The Royal Physician's Visit

by Per Olov Enquist

  During all this time his wife and daughter had remained at his Ascheberg estate, which was where he now gathered around him a group of intellectual, enlightened men.

  One of them was a young doctor by the name of Struensee.

  It was by virtue of this path in life and his extensive international contacts, as well as the influence he still exerted at the Danish court, that Count Rantzau considered himself an intellectual.

  He was soon to play a central role in the events surrounding the Danish revolution, a role that, in its versatility, can only be understood in light of the aforementioned biography.

  The role he plays is that of an intellectual.

  The first contribution he made to Denmark was to recommend that the German doctor J. F. Struensee should become the Royal Physician to King Christian VII.

  4.

  What a strange city Altona was.

  The city stood near the mouth of the Elbe River; it was a trading center with eighteen thousand inhabitants, and by the mid-1600s it had achieved city charter status. Altona developed into the first free port in the North, but it also became a free port because of various trends in belief.

  A liberal outlook was essential for trade.

  The intellectual climate seemed to attract both ideas and money, and Altona became Denmark’s port to Europe, the second most important city after Copenhagen. It was located close to the great German free port of Hamburg, and among conservatives it had a reputation for being a vipers’ nest of radical thinking.

  That was the general opinion. A vipers’ nest. But since radicalism had proved to be financially lucrative, Altona was allowed to keep its intellectual freedom.

  Struensee was a doctor. He was born in 1737. At the age of fifteen he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Halle. His father was the theologian Adam Struensee, who early on was imprisoned for Pietism and later became professor of theology at the University of Halle. He was a man of integrity, devout, educated, and somber, with a tendency toward melancholy, while Struensee’s mother is described as having a lighter temperament. Their Pietism was of the Francke school, with emphasis on the importance of public welfare, and was influenced by the cultivation of reason, which at that time characterized the University of Halle. Struensee’s home was authoritarian; virtue and morality were its guiding stars.

  Yet the young Struensee ended up rebelling. He became a liberal and an atheist. In his view, if human beings were allowed to choose freely, they would, with the help of reason, choose good. He later writes that early on he embraced the idea of the human being “as a machine,” an expression that was typical of the dream of rationalism at the time. He actually uses this expression—and that it was solely the human organism that creates spirit, emotions, good and evil.

  By this he seems to have meant that acuity and spirituality were not bestowed on human beings by some higher being but were shaped by our life experiences. It was our obligations to others that gave meaning to everything, that created inner satisfaction, that gave life its purpose, and that ought to determine a person’s actions.

  Hence the misleading expression “machine,” which no doubt must be regarded as a poetic image.

  His doctoral dissertation was entitled “On the Risks of Aberrant Motions of the Limbs.”

  His analysis was formalistic but exemplary. The handwritten dissertation did have one odd feature, however; in the margins Struensee has drawn people’s faces in a different-colored ink. Here he presents an ambiguous and confused picture of his own inner self. He allows the great intellectual clarity of the dissertation to be obscured by the people’s faces.

  The main argument of the dissertation is, by the way, that preventive medical treatment is important, that physical exercise is necessary, but that when illness or injury occurs, great caution is essential.

  He is a skilled artist, judging by the dissertation. The human faces are interesting.

  The text is of lesser interest.

  As a twenty-year-old, Struensee moves to Altona and there begins his medical practice. He will always, even later on, be regarded as a doctor.

  Not an artist, not a politician, not an intellectual. A doctor.

  Yet the other side of his personality is the publicist.

  If the Enlightenment has a rational and hard face, which is the belief in reason and empiricism within medicine, mathematics, physics, and astronomy, it also has a soft face, which is the Enlightenment as freedom of thought, tolerance, and liberty.

  It could be said that in Altona he moves from the hard side of the Enlightenment, the development of the sciences toward rationalism and empiricism, to the soft side, the necessity of freedom.

  The first journal he starts (Monatsschrift zum Nutzen und Vergnügen) contains in the first issue a long analysis of the risks inherent in the population flight from country to city. It is a socio-medical analysis.

  Here too he places the doctor in the role of politician.

  Urbanization, he writes, is a medical threat with political ramifications. Taxation, the risks of military service, wretched medical treatment, alcoholism, all of these things create an urban proletariat—which could be prevented with better-developed medical treatment among the peasants. He presents a chilling but in actuality formidable sociological picture of a Denmark in decay: declining population figures, continuous smallpox epidemics. He notes that “the number of beggars among the peasantry is now more than sixty thousand.”

  Other articles bear titles such as “On Transmigration,” “On Mosquitoes,” and “On Sunstroke.”

  But a crudely satirical text with the title “Encomium to the Heavenly Effect of Dogs and Dog Shit” becomes his downfall. The text is regarded, and rightfully so, as a personal attack on a well-known doctor in Altona who had earned vast sums on a dubious remedy for constipation, extracted from dog shit.

  The journal is confiscated.

  The following year, however, he starts another journal. He makes an effort to refrain from libelous remarks and from statements that could be viewed as critical of the state or of religion, but he fails in an article about hoof-and-mouth disease, which is rightfully said to exude religious criticism.

  This journal is also confiscated.

  In his last writings, composed in prison and finished on the day before his execution, Struensee touches on what might be called the journalistic period of his life. “My moralistic ideas during that time were developed while studying the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, and Boulanger. I became a freethinker, believing that a higher principle had certainly created the world and human beings, but that there was no life after this one, and that actions possessed moral power only if they influenced society in the proper way. I found unreasonable the belief in punishment in a life after this one. Human beings were punished enough in this life. The virtuous person was one who did something useful. Christianity’s concepts were much too strict—and the truths it conveyed could be found expressed equally well in the writings of the philosophers. The offenses of sensuality I regarded as highly excusable weaknesses, as long as they had no damaging consequences for oneself or others.”

  His adversaries, in a much-too-brief summary of his ideas, remarked: “Struensee considered human beings to be merely machines.”

  Yet of greatest importance to him was Ludvig Holberg’s Moral Thoughts. After his death, a well-thumbed and underlined copy, in German, was found.

  One of the chapters in this book would change his life.

  5.

  On May 6, 1768, King Christian VII set off on his European travels.

  His entourage included a total of fifty-five people, and the tour was meant to be a cultural expedition, a sentimental journey à la Laurence Sterne (it was later claimed that Christian had been greatly impressed by Tristram Shandy, book VII). But its purpose was also to give the outside world, by means of the splendor displayed by the royal entourage, a lasting impression of Denmark’s wealth and power.

  Initially the retinu
e was meant to include more participants, but it was gradually reduced; one of those sent home was a courier by the name of Andreas Hjort. He was sent back to the capital, and from there he was exiled to the island of Bornholm because one night, “loose-lipped and drunk,” he revealed to listening ears that the King had given him the assignment during the journey to search for Bottine Caterine.

  In Altona Struensee joined them.

  Their first encounter was extremely odd.

  The King was staying at the mayor’s residence. One evening when he asked for the courier Andreas Hjort, he was informed that the man had been recalled home. No explanation was given. The courier’s action was described as inexplicable but might have been prompted by illness in his family.

  Christian suffered a recurrence of his peculiar spasms and then began furiously demolishing the room, throwing chairs and breaking windows. With a piece of coal taken from the embers in the fireplace he wrote Guldberg’s name on the exceedingly beautiful silk tapestries, although deliberately misspelling it. During the tumult the King’s hand was injured and started to bleed, so that Struensee’s first task on the journey was to bandage the monarch’s hand.

  The new Royal Physician had been called in.

  His first memory of Christian was this: the quite slender boy was sitting on a chair, his hand was bleeding, and he was simply staring blankly, straight ahead.

  After a very long silence Struensee asked kindly:

  “Your Majesty, can you explain this sudden … anger? You don’t have to, but …”

  “No, I don’t have to.”

  After a moment he added:

  “They tricked me. She’s not anywhere. Even if she is somewhere, that’s not where we’re going. And if we do, they’ll take her away. Perhaps she’s dead. It’s my fault. I must be punished.”

  Struensee writes that at the time he didn’t understand (though he did later) and that he simply and quietly began bandaging the King’s hand.

  “Were you born in Altona?” Christian then asked.

  Struensee replied:

  “In Halle. But I came to Altona at an early age.”

  “They say,” Christian continued,”that in Altona there are nothing but freethinkers and men of the Enlightenment who want to smash society into rubble and ashes.”

  Struensee merely nodded calmly.

  “Smash!!! The existing society!!!”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” replied Struensee. “That’s what they say. Others say it’s a European center of the Enlightenment.”

  “And what do you say, Doctor Struensee?”

  The bandaging was now done. Struensee was on his knees in front of Christian.

  “I’m a man of the Enlightenment,” he said,”but first and foremost a doctor. If Your Majesty so desires, I will leave my post at once and return to my normal medical practice.”

  Christian then regarded Struensee with a newly sparked interest, not in the least annoyed or disturbed by the man’s almost insolent bluntness.

  “Haven’t you ever, Doctor Struensee, wanted to cleanse the temple of the fornicators?” he asked in a very low voice.

  No reply was given. But the King continued:

  “To drive the hawkers out of the temple? To crush everything? So that it could all rise up from the ashes again … a Phoenix?”

  “Your Majesty certainly knows his Bible,” was Struensee’s deprecating reply.

  “Don‘t you think it’s impossible to make progress? PROGRESS! If you don’t make yourself hard and … smash … everything so that the temple …”

  Suddenly he began walking around the room, which was littered with chairs and broken glass. The impression he made on Struensee was almost poignant because his boyish figure was so slender and insignificant that it was hard to believe he could have caused such destruction.

  Then he came over, stood quite close to Struensee, and whispered:

  “I received a letter. From Monsieur Voltaire. An esteemed philosopher. To whom I gave money for a court proceeding. And he hailed me in his letter. As … as …”

  Struensee waited. Then it came, spoken softly, the first secretive message that was to bind them together. Yes, later on Struensee would remember this moment, which he describes in his prison notes; a moment of absolute intimacy, when the mad young boy, this King by the Grace of God, confided in him a secret that was unprecedented and precious and that would unite them forever.

  “ … he hailed me … as an enlightened man.”

  There was not a sound in the room. And the King continued, in the same whispered tone:

  “In Paris I have decided to meet with Monsieur Voltaire. Whom I know. Through our correspondence. Can I take you with me?”

  Struensee, with a little smile, replied:

  “It would be my pleasure, Your Majesty.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  And Struensee said, simply and quietly:

  “Yes, Your Majesty. More than you know.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE TRAVELING COMPANION

  1.

  THE JOURNEY WAS to be a long one.

  The tour would last eight months, the fifty-five people would travel somewhat more than twenty-five hundred miles with horses and coaches, the roads would be miserable, it would be summer and then fall and finally winter; the coaches were unheated and they proved to be drafty, and what the purpose of this journey might be, no one knew—only that it had to be undertaken and that therefore the public and the peasants—a distinction was made between the public and the peasants—had to stand gaping and cheering or begging with hostility along the travel route.

  The journey was to go on and on, and no doubt there was some objective.

  The objective was to carry the little absolute ruler forward through the pelting rain, the increasingly apathetic little King who hated his role and hid in his coach, tending to his spasms and dreaming of something else, but what that might be no one knew. He was to be carried by this enormous cortege through Europe, chasing after something that perhaps was once a secret dream of rediscovering the Sove reign of the Universe, she who would make everything seem coherent, an internal dream that was now faded, erased, merely chafing like a rage that he could not put into words.

  They made their way like a caterpillar through the European rain, heading toward nothing. The journey took them from Copenhagen to Kolding, Gottorp, Altona, Celle, Hanau, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Strasbourg, Nancy, Metz, Verdun, Paris, Cambrai, Lille, Calais, Dover, London, Oxford, Newmarket, York, Leeds, Manchester, Derby, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Nijmegen—no, all of it seemed a blur after a while; didn‘t Nijmegen come before Mannheim, Amsterdam before Metz?

  Yes, that’s the way it was.

  But what was the purpose of this astonishing campaign through the pelting European rain?

  Yes, that’s right:Amsterdam did come after Nijmegen. That was at the beginning of the journey. Struensee remembered it quite well. It was at the beginning of the inexplicable journey, and it was somewhere before Amsterdam. The King, in his coach, on the approach to Amsterdam and in deepest confidence, had told Struensee that “he now intended to break out of the imprisonment of royal rank, protocol, and morality. He would now realize the idea of flight that he had once discussed with his tutor Reverdil.”

  And Struensee notes: “He suggested, in all seriousness, that I should flee with him. He would then become a soldier, so as not to continue to be under obligation to anyone but himself.”

  This was on the approach to Amsterdam. Struensee listened patiently. Then he persuaded Christian to wait a few weeks, or at least until after his meeting with Voltaire and the encyclopedists.

  Christian listened, as if to a faint, enticing cry from something that had once been enormously important but now seemed infinitely remote.

  Voltaire?

  In silence they drove into Amsterdam. The King peered listlessly out the window of the coach, seeing innumerable faces.

  “They’re staring,” he remarked to Struense
e. “I’m staring back at them. But no Caterine.”

  The King never again brought up his plans to flee.

  This particular incident was not reported back to the court in Copenhagen.

  Almost everything else was. There were countless dispatches, and they were carefully read.

  Three times a week it was the custom for the three Queens to play cards. They played tarot. The images were suggestive, particularly that of the Hanged Man. The players were: Queen Sophie Magdalene, widow of Christian VI, who had survived His Majesty by twenty-four years; Juliane Marie, the widow of Frederik V; and Caroline Mathilde.

  That three Queens, from three generations, could be found at court was considered natural since it was normal in the royal house for the Kings to drink themselves to death before they became widowers, or if the Queen should die, for example in childbirth, for a remarriage to occur, regularly, leaving in the end a Dowager Queen, like a discarded seashell in the sand.

  Posterity always spoke of the pietism and great devoutness of the Dowager Queens. This did not, however, destroy their speech. Juliane Marie, in particular, developed an unusual verbal severity that often manifested itself in apparent vulgarity.

  Perhaps it could be said that religion’s stern demands for truth and her own appalling experiences had given her language an extraordinary frankness that shocked many people.

  During the tarot evenings she had numerous opportunities to offer the young Queen Caroline Mathilde tutelage and advice. She still considered the young Queen to be without talents and lacking in will.

  Later she would change her opinion.

  “We have received,” she announced one evening,”many unsettling dispatches from the travelers. The Royal Physician who was hired in Altona has won His Majesty’s confidence. They are always sitting together in the King’s coach. This Struensee is said to be a man of the Enlightenment. Should that be true, it’s a national catastrophe. The fact that Reverdil was banished, which was unexpected good fortune, is of no help. A viper still exists.”