The Lost Queen: The Tragedy of a Royal Marriage

by Norah Lofts

  “Baron Juel-Wind is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”

  Then for a day and a half Smith hunted the Chief Justice who had more lackeys and they more insolent than any he had ever seen. He was told to stand back there, to get out of the way, to give his name, to state his business—and at the mention of a pass to Kronborg you’d think he had leprosy at the least. Both at his residence and at the Exchequer good care was taken that nobody who had not been sieved through several minor departments’ meshes ever got within spitting distance of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. So there was only one thing to do.

  It was a risk. The two chestnut horses were coming along at a spanking pace, the light carriage bouncing behind them. Smith, like a man intent upon suicide, stepped out in front of them and gave the secret horseman’s word. They checked as though confronted by a ten foot wall. The coachman, cursing, aimed a blow at Smith, which, if it had landed might have removed an ear. Missing him, he lashed the horses. Smith, moving alongside said, “You’ll only mar their hides. They’ll stand till my business is done,” and went to the carriage window, already rolled down so that the Chief Justice could look out and ask what the devil was happening.

  “It was,” Smith said, “the only way I could get near you, your Excellency. I tried and tried. I just want a pass to go to Kronborg.” And even on this aristocratic, well-fed face there was that same look.

  “Nothing political,” Smith said hastily. “It’s just that there’s a girl there, a girl I want to many. And I can’t tell her without a pass.”

  “You must be mad,” the Chief Justice said, “accosting me...”

  He put his head further out of the window and shouted, “Drive on, man!”

  “They’re a nice pair,” Smith said, “it’d be a pity to break their nerve. And do no good. They’ll stand till judgment day, or till I get my pass.”

  And it was true that the whip was whistling, and striking without result.

  “I just want,” Smith said, “leave to go and see Alice; that’s all.”

  Oddly enough the Chief Justice remembered Alice, who had died with her upper teeth driven through her lower lip, mouth sealed, screaming through her nose. “A girl I want marry.”

  “Alice is no longer at Kronborg,” he said in his best judicial manner. “It would be a waste of time to look for her there.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “That I cannot tell you. She was involved with this most unfortunate affair with her mistress. But she had nothing to add to the accumulating evidence, and my concern with her ended.”

  “Did she go back to England?”

  “Probably. She is not at Kronborg; so you are wasting your time, and mine.”

  “I’m sorry,” Smith said, “but at least now I know.”

  He walked until he was level with the horses, “Off you go, my beauties...”

  Probably in England; a girl called Alice, with no other name, no roots. Go and get drunk, what else was there to do? But before he was even half drunk he was arrested, jailed for two days and released, and given a line in the records, “William Smith, an English officer—for obstruction on the public highway.”

  He never knew that he had been lucky. The authorities learned that he had left Denmark with his master in September 1770; he could therefore, however severely racked, contribute nothing. Let him go.

  Let him go to England; and hunt and search and ask questions, and follow trails that led nowhere, look into the face of every woman and sometimes—very rarely—imagine that he saw...and quicken his pace toward the inevitable disappointment. Pass on. Begin again.

  Alice rotting in salt water, Smith tramping through streets and lanes, Caroline and Struensee, awaiting trial for treason; all victims of love.

  Prince Frederick, Regent of Denmark, asked the British Minister to wait upon him, and Sir Robert went promptly but unwillingly. He guessed what the talk would be about, and he wished that he were in a stronger position. Within a few minutes he was surprised to find that the Regent shared that wish.

  “Do you think that His Majesty of England fully understands his sister’s peril?”

  “I have written to him in the plainest possible terms.”

  “Then why does he do nothing?”

  “His position is difficult,” Sir Robert said. “His Majesty is an extremely reasonable man. He would hesitate to provoke an international incident over one misguided woman even though she is his sister.”

  “England once went to war over a pirate’s ear.”

  Astounded, Sir Robert said, “Is Your Royal Highness suggesting...?” Could it possibly be that they wanted war, with their country so nearly bankrupt, and torn by internal dissension?

  “War would mean ruin for Denmark. But some show of firmness; some support for her—whatever she has done—must come from England. From her own brother. And soon. Before the trial. His intervention would be understood and accepted—I can promise you that.”

  Leaden-footed laggard, he had only to send one of the famous British warships and threaten Kronborg, insist upon her being handed over, and the whole filthy business would be done with.

  “I feel that His Majesty thinks intervention before the trial might look like undue interference with the process of law in another country.” Sir Robert’s diplomatic manner deserted him. “If only she had not signed that damnable paper. If only I had been there, or anyone else capable of advising her. Poor child, she maintains that she was tricked into signing.”

  “The fact remains that she signed; and Struensee confessed. If she is tried she will be found guilty. Of treason. She may lose her head. Do they realize that—in England?”

  “I had not visualized so extreme...” Sir Robert said. “Why, I can think of no erring Queen being so treated since Henry the Eighth had Catherine Howard’s head off. Your Royal Highness; it would brand Denmark as barbarous. Even George the First was content to imprison his wife and that is more than seventy years ago.”

  “He was her husband,” Prince Frederick said curtly; “he may have entertained some lingering sentiment...Struensee will certainly die, as he deserves to. She is equally culpable, indeed she has claimed to be even more so and since some semblance of justice must be maintained, she can hardly hope to escape.” He got up and began to walk about the room, his deformity more obvious than Sir Robert had ever seen it. “There is this to remember too. I talked with Baron Juel-Wind this afternoon. Some of the evidence he has collected is of a most unsavory nature—servants examining bed linen, that kind of thing. Squalid. One firm move by her brother could prevent all this being dragged into the open. You understand me?”

  “I do, indeed. I will write again.”

  “Very frankly? Very firmly? And I will write to the Danish Ambassador in London in the same manner. I concern myself in this matter, Sir Robert, because a trial and the conviction—which I fear is inevitable—will strike a severe blow at royalty, as an institution. Your great poet wrote something about kings being hedged about by divinity. That was long ago. The hedge is thin now; this kind of thing could breach it forever.”

  “I understand,” Sir Robert said. “I will write again.”

  And for the love of God, Prince Frederick said to himself when he was alone, let George move, under the banner of brotherly love, because if he does not, if she is tried and condemned, I shall be forced to make my final move and that would be a tragedy for Denmark; I have it in me to be an excellent Regent...

  He thought of the bright shining girl whom he had met at Roskilde and with whom he had instantly fallen in love. A silly girl, frail and indiscreet, choosing a lover of low birth who had betrayed her, and then, still doting, betraying herself in an attempt to save him. Had I been born five years earlier, and with the level shoulders that thousands upon thousands of men take as their right and never think about and are never grateful for...There was no profit in that line of thought. We are as we are and we do what we must—-or rather what we can.

  PART SIX
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br />   COPENHAGEN; KRONBORG; MARCH—APRIL 1772

  On a bleak day in the last week of March one hundred and thirty-five men, the “Notables” of Denmark, met in the Great Hall of the Exchequer to consider the evidence for and against the Queen.

  England had made no move, so the decision of this tribunal might be a matter of life or death; but the procedure was singularly lifeless; a brooding over of depositions taken beforehand; a speech for the prosecution, a speech for the defense and more brooding.

  As the dreary business dragged on Baron Juel-Wind regretted more and more that he had not paid heed to the Prince Regent’s suggestion that Struensee’s confession and the Queen’s admission should be used as a cause for divorce and the whole thing left there, without all this business of prurient-minded ladies-in-waiting and coarse-minded serving girls. It was disgusting, much of it had little to do with law as he understood it and it was boring; he relieved the tedium by trying to frame sentences in which the evidence of Fräulein von Ebhn and Anna Peterson for example, could be purged of indecency and made fit to go down in the records. As a variation he wondered what on earth Advocate Uldall could possibly say when it came to the defense.

  Uldall was perhaps the best advocate in Denmark and it was the Prince Regent who had urged that he be employed. “It is necessary to remember that until she is found guilty and deposed, she is Queen of Denmark. She must have the best. What I mean is there must be no grounds for criticism afterward.”

  So Caroline had the best.

  Uldall began by pointing out that as Danish law stood—as he hoped it would always stand—a confession was not sufficient to condemn the person who made it. A confession in itself, unbacked by outside evidence, had no value; a person might make a confession while temporarily insane, ill, intoxicated or activated by a wish to help another. Nor, he held, did Her Majesty’s signature have any significance; in his experience he’d known women who had signed away their rights to money and property; given the right circumstances any woman would sign anything. And it may have been observed that Her Majesty’s signature on this particular document varied somewhat from her usual one...Baron Schack moved in his chair and fixed his eye on the sleet sliding down the window.

  The confession meant nothing, the signature indicated some strain; and what of the independent evidence? If these things had been going on for two years, for two years, why had nothing been done, or said? Servants could hardly be expected to interfere, but all the ladies-in-waiting were well-connected women, capable of understanding that in a Queen adultery was treason; why had not one of them made a protest or a complaint?

  Indeed one might ask what there was to complain of, to protest against. Not one of the depositions contained any evidence at all of the accused ever having been found in even a moderately compromising situation.

  He begged his listeners to study again the depositions, so full of details, culled by such sharp eyes and ears; was it feasible that over a period of two years these same sharp eyes and ears had not seen or heard anything more positive, direct and convincing?

  Bit by bit he demolished and ridiculed the so-called evidence; his defense was skilled and spirited; but the two confessions weighed more heavy than any argument and the squalid nature of some of the so-called evidence told against Caroline; a Queen who laid herself open to such suspicion was—whether guilty of the ultimate act or not—unfit to be first lady in the land. She must be deposed; and how could that be done unless the verdict was guilty?

  Not all, but enough of the Notables were influenced by Juliana, who in her undercover campaign against Christian had learned the effectiveness of the unfinished sentence, the sigh, the look of concern. She could say, “She is still very young...” in such a way that any man listening could visualize a young reckless creature who, having got away with this, would think she could get away with anything, and proceed, by indulging in further affairs, to bring more disgrace upon herself and upon Denmark.

  The verdict of guilty was necessary, and it was brought. Then began hot debate as to what was to happen to her. She was guilty of adultery, therefore of treason. The extreme penalty was legal; some believed that it should be exacted; others held that life imprisonment in some remote place would be sufficient punishment. And even some of these were not blind to the danger of plots; already Count von Bulow and Baron Schimmelmann had been so vociferous in the Queen’s defense that it had been thought wise to arrest them.

  On a day when all signs indicated that Caroline might go to the block, the Prince Regent talked with his mother.

  “It will be an atrocity,” he said. “And you must stop it.”

  “I? My dear boy, what can I do against a hundred and thirty-five men, backed up by the law?”

  “They most of them eat out of your hand,” he said sourly; “they regard you as the leader of the revolution, the one who saved Denmark from Struensee and anarchy. They will do what you indicate to be your wish. And it would be a not unpleasant role; your plea is ready made. A Queen yourself you have a natural aversion to the cutting off of Queens’ heads.”

  He watched her carefully. George of England had let him down; the moderate opinion among the Notables had let him down. Would she?

  She said, “Naturally I have an aversion. But to be honest I shrink from the responsibility. If she lives and there are plots...After all, people like von Bulow and Schimmelmann cannot remain in custody forever...it could mean civil war.”

  “People who shrink from responsibility should not assume power.”

  “Power! I have no power, Frederick. Oh, they ask my opinion and sometimes take my advice; they know my devotion to Denmark and I am old, considered knowledgeable. But I am only Mother of the Regent...”

  He looked at her as though he were about to shoot her, taking careful aim.

  “And that not for long, perhaps. If they pass sentence of death on the Queen they can look for another Regent.”

  Straight through the heart!

  “You...you couldn’t,” she stammered.

  “There is no law that I know of that compels me to be Regent. I refuse absolutely to be nominal head of a state that reverts to medieval barbarity. I have sedulously refrained from any interference in this business; I am not interested in whether sheets were soiled, or by whom. I am interested in my own reputation and I refuse to go down in history as the Regent who signed the death warrant for an unfortunate girl who committed an error of taste.”

  Rage restored her; after all the work and the waiting; the hope, the despair, the devotion to his interest, and now with complete success within reach.

  “Anyone would think you were in love with her too,” she said with the utmost spite.

  “The use of the word ‘too’ postulates the existence of others who loved her,” he said, coolly. “Who did? Her mother, her brother who shipped her off to marry an idiot? Christian, infatuated with his page boy? Struensee who at a turn of the screw betrayed her? A sorry company; and I am to join them because, in the year 1772, I refuse to associate myself with something out of the Middle Ages? Believe what you like, so long as you also believe that I mean what I say. If that crowd of old muttonheads passes the death sentence, I resign.”

  Run and tell your minions that.

  She did not run, but she made haste; she did not mention the threat. She spoke in her usual, sidelong way about the climate of opinion in these modern times, the quality of mercy, especially where the young and foolish were concerned, of her own natural feeling about the one who had been her daughter-in-law. Most of them were glad to be given so definite a lead; even those who from conviction or a backwash of disgust were willing to pass the death sentence had recoiled a little when it came to the point of considering how a Queen should be beheaded. For Struensee, and for Brandt, his accomplice in all his doings, the ax would serve; but more than two hundred years earlier that old Bluebeard of England, Henry VIII had thought it necessary to send to France for a swordsman to sever Anne Boleyn’s little neck. Must they do l
ikewise, or was there in Denmark...? They were happy enough to concede.

  On April 9 Baron Juel-Wind went to Kronborg and in the presence of the Castle’s Governor, Lieutenant Colonel von Hauch, informed Caroline of her sentence. She was to be divorced; her name was to be removed from the liturgy; and she was to spend the rest of her life in the Castle of Aarbourg, in the Jutland peninsula.

  It meant nothing to her. Struensee and Brandt had already been sentenced. From them the law was to exact the extreme penalty. First their right hands—those tools of treachery—were to be severed; then their heads were to cut off; they were to be disemboweled, cut into four quarters and exposed to the gaze of the morbid crowd and the sharp beaks of birds.

  It was too horrible to think of, yet it must be thought of day and night, night and day. This, this was the bloody, obscene end of the path she had chosen on a sunny afternoon; this was the price of a love that harmed nobody. She was to blame for it all; Johann, Brandt—and Alice. She could neither eat or sleep, she could not sit still; she could hardly bear to look on her baby, the child of love. Better a thousand times never to have been born than to have been brought into a world where such vile things could happen.

  Only death, she knew, could relieve her of the burden of guilt. When she thought of Johann, so unfailingly kind; that right hand, that head packed with knowledge, good sense and good intentions, the body that had taught her ecstasy...Not to be borne. Let me die too! Twice, since those who, at the beginning had no news about where he was, and later had no news of Alice, had been all too ready to tell her about the sentence passed on him, she had tried to kill herself, because this nagging torment, the burden of guilt was not to be borne.

  Once, on the ramparts, where she was allowed to walk and where the wall was breast high, she had leaned over and seen far below the flagstones of the courtyard. One dive from the top of the rampart, no more decision needed than it took to put a horse to an unfamiliar fence, and her skull would crack like an egg and this misery would be ended. Mantel had come and taken her by the knees as she heaved herself up and pulled her back. “When the gods call,” he said, “they send a messenger. You are not yet called.” He’d given her a draught of one of the concoctions which he had learned to make from his old grandmother, he said. It made her sleep, and the next time, and the next time, presented with such a dose she pretended to drink, hid the glass, and when five doses were there, secret and hidden, had swallowed the lot. Go to sleep for ever; put an end to this. Whatever it was, it must have lost potency by being kept; she slept, but she soon woke and the torture went on.