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Caroline Matilda of Great Britain, Danish Nobility, Frederick Louis of Great Britain, Frederik Christian II of Schleswig-Holstein-Sondenburg-Augustenburg, House of Augustenburg, House of Oldenburg, Johann Friedrich Struensee, King Christian VII of Denmark, King George II of Great Britain, Kingdom of Denmark, Prince of Wales
Frederik Christian II, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (September 28, 1765 – June 14, 1814 ) was a Danish prince and feudal magnate.
Frederik Christian II was born the eldest son of Frederik Christian I, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (1721–1794), by his wife and cousin Princess Charlotte of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön (1744–1770), daughter of Frederik Charles, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön and his wife Countess Christiane Armgard von Reventlow.
Until his father’s death, he was styled “Hereditary Prince of Augustenburg”.
He was a prince with an exceptionally high level of Danish blood in his ancestry: his maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, and paternal great-grandmother having been born, respectively, Countess of Reventlow, Countess of Danneskiold-Samsøe, and Countess of Ahlefeldt-Langeland.
He was closely related to all important families of the Danish high nobility of the time. The negative side was that his ancestry was rather too much “comital” and too little royal. Instead of including royal princesses and duchesses of small and large German states, as was customary with the Oldenburg royal family, their marriage connections had been mostly with the nobility (chiefly of Denmark).
Thus, although they were undoubtedly the senior cadet line of the Royal House of Denmark (Oldenburg), the family was regarded as a bit lower than the Ebenbürtige which the rulers of small Germany principalities thought to be the standard.
By marriage, however, Frederik Christian drew closer to his cousins, the Danish Royal Family. In 1786, the twenty-year-old hereditary prince married his distant cousin, the fourteen-year-old Princess Louise Auguste of Denmark and Norway (1771–1843), purported daughter of Christian VII of Denmark by his wife, the late Queen Caroline Matilda, the youngest and posthumous daughter of Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, by Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Caroline Matilda was raised in a secluded family atmosphere away from the royal court of her grandfather King George II of Great Britain.
At the age of fifteen, she was married to her first cousin, King Christian VII of Denmark and Norway, who suffered from a mental illness and was cold to his wife throughout the marriage. She had two children: the future King Frederik VI of Denmark and Louise Augusta; the latter’s biological father may have been the German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee.
Louise Auguste’s father, the king, was a man with mental disabilities and, throughout his reign, effective control was in the hands of other people (ranging from his step-mother to his wife to his half-brother to various courtiers).
The king’s mental condition, and his unharmonious relationship with his wife, gave rise to speculation that Louise had been sired by someone other than him, and rumour awarded fatherhood to Johann Friedrich Struensee, the king’s court physician and de facto regent of the country at the time of Louise’s birth.
Indeed, she was at times referred to as la petite Struensee. The truth of the matter cannot be definitely ascertained.
The story of antecedents of Prince Frederik Christian’s marriage goes as follows: In February 1779, the nation’s foremost statesman, Chief Minister Count Andreas Peter Bernstorff, hatched an ingenious plan for the young princess, something that often has been customary with a royal child suspected of not being sired by its nominal father but in its mother’s illicit liaison: to marry such a child to another member of the royal house.
Since a male child of hers could inherit the throne some day, it would be advantageous to arrange a marriage early, and to marry the “half-royal” back into the extended royal house, to the Hereditary Prince of Augustenburg.
This plan had the positive effect of more closely connecting the Danish royal house’s two lines, the ruling House of Oldenborg and the cadet House of Augustenburg, thus not only discouraging any breakup of the kingdom but also forestalling the possibility of a foreigner gaining influence into Danish affairs through marriage with her.
This would certainly happen, for instance, if Louise were to marry her closer relations, the Swedish royals. The danger of Louise Auguste marrying into the Swedish royal house (the latter danger was rather low, however: at that time, there were Swedish princes only twenty years or more her senior, and her first cousin, the future King Gustaf IV Adolph of Sweden, had just been born when she already was seven).
Binding agreements were made as early as in 1780, when Frederik Christian was 15 and Louise was only 9 years old. Five years later, in the spring of 1785, the young Frederik Christian came to Copenhagen. The engagement was announced then, and a year later, on May 27, 1786, the wedding was celebrated at Christiansborg Palace.
The couple lived at the Castle for many years until the Christiansburg Palace fire of 1794 and the death of his father, the Duke of Augustenborg Frederik Christian I, at which point the prince inherited the estate and the duchy. After 1794, the couple lived during the summer on the island of Als and in Gråsten.
Duke Frederik Charles died on June 14, 1814. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Christian August II, then but sixteen years old. Louise Auguste took control of the Augustenburg estates and the children’s upbringing. The estates were turned over to the son and heir on his return from an extended foreign tour in 1820.