The Doctor Who Ruled A Kingdom In Secret

Johann Friedrich Struensee is the subject of one of the most astonishing rise-and-fall stories in European history — a middle-class German doctor who, in the space of a couple of years, went from an obscure town physician to the ruler in all but name of an entire kingdom, the lover of its queen, and the master of its mad king — before being torn apart on a scaffold in front of a crowd of thirty thousand.

To understand it, you have to understand the king he served. In the later 18th century, Denmark-Norway was ruled by Christian VII, a monarch whose reign was defined by one terrible fact: he was profoundly mentally ill — his condition is usually described in hindsight as schizophrenia, though no one can diagnose a dead king — and it left him prone to hallucinations, self-harm, and long periods of childlike incapacity. He was king in name, but incapable of truly ruling, and real power fell to whoever could control and manage him. In 1768, to accompany the unstable young king on a European tour, the court hired a personal physician: a calm, intelligent, handsome German doctor named Johann Struensee. And Struensee proved remarkably good at his job. He was one of the few people who could soothe the king, manage his episodes, and win his fragile trust. Christian came to depend on him utterly. And Struensee, an ambitious man full of the radical new ideas of the Enlightenment, realised what that dependence meant: whoever controlled the king, controlled Denmark.

He rose with breathtaking speed. Struensee also grew close to the king’s lonely, neglected young wife — Queen Caroline Matilda, the sister of King George III of Britain, married at fifteen to a man who could not love her. By 1770, the doctor and the queen were lovers. And by the end of that year, Struensee had effectively made himself the ruler of Denmark. He dissolved the council of state and funnelled all government through the king’s cabinet — his cabinet. Because the king would sign whatever was put in front of him, Struensee began issuing royal decrees in Christian’s name — and then went further, taking the authority to issue orders that didn’t even need the king’s signature at all. For about thirteen months, this commoner, this foreign doctor, held near-absolute power over a kingdom.

And here is the part that makes him genuinely remarkable: he used that power to try to remake Denmark as an Enlightenment paradise. In a whirlwind, Struensee issued more than a thousand decrees. He abolished torture. He gave Denmark the world’s first full statutory freedom of the press. He outlawed the bribery of officials, broke the nobility’s grip on office, eased the crushing labour burdens on peasants, and slashed wasteful government spending. He was, in many ways, a genuine idealist trying to drag a feudal kingdom into the modern age by force.

The Horror

But he moved too fast, and made too many enemies. Struensee was arrogant and tactless; he was a German who never learned Danish and showed open contempt for Danish customs. The nobility despised him for stripping their privileges. The public, whipped up by his enemies, were scandalised by his open affair with the queen — especially after Caroline Matilda gave birth to a daughter, Princess Louise Augusta, who was almost certainly Struensee’s child, not the king’s. A powerful faction gathered around the king’s ambitious step-mother, the Queen Dowager Juliana Maria, determined to destroy him.

They struck in the dark. In the early hours of the 17th of January 1772, following a lavish masquerade ball at Christiansborg Palace, the conspirators moved. They frightened the confused, half-asleep king into signing orders for the arrests, and seized Struensee, his ally Enevold Brandt, and Queen Caroline Matilda in their bedrooms. The next morning, the king was paraded in his carriage through the streets of Copenhagen to celebrate his “rescue” from the doctor, to the cheers of the crowds. Struensee was thrown in chains into the Kastellet fortress and charged with lèse-majesté — a crime against the crown — and with usurping royal authority. What followed was a trial in which, as one modern historian puts it, guilt was a premise, not a conclusion. Under interrogation, Struensee at first denied everything; then, worn down, he confessed to the affair — and tried to shift the blame onto the queen. Caroline Matilda, shown his signed confession, signed one of her own, taking the blame upon herself in the hope of saving him. It saved neither of them. He was condemned to a traitor’s death.

On the 28th of April 1772, Johann Struensee was brought out to a scaffold on Øster Fælled, the common outside Copenhagen, before an enormous crowd said to number thirty thousand people — the Queen Dowager, it was said, watching through an opera glass. His ally Brandt was executed first, so that Struensee had to watch and know exactly what was coming. Then it was his turn. The full, horrific sentence was carried out. First, his right hand — the hand that had signed all those decrees in the king’s name — was struck off. Then he was beheaded; reportedly it took three blows of the axe. And then his body was drawn and quartered, the pieces carried to the gallows hill and displayed on wheels and stakes as a warning. The man who had ruled Denmark was scattered in pieces on the ground. He was thirty-four years old.

The Modern Relic

The fall destroyed almost everyone caught in it. Queen Caroline Matilda was stripped of her crown, torn away from her children, her marriage dissolved, and exiled from Denmark forever. Her brother, King George III, had readied the Royal Navy for a possible rescue; in the end she was taken to Celle Castle in his German territory — where she died of scarlet fever in 1775, alone and disgraced, at just twenty-three years old, never having seen Denmark or her children again. Their daughter, Louise Augusta, however, survived and thrived, growing up as a Danish princess. And the king, Christian VII, remained on his throne as a powerless figurehead, controlled now by others, until his death in 1808.

The relics of the story are still there to be found. The great fortress of Kastellet in Copenhagen, where Struensee was imprisoned before his death, still stands today — one of the best-preserved star fortresses in Northern Europe, its grassy ramparts walked by visitors every day. And in the crypt of St. Peter’s Church in Copenhagen’s Latin Quarter — the church of the city’s German congregation, which Struensee, a declared atheist, never once entered in life — there lies a small child’s coffin. In it are bones dug up in 1885 at the old gallows hill, some bearing the marks of an axe, believed to be his. And the story itself has refused to die: it became one of the most acclaimed European films of recent years, the Danish epic “A Royal Affair,” nominated for an Academy Award, which brought the tale of the doctor who ruled a kingdom to a global audience. Struensee is remembered now not just as a scandal, but as a tragic idealist — a commoner who briefly held a crown’s power and tried to use it to build a better, freer world, only to be cut down, hand and head, before thirty thousand people. Many of the reforms he was executed for were quietly brought back in the decades after his death. He lost his hand, his head, and the queen he loved — but some of the ideas he died for, in the end, outlived the axe.

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