Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (38 page)

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.

He was preparing his body to live in this better world. He would need to be invincible, impervious to pain. So Christian would practice by rubbing whatever was at hand all over his bare skin, everything from hair powder to snow to burning embers. The details of the Danish sovereign’s other world always involved pain. The doctor found it remarkable that there never was any mention of love or affection being given or received.

A true masochist, according to Struensee, Christian liked to be treated with “indignation.” He enjoyed being emasculated, and his wife’s appearance in male costumes excited him. Perhaps it was the riding habit, and her leather boots and whip. When he imagined the queen as a dominatrix, he liked her best.

At the bottom of it all was Christian’s fervent desire not to have to be king. It also troubled his physician that the sovereign never seemed to care for or about anyone, and he also ascribed Christian’s insensitivity to his wife as a nervous disorder. Although Struensee never diagnosed the king’s malady as madness, by this time he had observed enough of his behavior to presume it was incurable. At first Struensee tried to convince Christian that he was only imagining things, but that only depressed the monarch. So rather than have a
gloomy Dane moping about Christiansborg, the king’s closest attendants instituted a strict regimen for him, including regular walks to contain his violent outbursts, and cold baths to combat Christian’s frequent masturbation. Meanwhile, the king’s errant behavior was kept a secret from the public and the rest of the court.

Christian was clearly an unfit ruler, and from then on he was trotted out only at ceremonial occasions—which were few and far between, because neither Christian nor Caroline Mathilde liked them. Struensee then began issuing orders on behalf of the king. Christian would sign the various documents and proclamations, but they were all the brainchildren of his physician. At the time the sovereigns and the doctor were of the same opinion, so Christian didn’t seem to mind.

Struensee’s first ghostwritten announcement to the people of Denmark was an explanation of why there had been no official celebration to mark Caroline Mathilde’s nineteenth birthday in July 1770. “The Queen’s birthday was not celebrated this time because she has wanted it this way herself, and because we both [meaning the monarchs] think that the usual tedious ceremonies come less from the heart than ought to be the case on such an occasion. I have neither handed out medals nor made appointments because I have decided only to do so in extraordinary cases for the time being, and because of the great number I have promoted in previous years.”

The king had no idea that the real reason his wife didn’t want a big formal celebration of her birthday was that it would have deprived her of spending her special day with the one person she wanted to share it with—the third member of this dysfunctional triumvirate: her lover.

Both Caroline Mathilde and Struensee were strongly in favor of progressive reform, and they began right at home, with the court. Within a couple of months the physician had reduced Christian’s household staff and pensioned off several of his officials and courtiers. He and the queen were closing ranks around the increasingly demented king, gradually shoring up their power base. No one was permitted access to the royal couple, and their movements and decisions were kept a secret even from their own households.

Struensee replaced Christian’s Court Marshal with one of his
cronies and began to gather his own set of advisers around him. It became clear to Count von Bernstorff, the chief minister, that the physician was not content to merely take control of the king’s personal life, but had intentions of pushing his way into the political arena as well.

Regardless of what the outside world thought, the members of the triumvirate were perfectly happy with the way things were. Christian didn’t want the burden and responsibilities of power anyway. And Caroline Mathilde wished to be left alone to rule in tandem with her paramour. Count von Bernstorff had never seen the queen “so beautiful and cheerful.” With the yoke of responsibility removed from his slim shoulders, Christian’s fantasies took on a less troubled form. He traveled everywhere with his dog Gourmand, who rode in his own coach ahead of the king’s carriage.

Meanwhile, Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee did little to conceal their romance from their tight circle of friends. According to a contemporary, “Their intimacy showed that they loved each other, searched for each other and were happy when they found one another…. [T]heir love showed in a way that can be noticed but not described.” The paramours developed little rituals, taking tea together every morning, either in the queen’s bedchamber or in her parlor with all the shades drawn. By now, the queen’s maids discreetly left the couple alone.

Caroline Mathilde was in love for the first time in her life—and she was behaving like it. She bought yards and yards of feminine fripperies: lace and ribbons, silk hose. Struensee purchased a sentimental gift for her: a pair of red garters, which she wore every day. The queen called them her “ties of feeling.” By then she had a collection of objects that represented their love: a pair of gold-and-enamel buttons, and a garnet cross that she wore beneath her bodice, where the king couldn’t see it. She had a small portrait of Struensee that she kept hidden inside a book, later moving it to a special keepsake box made of gold-and-green enamel.

Their relationship was not only becoming more public; they flaunted it almost brazenly. The lovers enjoyed every meal together. Servants observed Struensee sneaking into Caroline Mathilde’s bedroom each evening, and one night the queen accidentally awakened
her son’s nurse when she tiptoed through the nursery on her way to visit her paramour.

When Johann Struensee wasn’t making love to Caroline Mathilde, he was ruling Denmark. He gave the chief minister his walking papers and began reorganizing the way the kingdom was governed, setting a new progressive tone and issuing decrees in Christian’s name, the first of which, on September 4, 1770, declared freedom of the press. Over the next several months he reduced the authority of the Council of State to an advisory one. Apparently it was all right if Denmark remained an autocracy as long as Struensee was the autocrat.

Christian willingly signed whatever papers Johann Struensee put in front of him, content to be no more than a figurehead. On December 27, 1770, a decree was issued ostensibly from the king, abolishing the privy council, but it had been ghostwritten by Struensee. And from then on it would be Struensee who would be running the kingdom “
lui seule
” [by himself], as the queen wrote to her brother George III.

On December 18, the king had granted the thirty-three-year-old physician the post of
maître de requêtes
, which authorized him to take decrees directly to Christian for his signature. Struensee himself was the author of those decrees.

Something was rotten in Denmark, but the abuse of power by the king’s physician was hardly the juiciest subject of gossip. Caroline Mathilde commissioned the portraitist Peter Als to depict her as a periwigged gentleman in the uniform of the Danish Royal Life Guards, in boots and spurs, holding a black tricorn, and wearing a ceremonial sword. The painting, completed during the summer of 1771, deliberately invites comparisons to the mannish Queen Christina of Sweden, who refused to marry, and to the formidable Catherine the Great, who also enjoyed dressing
en travestie
. Als flattered his subject by making her appear tall and slim. Caroline Mathilde’s detractors, who were unnerved to see a voluptuous woman dressed like a man and behaving in a bold, assertive manner, insisted she was far too plump to pull off the look.

Meanwhile, during the early 1770s, bored and annoyed with the perpetual business of reviewing and signing papers, Christian gazed
down at the dog snoozing at his feet and declared, Caligula-like, that his pet should have a government post. On another occasion he announced that he was appointing as his chamberlain the man who lit the ceramic stoves in each room.

Life at the Danish court was a combination of free spending and pragmatic restraint, noblesse oblige and bourgeois domesticity. In particular, Caroline Mathilde’s conduct as queen, wife, mother, and lover scandalized people. In 1771, an astonished British visitor, arriving from the chilly formality of St. James’s, remarked, “This court has not the most distant relationship to any other under the sun.” Some years later another observer would opine, “Nothing could be more licentious than the court of Mathilda [sic] in 1770 and 1771. Her palace was a temple of pleasure, of which she was the high priestess. Everything was found here calculated to excite and gratify sensual desires.”

At age nineteen and a half the queen was now pregnant with her second child. Very few Danes in the know assumed it was her husband’s. By ostentatiously displaying her increasing belly she was advertising not only her general immorality, but her relationship with the king’s physician.

Rare for a queen, Caroline Mathilde was very close to her son, the Crown Prince Frederik, now a toddler. Struensee saw that the boy was raised according to the back-to-nature precepts promulgated by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This child-rearing technique was all the rage in England, and Caroline Mathilde’s fondest girlhood memories were rural idylls, such as the months she passed at Kew. As a progressive physician, Johann Struensee would have advocated lots of fresh air and sunshine. Christian, who’d endured a nightmarish, loveless, and very strict upbringing, had no objections.

In the name of the king, Struensee instituted a raft of unprecedented reforms. Walking the Rousseau walk and talking the talk, he opened the royal gardens to all Danes. To get them to visit on Sundays as well, the atheist doctor booked military bands to entertain them.

This all-out reformation was a team effort between Struensee and Caroline Mathilde, abetted by a number of forward-thinking
aristocrats whom the physician had appointed to government posts. Many of these reforms were already sweeping the world to one extent or another. It was all the fashion to espouse English liberty (i.e., freedom of the press) and the French philosophy of Rousseau and Voltaire, who advocated the notion that morality began from within one’s own being, and that everyone should cultivate their own metaphorical garden.

Caroline Mathilde emulated Catherine the Great by opening a foundling hospital. Struensee’s friend Enevold Brandt became the manager of the Royal Theatre, democratizing the repertoire by producing French comedies and Italian operas, and opening the venue to all. Even more scandalous than allowing the riffraff to purchase a ticket was that performances were offered on Sundays. To religious conservatives and nobles who were losing the perquisites of the aristocracy, it was a sure sign that Denmark was in the bull’s-eye of the apocalypse.

Struensee also appointed another German, Adolph von der Osten, to the foreign ministry. Von der Osten was a talented career diplomat who would maintain Denmark’s political neutrality, much to the consternation of Robert Gunning, Britain’s ambassador to Denmark, who hoped that the queen’s more active role in government would make her a partisan for her homeland. But Caroline Mathilde had no love for the country that had sent her into exile, yoked to a known psychopath in a loveless marriage. And in any case, she agreed with her paramour’s politics.

Struensee instituted additional civil reforms, such as streetlamps, and addresses on houses. He also cracked down on police brutality and unlawful searches and seizures. Unsurprisingly, he abolished the punishments, including fines, for adultery. Adultery trials could now be brought only by one of the aggrieved spouses, and not by the authorities. Big Brother was no longer permitted to peep into people’s bedrooms. He abolished state-sanctioned torture. Nobles would no longer be forgiven their debts. He reduced the number of civil servants and trimmed government offices and budgets, cutting waste.

Ironically, royal spending didn’t diminish a jot. The queen and her lover never tightened their own belts.

But, according to Newton’s Laws of Motion, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Struensee, a man of science, should have realized that. He had enacted wide-reaching reforms, but had formed no plans to deal with the consequences. Unemployment (due in part to his downsizing so many bureaucrats out of a job) created homelessness, forcing people to live on the streets. The press, reveling in its newfound freedom, used the power to criticize the reforms and their architects. Scads of corrupt civil servants had been dismissed. But who would replace them? The business of government had to continue. And despite Struensee’s budget cuts, spending remained out of control.