"Professor John Egede," so Suhm tells us, "saw a man in ragged clothes working in a field with some half-naked children to help him, a few years after Struensee's fall. 'Will not the extra tax be soon removed?' he asked the passing professor. The latter replied that he did not know. 'Oh! yes, I can quite believe that,' the peasant retorted, 'for you don't think about things of that sort in Copenhagen. That was a worthy man who gave us the regulations by which the _corvées_ were settled. But that was the very reason, I fancy, why they cut his head off. The new regulation is only made to torment us poor peasants till we cannot stand it any longer.'" It is notorious that serfdom was not abolished until the regency of the Crown Prince Frederick. Under his long reign, which lasted from 1784 to 1839, nearly all Struensee's reforms, to which a more enlightened age did ample justice, and which had obtained general recognition through the ideas diffused by the French Revolution, were recalled to life. The task was completed, greatly to his credit, by Christian VIII., the grandson of Juliana Maria. All that remains for us now to do, is to show by what means the new faction sought to secure its position, and how at last Nemesis revenged herself on the principal conspirators. The usurpers did not consider themselves fully secured by having declared the king's sole signature invalid, but they wished to make themselves safe in the event of the weak king dying before the prince royal attained his majority. For this object, they persuaded the king, after the queen's matter had been amicably arranged with the English court, to sign a will, a copy of which was handed to the colleges and courts, with orders that the document was only to be opened after the king's death, in case it took place during the crown prince's minority. As the presumed event did not occur, however, the contents of the privy regulation have remained a secret. It was generally supposed that the king's testament contained an order that Queen Caroline Matilda should be excluded from the guardianship of her son, and that the Hereditary Prince Frederick should be appointed regent. Other suppositions hinted at still more important regulations as to the successor, but it can hardly be believed that the king, however imbecile he might be, would have signed such a document. A desire to prevent a possible surprise was certainly the motive for the decree that for the future foreign envoys would only be admitted to an audience with the king in the presence of the council of state; and yet such a custom had been regarded as high treason on the part of Struensee. The union among the conspirators, however, only lasted a short time after the revolution had been carried out, and this was specially evident among the military members. Generals Rantzau-Ascheberg and Eickstedt stood at the head of two opposite parties.