In Copenhagen, the reality of power resided first in a bedchamber where the King was unwilling to sign. On the night of the 16th to the 17th of January 1772, Christian VII received Koller Banner, who announced to him that a conspiracy threatened his person and his crown. The chronicles do not agree upon every detail of this nocturnal audience; the outcome, however, is unmistakable. The King hesitated, refusing at first to put his hand to the warrant; then the Queen Dowager and Prince Frederick entered in their turn. Beneath their relentless urging, and according to Borrow beneath direct threat, Christian yielded and signed.
The men who awaited him had not always held so elevated a place at his side. Johann Friedrich Struensee was a physician. Born in Germany, trained at Halle, and having practiced at Altona, he accompanied Christian upon his European tour of 1768. He won the monarch’s confidence, returned with him to Denmark, and was appointed his personal physician. Enevold Brandt, a Danish gentleman, had fallen into disgrace; Struensee procured his recall to court. Both were raised to the dignity of count. Struensee, for his part, soon became the King’s principal minister.
A bedside attendance was thus transformed into political mastery. Decrees and state affairs were submitted to the gaze of a sovereign whom his entourage deemed incapable of reigning alone. Struensee assumed a vast share of the administration, setting in motion a series of radical reforms, foremost among them the abolition of censorship. Yet this newfound freedom failed to conciliate the nation: restrictions returned the moment the press turned its barbs against his own governance. At court, the sudden reshuffling of offices, the dismissal of Minister Bernstorff, and the ascendancy of a German doctor fed the bitter grievances of a nobility that saw itself stripped of power.
Palace life added its own spectacle to the political conflict. Masked balls and foreign diversions were introduced into the court. Borrow depicts them as nests of profligacy; while this moral condemnation belongs to his own narrative, it demonstrates how thoroughly the luxuries and habits of the court were converted into weapons against the minister. The open affection of Queen Caroline Matilda for Struensee fed every rumor. The liaison between the physician and the Queen now forms part of the historical record recognized by the Royal Danish Collection. Borrow showed himself more circumspect. Yet this intimacy was indeed numbered among the charges of lèse-majesté: in an absolute monarchy, the private conduct of the crown involves the authority of the state itself.
As the months elapsed, his enemies learned to turn his own gifts against him. They gathered disaffected officers and laid the groundwork for an arrest. A first attempt miscarried. Count Rantzau might have warned him. According to Borrow, he awaited Struensee in his apartments, prepared to unveil the plot. Struensee, detained by state business, proceeded directly to the ball; the conspirators subsequently prevented the two men from meeting. On the night of the 16th to the 17th of January, a masquerade drew to its close in the palace of Christiansborg. When the festivities ended, the guests withdrew. The King was awakened; the warrant was at last obtained.
Koller Banner made his way to Struensee’s chamber, forced the door, and found him asleep. The physician offered no resistance to the royal mandate. He was conveyed by carriage directly to the Citadel. Brandt offered a brief struggle before being overpowered and secured in his turn. By morning, the Queen was escorted under guard to Kronborg. The overthrow took place not upon the public square, but within those very chambers where, hours earlier, supreme power had paraded itself in splendour. The men who had occupied the foremost rank were now under lock and key; the decrees they had issued no longer belonged to them.
The judicial proceedings dragged on for weeks. The commissioners subjected the two counts to repeated interrogations. Borrow reports that the instruments of torture were displayed before Struensee to intimidate him, though he adds that he found no record of the prisoners having been put to the question. He describes a confrontation wherein neither man sought to incriminate his companion. The two favorites, so long united in the royal grace, stood face to face beneath the scrutiny of those who were drafting their condemnation. The examinations began anew, protracted and frequent. Borrow puts forward the figure of 637 interrogatories addressed to the physician, recording this accumulation without setting down the entirety of the replies.
The criminal dossier, however, was not confined to an offense against morals. The prosecution charged Struensee with his illicit liaison with the Queen, with having usurped absolute authority and exercised it without the King’s knowledge, and with the falsification of a treasury account. Even the sale of a royal jewel at an undervalued price was entered upon the roll of grievances. These were assembled under the sweeping head of lèse-majesté, though the final decree did not rehearse them all individually. Against Brandt, the sentence alleged designs directed immediately against the person of the King. These motives were by no means equal; beneath the rubric of high treason, multiple grievances and court factions were inextricably joined.
On the 25th of April 1772, the commission pronounced the sentence of death, accompanied by the confiscation of all property and the forfeiture of titles. Christian VII confirmed the decree on the 27th of April, ordering its execution for the following day. The two condemned men learned their fate through their counsel. Struensee, according to the account, read his death warrant with composure, but betrayed profound distress upon learning that Brandt had been condemned to the same fate. That which wounded him most was no longer his fallen dignity nor his ruined reforms: it was the doom of the man whom he had formerly recalled to the court.
The sentence decreed the loss of nobility and coats of arms, the severing of the right hand, decapitation, and the quartering of the bodies. The letter of the law was thus translated into an awful public spectacle. On the 28th of April, Brandt and Struensee were conveyed in carriages toward a scaffold erected upon the Eastern Common, outside the gates of Copenhagen. Troops of horse and foot, together with sailors, guarded the perimeter. A vast concourse had assembled, many unable to obtain a view. Brandt appeared first. Borrow describes his green coat laced with gold, his hat, and his boots, then records his final colloquy with Pastor Hee. He mounted the scaffold with an intrepidity which Borrow contrasts with the penitence of Struensee.
For Struensee, the chronicle changes witnesses. Borrow incorporates the narrative of the Reverend Dr. Balthasar Münter, who had been appointed to attend the fallen minister in prison. On the eve of the execution, Struensee urged him to sustain their spiritual discourse on the morrow without discomposure, beseeching him not to yield to grief. He entrusted to him a message for his brother, expressing his bitter remorse at having drawn him into his ruin and charging the pastor with his deepest affection. He refused to see him a final time, because, as Münter relates, their parting would prove too agonizing. Yet he clung to the hope that his brother’s fortunes might still prosper. To Münter fell the duty of carrying to the living that which the condemned man could not bring himself to speak in person.
In the morning, Münter found Struensee attired for the scaffold, engaged in reading a sermon on the Passion of Christ. When the guards unbarred the door, it was the divine, by his own account, who appeared the more visibly shaken. Struensee exhorted him not to grieve, and mounted the coach. Münter was required to precede him, the royal command forbidding him to ride at the prisoner's side. When the carriages reached the vicinity of the scaffold, the pastor entered Struensee’s coach and had the horses turned, that the prisoner might be spared the spectacle of Brandt’s death. In his account, Struensee walked forth amidst the spectators, bowed to several acquaintances, and ascended the steps with heavy tread. The clergyman noted his pale countenance, his unmistakable dread, and, alongside it, a resignation to death which he interpreted as Christian piety.
The right hand was struck off before the head fell; the body was subsequently quartered in accordance with the judgment. In Münter’s narrative, the execution of Brandt had preceded that of Struensee. The minister who, but a few months before, held the destiny of the kingdom in his grasp now possessed no title to plead, nor any voice with power to stay the executioner's stroke. His armorial bearings had been shattered before the multitude prior to his disrobing. Royal favor had raised the physician to a count; a public proclamation and the headsman’s axe were sufficient to unmake him. Münter remained upon the scaffold, the sole repository of the message destined for the surviving brother.