The Lost Queen: The Tragedy of a Royal Marriage

by Norah Lofts

  She said, “If you are sure that she will not upset you further. If she begins to cry...”

  “I have never,” Caroline said truthfully, “seen Alice cry over anything. She was reared in a hard school and I believe the whole world could drop dead...” Dead. Dead. A word used often enough, its meaning only just realized. “...and Alice would not shed a tear.”

  Before Alice was admitted—not to act as handmaid at the dressing table, but to take Frau von Plessen’s place—the Mistress of the Robes tried to talk to her, strictly. It was very difficult because the girl was so stupid and in almost a year had acquired hardly any Danish at all. And strictness broke down when one must communicate in single words and gestures.

  “Not to cry,” Frau von Plessen said, shaking her head and making the motions of a woman weeping. “No, no. Not to cry.”

  Silly old hen!

  Alice alone of all the people in the Palace—perhaps of all the people in the world—understood what His Royal Highness’s death meant to the Queen. Despite the difference in their ages, they’d always been a pair, a little set apart from the rest of the family; within the family bond, another, closer; within the family resemblance another likeness more exact.

  “No cry,” she said. “No. No.” In her turn she gestured, moving her skinny hands about her lean body, shaped and tempered by early privation, so that later good feeding had no effect at all. “Baby,” she said. “Cry. Bad. Baby.”

  Frau von Plessen’s almost exhausted mind managed the reflection that there were occasions when communication could be achieved with the minimum of words.

  “You may go in,” she said.

  Alice had her own contribution to make. She said, “It’s worse for you than him. You should bear that in mind. It’s sudden and it’s shocking, but I reckon it suited him, dying like that, in the middle of a happy holiday. Pretty soon they’d have been marrying him off; he wouldn’t have taken kindly to that. Being told what to do always set his back up, didn’t it? And there’s another way of looking at it; getting old is no joke, a lot of aches and pains, going deaf, or silly. It is sad for you, the rooms ready and everything, but for him maybe it’s what he would have chosen, a short life and a merry one.”

  Where did grief and self-pity merge? I had so much to tell him, to ask him. And he had something to tell me. He’s dead. The world is the poorer, denuded of the good-humored wit, the handsome face and splendid body. I am bereft.

  “And you don’t want, do you,” Alice said, “a poor grizzling little baby?”

  The drawer in the bottom of the red lacquer box, much too small now to serve as jewel case, held Edward’s letters.

  She took them out and read them again and noticed sentences that she had skipped over: “Life is more complicated than we were led to believe.” “My visit to you will defer my return to England and give me a chance to think.” About what? “I hope to stay for a fortnight, but I must yield to circumstances.”

  It was over. Edward was dead; and propped up by Frau von Plessen on the one side, Alice on the other, she went down the ever-narrowing path that led to January and her delivery.

  Even Juliana failed to disturb her calm. She made frequent visits—she and Frederick occupied the whole second floor of the Christiansborg Palace and could visit without setting a foot out of doors where, once again, the snow lay deep.

  “I completely lost my temper with Christian, yesterday,” Juliana said. “You will probably hear about it, so I may as well tell you myself, so that you may know the truth.” Under the flick of blinked eyelid she took in the smooth, steadily ripening bulge which, coming to fruition, would end—this time finally—her hopes for her son. There had been so many ends: her husband’s death, Christian’s accession, his marriage which she had opposed and been forced to accept when her husband said “Yes, he is a silly boy, but it is a political alliance, and sometimes marriage is a steadying influence.” Then there had been her secret campaign to wreck the marriage: “Christian, have you ever looked closely at this portrait of your mother? Your bride may resemble her.” And then the remark, calculated to paralyze, about the difference between a Princess and a hired woman.

  All come to nothing. Pregnant within five months; how? why? Holmstrupp in ascendancy still and nothing changed; then the fall, the long swoon—Juliana when she rang the bell had thought that Caroline was dead...But she was not; she was here, resilient, bulky. And it was late in November, the seventh month.

  “I really gave him a thorough scolding,” Juliana said. “It passed all bounds. To appear with that woman, in public.”

  “What woman?”

  Juliana widened her eyes and put her hand in front of her mouth.

  “I thought you knew. Oh, what have I done?” She dropped her hand. “Between us, I trust, there is no room for hypocrisy. Steifelette Kathrine, so called on account of her beautiful feet. Dear Caroline, I have shocked you. Pray forgive me. I shall hold it against Christian that in my anger with him I let slip something that hurt you.”

  For the shot appeared to have gone home. Caroline’s face gave evidence of shock; not enough, but some. Juliana mistook its cause. This was, in fact, the first direct evidence Caroline had met with of what Mamma had so delicately called “other women,” but with things as they were between her and Christian, it was to be expected. What darkened her eyes and made a little patch of pallor around her nostrils was the sudden and complete realization that Juliana had deliberately planned this revelation, had come here with the intention of making it, was, in short, not her friend, but her enemy. And if now...perhaps all along...since the beginning…responsible perhaps...no, no, that was dramatic nonsense. Nonetheless, she remembered that on Juliana’s first visit, she had, under a pretended frankness, tried to spoil the poem. Nothing in her relatively sheltered life had prepared her for quite such malice or duplicity; but she kept her word about treating the thing lightly—as though Christian had acquired a new horse or hound. She threw her head back slightly and said,

  “Shock? Hurt? Look at my ankles.” She lifted her skirt to show their swollen state. “Could any man be blamed for preferring a woman with beautiful feet?”

  The letter came in the Queen’s personal post from England which the Queen’s Secretary had learned was to be handed to her just as it arrived, and the moment it arrived.

  It was written on poor, coarse paper, sealed with the smoke-tinged wax from a dripping candle, pressed down by a thimble. It read:

  “Madam, Your Majesty of Denmark—

  I thort you would want to know that he thort of you a lot and was sorry at the end that he never got there to tell you our plans. We was going to Rushia and get married but it was not to be. I’ve got the baby now and am up and about again. He is a luvly boy that will be like his farther one day and I mean to do my best for him. We never got to Rushia so he carnt have what he should, but I shall do my best. I thort you would like to know. I hope you get a luvly boy two, and just as easy.

  Yours respectfully, Felicity.”

  Caroline read it twice, filling in the gaps. Then she sent for Mr. Gunning who had succeeded Mr. Tetley as Minister to Denmark.

  When he arrived she asked him to be seated and said, “I wish to discuss with you a matter of some importance.”

  He thought—Steifelette Kathrine! And what can I do?

  She handed him the letter and he read it without comment. The essence of diplomacy was to let the other party get into position.

  Her Majesty, lacking all finesse, said, “I think that the child referred to is that of my brother, the Duke of York.”

  “With all due respect, Your Majesty, I would suggest that that is an unwarranted assumption. Unless you have some reason. Other than this-er-missive.” He looked at it with distaste. “His Royal Highness is not mentioned.”

  “Not by name. But I feel that the woman who wrote this knew that I should understand. And she wrote out of good will. She asks for nothing. She gives no address and signs only her Christian name.”
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  “So I observed. My first thought was that it could be a begging letter, or some form of blackmail. But that can hardly...”

  “Mr. Gunning, I want your help in finding her. I can think of no one else to ask.”

  “Your Majesty knows that I am always at her service. But with nothing to go upon except the one name...”

  “But you see,” Caroline said eagerly, “she mentions being with my brother at the end, so she was in Monaco in September. Now she writes from England. So she must have returned. She is not...not the kind of woman who travels abroad except in a menial capacity, and she was pregnant. Someone at Harwich or some other port may have noticed her. A Customs Officer perhaps or some other official who might remember. I think she is poor, a seamstress perhaps. They work long hours for very little. However well she means, the child would be reared in unfavorable circumstances. I should like to help her.”

  “If it is your wish, I will set some inquiries on foot.”

  But they would not be very vigorous or very searching. There were scandals enough about His Majesty’s younger brothers, borne with remarkable patience, or could it be indifference, by the King. And in fact, Mr. Gunning reflected, the Queen of Denmark’s attitude was unusual. No shock, no disapproval. Bastards were plentiful, but young women correctly brought up felt, or pretended to feel, some recoil...Tolerance and laxity could be confused. Then he withdrew that thought. Sentiment; that was what dictated her behavior; she was pregnant herself and so felt akin with any woman who was, had been, or claimed to be. It occurred to him that the writer of the letter might be very cunning, as frauds so often were. One letter, asking for nothing, giving no name and no address, could induce confidence.

  “I want her found, if possible,” Caroline said.

  “One thing I would ask, your Majesty. Should another letter from the same source arrive, please do nothing until you have conferred with me.” He paused and then said, “The wish which the letter concludes is the wish of us all and one with which I should like to be the first to associate myself.”

  An easy, safe delivery; and an heir to the throne of Denmark.

  COPENHAGEN; FREDERICKSBORG; JANUARY—MAY 1768

  The chief midwife, her assistant, the Queen’s own physician and two others—called in to provide moral support on this portentous occasion—all assured Caroline that it would be an easy birth; she was in splendid health, and young, and there was, the older midwife said, a tradition of easy childbirth in the Royal Family, because of their narrow heads. She had assisted at the birth of His Majesty, and of the Hereditary Crown Prince; just a pain or two and a grunt and it would be over.

  Frau von Plessen also took a resolutely cheerful view, and Alice, having taken the double precaution of hiding a knife and a pair of scissors under the bed “to cut the pain,” was equally confident.

  All were wrong.

  It went on and on; through one day, and a night, and a second day, relentless, mounting torture which battered all the barriers of fortitude and pride and finally broke them down.

  On the first day Frau von Plessen thought that Caroline was being a little too brave.

  “It sometimes helps,” she said, “to cry out.”

  The chief midwife agreed; she’d known several instances of a good yell doing the trick. Some hours later she remembered cases where a sniff of pepper and a hearty sneeze had served. This was not one such case.

  Beyond the suggestion that some warm, spiced wine would keep up the Queen’s strength, the doctors were not helpful. Childbirth was regarded as woman’s work and too close an association with it beneath a doctor’s dignity—no real doctor was anxious to earn the name of man-midwife. Comfortably installed in the anteroom they looked in at intervals to see how things were going. As time went on, some concern was felt, but no positive alarm. A first labor could last forty-eight hours; interference often did more harm than good; God, who had laid this ordeal upon women, had made them very tough.

  Alice, quite early on, began to cry; every pang that wrenched at Caroline seemed to communicate itself to her in a shuddering rigor. Presently, when Caroline moaned, Alice put her hands over her ears and made noises like an animal in a trap.

  “If you cannot control yourself,” Frau von Plessen hissed at her, “go away.” After that Alice put her hands not to her ears but to her mouth.

  Caroline lost all sense of time and occasionally of identity as well; a bit of her floated away and up and from somewhere near the cornice looked down upon the writhing, moaning figure on the bed. Poor Caroline; she is going to die…

  When the candles were lighted at the second sunset she did not see them as candles, just blurs of light; she could not tell one face from another, but voices were still recognizable; her sense of hearing seemed to have sharpened; people were talking very loudly; the shift of a log in the stove was an explosion, the tick of the clock a heavy hammer.

  The pain stopped quite abruptly and at the same time she began to leave herself again, not this time for the ceiling but for a soft, engulfing darkness that lay waiting under the bed. The child had been born, she thought, on that last pain, and she was dying. She said, in what sounded to her a loud voice, but was in fact the faintest whisper, “Frau von Plessen…”

  “I am here.” Others might need food and sleep but she had been out of the room only for the briefest moment on the most necessary errand. The bones of her hands were bruised, perhaps broken, because Caroline had clutched at them so fiercely, seeming to draw some slight comfort from the touch. But the grasp had slackened suddenly.

  “I am going to die. I want you to take charge of him. Nobody else; you. And...send...Alice...home.”

  She would have liked to entrust Alice with a message to Mamma, but it was too much effort, with the pain over, the baby born and the soft dark closing in.

  “If you give up now,” Frau von Plessen said, “you will die, and the child with you. Rouse yourself! Here, drink this. Drink it. Now, try again. You’re not to give up, you’re not...” She lifted Caroline’s shoulders from the bed and shook her fiercely. That started the pain again and Caroline screamed; the heir to the throne of Denmark slipped, feet first, into the midwife’s waiting hands. She took him, in the approved style, by the heels and holding him upside down slapped his buttocks until he gave a desolate kittenish cry.

  “It is a boy,” she said.

  “Well, there you are,” Christian said, accepting congratulations. “Nobody can say that I have not done my duty by Denmark. In a year and a half, a fine boy.”

  It was not a fine boy; nothing like the solid, pink and white baby of which Caroline had dreamed. Even the narrow Royal Danish head seemed too heavy for the frail neck; at the ends of his arms and legs the hands and feet hung straight and limp; a rag doll badly stuffed. And all over, even to the eyelids a funny color, like the plums that fall early from an overladen tree.

  But he was hers and the lightning struck the moment she was able to see him clearly. It seemed strange that all that bulk, so carefully carried, all that food, all that exercise in the fresh air had not produced something more thriving, with more apparent hold on life; but because he was so puny—five pounds the midwife said and it was incomprehensible that the birth had been so hard—and so, well, face it, ugly, she loved him all the more. She was determined to feed him herself. To devote the rest of her life to him. He was hers and she was his. He was the one good thing she had salvaged from a foundered marriage; he was the product of thirty hours of agony; to get him born she had repudiated death.

  She decided to feed him herself, though it was not a fashionable thing to do. The social activities of a nursing mother were restricted, and the process was held to be detrimental to one’s shape. Her bosom had always been much admired, so white and well-formed; now it proved its usefulness: within a week the child’s color had improved; at the end of two the flaccid neck had strengthened and the limp, finlike hands and feet were altering. Every day he became more and more like the baby of her dreams.
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  Self- and child-involved, happily fulfilling the function for which she had been born, cherished by Frau von Plessen who, if not actually proud of herself was conscious of duty well and truly done, and by Alice, she was hardly aware of the outside world at all. She was the most popular person in Denmark and Norway and the Duchies, the recipient of many messages of congratulation and gifts, but they all seemed to come from a different world from the one which she inhabited. And Christian’s two visits did not ruffle the calm. On the first occasion he said that he had not realized that new-born babies were so ugly, so closely resembling skinned rabbits; on the second he said that the child’s name had been chosen—it was to be Frederick. She accepted that, it was her father’s name, too; and nothing was worth making a fuss about, now. Whether the child bore Edward’s name or not, he would be like him, because the death and the new life—the anticipation of which had made the death just bearable—had a mystical link: and naturally she would bring him up by Mamma’s rules.

  Frau von Plessen, in her own apartments, which had seen so little of her of late, looked at her reflection in the glass and was satisfied that she was attired and coiffured with the utmost correctitude. Earlier in the day she had requested and been granted an audience with His Majesty. At the appointed time she made her stately way down stairs and along corridors—a walk of almost a mile; was announced and admitted and made her curtsy to Christian who—to give him his due—had forgotten the appointment. Knut had recently introduced a new game of cards, less dependent on skill, of which Christian had little, or upon luck, of which he also had little, than upon the ability to pretend that the cards one held or drew were more valuable than the ones held or drawn by the other players. It was in fact a game that anyone could win simply by sitting tight and from time to time adding money to the “pot” in the center of the table. He, Knut, Enevold and Conrad had been playing for three hours; and he was winning. In the excitement and the heat he had removed his coat and slung it over a chair, he had unbuttoned his waistcoat and completely forgotten his wife’s Mistress of the Robes. He had also been drinking fairly steadily, taking advantage of Struensee’s absence. Struensee was a wonderful fellow, after Knut the best fellow in the world, but he held some most uncomfortable views about eating and drinking.