When he was in his third year Christian lost his mother, Louise, daughter of George II. of England and consort of Frederick V. of Denmark. Queen Louise was very beautiful, and had inherited from her mother, Queen Caroline, her grace and dignity and her virtues and talents. She was possessed of great tact, and won the love and reverence of all classes, and, what was more difficult, of all races of her husband’s subjects, whether Danes, Norwegians or Germans. The Danes compared her to their sainted Dagmar, and her early death was regarded as a national calamity. During Louise’s illness the streets of Copenhagen were thronged from early dawn by people waiting for news, and the churches were filled with praying and weeping men and women. Every night, outside the palace gate, crowds waited patiently for hours, their faces, white in the darkness, turned towards the wing of the palace where the Queen lay dying. Louise died in 1751 (the year that Caroline Matilda was born), and left behind her the legacy of a bright example. The Danes owed England a debt of gratitude for sending them this admirable princess, a debt they amply repaid a century later when they gave to the English people a descendant of Queen Louise, a princess even more beautiful and beloved than her illustrious ancestress—our gracious Queen Alexandra.[25]
[25] A short table showing the descent of Her Majesty Queen Alexandra from Queen Louise of Denmark:—
| Louise daughter of George II. of England and Queenof Frederick V. of Denmark. | ||||
| Charlotte Princess of Denmark. | ||||
| Caroline Princess of Denmark. | ||||
| Christian IX. King of Denmark. | ||||
| Queen Alexandra. | ||||
King Frederick was overwhelmed with grief at his consort’s death and refused to be comforted. He could not mention her name without weeping; he commanded the deepest court mourning for a year and prohibited all public amusements for the same period. Yet, like many bereaved widowers, before and since, the more deeply this royal widower mourned his wife, the more quickly he sought consolation by giving her a successor. Six months of the stipulated mourning had scarcely passed when the King cast off his sables and wedded Princess Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. This princess was the youngest of six daughters, two of whom had already made great alliances. The eldest was married to Frederick the Great, and the second to Prince Augustus William, the heir presumptive to the throne of Prussia. One of her nieces came near to be married to George III., but was rejected by him on the advice of his mother. This slight upon her house did not tend to make Juliana Maria well disposed towards the English royal family; and the love of the Danes for the English princess who was her predecessor contrasted vividly with her own unpopularity. Juliana Maria was a handsome and determined woman, rigidly correct in her conduct and unblemished in her morals, but she was of a cold and selfish nature, a profound intriguer and dissembler. Frederick V. married her from a sense of duty; he wanted a queen to preside over his court, and a wife to give him another son. Juliana Maria fulfilled both these conditions; she looked every inch a queen, and in due time presented her husband with a prince, who was named Frederick. But though she shared her husband’s throne she had no place in his affections.
Frederick V. was popular with his subjects, who named him “Frederick the Good”. The first part of his reign as fully justified this title as the latter part belied it. Queen Louise was his good angel and led him to higher things, but when her beneficent influence was gone he abandoned himself to evil habits, especially to his besetting one of drunkenness. So much did he give way to this vice that he became a confirmed dipsomaniac, and the reins of government passed out of his hands into those of his Prime Minister, Count Moltke, and of his mother, the Queen-Dowager, Sophia Magdalena.
This princess, the widow of Christian VI.,[26] was a daughter of the Margrave of Brandenburg-Culmbach. She had obtained considerable political influence in her husband’s lifetime, and she continued to hold it throughout the reign of her son. She was a woman of narrow and strict views, but had a great love of display. Between her and Moltke an alliance existed for a time. They played into one another’s hands so cleverly that Juliana Maria, despite her ambitious and intriguing disposition, found herself outwitted by her mother-in-law and the Prime Minister. Sophia Magdalena’s superior knowledge of Danish affairs gave her an advantage over Juliana Maria, who, though the King’s wife, laboured under the disability of not being in the King’s confidence. Count Moltke was not a minister of great ability, and he was suspected of selling his country’s interests to other powers. Certain it is that during the last years of Frederick V.’s reign the foreign envoys of France, Russia and England were in turns the real rulers of Denmark. With Moltke the French influence was generally paramount.
[26] Christian VI., the son of Frederick IV., was born in 1699, ascended the throne in 1730 and died in 1746, after a peaceful and prosperous reign. He was succeeded by his son Frederick V.
The Crown Prince Christian suffered an irreparable loss in his mother’s death, for she was devoted to her son and kept him with her as much as possible, though this was contrary to the traditional etiquette of the Danish court. After Queen Louise died the Crown Prince and his sisters were handed over to the loveless care of governesses and tutors, and their father never troubled about them. Juliana Maria was not an affectionate stepmother, and left her husband’s children severely alone. Even if she had wished to give them personal supervision, the etiquette of the Danish court would have prevented her. Moreover, any movement she might have made in that direction would have been regarded with suspicion. Juliana Maria regarded the Crown Prince Christian as an obstacle in the path of her ambition. If he were out of the way her son Frederick would succeed to the throne. She probably wished him out of the way, but the stories that she plotted against the life of her stepson rest on no trustworthy evidence, and may be dismissed as unworthy of credence.
At the age of six Christian was taken out of the nursery and given an establishment of his own. Count Berkentin, a privy councillor, was appointed his governor, and Count Reventlow his chamberlain and tutor. Berkentin was an old man, indolent and easy-going, who was glad to shift the responsibility of his troublesome charge on other shoulders, and asked for nothing more than to draw his salary and be left in peace. The training of the Crown Prince therefore devolved wholly on Reventlow, who was a Danish noble of the most reactionary and barbarous type. Reventlow’s one idea of education was to harden the lad, to make, as he said, a man of him—he might rather have said to make a brute of him. He took no account of the idiosyncrasies of Christian’s character, or of his nervous, highly strung temperament. He sought to crush him down to one low level, the level of himself. The boy was brought up in slave-like fear of his brutal master, and sometimes beaten for trifling errors so inhumanly that foam gathered on his lips and he writhed in agony. Even in his boyhood, Christian’s nervous paroxysms sometimes degenerated into fits of an epileptic nature, and so encouraged the growth of a terrible malady.
Reventlow superintended the Crown Prince’s education, that is to say, his training and his daily life. He did not teach him his lessons. The learned German author, Gellert, was first asked to undertake this duty, but he refused. The King then appointed one Nielsen, who had been tutor to several of the young Danish nobility. Nielsen was a very learned man, but unfortunately had not the capacity of imparting his learning in a lucid and attractive manner, and he was too fond of abstruse speculations to teach things which would be useful to the royal pupil. Nielsen was a Lutheran clergyman, but he was notoriously unorthodox, and he mixed his religious instruction with a good deal of profane philosophy. The poor little prince was not old enough to understand theological, or philosophical, disquisitions; they weighed like a nightmare on his youthful mind, and the result of this teaching in after life was a curious mixture of freethinking and superstition. The Crown Prince was taken to church twice every Sunday, where he sat between his two tormentors, Reventlow and Nielsen, and listened to dull and interminable sermons. If his attention flagged for a moment Reventlow would pinch him, and when he came out of church Nielsen would catechise him concerning the sermon, and make him repeat the preacher’s arguments at length. Christian regarded these religious exercises with intense dislike, and dreaded Sunday as his chief day of torment.