Ministering to a Mad Prince

Mixing reportage with philosophy, barbarity with eroticism, the masterful Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist has fashioned an extraordinarily elegant and gorgeous novel, “The Royal Physician’s Visit.” “On April 5, 1768, Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII of Denmark, and four years later he was executed.” The passive historical voice of that opening sentence gives no hint of the remarkable tale that follows.

Struensee is only the latest in a line of overseers to the disoriented Christian, who “understood the court to be a theater, that he had to learn his lines, and that he would be punished if he didn’t know them by heart.” There is not only method to the madness of this Danish prince but a little bit of the wisdom of Shakespeare and “The Truman Show” to the confused victim of protocol who travels through Copenhagen in a glass coach and sees all the world as a stage.

In his attempt to make sense of things, Christian writes to one of the French Encyclopedists, beginning “the correspondence which to posterity would seem so peculiar ... between Voltaire and the deranged King Christian of Denmark; the correspondence best known by the poem of homage that Voltaire wrote in 1771 to Christian, whom he heralded as the prince of light and reason in the North.”

Ten years earlier, Voltaire proved that he himself knew a little bit about madness and innocence when he wrote his novel “Candide.” The Scandinavian court didn’t seem too far removed--Christian, his young English queen Caroline Mathilde and Dr. Struensee a Danish mirror of Voltaire’s French trio of Candide, Cunegonde and Dr. Pangloss. The horrors that Candide and Co. witness, from earthquakes to autos-da-fe, are no less rotten than the state of Denmark. The Danish peasants live in a state of slavery; public executions, dismemberments and disembowelings are the popular entertainment; and the Danish navy is several years into a disastrous war with Algeria. The king is mad, his half-brother is a hydrocephalic invalid and the court is filled with a deadly combination of whores and religious zealots.

But Enquist is writing nearly 250 years after Voltaire, and modern readers demand more than the cartoons of “Candide.” Enquist, whose nearest English-language equivalent may be the glorious philosopher-poet John Berger, mixes social history with gentle psychology, the tools of police investigation and the voyeurism of the National Enquirer, to paint three-dimensional BBC-style documentaries of Christian and Caroline Mathilde. Like many royals, this pair was brought up without mothering, fathering or a sense of the people and places of their kingdom. Caroline had been cloistered for her first 13 years, and Christian suffered beatings and psychological tortures throughout his childhood.Upon the arrival of Struensee, Christian very happily dismisses the rest of his councilors and turns over the keys of power to his physician. Struensee, a quiet man plucked from his medical practice in the German town of Altona, gradually comes to see that, although Christian may be incurable, his own task as an enlightened man is to rescue Denmark from the disease of its medievalism. In the space of only two years, he creates a paper revolution consisting of 632 decrees--dismantling the navy, enfranchising free speech--to pull the country toward the golden orb of rationalism and freedom.

Like Voltaire’s God, Struensee imagines himself as a watchmaker, or at least a repairman. “Sometimes he saw his life as a series of points lined up on a piece of paper, a long list of numbered tasks, that someone else had tallied up, someone else!!! His life enumerated in order of priority, with number one through twelve, like on a clock face, as the most important .... And next to every single number, after completing the work, he was supposed to put a double checkmark: the patient has been treated.”

But playing doctor has its dangers. Content to pass the day petting his lapdog and his black slave, Christian also turns over the keys to his queen--to disastrous effect. Caroline Mathilde has grown, since her arrival as an eternally weeping girl of 13, into an assured young woman fueled by a rage that finds its deepest expression (and some of Enquist’s most magnificent writing) in loving the bewildered Struensee. In 1771, Denmark is still, however, 200 years shy of celebrating free love. And when Caroline Mathilde becomes quite obviously large with Struensee’s child, the enemies descend.

Chief among them is Guldberg, like Christian a short man in a court of Scandinavian giants and, like Struensee, mortifyingly captivated by the queen’s charms. Guldberg, an ally of Christian’s evil stepmother, the dowager queen, is Struensee’s worthy opponent for the soul of Denmark, but Guldberg is a puritan, a true believer.

Guldberg plots. Caroline Mathilde and Struensee are accused of planning the death of the king. In an age of much torture and little communication, trials are merely protocol. On April 28, 1772, Struensee is executed, his head and right hand are displayed on a pike and the 632 decrees are rescinded. And yet the doctor’s brief visit left indelible traces. “It was quite obvious,” Enquist writes in an Epilogue, “that everything would revert back during [Guldberg’s] era. It was equally obvious that of Guldberg’s era nothing would remain.” But Enquist is loath to let politics have the last historical word. The little daughter who survived both Struensee and Caroline Mathilde went on to marry and produce and produce until “today there is hardly any European royal house, including the Swedish, that cannot trace its lineage back to Johann Friedrich Struensee, his English Princess, and their little girl.”

And even the bewildered Christian manages to find love with a gentle prostitute whom he deems “the Sovereign of the Universe,” believing that “she was his benefactress, that she had time for him, that she had all time, and that she was time.” Love conquers all, as it seems, even the kings and the watchmakers.

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Jonathan Levi is a contributing writer to Book Review.