Struensee's Ghost: Narratives of Pascal Paoli and Ebenezer Richardson in Philadelphian Newspapers, 1767

O’Donnell 1 Struensee’s Ghost: Narratives of Pascal Paoli and Ebenezer Richardson in Philadelphian Newspapers, 1767 – 1776 In Copenhagen, January 1772, a revolution occurred in Denmark. The country rejected German culture and embarked on a new programme of re-discovering and redefining the Danish people.1 The Revolution was precipitated by the arrest of Count Johann Friedrich Struensee. Since 1771, Struensee had been the court favourite, Royal Secretary, and personal physician to the Danish King, Christian VII. He was eventually executed in April 1772 for treason and lèse-majesté, convicted of signing the King’s name without due authority.2 He had become a particularly noisome figure in Danish politics by heedlessly pursuing a modernising agenda of abolishing traditional privileges in favour of enlightened rule. And like other attempts in European courts, these ‘rational’ innovations were not greeted enthusiastically. Struensee first surrounded himself with a select group of cronies then systematically isolated himself from the court, along the way incurring the wrath of merchants, burghers, and industrialists. Struensee finally pressed his enlightened reform too far when he ordered the dissolution of the Royal Guards. By 1772 Struensee was protected only by the Queen, with whom he was having an illicit sexual relationship, and the King, who had long suffered from a deteriorating and dissociative mental illness –thought either to be schizophrenia or porphyria and probably not caused by excessive masturbation as Struensee himself diagnosed.3 When Struensee’s ministry was toppled, the old court party made the Queen Dowager Juliana regent, and the King’s half brother Frederick her Prime Minister – this was the Revolution. Events in Copenhagen were particularly interesting to Britain because after the arrest of the Count, Queen Caroline Matilda, sister to George III, was sequestered in Kronborg and bullied into a confession of adultery, technically a capital offence. After a tense standoff she was eventually rescued by a British man-of-war, but the affair soured British perceptions of Denmark. More worryingly, early but unconfirmed reports suggested that Danish forces were moving against British interests in the country, 1 Stewart Oakley, The Story of Denmark (London; Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 156. In a notable absence Ove Korsgaard does not even mention Struensee as a factor in reasserting Danishness. Ove Korsgaard, The Struggle for the People (Copenhagen; Danish School of Education Press, 2008). 2 The South Carolina and American General Gazette, 23 April 1772. Virginia Gazette, 16 April 1772. 3 Johan Schioldann, ‘”Struensee’s Memoir on the Situation of the King” (1772): Christian VII of Denmark’, History of Psychiatry, 24:2 (2013), 227 – 47, (pp. 231). O’Donnell 2 threatening to seize assets and impound ships. And Prussia was even rumoured to be mobilising forces to protect the tranquillity of Europe because ‘something [was] rotten in the state of Denmark.’4 The story of the Danish Revolution unfurled in American newspapers in a confused fashion. Reports veered between aggressive indictments of the Danish treatment of the British princess,5 to calls for calm and moderation.6 Most conflicting of all was that two dramatically different accounts of Struensee’s arrest appeared in the same issue of nearly every American newspaper. The first presented the regency of Juliana as the result of a popular protest; the other was deeply suspicious of the Queen Dowager and presented the Revolution as a palace coup. Both of these accounts appeared one after the other without an editorial voice to reconcile the dissonance.7 And it this feature of eighteenth-century newspapers, the burden of narration as the responsibility of the reader, that I wish to explore for this paper. The facts in both cases focused on the arrest of Struensee, but each was radically different. In the account of the popular revolution Struensee was publically seized at a masked ball, and his arrest was greeted by a crowd.8 This was in practice a political fairy tale in which a greedy minister was removed to restore pristine liberty. The second account was much less spectacular. Rather than a public denunciation followed by popular support, the Revolution was conducted in private in the early hours of the morning. Juliana convinced Christian that Struensee and the Queen were plotting, and so both were arrested in their rooms. Unlike the happy ending of the first account, this version of events concluded remorsefully that the Queen Dowager had always had her eye on the Danish throne. She had in fact made numerous attempts on Christian’s life when he was a boy, including one incident in which she had him pushed from a bridge.9 4 The South Carolina and American General Gazette, 23 April 1772. Virginia Gazette 30 April 1772. 5 Hester W. Chapman, Caroline Matilda: Queen of Denmark, 1751 – 75 (London; Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 144. 6 Pennsylvania Packet 27 April 1772. 7 New York usually received the freshest advices from Europe, but the packet to New York and South Carolina was detained at Falmouth in Cornwall delaying news of the revolution. The news was first reported in Massachusetts before there was a strident refutation of Caroline Matilda’s infidelity, but in each case there was mention of a popular revolution and the fact that Struensee was arrested in his apartments. For the notice about the delayed packet see: The New Hampshire Gazette 10 April 1772. For the early New England reports see: Massachusetts Spy 3 April 1772. Boston News-Letter 3 April 1772. Boston Post Boy 30 March 1772. Further south, the later reports included both the popular and actual accounts of Struensee’s arrest discussed below. New-York Gazette 13 April 1772. Pennsylvania Packet 13 April 1772. Virginia Gazette 16 April 1772. The South Carolina and American General Gazette, 23 April 1772. 8 The South Carolina and American General Gazette, 23 April 1772. 9 The South Carolina and American General Gazette, 23 April 1772. Virginia Gazette, 16 April 1772. O’Donnell 3 The paper today is about the American Revolution, and specifically about how stories within newspapers helped to propel the dissolution of Britain and its colonies, but I wanted to start with the American reportage of Struensee’s arrest to highlight three important themes. First, the conflicting accounts of Struensee’s arrest are illustrative of the news gathering techniques of colonial newspapers. Second, the political fantasy first spread by Juliana and her supporters allude to the potential political power of telling a story. Third, the story of Struensee would superficially seem capable of being useful to Anglophone narrators as a warning to all who would interfere with proper governance, and yet the Count was such a complicated character that he was ultimately useless as the protagonist of a popular narrative. Ultimately I wish to argue that that although American newspapers appear to blandly report excerpts from letters mechanically organised by order in which they arrived, these disjointed notices had the capacity to acknowledge virtuous acts, incite discontent, and, most importantly, to animate crowds into action; however, not every narrative would suffice, and audiences were selective about the heroes and villains they followed. They had to appear unreservedly good, or irredeemably bad, and in fact it was this simplicity which gave them their power as a model for emulation or a cautionary example. The two characters I have chosen, Pascal Paoli and Ebenezer Richardson, have, I believe, been eclipsed from the history of the American Revolution, but they were both very successful at embodying important narratives about the colonial experience of the imperial crises. The Corsican rebel Pascal Paoli is interesting because he reveals that there was a global consciousness to the American Revolution. Paoli became a symbol for the tireless pursuit of liberty, a rallying call for ceaselessly opposing tyranny in whatever forms it appeared. Meanwhile, Ebenezer Richardson, the child murderer, became the manifestation of the evils of tyrannical government. The rumours that circulated about Richardson allowed Americans to give a concrete form to the evils they decried in the polemical press. Through Richardson, the jeremiads of Revolutionary writers were no longer disembodied threats or abstract fears, but the product of tyrannical government replete with observable consequences. Together these two narratives provided simple lessons for an American audience involved in a political crisis with Britain that provoked a series of complex rationales and conflicted sentiments. Uniting these two narratives was a comforting image of the American colonies as a persecuted guardian of liberty in a corrupt and degenerating world. O’Donnell 4 ‘Containing the Freshest Advices’: Constructing Newspaper Narratives Looking first at how narratives are constructed, it may on initial inspection appear as if the presentation of two contradictory accounts meant that eighteenth-century newspapers were examples of primitive or underdeveloped journalism, essentially lacking the sophisticated organisation of today’s papers; however, I would argue that it’s not really very helpful to think of eighteenth-century newspapers as a primordial versions of today’s media; they were a step in the evolutionary process, but they were a discrete entity in themselves. As an information technology, eighteenth-century newspaper had their own special and internal logic, and understanding this special arrangement can reveal how readers interacted with newspapers. There were no professional journalists working at the time, so the vast majority of news originated as letters collected by editors, who would then print relevant excerpts. Importantly they were not stories or articles in the way we think of newspapers today, but rather a collection of items extracted from longer pieces. This gathering process had a very important effect upon how the news was presented. If we take the traditional 4 page format of a colonial paper, it followed a fairly predictable pattern.

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