Under the peaceful reign of Christian’s son and successor, Frederick V. (1746-1766), still more was done for commerce, industry and agriculture. To promote Denmark’s Frederick V., 1746-1766. carrying trade, treaties were made with the Barbary States, Genoa and Naples; and the East Indian Trading Company flourished exceedingly. On the other hand the condition of the peasantry was even worse under Frederick V. than it had been under Christian VI., the Stavnsbaand, or regulation which bound all males to the soil, being made operative from the age of four. Yet signs of a coming amelioration were not wanting. The theory of the physiocrats now found powerful advocates in Denmark; and after 1755, when the press censorship was abolished so far as regarded political economy and agriculture, a thorough discussion of the whole agrarian question became possible. A commission appointed in 1757 worked zealously for the repeal of many agricultural abuses; and several great landed proprietors introduced hereditary leaseholds, and abolished the servile tenure.
Foreign affairs during the reigns of Frederick V. and Christian VI. were left in the capable hands of J. H. E. Bernstorff, who aimed at steering clear of all foreign complications and preserving inviolable the neutrality of Denmark. This he succeeded in doing, in spite of the Seven Years’ War and of the difficulties attending the thorny Gottorp question in which Sweden and Russia were equally interested. The same policy was victoriously pursued by his nephew and pupil Andreas Bernstorff, an even greater man than the elder Bernstorff, who controlled the foreign policy of Denmark from 1773 to 1778, and again from Christian VII., 1766-1808. 1784 till his death in 1797. The period of the younger Bernstorff synchronizes with the greater part of the long reign of Christian VII. (1766-1808), one of the most eventful periods of modern Danish history. The king himself was indeed a semi-idiot, scarce responsible for his actions, yet his was the era of such striking personalities as the brilliant charlatan Struensee, the great philanthropist and reformer C. D. F. Reventlow, the ultra-conservative Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, whose mission it was to repair the damage done by Struensee, and that generation of alert and progressive spirits which surrounded the young crown prince Frederick, whose first act, on taking his seat in the council of state, at the age of sixteen, on the 4th of April 1784, was to dismiss Guldberg.
A fresh and fruitful period of reform now began, lasting till nearly the end of the century, and interrupted only by the brief but costly war with Sweden in 1788. The emancipation of the peasantry was now the burning question of the day, and the whole matter was thoroughly ventilated. Bernstorff and the crown prince were the most zealous advocates of the peasantry in the council of state; but the honour of bringing the whole peasant question within the range of practical politics undoubtedly belongs to C. D. F. [Reventlow] (q.v.). Nor was the reforming principle limited to the abolition of serfdom. In 1788 the corn trade was declared free; the Jews received civil rights; and the negro slave trade was forbidden. In 1796 a special ordinance reformed the whole system of judicial procedure, making it cheaper and more expeditious; while the toll ordinance of the 1st of February 1797 still further extended the principle of free trade. Moreover, until two years after Bernstorff’s death in 1797, the Danish press enjoyed a larger freedom of speech than the press of any other absolute monarchy in Europe, so much so that at last Denmark became suspected of favouring Jacobin views. But in September 1799 under strong pressure from the Russian emperor Paul, the Danish government forbade anonymity, and introduced a limited censorship.
It was Denmark’s obsequiousness to Russia which led to the first of her unfortunate collisions with Great Britain. In 1800 the Danish government was persuaded by the tsar Denmark and Great Britain in the Napoleonic Wars. to accede to the second Armed Neutrality League, which Russia had just concluded with Prussia and Sweden. Great Britain retaliated by laying an embargo on the vessels of the three neutral powers, and by sending a considerable fleet to the Baltic under the command of Parker and Nelson. Surprised and unprepared though they were, the Danes, nevertheless, on the 2nd of April 1801, offered a gallant resistance; but their fleet was destroyed, their capital bombarded, and, abandoned by Russia, they were compelled to submit to a disadvantageous peace.
The same vain endeavour of Denmark to preserve her neutrality led to the second breach with England. After the peace of Tilsit there could be no further question of neutrality. Napoleon had determined that if Great Britain refused to accept Russia’s mediation, Denmark, Sweden and Portugal were to be forced to close their harbours to her ships and declare war against her. It was the intention of the Danish government to preserve its neutrality to the last, although, on the whole, it preferred an alliance with Great Britain to a league with Napoleon, and was even prepared for a breach with the French emperor if he pressed her too hardly. The army had therefore been assembled in Holstein, and the crown prince regent was with it. But the British government did not consider Denmark strong enough to resist France, and Canning had private trustworthy information of the designs of Napoleon, upon which he was bound to act. He sent accordingly a fleet, with 30,000 men on board, to the Sound to compel Denmark, by way of security for her future conduct, to unite her fleet with the British fleet. Denmark was offered an alliance, the complete restitution of her fleet after the war, a guarantee of all her possessions, compensation for all expenses, and even territorial aggrandizement.
Dictatorially presented as they were, these terms were liberal and even generous; and if a great statesman like Bernstorff had been at the head of affairs in Copenhagen, he would, no doubt, have accepted them, even if with a wry face. But the prince regent, if a good patriot, was a poor politician, and invincibly obstinate. When, therefore, in August 1807, Gambier arrived in the Sound, and the English plenipotentiary Francis James Jackson, not perhaps the most tactful person that could have been chosen, hastened to Kiel to place the British demands before the crown prince, Frederick not only refused to negotiate, but ordered the Copenhagen authorities to put the city in the best state of defence possible. Taking this to be tantamount to a declaration of war, on the 16th of August the British army landed at Vedbäck; and shortly afterwards the Danish capital was invested. Anything like an adequate defence was hopeless; Loss of Norway. Treaty of Kiel, 1814. a bombardment began which lasted from the 2nd of September till the 5th of September, and ended with the capitulation of the city and the surrender of the fleet intact, the prince regent having neglected to give orders for its destruction. After this Denmark, unwisely, but not unnaturally, threw herself into the arms of Napoleon and continued to be his faithful ally till the end of the war. She was punished for her obstinacy by being deprived of Norway, which she was compelled to surrender to Sweden by the terms of the treaty of Kiel (1814), on the 14th of January, receiving by way of compensation a sum of money and Swedish Pomerania, with Rügen, which were subsequently transferred to Prussia in exchange for the duchy of Lauenburg and 2,000,000 rix-dollars.
On the establishment of the German Confederation in 1815, Frederick VI. acceded thereto as duke of Holstein, but refused to allow Schleswig to enter it, on the ground that Schleswig was an integral part of the Danish realm.
The position of Denmark from 1815 to 1830 was one of great difficulty and distress. The loss of Norway necessitated considerable reductions of expenditure, but the economies Denmark after 1815. actually practised fell far short of the requirements of the diminished kingdom and its depleted exchequer; while the agricultural depression induced by the enormous fall in the price of corn all over Europe caused fresh demands upon the state, and added 10,000,000 rix-dollars to the national debt before 1835. The last two years of the reign of Frederick VI. (1838-1839) were also remarkable for the revival of political life, provincial consultative assemblies being established for Jutland, the Islands, Schleswig and Holstein, by the ordinance of the 28th of May 1831. But these consultative assemblies were regarded as insufficient by the Danish Liberals, and during the last years of Frederick VI. and the whole reign of his successor, Christian VIII. (1839-1848), the agitation for a free constitution, Constitutional agitation. Beginnings of the Schleswig-Holstein Question. both in Denmark and the duchies, continued to grow in strength, in spite of press prosecutions and other repressive measures. The rising national feeling in Germany also stimulated the separatist tendencies of the duchies; and “Schleswig-Holsteinism,” as it now began to be called, evoked in Denmark the counter-movement known as Eiderdansk-politik, i.e. the policy of extending Denmark to the Eider and obliterating German Schleswig, in order to save Schleswig from being absorbed by Germany. This division of national sentiment within the monarchy, complicated by the approaching extinction of the Oldenburg line of the house of Denmark, by which, in the normal course under the Salic law, the succession to Holstein would have passed away from the Danish crown, opened up the whole complicated Schleswig-Holstein Question with all its momentous consequences. (See [Schleswig-Holstein Question].) Within the monarchy itself, during the following years, “Schleswig-Holsteinism” and “Eiderdanism” faced each other as rival, mutually exacerbating forces; and the efforts of succeeding governments to solve the insoluble problem broke down ever on the rock of nationalist passion and the interests of the German powers. The unionist Unionist Constitution of 1848, and war with Prussia. constitution, devised by Christian VIII., and promulgated by his successor, Frederick VII. (1848-1863), on the 28th of January 1848, led to the armed intervention of Prussia, at the instance of the new German parliament at Frankfort; and, though with the help of Russian and British diplomacy, the Danes were ultimately successful, they had to submit, in 1851, to the government of Holstein by an international commission consisting of three members, Prussian, Austrian and Danish respectively.
Denmark, meanwhile, had been engaged in providing herself with a parliament on modern lines. The constitutional rescript of the 28th of January 1848 had been withdrawn in favour of an electoral law for a national assembly, of whose 152 members 38 were to be nominated by the king and to form an Upper House (Landsting), while the remainder were to be elected by the people and to form a popular chamber (Folketing). The Bondevenlige, or philo-peasant party, which objected to the king’s right of nomination and preferred a one-chamber system, now separated from the National Liberals on this point. But the National Liberals triumphed at the general election; fear of reactionary tendencies finally induced the Radicals to accede to the wishes of the majority; and on the 5th of June 1849 the new constitution received the royal sanction.