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Ci: AT. XXII.
DEATH OF QUEEN LOUISA.
339
the Danish people—“ good Queen Louisa,” as she is still
called—passed many happy days here before Frederic
grew faithless: not that he ever ceased to love her—
but his heart, like that of many other men, was
capacious, had room for her and other women too. Frederic
was a roi galant; conjugal fidelity was not the order of
the day; and Louisa, though the court of her father
George was far from pure, really did suffer from her
husband’s conduct. On her marriage, when she arrived
at Altona, she dismissed all her English attendants ;
not a word of Danish did she know, but she surrounded
herself by Danes, learnt quickly the language, which
again became the fashion at court after the lapse of
half a century.
It was, writes an eye-witness, a touching sight to see
some thousand people every day on their bare knees
(paa bare knæ) in the court before the castle, imploring
Heaven to save her. She was willing to die, for her
husband’s infidelity had embittered her life. The
effects of the birth of a dead son* terminated her
existence in the winter of 1751. She was in her
twenty-seventh year. Requiescat in pace. And now
Juliana rules the roast and her besotted king, and
* In the Müller collection I found a curious engraving of the
“ barsel91 of Queen Louisa, dated 1749, by Haas of Hamburg. The
queen, whose troubles are just over, is represented in her bed, the
footboard carved with her cipher. On one side the new-born child
(later mad King Christian) in a cradle, in the act of being crowned by
an angel; by his side stands the nurse, with a basin of caudle on the
table before her; while above appears the stork, bearing a swathed
child in his beak. On the other side, the king and his courtiers offer
their congratulations to the queen; above, an angel who blows
something from his trumpet in High Dutch, which, as I do not understand
the language, I regret being unable to translate.
z 2
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