horses, as if triumphing after a glorious victory over his enemies, in which he had saved his country. The city was illuminated. The preachers of the established church are charged by several concurring witnesses with inhuman and unchristian invectives from the pulpit against the Queen and the fallen ministers; the good doubtless believing too easily the tale of the victors; the base paying court to the dispensers of preferment; and the bigotted greedily swallowing the most incredible accusations against unbelievers. The populace, inflamed by these declamations, demolished or pillaged from sixty to a hundred houses.

The conspirators distributed among themselves the chief offices. The King was suffered to fall into his former nullity. The formality of his signature was dispensed with. The affairs of the kingdom were conducted in his name, till his son was of age to assume the regency. Guldberg, under the modest title of Secretary of the Cabinet, became Prime Minister. Rantzau was appointed a Privy Councillor, and Osten retained the department of Foreign Affairs; but it is consolatory to add, that, after a few months, both were discarded at the instance of the Court of Petersburgh, to complete the desired exchange of Holstein with Oldenburgh.

The object of the conspiracy being thus accomplished, the conquerors proceeded, as usual, to those judicial proceedings against the prisoners, which are intended formally to justify the violence of a victorious faction, but substantially aggravate its guilt. A commission was appointed to try the accused. Its leading members were the chiefs of the conspiracy,-men who could not acquit their opponents without confessing themselves to be deeply guilty. Guldberg, one of the members, had to determine, by the sentence which he pronounced, whether he was himself a rebel. General Eichstedt, the President, had personally arrested several of the prisoners, and was, by his judgment on Struensee, who had been his benefactor, to decide, that the criminality of that minister was of so deep a dye as to cancel the obligations of gratitude. To secure his impartiality still more, he was appointed a Minister, and promised the office of Preceptor of the Hereditary Prince, the permanence of which appointments must have partly depended on the general conviction that the prisoners were guilty.

The charges against Struensee and Brandt are dated on the 21st of April 1772. The defence of Struensee was drawn up by his counsel on the 224; that of Brandt was prepared on the 23d. Sentence was pronounced against both on the 25th. On the 27th it was approved, and ordered to be executed by the King. On the 28th, after their right hands were cut off on the scaffold, they were beheaded. For three months they had been closely and very cruelly imprisoned. The proceedings of the commission were secret. The prisoners were not confronted with each other; they heard no witnesses; they read no depositions; they do not appear to have seen any counsel till they had received the indictments. add, that the King went to the Opera on the 25th, after signifying his approIt is characteristic of this scene to bation of the sentence; and that, on the 27th, the day of its solemn confirmation, there was a masqued ball at Court. On the 28th, the day of execution, the King again went to the Opera. The passion which prompts an absolute monarch to raise an unworthy favourite to honour is still less disgusting than the levity and hardness with which, on the first alarm, he always abandons the same favourite to destruction. served, that the very persons who had represented the patronage of operas It may be ob

and masquerades as one of the offences of Struensee, were the same who thus unseasonably paraded their unhappy Sovereign through a succession of such amusements.

The volume before us contains the written answers of Struensee to the preliminary questions of the commission, the substance of the charges against him, and the defence made by his counsel. The first was written on the 14th of April, when he was alone in a dungeon, with irons on his hands and feet, and an iron collar fastened to the wall round his neck. The indictment is prefaced by a long declamatory invective against his general conduct and character, such as still dishonour the criminal proceedings of most nations, and from which England has probably been saved by the scholastic subtlety and dryness of her system of what is called special pleading. Laying aside his supposed connexion with the Queen, which is reserved for a few separate remarks, the charges are either perfectly frivolous, or sufficiently answered by his counsel, in a defence which he was allowed only one day to prepare, and which bears evident marks of being written with the fear of the victorious faction before the eyes of the feeble advocate. One is, that he caused the young Prince to be trained so hardily as to endanger his life; in answer to which, he refers to the judgment of physicians, appeals to the restored health of the young Prince, and observes, that even if he had been wrong, his fault could have been no more than an error of judgment. The truth is, that he was guilty of a ridiculous mimicry of the early education of Emile, at a time when all Europe was intoxicated by the writings of Rousseau. To the second charge, that he had issued, unknown to the King, an order for the incorporation of the Foot Guards with the troops of the line on the 21st of December, 1771, and, on their refusal to obey, had obtained an order from the King on the 24th for their reduction, he answered, that the draught of the order had been read and approved by the King on the 21st, signed and sealed by him on the 23d, and finally confirmed by the order for reducing the refractory guards, as issued by his Majesty on the 24th; so that he could scarcely be said to have been even in form guilty of a two days' usurpation. It might have been added, that it was immediately fully pardoned by the Royal confirmation; that Rantzau, and others of his enemies, had taken an active share in it; and that it was so recent, that the conspirators must have resolved on their measures before its occurrence, which reduces it to a mere pretext. He was charged with taking or granting éxorbitant pensions; and he answered, seemingly with truth, that they were not higher than those of his predecessors. He was accused also of having falsified the public accounts; to which his answer is necessarily too detailed for our purpose, but appears to be satisfactory. Both these offences, if they had been committed, could not have been treated as high treason in any country not wholly barbarous; and the evidence on which the latter and more precise of the charges rested, was a declaration of the imbecile and imprisoned King on an intricate matter of account reported to such a tribunal by an agent of enemies who had determined on the destruction of the prisoner.

Thus stands the case of the unfortunate Struensee on all the charges but one, as it appears in the accusation which his enemies had such time and power to support, and on the defence made for him under such cruel disadvantages. That he was innocent of the political offences laid to his charge is rendered highly probable by the "Narrative of his Conversion," published soon after his execution by Dr. Munter, a divine of Copenhagen, appointed

by the Danish government to attend him;* a composition, which bears the strongest marks of the probity and sincerity of the writer, and is a perfect model of the manner in which a person, circumstanced like Struensee, ought to be treated by a kind and considerate minister of religion. Men of all opinions, who peruse this narrative, must own that it is impossible to touch the wounds of a sufferer with more tenderness, to reconcile the agitated penitent to himself, to present religion as the consoler, not as the disturber of his dying moments, gently to dispose him to try his own actions by a higher test of morality, to fill his mind with indulgent benevolence towards his fellow-men, and to exalt it to a reverential love of boundless perfection. Dr. Munter deserved the confidence of Struensee, and seems entirely to have won it. The unfortunate man freely owned his private licentiousness, his success in corrupting the principles of the victims of his desires, his rejection, not only of religion, but also in theory, but not quite in feeling, of whatever ennobles and elevates the mind in morality; the imprudence and rashness by which he brought ruin on his friends, and plunged his parents in deep affliction; and the ignoble and impure motives of all his public actions, which, in the eye of reason, deprived them of that pretension to virtuous character to which their outward appearance might seem to entitle them. He felt for his friends with unusual tenderness. Instead of undue concealment from Munter, he is perhaps chargeable with betraying to him secrets which were not exclusively his own. But he denies the truth of the political charges against him; more especially of peculation and falsification of accounts. (Munter, 112, 113. 122. 129. 130. 160, particularly 166. 171. 190.)

The charges against Brandt would be altogether unworthy of consideration, were it not for the light which one of them throws on the whole of this atrocious procedure. The main accusation against him was, that he had beaten, flogged, and scratched the sacred person of the King. His answer was, that the King, who had a passion for wrestling and boxing, had repeatedly challenged him to a match, had severely beaten him five or six times; that he did not gratify his master's taste till after these provocations; that two of the witnesses against him, servants of the King, had indulged their master in the same sport; and that he received liberal gratifications, and continued to enjoy the Royal favour for months after this pretended treason. The King inherited this perverse taste in amusements from his father, whose palace was the theatre of the like kingly sports. It is impossible to entertain the least doubt of the truth of this defence. It affords a natural and probable explanation of a fact which would be otherwise incomprehensible.

A suit for divorce was commenced against the Queen, on the ground of criminal connexion with Struensee, who was himself convicted of high treason for that connexion. This unhappy Princess was sacrificed, at the age of seventeen, to the brutal caprices of a husband who, if he had been a private man, would have been deemed incapable of the deliberate consent which is essential to marriage. She early suffered from his violence, though she so far complied with his fancies as to ride with him in male apparel, and even with buckskin breeches-an indecorum for which she was sharply reprehended by her mother, the Princess-Dowager of Wales, in a short interview between them, during a visit which that Princess paid to her

* Reprinted by the late learned and exemplary Mr. Rennell of Kensington. London, 1824,

brother at Gotha, after an uninterrupted residence of thirty-four years in England. The King had suffered the Russian minister at Copenhagen to treat her with open rudeness. He disgraced his favourite cousin, the Prince of Hesse, for taking her part. He never treated her with common. civility, till they were reconciled by Struensee, at that period of overflowing. good-nature when that minister obtained the recal from banishment of the ungrateful Rantzau. The evidence against her consisted in a number of circumstances (none of them incapable of an innocent explanation) sworn to. by her attendants, who were employed as spies on her conduct. She owned that she was guilty of much imprudence; but in her dying moments she declared to M. Roques, pastor of the French church at Zell, that she never had been unfaithful to her husband.* It is true, that her own signature affixed to a confession was alleged against her. But if General Falkenskiold was rightly informed, (for he has every mark of honest intention,) that signature proves nothing but the malice and cruelty of her enemies. Schack, the counsellor sent to interrogate her at Cronenbourg, was received by her with indignation when he spoke to her of connexion with Struensee. When he showed Struensee's confession to her, he artfully intimated that the fallen minister would be subjected to a very cruel death if he was found to have falsely criminated the Queen. "What!" she exclaimed, "do you believe that if I was to confirm this declaration, I should save the life of that unfortunate man?" Schack answered by a profound bow. The Queen took a pen, wrote the first syllable of her name, and fainted away. Schack completed the signature, and carried away the fatal document in triumph. Struensee himself, however, had confessed his intercourse to the commissioners. It is said that his confession was obtained by threats of torture, facilitated by some hope of life, and influenced by a knowledge that the proceeding against the Queen could not be carried beyond divorce. But his repeated and deliberate avowals to Dr. Munter do not (it must be owned) allow of such an explanation. Scarcely any supposition favourable to this unhappy Princess remains, unless it should be thought likely, that as Dr. Munter's narrative was published under the eye of her oppressors, they might have caused the confessions of Struensee to be inserted in it by their own agents, without the consent, perhaps without the knowledge, of Munter, whose subsequent life is so little known, that we cannot determine whether he ever had the means of exposing the falsification. It must be confessed, that internal evidence does not favour this hypothesis; for the passages of the narrative, which contain the avowals of Struensee, have a striking appearance of genuineness. If Caroline betrayed her sufferings to Struensee; if she was led to a dangerous familiarity with a pleasing young man who had rendered essential services to her; if mixt motives of confidence, gratitude, disgust, and indignation, at last plunged her into an irretrievable fault; the reasonable and virtuous will reserve their abhorrence for the conspirators, who, for the purposes of their own ambition, punished her infirmity by ruin, endangered the succession to the Crown, and disgraced their country in the eyes of Europe. It is difficult to contain the indignation which naturally arises from the reflection, that at this very time, and with a full knowledge of the fate of the Queen of Denmark, the Royal Marriage Act was passed in England, for the avowed purpose of preventing the only marriages of preference, which a princess at least, has.

Communicated by M. Roques to M. Secretan, the editor of Falkenskiold, on the 7th March 1780. Falk. 224.

commonly the opportunity of forming. Of a monarch, who thought so much more of the pretended degradation of his brother than of the cruel misfortunes of his sister, less cannot be said than that he must have had more pride than tenderness. Even the capital punishment of Struensee, for such an offence, will be justly condemned by all but English lawyers, who ought to be silenced by the consciousness that the same barbarous disproportion of a penalty to an offence, is sanctioned in the like case by their own law.

Caroline Matilda died at Zell about three years after her imprisonment. The last tidings which reached the Princess-Dowager of Wales, on her death-bed, was the imprisonment of this ill-fated daughter, which was announced to her in a letter dictated to. the King of Denmark by his new masters, and subscribed with his own hand. Two days before her death, though in a state of agony, she herself wrote a letter to the nominal sovereign, exhorting him to be at least indulgent and lenient towards her daughter. After hearing the news from Copenhagen she scarcely swallowed any nourishment. The intelligence was said to have accelerated her death; but the dreadful malady under which she suffered, neither needed the co-ope ration of sorrow, nor was of a nature to be much affected by it.

We may now return, for a moment, to Falkenskiold, the writer of these Memoirs, the victim and narrator of the Revolution. He was apprehended at five o'clock in the morning of the 17th of January, by Colonel Eichstedt, who read aloud an order, appointing himself governor of Copenhagen, and a warrant for the apprehension of Falkenskiold, with two other officers. Falkenskiold examined these documents, which, together with the signature purporting to be that of the King, appeared to be written by Eichstedt himself. Remonstrance was, however, vain. He was thrown into a dungeon of ten feet square, in a naval prison, used for the vilest criminals, where he remained seven weeks, without fire, without books, without correspondence or other intercourse with the world. He was refused clean linen and water for washing; he was obliged to carve and eat with his fingers; he was not allowed wine; he was at last deprived of tea, and even tooth-powder, by means of which it was said that he might poison himself. In April he was examined by an inferior commission; and the interrogatories alone are sufficient to show that there never was any colour of a charge against him;-that his whole offence consisted in having served the public, under the administration of Struensee; and that his apprehension, as well as that of most of the others, was for the sole purpose of giving an appearance of reality and strength to the supposed conspiracy, by the numbers who thus seemed to be involved in it. One of the accusations against him was, that when playing at cards, while the King, who was on foot, spoke to him, he made answer without rising from his chair, after the King had particularly desired that none of the party should stand up when addressed by him! He never was tried; but in June it was announced to him, that the King had directed that he should be imprisoned for life. The particulars of his sufferings on the Rock of Munkholm are related with simplicity and calmness. The memorials of former prisoners, who had preceded him on this rock, served to attest the exactness of the picture drawn by Molesworth of the cruel administration which had prevailed in Denmark since the establishment of absolute monarchy. Count Griffinfeld, Chancellor of the kingdom in the latter part of the seventeenth century, (the very period of which the honest and eloquent Molesworth writes,) had, like