She was twenty-two when she married a duke from a small German court. A British prince had once been proposed for her, and a candidate for the Swedish throne. Neither of them was waiting at the altar.
Louise of Denmark was born in Copenhagen on 19 October 1726, the daughter of the future Christian VI and Sophie Magdalene of Brandenburg-Kulmbach. Her father became king in 1730. Her brother, Frederick, would succeed him. Louise's place in the family offered a different kind of usefulness: a marriage could carry Danish influence into another ruling house, without a soldier having to cross a frontier.
Her parents had found considerable happiness in their own marriage. Christian met Sophie Magdalene at Pretzsch in Saxony in July 1721, and within three days he had written to his father that he had found the woman he wanted to live and die with. They shared a deep religious devotion, and when they became king and queen, their court took on the restrained habits of their household. There was little encouragement for anyone who preferred something livelier.
There was, however, plenty of encouragement for building palaces. Christian commissioned the first Christiansborg, and Sophie Magdalene had Hirschholm built. Piety did not require small rooms. It required rather more restraint in what people did inside them. Christian opposed public entertainments such as the theatre, while Bible readings and hymns met with his approval.
Louise was lively, and the stiff manners of her parents' court did not suit her. Writing to a close friend, her father complained of her ill-bred manner. The daughter who might help him manage relations with another country was less easy to manage at home.
One possible husband was the Duke of Cumberland, the younger son of George II of Great Britain. Another was the Prince of Birkenfeld, the French candidate in the contest over the Swedish succession. A marriage to him offered the prospect of a Danish princess beside a future Swedish king. These were proposals with consequences well beyond the two people who would have to live together.
Both plans fell away.
Russia was considered too. Its designated heir, Carl Peter Ulrik, entered the discussions, but here Christian's calculations met a limit. He wrote that there was still something barbaric about the Russian court, and that he wanted nothing to do with it and would not give a child to it. The father negotiating his daughter's future could also recoil from one of the futures on offer.
Christian died in 1746 with Louise still unmarried. Her brother became Frederick V, and the atmosphere at court grew more cheerful. Louise, who had fitted so awkwardly into the old household, came alive in the new one.
Then came an attachment nobody had negotiated. According to the Danish Biographical Dictionary, an apparent mutual affection grew between Louise and a court gentleman named Ahlefeldt. He paid for his boldness with several years' imprisonment at Munkholm, a fortress on a small island in the fjord at Trondheim. A royal daughter's hand could be discussed across Europe. A court gentleman who came too close to it ended up on a rock in a Norwegian fjord.
Her marriage was settled soon afterwards. On 1 October 1749 she married Ernest Frederick III, Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, at Hirschholm, her mother's palace. Her twenty-third birthday was eighteen days away. After the British and Swedish possibilities, her married life would be spent at a German ducal court, in a house that ranked well below the one she had left.
It was still a court. There were formalities, entertainments and the expense of keeping up a princely household. The change in Louise's circumstances was a change of scale, not an escape from the business of rank. The king's daughter remained a king's daughter, even where her husband was a duke.
In 1755 she had a daughter, Frederica Sophie Juliane Caroline. The baby died in infancy. A memorial was made of her, a wax figure dressed in the child's own clothes, and sent to Sophie Magdalene in Copenhagen. The woman whose palace had held Louise's wedding received the likeness of her granddaughter.
The figure survives at Rosenborg. Its head and hands are wax, its body wood. It lies in a glass case shaped like a gilded canopy bed, with red velvet draperies. Beneath the finery is a little white linen shirt, with traces of an embroidered monogram and a fastening at the back of the neck. There are linen nappies too, folded into a royal memorial for a baby who had needed them for only a few weeks.
Louise died at Hildburghausen on 8 August 1756 and was buried there. She was twenty-nine, less than seven years into the marriage that had finally been arranged. Her mother lived until 1770, and the wax figure passed into the royal collections only after she died. It had been made for a king's granddaughter who died before anyone could propose a husband for her.
