Sophia Magdalena of Denmark

Sophia Magdalena of Denmark
Queen consort of Sweden
Reign	February 12, 1771 - March 29, 1792
Coronation	1772
Born	July 3 1743(1743--)
	Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen, Denmark
Died	August 21 1813 (aged 70)
	Ulriksdal Palace, Sweden
Consort to	Gustav III of Sweden
Issue	Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden Charles Gustaf
Royal House	House of Holstein-Gottorp House of Oldenburg
Father	Frederick V of Denmark
Mother	Louise of Great Britain

Sofia Magdalena of Denmark and Norway (Christiansborg Palace, Denmark, 3 July 1743 - Ulriksdal Palace, Sweden, 21 August 1813) was a Queen consort of Sweden.

She was the eldest surviving child of King Frederick V of Denmark and Norway and Queen Louise. Her maternal grandparents were George II of Great Britain and Caroline of Ansbach.

Early life

At the age of five (1751), she was betrothed to the successor of the throne of Sweden, Gustav, and she was brought up to be the queen of Sweden. In 1766 she was married to Gustav by proxy at Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen.

At the Swedish court, she was received with kindness from the king but she was hated by the queen, Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, who was the dominating presence in the court, and completely ingored by her husband. She was beautiful, brought the largest dowry since 1680 and was carefully educated to be a perfect queen and received many priaces, but she never became very popular, and her strict upbringing made it difficult for her to adjust to the environment of the Swedish court. After King Adolf Frederick of Sweden died in 1771, Gustav III became King of Sweden. The following year Sophia Magdalena was crowned queen.

Queen Sofia Magdalena was a serious and shy person and she was never a member of the kings inner circle; she did her ceremonial duties, but disliked the vivid lifestyle of the court that her husband was a center of. She was mocked by the more social witt, her sister-in-law Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp when her social duties made it "Forced to meet people", and she preferred to stay at her private residence Ulriksdal Palace whenever she could. It is also said that she preferred the English fashion before the French because she found it less revealing.

Marital difficulties

The marriage was a typical royal arranged marriage of political convenience, and Sophia is described by her husband as cold as ice. In fact, the marriage was not consummated until 1775, nine years after the wedding. This was a topic of gossip and ridicule among the European courts; the king was a homosexual or sexually undeveloped and did in fact need to be instructed in the ways of sexual intercourse. The sexuality of the king, which had a strong influence on Sophia Magdalens life, has been much debated, but judging from documents written from different people in his life, the most realistic thing to assume would be, that he was not homosexual, but bisexual; also, that he was very sexually inexperienced, either due to sexual immaturity, or, and this seems to have been the case, because he was simply not very interested in sex at all, perhaps even close to asexual; he was passionatly in love with the noblewoman Charlotte du Reitz in 1768, but it does not seem that they ever consummated their affair.

In 1778, Sofia gave birth to Gustav Adolf, successor to the throne, and in 1782 she gave birth to a second son, Charles Gustaf who only lived for one year. It has been suggested that her children were fathered by someone else. When the heir was born, the father was named, by the king's mother among others, as the count Adolph Frederick Munck of Fulkila, then chief of the royal stables. This rumor was widely believed by both the public and within the court, but the truth is even more interesting: it has been suggested by the letters of those involved, that the count actually acted as sexual instructor. The king was possibly a virgin, as was the queen, and the count was forced to physically show them how to consummate their marriage. The count himself writes in his memoirs that he "had to touch them both with my own hands". People imagined that the count helped the king by having intercourse with the queen to demonstrate, and that he had intercourse with the queen with his penis between the kings thighs,(They where also caricatured this way.) But this is hardly likely, as the king was very innocent when it came to these things, and the queen was even more so. Neither of them has ever been described as having a large interest in sex. But the rumours became more persistent when the queen gave Munck a watch with her image, a pension and a diamond-ring, and the king gave him a promotion. The circle around duke Charles, who wanted the throne, encouraged the rumours.

The Queen dowager Louisa Ulrika of Prussia openly proclaimed that Sophia's child was a bastard; she accused Sofia Magdalena of being too cold to take a lover, if she was not ordered to do so by the king. The queen dowager forced duke Charles to interrogate Munck, and the word spread to the king, who arranged for his mother to make a public apolology for her accusation. Sophia Magdalena was deeply shocked by the accusations; she swore she would never speak to the queen dowager again, and she kept this promise. The rumours somewhat disturbed the celebrations, as did the accident with the public banquet. The public was invited to a great feast to celebrate the birth of the heir, but too many people were let in, and the crowd panicked. Between sixty and one hundred people where trampled to death in the crowd.

Still, the years between 1775 and 1783 were probably the happiest in her life. Her relationship with the king was happier than ever before, and she was treated with respect after having done her duty to the dynasty. But after her younger son's death, the marriage reverted to its former state of separation.

An interesting trivia on the subject is, that the child of the ballerina Giovanna Bassi, who was rumoured to be the child of Munck, had a strong likeness to the prince.

Later life

Widowed in 1792, after her husband was murdered, Sofia lived a withdrawn life and spent much effort on charity. She was deeply horrified by the murder of her husband, but she also made a scandal by refusing to dress in morning, and it was a great relief for her to be a widow and withdraw from public life. Her brother-in-law, Duke Karl, became regent, and she eschewed a political role. In 1797, she insisted on skipping the protocol to make her new daughter-in-law, Frederica of Baden, to feel welcome, as she remembered how lonely she herself had felt when she arrived as a bride. She never had any political influence, and in 1809, she was forced to witness the abdication of her son, King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, after Sweden lost Finland to Russia. He was sent into exile and replaced by his paternal uncle Charles XIII, but she remained in Sweden until her death in 1813. In 1810-1811, she was one of few in the Swedish court who were nice to Desiree Clary, though Desiree's husband saw her with suspicison.

References

• Herman Lindquist; "History of Sweden; the days of Gustav III".

• Herman Lindquist; "History of the queens of Sweden".

Donate to Wikimedia