CHAPTER V.
DEPARTURE OF THE QUEEN.
THE BRITISH FLEET—SPIRITED CONDUCT OF KEITH—THE ORDER OF RELEASE—THE PRINCESS LOUISA AUGUSTA—THE DEPARTURE—THE LANDING AT STADE—THE STAY AT GOHRDE—ARRIVAL IN CELLE—THE QUEEN'S COURT—A HAPPY FAMILY—KEITH'S MISSION—LITERARY PIRATES—REVERDIL TO THE RESCUE.
We have seen that the sentence of the court, decreeing a dissolution of the marriage, was announced to Caroline Matilda. From this moment she was no longer regarded as queen, and all her ties with Denmark were broken off with her marriage. After her condemnation, the ambassadors of the foreign powers were convoked at the Christiansborg Palace. They proceeded thither in mourning, and heard from the grand-master that, as the king no longer had a consort, there was no longer a queen. The name of Caroline Matilda was from this moment effaced from the public prayers. She became a stranger to the country over which she had reigned.[34]
As was the case with the other prisoners, whose position was considerably mitigated so soon as they had made satisfactory confessions in their examination before the Commission of Inquiry, the queen, after the separation, was granted better apartments in the first-floor of the fortress, and was allowed to take the air on the ramparts. That Colonel Keith was permitted to visit the queen was looked on as a further concession, and that the envoy frequently took advantage of this permission, may surely be regarded as a further and important proof how greatly he was convinced of her innocence.
When her Majesty was informed of the circumstances connected with the tragical death of the two prisoners, she said to Fräulein Mösting, her maid of honour,
"Unhappy men! they have paid dearly for their attachment to the king, and their zeal for my service."
No thought of self, it will be noticed: Caroline Matilda entirely forgot the humiliation to which she had been exposed by Struensee's dastardly confession, and only evinced sincere compassion for his undeserved and barbarous fate. But she was ever thus: from the first moment to the last, she sacrificed herself for others. Of this, the following anecdote will serve as an affecting proof:—
The queen, having so fatally experienced the vicissitudes of human grandeur, was not so deeply affected by her own disasters as to overlook the sufferings and misery of some state prisoners, doomed to perpetual exile in the Castle of Kronborg. Her Majesty's liberal beneficence was never more conspicuous than in this period of affliction and distress. She sent daily from her table two dishes to these forsaken objects of compassion, and out of a scanty allowance, she sent, weekly, a small sum to be distributed among them. The governor having requested her Majesty to withdraw her bounty from an officer who had been closely confined for some years past in a remote turret, debarred from all human intercourse, on suspicion of a treasonable correspondence with the agent of a northern power, who had enlisted, with the assistance of the prisoner, several Danish subjects for his master's service, the queen merely replied with the following line of Voltaire:—