Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Myle from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion is advised.

Even though it was a masquerade ball, the identities of Queen Caroline Matilda and Dr. Struntz

were immediately obvious to anyone around them.

The doctor was tall, over six feet, and Caroline Matilda hadn't left his side the entire

evening. They were flirting in public and every tiny gesture, every glance, every hand

resting lightly on his arm unleashed a new shockwave of whispers through the ballroom at

Christianborg Palace. It was that sort of behavior that made people certain that the new royal infant,

a girl just over six months old, was actually the doctor's daughter and not the kings.

Of course, King Christian wasn't at this party. He hadn't attended a social event in weeks.

His condition, which historian sometimes characterized as schizophrenia, meant that there were

periods of highs and lows when it came to the king's cognition. For the winter of 1772,

it was a low period. For the past ten months, the country of Denmark had been ruled with almost

full control not by the king, but by Dr. Struntz, a German man born as a commoner.

But the nobles and the people of Denmark wouldn't stand for it for much longer.

Depending on which broadside you read, the doctor and his harlot, the Queen, had either kidnapped

the king or already poisoned him. And later that very night, the night of the masquerade ball,

the king's stepmother, the Dowager Queen, would give her go ahead for Struntz and Queen Caroline

Matilda to be arrested in their beds, unforged evidence of an attempted assassination of the king.

Around the world, the late 1700s was a time of social upheaval.

Philosophers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Montesquieu wrote widely read treatises

arguing for what they saw as more rational, more enlightened forms of government.

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