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Jefferson was already obsessed with two difficult missions – building his new mansion, Monticello, atop a hill, and ‘a city on a hill’, his vision of Enlightenment in America. ‘Architecture is my delight,’ he said, ‘and putting up, and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements.’ Monticello would be his lifelong obsession. Hired slaves levelled the mountain; the house itself was built by enslaved (his own and hired) and free labour, white and black, over the years. He designed it himself, filling it with novelties and charms, and having his study built around his bedroom. His ideas of liberty clashed with the reality of a lifestyle based on chattel slavery: as a lawyer, he represented the sons of slaves seeking freedom and proposed that masters should free their slaves, yet he did not free his own and did not believe black and white could live together. However liberal the slave master, the institution only worked because it was based on violence. He allowed his overseers to beat his slaves, but he was considerably less strict than, say, his contemporary and fellow grandee Colonel Washington. It was one thing to talk enlightenment and another to practise it.

Domestic slaves who lived close to the planter’s mansion were in some ways privileged over those who toiled in the plantations, but they were more likely to be raped by the masters. The Hemingses were treated differently – they were three-quarters white and half-siblings to Mrs Jefferson.

As Martha had two daughters with Jefferson, the Hemingses played the traditional role of house slaves in helping her raise the children, who grew up with their contemporary enslaved cousins. The youngest, Sally Hemings, was thriving at Monticello as Jefferson wrote his Summary View of the Rights of British America. ‘Kings are the servants,’ he wrote, ‘not the proprietors of the people … Let not the name of George III be a blot in the page of history.’ In this tract, he toyed with a definition of the rights of man and proposed the abolition of slavery – just not yet.

Not everyone was as measured in their reforms as those pillars of the Enlightenment, Catherine, Frederick – and Jefferson. At almost the same moment, in Denmark, a scandalous ménage à trois of a radical doctor, his lover the queen and her husband the king launched the most Enlightened reform anywhere in the world.

The experiment had started in in November 1766, when George III sent his fifteen-year-old sister, Caroline Matilda, to marry her first cousin, Christian VII, king of Denmark, Norway and Iceland. The groom, a gawky, pinheaded and unstable seventeen-year-old, a public masturbator, self-harmer and denizen of Copenhagen brothels, treated his wife coldly. The isolated teenaged queen, modest, passionate and intelligent, was desperate. She was bewildered and frightened by Christian’s sexual eccentricities, yet she charmed the Danes: ‘her appearance allowed her to avoid criticism of women, but still captivate the male eye’.

When she gave birth to a son, Frederick, her husband showed no interest. He was sometimes manic, often enervated. His veteran ministers enquired about treatment and were recommended to a young German doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, aged thirty-one, dashing, worldly, the scholarly son of a Pietist minister. Struensee had met the philosophes in Paris and embraced the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, their most radical thinker. Rousseau had just published The Social Contract, in which he argued that man was born pure and became corrupted by society, and Émile, or Treatise on Education, in which he declared, ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’ So he proposed that children should be ‘denatured’ to prepare them for citizenship. Struensee, who wrote his own Rousseauesque treatises, blew into the disturbed court like a breath of fresh air, calming the king, reassuring the queen. Christian came to trust him passionately as did the queen, especially after the inoculation of their son. Struensee reconciled the teenagers, encouraging the king to return to the queen’s bed, while supervising the upbringing of Prince Frederick according to Rousseau’s rules.

Still only nineteen, Caroline fell in love with Struensee, starting a wild affair right in front of the king. In September 1770, infected with the vision and authority of the doctor, Christian sacked the chancellor and promoted Struensee to count and Privy Cabinet Minister with the power to sign royal orders: Enlightened dictator. When the queen mother confronted her, Caroline retorted, ‘Pray, madam, allow me to govern my own kingdom as I please.’ Her mother-in-law bribed the servants to chronicle Caroline’s adultery with Struensee, scattering flour outside her bedroom to record male footprints. They also found her garters in Struensee’s bed.