protector—meaning, as it was argued to her, that
the king and crown prince were to be murdered,
Struensee married to the queen, and his children
by her set on the throne—she felt that no time
was to be lost, and that either she and hers must
fall, or they. Means were not wanting, nor agents,
nor adherents; they never are wanting when
a tumult is contemplated, and good pickings are
to be had out of a ruined palace; and the right
time came with the rest. After a certain masked
ball, where the queen had been most remarkably
gay and most strikingly beautiful, and
where, by the strange falling to pieces of a
certain supper, all things were marvellously
facilitated, the plot came to its culmination.
The ex-queen, her son, and some others (Guldberg,
Rantzau, Eickstedt, Köller, and the ex-
valet Jessen), entered the king's bedroom at
dead of night, where they first nearly frightened
him to death, and then got him to sign
orders for the arrest of Struensee, Brandt,
Falckenskjold, the queen, and others of minor
moment. One by one those named were
arrested and secured; and so was broken up in a
few moments the coalition which had changed
the whole face of Danish politics and the whole
current of Danish society, for two years.

Struensee, never a brave man, though so
daring in political action, first fainted, then
took to swearing horribly, and then gave way
to abject despair. Brandt was philosophical, and
even gay. Falckenskjold was calm and critical.
But the poor young queen was impassioned and
terrified, full of wrath and fear and desperation
and anguish: now struggling with the soldiers
whom Rantzau had with him to secure her; now
trying to hurl herself from the open window,
shrieking wildly for Struensee and the king;
finally borne away to the fortress of Kronborg
ruined and disgraced for ever. Young,
lovely, with a good and noble nature that had
been at first outraged and afterwards
misguided, we cannot but pity her. Truly she had
sinned in her degree; but she had been sinned
against more grievously, and her wrong-doing
had been retaliation rather than aggression.
For, as was said before, we cannot accept Sir
Lascelles Wraxall's theory of her innocence,
though her failings may be tenderly excused for
the sake of the evils she had undergone.

The end soon came. Struensee, pressed and
threatened, confessed to his liaison with the
queen, circumstantially detailed; and when the
queen was shown his confession, and told that
if she denied it he would be tortured, she signed
it in attestation of its truth, and so signed away
her good fame for ever. He was executed, with
certain barbarous circumstances disgraceful to
the time and people: having first seen his
colleague Brandt decapitated and disembowelled
before his face; Falckenskjold was sentenced
to be confined on the rock of Munkholm for
life. Caroline Matilda was removed from Kronborg
to the castle of Aalborg, where she was
kept a prisoner until released at the instance of
England. Thence, she went to Celle, or Zell,
the old residence of the former Dukes of Lüneburg,
where she lived happily enough, much
beloved by all who knew her, and cheered by the
frequent presence of her sister, the Princess of
Brunswick. Her only grief was the loss of
her children, especially of the little girl—whose
legitimacy, by-the-by, came under grave suspicion;
but the king had formally acknowledged
her at her birth. Here she saw Mr. Wraxall,
the grandfather of her present apologist, then a
young man, "just her own age," and who seems
to have been greatly struck by her beauty, and
interested in her fortunes. He describes her as
very beautiful, though too fat; like her brother
George the Third in feature, but harmonised and
softened; charitable, gay, sweet-tempered, and
discreet—all that the wronged princess should be.

Mr. Wraxall entered into the plot for her
release, which had as its object, the arrest of
Juliana Maria and Prince Frederick, and the
king's published order for her return to
Copenhagen. It is impossible to guess what new
historic complications might have arisen had she
not, in the midst of this under-current, died on
the 11th of May, 1775, wanting less than three
months of her twenty-fourth year. Of course
people said she died of poison, that wide and
convenient vagueness; but in truth it was of
scarlet fever, taking a typhoid character, and
easy to be accounted for. One of her young
pages had just died of this disease, and she,
very foolishly, went into the room where the
coffin was, and looked at the dead body. The
sight haunted her, and the disease found her
out, carrying her off in a very few days. When
dying, she wrote to George the Third, solemnly
protesting her innocence of all with which she
had been charged; and also to M. Roques, the
pastor of the French Protestant church at Zell,
she said the same: " I was never faithless to my
husband." So, at least, it is reported. Whether
Sir Lascelles Wraxall's chivalrous theory respecting
the unhappy princess be correct or not, the
memoir has high merits, not only as an historical,
but as a literary production. Some of the
details of court life are extremely curious.

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