AN UNFORTUNATE PRINCESS.

a certain March evening in the year of

step-mother, had always been his declared enemy (even, so Christian believed, to his attempted destruction), because of her own son Frederick,

Na Prince of come to the throne could

son of George the Second and father of George the Third, died at his house in Leicester-fields, in the arms of Desnoyers, a French dancingmaster who had been called in to soothe the last tremendous moments of the royal spendthrift with the twang of his favorite violin. On the 13th of the June following his widow gave birth to a baby princess, known to history as Caroline Matilda, the beautiful, imprudent, and unfortunate Queen of Denmark, about whose guilt or innocence there has been almost as much controversy as about that of Mary Stuart, and with as little likelihood of ever coming to a distinct and certain conclusion. The Princess of Wales was a stern-mannered, though in reality a loving and careful mother; still, so stern that once, when the little Duke of Gloucester was sitting deep in melancholy thought, and she asked him sharply what he was thinking of, he was able to answer, "I was thinking that if ever I have a son I will not make him as unhappy as you make me."

Caroline Matilda, it is to be supposed, bore her share with the rest; but we hear nothing of her life until the fatal year arrived when, at the age of fifteen, she found herself first the betrothed, and then the wife, of a fair-haired, under-sized, gay-tempered, handsome, dissolute young scamp of seventeen, Christian the Seventh, King of Denmark. "Diminutive as if he came out of a kernel in the fairy tales," with, adds Walpole, in another place, "the sublime strut of his grandfather (or a cock sparrow)."

The young queen was in her fresh girlhood; fair almost to a marvel, with light flaxen hair, shining like silver and of luxuriant growth, large, clear, bright, blue eyes, full red lips-the under one rich and pouting-small teeth white and even, and of a temper as bright and sweet as her face: lovely and fascinating enough surely to have made her lover for life the young profligate who kissed her publicly at Roeskilde when they met-perhaps moved for the moment by the sight of her girlish beauty-but who soon taught her what was the real worthlessness of his kisses, and of what infinite power of subdivision the instinct which it pleased his royal majesty to call love was capable. For the marriage feast was scarcely cold when Christian found "Milady," or "Katherine of the Pretty Feet"-about whose life the less said the better-a companion more congenial to his taste than the young English princess, whose soul was as pure as her face was fair. And not only "Milady," but all the roués and demireps to be met with in Copenhagen, to the scandal of decent people and the destruction of public morals.

Caroline Matilda found her Danish crown more thickly set with thorns than roses. Young as she was, and so sadly needing careful guidance, she had not a friend in her new home to direct or uphold her. Juliana Maria, the King's

prince, as he was then, be destroyed; so that she was the poor young Queen's enemy too, exofficio if not by personal dislike, and laid snares and digged pitfalls whenever and wherever she could; the old grandmother, Sophia Magdalena, was kind enough, but even she cared more for power than for the right, and had spent her life in trying to keep her personal influence paramount in Danish politics; and the Princess Charlotte Amelia, the King's aunt-who seems to have been about the best of the set-lived only for religious practices and charities, keeping as far out of the reach of her royal nephew as she could, having been his favorite butt and the object of his rudest practical jokes time out of mind.

The final cause of her withdrawal from the palace was "a fright she received through the King's first page crawling into the dining-room on all fours, disguised as a savage.”

So Caroline Matilda was absolutely unfriended, save by the Grand Mistress of her household, Frau von Plessen; and she, though a virtuous woman and so far desirable in a court where even common propriety was at a discount, was a harsh-tempered, domineering old-maidish kind of person, who made bad worse by injudicious advice, and by never being able to understand that sometimes it is better to drive with a slack rein and a silken lash than with tight ropes and a leathern thong. Influenced by this clever lady, Caroline Matilda put on an air of forbidIding coldness to her husband (perhaps it was not much trouble to do that), with the idea, so common among women, and so mistaken, that the best way to secure a husband's vagrant affections is to deny or conceal their own. In this case, however, it was not so much concealment as confession, for the young Queen had no great fondness for her royal spouse; as, indeed, how could she have? Unless neglect, debauchery, and open infidelity were qualities calculated to win the love and esteem of a girl-wife virtuously educated. Nevertheless, she nursed him assiduously when he had the scarlet-fever; and when he recovered, he went back to his street-rows, his mistresses, his low pot-house riots, his assaults on the watch, and all the other disgraceful doings which made him the disgust and the talk of Europe.

The royal favorite in chief at this time was Count Conrad von Holck, lately appointed Court Marshal, but acting as a kind of private Master of Ceremonies to the monarch, arranging all the court balls and fêtes: also helping him in pleasures less innocent. He it was who accompanied Christian to and from Milady's house, "during which street riots were but too frequent;" who shared in all his vices, and who organized many a nocturnal orgy during the brilliant luncheons which he was in the habit of giving at Blaagaard, a kind of castellated pleasure-house, just outside

She soon learned a different lesson, poor

He

the north gate. And even when the Queen gave to her black list, as one of the tribe of her enebirth to a son-the future Frederick the Sixth-mies. and all Denmark went mad with joy; always girl! excepting the queen-dowager, Juliana Maria, whose son was thus doubly barred; even then, Christian and his favorite continued their excesses, and made the whole town ring with the echo of their misdeeds. Christian was seen one day in broad daylight returning from "Milady's" in a state of intoxication, the people pursuing him with hootings and insults to his own palacegates; in a word, the private and public annals of King, court, and favorite were of the worst kind. At last, however, the ministers arrested Katherine of the Pretty Feet, and put her in prison, after her royal lover had bought her a hotel and created her a baroness.

Well for her if she had never done so. But indeed Struensee's policy was at the first quite puzzling enough to mislead her. wished to reconcile king and queen, he said, and yet he enticed Frau von Gabel into a web of circumstances, compromising in appearance and fatal in the end. This Frau von Gabel was a high-minded, noble-hearted woman, almost a republican in her political creed, and therefore unable to live at court; but, whether royalist or republican, patriot before all. The king had made certain advances to her in times gone by, which it is scarcely necessary to say were repulsed; but now Struensee took up the dropped loops, and, assuring Frau von Gabel that the king was in every way reformed, and that he did really need her ennobling influence to keep him in the right way, urged her to ad

Numa. Frau von Gabel consented; but soon found that all this talk of Christian's great improvement was mere moonshine; he was as bad as ever, and a little more mad; and the character of Egeria was soon sought to be brought down to a lower level and to baser purposes. When she found this out, and deception was no longer possible, the poor lady died of grief; and the strange intrigue about which no satisfactory theory as to why it was, and to what use, came to an end. She died, hating Struensee: whom the queen hated too, for his share in the plot.

And now Christian and his court set out on their travels; taking with them, as surgeon and physician in ordinary, John Frederick Struensee, hitherto physician of Altona, and of the lordship mit his visits again-she, the Egeria to his of Pinneberg. And first the King of Denmark came here to visit the King of England. But "Farmer George" was not especially eager to favor his brother-in-law; so little cager, indeed, that when Christian came to Dover, he found no royal carriages waiting for him, and had to come to town in hackney-carriages. Even when he got to town, "by another mistake," says Walpole, "King George happened to go to Richmond about an hour before King Christian arrived in London. An hour is exceedingly long, and the distance to Richmond still longer; so with all the dispatch which could possibly be made, King George did not get to his capital till next day at noon. Then, as the road from his closet in St. James's to the King of Denmark's apartments on the other side of the palace is about thirty miles (which posterity, having no conception of the prodigious extent and magnificence of St. James's, will never believe), it was half an hour after three before his Danish Majesty's cousin could go and return to let him know that his good brother and ally was leaving the palace (in which they both were) to receive him at the Queen's palace, which you know is about a million of snails' paces from St. James's. Notwithstanding these difficulties and unavoidable delays, Woden, Thor, Frigga, and all the gods that watch over the kings of the north, did bring these two invincible monarchs to each other's embraces, about half an hour after four on the same evening."

Christian's life in London was bad enough; but it was even worse in Paris, and the queen was carefully informed of all that would most pain and disquiet her, it being the policy of that nest of intriguers, of which Juliana Maria was the chief, to keep the young couple as far sundered in both life and love as was possible. It was not to be wondered at if she was cold and disdainful and full of wrath and bitterness, when her scampish husband came home after his seven months' tour, and if she resented Count Holck's familiarities and impertinences, and even added the new physician, Struensee,

At that time, then, there was no love between the doctor and the queen; but soon after this the crown prince-her little baby-had the small-pox, and old enmities were forgotten in the new conditions of help and trust this set up between them. Ever after this illness Caroline Matilda admitted Struensee into her intimate friendship; and so began the drama which ended in a cruel and a bloody tragedy. She was imprudent to an almost insane extent; she drove out alone with the handsome young doctor, walked with him alone, rode with him alone; at the court balls she danced chiefly with him, and suffered him to address her in a tone of temper and command, to say the least of it, astounding. These follies, and more to the back of them, got the young queen much illwill, and caused many a biting comparison to be instituted between her and Mary Stuart, with Struensee for Rizzio. Together with her character, whether rightfully or wrongfully, the queen began to lose something of her sweet English modesty, and to play unwomanly pranks in public quite as damaging as vices. She hunted daily, bestriding her horse in man fashion, and dressed as a man in "a dove-colored beaver hat with a deep gold band and tassels, a long scarlet coat faced with gold all round, a buff gold-laced waistcoat, frilled shirt, man's neckerchief, and buckskin small-clothes and spurs. She looked splendidly when mounted and dashing through the woods, but when she dismounted the charm was to a great degree

dispelled, for she appeared shorter than she | Enevold Brandt, whom Holck had exiled and really was; the shape of her knees betrayed Struensee restored. In truth, Christian's conher sex, and her belt seemed to cut her in two." dition was pitiable enough. Grant that he was At other times, when dressed like a woman, she mad, still the manner of life to which his wife was one of the most beautiful women of her time. and the minister doomed him was infamous. Struensee's political power was as great as No one paid him the smallest respect, and once his personal influence. The whole power of an impudent page even drove him into a corner, the state seemed to be vested in him: the saying, "Mad Rex, make me a groom of the queen being his tool, the king his victim, and chamber." He was compelled to make perthe country his mere foot-stool whereby he sonal appointments of men specially distasteful might mount to supreme honor. All Europe to him; and on one occasion, in revenge for began to talk. Then the talk got so loud that having been made to sign an appointment as the Princess of Wales, Caroline Matilda's mo- chamberlain for a man he hated, he made one ther, made a long and toilsome journey north- of his stove-heaters a chamberlain; again, anward, which, whatever the political motives as- other time, he gave out that his dog Gourmand signed, seemed to have for its motive simply to was a "Conference Councilor," and proposed see her daughter, and to remonstrate with her his health, which the rest were obliged to acon her folly. Not that she herself came into knowledge as de rigueur. This was to express court with clean hands; for the position of his disgust at certain fault-finding and scolding Lord Bute in her royal household had long been which he had to submit to in council, showing a favorite subject for scandal and satire. The that, as barking was the rule of the day there, meeting took place after some delay, and the Gourmand could bark as well as any of them, mother's resolute removal of certain obstacles and so was quite as efficient a conference counthrown in the way by Caroline Matilda; but cilor. His chief amusement was smashing no good was done. The king and queen came china and beheading the garden statues: in attended only by Struensee and Warnstedt, the which odd play Moranti, his black boy, assisted favorite page, who were seated in the carriage him. For a change he would roll on the ground with them; and when the Princess of Wales with the boy, biting and scratching him, or would spoke to her daughter in English, she pretended fling papers, furniture, books, glass ornaments, not to understand her-she had forgotten the any thing he could find, over the balcony down language! In fact, she showed herself as way- into the court-yard: once wishing to fling the ward and unmanageable as a naughty child who boy and dog Gourmand after the rest. In pubcan not be reasoned with and who will not be lic he was treated with contempt by his keeper, controlled. Letters and envoys from both mo- Brandt, who in private bit and beat him-he ther and brother (George III.) were received said by the king's own desire; and, indeed, the in the same manner; and thus the last drags whole treatment of this unhappy wretch, during sought to be put upon the downward course the reign of Struensee, was as damaging to the were knocked aside, and the royal lady's repute queen's repute as it was disgraceful and dewent on toward destruction. grading.

The queen, influenced by Struensee, who, however, was loyally well intentioned in this, brought up her son on the wildest principles of "hardening"-a kill or cure system indeed for a delicate child. His food was of the simplest and poorest kind, and what we should call innutritious, and always cold; he had a cold bath twice or thrice a day; he was kept in a cold room with

What was it which, at about this time, made her write with a diamond on the window-pane at Frederiksborg, "Oh keep me innocent, make others great?" Conscience? Sorrow for past, or fear of future, sins? Or was it simply dissimulation, and the endeavor to deceive eyes whose sharpness of vision was, she well knew, spying out her weak places and gauging her misdoings? For we can not for a moment ac-out a fire, dressed lightly in thin silk, and went cept Sir Lascelles Wraxall's theory, and account her innocent in her relations with Struensee; every incident related and every induction to be drawn, point but to one thing; and whatever the political basis, whatever the greater worth of the Dano-Germanic alliance against that of the Russian, and the zeal of the physician-minister for his own ideas and his own views of statecraft, the question between the man and woman remains the same for both and all concerned. Unhappily for the half-mad, half-bad king, who, when Struensee dismissed honest old Bernstorff, had not a friend left. Given up to Struensee and the queen, he was now simply a puppet and a prisoner, with two black children -a boy and a girl-for his only companions, and Enevold Brandt, whom he hated, for his valet, chamberlain, pedagogue, and master

about barefoot, although he was a delicate baby of not quite three years old. His playmate and companion was a little fellow of his own age, called "little Karl," the natural son of a surgeon, who was allowed to fight with him and master him if he could, no one being suffered to assist or prevent. The queen was so severe with him, that when the attendants wanted to frighten him into good behavior, they used to threaten to take him to his mother, which generally succeeded. Struensee's coadjutor, the physician Berger, got a few of the more extreme rules relaxed; and, owing to his representations, this royal baby was allowed to wear shoes and stockings, to be rather more warmly clad, to have his rice boiled in broth instead of water, to have meat soup for dinner twice a week, and to have his room slightly warmed in the morning.

And now popular feeling began to take a very | minor moment.

One by one those named were

decided tone, and the ministry knew that the arrested and secured; and so was broken up in

evil hour which has to come to all inisdoers was drawing near. The queen and the favorite dared not show themselves in public; the guards were doubled at the palace, and various unusual precautions were taken; the most abominable satires and caricatures were printed and circulated, or stuck or scrawled on the walls, half in jest and half in earnest; the queen and the ministers would speculate on their future lives, and what they should do when the crash came, and they were forced to fly-they foresaw nothing worse; and all this while the indignation of the people and the anger of the European courts became louder and deeper, and of more ominous intensity and fierceness. Anonymous letters were sent to Brandt, advising him to put himself out of danger by ranging himself on the king's side, and against the minister; and he and Struensee had misunderstandings, even to the extent of the former proposing a kind of coup d'état to Falckenskjold, one of the Government, beginning and ending in the arrest of Struensee, and the transfer of the queen to himself; and then the great plot was arranged, headed by Juliana Maria and Prince Frederick her son, the king's half-brother.

The favorite's treatment of this young man had been most impolite. Insulted, neglected, irritated, his rank and near relationship with the king ignored or remembered only to fix a deeper sting, no wonder that he put himself at the head of a party determined to rid the country of a group of adventurers who had lost their heads when they had gained the top round of the ladder, and whose so-called reforms were neither popular nor understood, besides being nullified by the poison of the scandals attached to them. When a forged document was shown to Juliana Maria (at least, Sir Lascelles Wraxall says it was forged), wherein it was set forth how that the king was to be forced to abdicate, and how that the queen was to be declared regent with Struensee as protector-meaning, as it was argued to her, that the king and crown prince were to be murdered, Struensee married to the queen, and his children by her set on the throne-she felt that no time was to be lost, and that either she and hers must fall, or they. Means were not wanting, nor agents, nor adherents; they never are wanting when a tumult is contemplated, and good pickings are to be had out of a ruined palace; and the right time came with the rest. After a certain masked ball, where the queen had been most remarkably gay and most strikingly beautiful, and where, by the strange falling to pieces of a certain supper, all things were marvelously facilitated, the plot came to its culmination. The ex-queen, her son, and some others (Guldberg, Rantzau, Eickstedt, Köller, and the ex-valet Jessen), entered the king's bedroom at dead of night, where they first nearly frightened him to death, and then got him to sign orders for the arrest of Struensee, Brandt, Falckenskjold, the queen, and others of

a few moments the coalition which had changed the whole face of Danish politics and the whole current of Danish society for two years.

Struensee, never a brave man, though so daring in political action, first fainted, then took to swearing horribly, and then gave way to abject despair. Brandt was philosophical, and even gay. Falckenskjold was calm and critical. But the poor young queen was impassioned and terrified, full of wrath and fear and desperation and anguish: now struggling with the soldiers whom Rantzau had with him to secure her; now trying to hurl herself from the open window, shrieking wildly for Struensee and the king; finally borne away to the fortress of Kronborg, ruined and disgraced forever. Young, lovely, with a good and noble nature that had been at first outraged and afterward misguided, we can not but pity her. Truly she had sinned in her degree; but she had been sinned against more grievously, and her wrong-doing had been retaliation rather than aggression. For, as was said before, we can not accept Sir Lascelles Wraxall's theory of her innocence, though her failings may be tenderly excused for the sake of the evils she had undergone.

The end soon came. Struensee, pressed and threatened, confessed to his liaison with the queen, circumstantially detailed; and when the queen was shown his confession, and told that if she denied it he would be tortured, she signed it in attestation of its truth, and so signed away her good fame forever. He was executed, with certain barbarous circumstances disgraceful to the time and people: having first seen his colleague Brandt decapitated and disemboweled before his face; Falckenskjold was sentenced to be confined on the rock of Munkholm for life. Caroline Matilda was removed from Kronborg to the castle of Aalborg, where she was kept a prisoner until released at the instance of England. Thence, she went to Celle, or Zell, the old residence of the former Dukes of Lüneburg, where she lived happily enough, much beloved by all who knew her, and cheered by the frequent presence of her sister, the Princess of Brunswick. Her only grief was the loss of her children, especially of the little girl-whose legitimacy, by-the-by, came under grave suspicion; but the king had formally acknowledged her at her birth. Here she saw Mr. Wraxall, the grandfather of her present apologist, then a young man, "just her own age," and who seems to have been greatly struck by her beauty, and interested in her fortunes. He describes her as very beautiful, though too fat; like her brother George the Third in feature, but harmonized and softened; charitable, gay, sweet-tempered, and discreet all that the wronged princess should be.

Mr. Wraxall entered into the plot for her release, which had as its object the arrest of Juliana Maria and Prince Frederick, and the king's published order for her return to Copenhagen.

It is impossible to guess what new historic com- | better rest, I trust; for I found a tiny Testament plications might have arisen had she not, in the in his hand when I folded it with the other. I: midst of this under-current, died on the 11th of was open, and his finger was on a prayer-one May, 1775, wanting less than three months of of the old, old prayers which are always new, her twenty-fourth year. Of course people said that his mother had marked for him. I had a she died of poison, that wide and convenient fancy for the poor, home-sick fellow, and had vagueness; but in truth it was of scarlet-fever, looked at his empty bed with something of that taking a typhoid character, and easy to be ac- feeling with which one goes into the twilight of counted for. One of her young pages had just a room a friend has left dark forever. I shrank died of this disease, and she, very foolishly, went from the thought of seeing a stranger there so into the room where the coffin was, and looked soon; a very foolish fancy for a hospital nurse, at the dead body. The sight haunted her, and of course, but some of these boys had become the disease found her out, carrying her off in friends indeed in the long months I had cared a very few days. When dying, she wrote to for them. Besides this, I had as much work on George the Third, solemnly protesting her in- hand as it seemed to me I could well attend to nocence of all with which she had been charged; without a little larger allowance of strength than and also to M. Roques, the pastor of the French usually falls to the lot of womankind, nurses not Protestant church at Zell, she said the same: excepted. There was Mrs. Cruppins had four "I was never faithless to my husband." So, at or five empty beds, though she was the last least, it is reported. Whether Sir Lascelles person I should want to go to, to be nursed Wraxall's chivalrous theory respecting the un-through a fever; and there was Miss Graves, happy princess be correct or not, the memoir has high merits, not only as a historical but as a literary production. Some of the details of court life are extremely curious.

she could take three more as well as not, even if she did go about her work like a martyr, and turn her ward into a church-vault, with her funereal face and her melancholy and interesting way of sighing over the men. What if the Doctor did prefer, and very naturally, to call on me? there was a limit to all things. So when I looked at him I was going to own up to my hidden depravity, and say that No. 2 didn't want the new-comer.

The Doctor is a discreet man, and can read the signs of the weather. He gave me a generous half of one of his professional glances, and remarked quietly to a curious young sergeant in the corner who had employed the time of my meditation in asking a volley of questions,

"Yes, half-starved, but thinks only of her husband and child; the infant is more dead than alive."

Something rose in my throat and choked me. "What a heathen!"

"Who? I or the typhoid ?"

"Neither of you," I responded, curtly; "bring him in here."

"Can't you come out and see to this arrival?" he asked, stopping a few feet in front of me, with his finger on Tom's pulse, his hand filled with lemonade for Dick, and his eyes on Harry, so economical of his time was our little Doctor. In fact, I do not think that since I came to the hospital I had succeeded in gaining his undivided attention for a single full minute in working hours. I regarded this as an insult at first; but discovering at length how much he depended on these fragmentary notes which he took of his patients, I had learned to hide my diminished head, and consider myself once for all a lesser light in his presence. But there is a natural perversity about me, which in spite of such discipline "still lived." It was with an instinct for which I do not hold myself at all accountable that I turned away from him with as professional an air as I could assume, and began choking the gruel down the poor Captain's throat, as if the safety of the army depended on its descent therein, while I asked, in my most busi-thirds of the poor creatures are fit for nothing ness-like tones,

"What is it?"

The Doctor went away with the least bit of a smile twitching the corners of his mouth. I felt too humble just then to take any notice of it, so I meekly returned to the Captain and his gruel, gave him his powders, tucked him up for a nap, and when Dr. Joyce came back I was ready for him.

A number of these refugees had dropped into our hospital since I had been there, for two

but a sick-bed by the time they reach Nashville, and I supposed I knew what to expect. But

"Three-a man already gone with typhoid, the sight I saw struck me dumb. Two shrunkwife, and a child-refugees."

"Hum! well?"

en, ghost-like figures, their clothes in tatters, covered with mire and blood, their faces so gaunt

"I want you to get hold of the woman and that, looking at them, a chill crept over me, as feed her up: she's a mere shadow." if I looked on Death.

"And the man?"

Dr. Joyce looked round the ward; so did I. I had one empty bed. A little pale-faced boy had left it only yesterday, and gone-well to a

But this was not a time to grow nervous. I roused myself with a start, and touched the man's hand to see if it were flesh and blood. In reply to my words of welcome he thanked me