreigner, never.
Almost more shocking than Matilda’s love affair was her sudden appearance in men’s dress. Encouraged by Struensee to flout tradition, Matilda began wearing men’s buckskin breeches, vest, and coat, her feet encased in knee-high military boots. Instead of piling her hair high on her head according to the fashion of the times, she wore it in a long braid falling down her back. In this outlandish costume she cast aside her ladylike sidesaddle and rode astride, as men did. Seeing a lady’s legs wide open—even if a horse’s back filled the space between them—was a shocking and vulgar sight in the eighteenth century.
At the annual Copenhagen archery festival, Danes were treated to the sight of their queen, dressed like a man, hitting the bull’s-eye while their king sat crouched with a vacant stare. “She is the better man of the two,” many remarked.72
To avoid prying eyes and stiff palace etiquette, Christian, Matilda, and Struensee moved to the secluded palace of Hirscholm, a lovely baroque confection on an island not far from Copenhagen. Christian delighted to walk in the gardens with his wife and her lover, and play with his dog and the little African boy who had become his playmate. While the king played, the queen’s lover worked all day preparing documents for Christian to sign. In September 1770 Struensee—having obtained the king’s signature—replaced the popular prime minister Johann Bernstorff with himself. He issued orders that all communications between the king and his ministers be in writing and that private audiences with the king be abolished. Struensee had given himself complete power to run Denmark. And his burning desire was to bring Denmark, still mired in medieval customs and laws, into the modern world.
Struensee reduced the burdensome salt tax and halved the price of wheat. The funds that came in from a tax on saddle and carriage horses of the rich were enough to build a children’s hospital for the poor. He opened up the royal parks and gardens—previously reserved solely for the nobility—to the citizens who delighted in walking and picnicking in them.
He had streetlights put up in Copenhagen and allowed everyone—not just the nobility—to carry torches at night. He had the houses numbered and the streets cleaned. A new law prohibited the police from entering houses without a search warrant. But his appreciative subjects—the poor—were powerless and their approval meant nothing.
Struensee outraged the clergy by removing the customary fine on citizens who worked on Sundays. He further infuriated the church by guaranteeing illegitimate children the same rights as those born within marriage and by prohibiting the punishment of unwed mothers. As a result, unwanted children were no longer exposed or murdered. He built a maternity ward attached to a foundling hospital where children could be dropped off, no questions asked. The pillory—in which adulterers were locked as a jeering populace threw rotten vegetables at them—was removed. From their pulpits, pastors railed against Struensee and his mistress the queen.
When Struensee tackled the problem of the national debt, he eliminated thousands of court posts and their corresponding salaries. Naturally, those who lost their positions became his enemies. He further enraged the nobility with the novel concept that all men were equal before the law, and that a title would not allow a murderer, rapist, or thief to escape justice.
Struensee abolished the council and exiled its members to their country estates. Furious, these powerful nobles banded together in an effort to remove the intruder and regain their ancient privileges. They found a friend in the person of Dowager Queen Juliana who, once she dislodged Matilda and Struensee, would rule as regent until Christian’s son came of age at fourteen. Clutching her Bible, Juliana expressed herself outraged at the decadence of the court and denounced the adulterous queen.
Struensee lost the support of the armed forces in a disastrous effort to reorganize them. He alienated the legal profession by dismissing corrupt judges and streamlining the courts of law, thereby rendering superfluous countless clucking lawyers. He angered the diplomatic community by decreasing salaries and benefits. He simplified taxation and reorganized pensions and titles. For every individual pleased with the new laws, there were several others who had lost their livelihoods. Struensee, for all his vision, succeeded in alienating every important segment of Danish society.
Lord Robert Gunning, George III’s ambassador to Denmark, wrote of his alarm at the unrest caused by Struensee’s laws. “There is scarcely a single family or person in these dominions of any considerable rank, property or influence, who has not been disobliged, disgusted and (as they think) injured,” he warned, “and whose disaffection, there is reason to apprehend, only waits for a favorable opportunity of manifesting itself.”73
Matilda, thrilled at the progress her lover was bringing to Denmark, often compared herself to Catherine the Great. And indeed, the two women had much in common. Both had been trundled into foreign countries and married to imbeciles at the age of fifteen, then abandoned in vicious and dissolute courts. But Matilda lacked Catherine’s slicing intelligence and brilliant political acumen. The Russian empress laughed heartily to hear of Matilda’s comparison. Aware that Struensee was behind Denmark’s sudden cooling of relations with Russia, Catherine icily observed, “Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves.”74
Struensee had plenty of rope. His power came from his connection to the queen, a connection which he advertised to the increasing resentment of influential forces at court.
During Christian’s spells of clarity, which were fewer and farther between, Struensee and Matilda paraded him in front of his subjects in carriage rides and poked him in the ribs to wave to the people. They pushed him onto the palace balcony and nudged him again. Their goal was to give the illusion of a king in charge. But many who saw the blank stare on their king’s face assumed the royal physician was drugging him. They feared Struensee might do him in and rule Denmark with Matilda.
In fact, Christian’s mental condition continued to sink rapidly. Many times he was found wandering the palace corridors lost and disoriented. Struensee assigned a keeper to watch over him. Matilda held levees alone, seated on a throne, speaking with courtiers, ministers, and ambassadors. One day the king, who had eluded his keeper, stumbled in. A respectful silence ensued. Christian began to recite a poem, finished with a shrill ripple of laughter, and ran off. Trembling, Matilda continued the levee as if nothing had happened.
One day as Reverdil and Christian walked in the gardens, Christian confessed that he had been contemplating suicide. “But how can I do it without making a scandal?” he inquired. “And if I do, shall I not be even more unhappy? Shall I drown myself? Or knock my head against the wall?” The next day, as the two were rowing on the lake, Christian said, “I should like to jump in—and then be pulled out, very quickly. I am confused. There is a noise in my head. I cannot go on.”75
On July 1, 1771, the queen gave birth to a daughter in great secrecy in her island palace of Hirscholm. Struensee held the queen in his arms throughout the labor and personally delivered the baby, whom they named Louise Augusta. Contrary to royal tradition, no announcement of her pregnancy had been made in the months before the birth, asking the people to pray for the safe delivery of the queen and her child. The Danish people were amazed by the news that they suddenly had a new princess.
When the birth was announced, the press, which had been freed from censorship by Struensee, decried their benefactor who “had shamelessly dishonored the King’s bed, and introduced his vile posterity” into the royal family.76 In response to these accusations, Struensee issued a proclamation with Christian’s signature stating that the child had indeed been fathered by the king. Christian actually believed Louise Augusta to be his and had great fun planning the christenin
g.
Shortly after the birth, Struensee made himself privy councilor and a count. The poor physician from Altona luxuriated in the trappings of royalty. He bought himself a new gilded coach of regal appearance and ordered for his servants uniforms of scarlet and white adorned with diamond badges.
Despite his unheard-of success, sometimes Struensee suffered from a melancholy foreboding. He often told his friends that he wanted to leave court, that he was exhausted from his round-the-clock issuing of decrees. When asked why he did not leave, Struensee replied, “Where else could you be Prime Minister, the King’s friend and the Queen’s lover?”77
The harvest of 1771 was scant. The merchants of Copenhagen were suffering, as Struensee had exiled most of the free-spending nobility to their country estates. The clergy decried the country’s woes as clear evidence of God’s displeasure at wickedness in high places. Warned on all sides of rising discontent and possible rebellion, Struensee simply shrugged. George III became so alarmed at his sister’s affair with the detested prime minister that he sent their mother, Dowager Princess Augusta, to Denmark to lecture her sternly. But Matilda abruptly ended her mother’s scolding with a scathing reference to Augusta’s own lover, Lord Bute. Furious, the princess dowager rumbled away in her carriage, never to speak to her daughter again.
When Matilda’s ladies begged her to send Struensee away, she only answered, “How fortunate you are, to marry where you wish! If I were a widow, I would marry him I loved, and give up my throne and my country.”78
Dowager Queen Juliana had been hard at work amassing copious evidence of Matilda’s love affair. Four of the queen’s servants willingly became Juliana’s highly paid spies. They wrote down the time at which Matilda and Struensee drove out alone in a carriage and the time they returned—usually several hours later. Each night they sprinkled powder on the secret staircase that led from Struensee’s apartments up to Matilda’s rooms. The next day they could see a man’s footprints in the powder, footsteps that reached the queen’s bed itself. The spies examined the sheets—unkempt, thrown about—and gloated over the stains. Struensee’s valet, paid to rifle through his coat pockets, found a special prize—a man’s handkerchief with semen stains.
Sex with the Queen Page 24