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Chap. XXV.
HISTORIC PORTRAIT GALLERY.
391
caresses with her pretty taper fingers the royal circlet.
Another of Queen Louisa, as a young woman, is
welllooking enough, large round eyes, fine complexion, and
good figure; she was four years older than her
husband, and, in her early days of matrimony, jealous
as a tigress. She knew well he had previously
entertained in his early youth a deep passion for a virtuous
Italian lady of high family, a Countess Velo, and
would have married her, but she was of the Roman
Catholic persuasion. The recollection of this affair
only rendered the queen more furious: when she
suspected him of infidelity, she is said to have
threatened him with a “loaded leaden pistol” pointed against
his head. Matters went on well enough as long as
Louisa was young and fresh; a pretty woman with a
loaded pistol—desperately jealous—flatters a man’s
vanity; but when Louisa, as you may see by her
later portrait, lost the éclat of her youth and turned
yellow, Frederic would stand it no longer;* he became
desperately enamoured of the daughter of the Prussian
Minister Viereck. Queer morals certainly were those
of the eighteenth century. In the presence of her
father, of the cabinet ministers, and councillors of state,
the king espoused his love with the left hand, and created
her Countess of Antvorskov: this was called a
“conscience marriage ”—most people would call it bigamy.
She died in childbirth the following year.*f* Then
* The earlier portraits of Louisa of Mecklenburg, engraved after
Peter Schenck, are very pretty; the best of her rival, Anne Sophia,
are by Larguilliere.
f In a letter from her father to Count Wartenberg, explaining the
contract of marriage between the King of Denmark and his daughter,
to be submitted to his sovereign, he says—“ The marriage has been
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