After this, the queen dowager gave Dr. Münter a snuff-box of rock crystal, while a similar gift in porcelain was forwarded to Dean Hee.[23]
But the historian, Suhm, who was attached to the court, and was one of the most zealous enemies of Struensee, tells us how far we are justified in believing the queen dowager's statement. As the queen occupied the upper floor of Christiansborg Palace, whence a view of the Gallows Hill was obtained, Chamberlain Suhm asked her some years later, why her Majesty, who had so many splendid palaces at her service, inhabited these unpretending rooms, and received the answer:—
"And yet these rooms are dearer to me than all my most splendid apartments; for from these windows I saw my bitterest foe exposed on the wheel."
Such was the end of a man whose miserable story is indubitably one of the most romantic episodes of his century; and it only required a Danish Walter Scott, in order to make of it an historical romance of the first class. For such a work the matter is fully sufficient. But for the same reason all efforts must fail to convert Struensee into the hero of a tragedy. Many poets, some of them in the first flight, have undertaken this ungrateful task, but have not attained any success worth mentioning. The reason can easily be found. Struensee was no hero; not even an original: he possessed no distinct character, but was merely a type of his age, and in spite of his undeniable talents, he was an ordinary adventurer after all. Fortune is as much the touchstone of minds as misfortune is. It subjected this man to a trial, and he came out of it badly. Arrogant and unbridled in fortune, he proved himself in misfortune despondent, cowardly, and even worthless. The fortune which he at first did not turn to a bad use, brought a king's sceptre into his hand, and he allowed it to be shamefully torn from him by people far inferior to him in intellect. A queen, young and beautiful as a May morning, supported him, and he betrayed her. He had felt a pride in being an avowed free-thinker, and he died with wailing and gnashing of teeth, as a penitent sinner. No, he was not a tragic hero. Even the genius of a Shakspere would have failed in rendering him one.
It is a fact worthy of attention that Struensee possessed none of the qualities which generally presuppose success at court. He was not an amiable man, in the conventional sense of the term. The English envoy, Gunning, who was not ill-disposed toward him, expressly stated, in a despatch of April, 1770, that Struensee did not at all display in his conversation the liveliness and pleasantry by which other men pave the way to fortune. "His mode of behaving and expressing himself is dry and even unpleasant, so that it was a subject of general surprise how he contrived to acquire such unbounded influence over the king and queen." Further, the envoy allows the favourite "no inconsiderable acquirements," but denies him all statesman-like ability and political tact. At the same time he was deficient in sufficient insight into Danish affairs. He was tolerably free from vanity, but not from an immoderate self-confidence, which not unfrequently degenerated into "impudence." The envoy, however, supplies us with the key to the enigma of Struensee's sudden elevation, when he mentions that he was "bold and enterprising," and such a man is sure to make his way among women.[24]
Still, in spite of Struensee's deficiency and all his mistakes, so much justice must be done him as to allow that he desired the welfare of the state. He originally possessed a not ignoble mind, which was lowered and degraded by his fabulous elevation and sudden fall. Being formed of much softer and more worthless stuff than the metal out of which great, or even second-rate statesmen are composed, he could not endure either fortune or misfortune. An idealist, trained in the school of enlightened despotism, he did not understand that a nation must be raised from the bottom to the top. This was the mistake of the age. The reasons of state of a Frederick the Great or a Joseph II. were, after all, only an improvement of the breed. We have all due respect for those enlightened despots who have so far freed themselves from the swaddling-clothes of the Byzantine ideas about the divine right of kings, as to wish themselves to be merely regarded as the first servants of the state; but, at the same time, we are inclined to say with old Wieland, "May Heaven protect us from the luck of being obliged to live under the sceptre or stick of such first servants of the state." Struensee acted on the principle that, in order to make nations progress, nothing further was required than to realise by edicts the principles of the French philosophers and German illuminati. After the fashion of many other world-betterers of the age, he did not know or reflect that it is far more difficult to lead the unjudging masses to what is good, than to what is bad; that the most absurd prejudices of the plebs must be humoured far more than the noblest human privileges; that the coarse diplomacy of pot-house demagogues is sufficient to make the ignorant mob throw away the diamonds of truth and eagerly clutch at the strass of falsehood and absurdity; and that, lastly, the people in all times are most willing, at the desire of their enemies, to hate, persecute, stone, and crucify their friends.
It is possible, even probable, that, if Struensee had held the power longer, he would have passed from the experimentalising stage to really beneficial results. The beginning of his display of power was not so bad. Denmark had long sighed under the brutal dictatorship which the envoys of Russia exercised. Struensee broke this yoke, and did it so cleverly, that the ambitious czarina in Petersburg was obliged to give way, whether she liked it or not. The management of the foreign policy by Struensee least of all deserves blame, because it was based on the sensible principle that Denmark must live in peace and amity with all states, but not be subject to any one of them. The same praise cannot be afforded to Struensee's home administration. The tendency generally was good and reasonable here, but the execution left much, very much, to be desired. We find everywhere hasty attempts, but no thorough carrying through. A despotic theorising, which was followed by no energetic practice, and the most correct designs destroyed and confused by the interference of personal interests, sympathies, and antipathies, characterised the administration.
Struensee's great fault was that he did not, and would not, understand that in statesman-like calculations, not abstract ideas but men are the figures employed in reckoning—men with all their weaknesses, follies, prejudices, and passions. Through mistaking this great fact, he contrived to embitter all classes of the nation. He offended the nobles without winning the peasants; he made the officers, soldiers, and sailors his enemies, without making the citizens his friends. And he did this among a people whose education was behindhand, and to whom he was an object of hatred, from the fact of his being a foreigner.
After his fall, which every one but himself had foreseen—and we may fairly say that he signed his own death-warrant by the maniacal cabinet decree which placed all the authority in his hands—Struensee behaved like a miserable coward and traitor. It has been said that his judges, or, more correctly, executioners, terrified the ruined man by a menace of the torture, and, at the same time, deluded him by the idea that his sole chance of salvation was in compromising Caroline Matilda most deeply. But, for all this, a man would never do, and only a weakling and coward would do what he did, when he confessed, on February 21, that he had been the queen's lover. From this moment he could only lay claim to a feeling of contempt. It would not even excuse him were it true, as has been alleged, that a pretended confession of Caroline Matilda's guilt was shown him.
Still the means employed to get rid of the favourites were most reprehensible. It is true that the queen dowager and Prince Frederick had a right to feel irritated at having no credit at a court where a Struensee domineered, and that they wished to remove him and his partisans. We can understand that Queen Juliana Maria, who had no experience of business, and Prince Frederick, who had scarce emerged from boyhood, should not suspect the extremities to which Guldberg's faction would lead them; and it may be true that it was owing to their generosity that the children of Caroline Matilda were not deprived of their rights. Nor can we positively condemn Guldberg for wishing to tear from Struensee powers which Struensee had torn from others. Perhaps Guldberg possessed more capacity, or a better claim to hold the power than he. But, as to the means employed in gaining the object, we cannot help agreeing with Falckenskjold when he says: