Who was the craziest leader in history?

The King of… Touching Himself?

It’s fair to say Christian VII of Denmark didn’t have an easy life. His uninterested, Lothario father set a bad example for him and his draconian chamberlain, who ruled him by the fist, didn’t help either. The child went from being happy and bright to insecure and apathetic, with his short and somewhat feeble stature giving him a complex about physical power. Entering his teens and adult years, Christian never matured, remaining childlike till the fatal stroke he suffered at fifty-nine.

It wasn’t a harmless ingenuousness though.

As a teen, he and a gang of friends would walk the streets of Copenhagen. Pretty innocuous, right? Nope. You see he was armed, with a medieval clubbed spike, and would use it to beat unsuspecting passers-by. As an adult and even after marriage, he spent a lot of time in brothels. More oddly though, he became extremely obsessed with beating the meat, to the point that his doctors were concerned that it would interfere with his health and ability to govern. If one of his councillors said something that displeased him, his normal reaction was to slap them hard across the face. Nice. During his marriage, he also took up a mistress. Not great but not unusual, surely? Well… it wouldn’t have been, if it weren’t for the fact that he shamelessly and unabashedly took her to court functions and public events, proclaiming her “Mistress of the Universe” to everyone.

Johann Friedrich Struensee

What is abundantly clear is that Christian was mentally ill, and the only one capable of calming him down was Johann Friedrich Struensee. For this monumental feat, the doctor was allowed into his circle of trust. This trust was repaid with betrayal though; he took up with Christian’s wife and clawed at power until he was effectively leader. Power was seized back by the archetypal wicked stepmother, who had the doctor killed and the wife exiled — she died shortly afterwards anyway, aged twenty-three.

What’s also abundantly clear is that even though the threads of Christian’s sanity had snapped, the frayed ends still held the traces of a lost, better Christian. Three years after the deaths of his wife and Struensee and despite the betrayal, he drew two profiles on a piece of paper and scribbled these five words underneath: “Ich hätte gern beide gerettet.” Or in English:

“I would have liked to save them both.”