STRUENSEE. 1737-1769. John Frederick Struensee was born at Halle, an old town in northern Germany, on August 5, 1737. His father, Adam Struensee, was a zealous Lutheran minister; his mother was the daughter of a doctor named Carl, a clever man, much given to mysticism, who had been physician-in-ordinary to King Christian VI. of Denmark. The Struensee family was of obscure origin. The first Struensee of whom anything is known began life under a different name. He was a pilot at Lubeck, and during a terrible storm, in which no other man dared venture out to sea, he brought into port a richly laden vessel. In honour of his courageous deed he received from the corporation of Lubeck the name of Strouvensee, which means a dark, stormy sea--a fit emblem of his descendant's troubled career. John Frederick Struensee received his early education at the grammar school of his native town. It was not a good education, for the masters were imperfectly educated themselves, but the boy was so extraordinarily precocious, and had such a thirst for knowledge, that he soon absorbed all that his tutors could teach him, and began to educate himself. The wave of mysticism was then passing over northern Germany, and Struensee's teachers were infected with it, and no doubt communicated their views to their pupil, for Struensee was all his life something of a mystic, or, to speak more correctly, a fatalist. Despite the orthodox Protestantism of his parents, the younger Struensee's eager and inquiring mind had always an inclination to scepticism, and before he had attained man's estate he was already a freethinker on most matters of religion. He seems always to have retained a belief in God, or a First Cause, but he never had the conviction that man enjoyed a future life: he held that his existence was bounded by this life, and always acted on that assumption. Side by side with the mysticism which was permeating northern Germany there existed a religious revival. The theory of conversion, whereby a man was suddenly and miraculously converted from his evil ways and made sure of future salvation, was peculiarly acceptable to many, and amongst Struensee's companions were youths of notoriously loose morals who declared that they had suddenly "found salvation". As this declaration was not always accompanied by a corresponding change of life, Struensee hastily and unjustly came to the conclusion that all religion was little more than an organised hypocrisy. His father's long sermons, to which he was compelled to listen Sunday after Sunday, left no impression on his heart, and his sire's private exhortations to his son to change his life, and flee from the wrath to come, wearied him. His mother, who had inherited her father's mystical views, and supplemented them with her husband's hard and uncompromising evangelicalism, also lectured her son until the limits of his patience were exhausted, and he resolved as soon as possible to quit a home where he was unhappy.