PART III.

KING CHRISTIAN LOSES ALL.

Reformers in Denmark.-Christian II. gave great offence to the Danish nobles as well as to the clergy by the favour which he showed towards the teachers of the Reformed faith, and in 1520, his uncle, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, sent to Copenhagen at his request a learned doctor named Martin Reinhard, to preach the gospel to the people. As, however, this preacher could not speak Danish, his sermons had to be translated from German before they could be understood, and therefore made so little impression upon the hearers that King Christian wrote again to his uncle, begging for another preacher, and asking whether Luther himself would not come to Denmark and settle a new Reformed Church for him. But the great Reformer had other things to do, and after a time Christian seemed to lose his interest in the new faith. At any rate, as soon as he found that a Nuncio was coming from Rome to inquire into the justice of the sentences passed upon the Swedish nobles who had been put to death at Stockholm by his orders, he wrote to the Pope to promise that he would punish heretics in his kingdom; and seemed ready to pledge himself to any measure demanded of him if he thought that it might ward off the anger of Rome, of which he stood in great awe.

The Danish nobles rejoiced at the downfall of the Reformed party, but they put little trust in the king's promises, and feared that his great love for the society and counsels of persons of low birth would some day bring upon themselves the same fate as that which had befallen their Swedish brethren. They knew that his chief adviser, a Dutchwoman, commonly called Mother Sigbrit,1 hated all persons of high rank, and they

This woman, who had first made Christian's acquaintance when she and her young daughter Dyveke kept a tavern at Bergen during the prince's viceroyalty, had unbounded influence at the Danish Court, and to show her contempt for the nobles, she would keep the highest officers of State waiting for hours in the cold in the depth of winter, while she amused herself by watching their discomfort from the windows of her own well-warmed rooms in the palace.

felt that as long as she and her kindred, with their Dutch notions of freedom and equal rights for all classes, kept their power over the king, there was no safety to be hoped for by the nobles of the land. This Sigbrit, who had for years been as great a favourite with the Flemish queen as with Christian himself, was the mother of a lovely young girl known as Dyveke, or the Dove, whom the king had dearly loved, and whose death he had deeply mourned. As Dyveke had died suddenly, it was said she must have been poisoned, and some persons even thought that she owed her death to eating a dish of cherries, sent to her by a nobleman, Torbe Oxe, who it was known had once wished to marry her. The king did not rest till he had had poor Torbe brought to trial on this and other charges, and when the council declared they could see no just cause of offence against him, Christian swore that "in spite of all they said, Oxe should lose his head, if it were ten times as hard to cut off as a bullock's." True to his word, the king refused to listen to any appeals in Oxe's favour, and caused him to be brought to the block and executed. After this event Mother Sigbrit rose to still higher power, and the Danish nobles began to look about them to see how they could best secure their own safety. Neither they nor the bishops liked to risk their persons by attending the annual Things, and soon a compact was made between these two Orders of the State to renounce their allegiance to the tyrant.

Fatal glove.-One day in the April of the year 1523 Christian found in a glove which he was about to draw on a rumpled paper, in which his nobles made known to him their purpose to call in his uncle, Duke Frederick of Holstein, to be their king. Strange to say, Christian's courage failed him at that moment when he most needed it, and although the city of Copenhagen, together with the peasants and burghers in all parts of Denmark and even of Norway were in his favour, he fled in haste, and setting sail with his family and all his belongings, betook himself to Holland, where he remained for some years, and where three years later his gentle queen died among her own countrymen at the early age of twenty-six.

Had Christian stayed amongst his subjects he would perhaps have put down the rebellion raised against him; for even

among the nobles he had devoted friends, and for many years his able commanders, Henrik Gjö, Sören Norby, and others, made a brave stand for him. In Norway, too, where he landed in 1531 with an army of Dutch and Germans, he was hailed with joy, but at that moment, his uncle Frederick made a treaty with Sweden and Lübeck, both of which powers dreaded Christian's return to Denmark. By their joint forces his troops were beaten, and at last in 1532 the unhappy king, on a promise of safety, gave himself up to his uncle's commander, Knud Gyldenstjerne, who, instead of setting him at liberty as he had promised, carried him to the Castle of Sonderborg on the island Als, and had him confined in a dark dungeon below the tower. In this wretched prison, to which light and air could only penetrate through a small grated window, that served at the same time for the passage of the scanty food given to him, Christian spent seventeen years of his life with a half-witted Norwegian dwarf for his sole companion.

On the death of Frederick I., his son, Christian III., showed a wish to release the unhappy captive, on condition of his pledging himself to retire to Germany. But the Danish nobles were still too much in dread of Christian II. to suffer him to be set at liberty, and all that this more merciful king could do was to have the prisoner removed to Kallundborg Castle, where he was permitted to pass the last ten years of his life in comparative comfort, and where he died in 1559, within a few months of the death of his cousin and namesake, Christian III.

Frederick I., 1523-1533.-We must now go back to the time when Christian II. left Denmark, and the nobles found themselves free to choose another king more to their mind than the one whom they had put down. They soon made choice, as we have seen, of Christian's uncle, Duke Frederick, who did not hesitate a moment in accepting the crown that was offered to him by the Council of State, and as soon as he felt secure of the support of the nobles of the Danish islands and of the duchies he called upon the Swede and Norwegians to proclaim him king. The former replied that they had already chosen a king for themselves, viz. Gustaf Ericksson Vasa; but

the Norwegians after a time consented to do homage to him, and in return Frederick declared Norway a free elective monarchy. From the moment Frederick I. became king of Denmark and Norway he began to undo everything that his nephew, Christian II., had done, and one of his first acts was to give orders that all the laws which had been passed in the last reign in favour of the peasants should be publicly burnt in his presence. The poor-schools were closed all over the kingdom, the newly-printed books burnt, and the Reformed preachers driven out of the towns and forbidden to preach the doctrines of Luther, or to read the bible to the people. Danish and Holstein nobles rejoiced in having a king who agreed with them in thinking that it was "contrary to good order and morality" to raise the condition of the peasants; and the poorer classes found themselves worse treated and more crushed than they had been before King Christian II. tried to lift them out of their misery. Frederick and the nobles looked upon them as mere slaves, fit only to work like the beasts of the field; and at Court, German manners and the German language had quite taken the place of the national customs and form of speech.

The

Frederick was not equally successful in his measures against the Reformers, whose influence increased rapidly during this reign, and was mainly due to the effect produced by the preaching of the doctrines of Luther in Denmark, in the year 1520, when Hermann Tast, a learned priest of Husum in Jutland, stood forth in the market-place of that town, and explained many passages of the Scripture to the people in accordance with the new teaching of the German Reformers. A few years later, another priest, named Hans Tausen, preached with such force against the Church of Rome, that the Danish clergy took alarm, and tried by all means in their power to put down this learned and dangerous man. But each time that he was shut up by his bishop the people flew to arms and clamoured till they secured his freedom. At length, in 1530, the burghers in Copenhagen and the other large Danish towns began in their turn seriously to ill-use the monks, and to destroy the images and ornaments of the churches, until the soldiers were sent to put an end to the riots. But at that time the people

at large had been made acquainted with the Scriptures, for in 1524 a translation of the New Testament into Danish had been published at Antwerp by Hans Mikkelsen, a learned man who had left his home and lost his all to follow King Christian II., and in 1529 a second and better version was given to the Danes by their countryman Kristen Pedersen, who also translated the Psalms into Danish. The Romish clergy had called meetings to decide what was to be done to put down these doctrines, and had taken strong measures against the preachers, but all to no purpose, and the whole Danish nation very soon adopted the Reformed faith, although it was not till the year 1536 that this form of religion was established by law in Denmark.

The Count's Feud.—There had been many troubles in the land on the death of Frederick I. in 1533, and for three years after that event the country was without a king, and a state of great disorder reigned in the land. This period is known as the time of "the Count's Feud," for it was taken up with the wars carried on under the command of Count Christopher of Oldenburg to recover the Danish throne for his cousin, the poor captive king, Christian II. But besides this cause of trouble there were other reasons why a new king was not chosen at once on the death of Frederick I. The nobles and the clergy could not agree on the question of religion; the former wishing to take Frederick's eldest son, Christian, to be their king, and the latter wanting to have him passed over as a heretic, and the younger son, Prince Hans chosen, who was only a little child at the time, and whom the bishops hoped they might bring up in their own faith. Gustaf Vasa, King of Sweden, gave much help to Prince Christian by carrying on war against the Lübeckers, who had taken the part of the count, chiefly because they were always glad to have an excuse to fight against Denmark; but when they found that Count Christopher was often beaten by the Swedes and by Prince Christian's friend and chief commander, Johan Rantzau, they hastened to make peace, and leave the poor deposed king, Christian II., to his fate.