[141] Gunning’s despatch, Copenhagen, April 4, 1771.
Brandt was given several lucrative court appointments, but he neither asked nor received any post in the Government. Gunning thus summed him up: “Mr Brandt, the King of Denmark’s favourite, seems to be too light and insignificant to deserve mention in a political light; he is considered by the others as a sort of dragon which they have planted within the precincts of the court to stop the avenues to the throne”.[142] Keith declared him to be “naturally rash, turbulent and waspish”.[143]
[142] Gunning’s despatch, Copenhagen, April 4, 1771.
[143] Keith’s despatch, Copenhagen, November 18, 1771.
These were the principal men Struensee chose to help him in governing the internal affairs of the kingdom, in place of the experienced statesmen whom he had evicted to make room for them. They were none of them first-class men, but they were the best available. Statesmen of credit and renown held aloof from Struensee, and would not have accepted office at his hands. Neither did he seek them, for the men he wanted were not colleagues but creatures, who would carry out his bidding. He had now complete control of the situation, and was already in fact invested with autocratic power. Although nominally only lecteur du roi, he read all letters that came to the King, and answered them in the King’s name as he thought best, the King doing whatever the Queen advised him, and signing all the documents laid before him by Struensee. In order to gather power still more into his hands, Struensee caused Christian to issue a rescript to the heads of departments of the state requesting them henceforth to send all communications to the King in writing, and the King would answer them in the same way. Audiences between the King and his ministers were hereby abolished.
Struensee followed up this rescript by an attack upon the Council of State, still nominally the governing body. Soon after Bernstorff’s dismissal a royal decree was issued, limiting the power of the council and increasing the King’s prerogative. The King wished—so the message ran—to have the Council of State organised in the best manner. He therefore requested that the councillors, at their meetings in future, should duly weigh and consider all the business laid before them, but leave the final decision to the King. Their object was not to govern, but to afford the King assistance in governing. The King, therefore, would have them remember that there must be no encroachment on the sovereign power, which was vested wholly in the King.
These changes caused great excitement among the official classes and the nobility. The government of the kingdom had hitherto been in the hands of an oligarchy, which was recruited solely from the nobility and their dependents. By this last decree the King intended to strip the nobility of their privileges and power. But the King was known to be a figurehead, and therefore the resentment aroused by these changes was directed, not against him but against the Queen. Struensee was still working behind the Queen, and therefore, though he was known to have great influence, the malcontents made the Queen the first object of their resentment. The hostility felt against Matilda for the revolutionary policy now inaugurated was especially bitter amongst the old nobility, many of whom, notably Count Reventlow, had formerly been her friends. Reventlow communicated his anger to Gunning, who wrote in haste to Lord Rochford. He saw in the present confusion an opportunity for English influence to be re-established in Copenhagen, and, ignorant of the rebuff the King had received from his sister a few weeks before, he urged his old expedient that George III. should write a private letter to Queen Matilda.
“Both Count Reventlow and everybody ascribe [these new measures] without scruple to the Queen of Denmark,” he writes, “whose power is affirmed to be unlimited, and on whose will all depends. If these assertions are not made without reason, your Lordship will judge how much those persons who are honoured with her Danish Majesty’s confidence have misrepresented the state of affairs to her, in order to make her consent to what is so evidently against the system this court has some time adopted. Should the preservation of it be thought worthy of the King’s (George III.’s) attention, your Lordship will, I am sure, think it necessary that the Queen of Denmark should be made acquainted with his Majesty’s sentiments on this important point as soon as possible, and before the Prince Royal of Sweden comes here, which under the present circumstances will be most effectually done (if I may humbly presume to offer my opinion) by a private letter from his Majesty to the Queen his sister. It is not to be doubted but that this would have great weight; and should it either procure the reinstatement of Count Bernstorff (whose indubitable attachment to the King’s person and family gives him a claim on his Majesty’s protection), or till such time as this could be more easily effected, prevent any extension of the present influence, it would soon give his Majesty (George III.) as great an ascendency here as the court of Petersburg has had, and which, were it conducted in a more moderate and judicious manner, would not be liable to the same reverse. It is not, however, impracticable for the latter [the court of Petersburg] still to prevent the defection of this court, but it must be by different and harsher methods than those (it is hoped) his Majesty has occasion to take.”[144]
[144] Gunning’s despatch, Copenhagen, October 6, 1770.
It is unlikely that George III., who was still smarting under the affront Queen Matilda offered to his last communication, acted on his envoy’s suggestion. Neither his brotherly remonstrances nor “the different and harsher methods” of the court of St. Petersburg would have had any effect on the Queen of Denmark. She was entirely under Struensee’s influence, and did whatever he wished, and in this case their wishes were identical. Nothing would have induced her to recall Bernstorff, against whom she had a grievance, and she had suffered so much from the meddlesome interference of the Russian envoys that she was determined to stop it at all hazards.