In July 1771, the queen gave birth to a daughter, Louise Augusta, who resembled Struensee. The king became suspicious and unsettled. Meanwhile the count-doctor signed over a thousand decrees that abolished torture, noble privileges, censorship and the slave trade.* He created foundling hospitals funded by a gambling tax and increased peasant land ownership. Denmark was now the most progressive kingdom in Europe.
On 16 January 1772, in Copenhagen, Struensee danced with his mistress the queen, watched by her husband, at a masquerade ball at the Court Theatre in the Christiansborg Palace. In the early hours after the ball, he was arrested by royal guards, in a coup organized by a cabal backed by the queen mother. While the queen was interrogated in Kronborg Castle, Struensee himself denied a sexual relationship, convinced that the king would back him and the queen defend him. But both lovers were tricked into confessing the relationship, she hoping to draw the guilt on to herself, he in response to being offered his life if he admitted the truth. She recanted her confession but too late. Condemned to the amputation of his right hand – signer of treasonous decrees – and then to losing his head, Struensee was convinced he would be spared until almost the last minute when he saw his closest associate beheaded before him. ‘I would have liked to have saved them both,’ said the king, but he did not. After three clumsy blows, Struensee was beheaded with an axe – now on display in Copenhagen – then quartered. Struensee’s decrees were abolished, the slavery of the Danish East Indies Company restored.
Although he was embarrassed by his sister’s ‘criminal conduct’, George III warned the Danes not to punish her and dispatched the Royal Navy to threaten Copenhagen.* But the king was now facing revolution in America.
George and North might have devised any number of solutions to the crisis. George could have declared himself king of America (his father had considered moving his younger brother to the colonies as duke of Virginia) and announced that he was protecting American rights – as he now did with his Canadian subjects; he could have called the Americans’ bluff by giving them seats in Parliament (as had happened with Scottish and Irish union). Instead, North decided to crack down,* provoking the American Patriots to hold their first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, attended by Washington. The delegates founded a Continental Association that linked the colonies in one organization. While Jefferson watched from Monticello, the lofty, taciturn Washington decided ‘to devote my life and fortune in the cause’, taking command of a Virginia militia.
George and North believed that the colonists were incapable of political coordination and would back down. ‘The die is now cast,’ George wrote to North; ‘the colonies must either submit or triumph … we must not retreat.’
In April 1775, at Lexington, British redcoats were defied by a posse of colonials – an escalation that led to a second Congress at which Washington was elected commander-in-chief – his appointment owing as much to ‘his tall stature’, noted John Adams bitchily, as to his ‘gift of silence’. Washington was toasted by Jefferson and the most famous colonial, the sixty-nine-year-old Benjamin Franklin, polymathic luminary of the Enlightenment, but so far the general was the only soldier in the Continental Army. Jefferson was elected to a Committee of Five to draft a Declaration of Independence, approved in July 1776: ‘all men are created equal’, this asserted, ‘with certain unalienable Rights’, among which ‘are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ – though not for everyone. The aspirations of the American founders – all males, writing about ‘men’ being equal – set high moral standards for democracy, but they did not live up to them. Jefferson wanted to abolish the slave trade but other slave masters resisted, so they compromised and agreed to revisit this after twenty years. In London, Samuel Johnson mocked American humbug: ‘How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’
Rushing to New England, Washington drove the British out of Boston but then had to defend New York with his small army of 8,000, which soon buckled under British attack. In the retreat, Washington unusually lost his composure, shouting, ‘Are these the men with which I’m to defend America?’ But they were and he did, withdrawing to New Jersey as the British took Philadelphia.
