The Royal Physician's Visit

by Per Olov Enquist

  Now he saw them, I saw, O God, who perhaps exists, an aperture there, it was my task to force my way in, was it for their sake and is everything now in vain, should I have asked them, O God, I see them and they see me but it is too late and perhaps I should have talked to them and not isolated myself and perhaps they should have talked to me but I sat there in my room and why should we meet for the first time in this way now that it is too late and they broke his coat of arms and spoke the words. And undressed him. The block was heavily smeared with Brandt and he thought this is Brandt this piece of flesh and this blood and this slime, what is a human being when the sacred disappears, is it only flesh sludge and blood and this is Brandt, what then is a human being, they gripped him by the arms and, as docile as a sacrificial lamb, his head was placed on the block and his hand on the other block and he stared straight ahead, at the endless host of faces which, pale and gray and with open mouths, were staring up at him, and then the executioner chopped off his hand with his ax.

  His body was then struck with convulsions so strong that the executioner, when he was about to cut off his head, completely missed his mark; Struensee rose up on one knee, opened his mouth as if he wanted to speak to all of the thousands he now saw for the first time, only one picture do I have Lord Jesus and it is the picture of the little girl but if I could also speak to all of these who have not understood and before whom I have sinned because I did not and then he was forced down on the block again, and when the executioner raised his ax for the second time, the last words he had said to her came flickering back in the eternities of Eternity and the ax at last found its mark and severed the head of the German Royal Physician; and his Danish visit was over.

  From the east heavy rain clouds came rolling in, and as the dismemberment of Struensee’s body was begun, the rain began to fall; but that was not what made the crowds leave the site.

  They left the scene as if they had had enough, as if they wanted to say: No, this we do not wish to see, something is wrong, this was not the way we wanted it.

  Have we been deceived?

  No, they didn’t flee, they simply began to move away, first a few hundred, then a few thousand, finally they all left. As if this was enough, they took no joy in what they had seen, no malicious delight and no revenge, everything had simply become unbearable. At first they were an endless mass staring silently up at what was happening—why so silent?—and then they began to move back, slowly at first, then ever more swiftly, as if in sorrow. They walked and ran toward town, the rain fell harder and harder, but the rain they were used to; it seemed to have finally occurred to them what this drama was all about, and they no longer wanted any part of it.

  Was it the cruelty they couldn’t stand? Or did they feel betrayed?

  Guldberg had ordered his coach to stop a hundred paces from the scaffold; he did not get out of the coach but commanded twenty soldiers to stand by, as guards. What were they supposed to guard against? Everything proceeded according to plan. But suddenly something felt ominous and out of control; what was it about those crowds? Why did they leave the scene, what was there in those tired, sorrowful, worn faces that made him feel uneasy? They moved past him like a gray, embittered mass, a river, a plaintive funeral procession that had no words and no emotions but seemed to express only … yes, sorrow. It was a sorrow that was deathly silent and at the same time out of control. They had witnessed the definitive end of the Struensee era, but at the same time Guldberg had a feeling that the danger was not past. That the contagion of sin had also spread to them. That the black glow from the torches of the Enlightenment had not been extinguished. That these ideas in some strange way had infected them, even though it was unlikely they could read, and in any case could not understand, and would never come to understand, and that therefore they must be kept under control and be led; but perhaps the contagion was still there. Perhaps the Struensee era was not over; he knew that now it was important to be extremely vigilant.

  The head had been severed but the ideas were still there, and the people had not wanted to stay and watch; why did they leave?

  It was a warning sign. Had he done something wrong? What could he read in those worn, sorrowful faces? Was it resignation? Yes, perhaps. Then so be it. He sat there in his coach and the mighty procession of people surrounded him like a river, not on the bank of the river! in the midst! in the midst! and he did not know how this should be interpreted.

  Extreme vigilance was now essential. The Struensee era was over. But the contagion.

  The thirty thousand had not greeted the severed head with cheers. They had fled, at a run, stumbling, dragging away the little children who had been brought along, away from the scaffold that was now shrouded in rain falling harder and harder. They didn’t want to look anymore. Something was wrong. Guldberg sat motionless in his coach, well guarded. But what he would always remember was how this endless crowd moved, though in silence; how the crowd was like a river that divided around his coach, and he sat there, not on the bank as an interpreter but in the middle of the river. And for the first time he knew that he could not interpret the maelstroms of the river.

  What had filled their hearts? Had the Struensee era not ended after all?

  Quite recently, only three months before, the sense of unity had been so great. He recalled the joyous riots in January. The wrath of the people was so great. But now they fell silent and left, stunned and showing no joy, in a gigantic funeral procession filled with a silence that for the first time made Guldberg feel fear.

  Was there something left that could not be chopped off?

  The cart stood under the scaffold.

  When the cart that was to carry the body parts to Vestre Fælled, where the heads and hands would be raised on poles and the genitals and intestines be put on the wheel, when the cart was at last loaded and about to set off, the field was deserted—except for the five thousand soldiers who silently, without moving, and in the heavy rain, stood guard over the void remaining after the thirty thousand had long since left the site where it was thought that the Struensee era had been decapitated and brought to an end.

  EPILOGUE

  SHE LEARNED OF the execution the day after.

  Then on May 30 the three English ships came for Caroline Mathilde and took her to Celle, in Hannover. The castle, which stood in the center of town, had been built in the 1600s and had been unoccupied, but it now became her residence. She was said to have retained her lively manner, to have shown great interest for the welfare of Celle’s poor, and to have demanded respect for Struensee’s memory. She often spoke of him, calling him “the blessed Count,” and she soon became much loved in Celle, where they embraced the idea that she had been unjustly treated.

  Many people were interested in her political role for the future. Christian, who was now wholly submerged in his illness, was still King, and the son that Caroline Mathilde had given him was the heir to the throne. The King’s illness created, as it had in the past, a vacuum at the center, which had been filled by others than Struensee.

  The true holder of power was Guldberg. In reality he became the absolute ruler, with the title of Prime Minister; and yet discontent was brewing in certain circles in Denmark, and plans were being forged to reinstate Caroline Mathilde and her child by means of a coup, and to overthrow Guldberg and his party.

  On May 10, 1775, these quite advanced plots were suspended when Caroline Mathilde very suddenly and inexplicably died from a “contagious fever.” Rumors that she had been poisoned on orders from the Danish government could never be confirmed.

  She was only twenty-three years old. She never saw her children again.

  The revolution that Struensee initiated was quickly stopped; it took only a few weeks for everything to revert to the way it was before, or to even earlier times. It was as if his 632 decrees, issued during the two years known as the “Struensee era,” were paper swallows, some of which landed, while others were still hovering low over the surface of the field and hadn’t yet ma
naged to alight on the Danish landscape.

  Guldberg’s era followed, and it lasted until 1784, when he was overthrown. It was quite obvious that everything would revert back during his era. It was equally obvious that of Guldberg’s era nothing would remain.

  Struensee’s astonishing political productivity was remarkable. Yet how much of it became reality?

  The image of him as merely a desk intellectual endowed with extraordinary power is hardly accurate. Denmark was never the same after Struensee’s era. Guldberg’s apprehensions proved to be right; the contagion of the Enlightenment had taken hold, words and thoughts could not be decapitated. And one of the reforms that Struensee never managed to carry out, the abolition of “adscription” and serfdom, had already become a reality by 1788, the year before the French Revolution.

  Struensee would also live on in another way.

  Louise Augusta, the little daughter of Struensee and Caroline Mathilde, was brought up in Denmark; her brother, Christian’s only child, took an active part in the coup of 1784 that overthrew Guldberg, and in the year 1808 he would succeed his demented father to the throne.

  The girl, on the other hand, met a different fate. She was described as very beautiful, with a “disquieting” vitality. She seemed to share her father’s fundamental political views, took a keen interest in the events of the French Revolution, sympathized with Robespierre, and of her father she said that his only fault was that he possessed “more spirit than cunning.”

  Perhaps this was indeed a correct analysis. Her beauty and vitality made her attractive, although not always the most tranquil or serene of partners in a relationship. She married Duke Frederik Christian av Augustenborg, who was hardly her equal in any way. Yet she had three children by him, one of which, a daughter named Caroline Amalie, married in 1815 Prince Christian Frederik, Denmark’s heir to the throne and future monarch; and thus everything came full circle at the court in Copenhagen. In this way many of Struensee’s descendants slipped into the peculiar and mysterious European royal houses that were soon to disintegrate, where he had been such a brief and unwelcome guest. His great-great-grandchild Augusta Victoria married the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and had eight children. Today there is hardly any European royal house, including the Swedish, that cannot trace its lineage back to Johann Friedrich Struensee, his English Princess, and their little girl.

  Perhaps this has little significance. If occasionally, in prison, Struensee had a dream of eternity that was biological, that eternal life meant living on through one’s children, then his wish was granted. His dream of eternity and his view of human beings were both something that he was never done with—something that he, with his characteristic theoretical vagueness, attempted to describe as “the human machine.” But what in truth was a human being, who could be dissected or dismembered and hung up on the post and wheel, and yet in some way continued to live on? What was it that was sacred? “The sacred is what the one who is sacred does,” he had thought: the human being as the sum of his existential choices and actions. But in the end it was something else altogether, something more important, that remained of Struensee’s era. Not biology, not just actions, but a dream of humanity’s possibilities, that which was the most sacred of all and the most difficult to capture, that which existed as the simple, persistent note of a flute from Struensee’s era and which refused to be cut off.

  One evening at the Royal Theater in September 1782, Ambassador Keith from England reported to the British government about an incident.

  It was his encounter with King Christian VII and Prime Minister Guldberg. Christian hinted that Struensee was still alive, and Keith noticed the rage, no matter how controlled, which this provoked in Guldberg.

  Everyone talked about the Struensee era. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair!!!

  Later that evening Christian disappeared.

  Where he went that evening, we have no idea. But it was known where he usually disappeared to, and that he did so often. And to whom. And thus it is possible to imagine what happened on that particular evening as well: that he walked the short distance from the Royal Theater to a house in central Copenhagen, on Studiestræ de. And that he also, after the incident Keith describes, entered the house on Studiestræ de and met the woman he so stubbornly called the Sovereign of the Universe, who had now returned, who had always been the only one he could trust, the only one he loved with his peculiar way of loving, the only benefactor left for this royal child who was now thirty-three years old, and whom life had mistreated so severely.

  It was Bottine Caterine who, many years earlier, after her stay in Hamburg and Kiel, had returned to Copenhagen. Now, according to contemporary descriptions, she was gray-haired, plumper, and perhaps also wiser.

  It must be assumed that on that evening as well, the same rituals were played out as before, the love ceremonies which had made it possible for Christian to survive for so many years in that madhouse. He sat down at her feet on the little stool he always used, and then he took off his wig, moistened a soft piece of cloth in a bowl of water and wiped all the powder and makeup from his face; and then she combed his hair as he sat there, completely calm, his eyes closed, seated on the stool at her feet, with his head resting on her knee.

  And he knew that she was the Sovereign of the Universe, that she was his benefactress, that she had time for him, that she had all time, and that she was time.

  THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

  THE Royal Physician’s Visit

  PER OLOV ENQUIST

  Translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally

  Set in Denmark in the 1760s, The Royal Physician’s Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German doctor from Altona, student of Enlightenment philosophers Diderot and Voltaire, and court physician to mad young King Christian, stepped through the aperture history had opened for him and became for two years the holder of absolute power in Denmark.

  Dr. Struensee, tall, handsome, and charismatic, introduced hundreds of reforms, many of which would become hallmarks of the French Revolution twenty years later, including freedom of the press and improvement of the treatment of the peasantry. He also took young Queen Caroline Mathilde—unsatisfied by her unstable, childlike husband—as his mistress. He was a brilliant intellectual and brash reformer, yet Struensee lacked the cunning and subtlety of a skilled politician and, most tragically, lacked the talent to choose the right enemies at court, a flaw which would lead to his torture and execution.

  An international sensation sold in twenty countries, The Royal Physician’s Visit is a view from the seat of absolute power, a gripping tale, vividly and entertainingly told. Enquist’s talent is in full force as he brilliantly explores the connections that will always run between political theory and practice, power, sex, love, and the life of the mind.

  “A great book, a powerful book—it effortlessly and self-confidently surmounts the standard works of fiction.”

  —Die Zeit

  “Incomparably exciting in its uncompromising lucidity and at the same time unsettling.”

  —Suddeutsche Zeitung

  “Time and time again the story takes to the air on the wings of fantasy … a magnificent adventure.”

  —Upsala Nya Tidning

  “The erotic scenes are among the most beautiful I have read in modern literature.”

  —Kvällsposten