THE REACTION—THE KING'S WILL—KOLLER-BANNER—RANTZAU'S DISMISSAL—PRINCE CHARLES OF HESSE—COURT INTRIGUES—EICKSTEDT'S CAREER—BERINGSKJOLD'S CAREER AND DEATH—VON DER OSTEN—THE GULDBERG MINISTRY—THE PRINCE REGENT—THE COUP D'ETAT—UNCLE AND NEPHEW—FATE OF GULDBERG—DEATH OF JULIANA MARIA.
With Struensee fell all his reforms, and "the good old times" returned in full force.
The detested cabinet minister had scarce been thrown into prison ere the new holders of power hastened to overthrow all the creations of the fallen man. As if anxious to give the country and all the persons watching their movements a proof of their care for the general welfare, they began by establishing justice on its old basis, and restored the Commission of Inquiry, who were allowed by the criminal code to extort confessions from prisoners with the lash. This care for the due administration of justice was soon followed to the satisfaction of the pietists and the orthodox clergy by the reintroduction of public penance for sexual sins, so that the plebs very soon enjoyed once more the edifying spectacle of hot-blooded sinners, male and female, being insulted by bigoted priests in temples devoted to the adoration of the Almighty. Still, they did not dare to abolish the court and city court established by Struensee, because the recognition of this benefit was universal. In the same way, a decided error on Struensee's part, and which, it might be assumed, the reaction would at once reform—the lottery, that plague-spot of the poorer classes—was allowed to exist, of course, because it caused a deal of money to flow into the treasury "of the dearly-beloved king who so dearly loved his nation," and cash was pressingly needed to satisfy the claims of the friends of the new government.
The spirit of the usurping party and its adherents was even more plainly shown by the restoration of serfdom, so that the holders of estates could treat their vassals as they pleased. The general dissatisfaction aroused by this measure among the poor servile peasants is depicted by Suhm, who once took the field so zealously against Struensee's "godless rule," in an anecdote from Jütland.
"Professor John Egede," so Suhm tells us, "saw a man in ragged clothes working in a field with some half-naked children to help him, a few years after Struensee's fall. 'Will not the extra tax be soon removed?' he asked the passing professor. The latter replied that he did not know. 'Oh! yes, I can quite believe that,' the peasant retorted, 'for you don't think about things of that sort in Copenhagen. That was a worthy man who gave us the regulations by which the corvées were settled. But that was the very reason, I fancy, why they cut his head off. The new regulation is only made to torment us poor peasants till we cannot stand it any longer.'"
It is notorious that serfdom was not abolished until the regency of the Crown Prince Frederick. Under his long reign, which lasted from 1784 to 1839, nearly all Struensee's reforms, to which a more enlightened age did ample justice, and which had obtained general recognition through the ideas diffused by the French Revolution, were recalled to life. The task was completed, greatly to his credit, by Christian VIII., the grandson of Juliana Maria.
All that remains for us now to do, is to show by what means the new faction sought to secure its position, and how at last Nemesis revenged herself on the principal conspirators.
The usurpers did not consider themselves fully secured by having declared the king's sole signature invalid, but they wished to make themselves safe in the event of the weak king dying before the prince royal attained his majority. For this object, they persuaded the king, after the queen's matter had been amicably arranged with the English court, to sign a will, a copy of which was handed to the colleges and courts, with orders that the document was only to be opened after the king's death, in case it took place during the crown prince's minority. As the presumed event did not occur, however, the contents of the privy regulation have remained a secret. It was generally supposed that the king's testament contained an order that Queen Caroline Matilda should be excluded from the guardianship of her son, and that the Hereditary Prince Frederick should be appointed regent. Other suppositions hinted at still more important regulations as to the successor, but it can hardly be believed that the king, however imbecile he might be, would have signed such a document.
A desire to prevent a possible surprise was certainly the motive for the decree that for the future foreign envoys would only be admitted to an audience with the king in the presence of the council of state; and yet such a custom had been regarded as high treason on the part of Struensee.
The union among the conspirators, however, only lasted a short time after the revolution had been carried out, and this was specially evident among the military members. Generals Rantzau-Ascheberg and Eickstedt stood at the head of two opposite parties.