GEORGE III., BROTHER OF QUEEN MATILDA.
From a Painting by Allan Ramsay (1767) in the National Portrait Gallery.
CHAPTER XVI.
QUEEN AND EMPRESS.
1770-1771.
The keynote of Struensee’s foreign policy was to free Denmark from outside interference, and the greatest offender in this respect was Russia. The inauguration of the new regime, therefore, was the occasion of a violent quarrel with the Russian court, to which a personal element gave additional bitterness. Russia at this time meant Catherine the Great, for the imperious Empress gathered all the reins of government, both foreign and domestic, in her hands. She had come to regard the King of Denmark as almost her vassal, and her first instinct was to crush any signs of revolt against her influence. The Empress was minutely informed of the changes at the Danish court and the causes which had led to them. She knew all about the intrigue between Matilda and Struensee. But she had no sympathy with the young Queen of Denmark, whose career, in some respects, offered a curious parallel to her own. Like Matilda, Catherine had been brought from a foreign country, when little more than a child, and married to a weak and vicious prince, in whose character there was a strain of madness; like Matilda, she had been left alone in a strange and dissolute court, outraged and neglected by her husband, ignored and set aside, and exposed to every temptation. Catherine had found consolation in a lover, and plotted with him and others. The outcome of her intrigues was the deposition and subsequent murder of her husband, and the Empress’s elevation to the sovereign power. Rumour said that she was privy to the assassination, but that must always remain a mystery. Of course, before this point had been reached the parallel between the two women ended, for Matilda, though she had undoubtedly intrigued with Struensee to get the power into her own hands, was not of the same calibre as Catherine. She was incapable of either her crimes or her vices; she had neither her soaring ambitions nor her consummate powers of statecraft. Though a woman of more than average ability, she had none of the genius of the Russian Empress; and her heart would always hinder her from playing a great part upon the world’s stage.
The weakness of Matilda’s position was her love for Struensee. At first she wished him to take no part in politics. “If Struensee had taken my advice, and had not become a minister, it would have been much better,” she said, two years later in bitter retrospect, but he overruled her in this as in all else. Everything he did was right in her eyes, and though she sometimes trembled at the perilous path he was treading, when he talked to her of his future policy and his sweeping reforms she believed that he would be hailed as the saviour of the country. She could not see that he was ignorant of statecraft, and made mistakes which a little forethought would have avoided, for she worshipped his commanding talents, and believed him to be a king among men. The Danish Queen’s all-absorbing passion for one man was regarded with contempt by the Empress Catherine. It is needless to say she did not condemn it from a moral point of view, for she was a very Messalina in her passions, but because she considered it a fatal weakness in a Queen who apparently aspired to reign over her husband’s kingdom and to inaugurate a new system of policy. So far from the similarity between the trials of Catherine’s early married life and the Queen of Denmark’s sorrows enlisting her sympathy, the Empress regarded Matilda with dislike, mingled with contempt. “I have had the opportunity of seeing the Empress of Russia’s sentiments expressed in her own handwriting relative to what is passing in Denmark,” wrote Woodford. “The Empress, in a letter to her correspondent, of September 24, says upon the changes in Denmark, ‘that allowances are always to be made for the follies of youth, but accompanied with the marks of a bad heart they excite even a public indignation’.”[145]
[145] Woodford’s despatch, Hamburg, October 16, 1770.