I'm planning a series of write-ups on "Danish kings and their favorites". This is the first installment, and subsequent installments, which have been outlined but not yet written, will cover Christian VII and Struensee.
Obvious caveats are obvious: this is all from a combination of Wikipedia (English, German, and Danish, the last thanks to helpful Google translate) and a biographie romancee by a guy who thinks FS was French, along with other factual gaffes. I have ordered more academic-looking books on Struensee, but who knows if I will read them, much less write them up--my German is slow, the post is slow, and by the time the books arrive, I will probably be on to some other obsession. (I considered sending one to Selena for the free shipping + 2-5 business day delivery, but I hear she's really overcrowded these days. ;))
So here goes. Take EVERYTHING with several grains of salt, and I reserve the right to retract things later. (And yes, I *am*, predictably, half-seriously wondering how far you can get with Danish on 3 years of German and 1 year of Old Norse. ;))
Intro So to understand how Struensee got into power, you have to understand Christian VII, the mentally ill king who let him get all that power, and to understand Christian VII, you have to go two generations back to behold the propagation of trauma.
The story of Grandpa Christian VI and Dad Frederik V has some interesting parallels with Cosimo III and Gian Gastone, my favorite dysfunctional Medici. (Seriously, the Danes immediately started making me want to give them fix-its too.)
Cast of characters Christian VI: King of Denmark 1730-1746 Frederik V: King of Denmark 1746-1766, son of Christian VI Count Adam Moltke: Favorite of Frederik V Christian VII: King of Denmark 1766-1808, son of Frederik V Caroline Matilda: Queen of Denmark 1766-1772, d. 1775, daughter of Frederick Prince of Wales, wife of Christian VII Doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee: Favorite of Christian VII, in power 1770-1772.
Frederik V Christian VI was your everyday autocratic religious bigot. He made everything fun illegal. He was an unpopular king (and dad). Major difference between him and Cosimo: instead of being strong-willed and free-spirited like Marguerite-Louise, Christian's wife was exactly like him. So their son, young Frederik V, grows up with a lot of parental emotional neglect and religious trauma.
Frederik turns into a freethinking/loosely Christian libertine, much like Gian Gastone. It gets so bad that Christian VI considers disinheriting him. But he is stopped because he can't legally do that any more than FW can. So at age 23 (quite a bit younger than poor GG, who had to put up with his father until he was 53), Frederik becomes Frederik V.
Also like GG, Frederik is a super laid-back, friendly, people-pleasing sort who wants everyone to be happy. As soon as he comes to power, he makes himself popular by agreeing to revoke all the Ridiculous Laws (TM). Theater is allowed again! But he does no ruling himself, because he's too busy drinking and having sex with (female) prostitutes. He's not one of those dime-a-dozen powerful men, like August the Strong, who takes advantage of his position to have tons of sex. Frederik basically abdicates power in order to treat orgies as his full-time job (again, much like GG). He also drinks non-stop and is too incapacitated to rule even if he wanted to (which he very much doesn't). His installment in a series of short bios on Danish kings I found is subtitled "the reign without a ruler."
Like Gian Gastone, Frederik gives total control to his "favorite", whom he's named as his chamberlain. Frederik's chamberlain is Count Moltke, who will get a whole section to himself in this post.
In the end, Frederik drinks himself to death and spends several years severely ill, so there is a lot of hanging out in bed while slowly dying (sound familiar?). He also does another thing GG does, which is end up bedridden after falling down drunk and breaking his leg (in Frederik's case; ankle in GG's case).
When Frederik dies in Moltke's arms, age 42, he is sincerely mourned for the same reasons as GG was: because he revoked all the bad laws and allowed tolerance to reign. His last words could have been Gian Gastone's: "It is a great consolation to me in my last hour that I have never wilfully offended anyone, and that there is not a drop of blood on my hands."
Major differences between Frederik and Gian Gastone:
- Frederik doesn't have the same social anxiety and agoraphobic tendencies GG did, so he doesn't spend his entire reign in bed. He's actually popular because he likes visiting farms and taking walks where his subjects can meet him, and going hunting. At least until the alcohol-induced illnesses and injuries kick in. Then it's bedridden time.
- The chamberlain favorite, Count Moltke, is not a former peasant like Giuliano Dami, but born nobility, which in his case means he is both prepared to rule and allowed to do it (as we'll see later, Struensee's non-noble birth was a major strike against him).
- Frederik will actually sign off on whatever Moltke puts in front of him (GG: "I do not sign things if I can help it!"), so the council of nobles actually gets some work done. And so the country of Denmark turns into an oligarchy-in-practice and somewhat flourishes, instead of going down the toilet because Tuscany basically turned into an anarchy-in-practice. This is the Bernstorff era in Denmark; Moltke may be the most powerful man in the country because of his influence over Frederik, but Bernstorff rules foreign policy.
- Frederik's first marriage is functional. He and his wife Louisa, one of G2's daughters, are both generally friendly people and get along and have enough sex to carry on the family line. They're not in love, but they also don't refuse to sleep with each other. He's generally nice to her, and she looks the other way while he has sex with every prostitute in the country. (He does have two long-term mistresses, but he's way more into casual, no-strings-attached sex (for which he paid), and even the two mistresses, judging by their Wikipedia articles, may not have been cases of super romantic love.)
So it's like a slightly less extreme version of the last of the Medici. Which is why this write-up is not called "The Last of the Oldenburgs." ;)
Moltke Count (dammit, I had to delete "Graf" and start over :P, but at least I did remember the word eventually) Adam Gottlob Moltke started out as a page at the Danish court. He was assigned to be the personal chamber page of crown prince Frederik as soon as Christian VI became king.* Moltke and Frederik became very close.
* Christian VI, you probably have forgotten but I remember, is the guy who became king right before Katte's death, and thus recalled Lovenorn, leaving von Johnn to write us the report of Katte's execution, much to Lovenorn's relief because he was in very hot water with FW. So when Moltke becomes personal page to future Frederik V, it's 1730.
Now, while my brain immediately went to a Fritz/Peter or Fritz/Fredersdorf place, as you can see, I checked the dates and it doesn't work: in 1730, when they met, Frederik was only 7, and his new chamberlain Moltke was 18. And unlike Fritz, or GG and his chamberlain Giuliano, Frederik seems to have been straight. I have found no hints of anything between him and Moltke; Frederik seems to have treated him as a surrogate father figure (actually calling him "father" in his letters). And given his relationship with his actual father, you can see why he was in need of a surrogate.
Wikipedia articles differ in how much Moltke enabled vs. unsuccessfully tried to restrain the nonstop drinking and orgies. There seem to be some letters from Frederik to Moltke apologizing for being so depraved, but whatever Moltke may have said or tried to convince him of, it obviously neither stopped the orgies and alcoholism nor harmed their relationship. So other Wiki articles say he just enabled Frederik's drinking and sex.
Moltke specifically avoided public positions that might put him on the level of the other nobles, and relied instead on his position as chamberlain and BFF to get things done.
When Frederik became king, suddenly "chamberlain" was not a meaningless honorary position, but the thing that allowed Moltke to be around him night and day and influence him, becoming the eminence grise of Denmark.
[Fritz: Not on my watch, Peter!]
Once in power, Moltke appears to have worked for the good of the country. He was not one of your radicals; he was opposed to abolishing serfdom, but he apparently did the thing Voltaire did, which was make his own estates prosperous precisely by treating his serfs well. He got very rich, but apparently through legal and ethical ways. People suspected him of lining his pockets, but apparently no evidence could be found (maybe he had it destroyed, who knows! but Wikipedia seems to believe he was clean).
When Struensee comes to power and started reforming left and right, Moltke refuses to support him, so he gets dismissed without a pension. But Moltke also refuses to join the conspiracy to overthrow Struensee. Apparently his memoirs also refuse to gossip and are very matter-of-fact. I get a kind of "upstanding, conservative, cautious" vibe from this guy, at least from Wikipedia.
Frederik's second marriage (Some anecdotes I had to tuck in at the end here.)
After Queen Louise dies, and Frederik V has to remarry, he doesn't really want to.
Frederik V: Unless maybe I can get another English princess?
English: Sorry, no English princesses available.
[ViennaJoe: I said I wanted to marry a sister of Isabella's if I had to remarry at all, but no, no dice for me. You have my sympathy, Frederik.]
Frederik: Hmm. Okay, maybe I can marry Moltke's unmarried daughter? Moltke's my favorite person in the whole world. Any daughter of his is sure to be great!
Moltke: *quiet panic*
Moltke: *marries his daughter off asap*
Moltke: Sorry, Your Majesty, I have no unmarried daughters at this time either!
Now, it is reeeally interesting to speculate why Moltke might do that. I immediately thought of Mazarin, of course! (cahn: reminder, Louis XIV wanted to marry one of Mazarin's nieces (the Mancini sisters); another man might have gone for being the king's practically father-in-law, but Mazarin said, "Nope, you will marry a Spanish princess for the good of the country!")
So is Moltke in it for the good of the country? Or does he think he's got nothing to gain and everything to lose? He's got the king's ear 100% already, this marriage will just expose him to the envy and hatred of the other nobles. And if the marriage *doesn't* work out, what then? Or does he maybe not want his daughter married to an alcoholic who does nothing but participate in orgies, no matter how nice said depraved alcoholic may be? All of the above? Who can know!
Anyway, Frederik ends up married to Juliana Maria, EC's sister (and future host of Ivan VI's siblings after their Siberian stint). This marriage does not go nearly as well as Frederik's first. It doesn't go spectacularly badly, they even have kids, but Juliana's much less laid-back than Louise, much more of a stickler for etiquette (this is explained as a German court thing), and much less forgiving of the non-stop orgies. Later, after she gains power after Struensee's fall, when she's the widowed queen mother regent, she will apparently propose a chastity commission based on MT's! (I gather this one does not take off.)
[MT: Those super nice and laid-back husbands who sleep around, I know the type well. You have my sympathy, Juliana.]
Danish kings and their favorites: Frederik V and Moltke
Obvious caveats are obvious: this is all from a combination of Wikipedia (English, German, and Danish, the last thanks to helpful Google translate) and a biographie romancee by a guy who thinks FS was French, along with other factual gaffes. I have ordered more academic-looking books on Struensee, but who knows if I will read them, much less write them up--my German is slow, the post is slow, and by the time the books arrive, I will probably be on to some other obsession. (I considered sending one to Selena for the free shipping + 2-5 business day delivery, but I hear she's really overcrowded these days. ;))
So here goes. Take EVERYTHING with several grains of salt, and I reserve the right to retract things later. (And yes, I *am*, predictably, half-seriously wondering how far you can get with Danish on 3 years of German and 1 year of Old Norse. ;))
Intro
So to understand how Struensee got into power, you have to understand Christian VII, the mentally ill king who let him get all that power, and to understand Christian VII, you have to go two generations back to behold the propagation of trauma.
The story of Grandpa Christian VI and Dad Frederik V has some interesting parallels with Cosimo III and Gian Gastone, my favorite dysfunctional Medici. (Seriously, the Danes immediately started making me want to give them fix-its too.)
Cast of characters
Christian VI: King of Denmark 1730-1746
Frederik V: King of Denmark 1746-1766, son of Christian VI
Count Adam Moltke: Favorite of Frederik V
Christian VII: King of Denmark 1766-1808, son of Frederik V
Caroline Matilda: Queen of Denmark 1766-1772, d. 1775, daughter of Frederick Prince of Wales, wife of Christian VII
Doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee: Favorite of Christian VII, in power 1770-1772.
Frederik V
Christian VI was your everyday autocratic religious bigot. He made everything fun illegal. He was an unpopular king (and dad). Major difference between him and Cosimo: instead of being strong-willed and free-spirited like Marguerite-Louise, Christian's wife was exactly like him. So their son, young Frederik V, grows up with a lot of parental emotional neglect and religious trauma.
Frederik turns into a freethinking/loosely Christian libertine, much like Gian Gastone. It gets so bad that Christian VI considers disinheriting him. But he is stopped because he can't legally do that any more than FW can. So at age 23 (quite a bit younger than poor GG, who had to put up with his father until he was 53), Frederik becomes Frederik V.
Also like GG, Frederik is a super laid-back, friendly, people-pleasing sort who wants everyone to be happy. As soon as he comes to power, he makes himself popular by agreeing to revoke all the Ridiculous Laws (TM). Theater is allowed again! But he does no ruling himself, because he's too busy drinking and having sex with (female) prostitutes. He's not one of those dime-a-dozen powerful men, like August the Strong, who takes advantage of his position to have tons of sex. Frederik basically abdicates power in order to treat orgies as his full-time job (again, much like GG). He also drinks non-stop and is too incapacitated to rule even if he wanted to (which he very much doesn't). His installment in a series of short bios on Danish kings I found is subtitled "the reign without a ruler."
Like Gian Gastone, Frederik gives total control to his "favorite", whom he's named as his chamberlain. Frederik's chamberlain is Count Moltke, who will get a whole section to himself in this post.
In the end, Frederik drinks himself to death and spends several years severely ill, so there is a lot of hanging out in bed while slowly dying (sound familiar?). He also does another thing GG does, which is end up bedridden after falling down drunk and breaking his leg (in Frederik's case; ankle in GG's case).
When Frederik dies in Moltke's arms, age 42, he is sincerely mourned for the same reasons as GG was: because he revoked all the bad laws and allowed tolerance to reign. His last words could have been Gian Gastone's: "It is a great consolation to me in my last hour that I have never wilfully offended anyone, and that there is not a drop of blood on my hands."
Major differences between Frederik and Gian Gastone:
- Frederik doesn't have the same social anxiety and agoraphobic tendencies GG did, so he doesn't spend his entire reign in bed. He's actually popular because he likes visiting farms and taking walks where his subjects can meet him, and going hunting. At least until the alcohol-induced illnesses and injuries kick in. Then it's bedridden time.
- The chamberlain favorite, Count Moltke, is not a former peasant like Giuliano Dami, but born nobility, which in his case means he is both prepared to rule and allowed to do it (as we'll see later, Struensee's non-noble birth was a major strike against him).
- Frederik will actually sign off on whatever Moltke puts in front of him (GG: "I do not sign things if I can help it!"), so the council of nobles actually gets some work done. And so the country of Denmark turns into an oligarchy-in-practice and somewhat flourishes, instead of going down the toilet because Tuscany basically turned into an anarchy-in-practice. This is the Bernstorff era in Denmark; Moltke may be the most powerful man in the country because of his influence over Frederik, but Bernstorff rules foreign policy.
- Frederik's first marriage is functional. He and his wife Louisa, one of G2's daughters, are both generally friendly people and get along and have enough sex to carry on the family line. They're not in love, but they also don't refuse to sleep with each other. He's generally nice to her, and she looks the other way while he has sex with every prostitute in the country. (He does have two long-term mistresses, but he's way more into casual, no-strings-attached sex (for which he paid), and even the two mistresses, judging by their Wikipedia articles, may not have been cases of super romantic love.)
So it's like a slightly less extreme version of the last of the Medici. Which is why this write-up is not called "The Last of the Oldenburgs." ;)
Moltke
Count (dammit, I had to delete "Graf" and start over :P, but at least I did remember the word eventually) Adam Gottlob Moltke started out as a page at the Danish court. He was assigned to be the personal chamber page of crown prince Frederik as soon as Christian VI became king.* Moltke and Frederik became very close.
* Christian VI, you probably have forgotten but I remember, is the guy who became king right before Katte's death, and thus recalled Lovenorn, leaving von Johnn to write us the report of Katte's execution, much to Lovenorn's relief because he was in very hot water with FW. So when Moltke becomes personal page to future Frederik V, it's 1730.
Now, while my brain immediately went to a Fritz/Peter or Fritz/Fredersdorf place, as you can see, I checked the dates and it doesn't work: in 1730, when they met, Frederik was only 7, and his new chamberlain Moltke was 18. And unlike Fritz, or GG and his chamberlain Giuliano, Frederik seems to have been straight. I have found no hints of anything between him and Moltke; Frederik seems to have treated him as a surrogate father figure (actually calling him "father" in his letters). And given his relationship with his actual father, you can see why he was in need of a surrogate.
Wikipedia articles differ in how much Moltke enabled vs. unsuccessfully tried to restrain the nonstop drinking and orgies. There seem to be some letters from Frederik to Moltke apologizing for being so depraved, but whatever Moltke may have said or tried to convince him of, it obviously neither stopped the orgies and alcoholism nor harmed their relationship. So other Wiki articles say he just enabled Frederik's drinking and sex.
Moltke specifically avoided public positions that might put him on the level of the other nobles, and relied instead on his position as chamberlain and BFF to get things done.
When Frederik became king, suddenly "chamberlain" was not a meaningless honorary position, but the thing that allowed Moltke to be around him night and day and influence him, becoming the eminence grise of Denmark.
[Fritz: Not on my watch, Peter!]
Once in power, Moltke appears to have worked for the good of the country. He was not one of your radicals; he was opposed to abolishing serfdom, but he apparently did the thing Voltaire did, which was make his own estates prosperous precisely by treating his serfs well. He got very rich, but apparently through legal and ethical ways. People suspected him of lining his pockets, but apparently no evidence could be found (maybe he had it destroyed, who knows! but Wikipedia seems to believe he was clean).
When Struensee comes to power and started reforming left and right, Moltke refuses to support him, so he gets dismissed without a pension. But Moltke also refuses to join the conspiracy to overthrow Struensee. Apparently his memoirs also refuse to gossip and are very matter-of-fact. I get a kind of "upstanding, conservative, cautious" vibe from this guy, at least from Wikipedia.
Frederik's second marriage
(Some anecdotes I had to tuck in at the end here.)
After Queen Louise dies, and Frederik V has to remarry, he doesn't really want to.
Frederik V: Unless maybe I can get another English princess?
English: Sorry, no English princesses available.
[ViennaJoe: I said I wanted to marry a sister of Isabella's if I had to remarry at all, but no, no dice for me. You have my sympathy, Frederik.]
Frederik: Hmm. Okay, maybe I can marry Moltke's unmarried daughter? Moltke's my favorite person in the whole world. Any daughter of his is sure to be great!
Moltke: *quiet panic*
Moltke: *marries his daughter off asap*
Moltke: Sorry, Your Majesty, I have no unmarried daughters at this time either!
Now, it is reeeally interesting to speculate why Moltke might do that. I immediately thought of Mazarin, of course! (
So is Moltke in it for the good of the country? Or does he think he's got nothing to gain and everything to lose? He's got the king's ear 100% already, this marriage will just expose him to the envy and hatred of the other nobles. And if the marriage *doesn't* work out, what then? Or does he maybe not want his daughter married to an alcoholic who does nothing but participate in orgies, no matter how nice said depraved alcoholic may be? All of the above? Who can know!
Anyway, Frederik ends up married to Juliana Maria, EC's sister (and future host of Ivan VI's siblings after their Siberian stint). This marriage does not go nearly as well as Frederik's first. It doesn't go spectacularly badly, they even have kids, but Juliana's much less laid-back than Louise, much more of a stickler for etiquette (this is explained as a German court thing), and much less forgiving of the non-stop orgies. Later, after she gains power after Struensee's fall, when she's the widowed queen mother regent, she will apparently propose a chastity commission based on MT's! (I gather this one does not take off.)
[MT: Those super nice and laid-back husbands who sleep around, I know the type well. You have my sympathy, Juliana.]