Sex with the Queen (47 page)

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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 ad-vised.69 He suggested that Matilda go riding, a sport rarely pur-sued 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 im-provement 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 mad-ness 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.

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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 imbe-cile, 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 Stru-ensee, Matilda could afford to be generous to her nervous fret-ting 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 in-trigue 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 de-lighted to find that no one wanted to talk politics to him any-more; 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 2 1 6

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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 hus-band’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 gath-erings, and allowed him, publicly, to take liberties which would have ruined the reputation of any ordinary woman, such as rid-ing 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, af-ter 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 wid-owed Princess of Wales, she lived a retired life at Kew Palace with her eight children. Family friend and adviser John Stuart, mar-quess 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 bench-mark 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 pro-tectors. 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.

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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, be-gan to feel threatened even as Struensee removed his mask of af-fected 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 sud-den 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. In-stead of piling her hair high on her head according to the fash-ion 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 ob-tained the king’s signature—replaced the popular prime minister Johann Bernstorff with himself. He issued orders that all com-munications between the king and his ministers be in writing and that private audiences with the king be abolished. Struensee 2 1 8

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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 citi-zens 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 prohib-ited the police from entering houses without a search warrant.