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battle of Waterloo. There are few instances of the affection of men for their country more touching than that of these gallant Poles, who, in voluntary exile, amidst every privation, without the hope of fame, and when all the world had become their enemies, daily sacrificed themselves in the battles of a foreign nation, in the faint hope of its one day delivering their own from bondage. Kosciusko had originally encouraged his countrymen to devote themselves to this chance; but when he was himself offered a command in 1807, this perfect hero refused to quit his humble retreat, unless Napoleon would pledge himself for the restoration of Poland.

When Alexander entered France in 1814, as the avowed patron of liberal institutions, Kosciusko addressed a letter to him,† in which he makes three requests,-that the Emperor would grant an universal amnesty, a free constitution, resembling, as nearly as possible, that of England, with means of general education, and, after the expiration of ten years, an emancipation of the peasants. It is but justice to Alexander to add, that when Kosciusko died, in 1817, after a public and private life, worthy of the scholar of Washington, the Emperor, on whom the Congress of Vienna had then bestowed the greater part of the duchy of Warsaw, with the title of King of Poland, allowed his Polish subjects

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to pay due honours to the last of their heroes; and that Prince Jablonowski was sent to attend his remains from Switzerland to Cracow, there to be interred in the only spot of the Polish territory which is now not dishonoured by a foreign master. He might have paid a still more acceptable tribute to his memory, by executing his pure intentions, and acceding to his disinterested prayers.

The Partition of Poland was the model of all those acts of rapine which have been committed by monarchs or republicans during the wars excited by the French Revolution. No single cause has contributed so much to alienate mankind from ancient institutions, and loosen their respect for established governments. When monarchs show so signal a disregard to immemorial possession and legal right, it is in vain for them to hope that subjects will not copy the precedent. The law of nations is a code without tribunals, without ministers, and without arms, which rests only on a general opinion of its usefulness, and on the influence of that opinion in the councils of states, and most of all, perhaps, on a habitual reverence, produced by the constant appeal to its rules even by those who did not observe them, and strengthened by the elaborate artifice to which the proudest tyrants deigned to submit, in their attempts to elude an authority which they did not dare to dispute. One signal triumph over such an authority was sufficient to destroy its power. Philip II. and Louis XIV. had often violated the law of nations; but the spoilers of Poland overthrew it.

SKETCH

OF

THE ADMINISTRATION AND FALL

OF

STRUENSEE.*

On the arrival of Charles VII. of Sweden, when he was projecting a professional estaat Altona, in need of a physician,-an atten- blishment at Malaga, or a voyage to India, dant whom his prematurely broken constitu- which his imagination, excited by the perution made peculiarly essential to him even sal of the elder travellers, had covered with at the age of nineteen,-Struensee, the son "barbaric pearl and gold." He was now of a Lutheran bishop in Holstein, had just twenty-nine years old, and appears to have begun to practise medicine, after having been been recommended to the royal favour by for some time employed as the editor of a an agreeable exterior, pleasing manners, and newspaper in that city. He was now ap- some slight talents and superficial knowpointed physician to the King, at the moment ledge, with the subserviency indispensable * From the Edinburgh Review, vol. xliv. P. his listless and exhausted master. His name in a favourite, and the power of amusing

366.-ED.

appears in the publications of the time as "Doctor Struensee," among the attendants of his Danish Majesty in England; and he received, in that character, the honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine from the University of Oxford.

Like all other minions, his ascent was rapid, or rather his flight to the pinnacle of power was instantaneous; for the passion of an absolute prince on such occasions knows no bounds, and brooks no delay. Immediately after the King's return to Copenhagen, Struensee was appointed a Cabinet Minister. While his brother was made a counsellor of justice, he appointed Brandt, another adventurer, to superintend the palace and the imbecile King; and intrusted Rantzau, a disgraced Danish minister, who had been his colleague in the editorship of the Altona Journal, with the conduct of foreign affairs. He and his friend Brandt were created Earls. Stolk, his predecessor in favour, had fomented and kept up an animosity between the King and Queen Struensee (unhappily for himself as well as for her) gained the confidence of the Queen, by restoring her to the good graces of her husband. Caroline Matilda, sister of George III., who then had the misfortune to be Queen of Denmark, is described by Falkenskiold* as the handsomest woman of the Court, as of a mild and reserved character, and as one who was well qualified to enjoy and impart happiness, if it had been her lot to be united to an endurable husband. Brandt seems to have been a weak coxcomb, and Rantzau a turbulent and ungrateful intriguer.

The only foreign business which Struensee found pending on his entrance into office, was a negotiation with Russia, concerning the pretensions of that formidable competitor to a part of Holstein, which Denmark_had unjustly acquired fifty years before. Peter III., the head of the house of Holstein, was proud of his German ancestry, and ambitious of recovering their ancient dominions. After his murder, Catharine claimed these possessions, as nominal Regent of Holstein, during the minority of her son. The last act of Bernstorff's administration had been a very

General Falkenskiold was a Danish gentleman of respectable family, who, after having served in the French army during the Seven Years' War, and in the Russian army during the first war of Catharine II. against the Turks, was recalled to his country under the administration of Struensee, to take a part in the reform of the military establishment, and to conduct the negotiation at Petersburgh, respecting the claims of the Imperial family to the dutchy of Holstein. He was involved in the fall of Struensee, and was, without trial, doomed to imprisonment for life at Munkholm, a fortress situated on a rock opposite to Drontheim. After five years' imprisonment he was released, and permitted to live, first at Montpellier, and afterwards at Lausanne, at which last city (with the exception of one journey to Copenhagen) he past the latter part of his life, and where he died in September, 1820, in the eighty-third year of his age. He left his Memoirs for publication to his friend, M. Secretan, First Judge of the

canton of Vaud.

prudent accommodation, in which Russia agreed to relinquish her claims on Holstein, in consideration of the cession to her by Denmark of the small principality of Oldenburg, the very ancient partimony of the Danish Royal Family. Rantzau, who in his exile had had some quarrel with the Russian Goverument, prevailed on the inexperienced Struensee to delay the execution of this politic convention, and aimed at establishing the influence of France and Sweden at Copenhagen instead of that of Russia, which was then supported by England. He even entertained the chimerical project of driving the Empress from Petersburgh. Falkenskiold, who had been sent on a mission to Petersburgh, endeavoured, after his return, to disabuse Struensee, and to show him the ruinous tendency of such rash counsels, proposing to him even to recall Bernstorff, to facilitate the good understanding which could hardly be re-restored as long as Counts Osten and Rantzau, the avowed enemies of Russia, were in power. Struensee, like most of those who must be led by others, was exceedingly fearful of being thought to be so. When Falkenskiold warned him against yielding to Rantzau, his plans were shaken: but when the same weapon was turned against Falkenskiold, Struensee returned to his obstinacy. Even after Rantzau had become his declared enemy, he adhered to the plans of that intriguer, lest he should be suspected of yielding to Falkenskiold. Whereever there were only two roads, it was easy to lead Struensee, by exciting his fear of being led by the opposite party.

Struensee's measures of internal policy appear to have been generally well-meant, but often ill-judged. Some of his reforms were in themselves excellent: but he showed, on the whole, a meddling and restless spirit, impatient of the necessary delay, often employed in petty change, choosing wrong means, braving prejudices that might have been softened, and offending interests that might have been conciliated. He was a sort of inferior Joseph II.; Like him, rather a servile copyist than an enlightened follower of Frederic II. His dissolution of the Guards (in itself a prudent measure of economy) turned a numerous body of volunteers into the service of his enemies. The removal of Bernstorff was a very blamable means of strengthening himself. The suppression of the Privy Council, the only feeble restraint on despotic power, was still more reprehensible in itself, and excited the just resentment of the Danish nobility. The repeal of a barbarous law, inflicting capital punishment on adultery, was easily misrepresented to the people as a mark of approbation of that vice.

Both Struensee and Brandt had embraced the infidelity at that time prevalent among men of the world, which consisted in little more than a careless transfer of implied faith from Luther to Voltaire. They had been ac quainted with the leaders of the Philosophi cal party at Paris, and they introduced the

conversation of their masters at Copenhagen. | power which he might easily have continued In the same school they were taught to see to execute without it. But this order was clearly enough the distempers of European society; but they were not taught (for their teachers did not know) which of these maladies were to be endured, which were to be palliated, and what were the remedies and regimen by which the remainder might, in due time, be effectually and yet safely removed. The dissolute manners of the Court contributed to their unpopularity; rather, perhaps, because the nobility resented the intrusion of upstarts into the sphere of their priviledged vice, than because there was any real increase of licentiousness.

the signal of a clamour against him, as an usurper of royal prerogative. The Guards showed symptoms of mutiny: the garrison of the capital adopted their resentment. The populace became riotous. Rantzau, partly stimulated by revenge against Struensee, for having refused a protection to him against his creditors, being secretly favoured by Count Osten, found means of gaining over Guldberg, an ecclesiastic of obscure birth, full of professions of piety, the preceptor of the King's brother, who prevailed on that prince and the Queen-Dowager to engage in the design of It must not be forgotten that Struensee subverting the Administration. Several of was the first minister of an absolute monar- Struensee's friends warned him of his danchy who abolished the torture; and that he ger; but, whether from levity or magnanimipatronized those excellent plans for the ty, he neglected their admonitions. Rantemancipation of the enslaved husbandmen, zau himself, either jealous of the ascendant which were first conceived by Reverdil, a acquired by Guldberg among the conspiraSwiss, and the adoption of which by the se- tors, or visited by some compunctious rememcond Bernstorff has justly immortalized that brances of friendship and gratitude, spoke statesman. He will be honoured by after to Falkenskiold confidentially of the prevaages for what offended the Lutheran clergy, lent rumours, and tendered his services for -the free exercise of religious worship grant- the preservation of his former friend. Faled to Calvinists, to Moravians, and even to kenskiold distrusted the advances of RantCatholics; for the Danish clergy were ambi-zau, and answered coldly, “Speak to Strutious of retaining the right to persecute, not only long after it was impossible to exercise it, but even after they had lost the disposition to do so;-at first to overawe, afterwards to degrade non-conformists; in both stages, as a badge of the privileges and honour of an established church.

No part, however, of Struensee's private or public conduct can be justly considered as the cause of his downfall. His irreligion, his immoralities, his precipitate reforms, his parade of invidious favour, were only the instruments or pretexts by which his competitors for office were able to effect his destruction. Had he either purchased the good-will, or destroyed the power of his enemies at Court, he might long have governed Denmark, and perhaps have been gratefully remembered by posterity as a reformer of political abuses. He fell a victim to an intrigue for a change of ministers, which, under such a King, was really a struggle for the sceptre.

ensee:" Rantzau turned away, saying, “He will not listen to me."

Two days afterwards, on the 16th of January, 1772, there was a brilliant masked ball at Court, where the conspirators and their victims mingled in the festivities (as was observed by some foreign ministers present) with more than usual gaiety. At four o'clock in the morning, the Queen-Dowager, who was the King's step-mother, her son, and Count Rantzau, entered the King's bedchamber, compelled his valet to awaken him, and required him to sign an order to apprehend the Queen, the Counts Struensee and Brandt, who, with other conspirators, they pretended were then engaged in a plot to depose, if not to murder him. Christian is said to have hesitated, from fear or obstinacy,-perhaps from some remnant of humanity and moral restraint: but he soon yielded; and his verbal assent, or perhaps a silence produced by terror, was thought a sufficient warrant. His last act of political imprudence illus- Rantzau, with three officers, rushed with trates both the character of his enemies, and his sword drawn into the apartment of the the nature of absolute government. When Queen, compelled her to rise from her bed, he was appointed Secretary of the Cabinet, and, in spite of her tears and threats, sent he was empowered to execute such orders her, half-dressed, a prisoner to the fortress of as were very urgent, without the signature Cronenbourg, together with her infant daughof the King, on condition, however, that they ter Louisa, whom she was then suckling, and should be weekly laid before him, to be con- Lady Mostyn, an English lady who attended firmed or annulled under his own hand. This her. Struensee and Brandt were in the same liberty had been practised before his admin- night thrown into prison, and loaded with istration; and it was repeated in many thou-irons. On the next day, the King was pasand instances after his downfall. Under raded through the streets in a carriage drawn any monarchy, the substantial fault would by eight milk-white horses, as if triumphing have consisted rather in assuming an independence of his colleagues, than in encroaching on any royal power which was real or practicable. Under so wretched a pageant as the King of Denmark, Struensee showed his folly in obtaining, by a formal order, the

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 bigoted 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; and the affairs of the kingdom were conducted in his name, only till his son was of an 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 for 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. Guldberg, one of them, 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 die 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.

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sion 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. It may be observed, that the very persons who had represented the patronage of operas 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 Memoirs of Falkenskiold contain 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 were 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 connection 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, on the 21st of December preced

The charges against Struensee and Brandt are dated on the 21st of April. The defence of Struensee was drawn up by his counseling, unknown to the King, an order for the on the 22d; that of Brandt was prepared on incorporation of the Foot Guards with the the 23d. Sentence was pronounced against troops of the line, and on their refusal to both on the 23d. On the 27th, it was ap- obey, had, on the 24th, obtained an order proved, and ordered to be executed by the from him for their reduction, he answered, King. On the 28th, after their right hands had that the draught of the order had been read been cut off on the scaffold, they were be- and approved by the King on the 21st, signed headed. For three months they had been and sealed by him on the 23d, and finally closely and very cruelly imprisoned. The confirmed by the order for reducing the reproceedings of the commission were secret: fractory Guards, as issued by his Majesty on the prisoners were not confronted with each the 24th; so that he could scarcely be said to other; they heard no witnesses; they read have been even in form guilty of a two days' no depositions; they did not appear to have usurpation. It might have been added, that seen any counsel till they had received the it was immediately fully pardoned by the indictments. It is characteristic of this scene royal confirmation; that Rantzau, and others to add, that the King went to the Opera on of his enemies, had taken an active share in the 25th, after signifying his approbation of it; and that it was so recent, that the conthe sentence; and that on the 27th, the day of spirators must have resolved on their meaits solemn confirmation, there was a masked sures before its occurrence. He was further ball at Court. On the day of the execution, charged with taking or granting exorbitant the King again went to the Opera. The pas-pensions; and he answered, seemingly with.

truth, that they were not higher than those | gether unworthy of consideration, were it of his predecessors. He was accused also not for the light which one of them throws of having falsified the public accounts; to on the whole of this atrocious procedure. which his answer is necessarily too detailed for our purpose, but appears to be satisfactory. Both these last 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 him by an agent of the enemies 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, with more tenderness, to touch the wounds of a sufferer, 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, though 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 those of peculation and falsification of accounts.

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, and 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 had been 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 faet which would be otherwise incomprehensible.

A suit for divorce was commenced against the Queen, on the ground of criminal connection with Struensee, who was himself convicted of high treason for that connection. This unhappy princess had been 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 had early suffered from his violence, though she so far complied with his fancies as to ride with him`in male apparel,-an indecorum for which she had been sharply reprehended by her mother, the Princess-Dowager of Wales, in a short interview between them, during a visit which the latter had paid to her 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; and had disgraced his favourite cousin, the Prince of Hesse, for taking her part. He had never treated her with common civility, till they were reconciled by Struensee, at that period of overflowing good-nature when that minister obtained the recall from banishment of the ungrateful Rantzau.

The evidence against her consisted of a number of circumstances (none of them incapable of an innocent explanation) sworn to by attendants, who had been employed as spies on her conduct. She owned that she had been 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

The charges against Brandt would be alto-intention), that signature proves nothing but

Reprinted by the late learned and exemplary

Mr. Rennell of Kensington. London, 1824.

*Communicated by him to M. Secretan on the 7th of March, 1780.

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