Louise Rasmussen was the mistress and later the morganatic spouse of King Frederick VII of Denmark.
12 Facts About Louise Rasmussen
1.
2.
Louise Rasmussen was not a queen consort, but officially styled Countess Danner.
3.
Louise Rasmussen was a student of the ballet school of the Opera in Copenhagen in 1826, was contracted in 1830 and a figurante ballerina in 1835.
4.
Louise Rasmussen retired from the ballet in 1842 and opened a fashion shop.
5.
Louise Rasmussen's illegitimate son, Frederik Carl Christian Louis Berling, born in 1841, later known as Christian Charles Jacobsen, was a farmer and became landowner of Weybread Hall in Suffolk.
6.
Louise Rasmussen got to know Crown Prince Frederick through Berling in the 1830s and had a relationship with him during the 1840s.
7.
Louise Rasmussen wanted to marry Louise, but the government forbade it, as Frederick was childless and no children born from a marriage with Louise would have been entitled to the throne.
8.
Louise Rasmussen was the morganatic spouse of King Frederick, and was thereby not queen, nor did any possible children from the union have any right to the throne.
9.
On one occasion, for example, Frederick and Louise Rasmussen participated at a grand formal dinner with many members of the highest nobility; at the occasion in question, it was the custom of the nobility to propose a toast to the spouse of the monarch.
10.
Louise Rasmussen was not regarded to be a member of high society nor to have any right to participate in it: she had never been a debutante or formally introduced at the royal court and high society in the way a noblewoman would normally be, and her presence was thereby basically considered to be incognito.
11.
Frederick did attempt to have Louise Rasmussen formally introduced to high society.
12.
Louise Rasmussen introduced her to his step-mother, queen dowager Caroline Amalie, by arranging a formal visit between them, and then demanded that the queen dowager's ladies-in-waiting return the visit to Louise, which was the normal process.