Christian VII of Denmark

Christian VII (29 January 1749 – 13 March 1808) was King of Denmark and Norway and Duke of Schleswig and Holstein from 1766 until his death. He was the son of Danish King Frederick V and his first consort Louisa, daughter of King George II of Great Britain.

King of Denmark

Christian became king on 14 January 1766 on the death of his father, just weeks before his 17th birthday. All earlier accounts agree that he had a winning personality and considerable talent, but he was poorly educated, systematically terrorized by a brutal governor, Detlev Count Reventlow, and hopelessly debauched by corrupt pages. He seems to have been intelligent and certainly had periods of clarity, but suffered from severe emotional problems, possibly schizophrenia.

After his marriage at Christiansborg Palace on 8 November 1766 to his cousin Princess Caroline Matilda (known in Denmark as Queen Caroline Mathilde), a sister of Great Britain's King George III, he abandoned himself to the worst excesses, especially sexual promiscuity. In 1767, he entered in to a relationship with the courtesan Støvlet-Cathrine‎. He publicly declared that he could not love Caroline Mathilde, because it was "unfashionable to love one's wife". He ultimately sank into a condition of mental stupor. Symptoms during this time included paranoia, self-mutilation and hallucinations. He became submissive to the progressive and radical thinker Johann Friedrich Struensee, his personal physician, who rose steadily in power in the late 1760s. The neglected and lonely Caroline Mathilde drifted into an affair with Struensee.

In 1772, the king’s marriage with Caroline Mathilde was dissolved by divorce. Struensee was, following a deluge of modernising and emancipating reforms, arrested and executed the same year. Christian signed Struensee's arrest warrant with indifference under pressure from his stepmother Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who had led the movement to have the marriage ended. Caroline Mathilde, retaining her title but not her children, eventually left Denmark in exile and passed her remaining days at Celle Castle in her brother's German territory, the Electorate of Hanover. She died there of scarlet fever on 11 May 1775, at the age of 23.

Christian's marriage with Caroline Mathilde produced two children: the future Frederick VI and Princess Louise Auguste. However, it is widely believed that Louise was the daughter of Struensee - portrait comparisons tend to support this hypothesis.

Christian was only nominally king from 1772 onwards. Between 1772 and 1784, Denmark was ruled by Christian's stepmother Juliana Maria of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, his physically disabled half-brother Frederick and the Danish politician Ove Høegh-Guldberg. From 1784 onwards, his son Frederick VI ruled permanently as a prince regent. This regency was marked by liberal and agricultural reforms, but also by the beginning of the disasters of the Napoleonic Wars.

Christian died in 1808 at Rendsburg, Schleswig — not of fright, as some have suggested, but from a brain aneurysm at the age of 59. He was buried at Roskilde Cathedral.

Contribution to science

In 1769 Christian VII of Denmark invited the Hungarian astronomer Miksa Hell (Maximilian Hell) to Vardø. He observed the transit of Venus, and his calculations gave the most precise calculation of the Earth-Sun distance so far (approx. 151 million kilometres). His companion János Sajnovics explored the affinity among the languages of the Sami, Finn and Hungarian peoples.^[1][2][3]

Popular culture

Christian was a major character in the 1935 British film The Dictator, in which he was played by Emlyn Williams. The film depicts his relationship with Caroline Mathilde, who is played by Madeleine Carroll.

• He is also one of the main characters in The visit of the royal physician (Livläkarens besök), a 1999 novel by Per Olov Enquist.

Ancestry

External links

• Royal House of Denmark
• Royal House of Great-Britain

References