The site had been in use since the Middle Ages. A fortification called Hørningsholm stood here from around 1100; Queen Margrete I brought the estate into crown hands in 1391; Frederik II and Christian IV put a royal hunting lodge on it at the end of the sixteenth century. The land around it took in what are now the municipalities of Hørsholm, Karlebo and Birkerød and part of Allerød. By the middle of the seventeenth century a custom had settled: the reigning king gave Hørsholm to his consort, the estate's income went to the queen, and the family summered there. Frederik IV's queen, Louise, held it from 1700 to 1721, modernised the buildings and added the farm ranges - some of which, unlike the palace, are still standing.

Christian VI became king in 1730 and handed Hirschholm to his queen, Sophie Magdalene, as a life estate. She found a medieval property with a few patches of modernisation and decided to replace it outright. Lauritz de Thurah - the same architect who built the Hermitage out on the deer-park plain - designed the Baroque palace that was completed in 1744, one of the most impressive buildings raised in Denmark that century. Thurah published his drawings in *Den Danske Vitruvius* between 1746 and 1749 - fortunate, because the drawings outlasted the building. Christian VI died in 1746 and Sophie Magdalene stayed on as dowager queen, running the estate along lines that anticipated the agricultural reforms of the coming decades. She died in 1770. The palace passed to her grandson, Christian VII.

Christian VII was severely mentally ill, and into that vacuum stepped his physician. Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed royal adviser in May 1770 and held effective power from 18 December 1770 until 16 January 1772 - thirteen months, during which he issued 1,069 cabinet orders, better than three a day. He abolished judicial torture, press censorship, unfree labour, noble privilege, the death penalty for theft, and Danish participation in the slave trade, and overhauled the universities and the medical institutions. It was the Enlightenment applied to a kingdom at speed, by a foreigner, in German, with no constituency behind him but a king who could not govern. He was made Geheimekabinetsminister in July 1771 and a count in November. By the spring of 1770 he had also become the lover of the queen.

Caroline Mathilde had been married off to Christian VII in 1766 at fifteen, a British princess shipped to a court she did not know and a husband who could not be a husband. On 17 June 1771 the royal household moved out to Hirschholm for the season, and on 7 July she gave birth in the palace to a daughter, Princess Louise Augusta, whose father was almost certainly Struensee. Danish history calls those weeks the Hirschholm Summer. Accounts describe something close to an idyll - a young mother, her son, her lover, an isolated Baroque house in the woods. Copenhagen was two dozen kilometres away, and there the nobility whose privileges Struensee had cancelled were counting their votes.

The coup came in the small hours of 17 January 1772. Struensee, his ally Enevold Brandt and the queen were all arrested. Caroline Mathilde was taken with her infant daughter to Kronborg and held there under guard. Her marriage was dissolved on 8 April. Struensee and Brandt were executed on 28 April 1772: their right hands struck off, then beheading, then their bodies broken and displayed - a punishment chosen to be seen. Caroline Mathilde left Helsingør on 3 May and reached Celle Castle in Hanover that October, exiled at twenty-one. She never saw either of her children again and died of scarlet fever on 10 May 1775, aged twenty-three. The palace where all of it began simply stopped being used. It stood empty for the better part of forty years.

Christiansborg burned to the ground in 1794, and Denmark needed stone. Around 1810 Frederik VI ordered the derelict Hirschholm pulled down so its materials could go into rebuilding the capital's palace; sources give the demolition as running from 1809 to 1813. In 1822-23 the architect Christian Frederik Hansen put up a small church on the cleared ground, and it is the church you find there now, sitting on its island with the old garden's geometry still readable in the park around it. Louise's farm buildings survive nearby; some of them once housed the Danish Museum of Hunting and Forestry. For the palace itself you have to go to the Hørsholm local history museum, which keeps a permanent exhibition on the building, the affair, and everything that followed from a single summer.