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Chap. XXII.
CAROLINE MATILDA.
341
enraged populace at the period of his execution.* One
avenue still bears the name of Matilda’s Road.
At Hirschholm King Frederic VI. passed his early youth,
running about shoeless, barefoot, like a peasant boy, in
company with a farmer’s son. He was delicate from
his birth, and Struensee, a doctor by profession (hence
dates his intimacy with the queen shortly after the
marriage), insisted, by way of fortifying his constitution,
on relieving him from all the trammels of royalty, and
allowing him to run wild in the meadows and forests of
* Struensee and Brandt were both arrested, and detained in the most
rigorous confinement. The former was loaded with chains about his
arms and legs, and at the same time attached to the wall by an iron bar.
With Count Brandt the king had previously quarrelled at the palace
of Hirschholm, and challenged him to fight. This the count naturally
declined. When next they met the king repeated the defiance, and
called him “coward.” Brandt behaving with temper, as befitted a
subject, the half-mad king became ungovernable, thrust his hand into
the count’s mouth, seized his tongue, and nearly tore it out, half
choking him; Brandt in self-defence (as who would not?) bit the
king’s hand. A reconciliation however was effected by Struensee, and
Christian promised never again to allude to the subject. The crime now
charged against Brandt was that of having lifted his hand against the
“ sacred person of his sovereign the punishment for which by the
laws of Denmark was 44 death/’ His lawyer is said^to have made an
admirable speech in his defence: — “Frederic II.,” he remarked,
“ when he unbent among his nobles, as be frequently did, was
accustomed to say 4 The king is not at home,’ then all etiquette was banished
from the court; but when it pleased him to resume his royal dignity,
he again exclaimed 4 The king is at home,’ and the courtiers at once
comprehended that all licence was at an end. But what," added he,
“ must we now do, when 4 the king is never at home’ ?” A bold speech
for a lawyer of the last century ; it is needless to add, he never rose
to the high office of Chancellor of the kingdom of Denmark. Struensee
and Brandt were both beheaded, their right hands first amputated ; and
their skulls and bones, in 1775, when Wraxall visited Copenhagen, were
still exhibited at one mile distance from the city : later the scaffold
was disposed of, and the wood now forms the staircase of a small
country house near the spot where it once stood outside the town.
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