[49] According to Falckenskjold’s Memoirs and the Authentische Aufklärungen, the Queen nearly fainted after writing the first two syllables—“Caro—,” but Schack-Rathlou seized her hand, and, guiding it, added the remainder, “—line Matilda”. This story bears a remarkable resemblance to one related of Matilda’s ancestress, Mary Queen of Scots, when forced to sign her abdication in the castle of Lochleven. Unfortunately for the truth of it, the document which the Queen signed is still preserved in the royal archives of Copenhagen, and the signature shows no sign of a break.
When the Queen recovered, the commissioners had gone, and with them the fatal document; only the women who spied upon her remained, and the guards who had come to conduct her back to her chamber. When Matilda reached it, she threw herself on her pallet, and, clasping the little Princess in her arms, gave way to unavailing lamentation. It is stated by some authorities that the threat of taking her child away from her was also used by the commissioners to extort her signature, and the promise was made that, if she avowed her guilt, the child would remain. This promise, if given, like all others, was subsequently falsified; but at the time it must have carried with it every appearance of probability, for the Queen, by admitting her guilt, also cast a slur upon the legitimacy of her child. Now that it was too late, she regretted the precipitation with which she had signed the paper. Her enemies’ eagerness to induce her to sign showed her clearly how she had erred: she ought to have demanded time for reflection, or insisted on adequate guarantees. She had signed away her crown, her honour, her children, perhaps her life, and it might be all in vain.
The commissioners, who had succeeded almost beyond their hopes, hastened back to Copenhagen to lay before the Queen-Dowager the crowning evidence of Matilda’s guilt. Juliana Maria was overjoyed: her enemy was delivered into her hands; nay, she had delivered herself. In this paper she found a full justification for all that she had done, and a complete answer to the remonstrances of the English envoy and his master. Keith, it is said, at first refused to believe the evidence of his eyes, and then fell back on the argument that the Queen’s signature had been wrung from her either by force or fraud. He realised that she had committed an irretrievable mistake. For the Queen-consort to be unfaithful to her husband’s bed was, by the law of Denmark, high treason, and as such punishable with death. Questions of high treason were, as a rule, solved by the King alone; the Lex Regia expressly prohibited the judges from trying such matters. But in this case the King could not be trusted; he probably had no wish to divorce his Queen, whether she were guilty or not guilty—much less to punish her with imprisonment or death; he regarded offences against morality with a lenient eye, and he had positively forced his unhappy consort into temptation. So he was not consulted.
The Queen-Dowager took counsel with her legal advisers, with the result that an old statute was raked up (Section 3 of the Code of Christian V.), and a special commission, consisting of no less than thirty-five members, who formed a supreme court, was appointed to try the case of the King against the Queen. The court was composed of representatives of every class: five clergy, the Bishop of Zealand and four clerical assessors; four members of the Council of State, Counts Thott, Osten, Councillor Schack-Rathlou and Admiral Rommeling; the members of the commission who had examined Struensee; the judges of the Supreme Court not members of the commission; two officers of the army; two of the navy; several councillors of state; and one representative of the civic authority. The court was thus composed of some of the most eminent men in Denmark, and representative of both the church and state. Some of them were creatures of the Queen-Dowager, and pledged to carry out her wishes, many were upright and honourable men, but all were hostile to the Struensee administration, which had been carried on in the name of the Queen.
The English envoy offered no protest to this trial, though he must have known that the judges were men prejudiced against the Queen, and the sentence of divorce was already virtually determined upon. But the blame for this inaction does not rest with Keith; he had received no instructions from the King of England, to whom Matilda’s confession had been communicated with the least possible delay by the Danish Government. George III. held that, primarily, the question was one between husband and wife, and if his sister had forgotten her duty as a wife and a queen, her husband was justified in putting her away. Hence he offered no objection to the divorce proceedings which followed, though they were conducted from first to last with the utmost unfairness. True, he entered a plea for a fair trial, but he must have known that, surrounded as his sister was with enemies, a fair trial was impossible. If George III. had entered a vigorous protest at this juncture, the trial would never have been allowed to go forward, and a painful scandal, discreditable alike to the royal houses of England and Denmark, might have been hushed up. Moreover, decided action at the outset would have rendered unnecessary the crisis which brought England and Denmark to the verge of war a few months later.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE DIVORCE OF THE QUEEN.
1772.