A Scandal in Denmark

Our Danish friend Sara tells of the tragic life of Caroline Mathilde of England, Queen of Denmark.

On the 8th of December 1766...Caroline Mathilde, daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, married her Danish cousin in The Church of Our Lady (Vor Frue Kirke). She was fifteen, her husband sixteen and a king of all of six months. Caroline Mathilde had grown up apart from her brother’s court, due to her mother’s widowhood and was by all accounts a sheltered, young woman who had been transplanted in a strange evironment under the expectation that she would easily understand how to maneouvre herself. Christian VII, her husband, had grown up in the midst of a court in turmoil, with his father’s wife more or less openly disliking him. He was subject to physical punishment throughout all of his childhood – which promptly ended when he was 16 and his father died. The young man suffered from nervous breakdowns, bouts of scizophrenia and mania. He was diagnosed with dementia praecox and was fully expected to recover from it as he grew older.

Of course, this is no fairy-tale story.