5 The Great, the Pages and the End of Eighteenth-Century Danish Court Culture

The court was the political centre of gravity in almost every eighteenth-century European monarchy. The purpose of this chapter is to show how hazy ideas about the exercise of power at court went along with attempts to regulate certain irregular elements there. By combining two brief analyses – of the notion of the so-called ‘Great’ and the royal page institution respectively – I shall argue that Danish court culture changed dramatically during the last decades of the eighteenth century as a result of political changes as well as adjustments in the structure of the court.