According to the famous study of royal transubstantiation by Ernst Kantorowicz, a king incarnates “two bodies”: the body natural and the body politic, the perishable body of the human individual and the eternal body of the institution. The obligation to personify this duality – which ideally forms a perfect unity – seems to be at the root of the misery felt by Christian VII during the entirety of his reign. King of Denmark-Norway from 1766 to 1808, the mentally unstable monarch considered himself profoundly out of place, being in his own eyes an impostor, an intruder, a “false” king. Consequently, he spent his whole life trying to escape his own role. Through a consideration of Christian VII’s relation to representation – theatrical and political – and of his strange need to physically and emotionally re-enact certain capital punishments officially carried out on his own orders, I examine the itinerary of this singularly unfree admirer of the Enlightenment’s thoughts on individual freedom; an itinerary that throws an interesting light on the institution of the Danish royalty at the end of the eighteenth century.