Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Carroll Leslie

Author:Carroll, Leslie [Carroll, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101607121
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

CAROLINE MATHILDE

1751–1775

QUEEN OF DENMARK: 1766–1772 (BANISHED)

As king of England, George III, who acceded to the throne in 1760, had the authority, if not also the obligation, to unite his younger siblings in marriages that would be strategically advantageous for Great Britain. Princess Caroline Matilda was the prettiest of George’s sisters—the youngest child of Augusta, Princess Dowager of Wales, and Frederick, Prince of Wales—born only four months after their father died.

Even as a little girl, Caroline Matilda was made aware that no royal child could marry for love. If you wanted to stay home, then you remained a spinster. Otherwise you were sent off to another land, ostensibly forever, to cement a diplomatic alliance with a foreign entity. Caroline Matilda had known since 1765 of her connubial destiny—to wed Christian, the Crown Prince of Denmark. Walter Titley, the British envoy to Copenhagen, made sure to emphasize Christian’s handsome, if slightly fey, looks as well as his many other fine qualities.

“To an amiable and manly countenance, a graceful and distinguishing figure, he joins an address full of dignity and at the same time extremely affable,” observed the assistant British envoy William Cosby, who described the young crown prince with effusion after visiting Copenhagen in the spring of 1764. When he wasn’t terrorized by his own fears, the small, slight, tow-haired prince was witty and charming. The problem with Christian was that he would probably be diagnosed today as a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic. Nowadays he’d be medicated to quiet the demons in his head and modify his masochism, fetishism, and other behaviors deemed outside the norm.

His mother, Queen Louise, the youngest daughter of George II of England and Caroline of Anspach (making Christian and Caroline Matilda cousins), died when Christian was only two. His father, King Frederick, consoled himself with alcohol and took a second wife, a daughter of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Juliane Marie. Christian’s stepmother wasn’t cruel to him, but she wasn’t exactly maternal. After her own son, Prince Frederik, was born in 1753, she focused all her energy and her love on her biological child.

When Christian was six he was given his own household, and his head was crammed with mathematics and theology by his strict and humorless tutor, Count Dietlev Reventlow. The prince was a sensitive and intelligent boy but was never nurtured, and consequently began to dwell inside his mind, where his phobias grew and multiplied.

At the age of eleven in 1760, he got a new tutor, Elie Salomon François Reverdil, who realized that he had a very strange kid on his hands. Out of the blue Christian would unbutton his breeches, yank up his shirt, and press against his abdominals, telling his tutor that he was intent on achieving a perfect body. He believed that if he could make himself physically invincible, he could overpower his demons.

Sixteen days before Christian’s seventeenth birthday, on January 13, 1766, Frederick of Denmark died, his body bloated with booze and dropsy. Christian was now king of Denmark, Norway, of the Goths

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