Struensee followed up this by an attack upon the marriage laws. It was decreed that henceforth none but the injured party should bring a charge of adultery. The custom by which persons convicted of adultery were put in the pillory and preached at publicly by the clergyman of the parish was also abolished, and all penalties beyond the dissolution of the marriage tie were forbidden. The table of kindred and affinity was rearranged, and marriages within certain prohibited degrees were allowed. The Church disapproved of the marriage of first cousins (though both Frederick V. and Christian VII. had contracted these alliances); they were not forbidden, but a dispensation was always required. This dispensation was now declared to be unnecessary by royal decree, and the same authority henceforth gave a man permission to marry his deceased wife's niece, or his deceased wife's sister. This aroused furious protests from the clergy, but Struensee did not heed, and further aggrieved the Church by converting two disused chapels into hospitals for the sick poor. Thus it will be seen that, in his zeal for reform, Struensee aroused against himself the antagonism of nearly every class. The court officials, the nobles, the clergy, the lawyers, the burghers were attacked in turn, and all saw their ancient privileges torn away from them. Under the circumstances, their hostility to the new order of things was natural, but the unpopularity of Struensee among the people, whom he sought so greatly to benefit, is not so easy to understand. That he was unpopular there is no doubt. A good deal of this was due to the prejudice among the Danes against the German and the foreigner. Nearly all the advisers who now surrounded the King were of German extraction, and were dubbed "the German Junto". All grace was taken from the royal decrees in the eyes of the Danes by the fact that they were issued in German. It is true the court had been for centuries the centre of Germanism in Denmark; but the people knew that Christian VII. spoke and wrote Danish very well, and until the advent of Struensee all royal decrees and government regulations (except those addressed to the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein) had been written in the Danish language. Now, in disregard of the national prejudice, they were issued in German; and the Danish people regarded this as an insult offered to them by a German minister. Moreover, it gave colour to the rumour that the King was for the most part ignorant of the decrees which appeared in his name, for it was said that otherwise he would most certainly have framed them in his own language when addressing his own people. Struensee, who had a contempt for forms and prejudices, and looked at everything from the broad point of view, excused himself on the ground that he had no time to learn the Danish language; but even so it would have been easy for him to have had these decrees translated into the Danish.