The Lost Queen: The Tragedy of a Royal Marriage

by Norah Lofts

  He aid never, in all his life, carried anything except a weapon, not even a spray of flowers to a lady. Out of sheer astonishment he took the revolting object and carried it as far as the head of the stairs, where, as was right and proper, a subservient figure slid alongside and murmured, “Allow me, your Excellency,” and relieved him of it.

  Wolfgang Mantel had not slept soundly since his grandmother hid sent him a Christmas cake. She lived at Zell, near Hanover, where she kept a poor little inn; and she had seemed quite agreeable when he said that he wanted to see the world. But the cake had called him home. In its center was a pigeon feather and a sprig of the herb which represented regret—its spotted, bluish-green leaves were perfectly preserved and Mantel recognized it. The old woman could neither read nor write, but to the boy who, until he was twelve and grew ambitious, had been her companion, aid, confederate, the message was loud and clear. It said, Come home or you will rue it. He had not obeyed. He had eaten the cake, sharing it with his fellow pages; the feather and the sprig, now rapidly crumbling, he had placed among his hose. But since Christmas he had not slept well; waking jerkily and thinking, Is this what she warned me of? Or this? Or this?

  On this night he had wakened from his light, uneasy sleep, become aware of a stir, thought, “Ah, she knew!” pulled on a few clothes and with a candle in his hand, gone along to the Queen’s room. What was said there meant only one thing to him- -they were taking her away; and hustled out of the room when she dismissed them all in order that she might dress, he had slipped away, bundled his own absolute necessities together and then emerged determined, if possible, to go wherever she went, the beautiful, soft-spoken woman who was Queen of Denmark, who always said “please” when giving an order, and smiled.

  With his own meager belongings in a little pack slung over his shoulder, Mantel took the valise from General Eichstadt’s hand and, holding it, fell into the rear of the procession making its way down the grand staircase. Of them all he was the only one who felt no fear, no doubt at all. The old grandmother’s message inside the cake meant simply that she wanted him home. “Or you will rue it,” was a purely superficial thing. Before he had left the Sand Krug, tucked into the edge of the forest, his grandmother had thrown the knuckle bones for him and foretold, looking a little bewildered, that he would live to be eighty and be remembered in a book. So, in the dead hour of night, he walked confidently toward the waiting carriages, the gaping valise his passport.

  They drove through the night, slowly, trusting almost as much to the instinct of the horses as to the pale, uncertain light of the carriage lamps. Day began with a faint gray light in the east; and then, veil by veil, darkness peeled away until all was gray. Gray land, gray sky, gray sea; and presently in the gray a dark solidity of towers, of pinnacles.

  Elsinore! Caroline recognized it.

  And I am come here. With Alice. I knew it, all along.

  The seagulls wheeled and let loose their desolate cries.

  COPENHAGEN; JANUARY 1772

  The Blue Tower offered accommodation of varying kinds. There were rooms that were tolerably clean and fully furnished. Before Struensee had passed an act forbidding the practice it had been quite customary for fathers to obtain a cachet which enabled them to have unruly sons imprisoned there until they promised to mend their ways and be obedient: and nobody wanted his son back lousy and stinking.

  Below ground there were other, different places and as he was hustled, down and down, green scum on the walls, steps growing damper and the graveyard smell everywhere. Struensee began to feel genuine alarm. Knoller and his friends must be very sure of themselves to dare treat him so infamously.

  He, the law-giver, made one more stand for legality.

  “It is against the law to confine even a guilty man in circumstances detrimental to his health,” he said.

  “Your law no longer runs in Denmark,” Colonel Knoller said.

  The cell seemed completely dark when he was first pushed into it, and he was obliged to feel his way about it in order to find something to sit upon: there was nothing, no bed, no stool; just an evil-smelling, damp-feeling blanket which had been thrust in before the door clanged shut.

  Presently he saw that the cell was not quite unlighted; in the center of the ceiling there was a little grill, about the size of a book, through which the light of a lantern or a candle filtered.

  When he dressed he had picked up his watch: he now found that by standing near the little ray of light and holding the watch high towards the grill, he could just see its face. It was four o’clock. The Cabinet was due to meet at ten in the morning and to hearten himself he chose to believe that it still would. He had done so much, in so short a time, to put the government of the country on the right lines—not truly constitutional yet, but that would come—that he had faith in the Cabinet meeting, coup or no coup. Six hours to go.

  At four in the morning in January, in Denmark, it was cold everywhere, but the cold in this stone cell was bone-piercing; he was glad of the blanket, despite its smell. And huddled in it, he entertained thoughts of the kind about which Heer Reventil had spoken.

  Did you, Johann Frederick Struensee, work so fast and so hard because you sensed that your time might be short?

  Did you, by yielding to love, condemn yourself? What other reason could there be for the accusation of treason? Lessening the numbers of the army? Not bothering about the King’s signature? My son you have not the strength of character to support power.

  As though he were his own patient, he prescribed for himself; such thoughts must be opposed: think cheerfully.

  This was an attempt by the army to put the clock back, and it would come to nothing. He was known as the Friend of the People; the people, once they knew where he was, would pull down the place with their bare hands, stone by stone, in order to liberate him. The King, demented as he was, would ask for Struensee. And Caroline...Great Heaven, if he failed to present himself, look at Freddy, Tammi and the baby, and drink the usual cup of coffee...

  Treason! the voice in his head reminded him. Only in the act of love did you commit treason, and if on that account you are a traitor, so is she! What will they do to her?

  These were the standard night thoughts. Look at the time again. Half past four. The hours dragged their caterpillar length. Horrible thoughts attacked him and he fended them off, and at the end of a year it was six o’clock in the morning. The first workers would be stirring now, huddled into their clothes, cramming down hasty breakfasts. Apprentices with blue chill fingers would be taking down shop shutters. Would there be in the streets any sign of the coup overnight? Posters? Chalked notices? Would the whisper start and run swiftly around, “Struensee is in the Blue Tower.”?

  At eight o’clock, after what seemed a lifetime, a light flickered behind the bars of the door and there was the sound of a shuffling step. An ancient man set down a lantern and opened a hatch in the bars and held toward Struensee a bowl of something wet and dark.

  He was not hungry yet, but his other need was urgent. He voiced it. The old man seemed not to understand, or not to hear.

  “I can make it worth your while to treat me properly,” Struensee said. “For the hour or two I shall be here. Do you know who I am? Struensee; Count Struensee. By midday I shall be in a position to give you a pension.” There was no response at all. The man was deaf. Deliberately chosen for his job?

  He regretted that he had no money with him; nothing of value at all, save his watch and a ring which Caroline had given him; he was not yet desperate enough to part with either. Deliverance might come at any moment; it must. He made a motion of rejection toward the bowl; the jailer withdrew it, slammed the hatch and shuffled away.

  Despite the fact that he was not a dandy, and had accustomed himself, as a doctor, to look unmoved on blood and pus and vomit, he was an intensely fastidious man: it was with disgust that presently he used the farthest corner; a disgust not assuaged by the realization that some previous occupant of this dreadful p
lace had been driven to the same extremity.

  When I get out of here the first thing I do, the very first thing, will be to appoint prison inspectors. Laws are not enough; they are evaded.

  After an eternity it was ten o’clock, and light from the little grill was gray instead of yellow. Ten o’clock; and in the stately paneled room the Cabinet would be meeting now. His chair empty. He had chosen every member himself; Brandt was a personal friend and Rantzau had been one of stoutest upholders of the baby’s legitimacy. In half an hour now...

  The time until midday passed so slowly that twice he thought that his watch must have stopped: at last he began to visualize the possibility of the whole Cabinet having been arrested; of Colonel Knoller in the Prime Minister’s chair and his minions around the table, of Caroline under strict guard.

  A government could be overset; he knew, he had done it himself when he dismissed the old Council and instituted the Cabinet. But I hurt nobody, he thought angrily: Bernstorff, my most rigid opponent, simply went to Germany to live as a private gentleman on his estates. It was an honorable dismissal.

  Treason!

  He tried to be calm; he walked about the cell, five paces along each side, avoiding the corner of which he had again been forced to make use; he jumped and slapped his arms across his chest, restoring his circulation. He must keep his health and his sanity; when the next food was offered he must eat, though to do so in this place was a violating of every instinct.

  Again and again he reminded himself that nobody could know; they’d been so very careful. Again and again he reminded himself that even if Knoller had taken over completely he couldn’t simply push the ex-Prime Minister into an oubliette like this.

  Daylight faded and was replaced by candle or lantern light in the grill overhead. At six o’clock the old man offered what seemed to be the same bowl and Struensee took it. It held some warmish liquid, greasy and tasteless and some bread crusts which had to be fished out with the fingers.

  Struensee carefully wound his watch and looked at the time. Fourteen hours. For the first time it occurred to him that he was not going to be liberated. His friends were powerless, his enemies in control, and it was their will that he should stay here, treated as the worst felon should not be treated, until he died.

  He took the watch key and made a little scratch on the back of the watch; one day.

  On the second day he attempted to bribe the deaf man with a visible reward. He pulled off and held up the ring and then made gestures of sleeping, of spreading a mattress on the floor. It was impossible to sleep on the stone with only that one poor blanket. The old man appeared to understand; he nodded and grinned. And he took the ring. But he brought no bedding and Struensee was left to learn that it was possible to sleep on stone with only one poor blanket.

  The watch bore four little scratches when he woke from sleep to aggravated discomfort and realized that he was ill. Every bone in his body, not only those in contact with the stone, ached with a grinding ache; his throat was sore, and the shivering to which he was now accustomed alternated with hot sweating fits. Fever. And here, without medicine, lying in filth and untended, fever had one predictable end.

  His thoughts no longer had clarity or coherence. Death came to all. Death was preferable to living in this way. He had done his best. People were ungrateful. A good thing the old man was deaf, fever patients raved. Nobody must know. Poor Caroline, poor darling. Let her off lightly. Pity those who never knew such joy. Water, I need water. I tried to arrange it so that no one should lack any necessity; now I have not so much as a cup of water. I shall die. Death is the only lasting cure.

  So he died, not easily, but quickly; and presently was resurrected, in a bed, in a sunny room. Strange, he’d never believed in life after death, had flung that away with everything else that his old father preached—except love thy neighbor. However, here he was, and comfortable, but weak, weak like the newborn; perhaps born again. Sleep.

  When next he woke he was in the same bed, the same room, but less weak. This time he could turn his head and see the soldier on guard by the door; and as he turned his head something rasped on the blanket. Feebly he moved a flaccid hand and felt the beard, quite long. And inside his head his wits and his senses, temporarily scattered, fell into line again. In the weak, old man’s voice that went with the beard, he said, “Where am I?”

  The young guard jumped as though he had been stabbed.

  “It is not permitted to talk, Excellency.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is an order. Forty lashes for disobedience.”

  Among other things he had forbidden flogging in the army except for the most heinous offences such as striking a superior officer. Your law no longer runs in Denmark.

  Muting a voice already almost inaudible, he said, “How long have I been here?”

  The boy—he was nothing more, probably one of the last victims of the compulsory conscription at twelve—said, “Three weeks.” Then he opened the door and looked out into a whitewashed corridor and came back, slightly reassured.

  “The Blue Tower?” Struensee asked.

  “Yes; the hospital.”

  “You have been on duty all the time?”

  “Eight hours each day, Excellency. To talk is forbidden. I am supposed to inform…”

  “Just tell me one thing. Did I rave?”

  The boy said, “Constantly”; and then, with the unlettered man’s acute perception, he answered the unasked question. “Nothing to be made head or tail of. Doctor’s stuff. You were afraid you would not pass your examinations and once you tried to innoc...innoc...you know the word, everybody, to save them from smallpox.”

  He hoped that that was true. And now his most urgent question must be asked in sidelong fashion.

  “Is His Majesty well?”

  “He is sick in the head; Prince Frederick is Regent.”

  “And Her Majesty?”

  “She is in the castle of Kronborg in Elsinore. It is now necessary, Excellency, that I should report…”

  He lay and thought, for the hundredth time, that if anyone had known anything, he would have come forward in July. Nobody knew; nobody could prove anything.

  I shall deny it, completely and categorically, to the last; and so will she, so will she...

  CARLTON HOUSE, LONDON; FEBRUARY 1772

  “It has been my death blow,” the Princess-Dowager said.

  George looking down on the supine, frail body of the woman who had always been so strong and so resilient knew that this was no exaggeration. The news from Denmark, killing Mamma’s will to live, had killed Mamma.

  It had been a severe shock to him, too; and deep inside himself he admitted, sadly, that he was not resilient, not equipped to withstand shocks, or even minor irritations. And there were so many; not only political: his brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland, cited as co-respondent in the Grovenor divorce suit and told to pay £13,000 in damages and costs, and then deserting his partner-in-guilt and marrying—everyone said they were married—a widow, with eyelashes a yard long. Everyone said that Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was married to another widow with whom he had lived openly for years. And now this!

  What is wrong with this family?

  He had to find something to say to comfort Mamma.

  “It may not be true. Struensee had many enemies and Caro had little sense. When everything is told, her name may be cleared.”

  She was past the point now where protecting George was a main aim.

  She said weakly, “Caroline is guilty.”

  ‘That has not been proved.”

  “It will be. She is. I’ve known—ever since I met her in Lüneberg. In order to live I made myself disbelieve.”

  It was impossible to say, Then why, in God’s name, didn’t you do something? Not to a dying woman.

  “But she is your sister,” Mamma said. “You mustn’t let anything—awful—happen to her. You are King of England.”

  So I am; I wish I weren’t. What am I exp
ected to do? Make war on Denmark because they call my sister slut?

  “Nothing will happen to Caroline, Mamma. At the worst, divorce; and nobody thinks much of that, these days.”

  “Death-in-life,” Mamma said, her voice growing weaker. “Like Dorothea of Zell. Forty years. Caroline is twenty.” She closed her eyes, visualizing behind her closed lids a forty-years’ imprisonment; once a day a ride in a closed carriage, four miles out, four miles back, always the same road. And her hands remembered the warm, love-enhanced vitality of the daughter she had embraced at Lüneberg. Death would be kinder.

  “Get her home, George,” she said, opening her eyes and focusing them with some difficulty on the face of her firstborn. “She is your sister. Bring her home.”

  “You may rely on me, Mamma, to do my best.”

  “I know,” the Princess Dowager said. She produced a smile, astonishingly sweet on her ravaged face. “I know. George, always my good boy...”

  KRONBORG; JANUARY—APRIL 1772

  At Elsinore time lagged, too, though Caroline had her baby, some books, and a piano and the company of the people appointed to attend her. Not one of them was well-disposed toward her, and though, on the day following her arrest there were comings and goings between the castle and the capital, nobody volunteered a crumb of information or seemed able to answer her questions about what was happening. She thought it unwise to inquire about Struensee by name and she was consumed with anxiety. Mantel tried to talk to the servants who knew, or pretended to know, nothing. Alice volunteered to go into Copenhagen and find out what was going on; but she was stopped at the gate and informed that though she was free to leave, if she did so she would not be allowed to come back.

  On the third day, however, Sir Robert Keith, the new British Minister to Denmark arrived and was admitted and left alone with her. It was only by the exercise of severe self-control that she restrained herself from asking what had happened to Count Struensee; but she managed it.