The Royal Physician's Visit

by Per Olov Enquist

He laboriously made his way through the 186 pages written in Danish, which he only with great willpower managed to read, and he understood nothing.

  What did Guldberg want?

  Four days later he returned, had the little chair brought in, sat down, and looked at the prisoner sitting on the bed.

  “I’ve read it,” Struensee told him.

  Guldberg did not reply. He merely sat quite still and then, after a long silence and in a very soft but clear voice said:

  “Your sin is great. Your member has besmirched the country’s throne, you ought to cut it off and throw it away in disgust, but you also have other sins on your conscience. The country was thrown into upheaval, and only God and His Almighty Mercy could save us. Denmark has now been saved. All of your decrees have been revoked. A solid government is ruling the land. You will now, in writing, admit to the abominable and sinful intimacy that you have had with the Queen, confess your guilt. Then, under the guidance of Pastor Balthasar Münter who, like yourself, is German, you will draft a written statement in which you describe your conversion, how you have now given up all heretical ideas of the Enlightenment, and confess your love for the Savior, Jesus Christ.”

  “Is that all?” asked Struensee with what he thought was restrained irony.

  “That’s all.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Guldberg sat there, small and gray, and steadfastly stared at him, as usual without blinking.

  “You won’t refuse. And therefore, since you will agree to this conversion and thereby set a pious example such as I described in my unassuming book, I will personally see to it that your little bastard child is not harmed. Is not killed. That the many—many!!!—people who wish to prevent her from pretending to the throne of Denmark do not have their way.”

  And at last Struensee understood.

  “Your daughter,” Guldberg added in a friendly tone of voice, “is your belief in eternity. Isn’t that what freethinkers believe about eternal life? That it exists only through children? That your eternal life rests solely in that child?”

  “They wouldn’t dare kill an innocent child.”

  “They are not lacking in courage.”

  They sat in silence for a long time. Then Struensee, with a vehemence that surprised even him, exclaimed:

  “And what do you believe? That God chose Christian? or the drooling Crown Prince???”

  Then Guldberg, in a very calm and quiet voice, said:

  “Since you’re going to die … I’ll have you know that I don’t share your view that these ‘royal wretches’—that’s the essence behind your words! the essence!—are not embraced by the grace of God. I believe that these small individuals also have a task that may have been given to them alone. Not to the arrogant, lecherous, admired, and handsome creatures like yourself. Who regard them as wretches.”

  “I do not!!!” Struensee fiercely interjected.

  “And! and that God has given me the task to defend them against the representatives of evil, one of which is you. And that my, my historic mission is to save Denmark.”

  At the door he said:

  “Think the matter over. Tomorrow we’ll show you the machines.”

  They took him into the room where the machines, those used at the “intense interrogations,” were kept.

  A captain of the guards was the guide, meticulously detailing the use of the various instruments. He also remarked on several cases when the criminal, after only a few minutes ’ treatment, was willing to cooperate, but the rules required that the intense interrogation should continue for the full time allotted. Those were the rules, and it was important that both parties acknowledged this; otherwise there was always a risk that the person under interrogation might think that he could instantly halt the torture if he so wished. But it was not the person being interrogated who decided on the duration of the intense interrogation. It could not be cut short once it had begun, even with a complete confession, unless this had been agreed to by the interrogation commission and it was done in advance.

  After the tour of the instruments, Struensee was escorted back to his cell.

  That night he lay awake, at times sobbing violently.

  The length of his chains prevented him from throwing himself headfirst against the wall.

  He was utterly imprisoned, and he knew it.

  The next day he was asked whether a certain Pastor Münter might visit him, a clergyman who had declared himself willing to guide him and to record his story of conversion.

  Struensee said yes.

  2.

  Brandt, in his cell, was assigned Dean Hee, and he immediately declared himself willing to cooperate fully with a conversion report and to describe to the public his complete conversion, his guilt, and how he had now cast himself at the feet of the Savior, Jesus Christ.

  Without being asked, he also declared himself eager to repudiate all ideas of the Enlightenment, and in particular those that were championed by a Monsieur Voltaire. As to this individual, he could speak of him with even greater expertise because he had once, and this was before the King’s European tour, visited Voltaire and stayed with him for four whole days. At the time it was not a question of discussing ideas of the Enlightenment but instead matters of theater aesthetics, which interested Brandt more than politics. Dean Hee did not want to hear anything more about these conversations on the theater, saying that he was more interested in Brandt’s soul.

  Brandt assumed, in fact, that it was unlikely he would be convicted.

  In a letter to his mother he assured her that “no one could be angry with me for long. I have forgiven everyone, just as God has forgiven me.”

  During the first weeks he spent his time whistling and singing opera arias, which he regarded as naturally in keeping with his title as Maître de plaisir, or with the later title of “Cultural Minister.”After March 7 he was given his transverse flute and entertained everyone with his skillful playing.

  He assumed it was only a matter of time before he would be released, and in a letter written in prison to King Christian VII, he requested for himself a government position, “no matter how lowly.”

  Only when his attorney informed him that the foremost and perhaps only charge against him would be that he had physically abused the King, and thus offended royal authority, did he grow alarmed.

  It was the story of the finger.

  It was such an odd incident that Brandt himself had almost forgotten about it; but it was true that he had bitten Christian on his index finger and had drawn blood. Now the story came out. For this reason he devoted even greater effort, together with Dean Hee, to shaping his defection from freethinking and his loathing for the French philosophers, and this conversion document was also very quickly published in Germany.

  In a German newspaper this confession by Brandt was reviewed by a young Frankfurt student by the name of Wolfgang Goethe, then twenty-two years old, who indignantly described the whole thing as religious hypocrisy and assumed that the conversion was a result of torture or some other form of pressure. In Brandt’s case, this was not true; but the young Goethe, who later on was also incensed by Struensee’s fate, had done a pen and ink drawing for the article, depicting the shackled Brandt in his prison cell, and standing before him was Dean Hee, who with sweeping gestures was instructing him on the necessity of conversion.

  As a caption to the illustration there was a short satiric poem or dramatic sketch, perhaps the very first Goethe ever had published, which said in its entirety:

  Dean Hee:

  “Soon, O Count, you will bask in joyful angelic glow.”

  Count Brandt:

  “Alas, my dear Pastor, to my woe.”

  And yet everything was under control.

  The physical control of the prisoners was most effective, their left foot shackled to their right arm with a chain a yard and a half lOng; this chain, in turn, was fastened to the wall with very heavy links. The legal control was also quickly devised. A court of inquisition was establ
ished on January 20, followed by the final body of the Board of Inquisition, which came to include forty-two members.

  There was only one problem. It was quite clear that Struensee had to be and would be condemned to death. But the constitutional dilemma overshadowed everything.

  The dilemma was the little English whore.

  She was locked up at Kronborg; her four-year-old son, the Crown Prince, had been taken from her, though she was allowed to keep the little girl, “since she was still nursing.” But the Queen was made of different and harder stuff than the other prisoners. She admitted to nothing. And she was, after all, the sister of the English King.

  Certain preparatory interrogations had been made. They were not encouraging.

  The Queen was the real problem.

  They sent Guldberg and a supporting delegation of three commission members up to Hamlet’s castle to see what could be done.

  The first meeting was very brief and formal. She categorically denied that she and Struensee had had an intimate relationship and that the child was his. She was furious but utterly formal and demanded to speak to the British ambassador in Copenhagen.

  At the door Guldberg turned around and said:

  “I’m asking you one more time: Is the child Struensee’s?”

  “No,” she replied, as curtly as the crack of a whip.

  But suddenly terror filled her eyes. Guldberg saw it.

  Thus ended their first meeting.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE WINE TREADER

  1.

  THE FIRST INTERROGATION of Struensee began on February 20, lasted from ten o’clock until two, and produced nothing. On February 21 the interrogation continued, and Struensee was presented with further proof that he had had an immoral and intimate relationship with the Queen. The evidence, it was claimed, was indisputable. Even the most loyal of his servants had testified; if he had believed himself to be surrounded by an inner circle of protective individuals who would defend him, he must now realize that this inner circle did not exist. Toward the end of the long interrogation on the third day, when Struensee asked whether the Queen wouldn’t soon give orders to put an end to this shameless farce, they told him that the Queen had been arrested and was being held at Kronborg, that the King wished to initiate divorce proceedings, and that Struensee, at any rate, couldn’t count on support from her, if that was what he was thinking.

  Struensee stared at them as if stunned, and then understood. Suddenly he burst into wild and uncontrolled weeping and asked to be taken back to his cell to think over his situation.

  The Board of Inquisition naturally denied his request since it was judged that Struensee was now unbalanced and that a confession was near, and it was decided to extend that day’s interrogation. Struensee’s weeping did not stop; he was in utter despair and abruptly acknowledged,“with great despondency and resignation,” that he had indeed had an intimate relationship with the Queen, and that intercourse (“Beiwohnung”) had taken place.

  On February 25 he signed a complete confession.

  The news spread quickly through all of Europe.

  Indignation and contempt characterized the comments. Struensee’s actions were condemned; not his intimate relationship with the Queen but the fact that he had confessed. A French observer, upon hearing the news, wrote that “a Frenchman would have told everything in the world, but he would never have confessed.”

  It was also clear that Struensee had now signed his own death sentence.

  A commission of four men was dispatched to Kronborg to present the Queen with Struensee’s written confession. According to the directive, the Queen was to be allowed to read only an authorized copy. The original would be taken along, and she would be given the opportunity to compare the copy to verify its authenticity, but under no circumstances was she to be given physical access to the original; it would be held up for the Queen to look at, but it would not be put in the Queen’s hand.

  They were aware of her determination and feared her rage.

  2.

  She always sat at the window and looked out across Øresund, which for the first time in all the years she had lived in Denmark was frozen solid and covered with snow.

  The snow often drifted in thin streaks across the ice, and it was quite beautiful. She had decided that snow drifting over ice was beautiful.

  She didn’t think many things in this country were beautiful anymore. Everything was actually ugly and icy-gray and hostile, but she held on to whatever might be beautiful. Snow drifting across the ice was beautiful. At least sometimes, especially one afternoon when the sun broke through and for several minutes made everything … well, beautiful.

  But she missed the birds. She had learned to love them during the time before Struensee, when she would stand on the beach and see how they “burrowed into their dreams”—that was the expression she used later on when she told Struensee about them—or occasionally rose up and disappeared into the low, hovering mist. The idea that birds could dream had become so important: that they had secrets and dreamed and could love, just as trees could love, and that the birds could “have expectations”and harbor hopes, and would then suddenly rise up and beat the tips of their wings against the quicksilver gray surface and disappear toward something. Toward something, a different life. It had seemed so splendid.

  But there were no birds now.

  This was Hamlet’s castle, and she had seen a performance of Hamlet in London. A mad king who forced his beloved to commit suicide; she had wept as she watched the play, and the first time she visited Kronborg the castle had seemed so impressive in some way. Now it was not impressive. It was just a horrible story in which she was imprisoned. She hated Hamlet. She didn’t want her life to be written by a play. She imagined that she would write her own life. “Imprisoned by love,” Ophelia had died; what was she now imprisoned by? Was it the same as Ophelia, by love? Yes, it was love. But she had no intention of going mad and dying. She was determined that, under no circumstances, none whatsoever, would she become Ophelia.

  She refused to become a play.

  She hated Ophelia and the flowers in her hair and her martyr’s death, and her demented song that was merely ridiculous. I am only twenty years old, she would constantly repeat to herself; she was twenty years old and not imprisoned in a Danish play written by an Englishman, and not imprisoned in anyone else’s madness, and she was still young.

  O, keep me innocent, make others great. That was the tone of Hamlet’s Ophelia. How ridiculous.

  But the birds had forsaken her. Was that a sign?

  She also hated everything that was a cloister.

  The court was a cloister, her mother was a cloister, the Dowager Queen was a cloister, Kronborg was a cloister. In a cloister a person lacked any talents. Holberg was not a cloister, the birds were not a cloister, riding in men’s attire was not a cloister, Struensee was not a cloister. For fifteen years she had lived in her mother’s cloister and lacked any talents; now she was sitting once again in a kind of cloister; in between was the Struensee era. She sat at the window and stared out across the snowdrifts and tried to understand what Struensee’s era had been.

  It meant growing up, from being a child who thought herself to be fifteen, to becoming a hundred years old, and having learned.

  In four years everything had changed.

  First the horrible scene with the mad little King who serviced her, then the court, which was insane, like the King, whom she nevertheless occasionally had loved; no, the wrong word. Not loved. She brushed that aside. First the cloister, then those four years. It had all happened so quickly; she realized that she was not without talents and, this was the most astonishing of all, she had taught them—them!!!—that she was not without talents, and thus taught them to feel fear.

  The girl who set out to teach them to feel fear.

  Struensee had once told her an old German folktale. It was about a boy who could not feel fear; he had set off into the world “to learn to know fear.”
How very German that phrase was, and mysterious. She thought it was a strange story, and she almost never thought about it.

  But she remembered the title:“The Boy Who Set Out to Learn to Know Fear.”

  He had recounted it in German. The boy who set out to learn to know fear. Yet, in his voice, and in German, the expression had sounded beautiful, almost magical. Why had he told it to her? Was it a story that he wanted to tell about himself? A secret sign? Afterward she thought that he had been talking about himself. There was, of course, another boy in the story. He was clever, gifted, good, and beloved; but he was paralyzed by fear. Of everything, of everything. Everything terrified him. He was full of admirable talents, but fear had paralyzed them. The gifted boy was paralyzed by fear.

  But the Stupid Brother didn’t know what fear was.

  The Stupid One was the victor.

  What did it mean, this story that Struensee had chosen to tell her? Was it about himself? Or was he talking about her? Or about their enemies, and how it was to live? The condition, or conditions, that existed but to which they refused to adapt? Why that ridiculous goodness in service of the good? Why hadn’t he purged his enemies, banished them, bribed them, adapted to the great game?

  Was it because he was afraid of evil, so afraid that he didn’t want to sully his hands with it, and hence all was now lost?

  A delegation of four men came to tell her that Struensee had been thrown into prison, that he had confessed.

  Presumably they had tortured him. She was almost certain of this. And then of course he had confessed to everything. Struensee didn’t have to set off into the world to learn to know fear. Deep inside he had always been afraid. She had seen it. He didn’t even like wielding power. She didn’t understand this. She had felt a unique pleasure when she understood for the first time that she could instill terror.

  But he did not. There was something fundamentally wrong with him. Why was it always the wrong people who were chosen to do good? God couldn’t be the one who did this. It must be the Devil who chose the instruments of good. So he picked the noble ones who could feel fear. But if the good people could not kill or destroy, then goodness was powerless.