Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark's Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596 9004137904, 9789004137905

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Note on Conventions
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 An Emerging Power, 1536–1572
The legacy of Christian III, 1536–59
Frederik II
Resources: military, naval, and financial
Chapter 3 Religion and Foreign Policy, 1559–1572
Frederik II and the state church
Confessional identity and foreign policy, 1559–72
Chapter 4 Two Weddings and a Conspiracy, 1572–1577
The ‘Bloody Wedding’ and the Baltic threat, 1572–80
The Papist conspiracy
Chapter 5 Protestant Solidarity and the Imperial Crisis, 1577–1583
Catholic resurgence and Protestant solidarity
Frederik II and the ‘Book of Discord’
Prospects for a Protestant alliance, 1577–83
Realignment
Chapter 6 The Common Cause, 1583–1585
Their ambitions have become as one
This manifestly wanton and devilish act
The English initiative, 1585
Chapter 7 The Third Peril, 1586–1588
To spare the blood of thousands
Towards Lüneburg
The Dutch quagmire
I have little hope
Chapter 8 Retreat
The Regency and isolationism
But our pious king of Denmark has passed over to God too soon
Bibliography
Index
THE NORTHERN WORLD

Citation preview

FREDERIK II AND THE PROTESTANT CAUSE

THE NORTHERN WORLD North Europe and the Baltic c. 400-1700 AD Peoples, Economies and Cultures

EDITORS

Barbara Crawford (St. Andrews) David Kirby (London) Jon-Vidar Sigurdsson (Oslo) Ingvild Øye (Bergen) Richard W. Unger (Vancouver) Przemyslaw Urbanczyk (Warsaw)

VOLUME 10

FREDERIK II AND THE PROTESTANT CAUSE Denmark’s Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596

BY

PAUL DOUGLAS LOCKHART

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2004

Illustration on the cover: Frederik II, bearing sword and scales, and behind the Ten Commandments. From Niels Nielsen Colding. De besynderligste historier / Sententzer oc Exempler / som findis i den hellige Scrifft / om Øffrighedz Kald / Regiment oc Bestilling indtil enden i det Ny Testament / Met en gantske kort Paamindelse Øffrighed forklarede (Copenhagen, 1567). Courtesy of Karen Brahes Bibliotek, Landsarkivet for Fyn, Odense, Denmark.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lockhart, Paul Douglas, 1963— Frederik II and the Protestant cause : Denmark’s role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596. / by Paul Douglas Lockhart. p. cm. — (The Northern world, ISSN 1569-1462 ; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-13790-4 1. Frederick II, King of Denmark and Norway, 1534-1588. 2. Denmark— Foreign relations—1448-1660. 3. Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. I. Title. II. Series. DL188.L63 2004 940.2’42’09489—dc22

2003065511

ISSN ISBN

1569–1462 90 04 13790 4

© Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

Til Jo Anna

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................... List of Maps .............................................................................. Note on Conventions ................................................................ Acknowledgements ...................................................................... List of Abbreviations .................................................................. Chapter 1

ix xi xiii xv xix

Introduction ..........................................................

1

Chapter 2 An Emerging Power, 1536–1572 ........................ The legacy of Christian III, 1536–59 .................................. Frederik II .............................................................................. Resources: military, naval, and financial ..............................

13 14 29 55

Chapter 3 Religion and Foreign Policy, 1559–1572 ............ Frederik II and the state church .......................................... Confessional identity and foreign policy, 1559–72 ............

63 65 83

Chapter 4 Two Weddings and a Conspiracy, 1572–1577 .... 101 The ‘Bloody Wedding’ and the Baltic threat, 1572–80 .... 104 The Papist conspiracy ............................................................ 128 Chapter 5 Protestant Solidarity and the Imperial Crisis, 1577–1583 .............................................................................. Catholic resurgence and Protestant solidarity ...................... Frederik II and the ‘Book of Discord’ ................................ Prospects for a Protestant alliance, 1577–83 ...................... Realignment ............................................................................

143 145 157 174 189

Chapter 6 The Common Cause, 1583–1585 ........................ Their ambitions have become as one .................................. This manifestly wanton and devilish act . . . ........................ The English initiative, 1585 ..................................................

202 202 219 225

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Chapter 7 The Third Peril, 1586–1588 ................................ To spare the blood of thousands . . . .................................. Towards Lüneburg ................................................................ The Dutch quagmire ............................................................ I have little hope . . . ..............................................................

242 243 252 273 290

Chapter 8 Retreat .................................................................... 298 The Regency and isolationism .............................................. 300 But our pious king of Denmark has passed over to God too soon . . . ........................................................................ 308 Bibliography ................................................................................ 329 Index .......................................................................................... 339

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The illustrations can be found between the pages 122 and 123 Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate Plate

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Frederik II. Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg. Sofie of Mecklenburg, Queen of Denmark. Rigshofmester Peder Oxe. Kansler Niels Kaas til Taarupgaard. Rentemester Christoffer Valkendorf. Statthalter Heinrich Rantzau. Heinrich Ramel. Christine of Lorraine. Fireworks display, 1577. Danish and Spanish ships in battle.

Plates 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, and 9 appear courtesy of Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark. Plates 3 and 5 appear courtesy of De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling, Rosenborg Slot, Copenhagen, Denmark. Plate 10 appears courtesy of Det kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark. Plate 11 appears courtesy of Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen, Denmark.

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. Denmark and the Baltic .............................................. xxi Map 2. Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire .................... xxii

NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

When writing about the history of the non-anglophone world in English, of course, spelling can prove to be an annoying problem, especially when those spellings were hardly standardised. Although I have utilised modern English-language spellings of common placenames (Copenhagen instead of København, The Hague instead of s’Gravenhage or Den Haag, Cologne instead of Köln), I have endeavoured to retain most proper names in their proper foreign forms: hence Frederik instead of Frederick (Danish), Friedrich instead of Frederick (German), Johann or Hans instead of John, and so forth. Some names are simply too well-known in English to merit this method; therefore, for example, I use William of Orange instead of Guillaume or Wilhelmus. I have eschewed referring to the Calvinist general Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir as ‘Casimir’—a mistake frequently found in histories of Tudor England—as Casimir was a second given name and not a surname. For the territories and lands of the former Oldenburg monarchy I have chosen to use their Danish spellings, with the obvious exception of the familiar ‘Jutland’ instead of ‘Jylland’. The term ‘Denmark’ itself can refer either to the kingdom of Denmark itself (as distinct from Norway or Iceland) or, more generically, to the entire Oldenburg monarchy. The term ‘Denmark-Norway’ is currently in fashion amongst Scandinavianists, but this is something I have sought to avoid. Norway may have been a twin kingdom, but constitutionally speaking it was a mere province of the Danish state after 1536; calling the Oldenburg realms ‘Denmark-Norway’, therefore, makes no more sense than using ‘Denmark-Jutland’ or ‘DenmarkSkåne’. When Danish or German titles for political offices have no readily available English-language equivalent (e.g., Rigshofmester or Statthalter), I have instead utilised the original forms, explaining the meaning of these offices and their attendant duties in the text. Since the ‘New’, or Gregorian, calendar was not used by most of Protestant Europe during this period, and by Catholic Europe for only a limited portion of the timeframe covered by this work, all dates in the text are rendered in the Old Style ( Julian calendar). Documents dated in the New Style are so noted in the footnotes.

xiv

note on conventions

Danish fiscal records generally use the daler as the basic monetary unit. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Danish daler or rigsdaler, like the Swedish riksdaler, was the near equivalent of the German Reichsthaler in value, and was very close to the French écu as well. About four daler in specie made up one English pound or a Danish rosenobel. The measurement ‘last’ (Danish læster) was used both to indicate the gross displacement of a merchant or naval vessel and to indicate weight or volume of cargoes. Unfortunately, the specific meaning of ‘last’ varied greatly from state to state within Europe, and even from region to region within Denmark.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Since I first began the research for this book in 1995, I have had the good fortune to discuss my ideas and my sources with a number of scholars and colleagues, so many that I cannot possibly name them all here, even if I could recall all of them. First, I should like to thank my friends in Denmark with whom I have discussed my research at length, many of whom have even opened their homes to me and my wife during our frequent travels abroad: Prof. Knud J.V. Jespersen, Dr. Michael Bregnsbo, Dr. Knud Korff, and the late Prof. E. Ladewig Petersen, all of the University of Southern Denmark, Odense; Prof. Martin Schwarz Lausten and Prof. Karl-Erik Frandsen of the University of Copenhagen; Dr. Frede P. Jensen, of the Danish Foreign Policy Institute (DUPI ), Copenhagen; Leon Jespersen of the Danish State Archives (Rigsarkivet), Copenhagen; Dr. Ole Degn, of the Regional Archives for North Jutland (Landsarkivet for Nørrejylland ), Viborg. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friends Kim Wagner, Hans Kargaard Thomsen (formerly of Rigsarkivet) and his wife, Yvonne, for their repeated acts of hospitality. The Thomsens, in particular, graciously endured many hours of dinner conversation about Frederik II and his Denmark. Profs. Geoffrey Parker (The Ohio State University), Simon Adams (University of Strathclyde), and Jason Lavery (Oklahoma State University), as well as Professor Emeritus Walter R. Weitzmann (SUNY/ Potsdam) read the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice, most of which I have incorporated into the following text. Many others have given me sage advice and timely encouragement, including Prof. Mark Charles Fissel (Augusta State University), Prof. Robert I. Frost (King’s College London), his wife Dr. Karin Friedrich, and the late Prof. Bodo Nischan. Prof. Bruce Laforse, of the classics department at Wright State, helped me with the translation of a particularly troublesome Latin quote in chapter 5. Ms. Diana Kaylor, head of interlibrary loan at the Dunbar Library, Wright State University, went out of her way to provide me with piles of obscure and esoteric texts; this work could not have been completed without her assistance and that of her staff. I would also like to thank

xvi

acknowledgements

the faculty and staff at the Institut for Historie, Kultur og Samfundsbeskrivelse, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, for their hospitality and support during my tenure there as guest researcher in 1997. Dr. Sophia, Countess of Dohna, graciously granted me permission to examine the remnants of the Dohna-Schlobitten family archives, housed at Berlin-Dahlem. The editorial staff at Brill, especially Ms. Marcella Mulder, have been exceedingly patient and helpful in the process of converting a typescript into a book. Financial support for this study came from a variety of sources. Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society made possible my extended stay in Denmark in 1997. Several smaller grants from the General Education Research Incentive Fund, College of Liberal Arts, Wright State University, allowed me to make repeated trips to Denmark, Great Britain, and Germany, and to purchase materials from European archives. The College of Liberal Arts at Wright State also aided my research and writing by granting me leave for the entire academic year 1996–97 and for the fall of 2001. Finally, I must note the contributions of my family and close friends. My four children—Kate, Nick, Paige, and Philip—collectively put up with the all-too-numerous occasions in which my work intruded upon my time with them, without complaint and with a surprising degree of curiosity. My parents, Newton and Marilyn Lockhart, were as always a source of great encouragement. My mother-in-law, Maria Beach, and my brother-in-law, Ralph C. Beach III, helped to ‘take up the slack’ when my research and writing kept me from attending to the minor vicissitudes of everyday life; Ralph’s considerable knowledge of computer technology rescued this manuscript from potential disaster more times than I care to contemplate. My wife’s family in Austria—the Rehlings, Kremsers, Tauschers, Zsaks, and Mosers—provided me with a pleasant home-base in central Europe from which I could travel easily to the archives I consulted in Germany. But my greatest appreciation I must reserve for my wife, Jo Anna Chu-Lockhart. It is commonplace for an author to thank his or her spouse by stating that ‘this book could not have been written without her love and support’; for me, this is no empty hyperbole. Jo Anna spent untold hours photocopying manuscript materials in a multitude of libraries and archives, making lodging and travel arrangements, and sparing me from thousands of mundane tasks so

acknowledgements

xvii

that I could concentrate on my research. Most important, she stoically endured innumerable hours of discussion about Frederik II and his foreign policies, and in doing so helped me to clarify points that once seemed hopelessly tangled. To her this book is dedicated— appropriately enough on Valentine’s Day—with my love. Kettering, Ohio 14 February 2003

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Aus Reg BL BN Cal. Scot P. Cal. SP For. Cal. SP Span.

Ausländisch Registrant British Library Bibliothèque Nationale Calendar of Scottish Papers Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series Hume, Calendar of Letters and State Papers . . . in the Archives of Simancas CCD Secher, Corpus Constitutionum Daniae DB Dänische Bücher DBL Engelstoft et al., Dansk biografisk leksikon DK Danske Kancelli DKB Det kongelige Bibliotek DM Danske Magazin DNT Laursen, Danmark-Norges Traktater GSPK Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem HHStA Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, Vienna HTD Historisk Tidsskrift [Denmark] KB Kancelliets brev-bøger KHS Kirkehistoriske Samlinger Kop Lat Kopibog ‘Latina’ KRA Kongehusets og Rigets Arkiv LAO Landsarkivet for Fyn, Odense LAV Landsarkivet for Nørrejylland, Viborg LHA Schwerin Landeshauptarchiv für Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schwerin NLS National Library of Scotland NRR Norske Rigs-registrater PA Privatarkiver PRO Public Record Office, Kew RAK Rigsarkivet København RSG Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal Säch. HStA Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden SP State Papers

xx StA Naumburg StAM TKIA TKUA/AD TKUA/SD

list of abbreviations Stadtarchiv, Naumburg a.d.S. Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Marburg Tyske Kancelli, Indenrigske Afdeling Tyske Kancelli, Udenrigske Afdeling, Almindelig Del Tyske Kancelli, Udenrigske Afdeling, Speciel Del

maps

Map 1. Denmark and the Baltic

xxi

xxii

maps

Map 2. Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Renaissance Denmark, which blossomed during the reign of Frederik II and in the early years of Christian IV’s reign—therefore in the decades around 1600—was a mighty kingdom with far-flung possessions, and it would have seemed strange to Danes living at that time that they belonged to a state that was in some way lesser than contemporary England . . .1 History, it is often suggested, is written by the winners. Yet losers also write history; they just don’t get translated.2

1588 was the year that the Armada menaced Denmark. The approach of the massive Spanish fleet, though perhaps the ‘worstkept secret in Europe’, caught Denmark unprepared and vulnerable. It had not been a good year for the guardian of the Sound. After a reign of nearly twenty-nine years, King Frederik II had died on 4 April 1588, leaving behind a central government with untried and unsteady leadership. It was the late king’s diplomatic legacy, however, that most troubled the aristocratic regency which ruled Denmark in the name of Frederik II’s son and successor, the boy-king Christian IV. Although there had not been so much as an exchange of harsh words between the Danish and Spanish crowns within recent memory, King Frederik had taken an unmistakeably pro-Dutch and pro-English stance since 1582 at the very latest, and had been foremost among those statesmen who called for Protestant solidarity against the pope and the Spaniard. Before reports of the Anglo-Spanish naval clashes in the Channel made their way to the Baltic, the regency government in Copenhagen received disturbing rumours of Spanish naval activity much closer to home. Dutch merchants sighted five Spanish warships off the Norwegian port of Trondheim; at least three, perhaps as many as five, Spanish ships had foundered on the Norwegian coast, 1 Hans Jensen, Myten om det “lille” Danmark. Træk af vor ydre og indre Historie (Copenhagen, 1941), p. 13. 2 Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars. War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558– 1721 (London, 2000), p. 14.

2

chapter one

including one near the prosperous commercial hub of Bergen, and possibly another on the west coast of Jutland in Denmark itself. The nervous regency ordered local Norwegian officials to offer no resistance to the Spanish vessels, and to aid the survivors of the Armada wrecks as much as they could. Philip II, it seemed, had finally decided to seize control of the Sound, simultaneously punishing Denmark and cutting off his rebellious Dutch subjects from the lucrative and vital Baltic trade.3 The fears of the Danish regency seem, to the modern student of early modern history, far-fetched. Yet in 1588 such fears would appear to be anything but laughable. England was not the only Protestant power of note to confront Catholic Spain and France during the second half of the sixteenth century. Denmark did so as well. And in the last decades of the century, the Oldenburg state—that is, the kingdom of Denmark and the associated lands of the Oldenburg patrimony—was beginning to realise its potential as a European power and to become integrated into the mainstream of European political life. It was not nearly so large or powerful as Habsburg Spain, nor so wealthy in population and resources as late Valois France or Elizabethan England, yet its commanding position over the Baltic sea lanes and its considerable possessions within the Holy Roman Empire gave it some degree of influence in pre-Westphalian Europe. As duke of Holstein and as Europe’s only significant Lutheran sovereign—Sweden being as yet a primitive backwater and its confessional affiliation unsure—the king of Denmark was a natural leader to the Protestant princes of Germany, and a useful intermediary between these princes and western Europe. The importance of the Baltic trade to the economies of England and the Netherlands meant that friendship with Denmark was vital to the security of the Protestant northwest, and even France and Spain depended heavily upon commerce in the Baltic. Prior to 1588, Denmark’s navy was second to none in northern waters; in the size of its fleet, in the size of its vessels, and in the technological proficiency of its shipwrights, Denmark was the equal of Elizabethan England. From 1570 to the end of the century, Denmark was at the height of its prosperity, and nearly at the height of its power. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Denmark would play 3 Torbjørn Ødegaard, Den spanske armada og Norge (Fredrikstad, 1997); NRR vol. 3, pp. 17–19, Regency to Christen Friis til Borreby and Nils Bilde, 6 November 1588.

introduction

3

an important role in the confessional conflicts that wracked Europe in the half-century or so before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Indeed it did, and this fact did not escape the attention of contemporary observers, though it has been all but forgotten today, even by Danish historians. It would be preposterous to suggest that Denmark led Protestant Europe in the fight against ‘international Catholicism’ in the decades before 1625, when Christian IV of Denmark (1596–1648) would lead an international Protestant coalition to defeat at the hands of the armies of Tilly and Wallenstein. But during the reign of King Frederik II (1559–88), the Oldenburg state would play an important indirect role in the European ‘wars of religion’, and would come very close to direct military intervention alongside Elizabeth’s England. Denmark’s rise to Baltic hegemony and diplomatic prominence on the Continent owed primarily to its geopolitical position astride the Sound, the main maritime passageway connecting the North and Baltic Seas. The sheer volume of international shipping passing through the Sound was enormous; exported in English, Dutch, and Hanseatic bottoms, Baltic grain fed much of northern Europe, naval stores and timber from the region supplied shipyards all over the Continent and in Britain, and all sorts of miscellaneous goods, from steers and hides to amber, found ready markets in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. As the Baltic trade grew in volume, so too did Denmark’s prominence. First and foremost, the Baltic trade was a source of great wealth for the kings of Denmark. Since the early fifteenth century, Danish kings had been collecting tolls on all maritime traffic entering or leaving the Baltic, the infamous ‘Sound dues’ (Sundtolden) levied at Helsingør. The spectacular growth of the Baltic trade in the sixteenth century accordingly stoked the royal coffers with gold and silver coin. It was during the reign of Frederik II, however, that the Sound dues became truly lucrative. Because Frederik maintained a large and powerful navy, one capable of preventing a forced passage of the Sound by any rival save Spain, he could risk exploiting the Sound dues to a much greater degree than before. He could, in fact, entirely seal off the Baltic to foreign shipping, as he would demonstrate on more than one occasion during Denmark’s bloody confrontation with Sweden, the Seven Years’ War of the North (1563–70), demonstrating graphically just what Danish control over the Sound entailed. In brief, mastery of the Sound made Frederik rich, and the ability to close off the Baltic to foreign trade brought Denmark to the attention of all of Europe.

chapter one

4

Perhaps Denmark was on the periphery of European affairs at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but by the 1570s Denmark was no longer a shadowy secondary state, ruled by a little-known sovereign; it was now seen as a potentially active participant in Continental politics, whose king was wealthy, assertive, and thoroughly Protestant. To be sure, Denmark would be able to wield much more muscle, and would have access to far greater wealth, at the time of its intervention in the Thirty Years’ War in 1625. As Paul Kennedy has observed, however, wealth and power must be seen in relative terms rather than in absolute ones.4 Among the Protestant or anti-Habsburg powers in 1625, Denmark’s prestige—though still considerable—was declining in relation to the Dutch Republic, Sweden, and France; within the same group of powers in 1570, before the ascendancy of Sweden and the Dutch, and while France had yet to suffer its darkest hours, Denmark simply had no rivals apart from England. Denmark, in other words, was a perfect candidate for the position of co-leader of Protestant Europe, and therefore figured highly in the political calculus of European statesmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The purpose of this present study is to examine the nature and extent of Danish royal involvement in what might fairly be termed ‘international Protestantism’ during the reign of King Frederik II. It does not purport to offer a comprehensive analysis of Danish foreign policy during these years; the struggle between Denmark and Sweden for Baltic dominion, which began with Frederik’s reign, is more than adequately covered elsewhere.5 To be sure, Scandinavian and Baltic affairs were of greater immediate importance to Denmark and its king until the signing of the Stettin settlement in 1570, but after this point Frederik II’s primary foreign policy aims revolved around the ‘wars of religion’ in France, the Netherlands, and the German states. The reign of Frederik II marks the beginnings of Denmark’s integration into western European political life, and the point at which expansion of Habsburg power and the perceived aggression of the Counterreformation Church became matters of serious concern to the Danish monarchy. 4

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987), pp. xxii–xxiii. 5 Frede P. Jensen, Danmarks konflikt med Sverige 1563–1570 (Copenhagen, 1982); Frost, The Northern Wars, pp. 23–43.

introduction

5

There are three overarching questions that I intend to address in this study. First, how did religion or religious identity shape the formulation of Danish foreign policy in the late sixteenth century? Second, what impact did Denmark have on the course of ProtestantCatholic conflicts in France, the Netherlands, and the Empire prior to the Thirty Years’ War? Why did Denmark not play a greater role than it did, given its obvious international prominence during this period? Third and finally, why was the king of Denmark—or his Protestant contemporaries, like Elizabeth I of England—unable to create an international Protestant coalition to counter the Catholic ‘conspiracy’ that they believed menaced their very existence? The first of these questions—the role of religion in foreign policy— is by far the most controversial. There is as yet no firm consensus about the role of religion in European politics during the so-called ‘confessional age’, namely the period 1555–1618. That confessional identity helped to drive domestic politics in the century following the Reformation has been well-established; this is particularly true in the case of early modern German historiography, thanks to the efforts of Gerhard Oestreich, Heinz Schilling and his students, and Bodo Nischan.6 But although the concept of ‘confessionalisation’ has become an integral part of early modern studies, historians have been slow to apply this to the study of international relations. The label ‘age of religious wars’, still commonly found in survey texts, has survived largely because of convenience and long usage, rather than because of any historiographical agreement on the role of religion in the making of foreign policy. Until relatively recently, historians of the ‘age of religious wars’ drew a sharp distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘political’ motivations, particularly when analyzing the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War. Scholars like James Westfall Thompson and S.H. Steinberg dismissed religion out of hand as a motivating force in these conflicts; instead, struggles over land and dynastic or commercial disputes— in short, over issues of power and control—lay at the heart of the wars of the late sixteenth century. Religion was, at best, a ‘smokescreen’ used by political and ecclesiastical authorities to disguise more 6 See, for example, the late Bodo Nischan’s study of confessionalization in Brandenburg: Prince, People, and Confession. The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994).

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worldly ambitions and insecurities.7 In the case of the French Wars of Religion, more recent scholarship—that, for example, of Mack Holt, Denis Crouzet, and Barbara Diefendorf—has attempted to ‘put religion back’ into the accepted narrative, rejecting the ‘power and land’ approach of earlier scholarship. Despite this admirable and necessary revisionism, current research on the political struggles of the period still retains substantial traces of the earlier materialists’ disavowal of religious factors. In particular, historians still tend to create a firm division between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in their interpretations of confessional conflict, whether domestic or international.8 The objection could indeed be made that the motives that drove the policies of statesmen now more than four centuries dead are impossible to discern. Konrad Repgen, for example, insisted that any attempt to pinpoint the motivations—confessional or otherwise—shaping foreign policy in Reformation Europe will inevitably be a fruitless exercise; instead, Repgen argued, we should pay attention to the ways in which monarchs sought to legitimise their decisions to go to war.9 At the risk of incurring accusations of employing a scientifically unsound methodology, I would counter that while it is a difficult thing to discern motivation in the making of policy, and that any conclusions drawn about the nature of such motivations will always be tentative to some degree, the effort to do so is not made in vain. Scholars should not take political rhetoric at face value, assuming that public statements regarding policy accurately reflect the mindset of their authors. Defense and legitimation are not the equivalents of motivation. Yet neither should we dismiss the words of sixteenthcentury statesmen and sovereigns as nothing but rhetoric of the most distasteful kind. By examining public expressions of motivation and intent in conjuncture with other forms of documentary evidence, like private correspondence between political allies, and with the subse7 James Westfall Thompson, The Wars of Religion in France, 1559–1576 (2nd edition, New York, 1957); S.H. Steinberg, The Thirty Years War and the Conflict for European Hegemony 1600–1660 (New York, 1966). 8 Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 1991); Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: La Violence au temps des troubles de religion (2 vols, Seyssel, 1990); Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, 1995). See also Holt’s excellent review article: ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1993), 524–51. 9 Konrad Repgen, ‘What is a “Religious War”?’, in E.I. Kouri and Tom Scott (eds), Politics and Society in Reformation Europe. Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his SixtyFifth Birthday (London, 1987), pp. 311–28.

introduction

7

quent political actions themselves, we can at the very least point to general trends in the ideologies that informed the making of policy, foreign or domestic. This book proceeds from the assumption that any effort to divorce the study of international politics and the making of foreign policy from their confessional backgrounds, at least in pre-Westphalian Europe, is inherently a futile one. Even to S.H. Steinberg, the scholarly tendency to label motivations for political action as either ‘political’ or ‘religious’ created a false dichotomy:10 It is . . . quite irrelevant to measure the relative importance of religious considerations against the promptings of statecraft, economic acquisitiveness or even personal aggrandizement, that may have decided the attitude of the statesmen of the period, for none of them would have found himself torn between choices of this kind. . . . [W]hat to later ages appeared as merely doctrinal controversies comprised for the seventeenth century debater the whole essence of life.

‘Religious’ and ‘political’ motivations were inseparable in the sixteenthcentury mind. To argue that confessionally-based ideologies constituted little more than an archaic and quaint appendage of Realpolitik, simply an ever-present consciousness that was nonetheless subordinate to more worldly concerns in political decision-making, is to fundamentally misunderstand the prevailing early modern mentalité. Whether defined as a ‘community of believers’ or as a ‘body of beliefs’, religion did determine or at least condition the course of politics, domestic or international in the age of the Counterreformation. Recent scholarship on the French Wars of Religion has assigned great importance to the role of popular religion in the initiation and escalation of the Huguenot struggles. But the masses, inarticulate or otherwise, did not have a monopoly on religious passions; these passions had just as much impact on the actions of royalty as they did on those of artisans and peasants. Geoffrey Parker’s study of Spanish grand strategy in the late sixteenth century has shown us how the personal piety of a single statesman—in this case, Philip II of Spain and his ‘messianic imperialism’—could shape the foreign policy priorities of a mighty empire.11 Even debates over seemingly trivial points of creed and dogma, far from being the sole province of professional theologians, could be of

10 11

Steinberg, The Thirty Years War, pp. 96–9. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, 1998).

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decisive importance to secular princes as well. The dispute over the Real Presence in the eucharist, for example, would constitute one of the most decisive factors behind the failure of all attempts to create an international Protestant coalition. Far from being a mere device to exploit the misdirected piety of gullible subjects, confessional identity provided a very real lens through which sovereigns and ministers made sense of the world around them. Questions of religion could be important in themselves in interstate relations, but they also infused all other areas of policy; even commercial policies bore in some way the stamp of religion, as demonstrated by Philip II’s efforts to manipulate trade in such a way as to ensure the defeat of the heretic Dutch rebels. Among Protestant princes, the assertiveness of postTridentine Catholicism led to a kind of confessional paranoia, prompting statesmen to see themselves as being surrounded by hostile ‘cabals’ and ‘conspiracies’ that may appear fanciful to modern eyes. The foreign policies of Frederik II serve as a useful case-study in the role of religion in early modern diplomacy. King Frederik, until the past two decades, has not attracted much attention from Danish historians, and the king’s foreign policy even less. That gaping lacuna in Danish historiography has since been redressed almost single-handedly by the thorough and exhaustive research of Frede P. Jensen. But even Jensen’s admirable essay on Frederik II and the ‘Catholic threat’ in the 1570s and ’80s examines the king’s confessional aims only briefly, and thereby misses many of the subtle nuances that informed Frederik’s decision-making and made the creation of an international Protestant front such a frustrating task. The same is true of the late Anna Tjaden’s otherwise excellent article on Frederik’s interest in Dutch affairs in the mid-1580s.12 But personal piety did help to shape the ‘grand strategy’ of the Danish monarchy in the ‘age of religious wars’, and especially between

12 Frede P. Jensen, ‘Frederik II. og truslen fra de katolske magter’, HTD, 93 (1993), 233–77; Anna Tjaden, ‘Frederic II, Lord of Holland and Zealand? Diplomats in Action (1584–1587)’, in J.Ph.S. Lemmink and J.S.A.M. van Koningsbrugge (eds), Baltic Affairs. Relations between the Netherlands and North-Eastern Europe 1500–1800 (Nijmegen, 1990), pp. 355–96. Walther Kirchner, ‘England and Denmark, 1558–1588’, The Journal of Modern History, 17 (1945), 1–15, provides a competent account of AngloDanish commercial relations; it is, however, based almost exclusively on English sources, and therefore makes the mistaken assumption that Denmark was all but an ally of Spain.

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1572 and 1588. To be sure, Frederik II devoted a great deal of time and resources to the containment of Swedish and Polish power in the Baltic region, and to maintain Denmark’s dominium maris Baltici; the king asserted himself strongly in German dynastic commercial politics, seeking to mediate disputes between his allies and relatives in the Empire while chipping away at the crumbling Hanseatic predominance in the Baltic and Norwegian trades. But from the very beginning of his reign, Frederik II feared the possibility of a Catholic onslaught in northern Europe, and after the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France in 1572 he became convinced of the existence of an overarching Catholic plot that sought nothing less than the subjugation of the Protestant creeds. Frederik II’s concern was broadly European. A ‘philippist’ Lutheran with tendencies towards irenicism, Frederik saw nothing wrong in collaborating with Calvinists and other non-Lutherans in defense of the reformed faith. To Frederik, the solidarity of Protestantism was the key to its survival. His diplomatic activities during the last sixteen years of his rule were dominated by his efforts to bring political unity to Protestants throughout Europe, and to protect religious dissidents in France, the Netherlands, and the Empire against destruction by Catholic powers. It would be naïve to argue that religious affiliation was the only factor that Frederik and his ministers took into consideration in the development of foreign policy, but it was certainly the predominant one. Though Frederik II jealously guarded the keys to the Baltic trade against all comers, regardless of religion, it was the prospect of the Sound falling into the hands of Catholic powers that troubled him the most. Frederik II’s fear of Catholic aggression would find echoes in the reign of Christian IV, who succeeded both in bringing Denmark to its greatest level of prestige in European affairs and in leading the Protestant coalition that his father had spent so much time trying to create. There are significant differences, however, behind the confessional foreign policies espoused by the two kings. Frederik’s concern was with Catholicism as an international entity, and like the more radical Protestant princes of his age he firmly believed that a Protestant defeat in one place—even if distant from Denmark—was a defeat for all Protestants everywhere. Christian IV, on the other hand, worried about Catholic and Habsburg intentions only when they encroached directly on his own territorial interests. Christian would be called upon to lend a helping hand on several occasions,

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most notably during the Spanish-Dutch peace negotiations in 1607–09 and the Kleve-Jülich dispute immediately afterwards. He became involved only because it suited his vanity to do so, and withdrew as soon as involvement proved unprofitable or the slow pace of negotiations bored him. Christian IV exhibited no lasting interest in promoting the ‘Protestant Cause’ until Habsburg victories in the first years of the Thirty Years’ War forced his hand. Indeed, it is for this reason that I have chosen to end this study with the year 1588 and not 1625. After Frederik II’s death in 1588, nearly four decades would elapse before a Danish king would see himself as having a responsibility to espouse international Protestant unity. What, then, was the nature and result of Denmark’s involvement in the European religious wars before 1588? As we have already seen, the nature of Denmark’s role was indirect, and the result was failure. It is this latter fact—that Denmark failed to have an appreciable impact on the outcome of the late sixteenth-century wars—that accounts for Denmark’s notable absence from the established narrative of European history of this period. Especially when studying international relations, historians tend to be far more interested in success than failure. Those states of the early modern period which failed to live up to their promised as influential powers—Poland, Denmark, and Saxony spring to mind—therefore take a historiographical ‘back seat’ to those which successfully wielded their influence, like England, Sweden, France, Spain, or even Brandenburg. The end result is not only a skewed understanding of the ‘balance of power’, but also a lack of appreciation for the nature of failure and for the myriad of missed opportunities that shaped international relations in early modern Europe—or in any time and place, for that matter. The study of Danish relations with western and central Europe during the ‘age of religious wars’ affords us a manageable example of a failed foreign policy. Even the most self-avowed danophile would have to admit that Denmark’s impact on the eventual outcome of these conflicts was minimal at best. Failure to influence the outcome of events, however, should not be confused with the inability to influence this outcome. Failure to execute a policy, as Geoffrey Parker pointed out in his study of Philip II’s statesmanship, is not inevitable; events have a way of ruining even the best-prepared plans of experienced leaders. As Robert Frost correctly observed in his study of Baltic warfare, it was not preordained that Denmark, Sweden, or the Polish Commonwealth would each fail to maintain a Baltic hege-

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mony; similarly, it was not inevitable that England, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden—and not Denmark—would be the principal Protestant powers at the middle of the seventeenth century.13 Frederik II’s inability to craft an international Protestant coalition in the later years of his reign is worthy of study not only for its implications vis-à-vis the European wars of the late sixteenth century, but also for what it tells us about the nature of politics in early modern Denmark. In particular, it highlights the personal role of the monarch in the making of policy. Traditional Danish historiography has—at least until the 1980s—portrayed Frederik II as a besotted and indolent ruler, who left the management of the Oldenburg state to his great magnates whose power was embodied in the aristocratic Council of State (Rigsråd ) while he enjoyed more frivolous pursuits. The researches of Frede P. Jensen have largely corrected this error, demonstrating that Frederik II was an effective political manager within the framework of conciliar monarchy, and not the mere puppet of his aristocracy. Though an elected king and in many ways a primus inter pares with respect to his conciliar aristocracy, Frederik was his own man in the making of policy.14 An examination of Danish foreign policy during this period largely confirms Jensen’s portrayal of Frederik. Within Denmark, Frederik generally got what he wanted, not by browbeating or circumventing his power elite but rather through the clever and low-keyed creation of political consensus. The reasons behind Frederik’s failure to achieve his stated goals, in other words, lay not within the Oldenburg polity, but were instead mostly external; that is, they stemmed from the king’s inability to create a consensus for action among the other leading Protestant statesmen of Europe. Frederik was far too cautious to commit Denmark to war without such a consensus, leading many—especially within the Tudor court, and later amongst Tudor historians—to believe that the king was truly ‘Spanish’ in his sentiments. Fear of opposition from the leading members of the aristocracy hobbled Frederik’s endeavors to a limited extent, and may well have prevented him from pursuing actions that would likely have resulted in war with Spain in 1586. In this way, Frederik’s statecraft stands in stark contrast to that of his more famous son, Christian IV. Christian IV failed to lead a Protestant coalition 13

Frost, Northern Wars, pp. 14–15. Frede P. Jensen, Bidrag til Frederik II’s og Erik XIV’s historie (Copenhagen, 1978), pp. 13–43. 14

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to victory in 1625–29 in large part because domestic opposition to his actions—internal factors—denied him the resources he needed. Denmark’s defeat in the Thirty Years’ War brought on a prolonged power-struggle between king and aristocracy, one that would ultimately lead to the royalist revolution of 1660 and the imposition of absolute monarchy. Christian IV’s Denmark was characterised by constitutional dysfunction, Frederik II’s (in its second half, at least) by constitutional harmony. That, of course, is another story altogether, and has been addressed at length elsewhere. In order to understand the context in which Denmark made its dramatic but ill-fated entrance onto the European stage, however, we must first examine the context and the mechanics of policy-making in the Oldenburg monarchy.

CHAPTER TWO

AN EMERGING POWER, 1536–1572

The king is around thirty-five years old, a tall, strong, and straightforward prince, handsome and well-proportioned in appearance, and, as we say, of high understanding and good common sense . . . he is well-informed, and is well loved by the people of the kingdom, from the highest to the lowest . . . Bernhardt Wusenbencz, 15671

Danish historians frequently refer to the late sixteenth century as ‘Denmark’s Renaissance’. The term is not entirely inappropriate. Although the governance of Frederik II was not marked by the same boundless energy as would that of his son and successor, Christian IV, the last three decades of the century did witness an unprecedented spurt of economic and cultural growth. It was also, in a way, the heyday of the Danish nobility. Having recovered from the destructive civil war of the 1530s, aristocratic families invested heavily in real estate, building large numbers of impressive manor houses, many of which are still to be seen dotting the landscape of the island of Fyn. Indeed, Danish scholars—with the notable exception of Frede P. Jensen— have been wont to portray Denmark during this period as a ‘noble republic’ of sorts, ruled by a weak and indolent king who indulged himself in the pleasures of the hunt while his aristocratic councillors carried out the day-to-day functions of governing the expansive Oldenburg realm.2 Such a portrayal, however, is misleading if not completely unsubstantiated by the surviving evidence. To be sure, the upper ranks of the nobility had become quite prosperous by mid-century, and they were certainly more vocal, even contentious, than they had been during the reign of Christian III (1536–59). To equate noble wealth and influence with weak kingship is to misconstrue the nature of limited 1 Knud Fabricius, ‘Danmark i Aaret 1567. En fuggersk Agents Indberetninger’, DM, Series 6, 2 (1916), 16–17. 2 See, for example: Erik Arup, Danmarks Historie (3 vols, Copenhagen, 1925–55), vol. 3, pp. 557–62.

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monarchy in sixteenth-century Denmark. As Nicholas Henshall has pointed out, ‘limited monarchy’ and ‘absolute monarchy’ were not polar opposites, and a powerful nobility could be a significant asset to the prerogative powers of the king.3 Late sixteenth-century Denmark offers convincing evidence for this argument. From unpromising beginnings as an inexperienced and bellicose young king, Frederik II would, in the first twelve years of his governance, emerge as an adept politician and statesman, and quite possibly as Denmark’s most successful ruler prior to the establishment of absolute monarchy in 1660.

The legacy of Christian III, 1536–59 As in much of northern and central Europe, the Reformation would prove to be a defining moment of profound significance for the Danish state. Denmark was the first sovereign state in Europe to give itself over to the Lutheran faith. The first tentative beginnings of the Reformation in Denmark came in 1521, when King Christian II (1513–23), attempting to create an independent national church, severed the ties that bound his clergy to Rome and invited Lutheran preachers from Germany to preach within Denmark. This reformation proved to be short-lived; Christian II, for fear of alienating his brotherin-law, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, soon sent the Lutheran preachers away, and two years later Christian II was no longer king. His progressive but heavy-handed political and economic reforms, which favoured mercantile interests in the towns over those of the landed nobility, soon made him unpopular with the Danish aristocracy. Moreover, Christian II’s brutal repression of national autonomy in Sweden led to a sustained revolt there under the leadership of Gustav Vasa, planting the seeds of Swedish independence and ending forever the old Kalmar Union of 1397, which had held Denmark, Norway, and Sweden together under one elective crown. Taking advantage of Christian’s alienation of his most powerful subjects, the king’s uncle, Duke Friedrich of Holstein, allied himself with some of the disaffected nobles and with the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. Together, Friedrich and his allies forced Christian’s flight and tacit abdication, and the 3 Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London, 1992), pp. 2–3.

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duke was proclaimed king of Denmark as Frederik I in March 1523.4 Denmark’s conciliar aristocracy, having no desire to endure again an overmighty lord, compelled their new king to accept an unusually strict coronation charter as a condition of his accession, guaranteeing noble privilege and demolishing the reforms of Christian II. Although the Council of State—on which sat both secular and ecclesiastical members—made Frederik I vow to defend the old faith against Lutheranism, the new king showed himself to be a friend, albeit a passive one, to those who professed the Lutheran heresy. When a former monk, Hans Tausen, began to preach in the Lutheran fashion at Viborg in 1525, Frederik I took no action to stop him. Nor would Frederik take any steps to slow down the growing popularity of the Lutheran faith in the larger towns, especially Copenhagen and Malmø. The Catholic episcopacy objected strenuously, but the secular nobles did nothing, either out of sympathy for the new faith or out of fear of rural insurrection. In 1530, the proponents of the Lutheran faith had become so bold as to meet in the capital to work out their statement of faith, the Confessio Hafniensis (Confession of Copenhagen); shortly thereafter, radical Lutherans in Copenhagen attacked the Cathedral (Vor Frue Kirke, or Church of Our Lady), destroying saints’ images and other religious paraphenalia. Contributing to Denmark’s unrest in the early 1530s were the ambitions of the deposed King Christian II, who with the support of Charles V endeavoured to reclaim his throne in 1531–32. Indeed, the former king managed to gain a foothold in Norway, where the Norwegian Council of State proclaimed him king. Christian demanded audience with his uncle in Copenhagen; after granting his nephew free passage to Denmark, King Frederik went back on his word, seizing the hapless Christian and incarcerating him permanently. Christian II was for the moment silenced, but he still presented a danger to Frederik I and his heirs. The end result of Frederik’s permissive stance in religious affairs was a potentially disastrous political dilemma, which came to confront the Council of State upon the king’s death in April 1533. Frederik’s eldest son and heir, Duke Christian of Holstein, was an avowed Lutheran, who had already begun the reformation of his dominions. 4 Mikael Venge, Christian 2.s fald. Spillet om magten i Danmark januar–februar 1523 (Odense, 1972).

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Several secular members of the Danish Council favoured Christian, but the majority—including the bishops—put their support behind Frederik’s younger and Catholic son, the twelve-year-old Duke Hans. The Council of State, jealously guarding its power, was in no hurry to elect a new king. Unfortunately for the aristocracy, however, a decision would soon be forced upon them, for Christian II’s adherents had been watching warily for an opportunity. While a religious dispute led to an open Lutheran insurrection in the city of Malmø early in 1534, the supporters of the deposed King Christian made their move. The Lutheran mayors of Lübeck and Copenhagen, Jürgen Wullenwever and Ambrosius Bogbinder, conspired with the ambitious and warlike Count Christoffer of Oldenburg. Christoffer, a grandson of Christian I, the first Oldenburg king of Denmark, raised an army and invaded Holstein, aiming to restore Christian II. As if this were not terrifying enough to the Danish nobility, Christoffer had also worked out a deal with Wullenwever, according to which Denmark would give control over the Sound to Lübeck, pay Lübeck half of the dues collected there, and give the Hanseatic city a voice in future royal elections. Faced with these threats and with peasant uprisings in Jutland and on Fyn, the Danish nobility had little choice. They elected Duke Christian of Holstein as their king, in hopes that he could save them. The resultant two-year civil war, known in Denmark as Grevens fejde (The Count’s War, 1534–36), was as confusing as it was destructive. The new king, Christian III, was hardly secure upon his throne, and had to fight several enemies simultaneously: not only the forces of Count Christoffer, but also a bewildering assortment of peasant uprisings, the city of Copenhagen itself, and an insurrection in North Jutland spurred by one Skipper Clement, a privateer acting on behalf of Christian II. Ultimately the king prevailed. Wullenwever’s fall in Lübeck early in 1536 took Lübeck out of the conflict; Christian III’s armies, under the brilliant leadership of Johann Rantzau, demolished Christian II’s forces one by one; a Danish royal fleet under Peder Skram prevailed in the Baltic. Malmø and Copenhagen eventually capitulated. Christian III made his triumphant entry into the capital city in early August 1536.5

5 On Grevens Fejde, see: Caspar Paludan-Müller, Grevens Feide (2 vols., Copenhagen, 1853–54).

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Christian III might have been elected king, but in reality he had made himself king by conquest. This, naturally, put the young duke in a position of great strength, an advantage that he utilised modestly. Immediately after his entry into Copenhagen, Christian III ordered the arrest of all the Catholic bishops, confiscated church lands throughout the kingdom, and set in motion the gradual process of dissolving the monasteries. Lutheranism had come to stay with royal sanction. Working directly with Luther’s disciple Johannes Bugenhagen, Christian III and his Lutheran clergy promulgated the Church Ordinance of 1537. The Ordinance created a new (although not much different) ecclesiastical hierarchy, obedient to the king.6 The political implications of Christian III’s victory were as great as the religious ones. The king granted considerable concessions to the Danish nobility, including almost unfettered control over their serfs, but in the main the new arrangement worked to the advantage of the king. The bishops were permanently barred from the Council of State, and all church revenues, properties, and functions now devolved to the king himself. The Council of State retained the right to levy taxes and dispose of tax revenues, and the elective nature of the monarchy remained intact, but Christian III compelled the aristocracy to recognise his son, the two-year-old Duke Frederik, as ‘princeelect’, or heir apparent vivente rege. Christian III punished Norway for its support of his cousin, Christian II, by dissolving the Norwegian Council and incorporating Norway (and its vassal-state of Iceland) into Denmark as a mere province of the crown. The victory was a moral one as well. The Council, like the nobility in general, had been thoroughly shaken by the Count’s War. They were more than happy to cooperate with the king, who had shown so much generosity in victory, in creating a more centralised and less restricted monarchy. Their fear of another disastrous interregnum allowed the king to move a step closer to the establishment of a monarchy that was still nominally elective but which in reality was hereditary. Christian III’s reign, which lasted until the king’s death on New Year’s Day 1559, marked the beginning of Denmark’s ‘golden age’. Denmark recovered rapidly from the devastation wrought by the civil war of the 1530s. The peasantry, which had proven itself to be 6 On the beginnings of the Lutheran state church in Denmark, see: Martin Schwarz Lausten, Christian d. 3. og kirken (1537–1559) (Copenhagen, 1987); Hal Koch and Bjørn Kornerup, Den danske kirkes historie (Copenhagen, 1959), vol. 4, pp. 14–103.

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potentially disruptive during the Count’s War and before, found itself cowed by a whole series of new social and economic regulations, but also found some protection in the form of rent and price controls enacted in the Kolding Recess of 1558. The king was not hobbled by his Council, yet he did work in close cooperation with the native aristocracy, in particular the king’s chancellor Johan Friis. This internal harmony was mirrored in Christian III’s foreign policy. Despite the violent beginning of his reign, Christian III and Johan Friis pursued a foreign policy that was conservative and cautious, seeking to avoid involvement in Continental politics and to preserve the status quo within the Baltic.7 The reasons for this caution were threefold. First, both the king and Friis were frugal men. Though Christian III was responsible for a significant expansion of the fleet, he had no interest in wasting his investment in a war. Second, Christian’s attentions were drawn inward, to the reformation of the government and the church; all of his energies were bent to this task, and he did not wish them to be diverted elsewhere. Third, and most important, was the fact that Christian III’s legitimacy as a sovereign was considered highly questionable outside of Denmark. In the eyes of the Council of State, the deposal of Christian II and the election of Frederik I had been lawful acts, but to the ousted king and his powerful family Frederik I was nothing more than a usurper. Christian II’s queen-consort was Isabella of Habsburg (Elisabeth to the Danes), granddaughter of Emperor Maximilian I and sister of Emperor Charles V. Charles V had supported his brother-in-law during the Count’s War, and the emperor’s preferences were not to be taken lightly. Worse still were the unquenchable dynastic pretentions of Christian II’s heirs. His sons were of no concern after the Count’s War. The twins Maximilian and Philip had died as infants; the eldest son, Hans, had been hailed as heir-apparent in Norway during the Count’s War, but he died at the age of fourteen in Regensburg in 1532. Christian II’s adult daughters, however, were a different matter altogether. The two girls, Dorothea (1520–80) and Christine (1521–90), were raised and educated at the Habsburg court in Brussels by their aunt, Mary of Hungary, regent in the Netherlands. While still in their teens, Dorothea and Christine were married off to Habsburg allies: Christine to the

7

Astrid Friis, Kansler Johan Friis’ første Aar (Copenhagen, 1970).

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Sforza duke of Milan in 1534, Dorothea to Count Palatine Friedrich, later Elector Palatine Friedrich II, the following year. Dorothea never made much of her claim to her father’s throne; her husband’s conversion to Protestantism in 1544 and subsequent alienation from the Habsburgs neutralised whatever threat she may have presented to Christian III. Christine, on the other hand, became more dangerous over time. A widow after only a year of marriage to Francis II of Milan, she remarried in 1541, this time to Francis of Lorraine, who became the reigning duke there three years later. Their brief marriage produced one son, Charles, and two daughters, Renée and Dorothea. Charles’ patrimony, as duke of Lorraine, was assured, but Christine’s daughters faced an uncertain future. Her desire to secure that future and her hatred for the usurper king who had imprisoned her father, depriving her of her birthright, was a dangerous combination. Christine’s memory was long, and her thirst for vengeance or compensation deep. While she lived, she would not entirely renounce her claim on the Oldenburg crown, either on her own behalf or that of her several daughters. In and of itself, this was not enough to cause Christian III many sleepless nights—Lorraine was too small and distant to threaten Denmark—but the fact that Christine and her offspring were Habsburgs made the Lorraine threat real and troubling. Neither Christine’s uncle, Charles V, nor her first cousin Philip II of Spain would ever give the duchess more than lukewarm moral support, but the mere prospect that the Lorraine claim on Denmark could be backed by Imperial or Spanish might was enough to give Christian III pause. Christian III was the son of a usurper, and had imprisoned the legitimate king of Denmark; for his own sake, and that of his line, he could not afford to alienate the most powerful dynasty in Europe.8 So Christian III avoided war at all costs. This was a simple task where it came to Sweden: the king of newly-independent Sweden, Gustav Vasa (1523–60), had supported Christian’s bid for the throne during the Count’s War. Christian, to his credit, was grateful, signing a defensive pact with Gustav and thereby tacitly renounced his claim to the Swedish crown. Handling the emperor would not be quite so easy, not only because of the dynastic issue but also of their differences in matters of religion. Christian III was not only a usurper, but a 8 Ludvig Daae, ‘Om Frederik IIs paatænkte lothringske Giftermaal og om Danmarks Forhold til de Grumbachske Uroligheder’, Historisk Tidsskrift (Norway), 2 (1872), 49–64.

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heretic as well, and as a prince of the Empire Christian was technically within the emperor’s disciplinary reach. Initially seeking protection against the wrath of Charles V by courting the emperor’s enemies, the king timidly entered into an alliance with Francis I of France and joined the League of Schmalkalden, an alliance of German Protestant princes opposing Charles. A brief but fruitless military expedition against the Netherlands on behalf of France in 1543, however, convinced the Danish king of the folly of such a course of action. Forced to come to some kind of agreement with the emperor, Christian III abandoned his Lutheran brethren in Germany and made peace with Charles V. In the Peace of Speyer (1544), Christian III repudiated his alliance with France and withdrew his membership in the Schmalkaldic League. Charles V would not formally renounce the claims of Christian II to Denmark, but he made the concession— secretly—of promising not to use military force to support the claims of Christian II’s heirs. Christian II would live out his days in comfortable but closely-guarded captivity, first at Sønderborg Castle, then at Kalundborg. Charles V had implicitly recognised the legitimacy of Christian III and his line, but that guarantee rested on a mere scrap of paper. Nor did the emperor speak for his niece in Lorraine.9 The Speyer treaty did not entirely free Christian III of the Lorraine problem. So long as Christine clung to her father’s claim, Christian III lived with the knowledge that there was an unsleeping enemy in the west, an enemy that could at the very least make things difficult for him through intrigue. As early as 1545, only a year after Speyer, Christian learned of wild rumours regarding a possible PalatineLorraine plot aimed at Denmark; one of them involved his old foe from the Count’s War, Christoffer of Oldenburg, who allegedly was mustering an army in nearby Bremen. A dynastic alliance, the king reasoned, might mollify his Lorraine cousin, and to that end he pursued a series of marriage negotiations for his eldest son, Prince Frederik, with the intent of either strengthening his ties with the Habsburgs or settling the Lorraine claims indirectly. In 1556, the king’s leading general and administrator in Holstein, Johann Rantzau, accompanied Christian III’s brother Adolf of Holstein during his visit 9 Paul-Erik Hansen, Kejser Karl V og det skandinaviske Norden 1523–1544. En historisk Oversigt over Skæbneaar for Danmarks Selvstændighed (Copenhagen, 1943), pp. 206–44; Martin Schwarz Lausten, Religion og Politik. Studier i Christian IIIs forhold til det tyske rige i tiden 1544–1559 (Copenhagen, 1977), pp. 19–23.

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to the Habsburg court at Brussels. Here Rantzau met with several nobles, including Count Aremberg, and discussed the possibility of a match between Prince Frederik and Renée of Lorraine. Rantzau’s son, Heinrich, continued to negotiate the match informally over the next six years. There was much interest on both sides, even from Duchess Christine herself, for the mutual advantages accruing from such a union would be considerable: both parties agreed that the terms should include the renunciation of all other claims to the Danish throne from Christian II’s descendants and a generous grant of landed estates in Denmark to support the future queen. Christian III even held out hope that he might be able to secure Prince Frederik’s right-of-succession in Lorraine should Duke Charles die without issue. Ultimately the negotiations would end without result— Prince Frederik showed only mild interest, and others within the Danish government expressed grave reservations about the match— but while he lived Christian III hoped for a marital solution to the Lorraine problem.10 Compromise with the emperor did not mean that Denmark was now powerless; quite the contrary. Danish military strength, concentrated in its fleet, flourished in the reign of Christian III. The defeat of Lübeck in the Count’s War mitigated the threat of Hanseatic aggression and commercial dominion, and the alliance with Sweden only reinforced this. When Christian III died in 1559, he left behind a state that was fiscally solvent, powerful, and stable, one which faced no significant external threats despite its official Protestantism. The Oldenburg state at the time of Christian III’s death was about at the peak of its territorial extent. The Danish monarchy could not really be called an ‘empire’ in the way in which the term is most commonly used. The kings of Denmark would make no attempts at overseas expansion until the reign of Christian IV, and not until the late seventeenth century would Denmark finally acquire non-European possessions in the Caribbean. It was an empire, however, in the sense that it incorporated several peoples with distinctively different cultures, languages, and political traditions, spread over a wide expanse of territory. When Christian III came to power by force of arms in 1536, he firmly tied three new possessions to the Oldenburg crown: the Duchies, Norway, and Iceland. The Duchies—namely, the mostly German-speaking lands of Slesvig (Schleswig) and Holstein—had been 10

Daae, ‘Frederik IIs paatænkte lothringske Giftermaal’, pp. 56–64.

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closely but vaguely associated with their Danish neighbours for some time, but Christian III actually held the title of duke of Holstein at the time of his accession in Denmark. Slesvig, with its mixed population of Germans and Danes, would remain in the Danish orbit— at least in part—for a very long time. Holstein was a far more complicated possession. Primogeniture was not strictly observed in Holstein, and in 1544 Christian III divided his possessions there between himself and his two brothers, Dukes Adolf and Hans. The territories of the latter would later revert to Denmark, as Hans died childless, but Adolf ’s line flourished as the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp. Christian III’s portion, known as the ‘royal portion’ (kongelige del ), was the personal patrimony of the king and not really part of Denmark itself. The king, along with his advisers and the local Estates, held sway there, unfettered by the administration in Copenhagen. Until the Danish kings completely lost Holstein in the war with Prussia and Austria in 1864, the Duchies would exert a powerful influence on the aims and ambitions of the Oldenburg monarchs. Holstein was a part of the Lower Saxon Circle of the Holy Roman Empire; hence the king of Denmark was simultaneously a Scandinavian sovereign and a membrum Imperii. This foothold in the Empire meant that the kings of Denmark, whether they liked it or not, would be involved in the political squabbles of the German territorial princes (Reichsfürsten). This only served to reinforce the already close commercial, political, cultural, and dynastic ties that bound Denmark to the principalities of northern Germany. Danish kings had aligned themselves through marriage to several princely houses in the Empire, most notably Saxony, Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg. Some kings, like Christian III, did their best to avoid entanglement in the politics of the Empire; others, like Frederik II and Christian IV, happily immersed themselves in this world. Also tied to Denmark through the actions of Christian III were Norway and Iceland. Norway, of course, had already been formally united with Denmark in the old Kalmar Union, but the events of 1536 led to Norway’s incorporation within the Oldenburg state as a mere province. Despite its vast size, Norway had no more constitutional significance than did Jutland, Sjælland, or Fyn. It was sparsely populated, with the vast bulk of its inhabitants living along the southern and southwestern coasts; very few people lived north of the town of Trondheim. As a crown province, it was subject to the full authority of the government in Copenhagen. The administrative centre of

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Norway lay at Akershus Castle, outside Oslo, but Norway’s only vital commercial centre was the city of Bergen, where there resided a large population of expatriate German and Dutch merchants. Norway’s agricultural output was insignificant, but foreign merchants were drawn to Norway for its timber and fish. Iceland, a Norwegian fief and therefore under the same administration, was even more sparsely populated. Under Christian III and Frederik II it might as well not have existed at all, for it remained practically impenetrable to Danish administrators and clergy for much of the sixteenth century. Its people were fiercely independent, resisting Denmark’s first attempts to impose Lutheranism with a fair measure of success.11 Even without these territorial additions, Denmark was not insignificant in itself. Prior to 1658, Denmark consisted of the mainland of the Jutland peninsula, the central island group centered around Fyn, and the eastern island group centered around Sjælland. Key to Denmark’s wealth and power, however, were the Danish possessions on the southern tip of the Scandinavian peninsula: the provinces of Skåne, Blekinge, and Halland, sometimes collectively referred to as the Scanian lands. These three territories would be lost to Sweden in 1658, but until then they were thoroughly Danish in language, law, and culture. Denmark enjoyed a thriving rural economy, producing enough grain to allow for sizeable exports, in addition to the production of steers, hides, and fish. The most significant geopolitical feature of the Danish monarchy, though, was its control over the maritime entrances to the Baltic Sea. Shipping could enter the Baltic from the North Sea (called the ‘West Sea’ by the Danes) via one of three passages: the narrow and shallow Little Belt (Lillebælt), separating Jutland from Fyn; the wider but tempestuous Great Belt (Storebælt), between Fyn and Sjælland; and the Sound (Øresund ), running between Sjælland and the Scanian coastline. The Sound was the only one of the three that was well-suited to heavy, freight-laden shipping, but even so it was narrow enough that it could easily be closed off or defended with a minimum of fortifications and naval support. This accident of geography was the primary reason for Denmark’s importance in international politics and the greatest single source of 11 Kare Lunden, ‘Norsk økonomi under dansk styre’, Historisk Tidsskrift (Norway), (1980), 88–108; Johan Schreiner, ‘Norges-artikkelen i Christian IIIs håndfestning’, Historisk Tidsskrift (Norway), 30 (1934–36), 185–205; Johan Schreiner, Hanseatene og Norge i det 16. århundre (Oslo, 1941); Øystein Rian, Den aristokratiske fyrstestaten 1536–1648 (Oslo, 1997), pp. 15–40, 66–74.

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income for the kings of Denmark. Denmark controlled the flow of maritime traffic into and out of the Baltic, and that traffic was voluminous. Trade between the Baltic ports and northwestern Europe increased steadily during the sixteenth century, and as the waning but still powerful Hanseatic cities began to lose their virtual monopoly over commerce in the region Dutch and English merchants moved in to take their place. Ships from England and the Netherlands, and even from France and Spain, brought fine cloths, salt, and cheap Spanish wine into the Baltic; from the Scandinavian towns, but especially from the Prussian ports of Königsberg, Danzig, and Elbing, and from Eastland towns like Riga, these same merchants returned to the North Sea carrying bulk goods and raw materials. These Baltic exports were absolutely vital to England and the Netherlands in particular. The Baltic region was the chief source of naval stores, like tar and mast timbers, for England’s navy and the Dutch merchant fleet; both were equally dependent on Baltic flax (for sailcloth) and hemp (for rope). By the last half of the sixteenth century, Flemish and Walloon entrepreneurs had developed the iron industry in Sweden, and Swedish bar-iron found a ready market in the North Sea ports. The grain trade, though not very glamorous, was the staple of Baltic commerce. The southeastern Baltic was fast becoming Europe’s breadbasket. Not until the close of the century would Baltic grain find its way to Mediterranean ports in significant quantities, but for the population of the Netherlands the eastern grain trade meant the difference between prosperity and starvation. During the 1560s, nearly onequarter of all grain consumed in the Netherlands came from the Baltic ports, and hence through the Sound. No matter what they carried, merchant ships passed through the Sound in ever-increasing numbers: in 1497, a total of 795 ships passed through the Sound in either direction; in 1537, that number had risen to 1897; in 1560, 2731 ships traversed the passage; and in 1583, nearly 5400 ships registered at Helsingør. Possession of the choke-point of the Sound, therefore, gave Denmark incalculable influence over the economic fortunes of most of northwestern Europe.12 12 Milja van Tielhof, The ‘Mother of All Trades’. The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden, 2002), pp. 1–5, 40–50; Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven, 1974), pp. 71, 169–73; Aksel E. Christensen, Dutch Trade to the Baltic about 1600 (Copenhagen, 1941), pp. 34–42, 291–325, 414–17; Henryk Zins, England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan era, trans. H.C. Stevens (Manchester, 1972), pp. 8–34, 153–286; John P.

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This degree of economic control had its advantages and disadvantages. It was a great potential source of wealth for Denmark, even if the kingdom’s share in the Baltic export trade was small. In 1426, Erik of Pomerania (king of Denmark, 1412–39) began to levy duties on maritime traffic passing through the narrow straights by his castle Krogen at the town of Helsingør. This toll, the ‘Sound dues’, initially netted only a very modest income for the Danish kings, but the blossoming of the Baltic trade in the mid-sixteenth century and the introduction of a more onerous customs scheme after 1567 transformed the Sound dues into the single most important source of cash income for the Oldenburg dynasty. Eventually, the Sound dues would have troublesome constitutional implications—the tremendous yields of the customs at Helsingør, in effect, would in the next century reduce the king’s fiscal dependence on grants of taxation from the Council of State—but during the sixteenth century the main problems emerging from the Sound dues were primarily diplomatic. The Sound dues made Denmark a predatory power, and the wealth of Danish kings derived more from a parasitical exploitation of Baltic commerce than from direct participation in that commerce. Those merchants who carried the bulk of Baltic goods to western Europe, hailing from England and the Low Countries, recognised this and resented it. Even when confessional issues drew Denmark and the northern Protestant states together later in the sixteenth century, commercial disputes invariably complicated the relationship. Command of the Sound might have been financially profitable, but it would also prove to be a diplomatic liability for Denmark.13 Since Christian III had made himself king of Denmark by the sword, he undoubtedly strengthened the constitutional position of the king within the Danish polity, but in its salient features the constitutional structure of the monarchy did not change, nor would it until the revolution of 1660 brought about the imposition of absolutism.14 Maarbjerg, Scandinavia in the European World-Economy, ca. 1570 –1625 (New York, 1995), pp. 29–45; Jason Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge. The Holy Roman Empire and the Scandinavian Struggle for the Baltic, 1563–1576 (Leiden, 2002), p. 92; Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London, 1988), pp. 56–7. See the figures in Nina Bang, Tabeller over Skibsfart og Varetransport gennem Øresund 1497–1660 (2 vols, Copenhagen, 1906–33), 1:2, 6, 26, 98. 13 Charles E. Hill, The Danish Sound Dues and the Command of the Baltic. A Study of International Relations (Durham, NC, 1926), pp. 11–31. 14 E. Ladewig Petersen and Knud J.V. Jespersen, ‘Two Revolutions in Early Modern Denmark’, in Kouri and Scott (eds), Politics and Society, pp. 473–82; Martin Schwarz

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Kingship remained elective in Denmark, though in practice the principal of heredity was still observed in the royal succession. The elective process, however, was no empty formality, for it gave the landed aristocracy the opportunity to place limitations on the royal prerogative through the composition of a coronation charter (håndfæstning). The håndfæstning spelled out, in detail, the powers and obligations of the king. The precise wording of the charters varied from king to king, depending on the political advantage—or lack thereof—that the upper aristocracy enjoyed at the moment of the coronation. For Christian III, who had established himself as king by force, the charter was quite liberal in granting the king extensive powers; for Frederik II it would be less so. In general, the constitutional system that prevailed in Denmark prior to 1660 was a partnership between king and aristocracy, a form of political and social organisation that Danish jurists later dubbed adelsvælden. At its highest level, adelsvælden was a form of dyarchy rather than ‘pure’ monarchy. The king ruled with and through his Council of State (Rigsråd )—a body, varying in size, composed of representatives of the foremost aristocratic families of the realm. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, the term ‘crown’ did not refer to the particular interests of the king; instead, the king and Council together made up the ‘crown of Denmark’ (Danmarks krone), and shared joint stewardship of the kingdom. The king enjoyed some prerogative powers in the making of foreign policy, but all major decisions were to be made in consultation with the Council. Collectively, the Council controlled the levying of extraordinary taxes as well as their disbursement, and had the final word in the elevation of commoners or foreigners to the native nobility. The king appointed new members to the Council, but his choices were limited, and the number of families from whom the membership of the Council was drawn was so small that the Council developed a strongly hereditary character. Rarely did a novus homo appear in the ranks of the Council; few councillors could not claim a father, uncle, grandfather, or brother as a colleague or predecessor.15 The Council met at the king’s pleasure, but as a rule Lausten, ‘Weltliche Obrigkeit und Kirche bei König Christian III. von Dänemark (1536–1559). Hintergründe und Folgen’, in Leif Grane and Kai Hørby (eds), Die dänische Reformation vor ihrem internationalen Hintergrund (Göttingen, 1990), pp. 91–107. 15 Grethe Ilsøe, ‘Det danske rigsråd 1570–88’, in Knud J.V. Jespersen (ed.), Rigsråd, adel og administration 1570–1648 (Odense, 1980), pp. 9–33; Svend Gissel, ‘Frederik II.s jyske råder’, in Festskrift til Astrid Friis på halvfjerdsårsdagen den 1. august 1963 (Copenhagen, 1963), pp. 99–122.

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they came together at least once a year, in the great annual assembly of nobles called herredag. In its capacity as kongens retterting, the Council (with the king in attendance) also served as the court of final appeal for the kingdom. Despite the great potential for constitutional conflict that would appear to be inherent in such an arrangement, under the middle Oldenburg kings political harmony, rather than faction, was the rule in king—Council relations. In a societal and cultural sense, at least, the king was merely the first nobleman of the realm, a true primus inter pares. The informal nature of Danish court culture and ceremonial reinforced this. The members of the Council were not necessarily the king’s political opponents: they were, more often than not, the king’s companions, with whom the king shared the kind of fraternal bonds that are forged of a common mindset, and bolstered by hunting, feasting, and drinking (frequently to excess) together. Modern historians have often displayed a tendency to view ‘limited monarchies’ as ineffective precursors to centralised ‘absolutist’ states, but in Denmark this species of government by consensus worked very well. Under Frederik II, it would reach its apogee. Compared to other European monarchies—Philip II’s Spain in particular—the structure of the central administration in Denmark would appear primitive. It was certainly simpler than the Spanish model, for it did not have the responsibility of governing an empire that was half so diverse and complex as Spain’s was. A handful of aristocrats, almost invariably members of the Council, served as the principal officers of the realm (rigsembedsmændene). These were appointed by the king. According to the terms of the coronation charters signed by Christian III and Frederik II, the king was required to keep filled the positions of rigshofmester, kansler, and rigsmarsk. The term rigshofmester is difficult to translate; some Danish historians, writing in English, have rendered it as ‘Lord High Seneschal’, which unfortunately does little to clarify the duties attendant upon the office. The rigshofmester was a kind of first minister and treasurer combined. He held nominal control over the kingdom’s finances and represented the king when the latter was absent from the capital. The kansler (sometimes called kongens kansler, or ‘king’s’ or ‘royal chancellor’, to distinguish him from the later rigens kansler, the chief legal officer of the realm) was head of the Chancery, and traditionally acted as intermediary between the king and the Council of State. Under Christian III and Frederik II, and for much of Christian IV’s reign, the chancellor was the minister who enjoyed the easiest access to the king, and in many ways held a more influential position than did the rigshofmester.

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The rigsmarsk (marshal of the realm) was responsible for the mustering and organisation of military forces, and the rigsadmiral commanded the fleet in time of war.16 The day-to-day functions of the central administration were the province of the two Chanceries, which drafted and dispatched the king’s edicts and correspondence, both domestic and foreign. The most important of these was the Danish Chancery (Dansk Kancelli ), usually referred to simply as the Chancery, which had the responsibility of receiving domestic correspondence and petitions, as well as transcribing the king’s orders and letters intended for a domestic audience. The secretaries of the Chancery were educated young noblemen, often from distinguised aristocratic families and—almost as often—bound for careers as members of the Council. The second, and lesser, body was the German Chancery (Tyske Kancelli ), which handled correspondence dealing with the Duchies and with foreign states. The distinction between the two chanceries was based not on areas of political jurisdiction, but rather on language: the Danish Chancery received and produced documents written in Danish for a native audience, the German Chancery handled those matters for which fluency in German, Latin, French, and sometimes even Italian or Dutch was necessary. The distinction might as well have been one between domestic and foreign affairs, though. The German Chancery, whose secretaries were of a wholly different breed than their Danish counterparts—for the most part, the former were university-educated German jurists from Holstein or Mecklenburg—not only dealt almost exclusively with foreign affairs, they were also themselves foreign. They served the king, and not the Council, but because of their abilities they frequently made their presence felt in embassies abroad or in the reception of foreign ambassadors. In short, the German Chancery was already beginning to act as a kind of ministry of foreign affairs.17

16 Poul Johs. Jørgensen, Dansk retshistorie (5th edition, Copenhagen, 1971), pp. 336–48; P. V. Jacobsen, ‘Om Kong Frederik den Andens Forhold til nogle af de øverste Rigsembedsmænd og enkelte andre Adelige’, HTD, Series 1, 5 (1844), 409–45. 17 Heinz Lehmann, Die deutsche Kanzlei zu Kopenhagen als Vorkämpferin für den Absolutismus in Dänemark und als Verwaltungszweig innerhalb des dänischen Verwaltungssystems bis 1676 (Hamburg, 1936), pp. 12–32.

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Frederik II It is not without reason that historians of early modern Europe so frequently choose the year 1559 as a major turning-point in European history, for collectively the European states experienced a quiet revolution of sorts in and around that year. England, France, Spain, the Empire, Scotland, Sweden, and the papacy all experienced a significant change in leadership in the late 1550s and early 1560s. Those changes, on the whole, did not portend well for international peace. The great relief brought by Cateau-Cambrésis and the end of the war between France and Spain was soon darkened, in France, by the deaths—in rapid succession—of Henry II and his teenage heir Francis II. As tensions between the Huguenot minority and the Catholic majority mounted, the Valois would be facing their final and most trying test of leadership under the direction of a child king and an unpopular, foreign regent. After less than a year on the throne, Elizabeth I of England would issue her Act of Supremacy, reasserting England’s Protestant identity as the young queen struggled to keep her realm at peace with Catholic France and Spain; threatened already by plots from within, Elizabeth would soon be confronted with a new menace from the north in the person of her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. In the Netherlands, popular dissatisfaction with the centralising tendencies of the new Spanish king, Philip II, was beginning to make itself felt. Denmark also faced a transition at the close of the 1550s. Christian III had been a successful and popular, if not especially charismatic, king, who had shown himself to be ruthless in the introduction of the Lutheran Reformation and yet patient and compassionate in its practical application. He had spent little time, however, in grooming a successor to take his place; and as the old king lay dying at his beloved Koldinghus, in the company of Johan Friis and his closest advisers, during the Christmas holiday in 1558, Christian’s unease over his legacy must have nearly matched that of his Council of State. The heir apparent, the twenty-four year old Prince-Elect Frederik, was neither well-prepared for his imminent duties nor, on the surface at least, did he appear to be the least bit promising as a sovereign. Worse still, his personal relationship with his parents was more than a little strained. Frederik and his father had not yet reconciled their differences when Christian III died in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 1559. Although the Prince-Elect had

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visited his ailing father the previous November, he was unable to return to the king’s bedside until 7 January 1559, by which time Christian III was already six days dead. It is unlikely that Frederik’s failure to meet with his father earlier, despite the repeated written entreaties of his grieving mother Dorothea, was due to anything less mundane than the difficulties of travel and the vicissitudes of communications in a harsh Danish winter, but it only served to confirm what many at court already thought of the young king: that he was irresponsible and selfish.18 Danish historians have not been kind in their assessments of Frederik II as a king and as a man, and were it not for the pathbreaking research of Frede P. Jensen this negative appraisal would probably still stand. Frederik II has been overshadowed in Danish historical mythology by his son and successor, Christian IV; the father did not leave behind so rich an architectural legacy as did his son, nor did Frederik enjoy the historiographical advantages that a lurid personal and sexual life would impart to the legend of Christian IV. But as a ruler within the context of Denmark’s limited monarchy, Frederik was a far greater success than his son would be. After less than auspicious beginnings as a monarch, Frederik II would in time emerge as a competent and decisive statesman. Far from being the unlettered, inebriated, and brutish figurehead depicted in traditional Danish historiography, a king who whiled away his time on the hunt while the aristocratic members of the Council of State made policy in his name, by the second half of his reign Frederik II managed both to compile a significant record of domestic reform and to place his personal stamp on the formulation of foreign policy. The reign of Frederik II witnessed the transformation of Denmark to a great regional power. It is easy to understand, however, why earlier Danish scholars held Frederik II in such disdain, and why the Council of State exhibited such trepidation upon his succession. Frederik was a poorly-educated sovereign, even by the standards of the day. Tutored in the company of a dozen younger noblemen, under the direction of Queen Dorothea and the royal historiographer Hans Svaning, the young prince was to be taught Danish, German, and French, as well as the ‘manly’ arts of fencing and horsemanship. Given Christian III’s 18 Poul Colding, Studier i Danmarks politiske Historie i Slutningen af Christian III.s og Begyndelsen af Frederik II.s Tid (Copenhagen, 1939), pp. 51–67.

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deep personal piety, there must have been a significant theological component to the prince’s education as well, but altogether it was not a wide-ranging curriculum. The German chancellor Wolfgang von Utenhof, who was responsible for drafting Prince Frederik’s educational ‘programme’, made it his avowed intention to raise the prince to be ‘a man and not a cloistered monk’. The prince-elect did not demonstrate much aptitude for formal learning, and seemed incapable of mastering written German and Danish.19 The limitations of this narrow and seemingly directionless education were compounded by a learning disability on the part of the prince himself. In a recently-rediscovered 1956 study by the Danish physician Victor Hermansen, it was postulated that Frederik II suffered acutely from dyslexia. As both Hermansen and Frede P. Jensen have demonstrated, Frederik’s handwriting and orthography exhibit many of the attributes of clinical dyslexia, including frequently but randomly transversed letters. Throughout his life, Frederik would be a self-conscious writer, who found the task of composing simple personal letters to be uncomfortable and embarrassing. He was well aware of his handicap, and the few holographic postscripts and letters he left behind—less than fifty known pieces of correspondence, as compared with his son’s nearly 3000 pieces—include apologies for being a ‘poor writer’.20 His difficulty was not limited by language, for he appears to have used both German and Danish with equally absent facility. Indeed, Frederik often wrote in an almost incomprehensible mixture of the two languages. Hermansen’s hypothesis would help to explain the tremendous gulf between the verdict of Frederik II’s eulogists and the assessment of modern historians. To the latter, Frederik II was simply an unintelligent and coarse man, though perhaps possessed of a certain animal cunning. To the former—especially the poet and historian Anders Sørensen Vedel, court chaplain at Copenhagen Castle—the king was gifted with a quick, active mind, a man who held learned men in great esteem and

19

Ibid., pp. 51–53. Victor Hermansen, ‘En ordblind konge’, Medicinsk Forum, 9 (1956), 33–48. Frederik’s rather small body of correspondence written in his own hand has been printed in Frede P. Jensen (ed.), Frederik IIs egenhændige breve (Copenhagen, 1984); Christian IV’s considerably more voluminous opera are in: C.F. Bricka and J.A. Fridericia (eds), Kong Christian den Fjerdes egenhændige Breve (7 vols, Copenhagen, 1878–91); and Johanne Skovgaard (ed.), Kong Christian den Fjerdes egenhændige Breve. Supplement til C.F. Brickas og J.A. Fridericias udgave (Copenhagen, 1947). 20

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enjoyed their company, despite his own mediocre achievements. Though not well-read, for obvious reasons, he did make brave attempts; in 1583, for example, he noted in his personal calendar that he had begun to read the Psalms of David.21 Nevertheless, Frederik’s lack of learning would set him at a disadvantage as a statesman, especially in the impression he made on foreign ambassadors. His inability to comprehend written or spoken Latin, for example, necessitated the translation of diplomatic correspondence and ambassadors’ speeches into German, sometimes making the king appear unlettered or, at least, aloof.22 In affairs of state Frederik’s education was no better. Although the prince spent much of his childhood at Koldinghus, possibly Christian III’s favourite residence, Frederik did not enjoy a close relationship with his father. There was little personal contact between the two, and even in Frederik’s adolescence Christian III rarely wrote to his son except to upbraid him for his behaviour. There is no indication that Prince Frederik had—or took—the opportunity to observe his father at work. In 1554, at the age of twenty, Christian III gave his son a measure of political independence and responsibility by granting him the title ‘Prince of Skåne’, a residence at Malmøhus Castle in Skåne, and his own household. Under the direction of hofmester Eiler Hardenberg, Eiler Rønnow, and Erik Rosenkrantz— all aristocrats and two of them members of the Council of State— Prince Frederik for the first time participated in the governance of his future realms, but there is no evidence to suggest that he exercised any initiative in this capacity. In a way, Frederik’s life at Malmøhus only served to alienate the now mature prince even further from his parents. In 1557 or 1558, as Christian III worked assiduously to arrange either a Lorraine or a Habsburg match for his son, the prince became deeply enamored of Anna Hardenberg, a lady in Queen Dorothea’s household. Anna, as niece of his hofmester and cousin of the prince’s friend Erik Hardenberg, came from a reputable family of the native aristocracy, but she was not a suitable candidate for marriage to a future king of Denmark. It would be a long time before Frederik gave up his hopes of marriage to Anna 21 Otto Carøe, ‘Kong Frederik IIs kalenderoptegnelser for Aarene 1583, 1584 og 1587’, HTD, Series 4, 3 (1873), 552, entry for 8 October 1583. 22 PRO SP75/1/125–30, Sir Thomas Bodley to Sir Francis Walsingham, 28 June 1585.

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Hardenberg; as late as 1571 he wrote openly of his plans to marry her, and gave up then only on the firm insistence of his Council and his mother. Still, it was a source of friction between Frederik and his parents in the last days of Christian III’s reign. Frederik’s resentment over this issue continued up to the death of Dorothea in October 1571, when the king pointedly refused his feeble and lonely mother’s pitiful last requests for a visit from her son. Frederik’s love for Anna, more than any other single factor, accounts for his reluctance to consider marriage to a foreign princess before 1572.23 The prince’s years as a young adult at Malmøhus reveal a great deal about his personality. The dearth of administrative records from his reign makes it difficult to discern Frederik’s constitutional politics, or to trace his thoughts in the formulation of policy. But in his personal traits Frederik was open and simple; he was not guarded in his sentiments as his father had been, nor was he so psychologically complex as his eldest son would be. Frederik revelled in the hunt and the outdoor life, passions that would not leave him even as his health began to fail him in the late 1580s. He loved to feast, drink, and carouse, but always in the company of native Danish noblemen of his own generation. Unlike his son and successor, Christian IV, Frederik was quick to make friends, whom he treated more as his social peers than as his inferiors, and he was steadfastly loyal to those he befriended. He would apply this same loyalty, in later years, to his wife and children. Conversely, he took what he saw as betrayal very personally; those who lost his favour rarely regained it. He had a reputation for being both quick to anger and violent in his wrath. During the 1560s, rumours about the king’s violent temper—that he had stabbed his friend Holger Rosenkrantz during an argument, that he had cut down Rigsmarsk Otte Krumpen with his rapier in a dispute during the Seven Years’ War with Sweden—circulated freely; and although such rumours were false, they undoubtedly contained a kernel of truth about Frederik’s temperament.24 It could be argued,

23 RAK KRA A2., Frederik II, f. 296, Dorothea to Frederik II, 9 December and 25 December 1570; Colding, Studier, pp. 62–3. Frederik’s love affair with Anna Hardenberg is chronicled in detail in C.F. Bricka, Kong Frederik den Andens Ungdomskjærlighed. Et historisk Forsøg (Copenhagen, 1873). 24 RAK TKIA A.77/4, Heinrich Rantzau to Frederik II, 1 October 1562; Jacobsen, ‘Kong Frederik den Andens Forhold’, pp. 427–8; Otto Brandt, Heinrich Rantzau und seine Relationen an die dänischen Könige. Eine Studie zur Geschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1927), p. 37.

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too, that Frederik was more of a Dane than any one of his predecessors and many of his successors in the Oldenburg line. Despite his personal ties to princes in the Empire and German bureaucrats in his administration, Frederik’s closest relationships were with Danish aristocrats. His existing personal calendars, annotated in his own hand and intended for his eyes only, show that Danish, not German, was Frederik’s preferred language.25 The feature of Frederik’s personality that probably caused more damage to his reputation than any other was his heavy drinking. On this point, all contemporary accounts of the king’s life and character agree. His mother scolded him for it; his male relatives and companions joked with him about it. In 1558, his uncle, Duke Hans the Elder of Holstein, wrote to Frederik: To me it would be a great shame if the wine and beer in my cellar soured, so that no one who wanted to drink it could do so. If you would come and rescue me from this fate, I would in truth be most grateful to you.

Frederik got entangled in at least one drunken brawl: during the wedding ceremonies for his sister, Dorothea, to the duke of BraunschweigLüneburg at Celle in October 1561, the inebriated king engaged Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg in a fistfight. Frederik, however, was not a mean drunk. Most of the anecdotal evidence about his drunken escapades—as, for example, when he rode a horse off a bridge into the moat at Nyborg Castle in 1560—give the impression that his countrymen accepted his frequent binges with good humor. Indeed, Frederik’s love for drink was entirely in accordance with the norms of behaviour at German princely courts and among the Dutch nobility as well.26 It made a less favourable impression, however, on observers from the courts of western Europe. In 1561, Nicholas Throckmorton reported from the French court to Elizabeth I of England that the Danish king was widely regarded as ‘a dissolute and insolent Prince’, while another Englishman that same year pronounced that Frederik surpassed all his predecessors in ‘insolency and monstrous manners’.27 Nothing, however, suggests that Frederik’s drink25

The actual calendars are in RAK KRA A2., Frederik II. Frederik’s holographic annotations are printed in Carøe, ‘Kong Frederik II.s Kalenderoptegnelser’. 26 Allan Karker, ‘Kong Frederik 2.s død’, Jyske Samlinger, Series 2, 6 (1964), 266–8. 27 Cal. SP For. 1561–2, p. 85, Nicholas Throckmorton to Elizabeth I, 29 April 1561; Cal. SP For. 1561–2, p. 421, Robert Jones to Throckmorton, 28 November 1561.

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ing ever encroached on his duties once he became king, and after his marriage in 1572 Frederik appears to have outgrown the habit. The companionship and encouragement that Frederik could not find at home he soon found in his extended family, something that would have a tremendous influence on his kingship later on. In 1548, Frederik’s elder sister Anna married Duke August of Saxony at Torgau. August had met Frederik earlier that year, during a visit to Christian III’s court at Koldinghus. The brother of the famous Elector Moritz of Saxony, August inherited the electoral title when Moritz had died without male issue in 1553. The new elector and Prince Frederik renewed their acquaintance when the electoral couple visited Denmark in 1557. The elector, eight years Frederik’s senior, apparently saw some promise in the prince-elect. The two men became fast friends; indeed, Frederik’s friendship with August was one of the two or three most important relationships of his life. Over Christian III’s objections, Frederik, his brother Magnus, and a small personal entourage accompanied August and Anna back to Saxony. Frederik would spend much of the next year in the Empire with his new mentor. Both Christian III and Dorothea were worried: the king, that the politically inexperienced prince might do something to embarrass himself, to involve Denmark deeper in German politics than Christian wanted, or to sabotage the continuing marriage negotiations with Lorraine; the queen, that her son’s friendly and trusting nature would be manipulated and exploited by the unscrupulous. ‘The world’, she wrote her son, ‘is not as you believe it to be.’28 The experience was an invaluable one for the impressionable young prince. The acquaintances and friendships Frederik made on his trip through the Empire would shape his approach to kingship and statesmanship for the rest of his life. With August as his guide, Frederik attended the dramatic Reichstag at Frankfurt early in 1558, witnessing the formal abdication of Emperor Charles V and the coronation of Ferdinand I. Far from embarrassing himself as his father had feared, Prince Frederik made a favourable impression upon the new emperor and his son, the future Maximilian II, and forged lasting friendships with a number of young German princes and leaders-to-be: Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hessen, William of Orange, and Duke Julius of 28 Colding, Studier, pp. 53–5. On Frederik’s relationship with August, see: Walter Fröbe, Kurfürst August von Sachsen und sein Verhältnis zu Dänemark bis zum Frieden von Stettin 1570 (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 30–56.

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Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. While Christian III had steered clear of princely politics in the Empire, largely in order to protect the legitimacy of his succession, Prince Frederik involved himself willingly and intimately in this new and unfamiliar political world that he found so fascinating, establishing close ties with the leading figures in the Protestant Reichsstände. His interest, though exasperating to his isolationist father, was warmly welcomed by the Protestant princes, not least by the Elector August himself.29 Frederik’s affinity for German politics owed in part, at least, to the boisterous nature of princely life at the Protestant courts of northern Germany. The austere piety of court life at Christian III’s Koldinghus did not appeal to Frederik; hunting and drinking were more to his liking. He had shown himself to be a bon vivant at his court at Malmøhus, and may already have been a heavy drinker. In the informality, fast living, and warm camraderie of the German princely courts Frederik felt at home. And, like his uncles Hans and Adolf in Holstein, Frederik was developing a taste for the soldier’s life. During his trip to the Germanies in 1557–58, the prince made the acquaintance of a number of Landsknecht captains, most notably Günther von Schwarzburg and Jürgen von Holle. Both Schwarzburg and Holle had seen extensive service in the wars in Italy, France, and Germany during the 1540s and ’50s. Captivated by their tales of Mühlberg and St. Quentin, and drawn to their hard-drinking fellowship, Frederik was soon under their spell. It is easy to see why Christian III was so concerned about Frederik’s exposure to Imperial politics. Where Christian III had studiously avoided entanglements in the Empire, even when his coreligionists were in danger, Frederik seemed to court them; where Christian III admired theologians like Melanchthon and Bugenhagen and looked to them for advice, Frederik’s early role-models were uncouth professional soldiers and militant Protestant princes. From Christian III’s perspective, it did not bode well for Denmark’s future. Within a few short months of Christian III’s death on New Year’s Day 1559, the new king would demonstrate, graphically, just how little his kingship would resemble that of his father. Within four years, Frederik II would completely reverse his father’s peaceful foreign policy. Frederik’s first major decision as king, in fact, would result in the most overt and studied act of aggression in Danish his29

Ibid., pp. 55–61.

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tory: the invasion and conquest of the Ditmarschen. The Ditmarschen was, as a fiercely independent peasant republic, something of an anomaly among the territorial states of northern Germany, and it had eluded Danish and Holstein attempts at conquest for centuries. Most recently, in 1500, Frederik’s great-uncle King Hans (1481–1513) had attempted to subjugate the region, but the campaign had been a bloody, expensive, and humiliating defeat for Danish arms. Since the mid-1550s, Duke Adolf of Holstein-Gottorp, Frederik’s uncle and Christian III’s younger brother, had been planning an assault on the Ditmarschen. As Adolf raised an army for this enterprise, it aroused both the suspicion and the ambition of the young King Frederik. By April 1559, Frederik had joined himself to both of his uncles, Dukes Adolf and Hans, and had resolved that Denmark should redeem the honour it had lost six decades before. The leading members of the Council, especially the elderly chancellor, Johan Friis, strenuously opposed the war. They had reason to believe that there was an imminent danger of an attack on Denmark, instigated by Sweden, Lorraine, or both; to commit Danish forces to something so frivolous as a campaign in the Ditmarschen, Friis argued, was to court disaster.30 But Frederik listened to his Germans, not to his Council. The German Chancellor, Andreas von Barby, and Frederik’s advisers in Holstein favoured the war; the king himself was young, impetuous, and anxious to flex his muscles. In May 1559, Danish and Holstein forces invaded the tiny enclave, utterly destroying the peasant army at Meldorp and at Heide in June. In a quick and relatively inexpensive campaign, Frederik had accomplished what his great-uncle could not. Despite his success, Frederik did not endear himself to his Council. He had shown great recklessness, and seemed unconcerned that the campaign in the Ditmarschen might awaken great suspicion and wariness in Lower Saxony.31 August of Saxony, fearing that the emperor might not look too favourably upon such an aggressive act, offered to intercede with Ferdinand I, but Frederik saw no reason to explain himself.32

30 Ibid., pp. 86–92; Karl Häfner, Geschichte des Niedersächsischen Kreises von der Augsburgischen Exekutionsordnung bis zum Abfall des Kaisers von der “gemäßigten Mittelpartei” 1555–1569 (Stadtroda, 1940), pp. 10–16. 31 Peder Hansøn Resen, Kong Frederichs den Andens Krønicke (Copenhagen, 1680), pp. 5–23; Colding, Studier, pp. 77–96. 32 Colding, Studier, pp. 93–4.

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Frederik’s relationship with his Council had been rocky from the day Christian III had died; the campaign in the Ditmarschen rendered that relationship almost hostile and bitter. The king was not without friends among the senior conciliar aristocracy—he had become quite close to Holger Ottesen Rosenkrantz during his travels through the Empire in 1557–58—but on the whole the Council did not find Frederik’s first actions as king to be particularly auspicious. When Frederik returned to Denmark in July 1559 to negotiate the terms of his coronation charter and arrange his formal coronation, he found the Council eager to place as many limitations on his executive authority as possible. The king’s coronation charter, signed in August 1559, was noticeably more restrictive than Christian III’s had been. Nonetheless, Frederik managed to ameliorate a large measure of the Council’s bitterness that same month by purchasing their loyalty: in August, Christian III’s German Chancellor, Andreas von Barby, died, and Frederik divided his extensive fiefholdings among the most powerful and influential members of the Council.33 Much of the Council’s dismay over their new king’s actions in the Ditmarschen stemmed from the fact that the campaign in Holstein diverted Denmark’s attentions and military strength to the south while a confrontation with Sweden loomed to the east. Johan Friis, for example, did not wish for the outbreak of open war with Sweden, but he had reason to believe that Sweden’s learned but aggressive young king, Erik XIV (1560–68), was plotting some kind of action against Denmark. Indeed, war with Sweden was only some four years away, but the breakdown of the fragile Oldenburg-Vasa détente cannot be attributed solely to Erik XIV. The initial frictions between the two Scandinavian powers emerged in 1560, as Frederik sought to find an appanage for his nineteen-year-old brother Duke Magnus. The king had no intention of further diminishing the royal portion of Holstein, since the duchy had already been divided between the royal line and the cadet houses of Adolf and Hans, and so securing a sinecure outside of Denmark was absolutely essential. To this end, the king purchased the island of Øsel, off the coast of Estonia, as a gift for Magnus. The young duke matched his older brother in impetuousness but not, perhaps, in intelligence, and immediately set 33 Ibid., pp. 69–77. Frederik II’s håndfæstning, dated 12 August 1559, is printed in Samling af danske Kongers Haandfæstninger og andre lignende Acter (Copenhagen, 1856–58), pp. 94–101.

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to work on an effort to acquire Estonia for himself. In doing so, he placed himself squarely in the midst of an escalating conflict between Sweden and Russia over the eastern Baltic lands. Magnus refused an offer of Swedish vassalage proffered by Erik XIV. Soon Denmark became involved in Erik’s trade war with Russia. Efforts to resolve Danish-Swedish commercial frictions by diplomatic means failed, and a dispute over the royal arms of the two kingdoms rendered these tensions dangerous: Erik incorporated the three Danish lions and the single Norwegian lion into his personal heraldry, and in similar fashion Frederik continued the use of the ‘three crowns’—representing the sovereignty of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—in his, a practice started by his father in the 1550s. When a small Danish naval squadron accidentally fired on a much larger body of Swedish warships, off the Danish island of Bornholm late in May 1563, open war was a foregone conclusion. Frederik hastily concluded military alliances with Poland and Lübeck against Sweden. The war with Sweden, commonly labelled the Seven Years’ War of the North (1563–70), would prove to be a bloody stalemate, with little advantage accruing to either side. Danish forces scored some impressive early victories, the most important of which was the capture of Älvsborg, Sweden’s only port on the North Sea, in September 1563. The combined Danish-Lübeck fleet managed to keep Swedish naval forces at bay, yet did not achieve any decisive victories. The main theatre of combat on land was in Halland and Blekinge, where the opposing forces expended most of their energies in minor actions and in plundering the local populations. Only once, at Axtorna in October 1565, did the Swedish and Danish armies meet in open battle, and though it was a Danish victory it was also a costly one. Denmark received a brief respite in 1568, when Erik XIV, who had by now slipped into insanity, was deposed in favour of his brother Duke Johan by the Swedish Riksdag. The Swedish regime practically collapsed in civil war, but Denmark had been so exhausted by the war that even the brilliant tactical leadership of the young Daniel Rantzau, the victor of Axtorna, could accomplish nothing substantial. Their armies ravaged by plague, the Danish and Swedish governments agreed to a cease-fire while their negotiators discussed peace terms at Roskilde in the autumn of 1568. Duke Johan, now King Johan III, rejected the Danish terms, and the armistice was soon cast aside. Neither kingdom was in much shape to continue the war indefinitely, and with the help of mediation from Saxony, France,

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and the emperor, representatives from the two belligerent kingdoms sat down once again to discuss peace, this time at Stettin. The resulting settlement, signed at Stettin on 13 December 1570, marked the war as a Danish victory, but only marginally. Denmark renounced any claims it had on Sweden, and Sweden did the same for Norway, Skåne, and the island of Gotland. In addition, the Swedish crown would be required to pay reparations to the amount of 150,000 rigsdaler against the return of Älvsborg to Swedish suzerainty. The issue of the three crowns, which had contributed so much to the outbreak of hostilities, remained unresolved.34 It would be another forty-one years before Denmark and Sweden would again go to war with one another, but the peace ushered in by the Stettin settlement would be an uneasy one. The war only served to exhaust both states while aggravating the mutual hostility between the rival kingdoms. The international ramifications of the Seven Years’ War of the North, however, extended far beyond the Baltic rim. For the first time, the kingdoms of Europe were able to witness not only the newborn Swedish state acting as an independent entity and successfully maintaining its independence, but also the full resources of the Oldenburg monarchy at war. The Danish-Swedish war was a disturbing development in many ways. To August of Saxony and to Emperor Maximilian II, it was a conflict that threatened to spill over into the Empire, and hence compromised the relatively new peace established at the Diet of Augsburg in 1555.35 Above all else, the conflict in Scandinavia demonstrated precisely how Denmark’s dominium maris Baltici could affect the rest of Europe. In early 1565, in an effort to deprive Swedish forces of imported munitions and to starve Sweden into submission, Frederik did the unthinkable: he closed the Sound to all maritime traffic. It awakened great dismay and anger in England, France, and the Netherlands; the storm of international protest, combined with the demands that the war with Sweden placed upon Denmark’s already overextended naval resources, pressured Frederik II into reopening the passage within a few months. Even then Frederik did not entirely renounce his right to seal off the Baltic at his pleasure, and he attempted another, more limited, restriction on ships entering the Sound the following year. Frederik may have 34

On the Seven Years’ War of the North and the foreign mediation attempts to end it, see: Jensen, Danmarks konflikt med Sverige, and Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge. 35 See Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge.

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seen the closing of the Sound as his right, but it was a matter of life and death to those northern European states whose economies depended upon regular shipments of grain from the Baltic. The brief closing in 1565 undoubtedly exacerbated the economic woes of the Dutch provinces that year, leading indirectly to the rising tide of anti-Spanish discontent that would come to fruition in the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566. It was this pressure, more than any other, that compelled so many European states to take an interest in Nordic affairs, and to attempt to force Denmark and Sweden to come to terms.36 The financial needs of the war effort also compelled Frederik II to introduce a radical change in the manner in which commercial duties were exacted from foreign merchants. Earlier in the century, the price schedule for ships entering or leaving the Sound had been quite simple. Each ship loaded with nothing but ballast paid a single rosenobel to the toll collector at Helsingør; vessels carrying less than one hundred lasts in goods paid two rosenobels, and larger ships loaded with more than a hundred lasts paid three. Over the intervening decades, this scheme became gradually more complicated: ships from the so-called ‘Wendish’ Hanseatic cities (Lübeck, Hamburg, Lüneburg, Rostock, Wismar, and Stralsund), for example, were ordinarily exempt from the Sound dues, as were Danish and Swedish vessels, while those from other Hanseatic cities and from the Netherlands paid either half or all of the ordinary dues, plus special duties for wine, copper, and salt. Ships hailing from ‘non-privileged’ nations— England, France, and Scotland—paid the full dues, the ‘special duties’ on wine, copper, and salt, and (from 1548) an additional tax of one per cent based on the value of the entire cargo. In the mid1560s, strapped for cash, Frederik II entertained several proposed ideas for extracting yet more money from passing merchant ships. One of these involved forbidding all foreign traffic through the Sound altogether, and making Helsingør a staple town, where all cargoes must be offloaded and sold, to be resold again to merchants who would carry the goods to their intended destinations! Fortunately for Denmark, Frederik II never attempted to carry out this plan. Instead, he introduced a revolutionary new procedure into the 36

Frede P. Jensen, ‘Øresund i 1500–tallet’, in Øresunds strategiske rolle i et historisk perspektiv (Lund, 1998), pp. 38–9, 45–6; Mikael Venge, Fra åretold til toldetat. Middelalderen indtil 1660 (Dansk Toldhistorie, vol. 1; Copenhagen, 1987), pp. 210–13; Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge, pp. 91–2; E.C.G. Brünner, ‘Die dänische Verkehrssperre und der Bildersturm in den Niederlanden’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter 53 (1928), 98–109.

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collection of the Sound dues, the so-called lastetold. The final form of the lastetold, enacted in early 1567, required all passing merchantmen to pay their dues according to a complicated scale that took both weight and value of cargoes into account. Bulk cargoes, like timber, would be taxed at a relatively low rate, while lightweight luxury goods like woven cloth from England would require a payment of twelve rigsdaler per last. Vehement protests from the Netherlands led to a temporary reduction of the lastetold, but Frederik introduced them again—permanently—in the spring of 1571. At the same time, Frederik II, following his father’s example, did his best to close off any existing loopholes in the collection of the Sound dues. Foreign traffic, except for ships from the Wendish cities and from the Duchies, was barred from traversing the Great Belt, which would allow merchants to bypass the Sound altogether; from 1560, a toll collector kept watch on Belt traffic from his station at Nyborg, on the island of Fyn. The new restrictions awakened a storm of protest from the regions that used the Sound most frequently, especially England and the Netherlands, not only because of the significantly higher costs involved, but also because the collection of the new duties required a much greater degree of surveillance and invasiveness by Danish customs officers. The fiscal advantages accruing to the king, however, were substantial; royal revenues generated by the Sound dues are estimated to have increased nearly three-fold as a result of the new toll practices.37 The domestic ramifications of the bloody war with Sweden were equally significant, though perhaps not so revolutionary in constitutional terms as earlier Danish historians have argued. The war had been a Danish victory, but not a resounding one, and it had cost Denmark dearly. The mercenary forces that had made up the bulk of Denmark’s army had been quite expensive, yet not reliable, and had caused untold misery for the inhabitants of the Scanian provinces where much of the fighting had taken place. Frederik and the Council of State found it necessary to supplement the German Landsknechten with native troops, necessitating the conscription on a limited scale of peasants for military service. The war also required some financial sacrifices on the part of the ordinarily tax-exempt nobility and their peasants, which caused no small amount of unrest at home. There 37 Jensen, ‘Øresund i 1500–tallet’, pp. 46–9; Venge, Fra åretold til toldetat, pp. 194–6, 199–210, 213–19; Christensen, Dutch Trade to the Baltic, pp. 293–6.

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is some evidence to suggest that the hard-pressed peasantry were openly resisting the collection of taxes by late 1569.38 And although Frederik did not attempt to divorce the aristocracy from the decision-making process during the war—indeed, the Council was actively involved in the war effort, and the king consulted frequently and religiously with the Council—the unaccustomed weight of the tax burden and the seemingly fruitless nature of the prolonged war caused the Council, finally, to oppose the king as a body. Late in 1569, after the armistice with Johan III had failed and the continued hostilities had not yet brought any great strategic advantage to Denmark, the Council simply refused to grant any more tax revenues to the war effort. The war, they argued, showed no sign of reaching a favourable conclusion; Frederik should accept the mediation offers of the interested foreign powers and make peace as quickly as possible. It was a test of leadership for the exhausted and frustrated king, and it was also perhaps his finest hour as a monarch. On 1 January 1570, he submitted to the Council an unusually personal and emotional letter, in which he berated—mildly—the Council for its unwillingness to commit to more taxes. Acknowledging the great sacrifices that the nobility had already made, Frederik pointed out that he, too, had suffered losses. He had committed all his personal resources to the conduct of the war—which was, he argued, being fought for Denmark’s security and reputation and not for his personal gain—and was now bereft of any means by which he could continue to prosecute the war. If the Council ended the war now, then Denmark would have suffered a humiliating defeat. He had given his all; and since he could do no more to save his realm at this most crucial juncture, he could not in good conscience lead his kingdom to certain catastrophe. He would instead abdicate, leaving the task of capitulating to Sweden to the good judgement of the Council. The letter was worded less as a threat than as a statement of sad resignation, the words of a king who felt that in his fatherly duties he had failed his troubled and ungrateful subjects. Despite his best efforts, he had lost the confidence of his people, and he reassured the Council that he did not blame them for his misfortune.39

38

CCD vol. 1, pp. 422–5, 28 September 1569. RAK KRA B5. Rigens råds breve, Papirbreve 1539–1624, Frederik II to the Council, 1 January 1570. 39

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Perhaps Frederik’s threatened abdication was irresponsible and even childish; certainly it was petulant. But it was also a well-calculated master stroke. As Frede P. Jensen has pointed out, Frederik’s threat was probably not an instantaneous decision, since on 10 December 1569 he had already summoned the Council to meet at Copenhagen on 8 January 1570.40 The possibility of a royal abdication played upon a deep-seated fear that had remained with the aristocracy since the dark days of the Count’s War: the fear of a leaderless interregnum. Frederik was still unmarried, and had no children or heir apparent. To leave Denmark without a king in such circumstances might have been unconscionable, but the threat was sufficiently convincing to the Council. It is not known exactly when and how Frederik II gave his letter to the Council, but shortly after he did so—around 15 January 1570—he left Copenhagen to go hunting in the countryside around Odsherred. A couple of uncomfortable days followed as the Council debated their response, but on 18 January 1570 the councillors drafted their response. They begged the king’s return, and sent their letter to the king at Odsherred with two of his favourite councillors, Holger Rosenkrantz and Peder Bille. The abdication threat had its intended effect: the Council allowed the king to summon a diet to meet at Copenhagen in February, which granted renewed taxation to support the war effort.41 In minor ways, the war with Sweden would weaken the king’s prerogative powers. One clause in the Stettin settlement stipulated that, in the future, potential conflicts between Sweden and Denmark would first be remanded to delegations of councillors from both kingdoms, who would meet at the Scanian border to attempt resolution of their mutual grievances through negotiation. Only after such ‘border-meetings’ ( grænsemøder) had failed could either of the kings issue a declaration of war.42 This clause would restrict, somewhat, the authority of the king in the making of foreign policy in the Baltic. But it did not have any effect whatsoever on the king’s ability to determine the course of Danish policy regarding the rest of Europe. Moreover, any disadvantage that came to Frederik as a result of the border40 KB 1566–70, p. 529, Frederik II to the Council, 10 December 1569; Jensen, Danmarks konflikt med Sverige, p. 289. 41 RAK KRA B5., Rigens råds breve, Papirbreve 1539–1624, Council to Frederik II, 18 January 1570. See Jensen’s excellent analysis in Danmarks konflikt med Sverige, pp. 286–94. 42 Sven Ulric Palme, Sverige och Danmark 1596–1611 (Uppsala, 1942), pp. 22–39.

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meeting arrangement was more than offset by the constitutional advantages the king had gained through his threatened abdication. In the abdication crisis of 1570, Frederik II had demonstrated that he was the master of his kingdom, that in the end it was the king who dictated policy to the Council and not the other way around. The first decade of the reign had proven to be a stern test of leadership for the young king. Although king and Council alike exhibited an acute distrust of Swedish intentions in the Baltic, this does not mean that Frederik and his foremost advisers shared a common resolve to settle Scandinavian problems by force. Frederik II had largely ignored the counsel of men like Johan Friis, the architect of Christian III’s cautious and conservative foreign policy, and relied increasingly on the advice of the German condottieri Schwarzburg, Holle, and Hilmar von Münchhausen, of the Rantzau clan in Holstein, and of Danes of his own age and temperament, men like Herluf Trolle and Frands Brockenhuus. Like the king himself, these men were inclined towards an aggressive and even reckless foreign policy, whether it involved relations with Sweden, Lorraine, or the Hanse. Inevitably, frictions between the king and council arose frequently during the course of the war, primarily over the issue of extraordinary taxes. Frederik had to reassure the nobility that taxes levied during the war were by no means permanent and in no way infringed upon noble privilege.43 In theory, the Danish variant of constitutional monarchy—adelsvælden—had not changed. Frederik’s coronation charter from the summer of 1559, it will be recalled, was more restrictive than that of his father, and was something of a return to the ideals of Germanic kingship in comparison to the rather liberal and permissive wording of Christian III’s charter. Danish historians have generally argued that the prefaces to Arild Huitfeldt’s Chronicles of the Kingdom of Denmark were the first printed articulations of Denmark’s home-grown theory of limited monarchy. To be sure, Danish jurists did not produce a significant body of printed political theory even during the seventeenth century, but there is some evidence to suggest that Huitfeldt’s ideas on kingship—a curious mixture of monarchomach and Lutheran non-resistance thought, penned during the aristocratic reaction immediately following the death of Frederik II—were already 43 CCD vol. 1, pp. 307, 325–36, 360, 435, 479–80, open letters of 6 April 1566, 12 February 1567, 15 May 1568, 12 March 1570, 4 April 1571.

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part of Danish political discourse before 1588. In a theological compendium published in 1567, The most remarkable stories, passages and examples, drawn from the Holy Scripture, on the duty, regiment, and practice of authority, Roskilde cleric Niels Nielsen Colding painted a picture of ideal kingship very similar to that Huitfeldt would set down some three decades later. According to Master Niels’ interpretation of Scripture, although a king spoke with God’s authority and was ultimately answerable only to God, and though ordinary subjects should not disobey their king, the king himself was obligated to rule together with the foremost men of the realm; to do otherwise was to practice tyranny.44 That was the theory; in practice, the king was not nearly so limited in his actions as Niels Nielsen implied. By war’s end, Frederik had clearly developed his own style of leadership and management. This style owed little to that of his father, but would resemble— superficially—the kingship of Christian IV, which is far better documented and hence more familiar to recent scholars. Like anything else from Frederik II’s reign, the political climate of the court was never described in detail by contemporaries, and the king himself left behind few written clues. By piecing together a miscellany of sources, however, a remarkable view of government by consensus comes to light. It is remarkable not only given the dreadful inadequacy of Frederik’s education as a prince, but also in that it contradicts what is often presupposed about limited monarchy in pre-Westphalian Europe: that prior to the widespread establishment of absolute monarchies, rulers were more often than not at the mercy of competing constitutional bodies, be they councils, parliaments, local assemblies, or noble families. On the contrary, Frederik II, at least after 1570, managed to maintain a close working and personal relationship with his Council of State and his foremost advisers without either alienating them or sacrificing his own interests. The king was not, as one British historian has recently suggested, a mere puppet of his aristocracy.45

44 Niels Nielsen Colding, De besynderligste historier/Sententzer oc Exempler/som findis i den hellige Scrifft/om Øffrighedz Kald/Regiment oc Bestilling: Uddragne aff Bibelen ordentlig/ fra den Første Mose Bog/oc indtil enden i det Ny Testament/Met en gantske kort Paamindelse til Øffrighed forklarede (Copenhagen, 1567). On Danish political discourse in the late sixteenth century, see: Knud Fabricius, Kongeloven. Dens Tilblivelse og Plads i Samtidens Natur- og Arveretlige Udvikling (Copenhagen, 1920), pp. 72–7; Leon Jespersen, ‘Knud Fabricius og den monarkiske bølge. Nogle kommentarer til de statsretlige brydninger i 15–1600–tallets Danmark’, Historie, (1997), 54–85. 45 Henshall, Myth of Absolutism, p. 169.

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Perhaps the most obvious aspect of Frederik II’s kingship was its peripatetic nature. Though this could be labelled a trait more characteristic of medieval kingship than of the post-Reformation era, it was by no means unique. Moreover, Copenhagen had been recognised as the seat of Denmark’s government only since the late fifteenth century. Christian III’s court had been almost motionless, geographically speaking; true to his German roots, Christian had spent nearly all of his reign in Slesvig and south Jutland, preferring the castles of Koldinghus and Sønderborg. Christian IV, similarly, seemed to favour Sjælland, and divided most of his time between his architectural masterpieces at Frederiksborg and Rosenborg, shunning the cold, drafty, and unpleasant Copenhagen Castle. Unlike his father and his son, Frederik II was frequently on the move. He travelled outside the realm only on rare occasions, and visited Norway no more than twice in his lifetime.46 Military duties kept the king on Sjælland, in close proximity to the fleet and the main theatre of the war, during the Seven Years’ War of the North. After 1570, however, the court was constantly travelling, dividing its time almost evenly between Sjælland and Jutland. His favourite residences were Skanderborg and Koldinghus in Jutland, and Frederiksborg and Antvorskov on Sjælland. After the mid-1570s, Frederik made frequent visits to his personal architectural legacy, Kronborg Castle at Helsingør. Undoubtedly this movement between palaces and hunting-lodges was an important motivation behind the king’s construction of Denmark’s first national road network, the so-called ‘royal road’ (kongevejen). The king studiously avoided Copenhagen; as Frede P. Jensen has suggested, this was not only because the king loved hunting and an active life outdoors, but also because of the capital city’s reputation as a plague-ridden ‘pesthole’.47 The court’s physically transient quality helped to dictate the relationship between king and central administration, especially the Council of State. During the war with Sweden, Frederik’s physical proximity to Copenhagen ensured close and frequent contact with the Council. Despite their differences over foreign policy, the king depended heavily upon Johan Friis and Peder Oxe who, as chancellor 46 NRR vol. 1, p. 109, 15 June 1548; ‘Nogle Aarsbogsoptegnelser fra 16. Aarhundrede’, KHS Series 5, 1 (1901–03), 551. 47 Jensen, Bidrag, pp. 14–17; Alex Wittendorff, Alvej og kongevej. Studier i samfærdselsforhold og vejenes topografi i det 16. og 17. århundrede (Copenhagen, 1973), chap. 7.

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and rigshofmester respectively, were the most prominent of his rigsembedsmænd and the most direct links between king and Council. And since the war with Sweden was a major national emergency, the members of the Council were required to be nearby, and hence were more frequently in session. During the course of the war, Frederik met frequently with the Council as a body; indeed, the pressing need for taxation left him little option. This would change with the signing of the Peace of Stettin in 1570. The members of the Council, with few exceptions, could not remain in Copenhagen indefinitely. Most of them were royal fiefholders (lensmænd ), and had other duties—mundane ones, to be sure, but equally pressing—that tied them to the countryside for most of the year and made frequent assembly impossible. From 1571 to the end of Frederik’s reign, the Council met together as a body only about once a year, and that usually in connection with the annual noble diet (herredag) and convening of the high court (kongens retterting). Frederik did not summon them more often than that, even if important affairs of state would seem to require their attention. Even then, the king was not invariably in attendance; on more than one occasion, he excused himself from the herredag when affairs required his presence elsewhere. To most members of the Council, personal contact with the king was a rare occurrence.48 Instead, from 1571 until his death, Frederik preferred to meet with individual councillors during the course of his travels throughout Denmark. This on occasion could present some difficulties, especially where it came to the reception of foreign visitors on urgent business. The English ambassador John Herbert, trying to obtain an audience with the king in 1583, wrote in exasperation that Frederik’s ‘whole delight at this tyme of the yere is in hunting, and [he] remayneth not above the night in a place.’49 This habit could also give the misleading impression of constitutional weakness. The French agent in Copenhagen, Charles de Dançay, was not alone when he presumed that the king’s physical distance from the capital meant that real authority rested not with the king but with his foremost councillors.50 48 Witness the experiences of Bjørn Andersen Bjørn: Karl Nielsen, Vor mand og råd. Bjørn Andersen til Stenalt, Bjørnsholm og Vår 1532–1583 (Viborg, 1991), pp. 55–171. 49 PRO SP75/1/76, John Herbert to Walsingham, 3 June 1583. 50 C.F. Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger fra Charles de Dançay til det franske Hof om Forholdene i Norden 1567–1573 (Copenhagen, 1901), pp. 205–6, Dançay to Catherine de’ Medici, 28 June 1573.

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The council of the king of Denmark, by whom all public affairs are administered, is almost always in this city of Copenhagen, which is the reason that I am constrained to remain here [in Copenhagen], because the king of Denmark does not stay long in any one place, as is the Danish custom.

To later Danish historians, this reinforced their view that Frederik was more concerned with the hunt than he was with governance. Such an impression, however, is mistaken. Frederik II was no more the indifferent puppet of his conciliar aristocracy than were his contemporaries Elizabeth I and Philip II. Frederik’s wide-ranging travels throughout the Danish countryside—especially in Jutland, where the majority of the Council resided—gave the king the opportunity to meet with individual members of the Council and with other prominent nobles. As John Herbert noted in 1583, when Frederik was ‘occupied in hunting with the nobility of those partes with familiar waye’, it was in large part his manner of holding court, of consulting with the aristocracy, giving the latter the opportunity ‘to assure their mynde unto him’.51 Whether this was an intentional political tactic or just the fortunate by-product of Frederik’s addiction to the hunt is impossible to determine for certain, but the end-result was the same: rather than allowing the aristocracy the advantage of strength in numbers, Frederik instead consulted with his potentially most vocal opponents in small, intimate, and ultimately more manageable groups in an informal setting. The very informality of these meetings renders tracing the course of kingcouncil relations a frustrating one for the historian, for—unlike during the reign of Christian IV—the proceedings of these meetings were rarely if ever recorded. For the last eighteen years of the reign, the Council of State as such was convened so infrequently that it is almost a misnomer to refer to the Council as if it were a distinct constitutional entity with its own agenda and responsibilities. It would be wrong, on the other hand, to label Frederik II an incipient absolutist. He introduced no constitutional innovations designed to undermine or sidestep the authority of the Council, as Christian IV would attempt to do in the 1620s and ’30s. Nor did Frederik II seek a more popular substitute for (or counter to) conciliar authority in the Estates (stændermøder or rigsdag). Though a mainstay of Swedish royal governance under the Vasa monarchs, popular assemblies at the national level were largely defunct in Denmark by 51

PRO SP75/1/78–9, John Herbert to Sir Francis Walsingham, 7 June 1583.

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the time of Frederik’s succession, and would only reappear as a regular feature of Danish political life during the great constitutional crisis of Christian IV’s reign.52 Nonetheless, iconographic evidence suggests that Frederik II viewed kingship as a divine calling. For all the familiarity and absence of ceremony that prevailed at court, Frederik believed that kings and sovereign lords stood above, or at least apart from, the aristocracy. When Pernille Oxe, sister of Rigshofmester Peder Oxe and widow of Admiral Otte Rud, dared to have a memorial to her late husband erected in the choir at the Cathedral in Copenhagen, the king was incensed. Frederik’s efforts to discourage conspicuous consumption among the nobility was only part of the reason for his outrage. As Frederik himself informed Pernille Oxe in 1576, the memorial was inappropriate because of its location, ‘high above the floor . . . in the location where kings and other foreign lords and princes will stand when any royal coronation or other ceremony takes place.’53 In 1578, Frederik commissioned the Flemish painter Hans Knieper and the tapestry-weaver Antonius de Goech to decorate his new castle of Kronborg at Helsingør. The decorations included forty tapestries depicting the lives and deeds of the kings of Denmark; the final tapestry of the series, a portrait of Frederik and the Prince-Elect Christian, bore an inscription trumpeting Frederik II’s virtues as a soldier and a peace-maker. Moreover, it is highly possible that, as Steffen Heiberg has argued, that the very few episodes of royal spectacle performed by or for Frederik’s court hinted at greater political ambitions on the part of the king. Biblical dramas like David and Goliath, performed at Christian IV’s baptismal ceremonies in 1577, or King Solomon’s Homage, presented during the traditional noble declaration of homage to the prince-elect at Odense in 1584, suggested a view of monarchy that was not compatible with adelsvælden: that kingly authority derived from divine mandate, and that it was God, not mortals, who chose and anointed kings. But if Frederik favoured these dramas for their tacit constitutional mes52 Knut Mykland, Skiftet i forvaltningsordningen i Danmark og Norge i tiden fra omkring 1630 og inntil Frederik den tredjes død (Bergen, 1974); Edward Kleberg, De danska ständermötena intill Kristian IV:s död. Till belysning av de konstitutionella strävandena i Danmark under äldre tid (Göteborg, 1917), pp. 9–20; Jørgensen, Retshistorie, pp. 498–501; J.E. Larsen, ‘Om Rigsdage og Provindsialforsamlinger samt Rigsraadet i Danmark, fra det 13de Aarhundrede indtil Statsforandringen 1660’, HTD, Series 1, 1 (1840), 303–24. 53 Oluf August Nielsen (ed.), Kjøbenhavns Diplomatarium. Samling af Dokumenter, Breve og andre Kilder til Oplysning om Kjøbenhavns ældre Forhold før 1728 (8 vols., Copenhagen, 1872–87), vol. 4, p. 617, Frederik II to Pernille Oxe, 2 April 1576.

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sages, he did not show it overtly. In practice, Frederik II was very much an aristocratic king; he simply did not allow the Council many opportunities to oppose him as a body.54 This new, more personal form of adelsvælden was made possible, in part, by a modest but significant change in the composition of the central administration. During the late 1560s and early 1570s, most of the senior members of the Council—those who had been born in the previous century, those who had begun their careers under Christian III—had died off. This included the most influential aristocrats of the early years: Chancellor Johan Friis died in late 1570, Rigshofmester Peder Oxe in late 1575. In the course of the next decade or so, they would be replaced by a younger generation of aristocrats (see chapter 5). In true Oldenburg fashion, and in disregard of the terms of his coronation charter, Frederik II did not immediately fill the vacancies left within the ranks of the rigsembedsmænd. Peder Oxe would be Frederik’s one and only rigshofmester; the post would remain vacant from Oxe’s death in 1575 until the appointment of Christoffer Valkendorf in 1596. The lacuna created by the death of Johan Friis, however, was simply too great to leave unfilled. In May 1573, two and one-half years after the death of the venerable Friis, the king announced the appointment of Niels Kaas til Taarupgaard to the post of kansler. The men who rose to prominence in the Danish administration in the late 1560s and 1570s were thoroughly professional and competent, but were not the type to offer much resistance to the king. The learned and erudite Peder Oxe (1520–75) was fourteen years older than the king, but was closer in age and in outlook to Frederik than he had been to Christian III. Elevated to conciliar rank in 1552, Oxe had been highly favoured by Christian III, but earned the collective resentment of the Council by sponsoring reforms of the royal fief system that restricted the discretionary powers of fiefholders. Disputes with other powerful families over his extensive real estate transactions sealed his doom. During his absence in Mecklenburg on an official errand in late 1557, Oxe’s many enemies schemed to remove him from the king’s good graces. Openly accused in 1558 of graft and corruption in his duties as lensmand, Oxe was 54 Hanne Honnens de Lichtenberg, Tro, håb og forfængelighed. Kunstneriske udtryksformer i 1500-tallets Danmark (Copenhagen, 1989), pp. 72–74, 141–61; Steffen Heiberg, Christian 4. Monarken, mennesket og myten (Copenhagen, 1988), pp. 16–17.

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stripped of all his fiefs. Fearing for his life, he fled Denmark immediately. Oxe spent much of his exile in Lorraine, where he sought revenge on his ungrateful king by encouraging the ambitions of Duchess Christine, daughter of King Christian II, to regain the Danish throne in her father’s name. Partly to minimise this threat, and partly because he had need of Oxe’s abilities as a financier, Frederik II recalled Oxe from his exile in 1565. Restored to the royal favour, Oxe performed his duties as rigshofmester in exemplary fashion during the closing years of the war with Sweden and in the first half of the next decade. Frederik relied heavily upon Oxe, but Oxe did not—as a few foreign visitors alleged—dominate the king. He did not accompany the king on his frequent travels, as did Niels Kaas, but remained in Copenhagen for most of his career. Undoubtedly he had some influence on the making of foreign policy. Because of his close association with Lorraine—and therefore, presumably, with the Guisard faction at the Valois court—he had strong pro-French sympathies. Despite these ties, Oxe was virulently anti-Spanish; at the very least, he distrusted Philip II’s intentions in the Netherlands, and spoke out openly against Alba’s regime there. But Oxe, like all of Frederik’s advisers from 1571 on, was more of a loyal servant to the king than a real influence upon royal policy, at least as far as foreign relations were concerned. Frederik, for example, went openly against Oxe’s francophilic sympathies in the Lansac crisis of 1573 (see chapter 4), and the king never completely trusted his rigshofmester. Shortly after Oxe’s death, Frederik ordered a thorough investigation of his personal papers, looking for evidence that Oxe had conspired with Lorraine against Denmark.55 The vacancy created by Oxe’s death, though never filled again during the reign, did not leave a vacuum within the administration. Throughout the 1570s and ’80s, the king relied on the services of a select few advisers—notably Chancellor Niels Kaas, Hans Skovgaard and Arild Huitfeldt in the Danish Chancery, and Heinrich Ramel in the German Chancery—who remained by his side during the ceaseless travels of the court. Even when hunting, Frederik II did not travel alone, but was constantly in the company of these few key figures. In most affairs of state, the bulk of the work was performed 55 Troels Lund, Peder Oxe. Et historisk Billed (Copenhagen, 1907), pp. 37–144. An excellent overview of the historiographic controversy surrounding Oxe can be found in Jensen, Bidrag, pp. 45–82.

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here—not in Copenhagen where the administration sat, but in the peripatetic court of the king. Only the most trivial and mundane details of daily administration were left to the Chanceries in Copenhagen. The king, aided by Kaas and a handful of others, dealt with everything else. Like Oxe, however, Kaas served more as a servant and secretary than he did as a favourite. The existing evidence suggests, instead, that Frederik—because of his literary handicap—dictated his edicts and his correspondence with foreign states to his travelling administrators, who then transmitted the king’s will (and words) to the Chanceries in Copenhagen to be transcribed into fair copy. It was an inefficient process, to be sure, but it ensured that it was Frederik, and not his advisers, who determined policy. Frederik II may have been an informal king, and one who enjoyed the pleasures of the hunt and of garrulous fellowship, but informality and boisterousness should not be mistaken for indolence and political impotence.56 Frederik’s ties with the aristocracy in general and the Council of State in particular were reinforced by the peculiar nature of Danish court culture. Court life under Frederik II exhibited none of the cultural sophistication of its contemporaries in Spain, England, France, or at the Habsburg courts in Vienna and Prague. The king enjoyed plays from time to time, commissioned paintings from prominent Dutch artists and tapestries woven by the celebrated Fleming Hans Knieper, and was particularly enamored of instrumental music from Germany and Italy; but he did not make the concerted effort to collect artwork or to bring renowned musicians to his court that Christian IV would do in the following century. Indeed, to foreign eyes Frederik’s court appeared not ungenerous but mean and unsophisticated, falling short of what was expected of a great king. A German visitor to the court in 1567 noted with some contempt that ‘the king has a stately household, when there is peace . . . [and] they all eat together at court, but poorly, [since they eat] herring and dried cod for the most part.’ The few glimpses we have into court life under Frederik II, however, reveal it to be happy and uncontentious, if somewhat loud and bawdy. An informal, tavern-like atmosphere prevailed in the king’s presence. The king, his courtiers, and his councillors revelled together in feasting and strong drink, and in this regard life at the Danish royal court was far closer to the impoverished princely courts of the

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Jensen, Bidrag, pp. 13–44.

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northern German Reichsfürsten than it was to its counterparts in the kingdoms of western Europe. The same German traveller who found the Danish court wanting in luxury nonetheless admired the open and informal character of Frederik’s kingship: ‘One can certainly enter [the king’s presence] and speak with [the king] himself.’ According to the eighteenth-century Danish historian Ludvig Holberg,57 After dinner, it was [Frederik’s] custom to say, ‘The king is not home’, which was a signal that the ministers and courtiers could behave [as they wanted] without restraint; but as soon as the king said ‘The king is home again’, then everyone was quiet.

Frederik craved friendship and good fellowship; the incessant partying and hunting not only satisfied this craving, but it also bound together the king and nobility in a highly personal way. The king invited his aristocracy to take part in the life of the royal family, and participated in their private celebrations as well, frequently attending noble weddings and standing as godfather at christenings. Frederik II may not have been a primus inter pares in a constitutional sense, but he was certainly one in a social sense—and a successful one at that.58 Primitive and quaint as this appeared to some foreign ambassadors, this characteristic of court society had important political advantages. Though there might emerge disagreements between king and aristocracy, the Danish court was seemingly devoid of major factions, political or otherwise. Certainly there must have been some significant differences of opinion among the councillors, and between individual councillors and the king—this would be demonstrated dramatically in the administrative shake-up that followed upon Frederik’s death in 1588—but during his lifetime Frederik II was somehow able to keep these differences from surfacing. And on those rare occasions when the Council did collectively oppose royal policy, as it did during the abdication crisis of early 1570, Frederik was capable of manipulating the Council without undermining or challenging its authority. It is a measure of Frederik II’s authority that the king could violate, albeit in minor ways, the stipulations of his coronation charter without reprimand from the Council. When the king neglected to appoint a new rigshofmester after Oxe’s death in 1575, 57 58

Karker, ‘Kong Frederik 2.s død’, p. 269. Fabricius, ‘Danmark i Aaret 1567’, pp. 16, 21.

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and when he elevated foreigners like Heinrich Below and Heinrich Ramel to noble status and even membership on the Council, noone voiced a single objection. Resources: military, naval, and financial During his entire reign, Frederik II did not endeavour to create a large standing military establishment. Except for an expansion of the fleet, Danish military institutions in 1588 were almost identical in size and character to what they had been in 1559. Overall, the Danish approach to national defense was much the same as contemporary England’s: a strong reliance on the navy, with relatively little resources devoted to land forces. Denmark’s native land forces were small, unprofessional, and impermanent. The nobility was obliged to provide feudal armed retinues to the crown upon demand, an institution known as the rostjeneste (‘knight service’), but since the Count’s War the Danish nobility was not especially warlike and the institution was not effective. The larger towns, likewise, could muster small urban militias, known as the borgerbevæbning. These were frequently mustered whenever there appeared to be a chance of invasion by a foreign power, but it is unlikely that they could have put up much resistance to a determined invader. In the early 1570s, Frederik II did attempt to reorganise and strengthen the local militias, but by 1576 the experiment had been abandoned. Denmark had nothing that approximated, in size or character, the national militia that was already beginning to take form in Vasa Sweden, which would demonstrate its effectiveness in the various Baltic wars of the late sixteenth century and gain renown under King Gustav II Adolf. Sweden’s reliance on native militia, after all, was borne of poverty, and Denmark was not poor. During the Seven Years’ War with Sweden, Frederik had utilised the services of Danish noble commanders, but had relied in the main on hired German Landsknechten, supplemented by a handful of Scottish mercenaries. These were not permanent forces, and most were dismissed within a year or two of the Stettin treaty, albeit at great expense. Throughout the reign, however, Frederik did retain the services of several German mercenary captains, upon whom the king could call if the possibility of war ever arose, which he did often during the last eighteen years of

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his governance. Permanent native garrisons of artillerists (bøsseskytter), paid directly from the king’s personal coffers, manned the larger fortifications like those at Helsingør.59 The fleet, however, was essential to Denmark’s security and to the maintenance of the dominium maris Baltici. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, the fleet carried out a formidable array of tasks, even in peacetime: it patrolled the Baltic, the Norwegian coast, the fishing grounds off Iceland, and the Arctic waters off the North Cape; it chased pirates in the Baltic and North Seas; it maintained a vigil in the waters of the Sound, enforcing the collection of the Sound dues. On occasion, it was called upon to perform more warlike duties, for example its blockade of Danzig in the late 1570s. Except when the king placed the fleet on a wartime footing, however, it exhibited many of the characteristics of a naval militia. Not all of the warships moored at Copenhagen were permanently crewed; in times of uncertainty or national emergency, large numbers of able seamen and gunners—for the two were considered separate professions— were pressed into service in the fleet. The Danish navy, already large in numbers at the death of Christian III, grew considerably under Frederik II’s direction. The escalation of hostilities with Sweden at the beginning of the reign spurred the initial expansion of the fleet in the 1560s, but even after Stettin construction of new warships continued apace until 1588. As new ships replaced old, the size of the fleet remained fairly steady—around forty vessels altogether, not counting merchantmen which could be armed in time of war—during the 1570s and ’80s. In the number and size of vessels, its closest rival was the English royal fleet. There were two or three huge warships, over one thousand English tons, that would rival the largest galleons of the Armada, but the workhorses of the fleet were somewhat smaller, closer in size (and prob59

Emil Madsen, ‘De nationale Tropper, samt Hærvæsenets Styrelse i det 16. Aarhundrede’, HTD, Series 7, 5 (1904–05), 123–223; Emil Madsen, ‘Om Rytteriet i de danske Hære i det 16de Aarhundrede’, HTD, Series 7, 1 (1897–99), 414–60; Emil Madsen, ‘Om Fodfolket i de danske Hære i det 16de Aarhundrede’, HTD, Series 7, 1 (1897–99), 165–215; Emil Madsen, ‘Om Artilleriet i de danske Hære i det 16. Aarhundrede’, HTD, Series 7, 2 (1899–1900), 135–76; E.O.A. Hedegaard, Landsknægtene i Danmark i det 16. århundrede. En kulturhistorisk studie (Helsingør, 1965); Jesper Bering Asmussen, ‘Bonden og det nationale fodfolk. Træk af landalmuens deltagelse i krigsførelsen i det 16. århundrede’, Historie, Series 2, 15 (1985), 611–32. On the feudal knight service, see: Knud J.V. Jespersen, Rostjenestetaksation og adelsgods. Studier i den danske adelige rostjeneste og adelens godsfordeling 1540–1650 (Odense, 1977), pp. 70–7.

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ably in design) to the famous ‘racing galleons’ of the English navy. Ships like Gideon and Rafael, each carrying upwards of thirty large cannon, and Josafat (fifty guns) were the pride of the fleet, and English observers who had the opportunity to see them during the Ramel embassy of 1586 (see chapter 7) found them quite impressive. Among its smaller vessels, the Danish navy had a disproportionately large number of galleys and galeasses for a northern European fleet, since these proved to be effective in coastal patrols and amphibious operations in the Baltic. It may be true, as well, that overall the warships of Frederik II’s fleet were more heavily armed than their English counterparts. In the year of the Armada, and for some time before, Denmark and England were equals as naval powers, with aggregate fleet displacements of approximately 13,000 to 15,000 tons.60 The most significant growth in industries that supported the Danish war machine would occur early in the seventeenth century, under Christian IV, but even under Frederik II the military establishment was largely self-sufficient in materials. Denmark was one of the few states in early modern Europe that could supply itself with all the constituent elements of gunpowder; sulfur, the rarest of the three main ingredients, was easily obtainable in Iceland. Both Copenhagen and Helsingør had iron foundries capable of producing large fortress and naval artillery. Since the Oldenburg lands in the Baltic were among the most fertile in Europe for the production of tar, pitch, mast trees and hull timbers, supply of naval stores was not an obstacle. Most impressive of all was the huge naval supply, repair, and manufacturing complex at Copenhagen, usually called Bremerholm or simply Holmen. Bremerholm traced its origins back to the days of Frederik I, but began to take shape during the reigns of Christian III and Frederik II. It contained extensive dry-dock and rope-making facilities, a cannon foundry, and warehouses for storing sails, rigging, and provisions. Bremerholm was not the only source of new warships for the fleet, however. Shipyards at Helsingør, Malmø, Oslo, and Flensburg regularly turned out vessels of all sizes for the navy. The 60 Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 254–6; H.D. Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid. Bidrag til den dansk-norske Sømagts Historie 1559–1588 (Copenhagen, 1902); H.G. Garde, Den dansk-norske Sømagts Historie 1535–1700 (Copenhagen, 1861), pp. 51–104; Jørgen H. Barfod, Christian 3.s flåde (Den danske flådes historie, vol. 2, Copenhagen, 1995). For comparative statistics on the Danish and English fleets, see: Jan Glete, Navies and Nations. Warships, Navies and State-Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860 (2 vols., Stockholm, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 130–35.

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fleet supplemented its numbers with ships captured during the Swedish war, taken as prizes from pirates, and apprehended in the Sound for tariff violations, as well as vessels purchased from friendly Baltic ports like Rostock. The task of maintaining a large fleet, let along augmenting it from time to time, required a steady flow of cash. This Denmark enjoyed in abundance. Under Frederik’s successor, Christian IV, the personal wealth of the Danish sovereign would become legendary. Although Frederik II was not so wealthy as his son would prove to be, the foundations for Christian IV’s good fortune were laid during the 1570s and ’80s. The joint stewardship of the Crown of Denmark made the state fisc confusing, with all sorts of overlapping areas of competence between king and Council. The delineation between the income and expenditures of the state, and those of the king and the royal household, was not so clearly defined as it would be in the next century. Nonetheless, the quantity of revenues flowing into the coffers of the central government increased significantly during the reign of Frederik II. A large portion of this increase must be attributed to the imposition of the lastetold in 1567. In 1560, the proceeds of the Sound dues—which went directly into the king’s personal accounts— amounted to 24,400 rigsdaler; twenty years later, the total income from the Sound dues (including the lastetold ) contributed 129,300 rigsdaler. Judging from the extant figures, the profit from the Sound dues increased from an annual average of 39,350 rigsdaler before the imposition of the lastetold to an average of 91,450 thereafter, an increase of 132 per cent. It was this significant liquid wealth that would allow the king to fund mercenary troops and to construct his lavish castle at Kronborg in the mid-1570s and ’80s.61 Domestic sources of revenue also grew substantially. Extraordinary taxes soared to record levels during the war with Sweden, from a mean annual aggregate of 67,000 rigsdaler before the war to 234,000 in wartime, but after 1571 the tax burden had dropped to prewar levels. The primary increase in ordinary income came from the reform of the royal fiefs (len). Prior to the Reformation in 1536, the Oldenburg monarchs had been at a great financial disadvantage in contrast to the nobility, who together with the Church controlled 61 Johann Grundtvig, Frederik den Andens Statshusholdning (Copenhagen, 1876), pp. 84–5.

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the vast bulk of Denmark’s landed wealth. The Reformation settlement, and the secularisation of Church properties that accompanied it, transferred ownership of ecclesiastical lands directly to the king. Christian III had shared this wealth with the nobility, by granting administrative positions as fiefholders to the foremost members of the aristocracy. Under Frederik II, however, the monarchy began the practice of consolidating royal fiefs by means of massive real estate transactions with the nobility, trading scattered royal lands in order to create fewer but larger royal fiefs. Reforms of the manner in which lensmænd were compensated for their services, first initiated under Christian III, brought a larger percentage of fief incomes to the royal coffers. The end result was that while fiefholders still could become quite wealthy off the proceeds of the fiefs entrusted to their care, the monarchy itself enjoyed a much-augmented source of income. Average annual income from the len amounted to about 25,000 rigsdaler before the war, 19,000 rigsdaler during the war, and grew to nearly 42,000 rigsdaler during the eighteen years after Stettin.62 The social and constitutional implications of the len reforms of the late sixteenth century would ultimately prove to be disastrous for the nobility. The choice fiefs went almost exclusively to members of the Council; and since the conciliar aristocracy was already an unofficially hereditary caste, the number of noble families profiting from the larger fiefs (hovedlen) became ever smaller, and those nobles who did not number among this aristocracy gradually descended into poverty and political insignificance. In other words, the len reforms drove a wedge into the ranks of the nobility, reducing it in numbers, a development which by the mid-seventeenth century would contribute to the imposition of absolutism. This does not bear on the constitutional situation which prevailed during the reign of Frederik II, but the len reforms, combined with augmented commercial duties, meant that the monarch enjoyed a respectable degree of wealth. Even though the costs of the fleet and of the court rose far above the austere levels of Christian III’s reign, the balance between expenditures and income remained a healthy one for the last eighteen years of Frederik II’s governance. Despite the significant reduction in extraordinary taxes in those years, the tremendous debt that had been incurred during the Seven Years’ War of the North—about 62

Ibid., p. 39.

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1.1 million rigsdaler—would be paid off by the time Frederik died in 1588.63 A healthy and powerful military, or at least a naval arm, meant little without the information necessary to employ it effectively. In this regard, too, Denmark was well supplied. The Oldenburg monarchy did not have a significant diplomatic presence abroad; indeed, although Frederik did from time to time employ foreign agents who provided a measure of diplomatic representation in larger European states—like Thomas Tennecker, who served as a diplomatic and commercial agent between Denmark and England in the 1570s and ’80s—there were no permanent Danish embassies in the major capitals. Despite the lack of a formal diplomatic network, the Danish court was singularly well-informed on international affairs. Control of the Sound was a great intelligence asset. Merchants stopping to pay the duties at Helsingør brought news from all over the world; and though oftentimes their ‘news’ constituted little more than wildly inaccurate rumours, much of the time the tales they told were surprisingly reliable. Sometimes they brought the Danes printed newsletters (usually called Zeitungen in German) from Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Danzig, which quickly found their way to the king and his advisers. Intelligence transmitted by means of private merchants generally moved faster than that sent through ordinary diplomatic channels, and as a result Frederik II was often informed of major foreign developments—especially if they involved the Baltic region in some way—before any other European sovereign. The Danish king, for example, probably knew of the election of Henry of Anjou to the Polish throne in 1573 well before the news reached the rest of Europe, and certainly before the news reached France. Frederik was better informed on affairs in France than was the French legate in Copenhagen, a circumstance which caused no small amount of embarrassment to the latter. Merchant traffic was by no means the only source of information for the Danish court. By the early 1570s, Frederik had assembled a 63 Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 248–9; Peder Enevoldsen, ‘Lensreformerne i Danmark 1557–96’, HTD, 81 (1981–82), 343–98; Kristian S.A. Erslev, Konge og lensmand i det sextende Aarhundrede. Studier over Statsomvæltningen i 1536 og dens Følger for Kongemagt og Adelsvælde (Copenhagen, 1879), pp. 161–209. On state finances in general, see: Grundtvig, Statshusholdning (Copenhagen, 1876); P.V. Jacobsen, Fremstilling af det danske Skattevæsen under Kongerne Christian III. og Frederik II (Copenhagen, 1833); Haakon Bennike Madsen, Det danske skattevæsen (Odense, 1978).

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formidable and reliable intelligence-gathering network within the Empire, largely through his regular personal correspondence with princes like August of Saxony and Ulrich of Mecklenburg. Frederik and his princely confidantes freely shared copies of the various Zeitungen they received. Perhaps the single most valuable intelligence resource was Frederik’s governor (Statthalter) in the Duchies, Heinrich Rantzau. Rantzau had been appointed to the post by Christian III in 1556, and would go on to serve Frederik II and Christian IV until his death in 1598. Son of the Danish military commander Johann Rantzau, Heinrich was a humanist and a man of letters, who counted among his correspondents some of the most influential German princes, scholars in France and the Netherlands, and leading figures at the Danish court. In his youth, he had met Luther at Wittenberg, and later served in the court of Charles V both in Germany and in the Netherlands. His three sons—Breide, Gert, and Kai—were very well-travelled, and acted as his informal agents throughout the Continent. Rantzau did indeed have a personal agenda: he was passionately anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic. Though widely admired by intellectuals throughout Europe, even within the papal curia, where there were some who hoped that he might be turned back to Rome, Rantzau fiercely defended Frederik’s confessional policies and did his best to promote the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, France, and the German states. His reports to Frederik II, submitted as frequently as once a week, were filled with the most minute details of dynastic politics and military affairs. By the 1580s, when Frederik II’s proProtestant sympathies had become well-known in western Europe, a number of foreign military commanders—men like Peregrine Bertie, Count Philip of Hohenlohe, and Johann Casimir of the Palatinate, who admired Frederik II and courted his open support—also kept the king regularly informed on the campaigns in France and the Netherlands.64 Well-informed and well-defended, and strategically positioned astride one of the most frequently travelled trade routes in the early modern world, the Danish monarchy could not escape involvement in the conflicts that had begun to rage in the west by the late 1560s. Alone, it could not match the might of Spain, but the strength of 64 DBL vol. 19, pp. 135–145; Brandt, Heinrich Rantzau; Horst Fuhrmann, ‘Heinrich Rantzaus römische Korrespondenten’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 41 (1959), 75–87; Joseph Hansen (ed.), Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst ergänzenden Actenstücken. 3te Abtheilung, 1572–1585, Bd. 1: Der Kampf um Köln 1576–1584 (Berlin, 1892), p. 749.

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its navy made Denmark a powerful potential ally or an annoying foe to the major combatants in France and the Netherlands; Denmark’s deathgrip on the Sound meant that those who sought to use the Baltic trade as an offensive weapon would have to either befriend Frederik II or subdue the Oldenburg state. So far, the Danish monarchs had demonstrated little interest in the world west of the Skaggerak. Denmark’s self-imposed diplomatic isolation from western Europe, however, would shortly come to an end.

CHAPTER THREE

RELIGION AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1559–1572

Denmark’s confessional identity and integrity were not the only determinants in the foreign policy of Frederik II, nor were they even the dominant ones. The maintenance of Denmark’s predominance in Baltic politics was more important overall, even more than it would be during the reign of Christian IV. Sweden may have suffered a defeat in 1570, but it was by no means a crushing one, and the Stettin treaty did little more than usher in a ‘cold war’ of sorts between the two Scandinavian rivals that would last until the renewal of open warfare in 1611. The Polish monarchy, too, was not an overwhelming threat, and most certainly was in decline as a military and naval power by 1570, but it was a threat nonetheless. If Denmark were to maintain its traditional dominium maris Baltici, it would have to ensure that rival fleets—Polish or Swedish—could not cruise the Baltic at will or, better still, would not be built at all. The unquenched political ambitions of the king’s younger brother, Duke Magnus, in the eastern Baltic lands meant that the still-smouldering hostilities between Poland, Russia, and Sweden would have a direct bearing on Danish dynastic interests. Control over the Sound also brought with it a host of lesser, but still dangerous, rivalries further to the west and south: tensions with the cities of the waning yet defiant Hanse, and with commercial interests in England and the Low Countries. The house of Lorraine, by virtue of its descent from the deposed Christian II, clung tenaciously to its claims to the Danish throne, regardless of the Speyer treaty and Christian III’s marriage negotiations in the late 1550s. Another series of obligations stemmed from the traditional role of the Oldenburg dynasty as the ‘good uncle’ of Lower Saxony, adjudicating seemingly innumerable disputes arising between the princely houses of north central Germany. These same obligations and tensions took on new overtones after 1572, as confessional identity became an increasingly important component of European international relations. While Frederik II’s attentions, and those of his Council, focused eastward and inward, the

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general timbre of interstate relations in western Europe was changing dramatically. Europe in 1572 was not as it was at the time of CateauCambrésis, thirteen years before. Internal religious and political strife, particularly within France and the Low Countries, was beginning to fuse together with the long-standing rivalries between Spain and France, Spain and England, even England and France, rivalries that had not been settled by Cateau-Cambrésis. The year 1572 witnessed the first tell-tale signs of this fusion: in France, the Admiral Coligny and King Charles IX would discuss the possibility of renewed war against Spain in the Netherlands; through the capture of Brill by the ‘Sea Beggars’, the Dutch rebels would demonstrate that their cause was not yet lost; Elizabeth I of England, shaken by the Ridolfi plot, would take the first steps towards intervention in the Netherlands; and, of course, the bloody terror of ‘the St. Bartholomew’ in Paris that August provided European Protestants with an unpleasant taste of the fate that lay in wait for them after the Council of Trent. Frederik II did have other obligations and more pressing interests than the growth of confessional conflict in western Europe. Denmark, like most of Baltic Europe, had a tradition of non-involvement in western politics; in his efforts to secure the legitimacy of his own claim to the throne over and against those of the houses of Lorraine and the Palatinate, Christian III had studiously avoided any diplomatic entanglements that might earn the enmity of the Habsburg, whether Austrian or Spanish. Frederik II, on the other hand, simply had no choice; such entanglements were thrust upon him, and not just because of the continuing fear of intrigue from Lorraine. The Seven Years’ War of the North, even if it ended any practical hopes that Denmark could recreate the Kalmar Union under Danish leadership, accomplished at least this: it provided the initial impetus for Denmark’s integration into ‘mainstream’ European politics. As international interest in the Stettin talks had demonstrated, Denmark— a wealthy state with a primitive bureaucratic infrastructure, gifted by nature with the ability to close off all maritime access to northern Europe’s most vital commercial highway—was capable of wielding enormous influence over any conflict that involved either England or the Netherlands. How far Denmark would pursue an active role in these conflicts, however, depended in large part on the character, fears, and ambitions of its enigmatic sovereign.

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Frederik II and the state church Insofar as we can credit the development of Protestantism in Denmark to the direction given it by the royal house, it could be argued that regimes of Frederik II and Christian IV were of greater consequence for Danish Lutheranism than that of Christian III had been. To be sure, Christian III had actually dismantled the Roman episcopacy and established the Lutheran faith as the state religion, but to his son and grandson fell the task of consolidating the Reformation settlement. Between 1559 and 1645, the kings of Denmark eliminated the last remaining vestiges of popery, extended the reach of the church into the periphery of the Oldenburg state, vastly improved the organisation and even the professional conditions of the clergy, and provided the church with some theological direction as well. Moreover, it was during the reigns of Frederik II and Christian IV that the state church became an instrument of Sozialdisziplinierung as Gerhard Oestreich defined it, allowing the monarchy to extend its authority into the private lives of its ordinary subjects, areas that had previously been beyond its grasp. Under Frederik II, however, the consolidation of the Reformation and the direction of the new state church was peculiarly personal. During the reign of Christian III, the Danish church was really that of the pioneer reformers, especially Peder Palladius; Christian IV’s church owed more to the direction given it by the great orthodox divines Hans Poulsen Resen and Jesper Rasmussen Brochmand than it did to the king himself. Frederik II’s episcopacy, on the other hand, was truly the handservant of the monarch. The leading clergyman of the age, Niels Hemmingsen, set the theological tone of the state church, but Hemmingsen was no administrator. Frederik II ruled over his clergy as surely as his aristocratic lensmænd ruled over the lowliest peasants; indeed, there was probably no area of governance in which the king’s power was so completely unrestrained. As ‘defender of the faith’, Frederik’s most significant achievements were three: first, liturgical and educational reform, distancing Denmark from papist ‘superstition’ while making the Oldenburg state more self-reliant in the education of its clergy; second, inaugurating the process whereby the clergy became effective instruments of state power; and third, the successful avoidance of confessional conflict, or even factionalism, within the Oldenburg realm.

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Although Christian III and the new Lutheran episcopacy had been able to accomplish a great deal in the establishment of a state church during the twenty-two years between Christian III’s formal accession in October 1536 and the king’s death on New Years’ Day 1559, the Reformation process could hardly have been said to have been complete at the end of Christian III’s reign. There were still some obdurate Catholics within the realm, not only within Norway and Iceland, where the Reformation had been least successful, but also within Denmark itself. Christian III’s Reformation had been distinctly Lutheran; here was no via media reform. It was, however, a ‘gentle’ Reformation in many ways. The mendicant orders, already nearly defunct in 1536, had been dissolved, but most of the other religious houses had been left alone after half-hearted attempts to convert them. Some, like the Brigittine cloister at Maribo on Lolland, became notorious for public celebrations of the Mass and for sexual scandal. Catholic practices among the laity flourished as well. The lack of trained Lutheran clergy meant that the parishes were served either by poorly-qualified, unlettered lay preachers, or by Catholic priests who had been allowed to keep their parishes so long as they observed the new Church Ordinance of 1537. Liturgical practices which had been castigated as examples of ‘papist superstition’—like, for example, the so-called ‘ringing of souls’ at burial—were tolerated and practiced openly. In Iceland and Norway there was far less change. The Icelandic bishops, at Skálholt and Holár, continued to practice both polygamy and concubinage without shame; still maintaining private armed retinues, they opposed the introduction of the new faith with force, and Christian III’s lieutenants in Iceland—secular or ecclesiastical—ran the risk of a violent death. Lutheranism was still an alien and unwelcome religion in Iceland at mid-century. On the sparsely-populated Færø Islands, qualified clergy were in such short supply that few of the residents there attended worship services more than three or four times in a year.1 In short, Christian III’s successor would have a difficult task ahead of him. The new king took to this challenge with an enthusiasm and sense of purpose that must have appeared surprising to his heretofore disapproving Council of State. Possibly inspired by the attempt 1 Jón Helgason, Islands kirke fra Reformationen til vore dage (Copenhagen, 1922), pp. 15–48; NRR vol. 1, pp. 145–46, Christian III to Jens Gregerssøn, superintendent on Færø, 1551 (?).

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at doctrinal unity made by Lutheran German princes at the Naumburg Fürstentag in early 1561, Frederik II directed the theological faculty at the University of Copenhagen to draft a new church ordinance in early 1561. Even though his attentions at this point were absorbed by rapidly deteriorating relations with Sweden, the king closely supervised the formulation of the new ordinance. The 1561 church ordinance never had the force of law, and did not officially supercede Christian III’s Church Ordinance of 1537; but its open, almost vague, interpretation of the Lutheran creed set the tone for the theological position of the state church for the remainder of Frederik II’s governance.2 Throughout the reign, Frederik II also sought liturgical uniformity throughout his realms as well. Christian III had previously recommended that churches throughout Denmark pattern their worship services after those practiced at Vor Frue Kirke in Copenhagen; Frederik II commanded liturgical conformity. Noting in January 1568 that there was ‘some dispute and disagreement’ about the proper manner of conducting worship services in parishes, large and small, throughout Denmark, the king directed that all churches follow the liturgy established at Vor Frue Kirke, which counted ‘as the primary church [hovedkirken] for the others here in the kingdom’.3 Ignorance of the Copenhagen liturgy would not be an acceptable excuse. To this end, Frederik II ordered the printing and widespread distribution of standardised liturgical texts, Hans Thomesen’s psaltery, Niels Jespersen’s Gradual, and Peder Palladius’ ‘altar book’ in 1569.4 Poul Madsen’s ‘altar book’ of 1574 became the standard liturgical guide for the entire kingdom in 1580, and the old Roman Catholic collects were finally replaced by those of the Nürnberger Veit Dietrich.5 Even the smallest details of public worship did not escape the king’s attention: in 1568, he commanded that priests and their assistants determine precisely the number of communicants at celebration of the Holy Eucharist and consecrate the exact amount of bread and wine required thereby, so that the priest would not have to bless the Host more than once, a violation of the Church Ordinance that 2 Bjørn Kornerup (ed.), Confessio et ordinatio ecclesiarum danicarum anno MDLXI conscriptae: Den danske kirkes lærebekendelse og kirkeordinans af aar 1561 (Copenhagen, 1953), pp. xix–xlvi. 3 CCD vol. 1, pp. 349–50, 353–4, 13 January and 24 March 1568; DKB Kall. 489, 4o, ‘Synodalia Anni 1568’, pp. 115–22. 4 KB 1566–70, pp. 520–21, 5 November 1569. 5 Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 82–5, 156–7.

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Frederik apparently found unconscionable. In February 1580, a royal edict decreed that, in the towns at least, high mass would begin promptly at eight o’clock and end at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings. Furthermore, Frederik noted, mixed seating of the sexes at service had led to frequent disorder at Vor Frue Kirke; to prevent such occurrences in all churchs, men would be restricted to sitting on the right-hand side of the sanctuary, women to the left.6 Such were not mere recommendations, but royal commands. The 1568 liturgy edict, like nearly all of the church legislation that followed it, ended with the cryptic but stern warning that clergy found in violation of royal decrees on liturgy would be punished ‘as they deserve’. Of course, even the fiercest threats could not guarantee results. Jacob Madsen, bishop-superintendent of Fyn, reported in 1576 that of the fortythree parishes in the counties of Båg and Sund, only nineteen owned all six books stipulated in the edict of 1569. One church did not even own a copy of the Bible.7 The education of native clergy improved considerably under Frederik II as well. Relatively early in the reign, Frederik established minimal standards for the education of the lower clergy. According to an edict of 1562, even rural deans would be required to demonstrate competence in reading, writing, and speaking Latin, and to be able to sing the Mass in Latin.8 Much royal attention and considerable royal funds were bestowed upon the Latin schools, the cathedral schools, and the University at Copenhagen, with the primary intention of providing an adequate education of Lutheran clergy, ensuring that a solid theological education could be had without necessary recourse to the universities at Wittenberg and Rostock. Working with Peder Oxe and Niels Kaas, Frederik II endeavored to assist promising but impoverished students who aspired to a university degree in theology. From 1569, the king underwrote the subsistence costs for one hundred students at the University of Copenhagen, each of whom enjoyed the royal privilege for five years. Each year, the king awarded four fellowships—the stipendium regium—to students who intended to pursue the doctoral degree at the University, but who desired a modi-

6

DKB Kall. 489, 4o, pp. 115–22; Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 156–7. 7 Jens Rasmussen and Anne Riising (eds), Biskop Jacob Madsens visitatsbog 1588–1604 (Odense, 1995), p. 15. 8 CCD vol. 1, pp. 203–4, 14 November 1562.

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cum of foreign education and travel in the meantime; three of these fellowships were earmarked for theology students.9 Frederik II had established himself as the protector of the Danish clergy. He looked after their education, and did his best (though without much success) to improve the pitifully inadequate incomes of the rural clergy. On numerous occasions, he intervened personally in the affairs of individual parishes, warning recalcitrant parishioners to pay their tithes in full or difficult noblemen to cease harassing their parish priests. On more than one occasion, he stood up for newlyordained priests who refused to marry their predecessors’ widows, a custom that was often forced—quite willfully—on new clergy by their congregations.10 But there was never any question about who was in charge. In most areas of governance, some kind of consensus between king and Council was necessary, but in the administration of the state church the king was his own master. He might consult with the theological faculty at the university—called the høilærde, or ‘most learned ones’—on doctrinal issues, but in the hiring, firing, and disciplining of the clergy his was the final authority. Although the Church Ordinance of 1537 granted the king little more than the right of final approval of candidates for church office, more often than not Frederik II overstepped his bounds, appointing candidates of his own choosing to the episcopacy regardless of the wishes of the clergy. On numerous occasions, the king even involved himself personally in the selection of parish priests, nullifying the appointments of priests whose qualifications or lifestyles he had reason to doubt.11 In disciplining the clergy, Frederik II was aided by the streamlined, almost monolithic administrative structure of the church. Ordinarily, the king made his will known directly by royal edict to the episcopacy, who then communicated new policies to the middling and lower clergy via synods in each diocese, and via general assemblies called landemode. The landemode had existed since the Reformation, but with Frederik’s encouragement they became a regular and established institution of church governance. The bishop-superintendents, who were ultimately responsible for the conduct of their clergy, would supervise the parish clergy by means of regular visitations, another 9

Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 166–9. KB 1580–83, p. 662, 20 April 1583; KB 1584–88, pp. 93, 784–5, 29 May 1584 and 28 July 1587. 11 KB 1561–65, pp. 19–20, 22 February 1561; KB 1584 –88, pp. 581–2, 21 September 1586. 10

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practice that became much more commonplace after Frederik II’s accession. But the king was not always content to leave the disciplining of the clergy to local authorities and the episcopacy. Priests who had committed adultery, were frequently inebriated, or had otherwise acquired reputations for loose living not infrequently found themselves dismissed, imprisoned, or banished for their transgressions. Even minor violations of the liturgy edicts could result in dismissal, unless the king could be convinced that these were simple mistakes arising from old age, forgetfulness, or physical incapacity.12 Nor were the bishop-superintendents themselves immune to reprimand from the king. It was not unusual for Frederik to berate them for ignoring the disciplinary shortcomings of their clergy—to ‘look through their fingers’, as Frederik invariably expressed it.13 Frederik II was indeed a stern, if genuinely concerned, taskmaster where it came to his clergy. The Danish clergy under Frederik II were held to higher standards of behavior than had been the case under Christian III, but they were expected to regulate public morality as well, not merely to act as models of Christian living. Although the political relationship between clergy and monarchy would not be firmly cemented until after Denmark’s abortive intervention in the Thirty Years’ War and the Ordinance on Church Discipline of March 1629, some four decades after Frederik’s death, the reign of Frederik II marks the beginnings of the process of Sozialdisziplinierung in the Oldenburg State. The inadequacy of the clergy, both in quality and in numbers, during the reign of Christian III precluded the enforcement of high standards of behavior among the clergy, let alone the use of the clergy as an instrument for regulating public morals. But improvements in clerical education made royal involvement in both areas possible by the early 1570s. Frederik II commanded the clergy to play a leading role in the elimination of the social problems presented by vagrancy, begging, and prostitution. At least twice during his reign, Frederik decried the pervasiveness of adultery, promiscuity, drunkenness, and disrespect for authority among the laity, and enjoined the clergy to castigate and discipline their parishioners for such offenses, threatening dismissal from office for clergy who knowingly tolerated the guilty. With the willing collaboration of Niels Hemmingsen, the king 12 KB 1566–70, p. 588, 25 May 1570; KB 1571–75, pp. 191–2, 602, 653, 2 December 1572, 22 April and 22 July 1575. 13 KB 1576–79, p. 670, 28 June 1579.

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promulgated Denmark’s first comprehensive marriage law in 1579, whose statutes were to be enforced by the clergy acting in the king’s name.14 It should be noted as well that royal efforts to regulate the private lives of ordinary subjects were not limited to Denmark itself. Although it would not be until the reign of Christian IV that Iceland would be brought fully under Danish political and ecclesiastical authority, there was at least an attempt to extend royal authority to Iceland under Frederik II. Christian III had neither the time, nor the energy, nor the inclination to consolidate the Reformation in the peripheral areas of the Oldenburg State, and hence Norway and Iceland had been tacitly allowed a great deal of autonomy in religious affairs. In a way, Frederik II also neglected Norway and Iceland— during his entire reign, he would visit neither—but his absence should not be mistaken for a lack of interest. Increasingly, Danes and Danisheducated Icelanders were appointed to key positions in the Icelandic clergy. Working through a few dedicated clerics like Guäbrandur ∏orláksson (1542–1627), a student of Hemmingsen and bishop of Hólar from 1571, the administration was able to squelch the last remnants of Catholic resistance to the new order. Icelandic marriage practices, which allowed for marriage in much closer degrees of kinship than was the case in Denmark, were frequently overridden— at the king’s insistence—by Danish marriage law, by the standards of which many Icelandic marriages were incestuous. The Danish Bible of 1550 and other important liturgical works were made available for the first time in printed Icelandic. By these means, not only did Frederik II manage to bring Icelandic religious practices more in line with Danish, but also to exert a greater degree of royal authority over this most inaccessible and remote portion of the Oldenburg realm.15 The clergy was to act as the king’s mouthpiece in another way as well. From the official adoption of the Lutheran faith in 1536, Danish sovereigns made use of special liturgical prayers (kirkebøn) and designated ‘prayer-days’ (bededage) to beg divine assistance in times of profound crisis, and to explain and promote royal policy to the population at large. The kirkebøn were prayers whose content, determined by the king and the episcopacy, addressed specific issues or asked 14 LAO FB/SAB 1/1, Frederik II to Niels Jespersen, 14 April 1579; CCD 2:270–96, 19 June 1582. 15 Helgason, Islands kirke, pp. 48–58.

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God’s blessing for named individuals, like members of the royal family; they were intended to be read at ordinary worship services on the Sabbath. The bededage, on the other hand, were supplemental worship services, whose origins can be traced back to the dies rogationum held several times a year in Catholic times. Under Christian III, however, the prayer-days took on a different form altogether. In 1553, Peder Palladius, bishop-superintendent of Sjælland and Christian III’s foremost cleric, recommended the regular observance of prayerdays, in part as a substitute for the public processions (korsebør) of the old religion. Far more significant from the point-of-view of the monarchy, however, were the so-called ‘extraordinary’ prayer-days, decreed at irregular intervals. The extraordinary prayer-days were intended to address specific issues or commemorate specific events, rather than to provide an opportunity for general penance. By the time of Frederik II, such happenings were scheduled as a rule over three consecutive days, often in the middle of the week; all subjects and residents in the entire realm were expected to attend. Absenteeism could be punished, and all ‘secular activities’—including local assemblies and courts—were to be suspended. To the episcopacy, or at least to the bishop-superintendent of Sjælland, would fall the task of designating the exact dates of the prayer-days, selecting appropriate passages from Scripture, and sometimes even writing complete prayers and sermons for all clergy to use, but it was the king who made the decision to call prayer-days and to announce the reasons that made additional public penitence necessary. Usually, the king called bededage to beg divine mercy and assistance in difficult times, as in severe outbreaks of epidemic disease, but sometimes the reasons underlying the prayer-days were clearly political. In 1546, news of Charles V’s stern actions against German Protestants in the Schmalkaldic War inspired Christian III to decree a special day of prayer to beseech God’s protection over Germany, ‘where the clear and pure Word of God is preached’.16 Christian III had decreed extraordinary prayer-days on several occasions, and the practice would become a regular, almost routine 16 Martin Schwarz Lausten, Biskop Peder Palladius og kirken (1537–1560) (Copenhagen, 1987), pp. 187–200; Lausten, Christian den 3. og kirken, pp. 30–3; Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 88–90; Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 554, entries for 19–21 November 1583. For examples, see the following correspondence in RAK DK B.44: Peder Palladius to all bishop-superintendents, 8 February 1559; Hans Albretson to Frederik II, 31 December 1560 and 28 October 1564.

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and annual, occurrence midway through the reign of Christian IV. The reign of Frederik II represents a transitional period in the employment of prayer-days by the Danish monarchy. The bededage were celebrated with a measure of regularity between 1559 and 1588: there were some twenty-three groups of prayer-days during Frederik’s twenty-nine year reign. Moreover, the purpose of the prayer-days and the kirkebøn under Frederik II was more avowedly political than had been the case during his father’s governance. Several prayerdays were decreed to celebrate the triumphs of Danish arms in the war against Sweden, and at least two were designated to beg divine assistance for Protestants in the Netherlands and France.17 Of the remainder, most were called to seek God’s guidance and help in times of famine, epidemic disease, or bad weather, but with an important underlying purpose as well: to chide Danish subjects in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland for their sinful behavior and to call for repentance. The king took such events very seriously. Frederik II frequently charged the clergy with the responsibility of enforcing attendance at the prayer-days, and reminded his bishops that it was not enough simply to notify parish priests of the chosen themes and scriptures: it was necessary to explain to the lower clergy the intended meaning of the king’s message, so that it would be conveyed accurately to the laity.18 The prayer-days and the kirkebøn were not merely a means of exalting royal policy; they were also a mechanism for enforcing social discipline, for forcing royal authority into the most private aspects of everyday life. In all of these areas—the standardisation of the liturgy, educational and financial reform, and the assignment of greater social and political responsibilities to the clergy—Frederik II was similar to many of his contemporaries, especially within the Protestant states of the Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps Protestantism was falling victim to a selfdestructive theological fragmentation at the international level, but within each of the Protestant states the later sixteenth century was a period of ecclesiastical consolidation, as the initial enthusiasm of the pre-Interim period wore off and hopes for a reconciliation through a general Christian council died away, to be replaced by a grim determination to hold on in the face of a resurgent and militant Catholicism. 17

DKB Kall. 489, 4o, ‘Synodalia Anni 1568’, pp. 115–22; DKB Kall. 489, 4o, ‘Sÿnodalia Anni 1568 habita Roeskildiæ’, pp. 122–7. 18 H.F. Rørdam, ‘Forhandlinger paa Roskilde Landemode 1554–69’, KHS, Series 2, 2 (1860–62), 486–91, minutes of the Landemode at Roskilde 1566.

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But the later sixteenth century was also a period of profound confessional strife, as Protestant minorities struggled for their existence in predominately Catholic states, and as Protestant states dealt— clumsily, on the whole—with the problems raised by heterodoxy. For Denmark, however, the last half of the sixteenth century witnessed little if any confessional strife, at least within the Danish heartland of the Oldenburg polity. It was hardly that Denmark had the advantages bestowed by insularity; quite the contrary. As the commercial crossroads between central and northern Europe as well as between east and west, Denmark was visited by thousands of foreigners professing a myriad of confessions. Commercial ties led to unremitting contact with Huguenots, Anabaptists, and others from the Netherlands, France, and the Germanies. Many of these non-Lutherans, to be sure, were but transients, making an obligatory stop at Helsingør on their way through the Sound. But an increasing number sought permanent refuge in Denmark, either fleeing religious persecution or joining the swelling ranks of the cosmopolitan merchant communities at Copenhagen, Helsingør, and Bergen. They brought with them not only alien religious ideas and modes of worship but also the means of spreading these ideas, namely printed theological books and tracts. It should not be presumed, however, that the problem of faction within the Oldenburg State was a simple struggle between a monolithic Lutheran state church and an influx of heterodox foreigners. In the years after Luther’s death in 1546, a dangerous theological division among the Wittenberg master’s followers emerged in the Empire. Many Lutheran divines modelled their teachings on the liberal and inclusive humanism of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s greatest personal disciple. Like Melanchthon, these so-called ‘Philippists’ had great respect for some aspects of Calvinist theology, especially in the interpretation of the Eucharist. By the 1560s, many Philippists outright denied the presence of Christ in the elements of communion (the ‘Real Presence’), which they held to be a papist superstition. Some Philippists went so far as to decry the persistence of the adiaphora, Catholic liturgical practices that Luther had deemed extrascriptural but harmless. Opposed to the Philippists were those Lutherans who favoured a more literal interpretation of Luther’s teachings. These orthodox, or ‘gnesio’, Lutherans did not view Calvinists (or other non-Lutheran Protestants) as mildly erring brethren, but as much as an affront to God as were Catholics. To these men, Philippists,

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by tolerating or even accepting some Calvinist ideas, were nothing but ‘secret Calvinists’ (cryptocalvinists). These factions existed not only in German Protestantism, but in Danish as well. Philippist sentiments were obvious within the Danish clergy from the 1550s on, but they did not go unopposed. For a conscientious Lutheran monarch like Frederik II, this made for a potentially dangerous mixture of creeds and dogmas. Nonetheless, Denmark was able to avoid prolonged clashes between the established Lutheran church and these heterodox minorities, or within the ranks of the Danish Lutheran clergy, a singular achievement within the context of the period after 1559. The Oldenburg state owed its confessional harmony not to any natural inclination towards a particular brand of Lutheranism, but rather to a deliberate effort on the part of the central administration and the king in particular. In order to understand the success of this effort, it is necessary that we first examine the theological stance of the king and of his leading clergymen. The precise nature of Frederik II’s personal piety, like so many aspects of his private life, is not easy to fathom. Just as his father before him, Frederik did not openly belong to any particular theological camp. The Augsburg Confession of 1530, and no other, was the true creed of the Danish state church. Yet there are some indications that Frederik’s faith had a pronounced Philippist tone to it. On visiting the Danish court in October 1585, the English ambassador Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby, expressed his doubts that the king was Lutheran at all. ‘This king hath abolished all images in his churches’, Bertie wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham, ‘and not only he but divers of his nobles are proven to be good Caluinistes, in wch relligion and all other good letters he carefully bringeth up his young princes’.19 Perhaps Bertie in his enthusiasm exaggerated the degree of Frederik’s zeal; if the king were a Calvinist or an iconoclast, no-one else seems to have remarked upon it. The king did, however, surround himself with outspoken Philippists, including his favourite court chaplains, Christoffer Knoff, Niels Nielsen Colding, and Anders Sørensen Vedel. And although Frederik II did not share his father’s active interest in matters theological—he paid a perfunctory personal visit to Melanchthon in 1558, but did not

19

PRO SP75/1/153, Willoughby to Walsingham, 25 October 1585.

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correspond regularly with Melanchthon, Georg Major, or Johannes Bugenhagen as Christian III did—he did continue to grant annual pensions to both Melanchthon and Major.20 It was within the ranks of the episcopacy, however, that the shift towards philippist Lutheranism was most obvious. Between 1557 and 1561, nearly all of the first generation of Lutheran bishop-superintendents died. Some of them, including both Niels and Peder Palladius, had been students of Melanchthon, but the new generation of bishops was more solidly and avowedly philippist in theology. Bishopsuperintendents Hans Albertsen (Sjælland), Tyge Asmundsen (Lund), Niels Jespersen (Fyn), Poul Madsen (Ribe), Laurids Bertelsen (Aarhus), Jørgen Mortensen Borringholm (Vendelbo), and Kjeld Juel (Viborg), all appointed between 1557 and 1562, may not have been as dynamic as their predecessors, but all were disciples of Melanchthon, and several had studied directly under the great pedagogue. Even after a second series of deaths and resignations had shaken up the membership of the episcopacy around 1569–71, the upper clergy remained not just predominately, but exclusively, philippist.21 The most influential member of this philippist ‘party’, the one man who bound together the episcopacy by his charisma and the strength of his achievement as a theologian, however, never achieved the rank of bishop-superintendent. This was Niels Hemmingsen, professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen. The reign of Christian III had been the age of Peder Palladius, and that of Christian IV would be the age of Hans Poulsen Resen; the reign of Frederik II was the age of Niels Hemmingsen. Unlike Palladius and Resen, however, Hemmingsen was an accomplished theologian in his own right, and well before his precipitous fall in 1579 he had managed to earn both fame and notoriety in theological circles well beyond the narrow confines of the Oldenburg state. Humbly born in 1513 on the island of Lolland, Hemmingsen matriculated at Wittenberg in 1537, where he became a member of Melanchthon’s household and developed a close friendship with the German master. Upon his return to Denmark, Hemmingsen was received into the University faculty in 1543, first as a professor of Greek and then of dialectic; in 1553, he was elevated to membership in the theological faculty. He played a major role in the translation and pub20 21

Colding, Studier, p. 60; Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, p. 32. Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 103–4, 135–8.

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lication of the Christian III Bible (1550), and dominated the drafting of both the unofficial Church Ordinance of 1561 and the Foreigner Articles of 1569. He wrote a large number of devotional tracts and liturgical manuals, but was best known for his ability to explain Melanchthonian dogma in plain language. There was no mistaking his philippist leanings. Even as early as 1557, in his treatise Enchiridion theologicum, Hemmingsen went beyond embracing Melanchthon’s Loci communes and began to explore far more dangerous territory, expressing some sympathy for Calvinist interpretations of the Holy Eucharist. Whatever Hemmingsen’s precise theological stance, there can be no doubt as to his immense popularity. He was on good terms with the entire episcopacy, with his fellow members of the høilærde, with the king himself, and with individual members of the Council of State. Niels Kaas, the leading member of the Council after 1570 and chancellor after 1573, was especially close to Hemmingsen after the charismatic teacher took the young Kaas into his household in 1549. In short, Hemmingsen was universally admired within Danish intellectual circles and among the clergy, enjoyed the king’s trust, and seemed to be without an enemy in the world.22 Danish Protestantism might have enjoyed the advantages of solidarity, but European Protestantism as a whole was increasingly beset by faction. Denmark’s commercial and political ties to the rest of Protestant Europe threatened its confessional integrity. Frederik II’s chosen mechanism for avoiding confessional strife was simple: to prevent a potentially dangerous division within Danish Lutheranism by suppressing debate and factionalism by fiat. This policy appears to have first emerged in the wake of the Fürstentag at Naumburg in 1561, and it continued throughout the reign. Printed literature was the first target of this policy. All Danish publications—not just theological tracts, but even simple broadsides—now were subject to rigorous inspection by the høilærde at the University, and had to receive the express approval of the University and of the king before they could appear in print. According to the terms of a January 1562 edict, all foreign religious books and tracts had to undergo the same process before they could be imported into or sold within Denmark; as the edict warned, if the flood of such literature—most of it published in northern Germany, but written in the Danish language—were to go

22

Ibid., pp. 135–7.

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unchecked, it could eventually result in ‘the introduction of many sects and much damage to the true religion’.23 The Protestant diaspora that commenced with Alba’s regime in the Netherlands after 1567 brought significant numbers of Dutch Anabaptists and Calvinists to Denmark; the spectre of confessional civil war demanded strict supervision of non-Lutheran foreigners within the kingdom. In September 1569, Frederik II reissued his father’s ‘foreigner articles’ of 1553, requiring all foreign nationals in Denmark to swear allegiance to the Augsburg Confession.24 The twenty-five articles of faith attached to this ordinance, probably authored by Hemmingsen, represented what has been called a ‘conservative philippist rendering’ of the Augsburg Confession. Foreigners refusing to subscribe to the articles would be expelled; those who signed the articles and failed to honour the obligation could forfeit their property and their lives. Nor were these mere empty threats. In Helsingør in 1574, and in Copenhagen in 1586, Frederik II ordered local authorities to take action against aliens—predominately Dutch Anabaptists—who refused to participate in Lutheran church services; in 1584, the king issued stern warnings to German Lutherans in Bergen who hesitated to recognise the authority of the Danish bishop there.25 Foreign pollution of the state church, however, was only part of the potential problem. Of equal concern were the difficulties that might arise from theological disputes within the Danish clergy. A royal edict of June 1574 decreed that the clergy was to preach and teach strictly according to the Augsburg Confession, and not to engage in debates, subtle or overt, on theological issues. Such debates in other states, the king noted, were attributable either to learned theologians or ‘troublesome people, who seek [to further] their own ambitions more than they do God’s praise and honour’. Such disputes, Frederik wrote, led to unnecessary confusion for ordinary parishioners and ultimately to religious strife. Priests were not to teach or preach anything about the Holy Sacrament or any other theological issue that might run counter to the Augsburg Confession.26 One of the king’s 23

CCD vol. 1, pp. 175–76, 1 January 1562. The complete text of the ‘foreigner articles’ of 1569 is in ‘Kirkelige Forhold og Personligheder i Kong Frederik den Andens Tid’, KHS, Series 2, 4 (1867–68), 231–43. 25 CCD vol. 1, pp. 420–1, 589–90, 20 September 1569 and 13 July 1574; CCD vol. 2, pp. 456–7, 12 November 1586; Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, p. 133. 26 CCD vol. 1, pp. 582–3, 26 June 1574; RAK DK.B.160, acknowledgement of obedience by the priests and professors of Copenhagen, 9 July 1575. 24

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favourite court chaplains, the later royal historiographer Anders Sørensen Vedel, recounted that Frederik preferred sermons that were neither polemical nor controversial: ‘He was greatly disturbed by the disunity and endless dissension [caused] by argumentative writings’.27 What made this policy of enforced non-controversy possible was not merely the common theological viewpoint uniting king, Council, and clergy; it was also the special nature of the relationship between king and episcopacy. The king had committed himself to act as defensor fidei in his coronation charter, but whereas the Council acted as guarantor of traditional liberties and privileges in most cases, it did not take such a stance in ecclesiastical affairs. The political structure of the church was far more monolithic. The king, and the king alone, made and enforced church policies. In this way, the church was a bulwark of support for royal authority. It should be noted, however, that while Frederik II ruled his clergy, involving himself even in the disciplining of wayward parish priests, he did indeed rely upon the clergy and the høilærde for advice. He was fair, even indulgent, in his dealings with the upper clergy. In at least one instance he allowed two of his foremost clerics to scold him sharply over his own behavior. In 1571, Laurids Brockenhuus, an aristocrat of considerable standing and one of the king’s trusted fiefholders, murdered a woman in Copenhagen. Although Brockenhuus was convicted of murder and compelled to pay an enormous fine, Frederik thought seriously of granting pardon to his faithful servant. He turned to Poul Madsen, then bishop-superintendent in Sjælland, and Niels Hemmingsen for advice. Madsen and Hemmingsen took the opportunity to give their royal master a sharp lecture on the patriarchal duties of a monarch and the necessity of the punishment of criminals, no matter what their station. Frederik II’s response is unknown, but neither Madsen nor Hemmingsen suffered for their affrontery.28 The king’s insistence upon firm control over theological discourse within the clergy and over public worship for both subjects and 27 Anders Sørensen Vedel, En sørgelig Ligpredicken: Salig och høylofflig Ihukommelse: Høybaarne Første oc Herre, Herr Frederich den Anden, Danmarckis, Norgis, Vendis oc Gotthis Konning . . . til en christsalig Amindelse, giort udi Riber Domkircke den 5. dag Junii (Copenhagen, 1588), D4 v. 28 DKB Gl. kgl. Sml., 3302, 4o, ‘Theologorum Academiæ Hafniensis Pauli Matthiæ et Nicolai Hemmingii, Svar og Erklæring, angaaende Manddraberes og ander ugiernings Mænds benaadning, Indsendt efter ordre til Hans Kongelige Mtet: K. Friderich den Anden, j anledning af et Manddrab, som Lauridtz Brockenhuus havde beganget. Dateret Kiøbenhaun den 8 Jan: 1582’.

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foreign expatriates alike should not be viewed as intolerance, at least as it is conventionally defined. Within his realms, Frederik demanded outward conformity to the norms of the Confession of Augsburg, but issued no restrictions upon private worship. Frederik II was not troubled by the existence of other forms of Protestantism within other states; he did not view Calvinists as apostates, or even as ‘erring brethren’ as many more moderate Lutheran princes in the Empire did. In many ways, the Danish court between 1559 and the end of the century was extraordinarily tolerant. Frederik’s clergy and his court, like Melanchthon himself or Philippism in general, had a strong humanist bent, an inclination that favoured the development of an unusually rich and vibrant intellectual life at court. Frederik assembled a closeknit circle of intellectuals; it included highly-educated ministers, like Niels Kaas and Peder Oxe, learned clergymen with wide-ranging intellectual interests, like Anders Sørensen Vedel and Christoffer Knoff, and even the French ambassador, Charles de Dançay. The king had a strong affinity for Paracelsian medicine, summoning Petrus Severinus to serve him as his personal physician in 1572 and appointing Johannes Pratensis to the faculty at the University of Copenhagen as professor of medicine. As John Christianson has demonstrated, Frederik’s abiding personal interest in astrology led directly to the creation of Europe’s first state-sponsored institution of scientific research: in 1575, he took the young nobleman Tyge (Tycho) Brahe into his service, and sponsored the activities of Brahe and his considerable body of research assistants at Uraniborg, Brahe’s observatory and informal academy on the island of Hven.29 It would probably be most accurate to label both Frederik II and his court as ‘irenicist’ in their leanings. For while Frederik II may have favoured philippist clergy, and though he took a strong stance against the introduction of foreign religious disputes within his own lands, neither he nor his clergy made anything but the most vague pronouncements on theological issues. In stark contrast to many of his fellow German princes—in particular, his brother-in-law August of Saxony—Frederik II refused to take sides in the passionate debates over the Real Presence in the Eucharist, debates that threatened to 29 John Robert Christianson, On Tycho’s Island. Tycho Brahe and his Assistants, 1570–1601 (Cambridge, 2000); Jole Shackleford, ‘Paracelsianism and Patronage in Early Modern Denmark’, in Bruce T. Moran (ed.), Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Europe Court 1500–1750 (Rochester, 1991), pp. 85–109.

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tear Lutheranism apart in the 1570s. It was not any particular brand of Protestantism that troubled him, but rather the existence of debate— and therefore factionalism—itself. As Frederik II’s foreign policy would soon demonstrate, the triumph of one Protestant faction over another was unimportant, and indeed irrelevant, if internal discord robbed Protestantism of what it needed most: solidarity in the face of a unified, reinvigorated, and militant Catholicism.30 In some regards, the ecclesiastical policies of Frederik II bear a strong resemblance to those of Elizabeth I of England. Both, for example, eschewed the endorsement of theologically-specific statements of faith in favour of an ambiguous official theology, in order to avoid civil strife. Frederik employed much the same tactic that James I would later use in England, when he sought to dissipate the tensions between Arminianists and Puritans by suppressing public debate.31 Unlike either Elizabeth or James, however, Frederik did not have to take into consideration the fears and ambitions of a significant and potentially volatile Romanist minority. The old faith had some adherents in Iceland and in portions of Norway, and there may even have been Jesuit ‘fifth columns’ at work in Flensburg and in Copenhagen itself as early as 1560. But any such Catholic minority must have been so small, fragmented, and isolated as to render it powerless. As an agent of the Fugger banking concern reported after visiting Denmark in 1567, though Danish churches retained many of the physical trappings of the old faith, flesh-and-blood Catholics were simply not to be found in the kingdom, ‘and the common people do not like to hear . . . the words “pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, [or] monk”’.32 Certainly the king had no reason to fear or coddle Danish Catholics; from the beginning of the reign, Frederik II’s attitude towards Catholicism was one of overt and undisguised antipathy.33 During the 1560s, even while preoccupied with the Swedish conflict, Frederik enjoined his clergy to cleanse the liturgy of Catholic practices and the churches of Catholic images, relics, and artifacts. This 30 G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, ‘Protestant Irenicism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in David Loades, ed., The End of Strife (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 78–81. 31 Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (Longman, 1998), pp. 102–24. 32 Fabricius, ‘Danmark i Aaret 1567’, p. 15; Vello Helk, ‘Jesuitten Henrik Mandixen og andre konvertitter fra Flensborg i reformationsårhundredet’, KHS, Series 7, 5 (1963–65), 286–305. 33 Oskar Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia (2 vols, Oslo and Bergen, 1963–80), vol. 1, pp. 36–40.

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the clergy was more than happy to do. The records of the synodal conferences for Sjælland show that this was perhaps the primary concern of the upper clergy during the 1560s; such practices as the elevation of the eucharistic elements in Communion (elevatio), hardly unusual in Lutheran churches, were abolished.34 Like the king’s probable inclination towards philippism, virulently anti-Catholic sentiments were pervasive throughout the clergy and the aristocracy. In 1569, Chancellor Johan Friis persuaded the king’s chaplain Vedel to write a history of papal scandal in Danish verse, based in part on Platina’s infamous Vitæ summorum pontificum (Venice, 1479). The result, Vedel’s Antichristus Romanus (Copenhagen, 1571), combined a shameless, gossipy recounting of papal misdeeds—concentrating on the recent escapades of Alexander VI and Pius V— with a more serious, almost scholarly indictment of the entire papacy, claiming that it was indeed the earthly manifestation of all evil as foretold in the Revelation of St. John:35 So now the Roman pope cannot deny that he is certainly the great and genuine Antichrist, who has been revealed in these most recent days; indeed, therefore he shall go forth from Rome into France, whence he will [be compelled to] retreat again, in even worse [condition] than has happened before. Nonetheless, he remains what he is: the great Belial, the opponent of Christ, the child of depravity, the personification of sin, the enemy of God, the Devil’s lieutenant, a destroyer of churches, a murderer of kings, a liar, the persecutor of the Christian Church, the patron of promiscuity, a leader to all that is evil, a beginning to all ungodliness; the true and genuine great Antichrist who in these recent days shall be revealed and killed with the spirit of the mouth of the Lord; he shall soon be unmasked with the coming of Christ, then he shall be cast into the glowing pit that burns with sulfur, and shall suffer for eternity.

The fact that Vedel at this time frequently associated with several leading members of the Council of State—his patron Friis, Rigshofmester Peder Oxe, the later Chancellor Niels Kaas, and Bjørn Andersen Bjørn, among others—suggests that such opinions were not unwelcome among the highest political circles in the realm. Indeed, Vedel dedicated Antichristus Romanus to both Johan Friis and Peder Oxe. It should also be remembered that Vedel’s book, like any printed in Denmark, would have to go through the rigorous censorship process 34 35

Rørdam, ‘Forhandlinger paa Roskilde Landemode’, pp. 470–4, 479–83. Anders Sørensen Vedel, Antichristus Romanus (Copenhagen, 1571), pp. Bviii–Ci.

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required by the king’s decree of 1562, and could not have been published without bearing the imprimatur of both the king and the høilærde.36 Vedel was only writing what his patrons, the king included, wanted to read. Because of Frederik’s ‘difficulties’ in reading and writing, we know very little about his literary tastes, but he may well have enjoyed such literature himself. Certainly he did little to discourage literary expressions of anti-Roman sentiment, even when it came from the pens of prominent clerics and intellectuals. The single great work of panegyric from Frederik II’s reign, Rasmus Glad’s account of the celebrations surrounding the birth and baptism of Frederik’s son Christian in 1577, is as unmistakeably anti-Catholic as it is royalist in tone. Many of the festivities associated with the royal birth in 1577—in which the king was an active participant—pointedly lampooned the papacy in a fashion that was none-too-subtle. Clearly Frederik II’s aversion to theological controversy did not extend to Catholicism; even the most vicious literary attacks on Catholics received royal sanction throughout the reign.37

Confessional identity and foreign policy, 1559–72 Danish historians have frequently alleged that Frederik II did not manifest any abiding interest in ecclesiastical affairs until the Ditmarschen campaign and the Seven Years’ War of the North had cooled his ardor for the battlefield. These two wars were indeed the most important and most dramatic developments of the first decade of Frederik’s reign, but—as we have already seen—they did not preclude royal involvement in the governance of the church. Nor did more immediate territorial and dynastic interests completely eclipse the king’s concerns over the perceived existence of an omnipresent Catholic threat. That Frederik II’s brand of Protestantism was less accommodating and more militant than that of his father became evident early in the reign. Less than two years after his accession, Frederik found 36 C.F. Wegener, Om Anders Sörensen Vedel, kongelig Historiograph i Frederik IIs og Christian IVs Dage (Copenhagen, 1846), pp. 57–60, 64–6. 37 Karen Skovgaard-Petersen and Peter Zeeberg (eds), Erasmus Lætus’ skrift om Christian IVs fødsel og dåb (1577) (Copenhagen, 1992), pp. 31–7.

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himself dragged into the confessional sparring that was already beginning to threaten the fragile peace so recently established in the Germanies. In the first real display of Protestant solidarity since the Augsburg diet of 1555, the leading Lutheran princes of the Empire— including the electors of Saxony, Brandenburg, and the Palatinate, the dukes of Braunschweig, Mecklenburg, Ernestine Saxony, and Württemberg, and the Landgrave of Hessen—resolved to convene at the city of Naumburg in January 1561. Their intention was to work out any possibly divisive confessional issues between them and shape a collective response to the final session of the Council of Trent. The response to the proposed ‘princely diet’ (Fürstentag) was overwhelmingly positive—nearly all of the invited princes attended in person, and the remainder at least sent delegates. The meeting attracted a great deal of foreign attention; both Elizabeth I and Pope Pius IV sent emissaries. Frederik II had many friends at the Naumburg meeting, his brother-in-law August of Saxony and his old Landsknecht friend Günther von Schwarzburg foremost among them, so it was hardly surprising that a Lutheran sovereign of Frederik’s stature should be invited too.38 The king was unable to attend the Naumburg meeting. Nonetheless, he heartily approved of the majority opinion of the assembled princes, namely the strict observance of the Augsburg Confession; indeed, this would be the central idea behind the king’s proposed church ordinance of 1561. The Naumburg meeting was not a success, and despite promising beginnings it had already begun to exhibit signs of faction and discord at the beginning of February 1561. The bitterness caused by the recent transfer of the Saxon electorate from the Ernestine Wettins to the Albertine line, among other disputes, rendered Protestant solidarity almost impossible. The Naumburg meeting did, however, manage to accomplish something during its short life: the collective rejection, by German Protestants, of papal efforts to bring about a truly general council. The idea of a ‘general council’ that would resolve the schism separating Protestants from the Roman church, of course, was one 38 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.1, August to Frederik, 7 December 1560; Resen, Krønicke, pp. 47–8; Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 22–5; Robert Calinich, Der Naumburger Fürstentag 1561. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Lutherthums und des Melanchthonismus (Gotha, 1870), pp. 1–137, 213; August Kluckhohn (ed.), Briefe Friedrich des Frommen, Kurfürsten von der Pfalz mit verwandten Schriftstücken (2 vols, Braunschweig, 1868), vol. 1, p. 288 n. 1; Kornerup (ed.), Confessio et ordinatio, pp. xix–xxiii.

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of the most successful and pervasive fictions of the early sixteenth century. But the Augsburg Interim of 1548, and the security offered by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the tolerant leadership of Emperor Ferdinand I, eliminated any enthusiasm for compromise among the Protestant German Reichsfürsten. By 1561, they harboured nothing but a malevolent suspicion of any ecumenical efforts on the part of the papacy. So when Pius IV made an honest effort to include not only German Protestants, but also the hitherto ignored Scandinavian kingdoms, in the third and final session of the Council of Trent, his emissaries did not encounter a warm welcome. Pius dispatched two of his most experienced diplomats—Zacharia Delfino, Bishop of Lesina, and Giovanni Francesco Commendone, Bishop of Zanthe— northwards in early December 1560, with the primary purpose of delivering an invitation to Frederik II of Denmark. Since the princely meeting at Naumburg was a matter of common knowledge, and since it was rumoured that the Danish king would attend, the papal legates made their way towards Naumburg, where they arrived at the end of January 1561. Frederik II, of course, was not at Naumburg. Nor were the attending princes especially cordial to the Catholic emissaries. Forewarned of the approach of Delfino and Commendone, the presiding prince— Elector Palatine Friedrich III (‘the Pious’), not yet a confirmed Calvinist but already militant and uncompromising—cajoled the others into refusing private audiences to the papal legates. After keeping Delfino and Commendone waiting in their lodgings for over a week, the assembled princes haughtily rejected the proffered invitation from the pope. Even as the meeting began to break up shortly thereafter, Commendone had no more luck with the individual participants. Delfino journeyed south to focus his attentions upon the southern German princes; Commendone retired to Antwerp, there to await further instructions—and funding—for the projected trip into Denmark itself.39 As Commendone waited patiently at Antwerp with his assistant and companion, the Habsburg diplomat Gaspar Schöneck,40 Frederik II was already being informed of his hopeful visitors. August of Saxony had alerted his brother-in-law to the presence of the papal legates at Naumburg, and on 6 February 1561—the day after Delfino 39 40

Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 25–6. In Danish sources, his name is rendered as ‘Caspar von Schöneich’.

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and Commendone received a formal audience with the princes—the Naumburg assembly wrote directly to King Frederik, asking him to honour their agreement not to treat separately with papal diplomats.41 Other rumours, far more alarming ones, reached the king from other sources as well. An anonymous letter from Lübeck, sent to Frederik in late April 1561, warned the king of the foul intentions of the papacy: how Pius IV had seized the papal tiara through a bloody combination of trickery and murder; how he and his adherents at Trent planned to overturn the Augsburg settlement and extirpate Lutheranism in the Empire; how the pope had even hoped to attack the Lutheran princes as they met at Naumburg.42 Such rumours were rife in northern Germany that spring; as Commendone passed through Osnabrück en route to Denmark, he observed that military recruiters were extraordinarily busy, and that large numbers of Landsknechten were marching northeast towards Holstein and Denmark. Some local citizens informed him that the king of Denmark was preparing to make war on his Catholic foes, and that Commendone was himself an object of suspicion, followed everywhere he went by Protestant spies. The nuncio began to suspect that the Naumburg meeting was nothing less than an attempt to form an alliance, enlisting the aid of the ‘young and wild’ Frederik II, to oppose the Council of Trent by force.43 Still, Commendone and Schöneck pressed on, reaching the Danish frontier early in July 1561. Their initial contacts with the Danish government appeared to offer some hope. Schöneck managed to communicate with Heinrich Rantzau, Frederik II’s loyal governor in Holstein, who responded quickly and courteously. The king, Rantzau informed Schöneck, would soon be visiting Koldinghus, far closer to the Holstein border than Copenhagen; perhaps Schöneck and Commendone should write directly to the king there. This they did, and their hopes were dashed immediately. Frederik II wrote to Schöneck on 22 July 1561, granting him audience at Koldinghus as an emissary of the emperor, but deny-

41 Calinich, Der Naumburger Fürstentag 1561, pp. 213–14; Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 29–30. 42 RAK TKUA/AD 3. Realia 7: Ecclesiastica, ‘Schreiben eines Pabstliche Nuntij an Ihre Königl. Mayt. d.d. Lübeck 1561’. 43 Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 28–9; Adam Wandruszka (ed.), Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst ergänzenden Aktenstücken. 2. Abteilung, 1560–1572, Bd. 2: Nuntius Commendone 1560 (Dezember)–1562 (März) (Graz/Köln, 1953), pp. 18–19, Commendone to Borromeo, 20 May and 24 May 1561.

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ing the same privilege to Commendone. Indeed, Frederik explicitly refused Commendone permission to enter Denmark at all, for any purpose. With studied contempt, the king did not even extend Commendone the courtesy of a personal rejection, but wrote only to Schöneck.44 Commendone had hoped, at least, to obtain free passage through Danish lands to Sweden, in order to present his papers to Erik XIV, but the barely-concealed hostility of the Dane and the noncommittal indifference of the Swedish sovereign precluded any chance of success. Fortunately, the Curia spared their faithful servant further embarrassment, relieving Commendone of his duties in northern Europe in November 1561.45 Frederik II’s rejection of the papal emissaries in 1561 had few if any repercussions. Rome did not have high expectations of such a mission, and it would be some time before the papacy would attempt to make direct contact with a Danish sovereign. The king himself found much more pressing matters at hand, as relations with Erik XIV of Sweden continued to deteriorate. But the Commendone affair did attract some favourable attention in Protestant Germany. Though not a participant in the Naumburg meeting of 1561, Frederik had publicly demonstrated his solidarity with the most militant Lutheran princes, something that the latter—notably Friedrich III of the Palatinate and August of Saxony—had hoped for since the king’s accession two years earlier. Indeed, to the Elector August, Frederik II now appeared to be ready to pursue a higher calling: that of Holy Roman Emperor. The idea of a Protestant prince—and especially a king of Denmark— overturning the established Habsburg dynasty in the Imperial office may seem unlikely in retrospect, given the longevity of the House of Austria on the Imperial throne. As Heinz Duchhardt has demonstrated, however, the effort to promote a Protestant opposition candidate to the Imperial succession was a recurrent theme in the political history of the Old Reich from the time of the Reformation until well into the eighteenth century. In the early 1560s, August of Saxony was the foremost promoter of this scheme, but his ambition was not

44

RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Kejseren A.II.11: Commendone to Frederik, 16 July 1561; Schöneck to Frederik, 16 July 1561; Schöneck to Rantzau, 13 July and 16 July 1561; Rantzau to Schöneck, 15 July 1561; Rantzau to Frederik, 17 July 1561; Frederik to Schöneck, 22 July 1561. 45 Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 30–5.

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for himself; rather, he advocated the candidacy of his brother-in-law Frederik II. Since Frederik’s visit to the Empire in 1557–58, August had been the warmest advocate of a match between Frederik and one of Ferdinand I’s daughters. Starting sometime in 1561, however, August began to drop hints that he would support Frederik’s election as King of the Romans, heir apparent to the Imperial crown, a position for which Archduke Maximilian—eldest son of Emperor Ferdinand I—was assumed to be the natural choice. Heinrich Rantzau, Frederik’s primary adviser on Continental affairs, waxed enthusiastic about the idea, and he sought actively to advance his master’s cause at the wedding of William of Orange to Anna of Saxony at Dresden in August 1561, which Rantzau attended as Frederik’s representative. It is difficult to say exactly what the Saxon elector hoped to gain through such an arrangement, other than the considerable advantage of having a brother-in-law on the Imperial throne. August and the Archduke Maximilian were friends, after all, and the probability that Maximilian would succeed his easygoing father did not elicit very much trepidation on the part of the Protestant princes. August may have had a particular vision of an ideal Empire, one in which the strict interpretation of the Augsburg settlement of 1555 guaranteed internal peace and stability, but Maximilian did not pose a threat to this hope. At any rate, the elector of Saxony did not pursue the Imperial candidacy on Frederik’s behalf with great ardor. No mention of the plan appears in the correspondence between Frederik and August, and when August met with Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg at Torgau in November 1561 the Saxon admitted that Frederik would probably not accept the Roman crown even if it were offered to him.46 Serious or not, Danish ambitions on the Imperial title—or, rather, Saxon ambitions on Denmark’s behalf—were no secret. Catherine de’ Medici in particular saw in the Oldenburg candidacy a possible means for advancing her own agenda in the Empire. Continuing the same anti-Habsburg stance that had figured so prominently in the foreign policies of Francis I and Henry II, in part by seeking close ties with the Protestant German princes, Catherine was happy to give the 46 Heinz Duchhardt, Protestantisches Kaisertum und altes Reich. Die Diskussion über die Konfession des Kaisers in Politik, Publizistik und Staatsrecht (Wiesbaden, 1977), p. 63. On Maximilian’s election, see: Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven, 2001), pp. 47–9.

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impression that France would support a Danish bid for the emperor’s crown. Frederik II played right into her hands. Hopes of marrying Frederik to a Habsburg princess—like Leonora, daughter of Ferdinand I—seemed very promising while Christian III was still alive, but Frederik’s unwillingness to allow his bride to practice Catholicism had effectively wrecked these plans by the time of the Naumburg meeting. Encouraged by the Elector August, Frederik pursued other options, including a possible match with Mary Queen of Scots. Such an alliance could have had significant diplomatic advantages for Denmark: it would bind Denmark more closely to France and to Scotland at a time when Frederik’s greatest rival, Erik XIV of Sweden, was actively courting Elizabeth I of England. The idea of a Scottish match was not entirely far-fetched. According to a Spanish report, William Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s pro-English secretary, claimed that Elizabeth I had no objections to a marriage between Frederik and the Queen of Scots. Catherine de’ Medici gave signs of her favour as well. Not long after the death of Mary Stuart’s husband, King Francis II of France, in December 1560, Frederik II dispatched his francophilic councillor Jørgen Lykke til Overgård to the Valois court to broach the issue. Little is known of the negotiations, but Lykke was warmly received at Paris, and in the summer of 1561 Charles IX bestowed upon the Danish king the Order of St. Michel. The prospects for a Scottish match still appeared favourable as late as the spring of 1564, when a Scottish ambassador to Denmark, William Douglas of Whittingham, bluntly asked Frederik about his willingness to marry the queen. Frederik continued to entertain the idea until late 1564, over the vocal objections of Heinrich Rantzau, who believed that the marriage would only serve to antagonise Spain and—hoping to sway the king—insisted that Mary was not especially pretty. Only the sad tidings of Mary’s wedding to Darnley at Holyrood in July 1565 dashed Frederik’s hopes for good.47 A Danish-Scottish marriage was one thing; that Frederik II saw in such a marriage a potential springboard to the Imperial throne was another. Frederik never voiced any interest in the Kaiserkrone, 47 Frederik Krarup, Oplysninger om Kong Frederik den Andens Ægteskabs-Forhandlinger (Copenhagen, 1872), pp. 27–30; Daae, ‘Frederik IIs paatænkte lothringske Giftermaal’, pp. 71–4; Cal. SP Spanish vol. 1, pp. 338, 340, Bishop Quadra to Philip II and Ferdinand I, 26 June 1563; Wandruszka (ed.), Nuntius Commendone, part 2, pp. 40–1, Commendone to Borromeo, 26 November 1561; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1563–64, fol. 391v–6v, Frederik to August, 16 June 1564.

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and there is little or no evidence to suggest that Frederik ever gave the matter serious thought, at least not this early in the reign. At a meeting with August at Kloster Oldenstadt in September 1562, the king admitted that his chances of winning the election were slim. In Vienna, Madrid, and Rome, however, Frederik’s ardent desire to stand as a candidate for King of the Romans was taken as a given, and the thought excited a great deal of worry. According to common rumour, Frederik enjoyed the backing of nearly all of the electors. It was widely believed that the occasion of William of Orange’s wedding to Princess Anna of Saxony, celebrated in Leipzig in August 1561, would serve as an opportunity for Frederik to meet with the three Protestant secular electors, who could then work out a common strategy. If Catherine de’ Medici lent her endorsement to Frederik’s candidacy, the results could well be disastrous, as it was commonly assumed that the three ecclesiastical electors were pensioners of the French crown and would therefore follow Catherine’s lead. Frederik’s aggression in the Ditmarschen in 1559 had demonstrated that the king could indeed be both forceful and restless, and his haughty rejection of the Commendone/Schönaick mission in 1561 was proof of his hostility towards Catholicism. Indeed, Commendone himself believed that Catherine de’ Medici, Anthony of Bourbon, Elizabeth I, the French Huguenots, and the Protestant princes of the Empire were all conspiring to place the Imperial crown on the brow of the Dane. Ferdinand I’s diplomat Johann Ulrich Zasius, the Venetian resident ambassador at Vienna, and even Cardinal Granvelle all assumed that Frederik would announce himself as Archduke Maximilian’s challenger in the election of 1562.48 In short, regardless of Frederik’s ambitions or lack thereof, in Catholic Europe the Danish king was perceived as the aggressive young champion of a militant and resurgent Protestantism. Nor did such suspicions diminish with time. Rumours of Frederik’s Imperial ambitions persisted well into the 1580s, taking on yet more threatening overtones as the Danish king became openly involved in attempts to form an antiCatholic coalition after 1585.49 48 Wandruszka (ed.), Nuntius Commendone, part 2, pp. 19, 23, 30–1, 40–1, Commendone to Borromeo, 24 May, 10 July, 4 September, and 26 November 1561. 49 Walter Platzhoff, Frankreich und die deutschen Protestanten in den Jahren 1570–1573 (Munich, 1912), p. 3; Duchhardt, Protestantisches Kaisertum, pp. 61–4; Robert Holtzmann, Kaiser Maximilian II. bis zu seiner Thronbesteigung, 1527–1564 (Berlin, 1903), pp. 393–4; Walter Wilhelm Goetz, Maximilians II. Wahl zum römischen König 1562 (Würzburg, 1891), pp. 85–7.

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Regardless of his intimate ties to the Empire, Frederik II generally steered clear of such fanciful designs, focusing his attentions and resources on the conflict with Sweden. But even the escalating rivalry in the Baltic did not permit complete isolation from affairs in central and western Europe. Indeed, worsening relations with Sweden lent an added degree of menace to a familiar threat: the dynastic intrigues of the house of Lorraine. Since 1556, Christian III had sought to negate the claims of Duchess Christine to the Danish crown by marrying Frederik to Renée of Lorraine, or at least to render the threat meaningless by means of a Habsburg match. By the time of Christian III’s death in 1559, none of the other proposed matches for Prince Frederik, including that with Leonora of Habsburg, had proven satisfactory or successful. Christine of Lorraine, however, remained willing to consider pledging her daughter to Frederik of Denmark. Frederik, in his mid-twenties and handsome, was eligible, and a Danish marriage would redeem the besmirched family honour of the dowager duchess. No doubt Christine was encouraged by the exiled Peder Oxe, who hoped that the plan could lead to the restoration of his properties and titles in Denmark. There were many in Frederik’s government who saw great advantages to the Lorraine match, especially Heinrich Rantzau. Rantzau opined that a marriage with Renée would allow Denmark to remain on good terms with both Spain and France simultaneously. Rantzau did his best to keep the option of a Lorraine marriage open, but as Frederik’s desultory negotiations with Lorraine dragged on into the early 1560s Rantzau had little cause for hope. The issue of Renée’s Catholicism stood in the way, as did Frederik’s assertions that neither Christine nor Renée had a valid claim to the Danish throne. Frederik was by now exhibiting greater interest in a dynastic union with either Elizabeth I of England or Mary Queen of Scots, though his ardor was not reciprocated, and marriage with Elizabeth had not been seriously discussed for nearly a decade; the king’s as yet unspoiled hope of marrying Anna Hardenberg likewise kept him from pursuing any marriage alliance with much enthusiasm. Even before the Lorraine marriage negotiations sputtered to an anticlimatic end in 1565, Christine had resumed her scheming to regain her lost patrimony by force. Her timing was perfect, for although Lorraine by itself did not possess the resources to pose a serious threat, Denmark was by now completely distracted by its expensive and bloody war with Sweden. Nor was that all. Peder Oxe, who vacillated between seeking reconciliation with his king and plotting vengeance against

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his old homeland, was beginning to lean towards the latter. Oxe encouraged Christine to pursue a marriage alliance between Renée and Erik XIV of Sweden, the latter recently spurned as a suitor by Elizabeth I of England. Christine was aided by petty princely disputes within the Empire as well. For Oxe had made the acquaintance of one of the most disruptive and tragic figures of sixteenth-century German history, a minor nobleman named Wilhelm von Grumbach. Grumbach (1503–67) was an Imperial knight without means. He had been a political failure for most of his life, and bore heavy grudges against those who he felt had wronged him. He was willing to go to almost any length to satisfy his thirst for revenge; in 1558, for example, he successfully carried out a plot to murder the bishop of Würzburg, Melchior Zobel, with whom he had had a territorial dispute of long standing.50 In 1557, Grumbach linked himself with a prince who felt himself similarly abused: he entered the service of Johann Friedrich II, duke of Saxony, son and namesake of the Ernestine elector of Saxony who had been imprisoned and shorn of his electoral dignities in the wake of the Schmalkaldic War. Together, this quartet of disaffected individuals—Oxe, Christine of Lorraine, Grumbach, and Johann Friedrich II—was potentially dangerous. Oxe wanted revenge upon the monarchy that had disgraced him; Christine aspired to overthrow the ‘usurper’ Frederik II; Johann Friedrich blamed Frederik’s brother-in-law, Elector August, for his own demotion in status; and Grumbach—after 1563 an outlaw of the Empire—wanted only to make a mark for himself at someone else’s expense. Their grievances against Denmark and Saxony led, naturally, to ties with Sweden during the 1560s. A Swedish-SaxonLorraine alliance never came to pass, but negotiations between the three states continued sporadically between 1564 and 1566. As Jason Lavery has demonstrated, the Scandinavian rivalry—by involving participants like Grumbach and the Ernestine house—thereby threatened to disrupt the stability of the Empire. Ultimately the Lorraine conspiracy would not amount to anything. Peder Oxe’s return to Copenhagen and to Frederik II’s good graces ameliorated the hostilities between Lorraine and Denmark to a degree. Erik XIV’s attempts to forge an alliance with Lorraine disintegrated in 1567, as the Swedish king commenced his rapid descent into madness. Nor was Duke Johann Friedrich fated to fulfil his dreams of vengeance 50

Daae, ‘Frederik IIs paatænkte lothringske Giftermaal’, pp. 80–6.

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upon his Albertine cousins and their confederates. His covert plans to aid Sweden against Denmark were laid bare when the Danes captured, interrogated, and executed a Saxon emissary to Stockholm late in 1566, and soon the duke suffered for his transgressions against the Empire as well. Refusing to take action against his servant Grumbach, and ignoring thereby the edicts of the emperor and of the Diet of Augsburg (1566), Johann Friedrich himself was under the ban of the Empire by the summer of 1566. With Emperor Maximilian’s sanction, August of Saxony attacked his Ernestine cousin, laid siege to Johann Friedrich’s stronghold at Gotha, and by April 1567 had compelled the duke’s surrender. The emperor incarcerated Johann Friedrich for life in Steiermark; Grumbach was ignominiously executed for his crimes against the Empire.51 What made the intrigues of Christine of Lorraine distressing was not the involvement of Erik XIV, Grumbach, or Johann Friedrich. Lorraine itself could not have greatly strengthened the Swedish war effort, and the Elector August had shown just how ephemeral was the threat posed by his Ernestine cousin and Grumbach. Rather, it was the possibility that a larger power might become involved, and Spain was the most likely candidate. Spain had had little contact with the Scandinavian kingdoms prior to the 1570s. The Baltic trade was at this point only marginally interesting to Spanish merchants, and Spanish-owned ships made up a very small proportion of Baltic maritime traffic. But the Baltic trade was vital for the Netherlands, and so long as the Spanish Habsburgs governed the Netherlands then Nordic affairs would directly affect the welfare of its subjects and the taxes that flowed from the Low Countries to Spain. As in everything, the Sound linked Denmark to the rest of the European world.52 The Speyer treaty, to be sure, provided some basic assurances that Denmark was safe from Habsburg retribution on behalf of Christian II’s heirs, but because of Duchess Christine’s unrelenting hostility 51 Ibid., pp. 86–110; Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge, pp. 25–7, 48–51, 70, 86–7, 104–5; Häfner, Geschichte des Niedersächsischen Kreises, pp. 33–42; Poul Colding, ‘De lothringske praktikker mod Danmark i syvårskrigens første år’, in Smaaskrifter tilegnede Professor, Dr. phil. Aage Friis (Copenhagen, 1940), pp. 63–81; Ingvar Andersson, ‘Erik XIV och Lothringen’, Scandia, 6 (1933), 23–62. The standard, exhaustive account of the affair is Friedrich Ortloff, Geschichte der Grumbachischen Händel (4 vols, Jena, 1868–70). 52 On the importance of the Baltic trade to Spanish interests, see: Carlos GomezCenturion Jimenez, Felipe II, la empresa de Inglaterra y el comercio septentrional (1566–1609) (Madrid, 1988), pp. 29, 77–9, 89, 126–9, 145–50.

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towards Denmark Spanish friendship could not be taken for granted in Copenhagen. The dowager duchess incessantly petitioned Cardinal Granvelle, Philip II’s minister in the Netherlands and Italy, requesting Spanish aid in reclaiming the Danish throne. Diplomatic hearsay tended to confirm that Christine had met with some success. As early as 1559, William of Orange suspected Spanish involvement in Christine’s machinations; five years later, Hubert Languet, the prominent French humanist and Saxon agent, wrote that he knew for certain that there was a Spanish-Lorraine cabal directed against Denmark. Elector Palatine Friedrich III reported in February 1565 that Spanish and Lorraine agents had recruited nearly ten thousand troops in and around Hildesheim for an attack on Denmark.53 Frederik II, immersed in his war with Sweden, was not about to take any chances. In the spring of 1565 he sent Councillor Jørgen Lykke to Madrid, to remind Philip II of the terms of the Speyer settlement and to ask that Spain withhold support for ‘the intrigues of Lorraine’.54 At the time of the Lykke embassy, Frederik II had nothing to fear from Philip II. Granvelle had dutifully relayed Christine’s requests for aid to his Habsburg master, but the cardinal found the duchess’s persistence annoying; Christine ‘dreams always’ of revenge upon Denmark, Granvelle informed Philip, despite the ‘hundred times’ he had dissuaded her. Moreover, Granvelle bluntly told Christine that she should not expect Spanish support. Such an endeavour would not be logistically practical, and anyway Spain and the Netherlands counted on Danish friendship.55 The Lorraine threat, in short, was 53 N. Japikse (ed.), Correspondentie van Willem den Eerste, prins van Oranje (The Hague, 1934), vol. 1, pp. 232–3, 343–4, William of Orange to Günther von Schwarzburg, 24 March and 2 May 1561; Japikse, ed., Correspondentie, vol. 1, p. 316, William of Orange to Jean de Ligne, Count Aremberg, 10 December 1559; Andreas Schumacher (ed.), Gelehrter Männer Briefe an die Könige in Dännemark, vom Jahr 1522 bis 1663 (3 vols, Copenhagen, 1758–59), vol. 2, pp. 400–2, Johann Sturm to Frederik II, 14 September 1560; Platzhoff, Frankreich und die deutschen Protestanten, p. 8; Arcana saeculi XVI: Huberti Langueti epistolae secretae ad principem suum Augustum Saxoniae ducem (Halle, 1699), vol. 3, pp. 295–7, Hubert Languet’s report of 7 November 1564; Kluckhohn (ed.), Briefe Friedrich des Frommen, vol. 1, p. 549, Friedrich III to Johann Wilhelm of Saxony, 6 February 1565; Christian Molbech, ‘En Notice om Philip den Andens Erobringsplaner mod Danmark’, HTD, Series 1, 6 (1845), 609–14. 54 RAK TKUA/SD/Spanien A.II.2: Frederik II’s instructions for Jørgen Lykke, 17 April 1565; Philip II to Frederik, 19 June 1565; Jensen, Danmarks konflikt, pp. 170–7. 55 Correspondencia de los principes de Alemania con Felipe II y de los embajadores de éste en la Corte de Viena (1556 á 1563) (Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vols 98–101; Madrid, 1891), vol. 98, p. 250, Conde de Luna to Philip II of Spain, 13 October 1561; L.P. Gachard (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des

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a chimera. Distance and mutual profit guaranteed cordial relations between Denmark and Spain. The Netherlands trade in the Baltic was too valuable for either party to put at risk. The outbreak of revolt in the Low Countries in late summer 1566 changed all that, and for two reasons. The first had to do with the confessional implications of the revolt. Frederik found himself genuinely torn by the conflict. On the one hand, Frederik was—like virtually any sovereign of his day—a legitimist, and he found it difficult to sympathise with subjects who rebelled against legitimate political authority. The fact that religious repression was an integral part of Spain’s response to the revolt, however, swayed opinion at the Danish court in favour of the rebels. Heinrich Rantzau was particularly well-informed on the course of events in the Low Countries, and his frequent reports to Frederik II were anything but impartial. Rantzau provided the king with numerous examples of Alba’s ‘inhuman tyranny’, and a lurid account of the martyrdom of Counts Egmont and Hoorne. He did not hesitate to lay the final blame on higher authorities: on the pope, who had sent a golden sword to Alba as a token of his appreciation for the duke’s persecution of the Dutch heretics, and especially on Philip II. To Rantzau, as to many Protestant activists, Philip II embodied all the cruelty, militancy, and malevolence of the post-Tridentine Church. Informing Frederik of the suspicious death of Philip’s heir Don Carlos, Rantzau repeated the commonplace accusation of murder; one should fear Philip’s intentions in the Netherlands ‘because the king did not even spare his own son’. Philip’s ministers—whom Rantzau characterised as ‘asses’ who did not dare to tell their master that his policies were laying waste to his own lands and subjects—deserved some of the blame, but Philip II was the evil mastermind behind an insidious Catholic plot.56 Frederik’s close personal ties with William of Orange, dating from the king’s tour of the Empire in 1557–58, undoubtedly helped to push Frederik’s sympathies in the direction of the rebels.

Pays-Bas (5 vols, Brussels, 1848–79), vol. 1, p. 342, and vol. 2, p. 70, Granvelle to Philip II, 17 February 1565 and 5 April 1569; M. Edmond Poullet (ed.), Correspondance du Cardinal de Granvelle, 1565–1586 (12 vols, Brussels, 1877–96), vol. 1, p. 179, and vol. 2, pp. 177, 185, Granvelle to Christine of Lorraine, 29 March and 23 December 1566. 56 Brandt, Heinrich Rantzau, p. 85; Gustav Wolf, ‘Kurfürst August und die Anfänge des niederländischen Aufstands’, Neues Archiv für die sächsische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 14 (1893), 54–77.

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The second reason for the change in Frederik’s attitude towards Spain was perhaps the most compelling. The steady build-up of Spanish military forces in the Netherlands, commencing with Alba’s arrival there in 1567, meant that Spain’s vast military power was no longer a distant or abstract thing. Spanish troops were now within several days’ march of Danish territory, and even closer if Philip II should decide to attack Denmark by sea. Precisely why Philip would choose to attack Denmark was unclear, but Frederik’s advisers made sure to point out that it could indeed happen, and that Philip was not a man to be trusted. Peder Oxe, whose time in Lorraine probably gave him the most intimate knowledge of Spanish politics of any in Frederik’s service, believed that Alba’s ambitions might lead him to launch an attack on Denmark. He was not alone. Rantzau warned that the Spanish military presence in the Low Countries put northwestern Germany in danger, and that Alba would not hesitate to occupy Ostfriesland, Oldenburg, and Delmenhorst if it suited his purposes. Intelligence gathered in Protestant Germany appeared to support Oxe’s and Rantzau’s suppositions.57 As a Danish tutor in Strassburg reported to the father of his young charges in September 1567,58 the Spaniards around here have departed immediately . . . for the Netherlands. May God in His mercy turn his wrath from us; it is to be feared that there shall be a great effusion of blood. . . . Some say that the Dutch and the Brabanters have reconciled with the king of Spain, that [Philip II] intends [instead] on making war on England; some believe also that he has something against Denmark in mind. I hope that God will hinder him in his intent, that he shall not crush the true religion, as he and the pope always have in mind.

The sudden proximity of Spanish power urged Frederik II towards a cautious stance. Although he offered his friend William of Orange, now exiled, sanctuary within Denmark in July 1567, the king did not openly express any sympathy with Orange’s cause, and fortunately William turned down the offer of a Danish safe-haven.59 In a way,

57 Troels-Lund, Peder Oxe, pp. 196–200; Brandt, Heinrich Rantzau, pp. 85, 90; Andreas Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz. Eine Studie zu den Grundelementen politischen Handelns bei Maximilian II. (1564–1576) (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 294–5. 58 ‘Et dansk Øjenvidnes Beretning om Bartholomæusnatten i Paris’, KHS, Series 2, 5 (1869–71), 248–9, Søren Skøtt to Christoffer Gøje, 1 September 1567. 59 Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (ed.), Archives ou correspondance inédite de la maison d’Orange-Nassau, Series 1 (9 vols, Leiden, 1835–47), vol. 3, p. 109, Frederik to Orange, 9 July 1567.

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Frederik’s silence did not matter; the king’s Protestantism made him automatically suspect in Spanish eyes. Günther von Schwarzburg, Frederik’s old comrade-in-arms and Orange’s brother-in-law, worked with William’s brother Louis to present Frederik with an offer to marry Juliane of Nassau, William’s sister. Frederik entertained the idea only very briefly and without much enthusiasm. Already engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Sweden, and still in fear of Lorraine’s intrigues, the king could not afford to alienate Spain by making a marriage alliance with a notorious rebel.60 The possibility of the Oldenburg-Nassau match, however, quickly became common knowledge throughout Europe by 1569. These rumours did not win Frederik any friends in Madrid or Brussels. Indeed, Granvelle reported as fact that Frederik and Juliane were betrothed, and that Orange had also arranged a marriage between a daughter of August of Saxony and Johann Casimir, second son of Elector Palatine Friedrich III. This, Granvelle argued, was only the prelude to a much more disturbing development: Orange, after brokering a peace settlement between Denmark and Sweden, was engineering an anti-Spanish alliance that included Denmark, Sweden, and England.61 What made such stories especially damning was that they were not entirely false. There was just enough truth in them to cast some doubt on Frederik’s intentions regarding the Dutch Revolt. Frederik did not wed Juliane of Nassau, but Granvelle was right about the other marriage; in June 1570, Johann Casimir married Elisabeth of Saxony, thereby uniting Germany’s most militantly Calvinist prince with its wealthiest and most influential Lutheran dynasty. Likewise, Frederik did not join any anti-Spanish league, but certainly the Dutch rebels and their English sympathisers hoped that he would. Guerau de Spes, Philip II’s ambassador in London, noted with apprehension the arrival of Danish ‘pirates’ in England, destined to fight the Spanish, and Alba fretted over reports that Frederik II was raising 60 Krarup, Frederik den Andens Ægteskabs-Forhandlinger, pp. 33–5; Jensen (ed.), Frederik IIs egenhændige breve, pp. 35–6, 42, Frederik to Günther von Schwarzburg, 13 April 1565 and 14 June 1568. 61 StAM 4f. Holstein 11, Christine of Holstein to Wilhelm IV of Hessen, 16 January 1569; Poullet (ed.), Correspondance du Cardinal de Granvelle, vol. 3, pp. 443, 490, Morillon to Granvelle, 10 January and 28 February 1569; Poullet (ed.), Correspondance du Cardinal de Granvelle, vol. 3, p. 480, Granvelle to Grobbendoncq, 19 February 1569; Poullet, ed., Correspondance du Cardinal de Granvelle, vol. 3, pp. 482–4, Granvelle to Philip II, 23 February 1569; Gustav Turba (ed.), Venetianische Depeschen vom Kaiserhofe, (4 vols, Vienna, 1895), vol. 3, p. 466 n. 2.

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an army to attack the city of Hamburg in 1571.62 Denmark’s precarious position, balanced between the rebellious Dutch and the Spanish government, was rendered even more complicated by the actions of Frederik’s uncle, Duke Adolf of Holstein. Adolf ’s German ambitions embarrassed and worried Frederik. Indeed, the king was spurred to hasty action in the Ditmarschen campaign of 1559 in large part because he distrusted his uncle’s designs on the territory. The duke’s loyalties during the Dutch revolt were ambiguous. Although Adolf received the Garter from Elizabeth I in 1560, he had been in Spanish service since 1556. In 1572, he led a small mercenary contingent in Alba’s army. None of this reflected very well on Frederik II. The king’s own uncle was serving the hated Alba, but Adolf ’s predominately Lutheran troops—mostly Holsteiners, though one Flemish observer labelled them ‘the Danes’—despoiled and desecrated Catholic churches in the Netherlands, and allowed their Lutheran and Calvinist chaplains to preach in public.63 In such circumstances, Frederik II had to tread very carefully. He could not risk alienating Alba and Philip II. When Alba lodged a formal protest about increases in the Sound dues and in the tariff on exports of Norwegian timber in 1568, Frederik II backed down immediately and without protest. The king quickly commanded his customs officers and local authorities to restore merchants from the Netherlands to their previously privileged position.64 Frederik deliberately avoided giving William of Orange any support, moral or physical, beyond bland pleasantries and expressions of friendship, and in his correspondence with the prince was careful to refer to Philip II as ‘our friend’. When, in 1571, Orange requested the use of two Norwegian harbours as refuge for Dutch privateers and their Spanish prizes, the Danish king prudently refused.65 62

Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 2, pp. 147, 324–5, Guerau de Spes to Philip II, 9 May 1569 and 19 July 1571; Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 2, pp. 261–2, Antonio de Guaras to Zayas, 28 July 1570; Cal. SP Spanish vol. 2, p. 348, Guerau de Spes to Alba, 31 October 1571; Bertrand Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, Correspondance diplomatique de Bertrand Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, ambassadeur de France en Angleterre de 1568 à 1575 (7 vols, Paris, 1888–1940), vol. 3, p. 453, Mothe Fénélon to Charles IX of France, 31 January 1571. 63 Poullet, (ed.), Correspondance du Cardinal de Granvelle, vol. 4, pp. 432–3, Morillon to Granvelle, 18 September 1572; Häfner, Geschichte des Niedersächsischen Kreises, pp. 43–6. 64 RAK TKUA/SD/Span Ned A.I.2, Alba to Frederik, 12 April 1568, and Frederik to Alba, 5 May 1568; NRR vol. 1, p. 589, 9 June 1568. 65 Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, p. 166; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1569–71, pp. 410–11, 469–70, 547–58, 556–7, Frederik to Orange, 9 March, 2 April, 11 June, 19 August, 20 August, and 3 December 1571.

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All in all, the revolt of the Netherlands was of little consequence to either Frederik II or Denmark at this point. Granvelle, Alba, and even Philip II himself might have recognised the strategic advantage that possession of the Sound might give Spain in its endeavors to crush the revolt, but gave no indication that they sought to act on this recognition. Other, more immediate problems, faced Denmark in the two years immediately following upon the Stettin treaty: economic recovery from the ravages of the war with Sweden, particularly in Skåne; the final payoff and demobilisation of a large mercenary army; the continued maintenance of the fleet. Poland, not Spain, presented a tangible danger to Danish security in the early 1570s. Heinrich Rantzau continued to rail against the cruelty of Alba, and a few voices warned of a Catholic plot that embraced Spain, the pope, the emperor and the house of Valois. Falk and Mogens Gøje, sons of Frederik’s lensmand Christoffer Gøje, were travelling through the Continent on their ‘grand tour’ in the early 1570s. They attended the Reichstag at Speyer in the summer of 1570, and were troubled by what they observed. Emperor Maximilian II, they informed their father, had effectively linked the Habsburgs to France through two of his daughters: Anna, married to Philip II of Spain, and Elizabeth, soon to be married to Charles IX of France. The emperor’s intentions within Germany were also suspect; the two young Danes reported that Maximilian, ordinarily considered to be sympathetic to the Protestant princes, was intent upon the creation of a German state centralised around Habsburg authority:66 The emperor has at this Reichstag requested that the German princes give him the means to build a stronghold here in Germany, and in order to fortify it to give him two barrels of gold annually, and in order to keep troops there to give him three barrels of gold; this he desires so that if any of the princes would oppose him, then he could suppress them, or if any conflict arose within the Empire he could silence it.

Such warnings, even if they emanated from members of the aristocracy, found no response in royal policy or even in the tone of Danish diplomatic correspondence. Frederik II maintained a healthy interest in military and political developments both in France and in the Netherlands, but his correspondence with his closest confidantes,

66 Gustav Bang (ed.), Breve til og fra Kristoffer Gøje og Birgitte Bølle (2 vols, Copenhagen, 1897–99), vol. 1, pp. 174–6, Mogens and Falk Gøje to Kristoffer Gøje, 1 September 1570. On the Diet of Speier of 1570, see Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II, pp. 178–9.

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like August of Saxony, reveals no passionate partisanship. His sympathies, especially in the Netherlands, may have been with the Protestants; if they were, he did not act upon these sympathies. The king did not echo the alarmism of many Protestant princes in the Empire. This would all change, however, in the wake of two royal weddings in the summer of 1572: one in Copenhagen, and one in distant Paris.

CHAPTER FOUR

TWO WEDDINGS AND A CONSPIRACY, 1572–1577

In the summer of 1572, Frederik II had not yet fulfilled one of the most important obligations incumbent upon a monarch. He had not married, and hence the future of the dynasty was not secured. He was still quite eligible. At the advanced age of thirty-eight, Frederik was handsome, healthy, and fit, without the tendency towards obesity shown by his successors at that age. The king was not unmindful of his duty to marry. The Council, fearful of the succession dispute that would inevitably arise should the king die without issue, had already expressed its concern to the king, as had Frederik’s mother, the Dowager Queen Dorothea. The queen mother had offered her maternal advice to Frederik in writing, frequently, in the years since Christian III’s passing, but her counsel did not find an appreciative audience with the king. Judging from Dorothea’s plaintive requests for an occasional visit from her son, Frederik ignored both her pleas and her advice. The marriage issue was an especially sensitive matter between mother and son; for as late as 1571, Frederik had still harboured hopes of marriage to his youthful love, Anna Hardenberg, which Dorothea strongly opposed. By January 1573, Anna would be married to Oluf Mouritzen Krognos, one of Frederik’s contemporaries from the days at Malmøhus, recently elevated to membership in the Council of State. With the end of the war with Sweden, the pressure on the king to marry was great. His threatened abdication in 1570 highlighted the potential difficulties caused by having a middle-aged monarch with no heir apparent. Both August and Anna of Saxony, out of familial concern, nagged Frederik II about the urgency of the matter. Frederik, however, was not an easy person for whom to find a mate. He had vowed that he would not marry purely for political advantage, and insisted upon a personal meeting with any proposed marriage partner. The possibility of a marriage alliance with Lorraine was closed; even if the Grumbach affair had not permanently soured the relationship between Frederik and the house of Lorraine, Renée

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had married Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria in 1568.1 Frederik’s advisers and family presented the king with several matrimonial candidates. Heinrich Rantzau had suggested a match with Princess Maria of the ill-fated house of Kleve-Jülich, a marriage that would have had interesting diplomatic repercussions by the end of the century had it come to pass. Two Pomeranians in Frederik’s service, Jakob Zitzewitz and Caspar Paselich, proposed a marriage to Margarethe, the eighteenyear-old daughter of the deceased Duke Philip I of Pomerania. They enlisted the support of Duchess Elisabeth of Mecklenburg, Frederik’s aunt. Apparently Elisabeth succeeded where the others had failed, for by the end of September 1571 she and Frederik had arranged a meeting between the king and his prospective bride at Nykøbing later that autumn.2 The meeting at Nykøbing, delayed until November on account of the dowager queen Dorothea’s death early in October, did not go as expected. Frederik was unimpressed with the Pomeranian princess, but instantly became enamored of another in her entourage. This was Frederik’s first cousin Sofie, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Ulrich and Elisabeth of Mecklenburg, who with her parents had accompanied Margarethe of Pomerania to Nykøbing. On New Year’s Day 1572 Frederik informed August and Anna of Saxony that it was Sofie he wanted, above all others, and asked for their blessing; he would not marry unless the match met with their approval. The electoral couple were elated with the king’s decision. If the considerable difference in age between Frederik and Sofie—twenty-four years—was a concern, no-one remarked upon it. Negotiations began in earnest the following month, and by mid-June the marriage contract was complete.3 The royal wedding, celebrated in Copenhagen in late July 1572, was probably the most fashionable Protestant wedding of the year, and perhaps of the decade. Sofie arrived in Copenhagen on 4 July, but the royal entry two weeks later was a far greater spectacle. King Frederik, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Elector August of Saxony, Daae, ‘Frederik IIs paatænkte lothringske Giftermaal’, p. 79. Krarup, Ægteskabs-Forhandlinger, p. 39; DNT vol. 2, pp. 300–2; von Stojentin, ‘Jacob von Zitzewitz, auf Muttrin und Vorwerk vor Lassan erbsessen, ein Pommerscher Staatsmann aus dem Reformations-Zeitalter’, Baltische Studien, Series 2, 1 (1897), 244–51. 3 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 1–1v, Frederik to August and Anna of Saxony, 1 January 1572; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.1, August and Anna to Frederik, 13 January 1572; DNT vol. 2, pp. 304–10. 1 2

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and his soon-to-be father-in-law, Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg, rode into Copenhagen in splendour on 18 July. Musicians stationed in each church tower in the city heralded their approach, the fleet fired a salvo from the harbour, and hundreds of cannon on either side of Vesterport thundered in salute. The wedding service itself, performed at Copenhagen Castle on 20 July by Frederik’s German chaplain, Christoffer Knoff, was a quiet and subdued affair in comparison to the coronation of Sofie as queen the following day. King Frederik led a procession of German princes, including Elector August and Duke Ulrich, to the coronation ceremonies at Vor Frue Kirke. As was typical of celebrations involving the royal family, the entire Council of State took part; Peder Oxe and Holger Rosenkrantz placed the crown upon Sofie’s brow.4 In personal as well as dynastic terms, the marriage of Frederik and Sofie was a great success. The couple had a total of seven children— Elisabeth (1573–1626), Anna (1574–1619), Christian (1577–1648), Ulrik (1578–1624), Augusta (1580–1639), Hedevig (1581–1641), and Hans (1583–1602)—nearly all of whom lived to mature adulthood. The match strengthened the bonds between Denmark and Mecklenburg. Duke Ulrich became, for Frederik, the father he never had. The two grew to be fast friends and confidantes, a tie which deepened the Danish king’s interest in German politics. Mecklenburg, moreover, would prove to be Denmark’s most steadfast German ally until the darkest days of the Lower Saxon War in the late 1620s. The marriage effected an outward transformation in the king’s character as well. Despite his earlier, seemingly unquenchable, passion for Anna Hardenberg, Frederik became deeply attached to his young queen, and there is nothing to suggest any infidelity on his part during their nearly sixteen years of marriage. The king’s three surviving personal calendars, all dating from the mid-1580s, give rare glimpses of domestic life at the Oldenburg court. They reveal the king as a devoted and enthusiastic family man, who took evident delight in everyday occurrences: measuring the height of his growing children, helping his son Christian to ride a horse for the first time, or attending worship service with his family. Recognising the shortcomings in his own upbringing, he devoted himself to supervising the tutelage of his children, making sure that his sons, at least, received an education that far surpassed his own in depth and breadth. Above all, he wrote 4

Resen, Krønicke, pp. 264–70.

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about his frequent separations from ‘my Sofie’ and their reunions. One month after the birth of their son Hans in late July 1583, for example, the sentimental king recorded his reunion with the queen at Haderslevhus: ‘that same night my Sofie lay by me again’. Though Frederik never lost his taste for fine wine, he became far more moderate in his drinking habits after his wedding. Difficult though it may be to quantify such things, marriage made Frederik a happier man, and provided him with the emotional support that he had never received from his own parents.5

The ‘Bloody Wedding’ and the Baltic threat, 1572–80 The splendour of the Danish royal wedding was quickly overshadowed by the much less happy postlude to a more famous and momentous royal wedding in distant Paris that same summer. The marriage of Henry of Navarre, first prince of the blood and a Huguenot, to the Catholic sister of King Charles IX of France, Marguerite de Valois, that August was meant to bring peace to France in the wake of three successive civil wars. The massacres of Protestants that followed, starting in Paris in the early morning hours of 23 August 1572 and moving to other major French cities over the next two months, however, not only marked the beginnings of renewed religious strife in France, but also polarised Protestant Europe. Naturally, Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici absorbed much of the blame, but it was the open celebration of the event in Catholic Europe— not only in Paris, but in Madrid and Rome as well—that proved to be the greatest shock to Protestant sensibilities. Exacerbated by the outraged polemics of Huguenot pamphleteers, news of the ‘bloody wedding in Paris’ gave new life to old fears of an international Catholic conspiracy to eradicate Protestant communities everywhere.6 It is difficult to say exactly when and in what form the news of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre first reached the Danish court. According to several accounts, August of Saxony was still visiting with his royal brother-in-law in Denmark when word of the mas5 Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, pp. 548, 551, 562, entries for 9 June 1583, 31 August 1583, 10 June 1584; Karker, ‘Kong Frederik 2.s død’, pp. 269–70. 6 Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester, 1996).

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sacre first reached him by courier. After briefly discussing the matter with King Frederik, August gathered his retinue and hastily departed Denmark for Dresden.7 The gruesome details of the massacre leaked back to Denmark gradually. Several Danish students had been studying in Paris at the time of the wedding; once they had escaped to safety, they sent back lurid reports of the incident to their concerned parents. Falk and Mogens Gøje were in Paris during the massacre, and barely escaped with their lives after selling or discarding most of their clothing, books, and anything by which they could be readily identified as Protestants. They managed to reach Strassburg in mid-September. Their governor and tutor, a pastor’s son named Søren Skøtt, wrote home to reassure the boys’ family of their safety. Skøtt described the massacre in sickening detail: the indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children, noble and commoner alike; the murder and dismemberment of the Admiral Coligny; the hundreds of corpses thrown into the Seine. ‘I have never seen anything so pitiful, as what happened there; blood from the [bodies of the] slain flowed in the streets like water.’ To Skøtt, there was no question as to who was responsible for the massacre:8 . . . all of us, with the help of God’s protection have left France from Paris to Strassburg, escaping the ungodly wretchedness and unchristian, inhuman tyranny, which the king of France has so basely and shamefully allowed to be committed against all those who profess the true word of God and reject the godless Roman antichrist. And since this place cannot well accommodate our studies, and we sense that those who will not profess the pope’s teachings would be similarly persecuted in Italy, we do not know where we shall go from here. . . .

Similar reports found their way directly to the king as well. Heinrich Rantzau, who had already established himself as Frederik’s eyes and ears in western Europe, confirmed the veracity of these eyewitness accounts, and forwarded to the king a bundle of written testimony from Danish students in Paris. The Statthalter also asserted what many

7 C.F. Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 193–4, Dançay toCharles IX, 5 June 1573; Alfred Richard, Un diplomate poitevin du XVI e siècle. Charles de Danzay, ambassadeur de France en Danemark (Poitiers, 1910), pp. 96–7. Strangely, August did not mention the massacre at all when he wrote to Frederik upon his return to Dresden in October; Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 267, August to Frederik, 19 October 1572. 8 ‘Et dansk Øjenvidnes Beretning’, pp. 251–2, Søren Skøtt to Fru Ide, widow of Falk Gøje, 30 September 1572; Bang (ed.), Breve, pp. 191–3, Skøtt to Kristoffer Gøje, 30 September 1572.

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suspected: that Catherine de’ Medici, Charles IX, the Guise family were collectively responsible for perpetrating the massacre, and that Spain had provided covert support through the offices of the Duke of Alba. Rantzau had a personal stake in the incident; his son Breide, who nine years later would become a member of the Council of State, had also been studying in Paris that fateful summer.9 Whatever the source, Frederik II and his court were thoroughly familiar with what had transpired in Paris following the ValoisBourbon wedding, well before the king received official reports of the massacre from the French court. The initial Danish reaction to the event, however, was unusually calm and measured. The news of the massacre had sent a shockwave of sorts through Protestant Europe, not only in England and the Netherlands, but among the Protestant princes of the Empire as well. Even those princes who later would abandon the Huguenots to their fate—most notably August of Saxony—were openly distressed by the event. Since the mid-1560s, Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX had been trying in earnest to establish closer ties with the Protestant Reichsfürsten, hoping thereby to undermine Habsburg influence in the Empire, to deny the Huguenots the use of mercenaries recruited in Germany, and—possibly—to secure the Imperial crown for the Valois. This was nothing more than a continuation of traditional French policy in the Empire; for similar reasons, Francis I had set himself up as ‘protector’ of the Schmalkaldic League in the 1530s, and Henry II had allied himself with Moritz of Saxony in the early 1550s. Through the arduous diplomatic labours of Hubert Languet, the Saxon elector’s principal representative at the Valois court, and of Caspar von Schomberg, a Saxon soldier and Valois agent in the Germanies, this was very nearly achieved. Encouraged by the apparently indulgent attitude of the French crown towards the Huguenots, as embodied in the Peace of St. Germain-en-Laye in 1570 and the recall of the Admiral Coligny to court the following year, August had entertained the idea of a defensive alliance between France and the leading Protestant princes of the Empire. The elector, for his part, seemed to be supportive of a Valois candidacy for the King of the Romans. 9 RAK TKIA/A.77/5, Rantzau to Frederik, 30 November and 25 December 1572; Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 282–84v, Michel Rud to Rantzau, 17 October 1572; Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 297–98, Michael Rheder to Rantzau, 7 October 1572; DBL vol. 19, p. 106.

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The news of the massacre in August 1572 effectively wrecked these arrangements, despite the best efforts of the Valois and their diplomats; as Schomberg remarked in November, ‘All my negotiations have gone up in smoke’. Although all but the most radical, activist princes refrained from active hostility towards the French court, even former moderates like Elector August and Ulrich of Mecklenburg lost all interest in a pro-French policy. By breaking their promises to protect the Huguenots, Charles IX and the queen-mother Catherine had, in the eyes of the German princes, joined themselves with the black ranks of the papist conspiracy.10 But Frederik II did not react in nearly so sharp a manner. The official Valois account of the massacre reached him on 16 October 1572, via the French legatus ordinarius at the Danish court, Charles de Dançay. Dançay was no ordinary ambassador. A native of Poitou with Protestant leanings, if not an active Huguenot, Dançay was the only foreign ambassador permanently attached to the Danish court. He had served in this capacity since 1548, and resided almost constantly in Denmark from 1563 until his death in Copenhagen in 1589. He spoke both Danish and German fluently, which undoubtedly helped to put him in the king’s good graces. Observers frequently noted Frederik’s fondness for the Frenchman. Dançay often enjoyed a prominent place in court ceremonies and celebrations: he was highly visible at the coronation of Queen Sofie that summer, and would be as well at the christenings of Frederik’s sons Christian and Ulrik, acting as godfather for the latter. He hunted with the king, even as late as 1584, when Dançay had reached the rather advanced age of seventy-five. Dançay was a favourite within the intimate circle of intellectuals at court, being especially close to such notables as Chancellor Niels Kaas, Anders Sørensen Vedel, Niels Krag, the poet Rasmus Glad, and the astrologer-astronomer Tyge Brahe. In spite of his Protestant sympathies and a lack of financial support from his home government, he was a faithful mouthpiece for the French monarchy through most of his long career.11 10 A. Waddington, ‘La France et les protestants allemands sous Charles IX et Henri III’, Révue historique, 42 (1890), 241–74; Platzhoff, Frankreich und die deutschen Protestanten, pp. 67–8; Pierre Chevallier, Henri III, roi shakespearien (Paris, 1985), pp. 181–6. 11 Richard, Charles de Danzay; Holger Frederik Rørdam, ‘Charles de Danzay, fransk Resident ved det danske Hof ’, in Rørdam, Historiske Samlinger og Studier vedrørende danske Forhold og Personligheder især i det 17. Aarhundrede (4 vols, Copenhagen, 1891–1902), vol. 3, pp. 252–84, 290–2.

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Dançay’s personal thoughts of the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day—as a client of the Montmorency clan or as a probable Protestant—are unknown; he did not record his opinion on the matter. He dutifully related to Frederik II the explanation given him by Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici. The massacre, the Valois court insisted, was simply an unfortunate incident arising from the blood feud between the houses of Guise and Châtillon; the Guise family, seeking retribution for the death of Duke Francis of Guise in 1563, assassinated Coligny, and the protagonists of both sides fought it out in the streets of Paris. Charles IX, far from involving himself in the bloody exchange, was instead doing his utmost to restore order to his kingdom and to bring the murderers of Coligny to justice. Frederik II was allegedly ill, and did not discuss the massacre personally with Dançay, but instead sent several (unspecified) members of the Council of State to meet with Dançay. Their response—and the written reply they brought from the king, then at Frederiksborg—was little more than a polite, even bland, acceptance of the official account of the massacre, expressing a measure of appreciation for the troubles Charles IX must be experiencing in ‘pacifying’ his kingdom.12 There is no other record of Frederik II’s immediate reaction to the massacre. Even as his German relations and fellow princes descried the long arm of evil, corrupt Rome at work in France, even as Protestant propagandists from Geneva to London to Heidelberg shrieked in outrage over the ‘murderous tyranny’ of the Valois and of the wicked Florentine Catherine, the Danish king barely even mentioned the incident in his correspondence, let alone issue any kind of rebuke to his French counterpart. Writing to Elector August, the king coyly hinted at his skepticism over the official account of the incident— The way in which the king of France, through his legatus ordinarius here, Dançay, has sought to explain the cruel murder of the sainted Admiral [Coligny], and the way in which we have responded to His Majesty [Charles IX], you may see from the enclosed copies. The aforementioned legate, however, has protested under oath that this [murder] happened without the knowledge and will of the king, and that His Majesty was detained almost as if he were a prisoner . . .

12 Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 168–72, Dançay to Charles IX, Catherine de’ Medici, and Anjou, 23 October 1572; Rørdam, ‘Charles de Danzay’, pp. 319–24, Dançay to Frederik, 16 October 1572, and Frederik and the Council to Dançay, 18 October 1572; Richard, Charles de Danzay, pp. 93–8.

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but he did not display any anger or revulsion.13 The detailed confirmations of the St. Bartholomew’s Day tragedy, sent to the king by Heinrich Rantzau through November and December 1572, elicited hardly a word from Frederik. This may appear remarkable at first; but although Frederik was markedly anti-Catholic, there is nothing to suggest that he was militantly so at this point in his reign. Besides, Denmark’s relations with the Valois court had generally been cordial. Denmark had depended on the goodwill of Francis I in the tense years between 1536 and the Speyer treaty of 1544, when Christian III’s legitimacy was in question and the Emperor Charles V was yet an enemy. Indeed, in November 1541, Christian III and Francis I had concluded the Treaty of Fontainebleau, promising each other mutual assistance in case of attack, and guaranteeing the closing of the Sound to France’s enemies.14 There were personal ties, too; not only was Dançay among those closest to Frederik II, but also one of the senior members of the Council, Jørgen Lykke til Overgård, had served at the court of Francis I from 1532 to 1544.15 Rigshofmester Peder Oxe would continue to advocate a pro-French foreign policy up until his death in 1575. Both men stood high in Frederik’s favour; no-one had freer and more frequent access to the king than did Oxe. Within a matter of months—by February 1573 at the latest— Frederik II changed his tune, and would be spouting the same kind of anti-French and anti-Catholic rhetoric as his fellow Protestant princes. It is difficult to say with any certainty just what effected such a change, but two factors appear to be most likely. First, and most obvious, was Frederik’s close contact with the leading activist Protestant princes in the Empire, notably August of Saxony, Ulrich of Mecklenburg, and Wilhelm IV of Hessen. Regardless of August’s later coldness towards the plight of the Huguenots, prior to 1574 he was as outraged by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as any Calvinist prince would be. The alarmist tone of the ‘news’ these princes forwarded to Frederik on a regular basis undoubtedly influenced the king’s own perception of events in France and the Netherlands. Starting in December 1572, Frederik II demonstrated a newfound interest in the war in the Netherlands and the plight of the Huguenots in France, trading news from the west with Elector August and Duke 13 14 15

Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 268–9v, Frederik to August, 1 November 1572. Rørdam, ‘Charles de Danzay’, p. 253; DNT vol. 1, pp. 404–14. DBL vol. 15, pp. 6–7.

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Ulrich.16 The timbre of the king’s correspondence leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lay. He openly celebrated rebel successes and mourned their failures. After August of Saxony had sent him news of the military situation in the Netherlands early in January 1573, Frederik responded to the elector: We thank you . . . for the news, but we hope that the prince’s [William of Orange] cause is not in such poor condition as has been reported to us. . . . [But] the Spaniards have also attempted to storm Harlem three times, and have lost several thousand [men], cut down in the snow.

Then Frederik added: ‘[I wish that] God would look upon these poor beleaguered Christians with mercy, and rescue them from this tyranny.’17 By early 1573, the king had even begun to express a measure of revulsion over the massacres in France; influenced by printed Zeitungen sent to him by August of Saxony and Heinrich Rantzau, what he was beginning to call ‘the bloodbath in France’ he blamed squarely on ‘the shameful schemes of the king of France’.18 Significantly, to Frederik the wars in France and the Netherlands were wars of religion and very little else. That the beleaguered Dutch and Huguenots were rebels against legitimate political authority did not trouble the king in the least. While relishing the minute military details of individual battles, he seems to have interpreted the wars in strictly confessional terms: ‘May it please God to spread His Word, which alone can redeem, and to protect poor Christendom. Amen.’19 The rhetoric of ‘universal monarchy’ had not yet entered Frederik’s political vocabulary, but that of ‘conspiracy’ clearly had. The king could, for example, write about Spanish successes in the Low Countries, Charles IX’s siege of La Rochelle, and French support for papists in Scotland in one sentence, as if they were all part of a single malevolent grand strategy. And the papacy played a central role; writing to Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Lüneburg in April 1573, he postulated that ‘the pope and his adherents’ were involved

16 Dançay was well aware of Frederik’s interest in the Huguenots; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 193, Dançay to Charles IX, 5 June 1573. 17 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 246–47, Frederik to August, 22 February 1573. 18 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 246–7, Frederik to August, 22 February 1573; fol. 278–9, to Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 13 April 1573. 19 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 233–4v, Frederik to Ulrich of Mecklenburg, 4 February 1573.

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in the orchestration of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres.20 In this he was undoubtedly influenced by Heinrich Rantzau, among others, who claimed that Catherine de’ Medici and Philip II were together actively hatching all sorts of insidious plots against the Dutch rebels and Elizabeth I, and that the papacy was ultimately responsible for authorising the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres.21 Historians of Catholic Europe during the Counterreformation have generally dismissed both the idea of a universal Catholic ‘plot’ to extirpate Protestantism and the existence of Habsburg-driven plans to create a Catholic ‘universal monarchy’. Their arguments have much merit. Relations between the French and Spanish monarchies continued to be quite tense for decades after Cateau-Cambrésis, especially after Philip II imposed military rule upon the Netherlands in 1567. Nor did the post-Tridentine papacy exhibit the requisite consistency of leadership and policy for ameliorating the Habsburg-Valois rivalry, let alone for giving direction and purpose to a vast Catholic alliance that would include both rival houses. Pius V, Gregory XIII, and Sixtus V may have actively promoted the interests of the Church as they saw them, but the mobilisation of Catholic Europe in a coordinated strike against the Protestant states was a task far beyond the capabilities of any of the late sixteenth-century pontiffs. Contemporary perception, however, is more important than historical hindsight where it comes to explaining the actions of statesmen, and the Protestant rulers of sixteenth-century Europe were convinced that such a Catholic cabal did indeed exist.22 In England, where the crown was the subject of constant plotting from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, where the very existence of Mary Stuart was a tacit threat to Elizabeth and her ministers, such a perception came early. In Denmark, where there was no significant Catholic minority, where there had been no plot more threatening than the unrealistic schemings of Christine of Lorraine, and to whom Spain and France had demonstrated nothing other than goodwill, there had been no reason to look anxiously about for evidence of an international Catholic conspiracy. Probably

20 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 278–9, Frederik to Julius of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 13 April 1573. 21 Säch. HStA DB12: fol. 282–4v, Michel Rud to Rantzau, 17 October 1572; fol. 300–2, anonymous letter, addressed to “herr hauptmann,” late 1572, forwarded to Frederik II by Heinrich Rantzau. 22 Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz, pp. 294–5.

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Heinrich Rantzau alone thought differently, and before 1573 Frederik II did not take his warnings at face value.23 Events in the Baltic and in the Empire, however, convinced at least Frederik otherwise in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day debâcle. By the spring of 1573, the Catholic ‘conspiracy’ appeared to be taking form in Poland, Sweden, and northern Germany, all of them much closer to Denmark than was distant France. The first of these developments came about as the result of increasing Valois interest in Baltic affairs. This interest did not stem from a well-crafted geopolitical agenda, but rather from the ambition of the dowager queen, Catherine de’ Medici, to secure crowns for all of her sons. Catherine wanted no trouble with Denmark; her frequent correspondence with Dançay in the months following the massacres of 1572 shows her to be solicitous of Frederik’s friendship. And with good reason, for both Catherine and Dançay must have foreseen the potential friction that her dynastic ambitions in the Baltic region might well cause. As it became obvious to Catherine that she would not be able to arrange a match between her son, Henry of Anjou, and Elizabeth I of England, the dowager queen set her sights on a Baltic crown for her third and favourite son. She had instructed Dançay to investigate the possibility of a marriage alliance with Sweden late in 1571. Dançay sent Catherine a dismal report on the recent history of the house of Vasa, a portrait of constitutional instability and madness—Gustav Vasa had suffered from ‘some lunacies, and his children are much worse’—and Catherine subsequently dropped the project for a time.24 Like most of Catherine’s marriage plans, that of a Valois-Vasa match came to naught. If Frederik II knew of the proposed marriage—which he undoubtedly did, as Dançay made no effort to be secretive about his efforts in the affair—he paid it no notice. Valois ambitions in Poland, on the other hand, disturbed the Danish king. When Sigismund Augustus died on 7 July 1572, bringing the Jagiello dynasty to an end, Poland embarked on a brave experiment: a transition from hereditary monarchy to truly elective and limited monarchy. The five foreign candidates who presented themselves for election 23 Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 295–96, anonymous letter to the archbishop of Würzburg, 17 September 1572, copy forwarded to Frederik by Rantzau. 24 Richard, Charles de Danzay, pp. 98–9; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 177, Dançay to Catherine de’ Medici, 4 January 1572.

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as Poland’s new king while Jan Zamoyski and the Polish diet (sejm) worked out the details of the new constitution were all, in some way, detrimental to Denmark’s Baltic interests. A Muscovite Poland under Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) or a Vasa Poland under either Johan III or his son, Sigismund, would upset the fragile balance of power in the Baltic; the election of the Archduke Ernst, son of Emperor Maximilian II, would mean the extension of Habsburg power into the northeast, a prospect equally as troubling. Fortunately, all of these were distinctly improbable, since the Muscovite and Swedish candidates manifested little interest in the Polish throne, and the Polish gentry (szlachta) was bitterly opposed to the candidacy of the Habsburg. It was the fifth, and eventually successful, candidate who would arouse Frederik II’s ire and ultimately change his outlook on western European affairs, for it was this fifth candidate who would make the terrors of St. Bartholomew’s Day come alive for the king in a way that all the gory recollections of Danish students in Paris could not. That candidate was Henry of Valois, duke of Anjou, son of Catherine de’ Medici and younger brother of Charles IX, and a man already infamous in Protestant Europe for his alleged role in the August 1572 massacre. The Anjou candidacy in Poland, in retrospect, could have worked to Denmark’s benefit. Catherine de’ Medici was anxious to secure Frederik II’s support for her son. Moreover, if Anjou were to be elected, it would entail changes within Poland that would be favourable to Danish interests. When the sejm finally elected Anjou as king on 11 April 1573, the gentry compelled his agent in Warsaw, Jean de Monluc, bishop of Valence, to agree to the terms of the Confederation of Warsaw of January 1573, guaranteeing toleration to all religious denominations within Poland. A tolerant Poland was far less of a threat than an avowedly Catholic Poland. Other articles strictly limited Anjou’s power as king, rendering him in effect little more than a chief executive presiding over the nobility. To be sure, there were other, more ominous, clauses in Henry’s pacta conventa: the maintenance of a large fleet, paid for by the Valois, and the use of Gascon troops for Poland’s wars with Russia.25 It was Anjou’s complicity in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, however, that drew Frederik’s ire, and elicited an unpleasant response. 25 W.F. Reddaway, J.H. Penson, O. Halecki, and R. Dyboski (eds), The Cambridge History of Poland from the Origins to Sobieski (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 371–3; Chevallier, Henri III, pp. 186–203.

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In part, Frederik II’s opposition to the Anjou succession in Poland stemmed from security and trade concerns in which religion played little if any role; after all, the sejm looked to Anjou and France to expand Poland’s commercial and military presence in the Baltic, something that Frederik had repeatedly demonstrated he would not tolerate.26 The issue that surfaces consistently in Frederik’s correspondence with his German co-religionists, however, was that of confession. It mattered little that Catherine de’ Medici had begun to prepare Anjou’s path to the Polish throne several months before the Paris massacres took place. If Frederik knew of this, he does not appear to have cared. To Frederik, the election of Anjou was a calculated attempt to undermine Protestantism. Even before Anjou’s succession was secured, the Danish king found the imminent election a source of worry—because of the election, ‘not only will all sorts of hurried and dangerous subterfuges be attempted, but also all of Christendom will be much disturbed’, he wrote to August of Saxony in February 157327—but the news of Anjou’s election evoked a much sharper reaction, and could well have led to war with Poland or France. Long after the massacre was over, Rantzau and others bombarded Frederik with news of more atrocities against the Huguenots elsewhere in France. Much of the blame for Frederik’s hostile reaction must be placed upon Catherine de’ Medici and Anjou himself. Considering how badly the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day had tarnished the reputation of the Valois house throughout Protestant Europe, the way in which Catherine and her favourite son handled the Polish succession at the Danish court showed a remarkable lack of tact or even of familiarity with Baltic affairs. The issue of Anjou’s eastward journey to Poland to claim his new crown would require skilful diplomacy in the Baltic. If Anjou were to make an overland journey, he would have to pass through the Empire. Catherine recognised the potential hostility of the Protestant German princes and of the emperor himself, whose own Polish ambitions had been thwarted by the election of Anjou. The dowager queen did not rule out this option, and sent Caspar von Schomberg to win German acquiescence to Anjou’s 26 Reddaway et al. (eds), Cambridge History of Poland, p. 372; Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 263–8. 27 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 246–7, Frederik to August, 22 February 1573.

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passage by land. But the easiest route to Poland, and the only realistic alternative to overland travel through the Germanies, was by sea through the Sound and therefore through Danish territory. Catherine, however, sent neither a special agent to Denmark nor any instructions to her agent Dançay. It may have been that Catherine was blissfully unaware of the aftershock generated by the massacre, and that she continued to count on Danish friendship for France. As late as August 1573, both Schomberg and Dançay assured Charles IX and the dowager queen that Frederik II would raise no objections to Anjou’s passage through the Sound. Dançay, who was in frequent personal contact with Frederik, claimed that the king expressed nothing but affection for France and an interest in maintaining friendly relations with the Valois.28 It could be argued that Catherine had no reason to suspect that the king of Denmark harboured any hostility towards her or her sons. But it was a hallmark of Catherine’s governance, in domestic affairs as well as foreign, to underestimate or even completely discount the very real passions that religious conflict could unleash. In fact, she had proposed the enlistment of Polish aid to assist the Dutch rebels in their war against Spain, with Anjou taking titular leadership of the rebellion. In this convoluted way, Catherine reasoned, Anjou could win the approval of the German Protestants and assure himself of Danish support as well. Apparently it did not occur to her that if Anjou—the man who had vanquished the Huguenots at Jarnac and Montcontour, and who was blamed far and wide for the August 1572 massacre—were to suddenly present himself as the champion of religious freedom, it would appear as the height of hypocrisy, if not as a cruel insult, to Protestant princes. Catherine’s confessional naïveté, combined with Dançay’s reports of Frederik’s unwavering loyalty to France, led to a species of complacence vis-àvis Danish affairs. Whatever her rationale, Catherine de’ Medici did not bother to discuss Anjou’s journey with Frederik II. This was a slight to the Danish king and a major diplomatic faux pas.29 The vicissitudes of communications in sixteenth-century Europe, and the apparent efficiency of Frederik’s intelligence-gathering network, 28 Emmanuel Henri Victurnien Noialles, Henri de Valois et la Pologne (3 vols, Paris, 1867), vol. 3, pp. 496–502, Schomberg to Charles IX, 19 May 1573, and to Catherine de’ Medici, 1 August 1573; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 198, 205–6, 211–12, 219–21, Dançay to Charles IX, 28 June and 6 July 1573, and to Catherine de’ Medici, 28 June and 17 July 1573. 29 Noailles, Henri de Valois et la Pologne, vol. 2, pp. 394–7.

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exacerbated the situation. Anjou, still in France, sent word of his election as king of Poland to Frederik II on 16 June 1573. Frederik already knew the outcome of the Polish election; on 5 June, Dançay— who had not received any official notification, either from Paris or Warsaw—noted that the entire Danish court was convinced that Anjou had been elected.30 And on 16 June, the very same day that Anjou wrote from La Rochelle, King Frederik fired off a series of letters from his palace at Skanderborg to the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony, and to Ulrich of Mecklenburg, announcing Anjou’s election as king and describing the diplomatic implications arising therefrom. Frederik’s revelation was based on solid evidence. Heinrich Rantzau had provided the king with newsletters from Danzig, allowing Frederik to relate in minute detail the precise conditions demanded of Anjou by the sejm, as well as the details of Anjou’s planned progress to Poland.31 This information was indeed disturbing: Anjou planned to travel by sea, through the Sound, accompanied by several large warships and four thousand Gascon infantry. Since the pope was assuredly behind this, Frederik continued, this posed a significant threat, not only to his own realm but also to the Protestant German princes. The king asked for the counsel of the two electors and the duke, but in the meantime he prepared for war. That same day, he asked his father-in-law to send back a Danish flotilla of six warships, put at Duke Ulrich’s disposal some months earlier to aid the duke in a conflict with Rostock, so that it could join the rest of the fleet in the Sound. Frederik II did what he could to beef up his land defenses, commanding several mercenary captains in his pay to transfer all available troops to Helsingør ‘to be held in readiness for the defense of our land’. Frederik even mobilised the young court nobles for military service.32 Dançay found himself in a very difficult position. Frederik II had summoned the French legate to Skanderborg, and their meeting on 15 June had been very tense. The king had wanted to discuss the 30 Pierre Champion and Michel François (eds), Lettres de Henri III, Roi de France (4 vols, Paris, 1959–84), vol. 1, p. 273, Anjou to Frederik, 16 June 1573; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 194, Dançay to Charles IX, 5 June 1573. 31 Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 374–75, Frederik to August (with enclosed Zeitungen), 16 June 1573. 32 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73: fol. 335–8, Frederik to August, Johann Georg of Brandenburg, and Ulrich of Mecklenburg, 16 June 1573; fol. 338v–39, to Balthasar Geist, Rittmeister, 16 June 1573; KB 1571–75, p. 277, Frederik to Peder Oxe, 16 June 1573; Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, p. 175.

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terms of Anjou’s passage through the Sound, but Dançay still had not yet been notified of either the election results or the details of Anjou’s proposed journey to Poland, nor had he received any instructions to negotiate such matters. Dançay’s silence angered the king, and the ambassador was justifiably concerned. Little more than a week earlier, he had described to Charles IX the strength of the Danish fleet and of the fortifications which lined either side of the Sound; he now observed that a forced passage of the Sound would be militarily impossible. And when Dançay finally did receive instructions, they were hardly satisfactory. Caspar von Schomberg wrote to Dançay, asking the ambassador to broach the subject of Anjou’s eastward journey informally with the king, ‘without giving me any other advice or means of accomplishing this’.33 Dançay was aghast; a matter such as this one, involving the presence of five or six French warships and four thousand infantry in Danish territorial waters, would require more finesse. It would, above all, require a formal embassy from France, but so far Dançay had not received a single instruction from Charles IX or Catherine de’ Medici.34 Fortunately for Dançay, Catherine de’ Medici had acted even before her ambassador’s plaintive cries for instructions reached Paris. She dispatched a pair of diplomats to the Scandinavian courts at the end of June 1573. They arrived in Copenhagen four weeks later, bringing official notification of Anjou’s election and requesting Frederik’s permission to allow the royal flotilla free passage through the Sound. Dançay was confident that formal assurances of French friendship would render the king more pliable. Though Frederik may have been heavily influenced by August of Saxony, whom Dançay suspected of spreading anti-French sentiments throughout the Empire, Dançay believed that if approached properly the king would decide in Anjou’s favour. If Catherine and Charles were to assure Frederik that the presence of French forces in Danish waters would in no way cause harm to Danish subjects and property, then Frederik could have no possible objection. In making this assumption, Dançay not

33

Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 198, Dançay to Charles IX, 28 June 1573. Noailles, Henri de Valois et la Pologne, vol. 3, pp. 496–9, Schomberg to Charles IX, 19 May 1573; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 192–3, 198–203, 211–14, Dançay to Charles IX, 5 June, 28 June, 6 July 1573; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 200–4 n. 1, Dançay to Lansac and Montluc, 28 June 1573; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 205–11, Dançay to Catherine de’ Medici and Anjou, 28 June 1573. 34

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only underestimated the impact of the recent massacres in France on Frederik’s thinking, but also misinterpreted the structure of power at the Danish court. Dançay had discussed the Polish election and its ramifications only with Peder Oxe. Oxe continually reassured Dançay that his master’s affection for France was undiminished; if Anjou chose to travel to Danzig through the Sound, Frederik would not oppose it. According to Croze, one of the two diplomats Catherine had sent to Denmark that June, Anjou had asserted that he was so confident of Frederik’s hospitality that he would not hesitate to arrive in Denmark unannounced and without a passport; Anjou knew that Frederik would show him nothing but brotherly kindness. Oxe told Croze that Anjou would be warmly received regardless of the circumstances of his arrival.35 Oxe, as rigshofmester and one of Frederik’s close companions, did indeed enjoy frequent access to the king and therefore bore some weight in the making of policy. But Dançay made the mistake of assuming that Oxe dominated the king: ‘Peder Oxe, steward of the king of Denmark, has so much credit and favour with the king . . ., and such authority and power in his kingdom, that all things are conducted and governed according to his will’, the ambassador wrote to Charles IX in August. Dançay met with Frederik II at Koldinghus on 8 August 1573, finally presenting the king with Charles IX’s and Anjou’s formal requests for safe conduct.36 Frederik II, however, was his own man where it came to the making of foreign policy. If Oxe spoke to Dançay and Croze in earnest, he did not speak for the king. A strong Poland was not in Denmark’s best interests; that Poland might be ruled by a man tainted by the scandal of the ‘bloody wedding’ was wholly unacceptable. Catherine de’ Medici pressed Dançay to assure Frederik of France’s benign intentions, and Dançay did not cease to point out to Catherine and her two royal sons that some more substantial tokens of French goodwill would be necessary if Anjou’s safe passage were to be assured.37 Catherine did not heed Dançay’s warnings, perhaps lulled into complacency by her legate’s reports of Frederik’s loyalty to France. It is impossible to tell 35

Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 230, Dançay to Charles IX, 2 August 1573. Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 216, Dançay to Catherine de’ Medici, 6 July 1573; Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, pp. 218–19, 229–30, Dançay to Charles IX, 17 July and 2 August 1573; Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 376v-8, Frederik to August, 9 August 1573. 37 Gustave Baguenault, Eugène Lelong, and Lucien Auvray (eds), Lettres de Catherine de Médicis (11 vols, Paris, 1880–1943), vol. 4, pp. 244, 254–5, 261–2, Catherine de’ Medici to Dançay, 23 July, 22 September, and 16 October 1573. 36

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if Frederik II intentionally sought to mislead Dançay; but his correspondence with August of Saxony and Ulrich of Mecklenburg had already revealed a certain mistrust of, even hostility towards, the Valois monarchy. This had been apparent in the in the king’s discussions with his fellow German princes regarding the massacres in France and the election in Poland. A minor diplomatic episode in the summer of 1573 would make this hostility obvious to all. In mid-July 1573, a small Franco-Polish diplomatic entourage shipped from Danzig for France aboard the new fifty-gun warship Concordia. Among the passengers were a Polish official, Stanis∑av Grotzky, and Guy de Lansac, seigneur de Saint-Gelais. Lansac, a favourite of Catherine de’ Medici who had worked alongside Monluc in Poland prior to the election, was a man of considerable political stature.38 The two diplomats intended to bring Anjou—then at La Rochelle—formal word of his election as king of Poland and to assist in making arrangements for the coronation. When Concordia anchored off the island of Amager, near Copenhagen, on 21 July, it attracted a great deal of attention—and suspicion. The Danes had not been apprised of its imminent arrival, so when it appeared in Danish territorial waters, Polish and French royal banners snapping proudly from each masthead, Danish officials were understandably apprehensive. The king was not nearby—he was hunting at Ry, in central Jutland, at the time—but Peder Oxe and other members of the Council were in Copenhagen. Oxe attended to the unexpected guests. Lansac was genuinely befuddled by his stiff reception, claiming that he had sent a courier ahead to Frederik to announce the ship’s progress towards the Sound, and he had expected no trouble from Denmark. Oxe, renowned for his courtliness, was civil but firm; repeatedly he asked Lansac why he presumed to enter ‘the king’s waters’ without prior written permission, much less aboard a powerful warship with banners flying. Since Lansac bore no credentials either from France or from Poland, Oxe had no choice but to detain the diplomats while he sought orders from the king. As Danish officials inspected Concordia and her crew, Lansac, Grotzky, and their servants were quartered comfortably in Copenhagen. They were allowed to roam the city freely, and quickly sought the advice of Dançay, whom they knew to be close to Frederik. 38

Nicolas le Roux, La faveur du roi. Mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (Seyssel, 2000), pp. 128, 137.

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Frederik was not happy with the arrival of the Franco-Polish delegation. In part this was because, in showing up unheralded, Lansac had committed a major diplomatic error, though this may well have been beyond Lansac’s control. But it was more than the breach of protocol that perturbed the king. Lansac’s appearance at Copenhagen was poorly timed, and the personnel poorly chosen. Frederik knew who Lansac was, and already bore the emissary a grudge; while in Poland, the king claimed, Lansac had ‘given voice to all kinds of insulting talk about Us and Our realm’. The Valois election, of course, remained a sensitive issue as well. As Oxe hurried from Copenhagen to the king’s hunting lodge at Ry, Frederik received timely advice from his brother-in-law and father-in-law. The two princes had finally responded to Frederik’s letter of 16 June, in which he had asked for guidance on the matter of Anjou’s passage. Both Ulrich of Mecklenburg and August of Saxony agreed that Anjou’s election was a bad thing in itself, but that the presence of substantial French military forces, in the Empire or in the Sound, would be even worse. The pope, Ulrich argued, had promoted the Valois election in Poland with his own anti-Protestant agenda in mind. Duke Ulrich urged caution in dealing with France; Denmark’s longstanding friendship with France would keep Poland in check, but an overtly hostile move against France could well result in punitive action from an allied Franco-Polish fleet.39 Elector August, however, had no such reservations: As for myself, I would not be inclined, if such a thing [i.e., Anjou’s passage] were to touch on my own lands, to allow [Anjou] to solve [his problems] or even to have any dealings with that man, on whose account the most cruelly practiced tyranny [has befallen] France. There is no doubt that [this tyranny], as Your Majesty has been informed, was furthered by the pope and his minions . . . and [Anjou] has been elected king in Poland, and he is bound and obligated to all evil dealings and subterfuges against the True Christian religion. So Your Majesty can well imagine that you would not like to have such a neighbour near you.

Moreover, August pointed out that he was not alone in his opposition to Anjou’s proposed journey to Poland; Wilhelm IV of Hessen, the

39 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.5, Ulrich to Frederik, 8 July 1573.

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electors of Brandenburg, the Palatinate, and Mainz, and even the emperor himself stood united on this issue.40 Most disturbing was what—or rather who—Danish officials found aboard Concordia. Among the warship’s crew were seventeen known Polish pirates, who had on numerous occasions trespassed on Danish territorial waters and ‘in our own waters frequently attacked, captured, robbed, and murdered [Danish merchant crews], and have conducted themselves deplorably at their pleasure’. This, too, was a sensitive issue, and a matter of poor timing. Since the end of the war with Sweden less than three years earlier, Frederik II had devoted considerable time and resources to the task of ridding the Baltic sea lanes of pirates. Piracy had become a thorny problem both in the North Sea waters off Norway and in the Baltic. Poles and Danzigers figured prominently among the freebooters, and their cruelty had become the stuff of legends; it was reported that these pirates had, in one incident in 1571, captured three Danish merchant ships in the Baltic, and then cast the captive crews overboard to their deaths. Frederik II attacked the problem with much zeal, making use of the fleet to hunt down pirates in Baltic waters. By the mid-1570s, the Danish fleet had successfully apprehended several pirate crews, and summary executions of pirates had become a routine occurrence at Helsingør. The fact that Concordia’s crew mustered such a large group of pirates was, therefore, both alarming and insulting to the Danes. Incensed, Frederik II ordered Peder Oxe to keep Lansac and his entourage confined to their quarters, and to apprehend the seventeen Polish freebooters. Returning to Copenhagen on 31 July, Oxe executed his master’s commands: he and several members of the Council interrogated Lansac further, and the hapless Polish seamen were seized, clapped in irons and thrown into the infamous Blue Tower at Copenhagen Castle. Almost immediately thereafter the accused pirates were dragged before a maritime court and sentenced to death by hanging. The ultimate fate of the convicted Poles is unknown. Concordia itself was impounded at St. Anne’s Bridge, near the modern-day Nyhavn district of Copenhagen.41 40

RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.8, August to Frederik, 6 July 1573. Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, pp. 166–7, 170–2, 175–7; RAK KRA B5a. Rigens Raads Breve, Breve til Rigshofmester Peder Oxe 1567–1575, Frederik to Oxe, 27 July 1573; Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 376v–8, 379–81v, Frederik to August, 9 August and 18 August 1573. 41

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Frederik detained Lansac in Copenhagen for nearly a full month. His comparatively rough treatment of Anjou’s ambassador confounded Dançay, who heretofore had had no reason to doubt Frederik’s friendship for France: ‘This harshness with which Lansac has been treated has put me in a terrible doubt.’42 Dançay and Croze set out to find Frederik. They did not catch up to the royal household until 8 August, when they met the king at Koldinghus. Dançay’s pleadings on behalf of his fellow Frenchman finally persuaded the king to release Lansac, but only after Frederik had made his way back to Copenhagen at a leisurely pace. Lansac first had to affix his signature to a long and humiliating document, in which he set forth in detail the events of late July, his assurances that no harm to Denmark had been intended, his promises that he would never again try to pass through Danish territory in the same manner, and his effusive and fulsome thanks to Frederik for his hospitality. The following day, 25 August 1573, Frederik ‘graciously’ accepted Lansac’s statement and granted him and his party free passage through the Sound to the North Sea. Frederik, however, was not entirely finished with Lansac. Prior to the ambassador’s departure from Copenhagen, the king compelled Lansac to sign yet another document, this time promising that neither France nor Poland would again attempt to send warships or troops through Danish waters without first securing Frederik’s written approval; if either crown would again try the king’s patience in this way—‘which of course shall not happen’, Lansac added—then the Danes would seize the offending ships, and any personnel found aboard would face the king’s justice. With this, Lansac and Grotzky were hurried along their way to France.43 The Lansac incident, so closely followed by the official French request for Anjou’s passage through the Sound, had a profound impact on Frederik II. In the king’s mind, the two issues were not unrelated; indeed, they appeared to be part of a larger Catholic plot. Compounding this uneasiness was the rumour, which Frederik received from a private source while Lansac was held captive in Copenhagen, that Charles IX was again mustering troops for further actions against the Huguenots in France. Frederik denounced this in the strongest language he had used to date, proclaiming it ‘persecution and tyranny’ 42

Bricka (ed.), Indberetninger, p. 230, Dançay to Charles IX, 2 August 1573. Säch. HStA DB 12: fol. 409–12, statement of Lansac and Grotzky, 24 August 1573; fol. 413–14, testimony of Lansac, 27 August 1573. 43

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Plate 1. Frederik II. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

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Plate 2. Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

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Plate 3. Sofie of Mecklenburg, Queen of Denmark. Courtesy of De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling, Rosenborg Slot, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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Plate 4. Rigshofmester Peder Oxe. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

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Plate 5. Kansler Niels Kaas til Taarupgaard. Courtesy of De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling, Rosenborg Slot, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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Plate 6. Rentemester Christoffer Valkendorf. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

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Plate 7. Statthalter Heinich Rantzau. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

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Plate 8. Heinrich Ramel. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

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Plate 9. Christine of Lorraine. Courtesy of Det nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot, Hillerød, Denmark.

Plate 10. Fireworks display, 1577. Courtesy of Det kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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Plate 11. Danish and Spanish ships in battle. Courtesy of Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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over ‘the unfortunate people’ in a letter he wrote to August of Saxony on 9 August. Asking August’s advice as to how best to deal with France, Frederik asserted that the Polish election, the continued persecution of the Huguenots, and now Lansac’s attempted passage of the Sound were evidence of ‘dangerous papist tricks’, calculated to cause unrest among Denmark and her Protestant neighbours. Perhaps sharing August’s regard for the sanctity of the Augsburg settlement and the peace it was intended to foster within the Germanies, Frederik implored August to find out how the Emperor Maximilian and the electors felt about Anjou’s requested passage by sea. The king did not wait for his brother-in-law’s reply. He sharply denied Anjou permission to pass through the Sound with anything more than one thousand infantry, and only then if chaperoned by Danish forces. And on the very day that he granted Lansac his leave, the king boldly proclaimed to Ulrich of Mecklenburg that war with France would ensue if Anjou were to attempt a forced passage of the narrows at Helsingør. This was neither threat nor bluster, but an expression of genuine fear of a French attack: two days earlier, he had commanded all freemen in Skåne, both noble and common, to muster the militia and prepare for an invasion from the North Sea.44 In the end, the dispute over Anjou’s election came to naught. In August, Maximilian II and the German princes, meeting at the Reichstag at Frankfurt, grudgingly granted permission for Anjou to cross overland to Poland, and Anjou reached Cracow for his coronation in February 1574 after an uneventful journey. The Anjou ‘threat’ would be short-lived, anyway, for Charles IX died at the end of May 1574, and Anjou fled Poland only three weeks later to take his brother’s place in France. But Catherine de’ Medici’s ambition to secure a Baltic throne for her son had not yet abated, and neither had Frederik’s mistrust of Valois intentions. This time Catherine turned once more to Sweden. Anjou, now King Henry III of France, had not yet married, and the queen mother hoped for a royal match. She had shown much interest in the Vasa lineage since Dançay had negotiated with Swedish malcontents who desired French support for 44 Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 376v-8, 379–81v, Frederik to August, 9 August and 18 August 1573; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 390v–2v, Frederik to Ulrich, 25 August 1573; KB 1571–75, pp. 315–16, 23 August 1573; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85: pp. 67–70, 70–3, 78–81, Frederik II to Charles IX, 17 August, 20 August, and 24 September 1573; pp. 74–8, Frederik II to Anjou, 20 August 1573.

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a planned coup against Johan III, early in 1572; now she decided to approach King Johan directly to arrange a marriage between his daughter, Elisabeth, and Henry III. Such a match, she reasoned, could improve Henry’s chances of keeping his crown in Poland.45 To this end, she sent a distinguished personage, Secretary of State Claude Pinart de Cramailles, to Sweden in December 1574. After meeting briefly with Frederik II at Horsens en route, Pinart proceeded to Stockholm, where he was received amidst considerable pomp by Johan III in February 1575. No sooner had Pinart arrived in Sweden than he received word—from a very disappointed Catherine—that Henry had already married Louise de Vaudémont. Pinart broke off negotiations immediately, greatly angering Johan III in the process, and left Stockholm for Denmark in haste. Frederik II was no happier to see him arrive than Johan had been to see him depart, and the Danish king refused Pinart an audience. Undoubtedly, there was some jealousy involved—as Peder Oxe remarked sourly to Dançay, the French did not usually send secretaries of state on ordinary diplomatic missions; why was such an honour bestowed upon Sweden but not Denmark?—but in the main Frederik felt that his suspicions of the Valois had been neatly confirmed.46 Now, it seemed, France sought union with Denmark’s two greatest enemies; Henry III, who had willingly done the pope’s dirty work in France, could be in a position to dominate the Baltic and attack Denmark.47 After the failure of the proposed Swedish match, Dançay suggested to Pinart that he resume talks with Johan III, this time with the intent of winning Elisabeth Vasa’s hand for the youngest Valois, the duke of Alençon; prudently Catherine did not pursue this option.48 The brief reign of King Henry of Poland had thoroughly shaken the Danish sovereign. Compounding Valois attempts at expanding French influence into the Baltic region were the ecclesiastical policies of Johan III himself. Confessional affairs had never been numbered among the multitude 45 R.J. Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici (London, 1998), p. 179. On Anjou in Poland, see: Pierre Champion, Henri III, roi de Pologne (1573–1574) (Paris, 1943). 46 ‘Discours du S:r de Danzai des affaires de Dannemark et de Suède à Monseigneur Pinart’, 12 April 1575, in ‘Correspondance de Charles Dantzai, Ministre de France à la Cour de Dannemark’, Nya Handlingar rörande Skandinaviens Historia (Stockholm, 1824), pp. 54–5; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 102–4, 109–11, Frederik to Claude Pinart de Cramailles, 19 January and 20 January 1575. 47 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1573–75: fol. 50v–2v, Frederik to August, 2 February 1574; fol. 266v–7v, Frederik to Ulrich, 8 April 1575. 48 Richard, Charles de Danzay, pp. 117–22.

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of issues that divided Denmark and Sweden. The Lutheran faith was almost as well established in Sweden as in Denmark; indeed, Erik XIV’s church policies had been almost puritanical in comparison with those of Frederik II. Johan III, however, was of a different mind. An accomplished theologian in his own right, Johan III was a true Erasmian, whose irenicism did not exclude the liturgy and dogma of the Roman faith. Among those who helped to shape Johan’s religious proclivities were individuals as diverse as the Catholic irenicist Georg Cassander and the Swedish philippist Petrus Mikaelis Fecht. His interest in a compromise, via media state church may well have been influenced by his visit to England in 1559; undoubtedly, too, he responded to the unrepentant Romanism of his Jagiello wife, Katarina, daughter of Sigismund Augustus of Poland. Whatever his source of inspiration, by 1572 he had initiated an eight-year flirtation with Rome. In 1572, Johan compelled his clergy to accept a church ordinance composed the previous year, which restored many of the old adiaphora while retaining an outward semblance of Lutheranism; between 1574 and 1575, the king and Fecht drew up yet another ordinance, the Nova Ordinantia of 1575, which both augmented royal authority in ecclesiastical affairs and subtly introduced doctrinal and liturgical elements which appeared to be disturbingly Romanist. Shortly thereafter, the king presented his nervous episcopacy with an entirely new liturgy, the so-called ‘Red Book’ of 1576. Though the Red Book did not represent a complete return to Catholicism, many clerics saw in its rich ritual a ‘first overt move towards an apostasy to Rome’, and there were strenuous objections to its introduction. Johan bullied his clergy into accepting the new ordinance and the new liturgy, all the same.49 At a time when the papacy had nearly given up hope of a restoration of the North to the True Faith, the changes initiated by Johan III did not go unnoticed in Catholic Europe, in part because of the king’s marital ties to Polish Catholicism. A change in papal leadership helped as well; while Pius V (1566–72) had all but ignored the North as beyond reconversion, Ugo Buoncompagni, who ascended

49

Martin Friedrich, ‘Johan III—katholischer Gegenreformator oder protestantischer Ireniker? Ein Hinweis auf eine bislang unbeachtete Quelle’, Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift, 96 (1996), 115–18; Michael Roberts, The Early Vasas. A History of Sweden, 1523–1611 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 278–82; Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 89–225.

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the throne of St. Peter as Gregory XIII in 1572, was far more optimistic. The ambitions of the king fit in neatly with those of the pope: Gregory wanted converts in northern Europe, and Johan wanted papal support—both for his possible succession to the Polish throne and for getting his hands on the tremendous fortune his wife stood to inherit from her Neapolitan mother, Bona Sforza. The king’s Polish ambitions, of course, were thwarted by the election of Anjou, but that failed to dampen his interest in a rapprochement with Rome. In response, near the end of 1575 Gregory XIII sent to Stockholm an ambitious young Jesuit from the faculty at Louvain, Laurentius Nicolai (Norvegus), soon to gain infamy in Sweden (and much later in Denmark) under the nickname of ‘Klosterlasse’. Laurentius Nicolai was of Norwegian birth, spoke both Danish and Swedish, and hence was highly prized by the Congregatio Germanica that Pope Gregory had established for the reconversion of the northern lands. The young Jesuit, whose official appointment was as confessor to Queen Katarina, quickly ingratiated himself with the king, who saw in him a pillar of support for the new liturgy and a means of educating new clergy who would be tractable to the royal will. With this in mind, Johan III soon appointed Klosterlasse to the faculty, and later to the rectorship, of a new college in Stockholm; shortly thereafter he replaced the stubbornly Lutheran rector of the Stockholm Grammar School with yet another Jesuit, Florentius Feyt of Utrecht. Confident that the king could be turned back to Rome, perhaps with some concessions, Klosterlasse happily disguised himself as a Lutheran; only the king and queen knew otherwise, and the Jesuit enjoyed moderate success in his efforts at proselytisation. Johan III, for his part, moved closer towards allegiance to Rome. A secretive Swedish embassy to Rome in late 1576 prompted Gregory XIII to send a former Jesuit secretary-general, Antonio Possevino, to Sweden the following year. Despite the accidental revelation of Klosterlasse as a papist, Possevino’s discussions with the king went well, and in early 1578 Johan III formally notified the pope of his willingness to return to Roman obedience. Unfortunately for Johan, Pope Gregory rejected the king’s conditions—which included such concessions as clerical marriage and communion in both kinds—and dismissed the Red Book as heretical. Johan, disappointed and angered, gradually began to drift back towards Lutheranism, and neither the refusal of his son (and hopeful successor) Sigismund to desert the Catholic faith, nor a second visit from Possevino, could change his mind. Faced with

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popular anger following the uncloaking of Klosterlasse, and disillusioned by the papacy’s unaccommodating stance, Johan by 1580 had broken off his dalliance with Rome. The death of Queen Katarina three years later resolved the matter neatly.50 The failure of the missio suetica must be partially attributed, too, to the reaction of Frederik II—or, rather, to the manner in which he was expected to react. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Johan III really intended a full-fledged return to Romanism. Popular opposition to such a move was too strong, and Johan too attached to the conditions he had given to Gregory XIII; besides, his Erasmian bent was so pronounced that he was one of the few (if any) European princes who still placed his hopes in an international ecumenical council to reconcile Protestant and Catholic. Moreover, the growing popular resentment gave much political leverage to Johan’s ambitious younger brother, Duke Karl of Södermanland, who had cryptocalvinist leanings and took the opportunity to pose as the defender of Sweden’s national faith. Danish sources comment little on Johan III’s ecclesiastical troubles, and Frederik II was doubtless unaware of all the details. It was not until September 1576 that August of Saxony first informed Frederik II of the presence of Jesuits at the Vasa court. Frederik did not utter a single threat to Johan III, but— as Frede P. Jensen has shown—he did indicate his displeasure in more subtle ways. Frederik kept up a warm and friendly correspondence with Duke Karl, who even then gave signs of interest in usurping his brother’s throne. During the brief Danish intervention on behalf of Danzig during its struggle with the Polish crown in 1576–77, Frederik had arranged a comic court masque in which pictures of Johan III and the pope were placed aboard two boats; both boats and portraits were subsequently burned. Johan III, at least, took such gestures as serious threats, admitting almost sheepishly to the Spanish ambassador in Stockholm that it was fear of a Danish attack that kept him from an open conversion to Catholicism.51 50 Roberts, Early Vasas, pp. 282–9; Vello Helk, Laurentius Nicolai Norvegus S.J. En biografi med bidrag til belysning af romerkirkens forsøg på at genvinde Danmark-Norge i tiden fra reformationen til 1622 (Copenhagen, 1966), pp. 65–95, 110–52; Karl Hildebrand, Johan III och Europas katolska makter. Studier i 1500-talets politiska historia (Uppsala, 1898), pp. 206–38, 249–313; Gustaf Ivarsson, Johan III och klosterväsendet (Lund, 1970); Magnus Nyman, Förlorarnas historia. Katolskt liv i Sverige från Gustav Vasa till drottning Kristina (Uppsala, 1997), pp. 135–76; Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, pp. 72–260. 51 Helk, Norvegus, p. 144; Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 261–2; F. Ödberg, Om Anders Lorichs, k. Johan III:s ständige legat i Polen, och hans tid (1569–1584) (Skara, 1893), pp. 56–7.

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In and of themselves, Johan III’s diplomatic advances to the Holy See accomplished nothing, and did not arouse the kind of reaction from Frederik II that the Swedish king had feared. But Johan III’s near apostasy also brought favourable attention from Spain. This may indeed have been Johan’s intention, for a partnership with Philip II would ameliorate Sweden’s diplomatic isolation in the Baltic region. It would offer some advantages to Philip II as well. Working together, Spain and Sweden might well be able to conquer Denmark; this, in turn, would allow Spain to close off the Sound to Dutch traffic, starving the Dutch rebels into submission. During his embassy to Rome in 1576–77, the Swedish ambassador Pontus De la Gardie discussed possible military collaboration with Spanish diplomats in Italy. Nothing came of these discussions, apart from mutual expressions of goodwill between Johan III and Philip II, but the mere fact that such negotiations had taken place—so close upon the heels of Valois dynastic endeavors in Sweden and Poland—simply rendered more palpable the existence of an international Catholic conspiracy.52 With the election of the avowedly Catholic Stefan Bathory to the Polish throne in 1575, the confessional climate in the Baltic became even more distinctly anti-Protestant. Given their past enmity, a Polish-Swedish alliance directed against Denmark was not very likely, much less a broad Catholic coalition that would involve France, Spain, and the papacy. The confessional changes in Sweden and Poland did, however, create the kind of atmosphere that tended to attract adventurers, schemers, and fanatics.

The Papist conspiracy One of the salient features of diplomacy and international relations in the later sixteenth century is its almost exaggerated ‘cloak and dagger’ nature. Confessional differences between major adversaries made the employment of methods hitherto considered unacceptable in interstate relations—state-sanctioned assassinations of sovereign rulers, for example—perfectly justifiable. In diplomatic affairs, the period between the Council of Trent and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was an age of paranoia; leading statesmen were obsessed

52

Hildebrand, Johan III, pp. 284–6.

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with the existence of secret international conspiracies directed against them and their realms, and with good reason, for such plots abounded and were not a matter of mere rumour. The situation in the Baltic kingdoms in the mid-1570s made fertile ground for cabals and secret pacts, all of them fantastical and unrealistic, but frightening to their intended targets nonetheless. The Swedish ambassador in Poland, Anders Lorichs (or Lorck), hatched a particularly imaginative plot between 1574 and 1579. Lorichs, a native of Flensburg, had fought in the armies of Charles V and Henry II before serving Frederik II as a diplomat. For some reason, he lost Frederik’s favour in 1566, and shortly thereafter offered his services to the Swedish court. He represented Johan III at the Polish court during the 1573 election. By 1577 Lorichs had established several important personal contacts in Poland, all of them Catholic: Anjou’s minister Guy de Lansac; the papal nuncio in Poland, Vincenzo Lauréo; and even King Stefan Bathory himself. In 1578, Lorichs converted to the Catholic faith, and King Stefan—who aspired to forge an alliance with Johan III— took the Swedish agent into his confidence. Lorichs had not forgotten his own grudge against Frederik II, and encouraged the Polish king’s dislike of Denmark and his hopes for a Swedish alliance. After further meetings with Catholic emissaries—the papal nuncios Possevino and Caligari, and Philip II’s ambassador to Sweden, Francisco de Eraso—Lorichs’ plot began to take shape. Lorichs’ proposal was breathtaking in its audacity. With Philip II’s help, Lorichs argued, Johan III could secretly construct a powerful fleet at Älvsborg, Sweden’s only North Sea port. The Spanish-Swedish fleet could then take the Sound fortifications at Helsingør and Helsingborg by surprise, and with Polish help the Sound could be closed. Copenhagen would fall in very short order, and sympathetic German princes could be enlisted to assist in invading Jutland. The Oldenburg monarchy would then be divided up between Spain, Sweden, Poland, and the Gottorp dukes; Frederik II would be forced to flee, and those Danes too stubborn to convert to the Roman faith could be shipped off to New Spain, forced to serve as slaves in the silver mines there. A subjugated Denmark would serve as a springboard for further conquests: Poland and Sweden could take Livonia from the Muscovites, and the closing of the Sound could be used as a weapon to bring the Dutch rebels and the troublesome English to their knees. Ultimately, the conquest of Denmark would lead to the recatholicisation of the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Lorichs’ ambitious plan

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won the warm approval of the papal nuncios in Sweden and Poland, opening the way for the humble Flensburger to discuss his proposal directly with men of considerable influence and stature: by the end of 1580, Lorichs had met with both Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma, Philip II’s new governor in the Netherlands, and with Pope Gregory XIII himself.53 The Lorichs plot, like most of such machinations, came to nothing. It was unrealistic: among other things, it underestimated the combined strength of the Danish fleet and the Sound fortifications, both of which were being beefed up during the 1570s, and did not take into account Johan III’s slow but deliberate moves away from the papacy after 1580. The nuncio Possevino never wavered in his support of the plot, but the papacy lost interest by 1583, and the following year Lorichs fell into Johan III’s bad graces and was beheaded. Lorichs’, however, was not an isolated case. Other schemers dreamed of similar strategems; in 1576, the French nobleman Lansac—who had been so harshly treated by Frederik II three years earlier—proposed a covert Swedish-Lorraine attack on Helsingør and Copenhagen.54 It is unknown whether Frederik II ever caught wind of the details of these plots directed against his coveted waterways. They were no secret in Catholic Europe; the French legate in Danzig, for example, relayed the particulars of the Lorichs plot to his masters in Paris. Though they were failures, the Lorichs and Lansac plots revealed unsettling things: the growing hostility and Baltic ambitions of Poland under Stefan Bathory, the willingness of Johan III to entertain proposals for military alliances with the major Catholic powers, and above all the complicity of Spain and the papacy. Philip II and his governors in the Netherlands, throughout the 1570s and most of the 1580s, would remain outwardly friendly to Frederik II. For his part, Philip II bore Frederik no grudge as he later would Elizabeth I. But so long as Denmark controlled the Sound, and so long as its king 53

Helk, Norvegus, pp. 153–62; Helk, ‘Jesuitten Henrik Mandixen’, pp. 296–7; Molbech, ‘Philip den Andens Erobringsplaner’, pp. 609–14; Henry Biaudet (ed.), Le Saint-Siège et la Suède durant la second moitié du XVI e siècle (Paris, 1906), pp. 112–13, Vincentio Lauréo to Tolomeo Gallio, cardinal de Como, 14 September 1574; Biaudet (ed.), Le Saint-Siège, vol. 1, p. 125, Cardinal de Como to Nicolo Ormaneto, 14 November 1574; Ödberg, Anders Lorichs, pp. 1–83; Magdalena de Pazzis Pi Corrales, ‘La “comisión” del capitán Francisco de Eraso a Suecia: una posible alternativa al conflicto con Flandes’, in José Martínez Millán (ed.), Felipe II (1527–1598). Europa y la Monarquía Católica, (5 vols, Madrid, 1998), vol. 1 pt. 2, pp. 617–30. 54 Helk, Norvegus, p. 162; Jensen, ‘Truslen’, p. 246; Ödberg, Anders Lorichs, pp. 102–19.

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kept it open to Dutch maritime traffic, Denmark was a potential target, and Frederik II knew it. So, too, did the Spanish crown; Eraso’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Lorichs plot made that plain.55 And even if Frederik II could not recognise on his own the importance of the Baltic to Spanish interests, Philip II and his lieutenants did not hesitate to drop subtle hints. Late in 1573, Don Luis de Requesens, who replaced Alba as Spanish governor-general in the Low Countries that year, counselled Philip II (in part at Alba’s prompting) that mastery of the northern seas would be necessary if the Dutch rebels were to be subdued quickly, and that this would require a measure of cooperation from Denmark. Accordingly, Requesens sent Georg van Westendorp, syndic of Groningen, to the Danish court to negotiate the purchase of warships to aid the Spanish war effort in the Netherlands. Frederik gently refused Requesens’ request. Neither Philip nor Requesens took obvious offense at the rebuff, but Philip used the opportunity to remind Frederik of the cordial relationship that had existed between Denmark and Spain since the days of Charles V and Christian III, and of the importance of the Speyer settlement of 1544. The message was courtly but clear: Frederik, in a way, owed his legitimacy as a ruler to Habsburg goodwill.56 And if thinly veiled threats were not enough to put Frederik on his guard, then there was an abundance of friends who were more than willing to help, within his own administration and among the princes of the Empire. Peder Oxe and Heinrich Rantzau had cautioned the king about Spanish ambitions in the North ever since Alba first arrived in the Low Countries in 1567. Rantzau’s informants tended to be alarmist in their fear of Catholicism; their reports, which Rantzau passed freely along to Frederik, claimed that both Alba and the pope had aided and encouraged Charles IX during the Huguenot massacres of 1572.57 Although Rantzau himself indulged in very little speculation about the existence of an international 55

Pi Corrales, ‘Francisco de Eraso’, p. 624. Gachard (ed.), Correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 436, 442, Requesens to Philip II, 4 December and 30 December 1573; L. Didier (ed.), Lettres et négociations de Claude de Mondoucet, résident de France aux Pays-Bas (1571–1574) (2 vols, Paris, 1891–92), vol. 2, p. 81, Claude de Mondoucet to Charles IX, 31 December 1573; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1573–75: fol. 36v–9, Frederik to Philip II, 10 January 1574; fol. 47–8, Frederik to Ulrich, 24 January 1574; fol. 70v–2v, Frederik II to August of Saxony, 15 March 1574. 57 Säch. HStA DB 12: fol. 300–2, Michael Rheder to Rantzau, 7 October 1572; fol. 282–4v, Michel Rud to Rantzau, 17 October 1572. 56

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Catholic conspiracy, his reports bore an unmistakeably pro-Protestant tone; he, like Oxe, was most disturbed by the actions of Philip II and his lieutenants in the Netherlands. Philip’s ambitious but abortive attempt to send a battle-fleet to recapture Dutch ports in rebel hands in 1574 frightened Rantzau, as did false rumours about another ‘great Armada’ from Spain in 1578; such an action, Rantzau warned his master in Copenhagen, would have grave repercussions for Denmark’s dominium maris Baltici.58 Perhaps to reinforce his admonitions, Rantzau pointed to celestial evidence as well: the appearance of ‘a terrible comet’ in the skies over Segeberg on the night of 9 November 1577, the governor argued, surely portended disaster for Protestants throughout Europe.59 The king’s princely contacts in the Empire also kept him apprised of the plight of the Dutch and French Protestants. Frederik, Ulrich of Mecklenburg, and August of Saxony traded Dutch pamphlets and newsletters back and forth at least once per month, and Frederik was accordingly very well informed on Continental affairs. Elector August in particular emphasised that Denmark was caught in the midst of these confessional disputes; in November 1573, well before the Lorichs plot, he alerted Frederik to rumours about an imminent Franco-Polish assault on the fortifications at Helsingør and Helsingborg.60 Frederik’s circle of associates within the Protestant Fürstenstand expanded during the late 1570s to include some true radicals as well. Starting in 1576, he commenced a lively and friendly correspondence with the militant Calvinist Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir. Johann Casimir was not a prince of great means. He was similar to his father, Elector Palatine Friedrich III, in his religious convictions, but it was his elder, Lutheran brother who succeeded to the electoral title as Ludwig VI in October 1576. Johann Casimir held only the small appanage of Pfalz-Lautern. Yet what he lacked in influence at home was more than offset by his international reputation. Johann Casimir was an active participant in the Huguenot wars of the 1560s and ’70s. His

58 Säch. HStA DB 12, fol. 281v, Rantzau to Frederik, late October 1572; RAK TKIA/A.77/6, Rantzau to Frederik, 18 July 1574; RAK TKIA/A.77/7, Rantzau to Frederik, 20 February 1578. On the 1574 Armada, see Parker, Grand Strategy, pp. 139–40. 59 RAK TKIA/A.77/7, Rantzau to Frederik II, 15 November 1577. 60 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.8, August to Frederik, 26 November 1573; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1573–75, fol. 31–4v, Frederik to August, 8 January 1574.

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invasion of France on behalf of Navarre in the spring of 1576, at the head of an army of 20,000 German mercenaries, helped to force Henry III to concede to the Peace of Monsieur. Even after Monsieur, Johann Casimir did not give up his ardent support for Navarre, in part because Henry III later refused to give the Pfalzgraf what he had been pledged in the peace settlement. Johann Casimir and Frederik II were related by marriage—the Palatine was married to Frederik’s niece Elisabeth, daughter of August of Saxony and ‘Mutter Anna’; despite the political tensions later caused by this interconfessional marriage, the Danish king and the Calvinist adventurer would remain lifelong friends. Johann Casimir, therefore, was delighted that Frederik II took such an evident interest in the fate of the French Protestants. Indeed, in August 1578 Frederik made the unusual move of asking the Pfalzgraf to visit him in Denmark, and though Johann Casimir was unable to accept the invitation he was clearly moved by it. It is difficult to say with any certainty if the members of the Council of State kept up with international politics in such detail, but there is evidence to suggest that at least one of them—the king’s trusted senior secretary of the German Chancery and later councillor, Hans Skovgaard—received similar reports of the existence of an international Catholic league from contacts in Hessen.61 Whatever the source of the king’s foreign intelligence, the tone of his diplomatic correspondence with his confidantes in the Empire shows that Frederik II was convinced that there was an international Catholic conspiracy afoot, and that the papacy was squarely behind it. The troubles in Poland and Sweden in the 1570s revealed it; his frequent contact with German princes, who perceived the international situation in precisely the same terms as he did, proved it.62 To Frederik II, it was plain that the persecution of the Huguenots, the attempted suppression of the rebellious Netherlands, and Habsburg and Valois ambitions in the Baltic were not unrelated events. They were, instead, parts of a monstrous overarching plot to eliminate

61 Friedrich von Bezold (ed.), Briefe des Pfalzgrafen Johann Casimir mit verwandten Schriftstücken (3 vols, Munich, 1882–1908), vol. 3, pp. 652–3, Johann Casimir to Frederik, 30 August 1578; Schumacher, Gelehrter Männer Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 291–4, Dr. Nicolaus Theophilos von Flesburg, Hessian Hofrat, to Hans Skovgaard, 27 March 1577. 62 For an example of the kind of ‘Catholic conspiracy theory’ rhetoric employed by the more radical Protestant princes of the Empire, see: Rolf Glawischnig, Niederlande, Kalvinismus und Reichsgrafenstand 1559 –1584. Nassau-Dillenburg unter Graf Johann VI. (Marburg, 1973), pp. 147–9.

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Protestantism altogether. Frederik asserted that Anjou had been a mere tool of the papacy. ‘There can be no doubt’, he wrote to Georg von Liegnitz in August 1573, ‘that the Polish election has been promoted and driven by the pope in order to root out the Lutheran teachings, and to bring about a bloodbath in Poland and in Germany, no less than in France.’ Both Peder Oxe and Christoph von Dohna, the king’s trusted hofmarskalk, assured him that ‘papist’ troops were massing at Danzig to crush Protestants in Poland and Prussia. The king asserted vaguely that German Protestants were also in danger of extermination, a claim that was no doubt encouraged by Rantzau.63 While Frederik II might have perceived a single Catholic threat facing all the Protestant states together, he came to the conclusion by the late 1570s that Spain was by far the greater evil and the greater threat. It helped, of course, that Peder Oxe was well-inclined towards the French. There must have been some on the Council who remained obdurate to Dançay’s charm; as the French ambassador remarked to Henry III in April 1575, ‘the kingdom of Denmark is not without strongly contrary factions . . . Others [in the government], carried away by their passions and personal profit, do not miss a single occasion to render you suspect and odious to the king of Denmark.’64 But even after Peder Oxe’s death on 24 October 1575 the relationship between the Valois and Oldenburg courts improved steadily. France was clearly the weaker of the two Catholic states. While Philip II’s strategic reach must have appeared limitless, the Valois rulers constantly demonstrated their inability even to keep their Protestant minority at home pacified, much less suppressed. Though Frederik was never entirely satisfied that the Huguenots were being accorded the religious freedom he felt they deserved, for the most part the king was willing to give Henry III the benefit of the doubt. Frederik was accordingly hopeful that a permanent peace in France was only just around the corner. When Dançay proudly presented Frederik II and Chancellor Niels Kaas with the terms of Edict of Beaulieu (May 1576) early in July 1576, Frederik was visibly elated. He trumpeted the virtues of this pacification—soon to become infamous to French Catholics as the ‘Peace of Monsieur’—which granted unpre63 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73: fol. 359–61v, Frederik to August, 12 July 1573; fol. 389–90v, to Georg of Liegnitz, 23 August 1573. 64 ‘Correspondance’, pp. 87–8, 115, Dançay to Henry III, 20 April and 24 November 1575.

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cedented religious freedoms to the Huguenots. To Frederik, the peace was a triumph for Protestants everywhere; it appeared to represent the long-awaited end to the persecution of Protestants within France.65 For all her poorly executed policies in the Baltic, Catherine de’ Medici must take some of the credit for the diminishing tension between Denmark and France. It was she who had decided to present Frederik II with the Order of St. Michel in 1561; it was she who maintained a steady diplomatic presence in Denmark through the good offices of Charles de Dançay. Dançay’s influence, however, was probably the most important factor. Dançay managed somehow to earn Frederik’s friendship and trust—plus that of the Council of State and of leading Danish intellectuals—and simultaneously serve Valois interests in the Baltic faithfully. He worked assiduously to soften the effect of the plethora of irritants, whether they involved Danish commercial policies in the Baltic or French treatment of the Huguenots, that invariably arose between the two crowns. Convinced that the continuing (though unrealistic) intrigues of Christine of Lorraine might possibly harm this relationship, Dançay was so forward as to ask the queen mother to subdue the duchess. He recognised Frederik’s growing distrust and fear of Spain; and while Dançay did not overtly encourage Frederik in this regard, by the late 1570s he had begun to prod Henry III and Catherine de’ Medici to pursue a possible Franco-Danish defensive alliance directed against Philip II.66 While Frederik II did not hesitate to express his anger with France publicly during the election crisis in Poland, he was circumspect in his contacts with Philip II, and rightly so. Catherine de’ Medici and Henry III were absorbed by their domestic problems, and for all their schemings in the Baltic, they were essentially harmless. Spain was a different matter altogether. By the mid-1570s, Frederik had come to share Heinrich Rantzau’s distrust and fear of Spain. Frederik’s formal correspondence with Philip II, though infrequent, was outwardly polite and cordial, and not the least bit provocative. The king’s letters to his German princely confidantes, however, exhibited a deep concern about Spanish actions in the Netherlands, the Baltic,

65 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1576–77: fol. 147v–8v, 531–2, Frederik to Ulrich, 10 July 1576 and 20 November 1577; fol. 8v–9v, to Anna of Saxony, 6 January 1576. 66 ‘Correspondance’, p. 117, Dançay to Catherine de’ Medici, 24 November 1575; ‘Correspondance’, pp. 86–7, 122–3, Dançay to Henry III of France, 20 April 1575 and 22 October 1580.

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and northern Germany. Where Frederik appeared confident that the Valois were working in earnest to secure peace with the Huguenots, he doubted that the Dutch Calvinists would find similar success with their sovereign; Philip II’s inflexibility on confessional issues, Frederik argued, ensured the continuation of the war in the Netherlands.67 Philip’s ruthless pursuit of the war against the Dutch rebels knew no bounds, and was an indirect threat to peace in the Baltic and within the Empire. Frederik believed that Philip’s preparations for a naval assault on the Dutch rebel ports in 1574, first brought to his attention by Rantzau, was nothing less than a precursor to a massive invasion of both England and the Netherlands.68 The king may not have known the details of the Lorichs plot while it was unfolding, but by late 1579 Rantzau had provided Frederik with details of Spanish diplomatic intrigues in Sweden. According to Rantzau, the Spanish ambassador in Stockholm, Francisco de Eraso, was ‘speaking ill of Your Majesty’ and trying to secure Johan III’s support for a joint action against the Dutch rebels and possibly Denmark as well. The king also believed that Spain was aiding Stefan Bathory in his attempts to subdue the city of Danzig; indeed, when Frederik intimated this information to William the Silent, he casually referred to Spain and Poland as ‘the enemy’, as if Denmark and the Dutch rebels were united in their enmity towards Philip II.69 Frederik II’s distrust of Spain did not go unreciprocated. Frederik had been careful in his dealings with Philip II and his governors in the Low Countries. Apart from imploring Philip to settle his dispute with the rebellious Netherlands by peaceful means, the Danish king studiously avoided any hint of provocation in his correspondence with Spanish authorities. But Frederik’s open hostility towards Catholicism in general, and his kingdom’s dominance over the Sound, rendered a warm and open relationship between the two states all but impossible. The Commendone affair in 1561 had given rise to rumours that Frederik was one of the foremost proponents of an international Protestant alliance, and his alleged designs on the Imperial crown 67 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1573–75: fol. 50v–2v, Frederik to August, 2 February 1574; fol. 266v–7v, to Ulrich, 8 April 1575. 68 RAK TKIA/A.77/6, Rantzau to Frederik, 18 July 1574; RAK TKUA/ AD/AusReg 1573–75: fol. 139v-141, 158–9, Frederik to August, 5 July and 6 August 1574; fol. 153v–4v, to Ulrich, 29 July 1574. 69 RAK TKIA/A.77/8, Rantzau to Frederik, 31 December 1579; RAK TKUA/ AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 4–6v, Frederik to Orange, 11 January 1578.

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in the early 1560s earned him a reputation as a troublemaker. Such rumours did not die easily. The Spanish ambassador in London could assure Philip II in 1570 that nothing could move the king of Denmark to ‘break his alliance’ with Spain, but that confidence faded away quickly. Philip’s informants believed that they had evidence of covert Danish support for the Dutch rebels, and feared that—if Elizabeth I did not come to their aid—the rebels were likely to offer their allegiance to Frederik II as their sovereign. The French resident in the Netherlands, Claude de Mondoucet, reported in 1573–74 that Frederik meant to send 11,000 cavalry to aid William of Orange, and that Duke Magnus personally commanded a force of 6,000 men there.70 Little wonder, then, that Spanish authorities entertained the prospect of an alliance with Sweden. To be sure, the wariness that characterised Danish foreign policy in the mid- to late 1570s did not stem entirely from fear of Valois and Spanish Habsburg ambitions in the Baltic. Even without the presence of a French king in Poland (and possibly in Sweden), or of Spanish and papal emissaries in Sweden, the four-way competition for Livonia and the difficulties presented by the Narva trade required some vigilance on the part of the Danish king. Duke Magnus, Frederik’s brother, continued to make trouble in the eastern Baltic. Magnus had lost Øsel following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1570, but had since entrusted himself to the protection of Tsar Ivan IV, who gave the Danish duke the title of ‘King of Livonia’ and married Magnus to a Russian princess. Having lost Ivan’s favour in 1577, Magnus spent the last six years of his luckless and unhappy life at the castle of Pilten in Courland, where he died as a pensioner of the Polish crown.71 Although Frederik had long since all but disowned his younger brother, who had been both a disappointment and an embarrassment to Denmark, the frequency with which Magnus appears in the king’s correspondence shows that Magnus caused 70

Correspondencia de Felipe II con sus embajadores en la corte de Inglaterra 1558 á 1584 (Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vols 87–92; Madrid, 1886–88), vol. 90, p. 374, Antonio de Guaras to Zayas [??], 28 July 1570; Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 2, pp. 324–5, Guerau de Spes to Philip II, 19 July 1571; Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 2, p. 348, Guerau de Spes to Alba, 31 October 1571; Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 2, p. 511, Antonio de Guaras to Zayas, 5 December 1575; Didier (ed.), Lettres de . . . Mondoucet, vol. 1, p. 225, and vol. 2, p. 135, Mondoucet to Charles IX, 27 March 1573 and 6 March 1574. 71 DBL vol. 15, pp. 222–4; Karl Heinrich von Busse, Herzog Magnus, König von Livland. Ein fürstliches Lebensbild aus dem 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1871), pp. 128–60.

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Frederik no small number of sleepless nights. Hostilities with Poland also continued to smoulder during the late 1570s. This never amounted to open war, but the Danish fleet frequently took brutal action against Polish pirates and privateers, well beyond the limits of Danish territorial waters. When Stefan Bathory fought with the city of Danzig over the city’s privileges in 1577, Frederik II provided substantial aid to the city, in the form of men, money, and naval support.72 The collective press of Denmark’s security concerns in the 1570s meant that the kingdom would have little respite from the demands of preparing for war. The end of the war with Sweden in 1570–71 permitted the demobilisation of nearly all of Denmark’s mercenary land forces and a reduction in expenditures on the fleet. Even before the ink had dried on the Stettin settlement, however, Frederik II and Peder Oxe had begun a systematic renovation and expansion of the fleet, a program that would continue steadily until the king’s death in 1588. Shipbuilders from all over the monarchy were drafted to work in the shipyards at Bremerholm, as well as smaller yards in Denmark and Norway. Frederik even purchased the services of twenty experienced ships’ carpenters from Amsterdam in 1572. The older ships, veterans of the war with Sweden, required repairs and longneglected maintenance, but the fleet was growing in numbers, too. Several merchant ships from Danzig, seized during the war, were slated for conversion into warships, and the construction of new vessels continued unabated. The pride of the fleet, the gigantic St. Oluf— seventy alen (between 40 and 44 metres) long in the keel, displacing 1200 lasts and carrying a crew of 1500—was ready for service by 1574. Overall naval expenditures increased dramatically during the 1570s. While total expenditures on Frederik II’s fleet would never again reach the level to which they had climbed in the midst of the war with Sweden (over 101,000 Rd in 1565 alone), as a proportion of the aggregate crown expenditures the cost of the new fleet was significant. Even during the Seven Years’ War, the costs of the fleet had never exceeded 12.5 per cent of the bloated wartime budget; but in the leaner budget of the postwar years, naval expenditures were far more prominent, rising to over 13 per cent in 1575, nearly 18 per cent in 1576, and attaining a peak of over 20 per cent in 1581.73 72

Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 263–4; Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, pp. 188–93. Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, pp. 163–86; Grundtvig, Frederik den Andens Statshusholdning, clxxviii–clxxix, Table 18. 73

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The reasons behind this gradual but steady augmentation of the fleet were manifold. The war with Sweden, of course, had taken its toll, yet the coming of peace did not mean the end of vigilance. The enforcement of the lastetold required the presence of a substantial naval force at Helsingør, and Frederik’s anti-piracy campaign in the early 1570s kept portions of the fleet busy in both the Baltic and North Seas. It was of course a cornerstone of Frederik’s security policy to keep Polish naval strength to a minimum, a policy which required frequent patrols off the southern Baltic coastline. Similarly, ambitions to establish an Imperial fleet in the Baltic, promoted by Pfalzgraf Georg Hans von Veldenz, Duke Adolf of Holstein, and Count Edzard of Ostfriesland, constituted a direct threat to Danish naval supremacy. Although the idea of an Imperial fleet was discussed at the Diets of Speyer (1570) and Regensburg (1576), strong princely opposition to the project ensured it a demise as rapid as that of Lazarus von Schwendi’s proposal for a permanent Imperial army.74 It was fear of Baltic intrigues on the part of the western powers, however, that was foremost in the king’s mind. Indeed, the greatest single mustering of naval personnel during the 1570s occurred on 20 October 1573, when 1850 seamen were called up for immediate duty in preparation for a Franco-Polish assault on the Sound. That same month, Frederik attempted to purchase one hundred iron culverins, large cannon designed for fortifications or for shipboard use, directly from the English crown.75 The king’s heightened concern for the security of the realm was reflected also in the strengthening of the coastal fortifications, particularly around the straits at Helsingør and at the eastern approach to the Sound at Dragør. The Krogen fort at Helsingør, erected during the reign of Erik of Pomerania in the fifteenth century, was decrepit and hopelessly outmoded by the mid-sixteenth century. In the late 1550s, Christian III had considered proposals for Krogen’s renovation, but the king’s death and the financial exigencies of the war with Sweden postponed the execution of these plans. The Lansac crisis, however, highlighted the need for stronger fortifications along the Sound. Frederik II decided to push ahead with the reconstruction 74 Jensen, ‘Truslen’, p. 268; Maximilian Lanzinner, ‘Konfessionelles Zeitalter 1555–1618’, Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte (24 vols, Stuttgart, 2001), vol. 10, p. 62. 75 Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, pp. 176–7; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 83–4, Frederik to Elizabeth I of England, 23 October 1573.

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of Krogen after visiting Helsingør late in the summer of 1573. Construction of the new fortification at Helsingør began in 1574, and three years later it was nearly complete. The resulting edifice, which the king dubbed Kronborg in 1577, was at once both a graphic demonstration of the power and majesty of the Danish monarch and a formidable fortification. Surrounding the magnificent residence at Kronborg—surely the most spectacular edifice in Frederik’s otherwise minimal architectural legacy—were intimidating water batteries of the most modern design, bristling with heavy cannon. Here, too, the primary motive behind the rearmament was fear of incursion from western Catholic powers. In the king’s menacing words, written after the Lansac episode, such fortifications were to ensure that ‘those who would pass through [the Sound] without giving notice can be received as they deserve’.76 If Frederik II were indeed gatekeeper of the Sound before 1577, the expansion of the fleet and the construction of Kronborg now allowed the king to shut those gates and lock them as well, for the guns that lined the narrows at Helsingør rendered the passage of the Sound all but impossible for even the most determined and well-armed foe.77 The danger of a possible foreign assault on the Sound was not the only way in which the wars in western Europe threatened Denmark’s national security. Equally frightening was the insidious menace presented by the influx of foreign, non-Lutheran Protestants. The flood of religious refugees from the embattled Netherlands—most of them tradesmen, many of them Calvinists or Anabaptists—in the early 1570s swelled the ranks of heterodox Protestants residing in Denmark. Frederik was sympathetic to the plight of the Dutch rebels, and recognised that many of the refugees provided valuable skills that could redound to the benefit of the Danish economy. But their mere presence potentially compromised the harmony and uniformity of the Danish state church, qualities which—in Frederik’s view—provided Denmark with its most effective defense against Romanism. The letter-books of the Danish Chancery reflect a growing nervousness on the part of the king. The Foreigner Articles of 1569, which required all resident aliens to conform to the Danish church ordinance of 76

Lind, Fra Kong Frederik den Andens Tid, p. 176. CCD vol. 2, pp. 48–9, 24 January 1577. On the design and construction of the fortifications at Kronborg, see: Otto Norn, Kronborgs Bastioner. En fortificationshistorisk studie (Copenhagen, 1954), pp. 19–37. 77

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1537, had not been enforced to Frederik’s satisfaction, and so he supplemented the Articles with additional regulations on foreign Protestants. In April 1571, the king ordered municipal authorities in Helsingør to register all foreigners residing within the city, and in the future to prohibit foreign visitors from settling there. This must have proven impossible to enforce, so instead Frederik attempted to regulate the behavior of religious refugees living in Helsingør. These foreigners, many of whom ‘pretend to have been driven [from their native lands] for the sake of religion, yet [in reality] have left on account of misdeeds and other improprieties that they have committed’, brought crime and prostitution in their train. Many of them refused to attend worship services, in violation of the established laws, preferring more salacious activities on the Sabbath. Frederik commanded the mayor and the city council to supervise their alien populations closely; those who refused to attend church services or who led ‘objectionable or immoral lives’ were to be banished summarily; prostitutes catering to the more licentious foreigners were to be banished on the first offense, and mutilated or executed on the second. Foreign artisans settling in Denmark with royal permission found that their privileges were conditional: they were forbidden to introduce any religious ideas that ran counter to the accepted doctrine of the state church. Moreover, in 1576 Frederik reiterated the 1562 ban on the sale or ownership of unapproved theological texts in much harsher terms than before.78 In part, Frederik’s stance stemmed from a marked dislike of, even contempt for, the Dutch, a prejudice that would be demonstrated repeatedly in the cold and unfriendly reception he would later give to embassies from the fledgling Republic. In the main, however, it was his fear of confessional divisiveness that inspired his rigidity towards asylum-seekers. Frederik believed firmly in the necessity of Protestant solidarity on an international scale, but at home he wanted homogeniety, not diversity. The Dutch Protestants, while martyrs for the faith in their own land, were unwanted troublemakers in Denmark. In Frederik’s defense, it should be emphasised that—in comparison with his contemporaries— he was relatively congenial in his dealings with non-Lutheran foreigners. He frequently granted them sanctuary, and even exemption 78 KB 1571–75, pp. 28–9, 399, 668, 14 April 1571, 1 March 1574, 3 September 1575; CCD vol. 1, pp. 589–91, and vol. 2, pp. 15–16, 13 July 1574, 15 May 1576; KB 1576–79, p. 15, 25 February 1576.

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from local taxes; the king did not actively persecute them or drive them away. He required only that they conform outwardly and keep their doctrinal differences to themselves. The flood of foreigners into Denmark in the mid-1570s, however, presented more than theological or moral dangers. Rumours of acts of sabotage in foreign lands, pervasive in sixteenth-century confessional ‘conspiracy theories’, had their effect on a king shaken by the recent events in the Netherlands, France, and Poland. The various plots on the lives of co-religionists like Elizabeth I and William of Orange, as yet unsuccessful but demonstrably real, only served to substantiate such speculation. Frederik’s allies frequently warned the king of plots against his person, his residences, and his fleet.79 In January 1577, Frederik II addressed the mayors and councils of several larger towns and ferry-ports—including Landskrona, Helsingør, Copenhagen, Assens, Odense, Middelfart, and Aarhus—about the recent influx of suspicious foreigners. Undoubtedly, the king asserted, many of these aliens were up to no good, and some of them must have been spies; therefore, local authorities were to make sure that no-one—foreign or native—entered or left the kingdom without a passport or at least a plausible excuse. Anyone who seemed the least bit suspicious was to be detained, interrogated, and remanded to the custody of the king.80 This same fear of espionage and subterfuge— generically labelled as Practiken (tricks) in the rhetoric of the German princes—may have also prompted the new, exceptionally tight restrictions on access to the king’s person and court, promulgated in February 1578.81

79 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73, fol. 268v–70v, Frederik to Ulrich, March 1573; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1573–75, fol. 31–4v, Frederik to August, 8 January 1574. 80 KB 1576–79, pp. 84, 134, 24 August 1576 and 25 January 1577. 81 ‘Bestemmelser om hvo der maate komme op paa Slottet i Kiøbenhavn 1578’, in ‘Uddrag af det danske Cancellies Registranter fra Kongerne Frederik I., Christian III. og Frederik II. Tid’, DM, Series 2, 6:2 (1836), 152–4.

CHAPTER FIVE

PROTESTANT SOLIDARITY AND THE IMPERIAL CRISIS, 1577–1583

Great Princes, when it cometh to the pinch, do cavil, and go from their bond. Daniel Rogers, 15771

Denmark was indeed preparing for war in the mid-1570s. Frederik II had returned the fleet to wartime numbers and readiness, strengthened the fortifications guarding the approaches to the Sound, and kept in much closer contact with his mercenary captains than he had at any time since the end of the war with Sweden in 1570. During the Polish election crisis in 1573, the king had also demonstrated a firm intent to go to war with France if necessary. An all-out war against Denmark’s confessional enemies—particularly Spain—was nonetheless out of the question at this point. Denmark did not have the requisite resources, allies, or even sufficient cause to take on the empire of Philip II, nor did Frederik manifest any interest in doing so. The sympathies of both king and aristocracy, however, were plainly anti-Catholic. Danish literary culture reflected this strong anti-Roman bent. Denmark produced relatively little printed literature during the reign of Frederik II, and published diatribes against Catholics would not emerge in large quantities until the early seventeenth century. That which was produced, however, shows that neither king, court, nor episcopacy shied away from negative literary depictions of Catholics that were nothing short of vituperative. There were some native expressions of anti-Catholic feeling, like those that came from the pen of court chaplain Anders Sørensen Vedel. Vedel, who had authored the anti-papal tract Antichristus Romanus (1571) mentioned earlier, published in 1580 an Oratio panegyrica for Frederik II. Vedel praised the king for preserving confessional harmony within Denmark, and blamed the woes of Denmark’s less fortunate neighbours on the Jesuits, ‘the

1

Cal. SP For. vol. 12, pp. 26–9, Rogers to Walsingham, 24 July 1577.

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elite troops of Satan’ [Iesuitae Triarij Sathanae].2 There was sufficient demand for this kind of polemic that popular foreign pamphlets, especially German, were frequently imported and sometimes translated into Danish. One such broadside, published by the court printer Laurentz Benedicht in 1581, neatly summed up the common Danish view of the papacy and the Jesuit order:3 Their names they bear in sooth For they stand against the truth. ‘Jesuit’ plus ‘Antichrist’ means ‘to be against Jesus Christ’.

Again, the strict enforcement of the 1562 censorship laws meant that such writings, no matter how small, had to meet the approval of the king and the theological faculty. Frederik encouraged such hostility towards Catholicism at court. The festivities at Copenhagen Castle celebrating the birth and baptism of Frederik’s heir, Prince Christian, in 1577 were full of expressions of anti-Catholic feeling. These included the performance to two biblically-themed ‘school plays’ written for the occasion by Peder Hegelund, master of the cathedral school at Ribe, an accomplished poet, and later bishopsuperintendent of Ribe. These two plays, Susanna and David and Goliath, were—like Hegelund’s later work, Calumnia—replete with anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish overtones, and the king was quite fond of them. David and Goliath has been interpreted as a visual representation of Oldenburg claims to hereditary monarchy, but just as likely the play contained a message of hope and belligerence as well. The performance of the play culminated, predictably, in an elaborately-staged battle scene between the Israelites and the Philistines. Though the mock battle got out of hand—members of the audience, including the ageing Rigsadmiral Peder Munk, got carried away by the lavish spectacle and leaped into the fray—it provided an appropriate allegory of Danish defiance of the great Catholic powers: the eventual triumph of a smaller but God-fearing nation over those of a powerful but pagan juggernaut. The high point of the baptismal celebrations, a fireworks display designed by one Rolf of Deventer, was much less subtle. Four monk-effigies, tonsured and in full vestments,

2 Allan Karker, Anders Sørensen Vedel og den danske krønike (Copenhagen, 1955), pp. 9–10. 3 Ny Tiender, Om tho Jesuwiter (Copenhagen, 1581).

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 145 were set afire by rockets as they stood atop a huge platform. Meanwhile, an ingeniously crafted mechanical soldier crossed a small bridge leading to this platform; the soldier thrust a firebrand into the mouth of an effigy of the pope, setting it afire as well.4 The long-awaited birth of an heir apparent in 1577 was indeed a joyous event for both the royal family and the Council of State. But the joy occasioned by Prince Christian’s baptism was mixed with apprehension over the international situation that faced Denmark that same year. The famous comet of 1577, first spotted in the night skies over Denmark in November 1577, excited considerable speculation about what such a dramatic celestial occurrence might portend. The theologian Jørgen Dybvad, Frederik’s recently enfeoffed astrologer, Tyge Brahe, and even Heinrich Rantzau gave their prognoses on the political meaning of the comet. Although the three men disagreed over the particulars, all believed that the appearance of the comet presaged hard times to come and some disturbing changes, especially with regard to religion. Brahe predicted trouble for Spain and the emperor, and he expressed some hope that international Catholicism was in trouble as well: ‘Monks, priests, and others of the Popish religion should fear [great persecutions], for this comet is very much opposed to them, and they might expect truly to be repaid in good measure during these coming years for the ruthlessness, murder, and pain which they have inflicted upon many pious folk.’ The Habsburgs could expect difficulties in the Netherlands and the Germanies, but still war and pestilence threatened to engulf all of Europe, Denmark included.5

Catholic resurgence and Protestant solidarity By 1577, Frederik II of Denmark had shown to the states of western Europe that he could be an effective supporter of a united Protestant front. His diplomatic rhetoric was not markedly different from that of such scions of militant Calvinism as Johann Casimir, and his 4 Heiberg, Christian 4., pp. 16–17; Skovgaard-Petersen and Zeeberg, Erasmus Lætus’ skrift, pp. 36–7. See Plate 10. 5 John Robert Christianson, ‘Tyge Brahe’s German Treatise on the Comet of 1577: A Study in Science and Politics’, Isis 70 (1979), 130–1, 137–40. On the European reaction to this comet, see C. Doris Hellman, The Comet of 1577: Its Place in the History of Astronomy (New York, 1944).

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standing among the premier Protestant Reichsfürsten was high. Most important, the Danish government had proven a certain willingness to act on its concerns when provoked; Frederik had nearly risked war with France and Poland over the Valois election, and he continued to defend the city of Danzig against its rightful—and decidedly Catholic—overlord, Stefan Bathory of Poland. Frederik II’s reputation as a solidly Protestant prince was important, for outside Denmark plans to create a broadly international Protestant coalition had begun to emerge by the late 1560s. Frederik was hardly the only Protestant statesman who perceived the existence of a multinational Catholic threat. Elizabeth I of England had come to this conclusion much earlier than had Frederik, and with much justification; her reign had opened under a cloud of uncertainty and confessional paranoia, exacerbated by the queen’s well-known troubles with Mary Queen of Scots and the arrival of Alba’s army in the Low Countries. By 1568, many of Elizabeth’s foremost advisers, Sir William Cecil in particular, were arguing the necessity of firm action to defend English religious, political, and commercial interests against Catholic encroachment. Indeed, from early in Elizabeth’s reign until the death of James I in 1625, England would serve as the rallying point for proponents of Protestant union. This concern was mirrored in the Palatine electorate, whose rulers had, since the conversion of Elector Friedrich III in 1563, exhibited the militancy that would become a characteristic of political Calvinism in the late sixteenth century. As interest in an international Protestant alliance blossomed between 1568 and 1577, it was natural that the promoters of such a scheme should seek Danish assistance in the defense of Protestantism in the Netherlands and in France. Frederik was perceived as a powerful sovereign, influential within the Empire and hence a means of mobilising German princely support for a Protestant coalition. This is not to say, however, that Frederik was universally liked in England or the Netherlands. Denmark was a predatory power, and the wealth of its sovereign derived in large part from the Sound dues. Since English and Dutch merchants collectively handled the bulk of the Baltic trade, they paid a proportionately heavier burden of Danish commercial duties. Regardless of his Protestant sympathies, Frederik II was far more aggressive in his enforcement of the Sound dues and associated commercial tolls than his father had been; much like his son and successor, Christian IV, Frederik did not see why those states which held common diplomatic interests with Denmark should

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 147 not be willing to pay the same tariffs as everyone else. The financial vicissitudes of the Seven Years’ War with Sweden had compelled Frederik II to lay an even heavier hand on Baltic commerce. When Frederik closed the Sound to maritime traffic in 1565, he intended no harm to anyone save the Swedes. When Frederik began to levy the lastetold in 1567, it was not meant as a punitive measure, but only to increase the royal revenues in a time of dire need. But the end result was the same, both for Frederik II and later for Christian IV: higher dues and threats of restrictions on Baltic commerce may have been necessary for Denmark’s national security, but such actions inevitably transformed potential friends into enemies. They also helped fuel allegations, especially common in England, that the Danish king was ‘Spanish’ in his sentiments. A plethora of other issues further distanced Frederik II from his coreligionists in the West. Danish seizures of English merchant vessels, whether justifiable or not, were especially frequent during the war years of the 1560s. Several English pirates operated actively in the Baltic and North Seas in the early part of Frederik’s reign, a problem which, as we have already seen, picqued the king during the 1570s. Questions of fishing rights in disputed territorial waters led to scuffles at sea between Danish and English fishermen, and at times even Danish royal warships became involved.6 The most remarkable source of friction between the two monarchies, however, came about as the result of a far less prosaic episode: the bizarre journey of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell, the third and final husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, fled Scotland by sea shortly after Mary’s ignominious defeat at Carberry in June 1567. The regent of Scotland, James Stuart, earl of Moray, sent warships out in pursuit, and the two forces clashed. Bothwell’s ships moved eastward towards Norway, hoping to purchase provisions and fresh water. They sought shelter at the Norwegian island of Karmøy, where they were apprehended in late August 1567 by the Danish warship Bjørnen, patrolling Norwegian waters in search of Swedish ships. Bothwell had no papers, and he was reluctant to reveal his identity, so the captain of Bjørnen, one Christian Aalborg, 6 See, for example, Frederik’s complaints to Elizabeth I regarding the intrusion of English fisherman in Icelandic waters: RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 122–5, 131–4, 139–44, 167–71, Frederik to Elizabeth, 5 March, 4 November 1576, 1 March, 12 September 1577.

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escorted Bothwell and his crews to the port of Bergen as prisoners. Once the local lensmand, Erik Rosenkrantz, established that Bothwell was indeed the consort of the queen of Scotland, Bothwell might have been free to go. But a troublesome legal matter—a lawsuit filed by Anna Throndsen, a local woman of some stature whom Bothwell had jilted many years before—detained him. Before long, Rosenkrantz discovered that his unwanted guest was a wanted man in Scotland, and that the Regent Moray had put a price on his head for his involvement in the murder of Robert Darnley, Mary’s second husband. Rosenkrants was not about to harbour a regicide; he sent Bothwell on to Copenhagen at the end of September. Frederik II was thoroughly occupied with the war against Sweden, but Bothwell’s arrival in Copenhagen warranted some attention. Both Moray and Elizabeth I of England wanted his return. Frederik had commercial grievances against England, and from Scotland he wanted mercenaries to feed his war effort. Bothwell could serve as a useful diplomatic bargaining chip. The king kept Bothwell confined on the other side of the Sound at Malmøhus, refusing all of Elizabeth’s and Moray’s demands that he be either executed or delivered in chains to England or Scotland. Adding to the tension were rumours, of which Elizabeth herself was well aware, that the accused regicide was living free and unrestrained in Copenhagen as a guest of the king. Moreover, Moray’s agent, one John Clerk (Clark), sent from Scotland to demand Bothwell’s immediate execution, was put on trial in Copenhagen. Charged with having aided the Swedes against Denmark, Clerk soon found himself imprisoned, and would shortly thereafter die in Danish custody. Frederik II treated Bothwell hospitably and humanely until the summer of 1573, when he transferred the prisoner from his comfortable quarters at Malmøhus to the stark castle of Dragsholm in north Sjælland. Existing evidence suggests that Bothwell’s mental health—reportedly he was quite mad by 1573—occasioned this change in venue. The earl’s pitiful final days are a mystery, but by all accounts he languished and died at Dragsholm in April 1578, ‘great swollen’, dropsical, and raving. Bothwell had suffered a grim fate, but Frederik’s refusal to extradite him exacerbated an already strained Anglo-Danish relationship.7 7 There is a melodramatic, but sound, account of Bothwell’s fate in Denmark in Robert Gore-Browne, Lord Bothwell and Mary Queen of Scots (New York, 1937), pp. 395–444. See also: Kluckhohn (ed.), Briefe Friedrich des Frommen, vol. 2, pp. 233–4,

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 149 Very likely it was the dislike of Denmark’s commercial policies that led statesmen in the West to distrust Frederik II’s diplomatic intentions as well. It was difficult for either the Dutch rebels or the English to place much trust in a state that seemed to enjoy such cordial relations with both Spain and France. But Frederik’s high standing among Europe’s Protestant sovereigns meant that Denmark could not be ignored in the struggle against international Catholicism, and Frederik’s reputation as a good Protestant was without blemish. The drive to bring Denmark into an international, pan-Protestant alliance began even before the war with Sweden had ended, and was occasioned in large part by a significant shift in English security policy. Throughout her life, Elizabeth I would be faced by the diplomatic dilemmas caused by fear of simultaneous expansion by both France and Spain. Early in the reign, Sir William Cecil and others on Elizabeth’s Privy Council had pushed for English intervention on behalf of the Huguenots, and in 1562 instructed the English agent in the Germanies, Christopher Mundt, to garner Protestant German support for an international initiative in France. Only after the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in 1566 and the dispatch of Alba’s punitive expedition the following year did Spain emerge as the greater immediate threat to England’s territorial and confessional security. Fear of Philip II’s intentions towards the island kingdom prompted the queen and her ministers to look to Continental Protestants, particularly within the Germanies, for assistance. The political and theological fragmentation of German Protestantism made this a daunting task.8 Elizabeth’s interest in uniting German Protestant princes with England in a defensive alliance did not go unreciprocated. Elector Palatine Friedrich III and the more militant members of his Privy Council (Oberrat) were also eager to create a grand Protestant alliance, both out of fear of Spain and from sympathy for the French Huguenots. Indeed, Elector Friedrich and his councillor Christoph Ehem were probably the first German statesmen to argue for the existence of Friedrich III to August, 12 July 1568; Cal. Scot. P vol. 3, p. 283, Thomas Randolph to Sussex, 29 July 1570; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85: pp. 5–13, Frederik to Thomas Buchanan, 9 March 1571; pp. 13–15, Frederik to James VI of Scotland, 23 March 1571; pp. 15–19, Frederik to Elizabeth, 4 May 1571; CalScotP vol. 3, pp. 470–1, Buchanan to Burghley, 19 January 1571; Cal. Scot. P vol. 5, p. 182, rumours from Scotland, 19 August 1575; Cal. SP For. vol. 10, pp. 192–3, Petrus Suavius to Burghley, 18 October 1572. 8 E. I. Kouri, England and the attempts to form a Protestant alliance in the late 1560s: A case study in European diplomacy (Helsinki, 1981), p. 81.

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an international Catholic conspiracy. The Palatine regime welcomed English overtures warmly, and set about the task of cobbling together an Anglo-German alliance with great vigour and enthusiasm. The initial Palatine alliance proposals mentioned neither Denmark nor Sweden, but that would soon change. Elizabeth and her foremost policymakers, especially Cecil, viewed Danish (and, to a lesser extent, Swedish) participation in such an alliance as vital. The king of Denmark enjoyed much greater resources, both financial and military, than did the individual German princes; Denmark, like England, was generally hostile towards the Hanse; and of course Denmark controlled the Sound. Moreover, an English rapprochement with Denmark might well have commercial advantages. English interest in the Baltic trade increased measurably after mid-century, and the prosperity of commercial interest groups like the Company of Merchant Adventurers depended both on the exclusion of a strong Catholic presence from the Baltic region and on the goodwill of Denmark. ‘Their ships are obliged to pass through that country as through a turnstile, and they [the English] do not wish to offend them’, remarked one Spanish observer.9 As Ehem and Elizabeth’s diplomats, notably Henry Killigrew, went from court to court to canvas the Protestant Reichsfürsten, they found that most of those expressing an interest in the alliance were also insistent upon Danish and even Swedish participation. The Scandinavian kingdoms, especially Denmark, had long-standing commercial and dynastic ties with the Empire, and overall were viewed as less ‘foreign’ than England. Theological distinctions—to which Elizabeth and her diplomats were often insensitive—played a role as well. The Calvinist Friedrich III was far more militant than the Lutheran princes of the Empire, who tied their hopes for internal harmony to the Augsburg settlement of 1555; the princes also tended to view England as extremist in its theological leanings. Denmark and Sweden were both Lutheran states, and many of the princes were not inclined to render support to Calvinists in the Netherlands and France unless the Nordic kingdoms did so as well. The problem, of course, lay in the fact that Denmark and Sweden were at war with one another. This was a troubling situation for both England and the German Protestant princes: for England, because the volatile state of affairs in the Baltic threatened further disruptions of trade; for the German princes, 9

Ibid., pp. 81, 84–6; Cal. SP Spanish vol. 2, p. 679, Bernardino de Mendoza to Zayas, 20 June 1579.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 151 because of the fear that the Nordic conflict might spread into the Empire; for the Protestant activists in England and the Palatinate, because the war precluded Protestant unity at a time when confessional solidarity was of paramount importance.10 The Anglo-Palatine alliance negotiations of 1568–69 ultimately came to naught. Denmark and Sweden were embroiled in their own disputes. Neither Elizabeth nor the more militant Germans were willing to commit funds or troops to the ‘common cause’ without a definite commitment from the other. August of Saxony, though initially sympathetic to the plight of the Dutch and French Protestants, was even more fearful that a Protestant alliance might tear the Empire apart; he, along with several other German princes, rejected the proposed alliance at a conference held in Erfurt in 1569. Nevertheless, August apparently suffered no qualms about encouraging Frederik’s participation in such a coalition. The elector, who exceeded all other interested parties in his efforts to bring the Danish-Swedish war to an end, tried to cajole Frederik in May 1569 to accept mediation, arguing that Protestant solidarity against militant Catholicism was more important than the issues that kept the Scandinavian kingdoms at odds. August even assured Henry Killigrew that the Danish king would undoubtedly be eager to join an anti-Spanish alliance once the war with Sweden ended, and the elector promised to help achieve both of these goals.11 For his part, Frederik evinced little or no interest in such goings-on. The English overtures to Frederik II attracted more attention within Catholic Europe than they did within Denmark itself. Cardinal Granvelle was deeply troubled by rumours of an Anglo-Danish rapprochement in the late 1560s, and for that reason was not at all happy to see the Swedish war come to a close.12 Still, this early attempt at alliance-building would leave its imprint on Danish foreign policy in the decades to come. As E.I. Kouri has demonstrated, it heralded the beginning of a new trend in Elizabethan

10 ‘Berathungen der Bevollmächtigen benachbarten Fürsten’, 1569, and ‘Memoire betr. ein Bündniß mit England’, May 1569, in Kluckhohn (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 289–90, 316. 11 Kluckhohn (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 320, 479, Killigrew to Ehem, 5 May 1569, and August of Saxony to Albrecht of Bavaria, 3 August 1572; Kouri, England and the Attempts, pp. 50–1; Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge, pp. 120–1. 12 Poullet (ed.), Granvelle, vol. 3, p. 480, 482–4, Granvelle to Grobbendoncq, 19 February 1569, and to Philip II, 23 February 1569; ‘Mémoire baillé a La Vergne,’ 1569, in Mothe Fénélon, Correspondance diplomatique, vol. 1, pp. 166–7.

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foreign policy: the aggressive pursuit of a pan-Protestant coalition aimed against both France and Spain, directed by England but based on the support of the Protestant Reichsfürsten and the Scandinavian monarchs. Until the 1590s, Danish involvement would be crucial in English eyes, a policy that Cecil first presented to his queen in a memorandum from January 1569.13 The alliance negotiations in the Empire also marked the emergence of the house of Wettin as the ‘spokesman’ for the German Lutheran princes. Elector August of Saxony may well have been renowned for his caution and for his devotion to the 1555 settlement as the only practical guarantor of harmony within the Empire, but in 1569 this did not dampen his enthusiasm for an Evangelical union. Perhaps August’s interest in such a coalition was due to the influence of his Philippist chancellor, ‘the fat doctor’ Georg Cracow; perhaps it owed to his familial ties to Calvinist Europe—his unpleasant niece Anna was still married, albeit unhappily, to William of Orange, and in 1570 his daughter would marry Johann Casimir. Either way, by 1569 the Lutheran princes of the Empire looked to the Saxon electoral house for leadership, a position that Elector August’s close personal ties to both Emperor Maximilian II and Frederik II of Denmark seemed to justify. In 1569, this appeared to bode well for the success of an international Protestant alliance in the immediate future, as the lesser German princes mirrored August’s guarded but genuine enthusiasm; by the late 1570s, as August’s sentiments changed dramatically, princely reliance on Saxon leadership would doom all such attempts to failure. The better part of a decade would pass before Elizabeth’s government would make a serious bid to revive the concept of a Continental alliance built upon a German-Nordic foundation. Relations between England and Denmark actually worsened after the end of the Seven Years’ War. Commercial disputes between the two did not abate, nor did the hated lastetold. Even as Habsburg and Valois intrigues in the Baltic region inspired in the Danish king a newfound interest in the confessional struggles of western Europe, at Elizabeth’s court it was widely believed that Frederik was negotiating an alliance with Spain against England.14 In the years between 1569 and 1577, however, political and confessional conditions had changed dramatically, both in the Scandinavian 13 14

Kouri, England and the Attempts, pp. 83–4. Cal. SP For. vol. 10, p. 64, Walsingham to Burghley, 29 March 1572.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 153 kingdoms and in the Germanies. Unfortunately, the changed situations in these two areas did not complement one another, and hence the outlook for a successful pan-Protestant alliance faded during the 1570s. In Denmark, where the disputes with France and Poland had awakened the king and many of his ministers to the existence of an international Catholic threat, the political climate was much more favourable for the establishment of a Protestant coalition than it had been in the last days of the Swedish war. In the Empire, Protestant solidarity on any issue was virtually impossible by 1577. In 1568, the Protestant Reichsfürsten were united in their fear of Spanish and Catholic expansionism. Conservative Lutherans like August of Saxony, moderates like Ulrich of Mecklenburg, and radicals like Elector Palatine Friedrich III agreed that Philip II and the French monarchy threatened Protestants everywhere, and that a Protestant union, backed by England and Denmark, would be in the best interests of all. The differences between Calvinists and Lutherans, between Philippists and Gnesiolutherans, were barely in evidence during the 1568–69 negotiations. The conciliatory fraternity demonstrated by the princes at the Naumburg meeting of 1561 was still very much alive at the end of the decade. Political Catholicism, however, was correspondingly fragmented, at least within the Empire. The Council of Trent was over, and its edicts loomed fearfully in the minds of Protestant sovereigns, but outside of Spain and the Valois court there was no crusading spirit. The holy mother church would later depend upon the ambition and ruthless devotion of a new generation of secular and ecclesiastical rulers to carry out the Tridentine reforms within the Empire, but in 1569 these leaders were not yet to be found among the ranks of the German Catholic princes. By 1577 this situation had reversed itself. Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85) lent to the Church a vitality and an aggressive militancy it had not seen since the pontificate of Paul III three decades earlier. The Jesuits had already established a firm foothold in the Empire, especially in Cologne and other towns in the western reaches of the Germanies. Under Gregory’s direction, the Church took a more active interest in the Empire, and in 1573 the papacy founded the Collegium Germanicum specifically with the intent of expanding Catholic influence there. The Protestant Reichsfürsten watched, with mounting agitation, as Catholics scored dozens of minor constitutional gains in the closing years of Maximilian II’s imperium. In 1571, Balthasar von Dernbach, the irenicist prince-bishop of Fulda, refashioned himself

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as a militant Catholic and invited a number of Jesuits to assist him in his plans to make Fulda a loyal and profitable servant of Rome. Balthasar attempted to enforce allegiance to Rome in 1573, threatening dissenters with expulsion. This was distressing to Fulda’s largely Lutheran population as well as to neighbouring Hessen. Balthasar’s actions were in clear violation of the Declaratio Ferdinandea, a secret clause attached to the 1555 Augsburg settlement, guaranteeing freedom of worship to Protestant nobles living in Catholic ecclesiastical territories. Wilhelm IV of Hessen and August of Saxony appealed to both the emperor and to the Reichskammergericht, but to no avail. In 1574, the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, Daniel Brendel von Homburg, suppressed Protestant worship in the Lutheran exclave of Eichsfeld, again with Jesuit assistance. Following this trend, the archbishopelector of Trier and the bishop of Worms likewise stifled Protestantism in their territories; in Baden and in other southern cities, Protestant worship was all but eliminated. In Würzburg, the unyielding Romanist Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn succeeded to the episcopal throne in 1573. In exercising their jus reformandi, these Catholic princes were revealing to the world the built-in contradictions of the Peace of Augsburg. To Protestant princes—especially to Wilhelm IV, whose territory bordered on several of these newly Catholic states—the Declaratio Ferdinandea, a perfectly valid piece of Imperial law, had been unjustly disposed of by Catholic princes. To the Catholics, the Declaratio had been a purely personal agreement between Emperor Ferdinand I and the Protestants; since it had never received the mandate of the Imperial Diet, it was not permanently binding. Ferdinand had been dead since 1564. It was high time that his deplorable concession to the Protestants died, too.15 Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this new Catholic counteroffensive was that it appeared to have Imperial sanction. Maximilian II may have earned a reputation as an irenicist and, perhaps, as a ‘closet’ Lutheran, but in the mid-1570s he was by no means a friend to the Protestant princes. The protests of Saxony, Hessen, and 15 Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz, pp. 348–55; Heinrich Schnell, Mecklenburg im Zeitalter der Reformation 1503–1603 (Berlin, 1900), pp. 245–7; Holger Thomas Gräf, Konfession und internationales System. Die Außenpolitik Hessen-Kassels im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Darmstadt/Marburg, 1993), pp. 122–31; Lanzinner, ‘Konfessionelles Zeitalter’, pp. 64–6; Moritz Ritter, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation und des dreißigjährigen Krieges (3 vols, Stuttgart, 1889), vol. 1, pp. 299–312, 445–52; O. Schaffrath, Fürstabt Balthasar von Dernbach und seine Zeit (Fulda, 1967).

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 155 Brandenburg-Ansbach fell on deaf ears in Vienna. Maximilian upheld the Catholic reformation of Fulda by Imperial mandate in March 1574, and the following year he all but nullified the Declaratio. In ill health and nearing the end of his days in 1575, he called upon the electors to recognise his eldest son, the Archduke Rudolf, as King of the Romans and hence the successor to the Imperial dignities. Despite Protestant protests, Maximilian refused to countenance the inclusion of the Declaratio in Rudolf ’s election charter. Rudolf, educated in Spain and unsympathetic to the Protestant plight, was elected anyway, and upon his father’s death in 1576 he took the throne as Rudolf II. Again, some Protestants, notably Elector Palatine Friedrich III, sought unsuccessfully to make ratification of the Declaratio a condition of Rudolf ’s accession. The Protestant cause in the Empire had suffered a major blow, from which it would not recover before the Thirty Years’ War.16 With or without the blessing of the emperors, these Catholic victories could not have been so one-sided without complacency and faction on the part of the Protestant princes. Some theological differences between the German Protestants had surfaced at Naumburg in 1561 and during the alliance negotiations in 1568–69, but there had also existed a sufficiently deep sense of community between the members of the Protestant Stände that these differences did not pose a real obstacle to political solidarity. That would soon change, and much of the blame must rest on the shoulders of August of Saxony. August had not shown any great interest in fine points of theology or doctrine, and marital ties bound him to two of the more radical Calvinist leaders—Johann Casimir and William of Orange. Neither of these marriages, however, would help to promote Protestant unity for long. No-one could reasonably fault William when he divorced his irrational and promiscuous wife, August’s niece Anna of Saxony, in 1570–71, but the publication of the divorce was an embarrassment to the house of Wettin and strained the relationship between August and the rebel cause in the Netherlands. William’s remarriage to Charlotte de Bourbon in 1575 angered not only the French court, but the Saxons and the Hessians as well. William had tacitly tied himself to the Huguenot cause in France, and in doing so had permanently alienated 16 Hugo Moritz, Die Wahl Rudolfs II., der Reichstag zu Regensburg (1576), und die Freistellungsbewegung (Marburg, 1895), pp. 59–136, 154–79; Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz, pp. 367–444.

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August of Saxony. The elector had little use for France or for Elector Friedrich III, whom he believed to be responsible for promoting the Bourbon match. August demanded the return of Anna’s dowry, and William began to lose faith in German support for his cause. The marriage of August’s own daughter Elisabeth to the Calvinist condottiere Johann Casimir was only slightly less dysfunctional.17 The widening gap between Lutheran and Calvinist was only part of the problem; the political division between Gnesiolutherans and their Philippist brethren was to have much more dire consequences. In the spring of 1574, August allowed himself to be convinced by his orthodox Lutheran divines that a Calvinist conspiracy was afoot in Saxony. For years, as in Denmark, Philippist and orthodox Lutherans had coexisted in Electoral Saxony, but Calvinism’s close association with rebellion and reports of intrigue from the dispossessed Ernestine line of the dynasty—which purportedly had Calvinist leanings—convinced the elector that action was necessary. Fearing confessional subterfuge and possibly even a coup, August embarked upon a thorough purge of his court. All those who could possibly be labelled as a cryptocalvinist—in short, all Philippists—were mercilessly rooted out as potential traitors, and unfortunately this included August’s chancellor Cracow.18 With Cracow’s moderating influence gone, and with August convinced that Calvinists were as dangerous as Catholics, Saxon foreign policy would make a radical shift away from the conciliatory spirit characteristic of the 1560s. Enemies of the true Confessio Augustana, whether Catholic, Calvinist, or Philippist—were to be regarded equally with suspicion and distrust. August, already very careful in his dealings with the Habsburg emperor, lost any inclination he had once had to join or lead a pan-Protestant coalition.19 And since so many Protestant Reichsfürsten looked to Dresden for guidance, the chances for successfully creating a broad anti-Catholic alliance—such as England espoused—seemed very slim indeed. 17 Glawischnig, Niederlande, Kalvinismus und Reichsgrafenstand, pp. 134–5; H. Kruse, ‘Wilhelm von Oranien und Anna von Sachsen, eine fürstliche Ehetragödie im 16. Jahrhundert’, Nassauische Annalen 54 (1934), 1–184; Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz, pp. 171–5. 18 Ritter, Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 1, pp. 453–60; August Kluckhohn, ‘Der Sturz der Kryptokalvinisten in Sachsen 1574’, Historische Zeitschrift, 18 (1867), 66–127; Inge Mager, Die Konkordienformel im Fürstentum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Entstehungsbeitrag— Rezeption—Geltung (Göttingen, 1993), pp. 126–41. 19 Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz, pp. 355–62.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 157 Frederik II and the ‘Book of Discord’ The initial stance of the Danish court vis-à-vis the confessional tension within the Empire is difficult to determine. Frederik II himself was a Protestant Reichsfürst, and as such had an abiding interest in the politics of the Empire. As we have seen, the king’s conviction that an international Catholic conspiracy threatened the welfare and existence of Protestantism did not diminish during the course of the 1570s. Nor was this perceived cabal limited geographically to the Baltic, the Netherlands, or France; it affected the German lands as well. Hence Denmark was virtually surrounded by hostile forces. The legacy of the Grumbach conspiracy weighed most heavily on the king’s mind. Grumbach, of course, was long dead, and Christine of Lorraine was by now harmless. Nonetheless, in early 1576 Frederik felt that he still had cause for concern. In March 1576, he sent Christoph von Dohna, one of his most trusted German diplomats, on an embassy to Wilhelm IV of Hessen. After the death of Rigshofmester Peder Oxe in October 1575, Frederik told Wilhelm, he had been presented with considerable documentary evidence to suggest that Oxe, Grumbach, and others at the Palatine and Lorraine courts had been planning ‘various subterfuges against Us and Our kingdom’ on a scale much greater than he had been led to believe previously. Did Wilhelm know anything about this? The Hessian landgrave’s answer could not have given Frederik much solace; Oxe and Grumbach might be dead, Wilhelm replied, but the threat from Lorraine certainly was not, and Frederik had best remain on his guard. Perhaps Wilhelm was referring to the plot that Lansac hatched in that year.20 The situation in the Lower Saxon Circle in the late 1570s added to Frederik’s discomfort. There were persistent rumours in 1577 that Duke Erich II of Braunschweig-Calenberg, a minor prince and soldier-of-fortune, was raising an army in Lower Saxony to assist the Spanish forces in Flanders. Duke Erich had already established a reputation as something of a loose cannon; in 1563, he was rumoured to have accepted a Swedish offer to employ his services in an attack on Holstein. Here, too, Lorraine was involved, since Duke Erich had married Dorothea, the younger daughter of Duchess Christine, in January 20 Säch. HStA DB.12, fol. 451–4v, Frederik’s instructions to Christoph von Dohna, 16 March 1576; StAM 4f. Dänemark 15, Wilhelm IV of Hessen to Frederik, 6 April 1576; RAK TKUA/SD/Lothringen 1, Wilhelm to Frederik, 27 May 1576.

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1576.21 The princes of the Lower Saxon Circle regarded the escalation of the war in the Netherlands with growing nervousness. Despite the assurances of the Spanish governor there, Don John of Austria, that Spain would not try to invade the Circle or quarter troops there, the circle Diet decided in 1578 to keep troops in readiness for a Spanish invasion.22 Taken together, these developments implied that Spain and Lorraine—and therefore France and the Guise family as well—had set their collective sights on northern Germany and possibly Denmark itself, even if their actions might be carried out indirectly by minor characters like Erich of Braunschweig-Calenberg. Of the confessional disputes in western Germany, however, Frederik II wrote not a word, and his confidantes among the German princes were strangely silent on the topic in their correspondence with the king. Frederik involved himself briefly in a succession dispute in the bishopric of Hildesheim in 1573, warning the cathedral chapter sternly but vaguely about the dangers of succumbing to the designs of an evil papacy, but the Catholic gains at Fulda and Eichsfeld did not excite any great concern in Denmark.23 It could be said, of course, that like his successor Christian IV, Frederik II only became alarmed when papal interests encroached on his own, but that would hardly explain Frederik’s unfaltering sympathy for Calvinists in France and the Netherlands. Throughout the 1570s, the king kept a close eye on the confessional struggles in western Europe, and was unwavering in his belief that a papal conspiracy was behind the actions of Philip II and Henry III. The split within Lutheranism, however, could not be ignored at the Danish court, given the court’s Philippist leanings and the close relationship between Frederik and August of Saxony. Frederik, like August, feared the growth of Calvinist influences within his realm, but not for the same reason; rather, it was the king’s dislike of con21 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1576–77: fol. 268v–70, Frederik to Ulrich, 25 January 1577; fol. 275v–6v, 322–4v, to Joachiim Hincken, 27 January and 30 March 1577; fol. 277, to Calixtum Scheinn, 27 January 1577; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.6, Ulrich to Frederik, 12 January 1577; Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge, pp. 23–4; Häfner, Geschichte des niedersächsischen Kreises, pp. 20–8; Jensen, ‘Truslen’, p. 236 n. 5. 22 Schnell, Mecklenburg, pp. 248–9. 23 Säch. HStA DB.12, fol. 324–4v, Rantzau to Frederik, March/April 1573; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1572–73: fol. 278–9, 320–2v, Frederik to Julius of BraunschweigLüneburg, 13 April and 27 May 1573; fol. 279–80v, Frederik II to the cathedral chapter at Hildesheim, 13 April 1572.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 159 troversy and religious dispute, which he felt threatened the legacy of his father. Since Philippism was the prevalent form of Lutheranism in Denmark, Frederik and his episcopacy had no reason to fear the presence of cryptocalvinists, for measured by August’s yardstick all of them were cryptocalvinists. It is a telling measure of the depth of the split between orthodox and Philippist Lutherans after 1574 that the warm friendship between these two sovereigns—August and Frederik—should be wrecked by something as seemingly trivial as the issue of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. The friendship between August and Frederik—after the AngloDutch connection, arguably the most important political partnership in Protestant Europe—began to unravel during August’s Calvinist purge of 1574. At the heart of the controversy was Niels Hemmingsen, still Denmark’s leading theologian and now (since 1572) vice-chancellor of the University. Hemmingsen, the archetypal Philippist, was no Calvinist—he did not subscribe, for example, to the concept of predestination—but he did come close to embracing Calvinist ideas about the Blessed Sacrament, all but rejecting the ‘ubiquity doctrine’ of the Gnesiolutherans. His Calvinist-tinged theology was well-known by his friends and colleagues at the University and within the regime, and shared by many Danish clerics and intellectuals as well. In 1574, with the publication of his treatise Syntagma institutionum christianarum, Hemmingsen ceased hinting at his eucharistic leanings and stated them outright. The Syntagma caused little immediate controversy in Denmark—after all, in accordance with the 1562 censorship edict, it had to pass inspection by the Høilærde and by the king himself—but it created an uproar in Saxony. During the Calvinist purge in Dresden, several of August’s clerics defended themselves by pointing to Hemmingsen’s writings, especially the Syntagma. The Gnesiolutheran theologians in Saxony already had reason to dislike Hemmingsen. In 1569, Dr. Jacob Andreae, later to achieve immortality in the writing of the Formula of Concord, visited Koldinghus to discuss theological matters with the Danish royal house. His passionate defense of the ubiquity doctrine found a favourable audience with the Dowager Queen Dorothea, but not with the official delegation of Danish clergy, whose case against the doctrine was argued by Hemmingsen himself.24 The 24 Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 148–50; Erich Pontoppidan, Annales ecclesiæ danicæ diplomatici, oder nach Ordnung der Jahre abgefassete und mit Urkunden belegte Kirchen-Historie des Reichs Dännemarck (4 vols, Copenhagen, 1741–48), vol. 3, pp.

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orthodox clergy in Saxony, who had assisted Elector August in his purge, were not reluctant to pin some of the blame for the Calvinist ‘conspiracy’ in their own lands on Hemmingsen’s influence. Frederik II was already well aware of the potential for theological turmoil embodied in Hemmingsen’s latest work. Although Syntagma must have received the approval of the Høilærde, the king nonetheless summoned Hemmingsen to court at Frederiksborg in June 1574, not long after the Syntagma’s appearance in print. After reminding Hemmingsen and his colleagues on the Faculty of Theology to avoid controversial interpretations of the Eucharist, Frederik promulgated a royal edict on the issue on 26 June 1574. In an effort to compensate for any confusion Hemmingsen’s book might have caused at home, the University released a Danish translation of one of Hemmingsen’s earlier works, Tabella de coena domini of 1557, in which the Philippist master attacked the Calvinist, Zwinglian, and Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist.25 Characteristically, Frederik was unconcerned with the details of Hemmingsen’s eucharistic arguments; rather, he sought to preserve the faith of his father, to exclude foreign influences, and above all to prevent ‘troublesome people’ from causing confessional division within the monarchy. When, in September 1574, the Gnesiolutheran cleric Henrik von Bruchofen announced his intention to refute the Syntagma in writing, Frederik ordered Bruchofen to remain silent with the threat of permanent exile.26 Perhaps the king’s actions squelched controversy and debate within the Oldenburg state, but they did little to satisfy August of Saxony. In May 1575, the elector sent Frederik II a copy of Hemmingsen’s Syntagma, accompanied by a long-winded diatribe on the potential dangers presented by Hemmingsen’s Calvinist-tinged writings. Observing that Calvinism presented a credible threat to legitimate political authority—‘The resulting schism and mistrust will give rise to nothing other than the kind of dreadful bloodbath that is happening now in France and the Netherlands, which God in His mercy has not pre-

412–27, Jacob Andreæ to Niels Hemmingsen, 13 November 1569, and Hemmingsen to Andreæ, 19 December 1569; RAK DK B.44, Hemmingsen to Frederik, 20 December 1569. 25 Niels Hemmingsen, ‘En Taffle om Herrens Naduere eller Alterens Sacramente’, in ‘Bidrag til Krypto-Calvinismens Historie i Danmark’, KHS, Series 1, 1 (1849–52), 222–41. 26 Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 141–2; ‘Bidrag til de filippistiske Bevægelsers og til D. Niels Hemmingsens Historie’, KHS, Series 2, 4 (1867–68), 296–7, Frederik to Oxe, 10 September 1574.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 161 vented’—August suggested that Frederik and the Council of State take further steps to silence Hemmingsen.27 Frederik must have been more than a little embarrassed; he was not accustomed to receiving such reproofs from his old friend and brother-in-law. At five o’clock on the morning of 15 June 1575, Hemmingsen, the entire theological faculty at the University, and all the priests of Copenhagen were summoned to Copenhagen Castle for a meeting with Peder Oxe, Niels Kaas, and Jørgen Rosenkrantz.28 Frederik’s ministers informed the assembled clergy of the Saxon protests and issued a stern warning about future ‘contradictions’ of the Augsburg Confession. Oxe tried to be conciliatory, but the meeting quickly turned into a public indictment of Hemmingsen himself. Hemmingsen, ordered to retract the controversial arguments he had made in Syntagma, offered to recant the offending passages, but blankly refused to rewrite them. He reminded the audience of the promise that Frederik had made to him the year before—that he would not be punished for anything he had written before—and issued an indirect but bold challenge to his royal master: Germany is large, and there are many princes, and they are all under the Emperor; each [prince] has his own theologian, and these accommodate themselves to their princes the way that a cook does to his master’s tastes. The king of Denmark is a monarch in his own kingdom; it is to him that we should answer. Many confessions are produced in Germany, and at times one will [rise up to] oppose another in fourteen days’ time. That we should subscribe to [these confessions] is unjust. Until now my book has not been the cause of any uproar. I thank God and His Majesty that here unity of doctrine prevails, in both churches and schools.

This bordered, to say the least, on affrontery to the king; it is a measure of the respect that Hemmingsen still commanded that he did not suffer for his remarks. The following month, the same clergy who had attended the 15 June meeting at Copenhagen Castle— including Hemmingsen—signed a declaration that they understood the king’s wishes on the matter, and vowed not to preach or teach anything about the Eucharist contrary to what was contained in the Confessio Augustana and Luther’s Catechism.29 Hemmingsen, the leading 27

Säch. HStA GH Loc.10303/6, August to Frederik, 14 May 1575. ‘Bidrag til de filippistiske Bevægelsers og til D. Niels Hemmingsens Historie’, pp. 297–300. 29 RAK DK B.160., acknowledgement of obedience to edict by the priests and professors at Copenhagen, 9 July 1575. 28

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light in Danish theology, had been rebuked and forced to repent. This was not enough for Elector August. Even after receiving assurances from Ulrich of Mecklenburg, asserting that Hemmingsen was no Calvinist and that his teachings were deemed acceptable by the solidly orthodox Lutheran faculty at Rostock, August continued to harangue Frederik about Hemmingsen.30 This was no mere internal matter, August railed; Hemmingsen, through his great influence, threatened the integrity of Lutheranism throughout the Empire. Again Frederik tried to please his friend, calling upon the theological faculty to press Hemmingsen for both a Latin retraction of his earlier statements and a corrected edition of the Syntagma. In response, the consistorium of the University held a series of meetings over a five-week period in early 1576 to address the problem. The debate was quite heated, and in the end the consistorium produced another vague recantation. Hemmingsen fought the process bitterly, but was finally compelled to sign the declaration. The king was singularly disappointed in Hemmingsen and unimpressed with the recantation—‘That should have been done three weeks ago’, he remarked—yet he accepted it anyway, reminding the faculty once again to avoid further controversy.31 Hemmingsen was still not off the hook. The king’s disciplinary actions—the strongest he would ever take with his clergy on a point of doctrine—were not yet sufficient to satisfy his well-meaning but increasingly orthodox Lutheran family outside Denmark. Electress Anna, August’s wife and Frederik’s sister, accused Hemmingsen of dividing the Lutheran community, and warned Frederik that Master Niels was leading Denmark irrevocably down the long and treacherous path to Calvinism. The king haughtily rejected any such suggestion, arguing that the matter had been resolved as soon as Hemmingsen signed the recantation. Unfortunately, Hemmingsen’s notoriety abroad only grew. Although the Syntagma was no longer printed in Denmark, in 1578 a new edition was published in Geneva. Hemmingsen had no hand in this, but the simple fact that the now-infamous work was published in Calvinism’s holy city was enough to confirm the darkest suspicions of the Lutheran princes. This time both August and Duchess Elisabeth of Mecklenburg, Frederik’s mother-in-law, objected vehe30

Säch. HStA GH Loc.10303/6, fol. 80–4, Ulrich to August, 28 October 1576. Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 143–6; ‘Acta Consistorii 1576’, in ‘Bidrag til de filippistiske Bevægelsers og til D. Niels Hemmingsens Historie’, pp. 278–86; Hemmingsen’s retractions in ibid., pp. 303–10. 31

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 163 mently and demanded further action against Hemmingsen. Putting dynastic harmony and political considerations above loyalty to his troublesome theologian, Frederik finally caved in. In July 1579, he suspended Hemmingsen from his post at the University.32 It should be pointed out, however, that the king did not do this out of anger towards or resentment of Hemmingsen. Though he relieved Hemmingsen of his teaching duties, he did not impoverish or humiliate the man. Hemmingsen was given a post at the cathedral in Roskilde, a position that gave him considerable honour, a generous stipend, and even more time to write. Nor was Hemmingsen’s influence by any means gone. The key figures in the theological faculty, the bishops, and the court chaplains Knoff and Vedel—all committed Philippists, as well as defenders and friends of Hemmingsen—remained at their posts. Even after Hemmingsen’s fall, Frederik continued to appoint outspoken Philippists, disciples of Hemmingsen, to key offices within the church. There would be no purge as there had been in Dresden. Frederik II had made a concession to the Saxons, but did not alter the theological climate of his realm.33 This far Frederik II would bend, and no farther. His stance on the most divisive theological issue to affect Protestantism in the late sixteenth century, the Formula concordiæ, was by contrast completely unyielding. Historians of the late Reformation period have been mixed in their judgements of the Concord. Although some have pointed to the unfortunate factionalism it caused within the Lutheran community, by and large the historical verdict has been a positive one.34 It was, of course, a true milestone in the history of the Lutheran faith, the first successful attempt to bring unity of doctrine and purpose to the creed since the Confessio Augustana of 1530. When seen from the viewpoint of international relations and Protestant ecumenicalism, however, it is difficult to look at the Concord as anything but a tragedy, which perpetuated and deepened the rift between Lutheranism and Calvinism.

32 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.14, Elisabeth of Mecklenburg to Frederik, 11 January 1579; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 324v–8v, Frederik to Elisabeth of Mecklenburg, 9 March 1579; ‘Bidrag til de filippistiske Bevægelsers og til D. Niels Hemmingsens Historie’, p. 311, Frederik to Niels Kaas, 29 July 1579. 33 Koch and Kornerup, Danske kirkes historie, pp. 146–7. 34 See, for example, the articles in a special issue of Sixteenth Century Journal, 8:4 (1977), devoted to the Formula, and Theodore R. Jungkuntz, Formulators of the Formula of Concord, Four Architects of Lutheran Unity (St. Louis, 1977).

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The Concord led not to greater harmony within Protestantism, but rather to greater intolerance on the part of Lutheran princes and theologians, and to disunity at a time when solidarity in the face of a militant Catholic revival was absolutely necessary for the survival of Protestantism. The Reformation historian Lewis W. Spitz has argued that the motives of Jacob Andreæ and the other authors of the Concord were pure, and stemmed only for a desire for ‘peace and unity’ within Lutheranism.35 Andreæ’s enthusiastic complicity in the Dresden purges of 1574, and his bitter vendetta against Niels Hemmingsen, would hardly appear to be consonant with a desire for doctrinal harmony. The efforts to promote the Concord after 1577, moreover, were driven more by stubborn and uncompromising religious bigotry than by any desire for ‘peace and unity’. The spirit of the Concord was directly opposed to unity. It was not without reason that Johann Casimir casually referred to the Formula as ‘the book of discord’. Any speculation on the long-term effects of the Concord on the development of Protestantism would be just that—mere speculation—but it would be reasonable to argue that the confessional problems of the Empire would not have required so long and so bloody a resolution as they did in the Thirty Years’ War if the Concord had never seen the light of day. This, in essence, was the stance of the Danish court as well as that of the activist Lutheran princes in the Empire. Frederik II’s personal brand of Lutheranism was in some ways conservative, in some radical. He continued to demand strict adherence to the precise wording of the Confessio Augustana, treating it as almost sacrosanct, and insisted that he would countenance no change in the religion established by his father. In no way could Frederik be said to have been a model of confessional toleration, as demonstrated by his stern response to the Calvinist and Anabaptist emigrés who sought refuge within his kingdoms, yet he tolerated and befriended clergy who embraced some Calvinist ideas. From the very beginning of his reign, he had tried to avoid religious controversy within the Oldenburg state, but after 1572 he demonstrated a deep-seated fear of militant Catholicism that only intensified over time. These two priorities complemented one another, and conditioned his response to the Concord: theological controversy led to factionalism and fragmentation, which 35 Lewis W. Spitz, ‘The Formula of Concord Then and Now’, Sixteenth Century Journal 8 (1977), 9–21.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 165 would ultimately leave Protestantism vulnerable to attack and extirpation by the Church in Rome. At home, he would not tolerate public deviations from the faith of his father, yet where it came to international politics he was a Protestant irenicist, who believed that cooperation and fraternity between Protestants of all types was of paramount importance for the struggle against the greatest evil of all: that emanating from the ‘Antichrist’ in Rome. The evolution of the Formula and Book of Concord is well-documented elsewhere, and it is not necessary to recount it here in detail. Suffice it to say that Frederik II objected to the idea of the Concord from the very beginning. Only a month after Andreæ, Chemnitz, and Chytraeus composed the first draft of the Concord in June 1576 at Torgau, August of Saxony sent a copy of this new statement of the Lutheran faith to the king, hoping to solicit Frederik’s participation—or at least that of his theologians—in the project. The king showed an instant antipathy towards the document, and purely for reasons of domestic tranquility. Consideration of the Formula, he claimed, would require that he call together his leading theologians to discuss it; the more controversial articles, such as those regarding the Eucharist, would inevitably spark some debate. Debate could well lead to theological division, something that Frederik wanted to avoid at all costs. August had no patience for Frederik’s objections, especially so in light of the as yet unresolved Hemmingsen controversy. ‘We regret’, he wrote to the king in late August 1576, ‘that several theologians in Your Majesty’s kingdom are tainted with highly dangerous errors concerning the Blessed Sacrament, as several of ours once were, [and] as several of Hemmingsen’s printed books clearly testify.’ Assuring Frederik that any disruption within Denmark could easily be dealt with, he tactlessly observed that ‘the Calvinist sect . . . has unfortunately taken root in Your Majesty’s kingdom, [which is] something that would not have been tolerated or suffered during the life of [your] late father’. And, August continued, ‘we do not know from our own minimal experience if Calvinists are any better than, or are to be preferred to, Papists’.36 In a way, August’s frustrated persistence is understandable. As he later admitted to Ulrich of Mecklenburg, he had promised Christian 36 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.9, August to Frederik, 11 July and 25 August 1576; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1576–77, fol. 167v–70, Frederik to August, 3 August 1576.

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III that he would look out for Frederik’s welfare, and to him it appeared as if his brother-in-law were being manipulated by an insidious Calvinist plot among his clergy, just as August felt that he himself had been in 1574. Frederik, however, was indignant; August was accusing him of tolerating heterodoxy and possibly even heresy, when Frederik clearly prided himself on the harmony prevailing among his clergy. The articles of the Confessio Augustana had been ‘kept pure and undefiled’ since his father’s reign, and Hemmingsen—who had recanted anyway—had done nothing to compromise this. Calvinists, secret or otherwise, simply did not exist within the Danish clergy. It was not Hemmingsen who threatened the integrity of Lutheranism in Denmark, but foreigners: . . . no-one in our kingdom has been incited [to Calvinism] by Hemmingsen. That, however, has been done by other, foreign theologians, of whom we have positive intelligence: that several foreign theologians are so highly driven by ambition that they gladly stir up unrest not only in Germany, but also in other kingdoms, [lands] which rule themselves in matters both ecclesiastical and secular and are beholden to no other [persons]; [these foreign theologians] want to bend them to their opinions.

With his sister, the Electress Anna, Frederik was far more blunt, descending into unaccustomed sarcasm. In his letters to Anna, the king insinuated that August’s willingness to persecute cryptocalvinists in his own lands reflected a softness towards Catholics, and denied the presence of Calvinists within Denmark: ‘We neither hope nor desire that, as Your Highness has claimed, the Calvinist sect has become rooted in Our kingdom; We also are certain that if this has indeed happened, then We cannot recall it having happened.’37 August, stung by Frederik’s unusually harsh reply, withdrew for the moment. Proceeding without Danish assistance, August once again brought the Saxon divines together at Berg in the spring of 1577, whence they emerged with the penultimate form of the Concord, the so-called Bergisches Buch. Once revealed to the Protestant world, the Formula was instantly at the heart of a passionate debate. Its wording was strongly anti-Calvinist, in particular attacking Calvinist (and hence Philippist) ideas on the meaning and significance of the 37 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1576–77, fol. 201–4v, Frederik to August, 15 September 1576; Säch. HStA GH Loc.10303/6, fol. 52–4, 71–5, Frederik to Anna of Saxony, 19 July and 15 September 1576.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 167 Eucharist. Protestant theologians held a conference to discuss the Concord at Frankfurt-am-Main in the autumn of 1577. The Formula’s vagueness on major points of faith sparked animated debate even among its adherents, but the real problem was its barely-masked hostility to Calvinism. The Reformed communities in the Germanies, France, the Swiss cantons, and the Netherlands immediately condemned it, since it excluded them from the body of the faithful; some Lutheran princes, like Wilhelm IV of Hessen, attacked the Formula as being unnecessarily divisive.38 August of Saxony spent a great deal of time, trouble, and expense to promote the Formula of Concord. It was a hard sell, but altogether he was quite successful; apart from Denmark, Holstein, Hessen, and Anhalt, nearly all of the Lutheran princes officially subscribed to the Formula by the beginning of the 1580s. Even the new Elector Palatine, the Lutheran Ludwig VI, put his name to the Formula. Frederik II’s obstinacy, however, caused August considerable worry, and the elector spared no pains to cajole Frederik into compliance. Ulrich of Mecklenburg also tried to intercede, possibly at August’s request. Approaching Frederik in a far more gentle way than August had employed, Ulrich patiently explained to his son-in-law that the Concord contained nothing that contradicted the Confessio Augustana. Frederik was unmoved.39 Direct appeals from the German theologians who authored or supported the Concord were similarly ineffectual. Both David Chytraeus at Rostock and Georg Cölestin at Berlin dedicated writings to the king of Denmark in 1576 and 1577, and Chytraeus attempted to win over Dançay as well. Ordinarily, Frederik showed his appreciation for such gestures, even from foreigners, with small gifts of cash; he sent nothing of the sort to either Chytraeus or Cölestin, except for the proud assertion that he intended to keep the Danish church free of ‘any falsehood or even unnecessary and dangerous disputations’.40 38 Manfred Kuhn, Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir von Pfalz-Lautern 1576–1583 (Kaiserslautern, 1961), pp. 102–16; Gräf, Konfession und internationales System, pp. 113–18. 39 Säch. HStA DB12, fol. 462–2v, Ulrich to August, 28 June 1577; RAK TKUA/ SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.7, Ulrich to Frederik, 1 January and 17 March 1578; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1576–77, fol. 432–4v, Frederik to Ulrich, 21 July 1577; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 23–6, Frederik to Ulrich, 22 February 1578. 40 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 2v–4, Frederik to Georg Cölestin, 8 January 1578; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1576–77, fol. 265v–6, Frederik to David Chytraeus, 13 January 1577; Dänische Bibliothec, oder Sammlung von alten und neuen gelehrten

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At first glance, Frederik II’s obstinate refusal to so much as consider the Formula of Concord might seem just a bit hypocritical, given his willingness to sacrifice his foremost theologian to the whim of August of Saxony. Although both issues, which occurred concurrently, appear to be closely related—both involved the integrity of Philippist theology in the Danish monarchy—they differed greatly in other ways. Frederik was eager to please his old friend August, and never took their theological disagreement as personally as did the Saxon elector. Even after their friendship had soured in the early 1580s, and August had given up on the old Danish-Saxon partnership, Frederik still wrote touchingly personal letters to his brother-in-law as if nothing had changed between them. The Hemmingsen affair involved the relationship between a sovereign and a disobedient subject, of whom an example had to be made if religious harmony were to be preserved at home. Hemmingsen had violated the king’s enforced theological peace, and his book had already earned Frederik’s disapproval a full year before August protested its publication. Regardless of his importance, Hemmingsen was but a single professor, and his punishment—a light one, to be sure—at the hands of the king was in no way a doctrinal compromise. Subscription to the Formula of Concord, though, would have constituted such a compromise. The decision to reject the Formula of Concord was the king’s alone, but he was not without support. The Concord controversy, as an external issue with internal ramifications, united the court and the clergy behind the king’s leadership. There were many who applauded and encouraged the king, and very likely influenced him in his opposition. Those at court whom the king trusted the most were in agreement with the king. Chancellor Niels Kaas, court chaplains Anders Sørensen Vedel and Christoffer Knoff, and Poul Madsen, bishop-superintendent of Sjælland, were all dedicated Philippists and friends of Hemmingsen. All of these, as well as the French ambassador Dançay, nurtured Frederik’s dislike for the Concord movement.41 Heinrich Rantzau and Christoph von Dohna, both of whom had close ties to Calvinists abroad, undoubtedly influenced the king Sachen aus Dännemarck (3 vols, Copenhagen, 1738), vol. 3, pp. 239–42, Johann Georg of Brandenburg to Frederik II, 5 May 1577; Rørdam, ‘Charles de Danzay’, pp. 326–7, David Chytraeus to Dançay, 1 December 1579. 41 Philippe de Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, pour servir à l’histoire de la réformation et des guerres civiles et religieuses en France (12 vols, Paris, 1824–25), vol. 2, pp. 100–9, 110–18, Dançay to Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, 14 June and 6 November 1580.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 169 as well. Rantzau was especially well-suited to do this. The Holstein governor corresponded frequently with Wilhelm IV of Hessen, one of the most vehement foes of the Concord, and with Paul von Eitzen, the bishop-superintendent in Holstein who bitterly and publicly disputed the Formula with Andreæ and others. Rantzau passed the information he gleaned from the landgrave and from Eitzen on to Frederik II, interpreting the Concord in a wholly unfavourable light.42 Encouragement came from abroad as well, not only strengthening Frederik in his determination to resist the Concord, but also changing the nature of his arguments against it. In the spring of 1577, Elizabeth I resumed her efforts to assemble a Protestant league on the Continent. The need for such an alliance was pressing. Henry III of France, under tremendous pressure from the Estates-General he had convened at Blois the previous autumn, had taken up the sword against the Huguenots once again. Elizabeth was under similar pressure to come to the aid of the Huguenots, but already having made financial commitments to William of Orange her participation in the sixth French war of religion would be necessarily limited. Spreading the costs of the war to Denmark and the Protestant German states would be the best alternative; the failure of the Huguenot cause posed as much of a threat to them as it did to the queen, and they as yet had not contributed in a meaningful way to the protection of international Protestantism. The dispute over the Concord could not have come at a worse time. Elizabeth’s diplomats in Germany were just becoming aware of the controversy over the Formula, which caused the queen justifiable worry.43 Hoping that Frederik II might be able to exert some moderating influence on Elector August, Elizabeth penned the king an unusually personal and direct letter from Windsor in October 1577:44

42 RAK TKIA/A.77.7, Rantzau to Frederik, 4 July and 23 November 1577, 20 January and 26 February 1578; RAK TKIA/A.77/8, Rantzau to Frederik, 25 April 1579. On Eitzen’s opposition to the Formula, see Heinrich Heppe, Geschichte des deutschen Protestantismus in den Jahren 1555–1581 (4 vols, Warburg, 1852–59), vol. 4, pp. 175–81. 43 Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 215–17, Robert Beale to the Elector Palatine, September 1577; Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 185–8, Daniel Rogers to Walsingham, 23 September 1577; Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 214–15, reports from English envoys sent to German Protestant princes, September 1577. 44 RAK TKUA/SD/England A.I.1, Elizabeth to Frederik, 29 October 1577. A Danish translation of this letter can be found in Jens Møller, ‘Om Dannerkongen Frederik den Andens Mægling i udenlandske Religions Stridigheder’, Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Philosophiske og Historiske Afhandlinger, 2 (1824), 350–3.

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chapter five . . . the enemy of Christendom, who would uproot from Christ’s church those of the Augsburg Confession as well as all those who reject the tyranny of the pope, it is he who drives and approves of this work [i.e., the Concord] with poison and cunning. Our union and our harmony in Christ to throw off the heresy and idolatry of Rome are the things that for so long have been, and still are, the obstacles to the dominion of the papacy. . . . [The pope] has placed his only hope for salvation on our fragmentation. . . . This, his destructive . . . plan . . . is only set in motion by the conferences and commonly-subscribed . . . books of our cousins the German princes, by which they intend to make all those faithful of the true Christian religion who do not agree with them hated over the entire world, and to exclude them from Christendom; but thereby they, in truth, would destroy and injure themselves, as well as the Church purified by Christ and the furtherance of the Gospel, including us and our [church]. The Elector of Saxony is most able to either promote or hinder this undertaking. . . . Our most fervent prayer is that your will in this matter may match your abilities. Your Majesty shall thereby fulfil a Christian prince’s most Christian duty, to defend God’s Church and Gospel, save myriad lives from ruin and prevent the effusion of blood of many [people]. We should then have Your Majesty to thank for peace in the Christian world; certainly the German Empire itself shall regard you as their father and liberator.

Almost immediately after receiving Elizabeth’s letter, Frederik forwarded a copy—along with an enthusiastic endorsement of its contents—to August, who once again was dumbfounded at the king’s stubbornness. Elizabeth proposed a general Protestant conference to heal the schism within German Protestantism; to August, this was nothing short of a ‘hindrance’ placed in the path of ‘the holy work of Christian concord between the states and churches of the Augsburg Confession’. This, of course, stemmed from the fact that the queen was ‘poorly informed about this most important and holy work’. The gap between Lutheranism and other Protestant confessions was too great, and could not be bridged by a general synod. August took great offense at the suggestion that the papacy was behind the Concord; by not supporting the Concord, Frederik and his fellow dissenters were the ones who were playing into the hands of the pope, since the Concord was intended to foster unity, not fragmentation.45 What is perhaps most interesting about Frederik II’s opposition to the Concord is the way in which the reasons for his vehement rejec-

45 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 1–1v, Frederik to August, 2 January 1578; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.9, August to Frederik, 1 February 1578.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 171 tion of the document changed over time. Prior to the end of 1577, the king had based his arguments on purely domestic grounds: the Concord was yet another means by which Denmark’s confessional harmony could be disrupted. Elizabeth’s letter of October 1577, however, worked a profound change on Frederik. For the first time, Frederik became aware of the international ramifications of the Concord movement. The Concord, as Elizabeth had pointed out, made enemies of the Calvinists and of those Lutherans who did not agree with the Saxon divines. August’s theologians were academics who wanted to further their own reputations at the expense of the welfare of the faith; Frederik would later write that Andreæ ‘wanted to play pope in Germany’.46 Protestant was now pitted against Protestant in a useless theological struggle, while the papacy stood ready to take advantage of a divided opponent. Such an argument dovetailed perfectly with Frederik’s well-established fear of international Catholicism, so it is no surprise that Frederik should adopt this objection wholeheartedly into his political language. After receiving Elizabeth’s letter, Frederik made the international argument the main focus of his active resistance to the Concord. Frederik also took up the call, already put forward by both Elizabeth I and Navarre, for a general Protestant synod to heal the worsening schism between Calvinism and Lutheranism.47 Armed with this new and convincing argument, Frederik II metamorphosed from defender of the faith to crusader for the faith, actively seeking to undermine the Concord rather than merely to justify his refusal to force it upon Denmark. In the summer of 1579, the king would have the opportunity to argue his case in person before a larger audience. That spring, Henry of Navarre contacted the Danish king with the assistance of William of Orange. The Concord movement was of great interest to the Huguenot leader, for the faction it wrought among the German princes would jeopardise future attempts to rally German support for French Protestants. Navarre’s letter begged Frederik to persuade August of Saxony to reject the Concord, and echoed Elizabeth I’s call for a general Protestant conference. The Dutch courier who carried the letter to Denmark found Frederik sympathetic but not hopeful of a happy 46

Møller, ‘Om Dannerkongen’, p. 361, Frederik to Henry of Navarre, 13 June 1580. See, for example, the undated postscript, late 1578, from Frederik to August, Säch. HStA GH Loc.10303/06, fol. 114–14v. 47

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result; the king told him that ‘the elector was so hostile to those whom he held for Calvinists that if his Majesty spoke about the Churches of France and the Low Countries [August] would be so much offended that he would give no answer’.48 True to his word, Frederik made a valiant effort, but his skepticism proved to be accurate. Shortly after receiving Navarre’s letter—and, coincidentally, shortly after firing Hemmingsen—Frederik, a very pregnant Queen Sofie, and the entire royal household made a rare state visit to Duke Ulrich’s court at Güstrow. The occasion was more of a social gathering than anything else. The Saxon electoral couple also made the journey to Güstrow, as did Margrave Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg and a host of lesser princes. Even David Chytræus, one of Ulrich’s prized Rostock theologians and a staunch proponent of the Concord, was in attendance. Although most of their time together was taken up with hunting, feasting, and heavy drinking, the princes at Güstrow eventually turned to less frivolous matters. Predictably, the Concord was a major topic of conversation. Frederik II had already shown Navarre’s letter to Duke Ulrich. Ulrich was impressed with Navarre’s plea, and found Frederik’s reasoned objections to the Concord convincing. Two days later, Frederik and his father-in-law discussed the matter with Elector August and the other princes. The discussion had no result other than to offend August, who left Güstrow in a huff the following day.49 Frederik II’s course, however, was set, no matter how much it angered August. Consistent with his policy of compulsory confessional harmony within the Oldenburg state, Frederik banned the Concord in any form within his realms. Acting on his own, without convening his clergy or the Høilærde, the king issued a prohibition edict on 24 July 1580. According to the edict, the Concord contained ‘teachings which are foreign and alien to us and to our churches, [and which] could easily disrupt the unity which, God be praised, these kingdoms have hitherto maintained’. The edict stipulated that no-one living within Denmark could sell, import, or even possess a copy of the Concord. Bookdealers found selling the Concord would 48 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 1, p. 341, Navarre to Frederik, 30 June 1579; ‘A discourse of the K. of Denmark’s proceedings with the D. of Saxony etc.’, September 1579, Cal SP For., vol. 14, pp. 63–6. 49 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1580–81, fol. 71v–4, Frederik to Ulrich, 10 May 1580; Holger Frederik Rørdam, Historieskriveren Arild Hvitfeldt, Danmarks Riges Kansler og Raad (Copenhagen, 1896), pp. 58–9.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 173 have all of their books confiscated; priests found with it in their possession would be removed from office and ‘punished without mercy’. The bishop-superintendents were to enforce this, and if they neglected their duties in this regard their positions were forfeit as well.50 In Viborg diocese, bishop Peder Thøgersen required all of his priests to sign affidavits acknowledging the king’s edict and vowing to uphold it.51 The king himself set an example to the rest of the kingdom. When Electress Anna of Saxony sent her royal brother two beautifullybound presentation copies of the Book of Concord in January 1581, Frederik tossed both books into a flaming hearth at Skanderborg ‘all to put a clear end and resolution’ to the matter. This last incident, denied by later historians who did not want to portray the king as anything other than a good Lutheran, was well-known throughout Europe by 1582.52 Frederik’s enmity towards the Concord movement remained steady throughout the reign. As late as 1583, the king continued to attack the Formula directly in letters to David Chytræus.53 Denmark’s steadfast refusal to subscribe to the Concord attracted the attention of Protestant Europe, and made Frederik II a celebrity of sorts among radical Protestants. Navarre’s court had been anxiously following the Danish reaction since late 1577, but Frederik’s position was not fully known until early 1580.54 Word of the king’s refusal to participate may have leaked out from the meeting at Güstrow in 1579, or perhaps via Dançay, who despite his outward loyalties to the French crown nevertheless maintained contact with Philippe du Plessis-Mornay and other Navarrese statesmen. Mornay joyously hailed King Frederik’s decision:55

50

CCD vol. 2, pp. 166–8, 24 July 1580. The only extant examples of these affidavits, dated between 3 and 5 August 1580, can be found in LAV C2/112. 52 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.10, Anna of Saxony to Frederik, 27 November 1580; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1580–81: fol. 197v–8, Frederik to Anna of Saxony, 13 January 1581; fol. 207v–8v, Frederik to Wilhelm IV, 8 February 1581; Cal SP Spanish, vol. 3, pp. 361–2, Bernardino de Mendoza to Philip II, 15 May 1582. See also Bjørn Kornerup’s interesting if episodic overview: ‘Danmark og Konkordienbogen’, KHS, Series 7, 3 (1957–59), 217–48. 53 RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 424–5, 497–501, Frederik to Chytræus, 18 July 1582 and 14 February 1583. 54 Hippolyte Aubert, Fernand Aubert, and Henri Meylan (eds), Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze (24 vols, Geneva, 1960–), vol. 17, p. 217, Ursinus to Théodore de Bèze, 25 December 1577. 55 Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 84–94, Mornay to Dançay, 28 February 1580. 51

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chapter five . . . if the king of Denmark had subscribed to the Book of Concord, it would have been made public immediately, to the great prejudice of all Christendom; but by constancy and free remonstrances, he has made fearful the authors of the Book of Concord, bolstered those who oppose it, and induced several [princes] to refuse to subscribe to it for the reasons which he put forward in public, at Güstrow last year, in the presence of the Elector of Saxony . . . where more than five hundred German noblemen were in attendance. For the king of Denmark is no dissimulator.

Navarre’s agents in Germany expressed some hope that Frederik’s influence might draw Saxon and Brandenburg support away from the Concord. According to several reports, August planned to visit Denmark in the spring of 1580, either to attend the christening ceremonies for his newborn niece, Duchess Augusta, or to participate in a meeting to settle minor feudal disputes between Frederik II and his uncles, Dukes Hans the Elder and Adolf of Holstein, scheduled to take place in Odense in March 1580. Saxon, Brandenburg, and Hessian delegations had served as mediators at a similar meeting held in Odense the previous spring. Such hopes, however, were misplaced. August did not travel to Denmark in 1580, and—in any event—it is unlikely that anyone could have convinced August to cease crusading for the Concord. Frederik’s stubbornness only frustrated the elector, but did not move him.56

Prospects for a Protestant alliance, 1577–83 Danish foreign policy in the period between the appearance of the Bergisches Buch in 1577 and the assassination of William of Orange in 1584 reveals, better than anything else, the shortcomings that compromised Frederik II’s effectiveness as a Protestant leader in European politics. The king’s enmity towards Catholicism was wellknown, as was his insistence upon the creation of a broadly-inclusive Protestant front in the wake of the Concord controversy. But noone, possibly not even Frederik himself, knew exactly how far the 56 Aubert (ed.), Correspondance, vol. 21, pp. 11, 13, Pierre Loiseleur de Villiers to de Bèze, 20 February 1580; Aubert (ed.), Correspondance, vol. 21, pp. 67, 69, Heinrich Möller to de Bèze, 11 March 1580; Aubert (ed.), Correspondance, vol. 21, pp. 92, 95, Laurent Dürnhoffer to de Bèze, 5 April 1580; Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 84–94, Mornay to Dançay, 28 February 1580; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1579–81, fol. 64v–5, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 6 May 1580.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 175 king would go in promoting Protestant unity. The king’s German allies were well aware of his fear of Catholic conspiracy, at home and abroad, and of his deep sympathy for the plight of the Huguenots and of the Dutch Calvinists. The problem was that Frederik’s sympathy and fear did not translate into a pressing urge to create or join an international Protestant alliance, whether offensive or defensive. Frederik’s foreign policy vis-à-vis the confessional conflicts in the West was therefore self-contradictory: he desired harmony and unity among the Protestant states and communities, but was unwilling to give this Protestant brotherhood the requisite ‘teeth’ it would need to defend itself. Exactly how such a united Protestantism would stave off the might of Spain, France, or even Poland and Sweden, is impossible to determine; perhaps Frederik hoped that the absence of doctrinal divisions among Protestantism would, in itself, be enough to intimidate the masterminds of the international Catholic cabal—a passive defensive alliance of sorts. Just why Frederik II pursued such a docile and unrealistic end as a passive Protestant alliance is difficult to ascertain. In part, Frederik’s devotion to the Augsburg settlement of 1555 restrained him from advocating force in the defense of Protestantism. Like August of Saxony, Frederik II embraced both the letter and the spirit of the ‘Religious and Secular Peace’, which was no easy task in the Empire as it existed in the late 1570s. Such a strict interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg meant that Catholic gains in the Germanies would have to be interpreted as violations of Imperial law, but that actions taken in defense of Protestants in the Empire could possibly destroy the fragile balance between emperor, Protestant princes, and Catholic princes that had been established in 1555. In short, for Frederik and for the Protestant Reichsfürsten, the Augsburg ‘mentality’ simultaneously made them alert to the dangers of a militant Catholicism while it tied their hands in the defense of their own interests. In the main, though, Frederik’s reticence to take action stemmed from the latent but unceasing threat presented by Philip II’s Spain. In its dealings with Poland and Sweden, Spain had manifested its interest in acquiring a foothold in the Baltic, to help subdue the Dutch rebels if for no other reason. Philip II had good reasons for coveting control of the Sound. The only thing that held Spain back, at least from Frederik’s perspective, was the 1544 Speyer treaty, which also guaranteed Frederik’s legitimacy as sovereign. In the long term, the best defense for Denmark would have been a quick victory for the rebels or Spanish

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concessions to Dutch autonomy. In this sense, Denmark’s geopolitical problem was nearly identical to England’s: so long as Spanish troops remained in the Netherlands in force, neither Denmark nor England would be entirely safe. But until Spanish forces withdrew from the Low Countries, Denmark could only safeguard the Sound by remaining on good terms with Spain. This entailed, of course, not getting involved in the Dutch war; it also meant dealing fairly with Spanish interests in Baltic commerce and showing outward friendliness towards Philip II and his governors in the Netherlands.57 The dilemma lay in the fact that Denmark could not accomplish all of Frederik’s goals. Denmark could not defend the ‘common cause’ against Catholicism while maintaining friendly relations with Spain and France. It was this very dilemma that led to a widespread distrust of the king and a misunderstanding of his motives outside of Germany. To Spain, Frederik was a potentially dangerous Protestant firebrand, willing to sabotage Spanish interests in the Baltic and always plotting some kind of an alliance with England. To England, where Elizabeth I was by now asserting herself as the organising force behind an international Protestant alliance, Denmark was also a potential enemy. Frederik did nothing to allay such fears on the part of the English. Indeed, the king only aggravated these suspicions. His need for increased revenues, a need which stemmed paradoxically from greater military spending, drove him to a strict enforcement of the Sound dues and other tariffs. These he applied with equal vigour to English and Dutch merchants as to those from Catholic states. The option of closing off the Sound to Spanish shipping, on the other hand, was out of the question, if for no other reason than that it would result in a terrible loss in revenues while angering Philip II at the same time. This made sense fiscally, but it was poor diplomacy. Hence it is easy to understand the distrust of Denmark that often prevailed at the Tudor court and elsewhere, for Frederik’s position was confusing. While calling for Protestant solidarity, and recognising the dangers of a Catholic conspiracy, Frederik II was unwilling to enter into any pan-Protestant alliance or even to extend commercial courtesies to his coreligionists. In his heart, the Danish king was a crusader for the Protestant faith; but his actions seemed to signal a different agenda.

57

Gomez-Centurion, Felipe II, pp. 145–50, 224–7.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 177 After the abortive alliance projects of 1562 and 1568–69, the first earnest attempt to recruit Denmark and the German princes into a Protestant coalition came in the summer and fall of 1577. The impetus and direction for this coalition came entirely from Elizabeth I and her more aggressively Protestant ministers, especially the queen’s First Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham. Although the mid-1570s were years of peace for the Tudor state, Elizabeth’s government was by necessity ever vigilant of the situation in France and the Netherlands. This required a heightened sensitivity to the diplomatic posturings of both Spain and France, both of which stood to gain (or to lose) much in the progress of the Dutch revolt. The years 1576–77 were especially tumultuous ones in the history of the revolt, and had a direct impact on England. In March 1576, Philip’s moderate governor in the Netherlands, Don Luis de Requesens, died unexpectedly, leaving behind an unpaid army and an administration that was virtually bankrupt. It would be several months before his appointed successor, Don John of Austria, would arrive in the Low Countries, and during that time the character of the Dutch revolt would change dramatically. In July, the Spanish Army of Flanders mutinied, launching itself into a four-month rampage that would end only with the sack of Antwerp in November. Confessional distinctions for now pushed aside, the Dutch provinces pulled together to produce the Pacification of Ghent that same month. The Pacification, while professing loyalty to Spanish rule, called for an end to religious persecution and the removal of Spanish troops from the Netherlands. This was exactly what Elizabeth I had hoped for: a quasi-autonomous Netherlands, restored to the liberties it had enjoyed under Charles V, that did not pose a direct threat to England through the presence of foreign troops. The StatesGeneral planned to press their new governor to accept this fait accompli, and to this end they asked Elizabeth I for diplomatic assistance and for military aid should Don John reject the proposal. Don John had no choice but to accept the Pacification, and he did so in the so-called Perpetual Edict of February 1577.58 But the terms of the Pacification were too humiliating for both Don John and his Spanish master. By the summer of 1577, both had repudiated the Edict—hardly a perpetual one, as it turned out—plunging the Netherlands once more into war and compelling Elizabeth to undertake 58 Don John communicated the terms of the peace to Frederik in a letter dated 12 March 1577, RAK TKUA/SD/Span Ned A.I.2.

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a more active English presence in the revolt. Thus committed in the Netherlands, Elizabeth did not have the resources to assist Navarre when the sixth War of Religion broke out in France that spring. Hoping to aid the Huguenots indirectly, Elizabeth in July 1577 dispatched her agents and diplomats to the German states in the hope of cobbling together a Protestant coalition there.59 The prospects for the successful creation of a Protestant alliance, though, were far worse than they had been in 1568–69. Although the Bergisches Buch had just been written, the Protestant Reichsfürsten were already divided over the Concord issue. This time, only William of Orange and the more radical German princes, notably Wilhelm IV of Hessen and Johann Casimir, gave much encouragement to the English efforts. The Lutheran electors—August of Saxony, Johann Georg of Brandenburg, and Ludwig VI of the Palatinate—were uninterested, even antipathetic to the idea, not wanting to alienate their emperor for the sake of a few Calvinists. Those princes and statesmen who encouraged Elizabeth were in agreement on two things: first, that England would have to provide financial assistance, as a token of the queen’s support and as a means of raising an army; second, that the king of Denmark would have to be involved. Discussing the possibility of a pan-Protestant coalition with Elizabeth’s new agent in Germany, Dr. Daniel Rogers, in July 1577, William of Orange had emphasised the necessity of Danish involvement if such an endeavor were to succeed. The Dutch leader thought that Elizabeth should assume leadership of any such league, but Frederik II—who bore William ‘a singular good affection’—was the man closest to August of Saxony, and therefore vital in rallying German princely support to the cause.60 By now, Rogers and his colleagues were fully cognisant of the parlous theological fragmentation that existed in German Protestantism, and their negotiations with individual German princes were not encouraging. Wilhelm IV of Hessen, for example, liked the idea of an international Protestant coalition, but thought it a near impossibility to execute in the German states. Without Saxon support, such an enterprise would surely fail, and Elector August was unlikely to be of much help. August, the landgrave 59 Peter Krüger, ‘Die Beziehungen der rheinischen Pfalz zu Westeuropa 1576–82. Die auswärtigen Beziehungen des Pfalzgrafen Johann Casimir’ (dissertation, Munich, 1964), pp. 25–60. 60 Cal. SP For vol. 12, pp. 26–9, Rogers to Walsingham, 24 July 1577.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 179 asserted, was ruled by his ‘mad divines’, making cooperation with Calvinists out of the question. The only hope, Wilhelm argued, was to enlist Danish assistance. An English embassy to King Frederik just might be able to sway the Danes, and a joint Anglo-Danish embassy—to include, significantly, Heinrich Rantzau—to Dresden could work to neutralise the influence of the ‘mad divines’. Frederik II received glowing endorsements from the Strassburg theologian Johann Sturm, who also served as one of Elizabeth’s German agents.61 Even before the details of Rogers’ negotiations reached England, Elizabeth and her ministers were already hard at work in seeking to win Danish friendship. Since the year previous, the English regime had endeavored to settle its long-standing commercial disputes with Denmark at a conference between the two governments, hopefully leading to a defensive alliance of sorts between the two crowns. The conference was arranged, and the timing was perfect: representatives of the two governments met outside Hamburg on 10 August 1577. Ostensibly, the purpose of the meeting was to resolve differences that had arisen over the Narva trade, the Icelandic fisheries, seizures of merchant vessels and the like, but secretly John Rogers and Anthony Jenkins were instructed to approach the Danish delegation about an anti-Catholic alliance. Elizabeth was to be sorely disappointed, for the Danes gave nothing but a ‘cold answer’ in response. Nor did Frederik II himself manifest much interest over the next few months; Elizabeth’s direct and candid appeal for help, sent in late October 1577, did not receive anything more than a cool and detached reply.62 On the commercial disagreements, too, the Danish king had proven most unaccommodating during the autumn of 1577. There was little to suggest that Frederik II had any inclination towards a closer relationship with England, and therefore towards an anti-Catholic alliance. By the end of 1577, Elizabeth and her ministers had given up— for the time, at least—on the alliance project. Robert Beale, Elizabeth’s emissary to Berlin and Dresden, had found the Protestant electors to be of little use. The elector of Brandenburg expressed some interest in an alliance, but was too timid, waiting for the elector of Saxony 61 Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 185–8, Rogers to Walsingham, 23 September 1577; Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 215–17, Robert Beale to the Elector Palatine, late September 1577; Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 347–50, Sturm to Walsingham, 4 December 1577. 62 Cal. SP For., vol. 11, pp. 376–7, memorial for John Foxall, 16 September 1576; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85: pp. 144–5, Frederik to the English commissioners at Emden, 23 June 1577; pp. 178–82, Frederik to Elizabeth, November 1577.

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to make the first move; and August, for his part, was completely inflexible. The Saxon elector was offended at the suggestion that the Concord—his Concord—might be responsible for the fragmentation of Protestantism. Beale reported back to Walsingham that Elector August, in confessional affairs at least, was no more than the puppet of the Electress Anna and of his clergy. Ultimately, these obstacles made little difference, for the Peace of Bergerac (September 1577) brought a temporary end to the war in France and thus, too, to the need for a German alliance.63 Despite his rejection of Elizabeth’s diplomatic advances, Frederik II’s reputation as an opponent of the Concord grew within the Empire, and with it Denmark’s reputation as a bastion of Protestantism. The king’s public objection to the Concord movement at Güstrow in 1579 increased his stature among such Protestant activists as Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV of Hessen. It also drew accolades from Dançay, who gleefully informed Mornay of the details of the 1580 prohibition of the Book. Frederik’s newfound friends in the Empire continued to promote him as a valuable partner in their correspondence with both Navarre and Elizabeth, so regardless of the king’s lukewarm reaction to the proposed alliance in 1577 Elizabeth gave Denmark another chance.64 Fear of Spain, and the queen’s own deepening involvement in the politics of the Netherlands, compelled her to do so. English funds earmarked for Johann Casimir’s proposed enterprise in France in 1577 were diverted to raise an army for the Netherlands, and in August 1578 Johann Casimir led his forces into Brabant. By year’s end, Elizabeth had opened negotiations for a marriage alliance with the youngest Valois, Francis duke of Anjou (formerly Alençon), to whom the States-General had given the title of ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries’ that August. In the meantime, the Spanish governor-general, Don John of Austria, had died of the plague, to be replaced by the far more successful Parma. As the rebellious provinces in the north drew themselves together as a single state—the United Provinces—in the Union 63 Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 242–7, Robert Beale to Walsingham, 11 October 1577; Cal. SP For., vol. 12, pp. 293–5, Walsingham to Rogers, 31 October 1577; Heppe, Geschichte des deutschen Protestantismus, vol. 4, pp. 13–16. 64 Cal. SP For., vol. 12, p. 465, Orange to Elizabeth, 21 January 1578; ‘A discourse of the K. of Denmark’s proceedings with the D. of Saxony etc.’, September 1579, Cal. SP For., vol. 14, pp. 63–6; BL Cotton, Titus C.vii, fol. 220–1b, Johann Sturm to Walsingham, 15 June 1582.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 181 of Utrecht in January 1579, their neighbours to the south, now constituted as the Union of Arras, opened negotiations with Parma and returned to obedience to Spain. Rudolf II’s attempt to end the revolt through a peace conference at Cologne sputtered to an anticlimatic end later that year. The incipient United Provinces exhibited little real unity, and when fighting resumed in the Low Countries in 1580 Spanish arms were in the ascendant. Elizabeth’s Dutch policy had suffered a serious setback. Hoping once more to cajole Frederik II into joining her against Spain, Elizabeth promoted Frederik’s election into the Order of the Garter in April 1579, and made the announcement public the following year. The timing was significant in terms of Elizabeth’s German policy—she had already bestowed the Garter upon Johann Casimir in January 1579—and it was a great honour for Frederik: he would be the 363rd inductee, and the third Danish king to be received into that illustrious brotherhood.65 Once again, Frederik would disappoint Elizabeth. In all fairness to Frederik II, there were good reasons for Denmark not to get entangled in a confessional alliance in 1577 or in 1580. There were more immediate diplomatic and security concerns closer to home. Sweden could not be trusted; Johan III was only then giving up on his attempted reconciliation with Rome, and lingering commercial disputes between the two Scandinavian kingdoms had become so heated by 1580 that they required a border-meeting. The negotiations, which began in September 1580, resolved the mutual grievances of both kingdoms peaceably enough, but it was no time for Denmark to let down its guard in the Baltic. Moreover, by taking Niels Kaas and Christoffer Valkendorf away to the Scanian frontier for several weeks, it deprived the king of the services of his most valued advisers.66 The conflict between Stefan Bathory of Poland and the city of Danzig gave Frederik more than a few sleepless nights. A Polish victory over Danzig would be, in Frederik’s eyes, a direct threat against Denmark; it would make the construction of a major Polish fleet a real possibility, and Stefan Bathory’s close ties with Rome added to the potential danger. There were minor but nagging 65 Christian Molbech, ‘Bidrag til Historien af det Gesandtskab, som Dronning Elisabeth 1582 sendte til Danmark, for at bringe Kong Frederik II. den engelske Hosebaandsorden’, DM, Series 2, 4 (1823), 249–51. 66 Resen, Krønicke, pp. 324–36; DNT vol. 2, pp. 497–513; Fredrik Westling, ‘Sveriges förhållande till Danmark från freden i Stettin till Fredrik II:s död’, Historisk Tidskrift [Sweden], 39 (1919), 123–52.

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problems on Denmark’s southern frontier as well. Long-standing disagreements between Denmark, the Duchies, and the city of Hamburg over their respective commercial privileges on the Elbe led to long and wearying—but ultimately fruitless—negotiations, in which both Ulrich of Mecklenburg and August of Saxony acted as mediators. In the Duchies, Frederik’s uncle Duke Hans the Elder died without issue in 1580, leaving to Frederik and Duke Adolf the complicated task of dividing Hans’ portion of Holstein between themselves.67 In short, Frederik had his hands full, and to antagonise Philip II by joining a Protestant coalition would have been unthinkable. Still in the process of rebuilding its fleet, Denmark was in no condition to risk war with Spain.68 Reluctance to participate in a Protestant alliance under Elizabeth’s direction did not mean that Frederik II favoured Spain. In his correspondence with his fellow princes in the Empire, Frederik continued to rail against the Concord as injurious to the Protestant cause. He actively solicited German Protestant support for the city of Danzig against Stefan Bathory, something which Frederik’s supporters in Germany—like Johann Sturm—saw as ironclad proof of the king’s devotion to Protestant interests. At Navarre’s court, there was doubt that Frederik II was anything other than an ally. Navarre wrote to Frederik in March 1580—probably at Mornay’s suggestion—once again to beg Danish support for a general Protestant synod in the Empire. According to Dançay, who was present when Frederik received the letter,69 After the said letter from the king of Navarre had been translated and read to the king of Denmark, he [Frederik] repeated . . . these words several times with great pleasure, ‘Injury has done on both sides; let us acknowledge this sin each to each, let us offer each other a healing hand’, arguing that [a general conference] would be the true means of pursuing peace, union, and concord—not to use detraction and insults, as the theologians would do.

67

Resen, Krønicke, p. 327. RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1580–81, fol. 202–3v, Frederik to August, 29 January 1581. 69 Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 100–9, Dançay to Mornay, 14 June 1580. Dançay’s rendering of Frederik’s words is ‘Utrumque peccatum est, utrique peccatum agnoscamur, utrique manum medicam afferamus’. My thanks to Dr. Bruce Laforse for his assistance in translating this troublesome quotation. 68

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 183 Frederik’s response was buoyant. Praising Navarre for his sacrifices on behalf of the ‘true faith’, Frederik apologised for Elector August’s actions on behalf of the Concord; August meant well, but did not realise the damage he was causing to Protestantism. Although he doubted that August could be convinced to do otherwise, Frederik promised to try his best, and to work with Navarre and Elizabeth I to arrange the hoped-for synod.70 It was Frederik’s unflagging interest in the Low Countries wars, however, that provided the best evidence of his sympathies. The king unremittingly pressed Heinrich Rantzau for news of the war in the Netherlands, requests the Statthalter was more than willing to fulfil. After 1578, he corresponded more frequently than ever before with William of Orange. Although Frederik could not promise military or financial support to the rebel cause in the Netherlands, he did send dozens of ambitious young Danish noblemen to serve in William’s armies. Just during the period between 24 March and 17 April 1578, the Danish king recommended thirteen of his nobles for commissions in William’s service, and allowed one of his mercenary captains to bring a full company of cavalry into the rebel army.71 And Frederik was more open in expressions of sympathy for the rebel cause; writing to Orange in January 1578, the king related his sadness over the collapse of the Perpetual Edict, and conveyed his hope that William would triumph over ‘the enemy’. No longer content with Rantzau’s second-hand reports on the Dutch struggle, Frederik sent Matthias Budde, one of his German secretaries, to meet with Orange in early 1578.72 Apprehensive of Philip II’s designs on the Baltic region, and with Danish resources and energies occupied with other, more trivial, problems, Frederik II could not afford to alienate Spain through open

70 Møller, ‘Om Dannerkongen’, pp. 354–6, Navarre to Frederik, 10 March 1580, and Frederik to Navarre, 13 June 1580; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 302–7, Frederik to Elizabeth, 13 June 1580. 71 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 42–3v, 53–4v, 61v–2v, 63v–4, 65–6v, 66v–7v, 73v–5, Frederik to Orange, 24 March, 2 April, 5 April, 7 April, 8 April, and 17 April 1578; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 62–3v, Frederik to Rittmeister Johan von Alden, 6 April 1578. 72 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1578–79, fol. 4–6v, Frederik to Orange, 11 January 1578. See also William’s many appeals for Danish assistance: RAK TKUA/SD/Ned A.I.1, Orange to Frederik, 30 August 1578, 12 July 1579, May 1582, 19 September 1582.

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support for the Dutch. His distrust of Spain, however, did not abate in the late 1570s and early ’80s. Episodes of Spanish belligerence in those years—like Philip II’s successful annexation of Portugal in 1580, or the Spanish-papal attempts to gain a foothold in Ireland—fed the king’s fears of Catholic aggression, fears that he freely communicated only to a few German princes and no-one else.73 Responding to Spanish complaints about the severity of the Sound dues, Frederik offered his first public criticism of Philip II’s policies in the Netherlands. He sent Gert Rantzau to meet with Granvelle in Madrid late in 1581, in order to inform Philip that he could not reduce the commercial duties exacted from Netherlands merchants. The political situation in the Netherlands was hardly the same as it had been in 1544, Frederik argued, and so the terms of the Speyer treaty were not valid in this regard. Instead, Frederik complained of the damage that the prolonged war in the Netherlands had wrought upon Danish commerce. Pointing out that many of his own subjects did not recognise Spanish suzerainty in the Netherlands, Frederik asked Philip to consider returning the Netherlands ‘to their previous condition’, namely the quasi-autonomous status they had enjoyed under Charles V. What Frederik II hoped would emerge from the Dutch revolt, therefore, differed very little from what Elizabeth I envisioned.74 Frederik II’s sentiments were not those of a hispanophile, but they were hidden from all but those to whom he intimated them directly. To Navarre—with whom Denmark had no commercial frictions— Frederik II appeared to be exactly what he was hoped to be: an eager proponent of a general Protestant synod and a means by which the elector of Saxony might be swayed. At Elizabeth’s court, Frederik’s intent had to be judged from his actions, and his actions did not appear friendly in the least. To be sure, the alliance projects of 1577 and 1580 would likely have collapsed even if Denmark had pursued them vigourously. Indirectly, Frederik II had given his support to Elizabeth I’s designs. He called upon the German princes to reject the Concord; he asserted that the papacy and the kings of Spain, France, and even Poland were one and the same where it came to the mak73 RAK TKIA/A.77/8, Rantzau to Frederik, 9 October 1580; RAK TKUA/ AD/AusReg 1580–81: fol. 202–3v, Frederik to August, 29 January 1581; fol. 350–50v, 362v–4, Frederik to Ulrich, 2 July and 13 July 1581. 74 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1580–81, fol. 435v–6, Frederik to Philip II, 27 October 1581; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 385–7, Frederik to Parma, 13 December 1581.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 185 ing of foreign policy; he had given his enthusiastic endorsement to Elizabeth’s call for a general Protestant synod. But in his direct dealings with Elizabeth the king showed not a trace of favour. He did not give the English the slightest hint that he was interested in the coalition projects, and was ill-disposed to grant commercial concessions of any kind. Elizabeth sent Frederik passionate and lofty appeals for Protestant solidarity; in reply, all she received were stern warnings about the consequences of English shipping trespassing in Danish territorial waters, refusals to reduce the Sound dues by the most trivial amount, reports of English ships seized in the Sound, and claims for damages presented by aggrieved Danish merchants. On several occasions, Danish squadrons chased or fired upon English merchant vessels attempting to reach Narva or Archangel.75 Whether they stemmed from poor judgement, naïveté, or simple parsimony on the part of the king, such actions did not speak well for Frederik II.76 Little wonder, then, that Walsingham and others in Elizabeth’s employ regarded Frederik II—or at least his ministers and advisers— with a modicum of suspicion. It was difficult to trust the Danes when the king’s commercial policies toward England were so unyielding. William Herle, Elizabeth’s expert on north German and Baltic affairs, assessed the king’s character appropriately: ‘The King of Denmark has two virtues in him that are remarkable; the one that he is changeable and heady, the other, covetous and busy above measure.’ It took only a very small leap of logic to come to the conclusion that Frederik and his court were pro-Spanish. Gert Rantzau’s embassy to Spain in the winter of 1581–82 seemed to offer proof positive of a Danish rapprochement with Philip II. Elizabeth’s agents on the Continent reported that the Rantzau mission was intended to offer Philip Danish military and naval support against the Dutch rebels. The Danes, it was alleged, hoped to profit from the misery of the rebellious provinces, and were eager to join Spain in a war against the Dutch and England, too. Indeed, as late as April 1582 William Herle claimed that the Danes were fitting out a fleet for Spanish service. Herle even believed that Frederik II had joined with the emperor and the ‘Martinists’— the supporters of the Concord in the Empire—to crush Protestantism 75 Cal. SP For., vol. 14, pp. 534–5, report of the crew of the fishing vessel Emanuel, 1580; Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 3, pp. 329, 386–7, Bernardino de Mendoza to Philip II, 1 April and 11 July 1582. 76 ‘Correspondance’, p. 175, Dançay to Henry III, 9 March 1582.

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in the German states.77 In this, Frederik was heavily influenced by the presence of Jesuits within Denmark, and by two men in his own court. The first was Heinrich Rantzau, a man who was as ‘covetous’ as his master. The second was the ‘treasurer’, presumably meaning Rentemester Christoffer Valkendorf:78 . . . a man evil spoken of everywhere, of mean calling and no great capacity other than in getting and gathering in; yet so possesses the king’s mind that he usurps authority over all the chief officers in the realm. So the officers retire, for such as have contested with him have got nothing thereby but disgrace. Besides, it is noted in him to favour the Spaniard . . .

Such allegations were ill-informed. Valkendorf, as rentemester, was far more ‘covetous’ than his master; as several ambassadors would testify, Valkendorf was no friend to England or to the Dutch, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was well-inclined towards Spain. And though Rantzau might have once had personal connections to the Habsburg court at Brussels in the 1550s, his frequent philippics against Spain and its policies after 1567 easily disproved Herle’s allegations. It is doubtful that there was a single member of the Council who had any affection for Spain; fear and respect, perhaps, but not affection. The English perception of the structure of power at the Danish court was similarly flawed. Rantzau was certainly a valued adviser to the king, but Valkendorf was little more than a mere functionary, who in no way dominated the king or intimidated the other members of the central administration. Moreover, the 1582 embassy to Spain was hardly an offer of alliance; far from it. But Frederik II must bear much of the responsibility for these misinterpretations. There was probably no sovereign in Europe whose theological sensibilities and confessional priorities came closer to matching Frederik’s than Elizabeth I. By showing little flexibility in the collection of the Sound dues, by not expressing the least bit of fraternity with England in the ‘common cause’, Frederik had very nearly alienated England. By 1582, the king had come dangerously close to turning a poten-

77 Cal. SP For., vol. 15, pp. 536–8, Herle to Burghley, 7 March 1582; Cal. SP For., vol. 15, p. 638, Herle to Walsingham, 21 April 1582. It was also reported, incorrectly, that Heinrich Rantzau—and not his son, Gert—led the Danish diplomatic mission to Philip II. 78 Cal. SP For., vol. 15, pp. 536–8, Herle to Burghley, 7 March 1582; Cal. SP For., vol. 16, pp. 215–17, William Waad to Walsingham, 2 August 1582.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 187 tially faithful ally into a potentially dangerous enemy—a mistake that Christian IV would repeat in the 1630s. Happily for both kingdoms, and for the Protestant cause in general, Elizabeth persevered in her pursuit of Danish friendship. After a delay of nearly two years, for which she apologised profusely, the queen made the final arrangements to induct Frederik II into the Order of the Garter.79 To this end she dispatched Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby, to bring the insignia to Frederik and to perform the induction ceremonies in Denmark. Elizabeth, however, expected something in return. Only a small portion of Willoughby’s instructions from the queen concerned the bestowal of the Garter; the remainder was devoted to settling the rancorous commercial disputes that existed between the two kingdoms. Willoughby handled his mission with great tact and diplomatic skill. This was fortunate, for Frederik was immediately suspicious of the Garter ceremonies— not so much from distrust of England, but rather because of the nature of the induction ritual itself. The king thought that the ceremonial robes he would be required to wear were in some way ‘popish’. The wording of the ceremony bothered him as well. Frederik steadfastly refused to take any oath that invoked the names of anyone besides the Holy Trinity; the mention of any saints’ names made him uncomfortable. Several days of negotiations on the details of the ceremony ensued: Willoughby and his small entourage had arrived at Helsingør on 22 July 1582, yet the Garter ceremony could not be conducted until 11 August. In the meantime, Willoughby had to meet first with Gert Rantzau and Dançay, and then with Chancellor Kaas, Christoph von Dohna, and Caspar Paselich from the German Chancery, to discuss the induction ceremony and any other business he might be bringing from his queen. Willoughby, to his credit, expounded upon the great honour that membership in the Order entailed, and minimised the importance of the commercial matters he was sent to negotiate: ‘I declared yt har maties meaninge was cheifly to honnor him and not to be troblesome unto him and therefore she had willed me to impart those matterrs to sutch of his concett as it should please him to appoint after thise discours . . .’ Willoughby firmly demanded a personal audience with the king, which Frederik granted the next day. The ceremony, which took

79

RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.9, Elizabeth to Frederik, 21 May 1582.

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place at Kronborg, went off perfectly, and the king was pleased. He celebrated the occasion with ‘a whole volley of all ye greate shot of his of his castell discharged, a royall feast, and ye most artificiall cuninge fires workes.’ Frederik took an immediate liking to Willoughby, and invited the ambassador to hunt with him two days later.80 The Garter had its intended effect. In private conversation with Willoughby, Frederik vowed to ‘serve har matie in parson by sea and land as an asseured frend to harsellf and a ernest foe and ennemie to har ennemies.’ The king even hinted at his hopes for an English marriage for Prince Christian. On 16 August, Frederik once again gave Willoughby audience to discuss his commercial proposals. There was no immediate result—the king deemed the issues too complicated to settle in a single audience, and there were a few heated moments as the English ambassadors and Frederik’s ministers aired their complaints about the unfair treatment accorded their merchants— but the king suggested that Elizabeth send a commission to iron out their differences. This was a positive sign, and Elizabeth responded appropriately. The following spring, John Herbert arrived at the head of yet another English delegation to meet with Frederik’s representatives at Haderslev. Finally, Frederik showed some willingness to listen to Elizabeth’s demands. While the Danes refused to reduce or abolish the lastetold, they did grant English shipping unrestricted passage to Archangel in return for a nominal annual fee of 100 rosenobles.81 The goodwill resulting from the Garter was mutual. Willoughby 80 Resen, Krønicke, pp. 332–4; BL Cotton Mss, Titus C.vii, fol.181–183, Willoughby to Frederik II, 12 August 1582; BL Cotton Mss, Titus C.vii, fol. 214–15, ‘Instructions for the Lord willowghby sent to the king of Denmark’, 1582; BL Cotton Mss, Titus C.vii, fol. 228–31b, ‘A brief narration of my L. Wilughbyes Embassade into Denmarke 1582’; BL Cotton Mss, Titus C.vii, fol. 218–19, Frederik II’s acceptance of the Garter, 11 August 1582; RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.9, Paselich’s account of the negotiations; William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (London, 1688), pp. 273–4; ‘Correspondance’, pp. 183–7, Dançay to Henry III, 3 September 1582. On the award of the Garter to foreign princes, see: Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth. Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1999), pp. 176–8. 81 BL Cotton MSS Titus C.vii, fol. 228–31b, ‘A brief narration of my L. Wilughbyes Embassade into Denmarke 1582’; Molbech, ‘Bidrag til Historien af det Gesandtskab’, pp. 252–3; PRO SP75/1/76, 78–79, John Herbert to Walsingham, 3 June and 7 June 1583; Cal. SP For., vol. 18, pp. 99–100, notes by Burghley, July/August 1583; ‘Correspondance’, pp. 223–4, Dançay to Henry III, 26 August 1583. See also the documents in RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.9; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 429–34, 434–8, Frederik to Elizabeth, 15 August 1582; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 438–40, Frederik to Willoughby, 25 August 1582.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 189 found the Danish king frank, open, and genuinely interested in closer ties with England. Shortly after his 1582 embassy to Denmark, he reported to Elizabeth on the details of the Concord controversy, emphasising Frederik II’s opposition in the name of Protestant solidarity. Suggesting that Elizabeth should continue to encourage the king in his efforts, Willoughby reminded her of the debt she owed to Frederik’s exertions: ‘it wold not be amisse to remember his godly and carefull travall therin with thanks, and to pray contrymann therof as a matter giveth tending to ye benifit of the whole church’.82

Realignment The bestowal of the Garter on Frederik II triggered no great change in the direction of Danish foreign policy. It was, however, a welltimed gesture of friendship, and a distinction of which the king was enormously proud. A single entry in Frederik’s diary from October 1583—‘Today the Order, which I received from the Queen of England, fell off of my neck-chain, but I put it back on immediately’—hinted at the king’s pride in the Garter. It must have been a part of the king’s ordinary dress at court, and a highly-prized article at that, to have elicited comment as the important occurrence of the day. Frederik recognised the Garter for what it was—an attempt by Elizabeth to woo him diplomatically—but he candidly admitted to his father-in-law that the Garter had given him reason to reconsider his policies towards England: ‘We have taken this [matter] and this opportunity, a divine gift, into good counsel, as other people waver in inactivity’.83 And the king was not the only one to rejoice at the positive turn that Anglo-Danish relations had taken. Chancellor Niels Kaas took the trouble to thank Elizabeth I personally for her ‘outstretched hand’, as did Johann Casimir, himself a recipient of the Garter in 1579.84

82 BL Cotton MSS Titus C.vii, fol. 226, ‘Touchinge the proceedinges of the Lutherians in Germany’. 83 Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 552, entry for 6 October 1583; RAK TKUA/ AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 131v–3v, Frederik to Ulrich, 7 September 1582. 84 PRO SP75/1/58–9, Kaas to Elizabeth, 20 August 1582; Cal. SP For., vol. 16, p. 466, Johann Casimir to Walsingham, 26 November 1582; Cal. SP For., vol. 16, p. 253, Arild Huitfeldt to Walsingham, 18 August 1582.

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The Garter ceremony was well-timed because it coincided with a subtle and gradual change in the nature and make-up of Frederik’s political networks, both within the court and abroad, that had commenced in the mid-1570s but was reaching its peak in 1583. At home, this process was a natural result of the passage of time. The councillors and ministers of the first half of the reign, many of whom had served Christian III as well, had begun to die off or retire shortly after the Peace of Stettin. Johan Friis, who had served both the king and his father as King’s Chancellor, died in 1570; Peder Oxe, who had been Frederik’s right hand during the Polish election crisis, died in late 1575. As Rigshofmester, Oxe had been the leading administrator in the kingdom. Though the post of Rigshofmester would remain vacant until Christian IV’s accession in 1596, there were several experienced ministers to take up his duties. Niels Kaas til Taarupgaard (1534–94), Friis’ successor as King’s Chancellor, was perhaps the closest equivalent to a royal favourite in Frederik II’s administration. Born in the same year as the king himself, Kaas worked his way to the top very rapidly. In the early years of his education, he became a member of Niels Hemmingsen’s academic household, and throughout his life remained a friend of Hemmingsen and a devout Philippist. As such, he was a stern opponent of the Concord, writing personally to David Chytræus in 1582 to express his disapproval of the Formula.85 After further education on the Continent, he was appointed to the Danish Chancery in 1560. He was the leading member of the Chancery at Copenhagen during the Seven Years’ War, earning a reputation for loyalty, hard work, and administrative competence. Kaas quickly caught the king’s attention; in 1571 Kaas took his oath as Chancellor, and two years later was formally elevated to that post as well as to membership in the Council of State. Kaas appears to have been vehemently antiCatholic and suspicious of Spain, but above all his surviving correspondence portrays Kaas as a loyal servant to Frederik. He never married, and was almost perpetually by Frederik’s side during the king’s frequent travels through Denmark.86 Niels Kaas’ partners in this new administration were men much like himself. Christoffer Valkendorf til Glorup (1525–1601), scion of 85

RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 425–9, Kaas to Chytræus, 18 July 1582. On Chytræus’ personal contacts with Kaas, see: Otfried Czaika, David Chytræus und die Universität Rostock in ihren Beziehungen zum schwedischen Reich (Helsinki, 2002), pp. 178–80. 86 DBL vol. 12, pp. 292–8.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 191 one of the most distinguished aristocratic families in the kingdom, had begun his state service in Christian III’s declining years. He served as the king’s lensmand around the periphery of the Oldenburg state—in Bergen (Norway), Iceland, and the island of Gotland—and carried out a number of diplomatic assignments in the eastern Baltic. His responsibilities as lensmand in Bergen and on Iceland involved the levying of export duties, the adjudication of disputes between foreign merchants and Danish subjects, and above all the protection of the local populations in his jurisdiction from the oftentimes rapacious business practices of visiting merchants. It was a thankless and difficult job, but Valkendorf excelled at it. Most important, his time at Bergen and on Iceland seems to have awakened in Valkendorf a certain distaste, even an open dislike, for foreign merchants, whether English, Dutch, or Hanseatic. In 1574, Frederik II appointed Valkendorf as Rentemester, a post that placed him immediately under Peder Oxe’s supervision. More talented in fiscal affairs than Oxe, Valkendorf introduced much needed order into the monarchy’s finances, and was responsible for the administration of the fleet and of the naval complex at Bremerholm. Valkendorf was elevated to membership in the Council in 1576, and from 1578 on he played a leading role in state affairs. His duties as Rentemester and as Stadholder of Copenhagen kept him confined to the capital city for most of his career. Nonetheless, he kept in close contact with the king’s travelling entourage, and seems to have been quite friendly with Niels Kaas. Like Kaas, Valkendorf was utterly dedicated to state service and never married. He was an active member of the ‘intellectual’ circle at court, and counted Tyge Brahe and Anders Sørensen Vedel among his closest friends. Although the Rentemester was not frequently in the king’s presence, Frederik took an obvious personal liking to Valkendorf, joking on one occasion with the bachelor about his fondness for the ladies of Copenhagen.87 Valkendorf had the rare privilege of standing as godfather at the baptism of Prince Christian in 1577. But the king relied on him heavily, too: for the administration of the fleet, for making logistical arrangements for visiting ambassadors and for the king himself, and finally as a kind of state prosecutor in high-profile legal cases. Valkendorf may have been, as Steffen Heiberg has suggested, the closest thing to a true monarchist within Frederik’s close

87

Jacobsen, ‘Om Kong Frederik den Andens Forhold’, pp. 420–1.

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circle of advisers.88 Valkendorf ’s dedication to the collection of commercial tariffs won him few friends in England or the Netherlands. Several foreign ambassadors testified that Valkendorf was openly proSpanish in his political sentiments.89 There is no other evidence to support this claim; rather, it appears as that Valkendorf was not so much pro-Spanish as he was anti-Dutch and anti-English, and on commercial grounds rather than political, a legacy of his difficult days as lensmand in Bergen and on Iceland.90 There were other, lesser figures in Frederik’s closest circle of advisers: Hans Skovgaard, senior secretary of the Danish Chancery until his death in 1580; Arild Huitfeldt, Skovgaard’s erudite successor and a close friend of Dançay, who would join the Council in 1586; and the Councillor Absolon Juul, about whom very little is known. Then there were the Germans, who in the 1580s would rise to prominence as diplomats. Typical and most significant of this group was Heinrich Ramel (1550–1610), a Pomeranian nobleman who entered Frederik’s service sometime before 1581. Educated, experienced, and well-travelled—he had worked for over a decade in the Turkish, Imperial, and Polish governments—Ramel was a true professional, and Frederik promoted him rapidly. In 1582 Ramel was a mere courtier; in 1583 the king appointed him as director of the German Chancery and as hofmester to the young Duke Christian; in 1584 the king naturalised Ramel as a Danish nobleman. Ramel, like Niels Kaas, travelled frequently with the king’s entourage and was present at virtually every audience Frederik granted to foreign ambassadors in the 1580s, but otherwise his career was typical of a group of German expatriates that included Heinrich Rantzau, his sons Gert and Kai, the Mecklenburger Heinrich Below, and the Holsteiners Hans Blome and Dr. Veit Winsheim.91 These men—except for Valkendorf, who represented the king in Copenhagen—accompanied the king on nearly all of his journeys through Denmark, and acted as a regency of sorts on the rare occasions when the king left the country. They were all similar in many ways. They were very close to king in age; they were, as a group,

88

Heiberg, Christian 4., pp. 32–3. E.g., PRO SP75/1/169–70, Willoughby to Walsingham, 15 December 1585. 90 Arthur G. Hassø, Rigshofmester Kristoffer Valkendorf til Glorup (1525–1601). En Biografi (Copenhagen, 1933), pp. 134–58. 91 DBL vol. 19, pp. 81–3. 89

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 193 learned; they participated in the boisterous everyday life at court that was a characteristic of Frederik II’s kingship. Some of them the king practically adopted into his extended royal family; in 1583, for example, Frederik hosted Heinrich Below’s wedding at Koldinghus, and the following year acted as godfather when Below’s first child was baptised there. ‘I held the child myself ’, Frederik proudly wrote in his diary.92 They worked well together as a team, with no evident jealousies or rivalries. Where it came to their preferences in foreign policy, their associations at court and their few surviving letters show them to be good Philippists and men who sympathised with the Protestant ‘common cause’. In a way, however, their sympathies were almost irrelevant. The king might have been frequently in their company, but he rarely solicited their opinions in writing, and his letters to foreign princes were usually written without their help or input. Valkendorf, for example, may have been unfriendly to English and Dutch interests, but he was no more than a mere bureaucrat; Frederik II relied on him to secure lodgings and arrange entertainments for visiting dignitaries, not to treat with them. These men were functionaries more than they were advisers, loyal and voiceless servants who carried out the king’s commands without complaint or objection.93 Still, Frederik II had by 1580 surrounded himself with ministers who best suited him. They were his contemporaries who shared his religious convictions. They were neither very young men nor very old. Much the same could be said of patterns of recruitment to the Council of State during this period. Of the twenty-one councillors who survived Christian III’s reign to serve under Frederik, eighteen were dead by 1580, and the remaining three by 1583. During his entire reign, Frederik II elevated thirty-eight noblemen to membership in the Council, eighteen of them between 1576 and 1586, thirteen of them on a single day in 1581. The new councillors tended to be very close to the king in age; the average age of those appointed in 1581, when the king was not yet forty-seven, was forty-one years. Most of them had served with the king during the Seven Years’ War with Sweden, either as diplomats or as military commanders; several, like Hak Holgersen Ulfstand, had been part of the hard-drinking brotherhood at Malmøhus during the king’s youth. Three of those 92 Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, pp. 542, 558, entries for 10 February 1583 and 1 March 1584. 93 Jensen, Bidrag, pp. 21–44.

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appointed in 1581 were, in fact, foreigners: Heinrich Below, Heinrich Rantzau’s son Breide, and Christoph von Dohna. All three would go on to have distinguished diplomatic careers. Two of them—Breide Rantzau and Christoph von Dohna—had ties to international Calvinism. Breide’s father, it will be remembered, was most vocal in his hostility towards Spain, and Breide himself had studied at Heidelberg. Christoph von Dohna, whose father Peter had been an early convert to Lutheranism and had helped introduce the Reformation in Prussia under Duke Albrecht, belonged to the Dohna-Schlobitten family of East Prussia; his brothers Achatius and Fabian had both converted to Calvinism, Fabian serving as Johann Casimir’s chief lieutenant. Christoph himself had been a pupil of Melanchthon. He later distinguished himself in Danish service during the Seven Years’ War, and by the 1570s had become one of Frederik II’s favourite courtiers.94 None of the new appointees were ‘new men’ in any way. All but the foreigners came from distinguished aristocratic lineages, and all had worked their way up from lowly positions as hofjunker, often rising through administrative careers in the Chanceries or as lensmænd, earning distinction through hard work. This restructuring of the central administration paralleled an even more significant shift in the character of Frederik II’s network of ‘friends’ abroad. Up until the late 1570s, Frederik had aligned himself primarily with the greater and more conservative Protestant princes in the Empire. August of Saxony had been both his closest friend and his staunchest ally, and not just because they were bound by ties of blood and marriage; they also shared a common mindset, borne of a common devotion to the ‘religious and secular peace’ of Augsburg. As the Danish king found himself cast in the role as leader of those who opposed the Concord and therefore—unwittingly—as defender of oppressed Calvinists, this partnership with Saxony could 94 DBL vol. 6, pp. 42–3; C.E.A. Schøller, ‘Danske, norske og holstenske Studenter ved Universitetet i Heidelberg 1386–1668’, KHS, Series 5, 5 (1909–11), 140. Frederik II first made the acquaintance of Christoph and his elder brother, Friedrich, during the young prince’s tour of the Empire in 1557–58. Friedrich also served as an officer under the king during the Seven Years’ War of the North; years later, the king would grant the huge sum of 1000 daler to Christoph and his younger brother, Fabian, in honor of their brother. Hans G. Schmidt, Fabian von Dohna (Halle, 1897), p. 9; GSPK VI. HA Fürstliches Hausarchiv Dohna-Schlobitten, Karton 3a Nr. 32, ‘Quittung über 1000 Thaler nach dem Tode der Burggrafen Friedrich von dem Könige von Daenemark jedem der überlebenden Brüder gezahlt, 1575’. See also: Heinrich Borkowski, ‘Ein Schüler Philipp Melanchthons’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 19 (1899), 455–60.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 195 not stand for long. Whether Frederik II wanted to admit it or not, his confessional and political outlook was by 1580 more consonant with that of the militant and radical princes, men like Johann Casimir, Wilhelm IV of Hessen, Joachim Ernst of Anhalt, and Joachim Friedrich, administrator of Magdeburg. Frederik still discussed foreign affairs and confessional issues with Ulrich of Mecklenburg, but Ulrich was by no means of one mind with August of Saxony: though a subscriber to the Concord, Duke Ulrich believed fervently that Calvinists— while ‘erring brethren’—were still brethren, and deserved a ‘helping hand’ from the Lutherans.95 August, on the other hand, appeared to be moving in the opposite direction. Between November 1581 and the following spring, Rudolf II and Parma approached the elector with an unusual proposal from the Imperial and Spanish courts: would August try to convince the Danish king to close the Sound to Dutch maritime traffic, provided that Denmark would be recompensed for the loss in commercial duties? The proposal reflected Philip II’s continuing hope that he could end the revolt in the Netherlands by shutting down the Dutch grain trade in the Baltic. Later in 1582, for example, Pedro Cornejo, Philip’s agent in the Baltic, would visit Cracow in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Stefan Bathory to halt all sales of Polish grain to Dutch merchants, likewise promising Spanish gold as compensation.96 It was one thing to ask a fellow Catholic sovereign to do such a favour, but entirely another to make a similar request of a Protestant. What made the Spanish proposal to Denmark especially bizarre, however, was the fact that it was transmitted through August. Parma eventually came to the conclusion that Frederik would never consent to such a drastic measure. Dutch shipping was too important to Danish royal revenues; in 1581 alone, 2340 of the 4262 ships passing through the Sound in either direction—a full 55 per cent—hailed from ports in the Netherlands. Yet August nonetheless persisted in the matter, encouraged by promises of territorial concessions in the Low Countries. Rather than present the proposal directly, August made use of Ulrich of Mecklenburg as a middleman. Ulrich, though taken aback, dutifully contacted Frederik with the suggestion. Frederik II found the whole business unsettling and politely declined, stating vaguely that 95

Schnell, Mecklenburg, pp. 253–5. Felipe Ruiz Martín, ‘El pan de los países bálticos durante las guerras de religión: andanzas y gestiones del historiador Pedro Cornejo’, Hispania 21 (1961), 557–69. 96

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there was more at stake than simply the problem of lost revenues from the Sound dues. Yet Frederik did not waver in his firm belief that August’s heart was in the right place. He defended his brotherin-law as a man ‘of great piety and heroic spirit’, whose actions were driven by ‘zeal for the true religion’. August had merely been misled by his self-seeking theologians.97 It was hard for Frederik to part ways with an old friend, especially one who had been so close as August. The king did his best to reconcile. He backed away from tirades against the Concord to address more lighthearted and personal matters: the births of his daughters Augusta and Hedewig in 1580 and 1581; a request for August to send him some wild boar for stocking his Tiergarten at Skanderborg; an invitation for August to join him in the hunt. Frederik had customarily ended his letters to his brother-in-law with closings written in his own hand, a rare thing from a man who was so self-conscious about his literary abilities. Now these little expressions of personal affection—they had usually read ‘Your Highness’ true brother-in-law and friend while I live’—became almost maudlin. In January 1581 he closed a letter to August with the phrase, written in the king’s curious blend of German, Danish, and Latin, ‘Dear brother-in-law, I drink to you a goblet of wine in good old Danish [fashion], as my old companion, out of love’.98 Neither sentiment nor reminders of happier times would move the elector to resume his friendly correspondence with the king who had proven to be such a hindrance to the smooth progress of the Concord. Frederik II, finding August unresponsive to his letters about the Concord and the king of Navarre, in frustration sought the intervention of Ulrich of Mecklenburg, but to no avail.99 The Concord dispute had permanently damaged the partnership 97 Bang, Tabeller over skibsfart, vol. 1, p. 90; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 1, p. 456, Rudolf II to August, 3 November 1581; Joseph Lefèvre (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des Pays-Bas, deuxième partie (5 vols, Brussels, 1940–60), vol. 2, pp. 298–9, Parma to Philip II, 23 May 1582; RAK TKUA/AD/1:104 Koncepter, Frederik to Ulrich, 31 March 1582 (draft, never sent); Säch. HStA GH Loc. 9310/6, Ulrich to August, March 1582; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 1, p. 470, Frederik to Ulrich, 31 March 1582; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 1, p. 510, Ulrich to August, 31 July 1582; Møller, ‘Om Dannerkongen’, pp. 360–1, Frederik to Navarre, 13 June 1580. 98 ‘Keyre schwagger ich dricker deg it begger wyn wyl pa got gammel dansche sum mint gammel stalbroder ex carritate’. Säch. HStA DB12, fol. 474–4v, 478–8v, Frederik to August, 3 July 1580 and 5 August 1581. 99 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1580–81, fol. 71v–4, 198–9v, Frederik to Ulrich, 10 May 1580 and 13 January 1581; Säch. HStA GH Loc.8506/4, fol. 225–5v, Frederik to Ulrich, 5 February 1585.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 197 between Frederik II and August; the events of 1582–83 would shatter it completely. The first string of Catholic political successes in the Empire, around 1573–75, had occurred while the Protestant states were still relatively united, and while the irenicist Maximilian II retained the Imperial crown. Maximilian, however, died in 1576. His successor, Rudolf II (1576–1612), soon demonstrated in small ways that he, in a political sense at least, was not his father’s son. Rudolf refused to acknowledge the declaratio Ferdinandea at his formal accession in 1576; in 1578, he began the process of rooting out Protestants from the city of Vienna; in 1581, the emperor banned Protestant worship in the ‘free city’ of Aachen and allowed Spanish troops to quarter themselves there. He was proving to be the kind of emperor that Protestant princes had dreaded since the death of the Schmalkaldic League: a zealously Catholic ruler who had no regard for ‘princely liberties’ and whose ambition, it would seem, was the establishment of a Habsburg ‘universal monarchy’.100 Rudolf II did not summon his first Reichstag until the summer of 1582. When the Diet convened at Augsburg that June, the tension between Catholic estates—who had the majority in the Fürstenrat and among the electors—and their Protestant counterparts was palpable. The weakness and division of the Protestant princes was painfully evident at the Augsburg diet, and here too the Protestants missed their last chance to unite and to wring concessions from the emperor. For Rudolf II, the main purpose of this Diet was to seek larger military and financial contributions from the princes for the defense of the Empire against the Turk. This could, as always, have been a boon to the Protestant princes, for it gave them considerable political leverage; the Protestants, however, found it impossible to agree on anything. The secular administrator of Magdeburg, Joachim Friedrich of Brandenburg, came to the meeting demanding the chairmanship of the Fürstenrat, an honour traditionally accorded to the bishops of Magdeburg. But Joachim Friedrich, an outspoken Lutheran, had never been officially recognised in his position by either Maximilian II or Rudolf II; the Protestant electors—at least Brandenburg and Saxony—were lukewarm in their support for Joachim Friedrich, and the Catholic majority in the Fürstenrat were easily able to block the administrator from his seat. The gulf between Lutheran and Calvinist opened further still when neither Saxony nor Brandenburg would 100

Moritz, Die Wahl Rudolfs II.

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back Palatine efforts to seek confirmation of the declaratio Ferdinandea by the emperor. As if to reinforce his refusal to confirm the declaratio, Rudolf II also confirmed the ban on Protestant worship in the city of Aachen. Rudolf managed to get his Türkenhilfe, or at least a portion thereof, while conceding nothing in return to the Protestant estates at the Diet. The electors of Brandenburg and Saxony raised not a finger to hinder the emperor; most of the lesser Protestant princes, accustomed to following their electors’ lead, timidly conceded. Only a few radicals openly resisted the emperor, and they were too small in number to accomplish anything.101 The 1582 Diet had barely concluded its business when a fresh controversy arose, further polarising the already-divided princes. In 1582, the archbishop-elector of Cologne—one of the three ecclesiastical electors in the Empire—decided to take a course of action that would ultimately end his career and bring the Empire to the brink of war: a personal conversion to Lutheranism. The elector, Archbishop Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, had been elected to his post and confirmed in 1577. Truchsess was licentious and dissipated, but was widely considered to be a reliable Catholic. His religious credentials, however, were not impeccable. His election as archbishop-elector owed much to the political wrangling of Johann VI, count of NassauDillenburg, Calvinist brother of William of Orange. To Johann, Truchsess was far more palatable than his greatest rival for the position: the son of Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria, Ernst. Ernst of Bavaria was known as something of a libertine, but his family ties to the most militant of all German Catholic princes posed a threat to Protestantism in western Germany.102 Truchsess’ love affair with a local noblewoman, Agnes von Mansfeld, presented few problems in itself, but mere concubinage was not enough for the elector. Instead, he was determined to marry the lady. In order to make the union possible, and with the encouragement of radicals like Johann of Nassau, he secretly converted to the Lutheran faith in late 1582. Truchsess consulted with several Protestant princes before making his decision, and most—including August of Saxony— 101 Schnell, Mecklenburg, p. 248; Ritter, Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 1, pp. 573–7; Lanzinner, ‘Konfessionelles Zeitalter’, pp. 66–7; Max Lossen, Der Kölnische Krieg, vol. 2: Geschichte des Kölnischen Kriegs 1582–1586 (Munich, 1897), pp. 3–29; G. Wolf, ‘Die Anfänge des Magdeburger Sessionsstreits im 16. Jahrhundert’, Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte 5 (1892), 353–401. 102 Glawischnig, Niederlande, Kalvinismus und Reichsgrafenstand, pp. 130–1, 138–9, 142–62.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 199 advised Truchsess against both the conversion and the marriage. August knew full well the explosive political potential of Truchsess’ defection. In the short term, it would mean a political victory for the Protestant princes, who would now have a majority among the electors. But any advantage accruing to German Protestantism would only be temporary. Neither the emperor, the papacy, nor the Catholic princes would allow Truchsess to keep his lands and titles while withdrawing his allegiance from Rome. Besides, if Truchsess refused to step down, it would constitute a direct violation of the Peace of Augsburg, something that August strove to avoid at all costs. Even those Protestant leaders who apparently stood to gain from Truchsess’ hasty conversion, like William of Orange, urged caution on the archbishop. Some princes, like Johann Casimir and Johann of Nassau, encouraged Truchsess and pledged their support. In February 1583, Truchsess went through with his planned apostasy and married Agnes von Mansfeld. The result was an immediate constitutional and confessional uproar. Rudolf II deposed the elector; Gregory XIII divested Truchsess of his clerical offices and excommunicated him as well. Even Truchsess’ own cathedral chapter and estates turned against him, electing Ernst of Bavaria in his stead. Ernst had powerful friends, and his father, Wilhelm of Bavaria, raised an army to defend his claim, strengthened by Spanish reinforcements and papal subsidies. The Protestant reaction, though, was the most surprising and the most disruptive. Johann Casimir had been looking for a fight, and now he had one, pledging his services to Truchsess as his military champion. To men of Johann Casimir’s ilk, the Cologne dispute was more opportunity than crisis. Of the electors, only Ludwig VI of the Palatinate manifested any inclination to defend the apostate archbishop, attempting to mobilise local support among the Protestant estates of the Rhine valley. The Catholic archbishop-electors of Mainz and Trier, however, frustrated Ludwig’s endeavors to intervene. A broader Protestant front was plainly needed, and Truchsess’ defenders turned to the acknowledged leader of the Protestant princes in the Empire: August of Saxony. Given August’s stance at the Augsburg diet the previous year, Saxon reticence to participate in a political dispute that simultaneously constituted disobedience of Imperial authority, a disregard for the terms of the 1555 settlement, and likely the origins of an armed conflict should hardly have come as much of a surprise. August was indeed shocked by the Cologne affair, but more because it threatened

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the precarious balance created by the 1555 peace than because of any perceived threat to Protestant and princely liberties. Both August and Elector Johann Georg of Brandenburg agreed to meet with a Palatine delegation at Erfurt in late March 1583. August urged caution and patience, and characteristically the Brandenburg elector followed August’s lead. They cast aside the aggressive Palatine proposals: to seek the assistance of England and Denmark, to make common cause with the Huguenots and the Dutch rebels, and to raise a defensive military force to fend off the Bavarian-Spanish army. Johann Casimir raised an army anyway in defense of Truchsess. This wellintentioned but pitiful effort at defending Protestant liberties could not help but fail when confronted with Parma’s veteran tercios. Moreover, the financial support necessary for maintaining a Protestant army in the field was lacking. Rudolf II commanded Johann Casimir to disband his army or else suffer the ban of the Empire. Ludwig VI, Johann Casimir’s brother, died in October 1583, leaving behind a minor son as successor, thereby compelling Johann Casimir to return home to Heidelberg as regent. Bereft of funds, Johann Casimir’s army disintegrated, and there was no time to muster foreign aid. Truchsess fled into exile in the Netherlands, and the Bavarian-Spanish army marched unopposed into the erstwhile bishop’s last stronghold, Bonn, in January 1584.103 It would be some time before the Protestant princes, even the conservative and cautious August, would acquiesce to Cologne’s fate, but for all intents and purposes the affair had been settled before the year 1583 had ended. The acrimony within the Protestant community spurred by the so-called ‘Cologne War’, however, had just begun. Deserted by August of Saxony, Johann Casimir broke off all ties with his father-in-law, barring his wife from any further contact with her parents in Dresden. The Cologne War made final the split between Calvinist and Lutheran that had begun with the Dresden purge a decade before. The split was bound to happen sooner or later. The real tragedy of the Cologne affair from the Protestant point-of-view, however, was the subtle but momentous realignment it triggered among the more moderate Protestant princes. Wilhelm IV of Hessen, already inclined to favour the Palatine Wittelsbachs over the Saxon Wettins, now went over entirely into the camp of 103 Kuhn, Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir, pp. 146–61; Lossen, Geschichte des Kölnischen Kriegs, 30–475.

protestant solidarity and the imperial crisis, 1577‒1583 201 radicals like Johann Casimir. Even Ulrich of Mecklenburg, perhaps the outstanding example of a moderate Lutheran prince, a man who had subscribed to the Concord and who had almost unfailingly followed Saxony’s lead, broke with August over the Cologne dispute. Duke Ulrich still believed that Calvinism was a problem; it was just that Catholicism, backed by papal gold, Spanish troops, and the emperor’s mandate, was a much greater problem.104 The implications of the Cologne War for Danish foreign policy were, as a consequence of this realignment, also grave. Regardless of Frederik II’s now frayed friendship with August, the Danish king had—since 1576—begun to move away from Saxony and into the orbit of those who demanded immediate action to defend European Protestantism. Mecklenburg had had a moderating influence on Frederik, spinning a thread—albeit it a thin and fragile one—between Denmark and Saxony. That thread was now severed. As Frederik’s affinity for Calvinist crusaders like Navarre and Johann Casimir grew, and as Danish commercial frictions with England and the rebellious Dutch provinces abated, the Danish king was drawn nearer to active participation in a Protestant alliance. Only Frederik’s inherent caution, and that of his aristocracy, stood in the way.

104 Schnell, Mecklenburg, pp. 249–52; Gräf, Konfession und internationales System, pp. 131–5.

CHAPTER SIX

THE COMMON CAUSE, 1583–1585

I think that the devil means to make his last attempt, for everywhere there are happening strange things. Jacques de Ségur-Pardaillan, 1584 1

The Cologne War, though all but forgotten in standard histories of the ‘age of religious wars’, was a turning-point of sorts in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. The Catholic princes were now conscious of their own strength and secure in their trust in the emperor. The Protestant princes had confirmation of what they had feared since the days of Charles V: a Catholic universal monarchy that robbed them of the liberties they believed they had gained since the promulgation of the Golden Bull two centuries before; unfortunately, by 1583 they were too divided to do anything about it. It also changed the nature of the relationship between the German princes and the Protestant communities of western Europe. Heretofore, Elizabeth I, William of Orange, and Henry of Navarre had tried, with few noticeable results, to ask the Protestant Reichsfürsten for assistance. Now it was the German princes, or at least a significant portion of them, who needed the help of the non-German Protestant states.

Their ambitions have become as one The years 1583 and 1584 formed a critical juncture in the wars outside the Empire as well. In the Netherlands, the military situation had turned against the rebels since the appointment of Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma, as Philip II’s governor-general in October 1578. The southern provinces defected piecemeal to Spain and Parma’s troops advanced towards the core of the rebellion in the northeast. The war effort against Parma’s legions appeared to be in serious danger of falling apart by the beginning of the 1580s. By the middle 1

Cal. SP For., vol. 18, p. 441, Ségur to Walsingham, 39 March 1584.

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of 1584, with the desertion of François de Valois, duke of Anjou, nominal leader of the rebellious provinces ( June 1583), and the assassination of William of Orange ( July 1584), the Dutch rebels were bereft of both leadership and external funding. These setbacks in the Low Countries had a direct impact on England as well. Elizabeth I had counted on her ‘dear frog’ Anjou and Johann Casimir at least to hold back the Spanish, at no inconsiderable cost to herself; both men had failed her. England and Spain were not yet at war, but Elizabeth did not shy away from provoking Philip II. Through her financial support for Anjou after 1581, her official sanction and open celebration of Sir Francis Drake’s ravaging of Spanish shipping, and not least the honours she gladly heaped upon Dom Antonio, pretender to the throne of Portugal, she seemed determined to bring on a war with Spain. There was good reason to believe that if Parma succeeded in subjugating the Netherlands—a distinct possibility in 1584—then Philip II might well set his sights on troublesome England. Henry III of France had shown himself to be amenable to English diplomatic advances, but after Anjou’s death in June 1584 he was of little use to England or the Netherlands. With the passing of Anjou, the last of the Valois line, Navarre was heir presumptive to the childless Henry III. This very idea, anathema to militant French Catholics, spurred the reemergence of the League and ultimately the outbreak of the worst of the civil wars in France. The League was dedicated to promoting Catholic and Guise interests at the expense of Protestants and the crown; the groundswell of popular support for the League effectively tied Henry’s hands, and the king barely commanded the allegiance of his subjects. The Treaty of Joinville (December 1584), in which Philip II pledged to help the League root out Protestantism in France, was the most compelling evidence to date that all of Europe’s confessional wars were merging into a single Catholic crusade.2 All of these developments put Denmark in an interesting position. Denmark’s wealth and military strength, its dynastic and personal ties with the major princely houses of Protestant Germany, and Frederik’s image as a Protestant irenicist meant that, more than ever before, Denmark would be called upon to serve as a bridge between 2 Simon Adams, ‘The decision to intervene: England and the United Provinces 1584–1585’, in José Martínez Millán (ed.), Felipe II (1527–1598). Europa y la Monarquía Católica, (5 vols, Madrid, 1998), vol. 1 part 1, pp. 21–2.

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the Protestant German princes and their counterparts in western Europe. The nature of Frederik II’s contacts with both groups—the Protestant Reichsfürsten on the one hand, the English, the Dutch, and the Huguenots on the other—changed accordingly. Prior to 1583, Frederik had been called upon primarily to act as a mediator between Calvinists and Lutherans, between Gnesiolutherans and Philippists. Although it was still hoped that Frederik II might provide this service, after the outbreak of the Cologne War something more was expected of Denmark: direct financial or military support. Frederik II was well aware of the state of affairs in the Empire, the Netherlands, and France, thanks to the intelligence liberally provided by Heinrich Rantzau and Johann Casimir. As Frederik’s friendship with August of Saxony diminished into an awkward silence, the king’s reliance upon Ulrich of Mecklenburg grew in proportion. Ulrich was intimately involved in the Cologne dispute; his frequent letters to Frederik on the subject, accompanied by long extracts from foreign newsletters, could hardly be said to have been impartial.3 And if the fragmentary remains of Danish ministerial correspondence constitute a valid barometer, the confessional troubles on the Continent were a common—if not the predominant—topic of conversation at court as well.4 The worsening situation for Protestants in France, the Netherlands, and the Empire did not change Frederik II’s perception of the role of religion in international politics. The news from the Netherlands and from Cologne did, however, amplify the fears which the king had already harboured, and brought an immediacy and urgency to these fears that had been lacking since the Lansac incident a decade before. Frederik first expressed these concerns in a letter to his father-in-law written in early February 1583. The king had first learned of Truchsess’ apostasy from Heinrich Rantzau, but it was Ulrich who filled in the details of the archbishop’s public conversion and subsequent ostracism. The duke also informed Frederik of the unexpected and farcical ‘treason’ of Anjou in the Netherlands; tiring of shabby treatment at the hands of the States-General, the young Valois prince had attempted— 3 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.8, Ulrich to Frederik, 20 February, 14 March, 4 April, 21 May, 28 August, 28 September, 14 October, 23 October, 14 December, 23 December 1584. 4 RAK PA 6487 (Valkendorf ), pk. 2: Absalon Juul to Christoffer Valkendorf, 5 August and 23 November 1583; Niels Kaas to Valkendorf, 19 August 1578 and 27 February 1584; Arild Huitfeldt to Valkendorf, 3 February and 12 December 1579.

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unsuccessfully—to seize Antwerp by force in the notorious ‘French Fury’ of January 1583.5 Frederik reacted to both developments with alarm. It was tragic, the king replied to Ulrich, that ‘from the beginning Alençon has had a secret understanding with the Dutch ‘malcontents’, and therefore with the king of Spain as well, and their ambitions have certainly become as one’. The hostilities in the Rhineland elicited the greatest worry from Frederik. The king expressed some skepticism over the sincerity of Truchsess’ conversion. That Truchsess—‘educated from youth in the papist religion and the harsh discipline of the Jesuits, and who until this time has been a passionate and zealous papist’—would become a Lutheran so quickly seemed too good to be true, and Frederik suspected that the archbishopelector might have might have a hidden political agenda. Genuine or not, Truchsess’ defection threatened to undermine the tenuous peace in the Empire; even worse, it presented Rome with an opportunity that could be easily exploited.6 . . . so both [parties], the old archbishop and the new, have an excuse to muster armies within the Empire of the German Nation [to fight] against one another; so now the pope and other Catholics also have an unperceived excuse to send Italian and other troops as aid to one side, and therefore to worm their way into the Holy Roman Empire. . . . Rather it is advisable (as the world is full of such cunning tricks and plots, which are revealed more and more each day, and in particular since the papists neither rest nor sleep), in our opinion, that the Protestant estates in the Holy Roman Empire should not become so confident that they do not protect themselves against domestic or foreign affairs as important . . . and as dangerous as this.

For a while, it seemed as if Frederik II and Duke Ulrich had switched positions. Ulrich was now the firebrand, Frederik the fatalistic voice of caution, who depended on the Peace of Augsburg and a kind Providence to stave off confessional war in the Empire. Superficially, Frederik II’s attitude towards the Cologne crisis resembled that of August of Saxony. Neither man wanted to see the war expand as a result of military preparations or warlike posturing; both men remanded the fate of Cologne and Truchsess to the care of a just God. But the similarities between their positions on Cologne ended there. To 5 Mack Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 177–86. 6 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 197v–200v, Frederik to Ulrich, 8 February 1583.

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August, union of any kind between Lutherans and Calvinists was as distasteful as ever. To Frederik, the Cologne crisis demonstrated the pressing need for such a union, if only to dissuade further Catholic incursions within the Empire. In fact, the wars in the Rhine valley, the Low Countries, and France were to Frederik a manifestation of divine wrath. The endless arguments of self-seeking theologians over doctrinal trivialities had divided Christ’s one true religion, and now the Protestant world was reaping its dubious rewards through a welldeserved punishment from God. Even the instructions for preaching which accompanied the decrees for official prayer-days in 1581 and 1583, penned by Bishop Poul Madsen, emphasised this theme.7 Until Danish foreign policy took an aggressive turn in mid-1585, Frederik did not waver in his refusal to support Truchsess. There were very good reasons not to become involved. The Cologne War, in and of itself, did not pose a threat to Danish interests. The war did occasion considerable unease in northern Germany. Parma’s preparations for the 1583 campaign in Flanders, including intensive recruitment in the Empire, quickly gave rise to speculation that Parma intended a full-scale assault on Truchsess and his supporters in Germany.8 Frederik II, however, had more immediate concerns. Relations with Poland had taken a turn for the worse after 1583. It was Spain that caused Frederik the greatest worry, and not because of Parma’s involvement in the Cologne War. Despite Denmark’s recent rapprochement with England, it was widely believed—even by Dançay—that Frederik II and Philip II were on the friendliest of terms.9 But it had only been a year since Parma had asked Frederik to close the Sound to Dutch shipping, a request that Frederik had denied. Thanks to Parma’s string of victories, the Army of Flanders was within striking distance of Danish territory, and the escalation of the Spanish war effort in the Netherlands made Frederik visibly nervous. The king had heard that Philip II and Parma were assembling a great armada; it did not take a great stretch of the imagination for the Danish king to believe that a Spanish assault on the Sound was 7 Poul Madsen, Brevis dispositio concionum, quæ in tribus diebus, publicarum precationum 27, 28, Februarij, & 1, Martij, Ecclesiæ proponentur (Copenhagen, 1581); Poul Madsen, Concionum, quæ in tribus diebus publicarum precationum, 28. 29. 30. Ianuarij, Ecclesiæ proponentur (Copenhagen, 1583). 8 Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 269–72. 9 Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, 148–51, Dançay to Mornay, 18 May 1582.

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possibly imminent.10 Fear of Spanish retribution prevented Frederik II from showing support for Spain’s enemies, even in small ways. In 1582, for example, Dançay asked the king not to turn his back on Anjou, who was then nominal leader of the Dutch rebels. This, Frederik replied, he would be happy to do, but he would make ‘neither league nor confederation’ with Anjou in the latter’s capacity of Duke of Brabant or Seigneur des Pays, only as ‘brother of Henry III and prince of France’. To do otherwise might arouse the anger of Philip II.11 Just as in 1573–74, when a Franco-Polish attack appeared likely, Frederik mobilised the fleet. During much of 1583 and 1584, the fleet remained on a war-footing and constantly vigilant. Danish warships patrolled the Sound and the Belts, while other ships kept watch over Copenhagen and Dragør, in reserve but fully manned and provisioned. As an extra precaution, Frederik ordered Valkendorf to muster the town militias at Copenhagen, Roskilde, and Køge.12 This was no easy task for the king, or rather for his treasury. The war with Sweden might have been over long ago, but the costs of patrolling the Baltic for pirates and defending the Sound over the intervening thirteen years had gradually drained the royal coffers. Naval expenditures had not decreased appreciably since 1567, and had actually risen during the mid-1570s. Denmark had not had adequate time to recover from the devastation wrought by the Seven Years’ War, and natural disasters—a string of bad harvests and a particularly virulent outbreak of plague between 1581 and 1583—compounded the difficulties of maintaining a strong peacetime fleet. Intervention in the Cologne War, even on a limited scale, would have been well nigh impossible; provoking a war with Spain over Cologne would have been calamitous.13 Denmark was in no condition to go to war in 1583, so involvement in the Cologne dispute was out of the question. Frederik’s interest in the war deepened over the course of the year, no doubt urged on by Ulrich, but his interpretation of the conflict and his policies 10 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 342v–6, Frederik to Ulrich, 6 September 1583. 11 ‘Correspondance’, pp. 180–1, Dançay to Henry III, 18 May 1582. 12 Lind, Fra Frederik den Andens Tid, pp. 220–5; Hassø, Valkendorf, pp. 134–5; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 218–8v, Frederik to Friedrich of Liegnitz, 13 March 1583; ‘Correspondance’, pp. 200–1, 203–7, 244–5, Dançay to Henry III, 22 October and 16 December 1582, 1 February 1584. 13 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 342v–6, Frederik to Ulrich, 6 September 1583.

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towards the belligerent powers did not change fundamentally in 1583 or 1584. In the king’s view, Truchsess’ cause in itself was not a worthwhile one. The archbishop’s conversion was suspicious and ill-timed, and hence the man was not worthy of much sympathy. Nor did Frederik II interpret the clash in apocalyptic terms; unlike Truchsess’ allies, the king doubted that the Catholic princes were eager to risk widespread confessional war within the Empire over the Cologne electorate. Instead, the Cologne War was a symptom rather than a cause, a tragedy that graphically revealed the harmful divisions within Protestantism, a portent of much worse things to come.14 We do not doubt that neither the cause of this disreputable duke [i.e., Wilhelm V of Bavaria], nor that of the deposed bishop himself, is the same as the cause of the almighty God . . . rather, they seek and are bent on something else entirely. . . . The papists, however, are not so eager for war as Your Highness thinks they are, but rather would have peace; they could, if it suited them, abandon this matter altogether, and make themselves appear not so outwardly pious and friendly as they truly are in their hearts, and would probably find some other opportunity to attempt something hostile against us.

If the Protestant states could present a united front to the ‘pope and his minions’, then peace would prevail; there would be no need for confrontations such as that over Cologne. The Cologne War, in short, transformed Frederik II from a passive advocate of Protestant unity— as he had been during the Concord controversy—into an active and passionate one. This was a fine distinction. Frederik’s reasoning was as convoluted and specious as that of the activist princes was alarmist. It resulted in a confessional foreign policy that Denmark’s would-be allies found understandably confusing. The activist princes who defended Truchsess, men like Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV of Hessen, tended to view the situation in black and white; either one supported Truchsess, or one was party to Protestantism’s downfall. To them, there was no distinction between the political survival of Truchsess and that of Protestantism. Frederik II’s stance sent mixed messages to the activists. Like August of Saxony, Frederik flatly refused to get involved in the

14 RAK/TKUA/AD/AusReg 1584–85, fol. 5–9, Frederik to Ulrich, 13 January 1584. See also: RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 206v–7v, 225v–8v, 244v–7v, 383v–3v, 387–90, Frederik to Ulrich, 14 February, 27 March, 14 April, 27 October, 18 November 1583.

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Cologne War, and was willing to sacrifice Truchsess if that prevented escalation of the conflict. The danger of war with the Habsburg monarchies, especially Spain, was simply too great a threat to Frederik II’s legitimacy and to Denmark’s territorial integrity. At the same time, however, Frederik expressed undisguised sympathy and even admiration for those who defended the erstwhile archbishop. Their efforts to promote Protestant solidarity echoed his own. It was difficult for any outsider to understand Frederik’s position, but the Dane’s open sympathy for the enemies of Spain and Catholicism inclined the activist princes to believe that Frederik II was their reluctant ally. All it would take to win Danish support, therefore, would be a little more encouragement. Encouragement was something that Protestant militants were willing to supply. They continued to view Frederik II as the only sovereign, apart from Elizabeth I, who was powerful enough to counter Spanish and papal designs, and willing to work with the Calvinists in order to achieve this. Frederik was the only prince with sufficient clout within the Empire, exercising—so the activists believed—a weighty influence on Saxony and Brandenburg, to bring the German Protestants together and possibly align them with the Huguenots and the Dutch rebels. In this capacity, even Elizabeth I was helpless. Truchsess himself appealed directly to Denmark for aid in September 1583, receiving a polite and unembellished rejection.15 The most urgent pleas for Danish support came, however, from Truchsess’ staunchest ally, Johann Casimir. Johann Casimir has probably inspired more vitriol and negative criticism than any other leading figure in the ‘religious wars’ of the 1570s and 1580s. Much of this criticism is well deserved; his campaign in Brabant in the summer and autumn of 1578 did more harm than good to the anti-Spanish cause in the Netherlands, and his disastrous foray into Alsace and Lorraine in 1587 triggered a pointless and internecine battle of letters among Navarre’s supporters. The Count Palatine, however, was no unprincipled soldier of fortune as English and French historians have often alleged. He worked tirelessly to assemble a Protestant coalition both within the Empire and without, at considerable expense and risk to himself, and drew no distinctions between the Protestant struggles in France, the Netherlands, and the Germanies. He recognised the importance of 15 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83: fol. 335, Frederik to Truchsess, 3 September 1583; fol. 342v–6, Frederik to Ulrich, 6 September 1583.

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his father-in-law, August of Saxony, and did not cease in his attempts to enlist Saxon support until after the Cologne War, when it was obvious that August could not be moved. At the very worst, Johann Casimir was a Calvinist zealot; despite his zeal, he never managed to transcend mediocrity in field command. Moreover, those who supported him—first and foremost Elizabeth I of England—should not be excorciated for their support, for they did not have many other options. In the late 1570s and 1580s, Johann Casimir did not have any competition for the role of Protestant champion. There were no other soldiers of his stature willing to fight for a united Protestantism. As a soldier, he cannot be said to have been any worse than Leicester would prove to be; as a diplomat and spokesman for international Protestantism, he surpassed men of Leicester’s or Anjou’s caliber.16 Johann Casimir made his first attempts at crafting a Protestant alliance in December 1582, in anticipation of Truchsess’ conversion to Lutheranism. He knew that if Truchsess converted, married, and yet refused to abdicate, a hard battle would ensue. These were not the fervid imaginings of a conspiracy theorist, but rather reflected hard political reality: the loss of another elector to the Protestant faith, especially one whose lands—Catholic lands—bordered so closely on Spanish interests, would not be timidly accepted by either Habsburg house. Like his brother, Elector Palatine Ludwig VI, Johann Casimir saw an international Protestant front as the only means by which a war over the Cologne electorate would be either averted or won. There were other possible allies, but England and Denmark were the obvious first choices. The rulers of both states had given him encouragement: Elizabeth I through subsidies and the award of the Garter, Frederik II through moral support embodied in their mutual correspondence after 1577. In June 1578, immediately prior to his direct intervention in the Dutch war, the brazen Pfalzgraf had composed an apologia for his defiance of both his emperor and Spain, proclaiming his mission to free the Dutch of Spain’s religious oppression and the Protestants of the Rhine from the threat of the same. He sent copies of this document to his enemies and to his well-wishers, including Frederik II; the Danish king was so impressed with it that he ordered Niels 16 Johann Casimir still lacks a comprehensive modern biography. The best are still Kuhn, Pfalgraf Johann Casimir, and Krüger, ‘Die Beziehungen der rheinischen Pfalz’. Neither of these biographies, unfortunately, covers the years after the outset of the Köln War.

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Kaas to have the statement printed, in German, by the court printer.17 That Johann Casimir pinned his hopes for a successful military defense of Truchsess on Danish support was clear from the beginning of the crisis, but it was not until late April 1583 that the Palatine asked Frederik II for financial assistance.18 Frederik politely declined the request, citing shortage of funds as his primary reason for doing so, but the king sounded a note of caution as well. Noting, correctly, that the German princes were more interested in preserving their own individual interests than they were in making a concerted effort to protect all Protestants, Frederik counseled Johann Casimir to tread carefully. Breaking the long-standing peace enacted in 1555 could have dire consequences for the harmony of the Empire. Altogether, though, Frederik’s letters to Johann Casimir fairly glowed with praise for his efforts. The king expounded upon Johann Casimir’s virtues at great length: for selflessly offering ‘the helping hand’ in defense of the German liberties and oppressed Protestants, for recognising that war might be necessary in order to achieve these ends. Protesting that fear of a Spanish naval assault and worsening relations with Poland tied his hands—whatever military and naval forces he had on hand must be kept close to home—Frederik wished Johann Casimir good luck, but offered nothing more than moral support.19 Moral support may have been better than no support at all, but in this case the tone of the Danish response may have done Johann Casimir more harm than good, for it bred no small amount of false hope. Elizabeth I, to whom the Count Palatine had also appealed for help, had also turned down the opportunity to back Truchsess; her rejection, however, was gentle, firm, and final. Frederik II, on the other hand, gave Johann Casimir cause for hope when there really was none. And he continued to do so: Frederik sent his initial written response 17

RAK PA.6487 (Valkendorf ), pk. 2: Kaas to Valkendorf, 19 August 1578; Huitfeldt to Valkendorf, 3 February 1579; Krüger, ‘Die Beziehungen der rheinischen Pfalz’, pp. 77–8; Lossen, Geschichte des kölnischen Kriegs, pp. 240–3. 18 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 69–70, Johann Casimir to Ludwig VI of the Palatinate, 11 February 1583; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 98–9, Johann Casimir to August, 22 April 1583; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 674 and vol 2, p. 108, Johann Casimir to Frederik, 22 April and 14 May 1583. 19 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 284v–6v, 299–300v, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 28 June and 27 July 1583. In his letter of 28 June 1583, Frederik noted ‘dass e.L. nicht ungeneigtt dess Babstes und seiner anhengigen durstigkeit sich zuwidersetzen, damit denselbigen ihres gefallens mit so furnhemen Stenden dess Römischen Reichs zugeleben dieselbiges so oftt, und wan es ihme geliebtte auf und abzusetzen, nicht verstattet . . . werden möchte . . .’

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to Johann Casimir’s camp at Homburg via a member of the Rantzau clan, accompanied by a gift of two fine stallions; he gave a warm reception to Johann Casimir’s ambassador, Adam Gans, Herr zu Putlitz, who visited the king at Skanderborg in late September 1583. Frederik’s answer to his appeals for assistance did not change, but the king’s profuse apologies to the Pfalzgraf were almost unstatesmanlike, and his praise of the Palatine war effort so effusive, that it is easy to see why Johann Casimir did not give up on the possibility of a Danish alliance. Frederik’s correspondence with Johann Casimir in 1583 and 1584 seems to portray the king as a well-intentioned but vacillating ruler, who could not quite bring himself to reject the Palatine proposals with any degree of firmness.20 The Cologne crisis also inspired the Huguenots to undertake a diplomatic offensive of their own. Though not directly affected by the Cologne War, the Huguenots watched the drama there unfold with keen interest. Well before the conflict over Cologne erupted, Navarre and his ministers seriously considered their own attempt to create an international Protestant coalition. It seemed that a renewal of open hostilities in France was imminent: by the terms of the 1577 Peace of Bergerac, the Huguenots were due to surrender a number of cautionary towns, yet Navarre’s adviser Mornay thought this unwise even if it meant going to war. Mornay suggested direct diplomatic overtures to the leading Protestant princes of the Empire, urging them to heal their doctrinal schism and come to the aid of the Huguenots. The Cologne crisis, which was well underway when a synod of French Reformed communities met at Vitré, Brittany, to discuss a panProtestant alliance in May 1583, presented the Huguenots with a golden opportunity to present their case in the most favourable light. Perhaps the German Protestants could now appreciate the oppression that the Huguenots had endured for years, and would be willing to make common cause in defense of their mutual liberties. Though Mornay may have desired to lead the German embassy himself, Navarre assigned the task to a trusted member of his household, Jacques de Ségur-Pardaillan. Mornay drew up Ségur’s instructions in mid-July, and Ségur left France the following month. 20 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1581–83, fol. 299–300v, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 27 July 1583; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1584–85, fol. 20–2, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 3 February 1584; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Pfalz A.II.13, Johann Casimir to Frederik, 8 July 1583; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 678, 700–1, Johann Casimir to Frederik, 5 September 1583 and 28 February 1584; Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 552, entries for 26–28 September 1583.

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The Ségur embassy was a remarkable endeavor on several counts. It was by no means the first attempt to create an overarching Protestant alliance based on a broad international consensus. Elizabeth I had already tried her hand at this three times, but to no avail. It was, however, Navarre’s first attempt. Henry had hitherto sought foreign aid in piecemeal fashion, by approaching potential individual allies. Now he and his advisers hoped that they could succeed where Elizabeth had failed, and that the Cologne War—‘after so many other missed opportunities’—had given just enough incentive to the German princes so that they might join their cause to his.21 It was better conceived and planned than the English efforts had been. Its purpose was simple: to garner as much support as possible for a Protestant alliance, and to accept any contributions, no matter how small, that the potential allies were willing to make. Instead of employing a multitude of foreign agents scattered across the Continent and often working at cross-purposes—as had been the English practice— Navarre relied on a single agent and a small entourage. This would prove to be a herculean task for Ségur. He was instructed to obtain, in rapid succession, audiences with Elizabeth I, the States-General, Frederik II, and Johan III of Sweden; all three Protestant electors and a whole host of lesser princes, including Württemberg, Hessen, Mecklenburg, Magdeburg, Anhalt, Ansbach, Holstein, BraunschweigLüneburg and Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel; and the Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Lübeck, and Hamburg. Because of the vicissitudes of travel and communications in sixteenth-century Europe, not to mention the complexities of princely politics in the Empire, the pace of the diplomatic mission was painfully slow. Ségur would spend some twenty months on his first embassy before its disappointing conclusion in the spring of 1585. It is possible, however, that Ségur was not the man for the job, and this undoubtedly rendered his assignment all the more difficult. Ségur could neither speak nor write German, a distinct liability in his dealings with the princes. His correspondence reveals him to have been impatient and easily frustrated. Ségur was not on good personal terms with those Germans who so far had been most willing to help Navarre, including Johann Casimir and Fabian von Dohna. Moreover, Ségur’s embassy evoked an unfavourable reaction from Henry III: it was clearly in violation

21 Three Huguenot Gutachten regarding the Köln War for Elizabeth I of England, 1584, in Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 692.

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of the Bergerac treaty and the edict of Poitiers, which expressly forbade foreign alliances. Henry III, outraged at this breach, applied considerable diplomatic pressure to ensure that Ségur would not receive a warm welcome in England or Germany.22 According to his instructions, Ségur was to ask three things of each government he visited: first, participation in a general synod, to include Calvinist and Lutheran theologians; second, membership in a defensive alliance; and third, military or financial support for Gebhard Truchsess. He was to emphasise the papacy’s ambitions for world domination, and the determination of Spain, France, and the emperor to enforce the Tridentine decrees within their lands. Neither the message nor the proposed solution were new, and were no more compelling to their intended audiences than they had been in 1577. The results of the prolonged embassy were predictable, and only served to highlight the divisions that already plagued the Protestant states. The English response was positive but cautious. Elizabeth, Walsingham, and Burghley had heard all of this before; Ségur’s instructions did not differ significantly from those given to English agents on the Continent six years earlier. Elizabeth would gladly do what Navarre asked, but only if Ségur had better luck in obtaining the support of Denmark and the German princes. Johan III of Sweden had little or no interest in the fate of Navarre. The response of the German princes was mixed. The Cologne War was over by the time Ségur set foot in the Empire, and with it any sense of urgency the German princes might have felt about their confessional security. A very few, like Hessen, Anhalt, and Württemberg, needed no convincing. Others, like Mecklenburg, were slightly more cautious. Duke Ulrich, for example, agreed to participate in a general Protestant synod only if the Calvinists did not try to resolve theological differences by means of ‘nebulous statements of compromise’. As to membership in any kind of alliance or military assistance to Truchsess, Ulrich was more reticent, waiting for Saxony or Brandenburg to make the first move. That was the collective response of nearly all of the German princes, and therein lay the fatal flaw in

22

Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 272–94, instructions for Ségur, 15 July 1583; Buguenault et al. (eds), Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, vol. 8, pp. 158, 160–1, Catherine de’ Medici to de Mauvissière, 25 November and 17 December 1583. My thanks to Simon Adams for sharing his extensive knowledge of the Ségur embassy.

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any attempt to mobilise German Protestant support.23 The princes looked to Dresden and Berlin for leadership, Berlin looked to Dresden, and at Dresden no embassy could convince Elector August to prepare for war or to embrace Calvinists as erring brothers in the faith. August bluntly told Ségur that a Protestant synod would accomplish nothing, and that a defensive league as proposed by Navarre was out of the question. Regarding the third point, a call to arms on behalf of Gebhard Truchsess, August simply refused to give any answer at all. If that was not enough to discourage the moderate princes, then the anger of the emperor—Rudolf II had ordered Ségur’s arrest—definitely was.24 Ségur turned to Denmark only after he had worn out his welcome in Germany early in 1584. Frederik II did not greet the Navarrese embassy with open arms, but rather was far more cautious in granting the Frenchman an audience than he had been with Putlitz, and perhaps with any previous ambassador. Ségur’s arrival at the end of February was no surprise; Mornay had taken the precaution of alerting Dançay well in advance.25 The king proceeded with great care; altogether, Ségur waited at Flensburg for two weeks before Frederik summoned the ambassador. In the meantime, Frederik had Ségur examined thoroughly. Heinrich Rantzau met with Ségur several times, and he tried to assure his master of Ségur’s good character and of the importance of his mission. ‘The ambassador is an especially fine and clever person, who was in Paris at the time of the Massacre, when two of his brothers were stabbed to death in the king’s chambers’, Rantzau wrote the king. ‘He has come here with a specific errand, [and] has noted that [another] such massacre is at hand.’ The Statthalter summarised the contents of Ségur’s instructions for 23

Schnell, Mecklenburg, pp. 253–5. RAK TKIA/A.77/10, Rantzau to Frederik, 25 February and 1 March 1584; L. Anquez, Henri IV et l’Allemagne d’après les mémoires et la correspondance de Jacques Bongars (Paris, 1887), pp. 8–9; Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford, 1956), pp. 114–15; Raoul Patry, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. Un huguenot homme d’Etat (1549–1623) (Paris, 1933), p. 74; Cal. SP For., vol. 18, pp. 530–1, compilation of the German princes’ responses to Ségur, May 1584; Cal. SP For., vol. 18, p. 546, Ségur to Walsingham, 8 June 1584; Resen, Krønicke, pp. 458–9, Ségur to Frederik, 8 April 1584; GSPK I. HA Rep.11 Nr. 89 Fasz. 3: fol. 40–3v, Ségur to Johann Georg of Brandenburg, 22 May 1583; fol. 44–56v, ‘Formula Responsi, Quod Srno. Regi Nauarreno Illmor. Elector Saxonis & Brandenburgici . . . dandum existimarunt’, 1583. 25 Mornay, Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 306–7, Mornay to Dançay, July 1583. 24

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Frederik, informing him of the embassy’s poor luck with the German princes. Even then, Frederik was not convinced that receiving Ségur was a very good idea. He dispatched Niels Kaas to meet with Rantzau and Ségur, who was by now worried and angered by his treatment, to determine whether or not he should grant Ségur an audience. Kaas and Rantzau assured Frederik that he should: he sought nothing more than closer ties between Denmark and Navarre, and at any rate sending the ambassador away without an audience would offend Navarre and reflect badly upon Frederik himself.26 The king still waited another six days before issuing a formal invitation for Ségur to meet with him at Haderslev.27 Frederik II’s reluctance to admit Ségur to his presence, though frustrating to the ambassador, was not inexplicable. He was otherwise occupied; the annual Herredag and Retterting were in session, and the king was also hurriedly making the final arrangements for the ceremonial elevation of his eldest son, Duke Christian, to the title of Prince-Elect that spring. Most likely Frederik also thought that receiving a Navarrese ambassador might prove offensive to royal French sensibilities. Certainly Dançay took great pains to explain to Henry III that Frederik’s reception of Ségur was in no way meant to be a slight upon the Valois.28 Despite its inauspicious beginnings, however, the Ségur embassy met with its only real success at Haderslev. Ségur’s instructions and his written proposition to Frederik deemphasised the Cologne affair, referring to the sad fate of Gebhard Truchsess only as a recent example of Catholic aggression. Instead, Ségur asked the king to use his influence with the German princes to organise a theological conference, and to consider joining with England, Navarre, and the German Protestants in an alliance. The first proposal was nothing new; Frederik had by now established a reputation as a confessional mediator of sorts. Nor was the second proposal any more novel, but it was phrased in such a way as to correspond perfectly with the Dane’s sensibilities. Through Ségur, Navarre was proposing ‘a defensive alliance, not in order to wage war on the pope so much as to guard against his molestations through common counsel and 26 Resen, Krønicke, pp. 454–5, Ségur to Frederik, 28 February and 8 March 1584; RAK TKIA/A.77/10: Rantzau to Frederik, 25 February, 28 February, 1 March 1584; Kaas and Rantzau to Frederik, 3 March 1584. 27 Resen, Krønicke, pp. 455–6, Frederik to Ségur, 9 March 1584. 28 ‘Correspondance’, pp. 258–65, 273–8, Dançay to Henry III, 18 March and 28 September 1584.

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combined power, so that from now on we shall not be deprived of each other’s advice and support, set in disunity, opposed by as many enemies as the popes can array against us, so that we are conquered one by one; and in this [struggle] when we fight as individuals, we also lose as individuals’.29 This was precisely what Frederik wanted to hear. Indeed, it echoed almost word-for-word what the king had described to Ulrich of Mecklenburg and Johann Casimir: a passive defensive alliance, one that sought to intimidate the members of a papist conspiracy through its strength and solidarity, not one that looked eagerly to start a war over something so trivial as the deposal of Gebhard Truchsess. In Mornay’s instructions as well as in Ségur’s proposal to Frederik, the Cologne crisis is depicted as a symptom of Protestant disunity, an object-lesson in the costs of faction in the face of a well-directed and well-funded papist cabal. Ségur, unlike Johann Casimir, made no appeals for Danish support for Truchsess’ cause. In this respect, his overtures to Frederik II were presented in much different terms than his appeals to the German princes had been.30 It is impossible to determine whether the wording of Ségur’s proposals to Frederik II was a consciously-made strategem on the part of Mornay or simply the product of happy circumstance. Perhaps Dançay or Rantzau, as members of Frederik’s inner circle, informed Navarre or his ministers about the details of the king’s prejudices; unfortunately, this remains a matter of sheer speculation. Whatever the reasoning behind Ségur’s approach, it worked. Frederik treated the ambassador with more than customary hospitality. The king hosted banquets in Ségur’s honour at Haderslevhus, and the delighted Huguenot remained with the king for a full week before departing for Bremen. When Ségur wrote to the king, two months later, about Rudolf II’s warrant for his arrest, Frederik immediately offered the ambassador sanctuary within his realms.31 It was Frederik’s response to the content of Ségur’s mission, however, that was most surprising,

29

Resen, Krønicke, pp. 446, 456–8, instructions for Ségur, 15 July 1583, and Ségur’s proposal to Frederik, July 1584. 30 GSPK I. HA Rep. 11 Nr. 89 Fasz. 3, fol. 21–31, instructions for Ségur for his embassy to Saxony and Brandenburg, 25 July 1583. 31 RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85: pp. 599–608, Frederik to Ségur, 15 March 1584; pp. 613–15, Frederik to Navarre, 15 March 1584; Resen, Krønicke, pp. 458–60, Ségur to Frederik, 8 April 1584, and Frederik to Ségur, 11 May 1584; Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, pp. 558–9, entries for 11–17 March 1584.

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for it showed the king willing to undertake a much more assertive role in European affairs outside of Germany and the Baltic. Immediately after his audience with Ségur, Frederik penned a terse warning to Henry III, cautioning the French king against further persecution of his ‘true subjects, who have let go of the idolatrous papacy and have accepted the pure and right religion’—strong words to use in addressing a Catholic monarch.32 While his formal written reply to Ségur was bland, even vague, Frederik must have intimated more to the ambassador in private, for Ségur came away from Haderslev convinced that his mission there had been an unqualified success. In May 1584, he reported to the Tudor court that, of all the responses he had received, Frederik’s was the only unconditional ‘yes’—the king would ‘employ himself to the uttermost of his power for the furtherance of these causes’.33 Frederik II had found a confessional agenda that matched his own. It addressed the larger issue of international confessional conflict, rather than dwelling on the troubles of individual Protestant Reichsfürsten—like Gebhard Truchsess—who deserved punishment by violating Imperial law. Frederik evinced little interest in such causes. In late 1584, for example, both Wilhelm IV of Hessen and Johann Casimir asked the king to intervene with the emperor on behalf of Duke Johann Friedrich II of Saxony, whose involvement in the Grumbach affair in the 1560s (see Chapter 3) had led to his imprisonment in Steiermark. The Ernestine Wettin duke, a frail old man by 1584, was still languishing in prison; Wilhelm IV and Johann Casimir seemed determined to transform the captive duke into a Protestant martyr. Frederik II was unmoved. Even a personal visit from Fabian von Dohna, brother of the recently-deceased councillor Christoph von Dohna, could not sway the king. The Ernestine duke had made many enemies before his capture in 1567, and to make an issue of his treatment might raise a few hackles and breed greater disunity among the Protestant princes, especially August of Saxony. But at the same time, as Dohna observed from the court in Copenhagen, ‘they are well-disposed here towards the cause of the king of Navarre and that of the Netherlands’.34 32 RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 608–13, Frederik to Henry III, 15 March 1584. 33 Cal. SP For., vol. 18, pp. 530–1, German princes’ responses to Ségur, May 1584; BL Cotton Mss Galba D.xiii, fol. 107–7b, ‘Answeares to this legation’, 1584. 34 GSPK VI. HA Fürstliches Hausarchiv Dohna-Schlobitten, Karton 3a Nr. 8,

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The Navarre alliance proposal did not hint at any attempt to win back, by force, that which had already been lost to Catholic interests. Instead, it mirrored Frederik’s view of a defensive Protestant alliance: it would prevent future Catholic victories purely through intimidation and a show of strength, without provoking war. It was, to say the least, a naïve plan, for it did not address the obvious question: what would the Protestant states do if Spain, the emperor, and the pope were not intimidated? Without provisions to use force, even as a last resort, such an alliance would ultimately be worthless. But in 1584, Frederik II saw no alternative. He was busy elsewhere, and his military and naval forces were needed to guard the Sound. Moreover, as he revealed to Ségur, he could not risk any action that might provoke Spanish enmity; Frederik still had reason to believe that Philip II would not hesitate to ally himself with Sweden and seize the Sound if Denmark gave him the least excuse to do so.35 It would require a far more tangible and immediate threat to Denmark—or to Frederik II himself—to move the king towards a more belligerent stance.

This manifestly wanton and devilish act . . . On 7 February 1585, a bedraggled and exhausted Prussian nobleman hobbled into the court of Ulrich of Mecklenburg at Güstrow Castle. He demanded an audience with the duke, and after a short explanation this was granted; Güstrow was a beautiful but unpretentious castle, and Ulrich’s court an informal one. Quickly ushered into the duke’s presence, the man breathlessly apologised for his appearance. He had come a long way, through almost unbelievable difficulties, to see the duke. He had been pursued by his enemies, who sought to silence him; on the way to Güstrow he had been forced to sell most of his belongings, and the rest he had lost to robbers and pickpockets. But he had a story to tell, one which only the duke could hear, and only the duke could protect him from its consequences.

Dohna to Johann Casimir, September 1584; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Hessen A.I.4, Wilhelm IV to Frederik II, 29 August 1584, 10 January and 27 January 1585; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1584–85, fol. 173–7, 277–9, Frederik to Wilhelm IV, 22 September 1584 and 5 February 1585. 35 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 228–9, report of a Huguenot agent at Johann Casimir’s court, July 1584.

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The man gave his name as Philip Sabinus, a native of Königsberg, and formerly a Feldwebel in an infantry regiment fighting for William of Orange in the Low Countries. He had come to reveal to Duke Ulrich the existence of a foul assassination plot—not directed against Ulrich, but rather against his son-in-law, Frederik II of Denmark, and Ulrich’s grandson, the seven-year-old Prince Christian. Sabinus’ story was a long and convoluted one. Intending to return home to his wife in Königsberg from the Netherlands in early October 1584, Sabinus stopped in Bremen. At the tavern where he lodged he met an old man, one Zacharias Köller, who presented himself as a former officer in the Swedish service. The two quickly became friends, and Köller offered him a lucrative job; Sabinus, desperate for cash, accepted without even asking what the position entailed. The two men set off for Lübeck, where they met up with several of Köller’s associates: a Dutch physician named Antonius Marcus, a secretary from the Polish court named Matthias Conopatzki, another mercenary officer named Josias Kubener, and the brother-in-law of Georg (or Jürgen) Farensbach. Farensbach was hardly an unknown in Denmark—he was, in fact, a notorious traitor. A Livonian noble and a mercenary captain of considerable experience, Farensbach had been in the king’s pay—as a courtier (hofjunker), court marshal (hofmarskalk), and an army officer since 1575. Sent to Øsel in 1579 to defend Duke Magnus, he defected to Poland four years later.36 Sabinus would soon learn the nature of his employment. The group met in a Lübeck tavern and drank heavily; Sabinus retired to a nearby stable to nurse a terrible hangover. While he lay unnoticed in the straw of an unoccupied stall, several of his recent acquaintances entered the stable and began to discuss the details of an assassination. They would kill their targets with poison concealed in their food or drink, but they did not reveal who, precisely, the intended victims were. They only remarked that they would kill ‘both the old one and the young ones’. Apprehensive about the working conditions of his new job, Sabinus endeavored—or so he said—to find out the details of this obvious conspiracy. His new companions did not openly

36 Resen, Krønicke, pp. 330–1; ‘Frederik IIdens og Formynderstyrelsens Hof- og Regeringspersonale 1558–96’, Meddelelser fra Rentekammerarkivet (1873–76), 145, 162, 211. There is a brief biography of Farensbach (by Frede P. Jensen) in Sv. Cedergreen Bech (ed.), Dansk biografisk leksikon (16 vols, 3rd edition, Copenhagen, 1979–84), vol. 4, pp. 342–3.

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reveal anything to Sabinus, but over the next two months—as Sabinus and the conspirators travelled, together or in small groups, to Stettin, to Danzig, to Schlochau (now Cz∑uchów, Poland) in East Prussia— the befuddled veteran was able to piece together some of the details. Fortunately, Sabinus claimed, much of the conversation was held in Polish, in which language—unbeknownst to the conspirators—Sabinus was quite fluent. He discovered that other, more prominent, individuals were involved: an East Prussian nobleman, the count of Schlochau; Georg Farensbach himself; and Paul Warnicke, another former courtier of Frederik II. Still Sabinus did not know whom his companions intended to kill. He suspected that it might be King Stefan Bathory of Poland, but he did not know for sure until early January 1585. The conspirators met for a final time at the residence of the count of Schlochau; the wine flowed freely and so did the talk. Chatting in Polish, the would-be assassins began to talk about the details of Frederik II’s court and household. Warnicke and Farensbach spoke of the Danish king with great contempt: Farensbach proclaimed that ‘neither dog nor man, as far as he knew, would willingly be a subject of the king of Denmark’, and announced that the king’s days, and those of his sons, were numbered. It was also revealed to an astounded Sabinus that even more prominent men were involved in this plot, men who enjoyed direct access to the king’s person and would therefore be in a position to poison his food and drink. At this point, Sabinus claimed, he had heard enough, and he tried to make good his escape. It was well over a week before he could do so, and then only because he had no choice: he had been discovered. The conspirators found out that Sabinus did indeed speak Polish, and therefore had uncovered details of the plot that he was not meant to hear. Pursued by a hired thug—a ‘Tartar’, according to Sabinus— he fled in terror to the town of Stargard in Mecklenburg, leaving behind all his belongings except for the clothes on his back. Sabinus hoped to get to Denmark before the assassination could take place, but he feared that it would be to no avail, since the principal assassins were already in Frederik’s court. So he rushed to Güstrow instead, calculating that Duke Ulrich would have a better chance of warning Frederik in time.37 37 RAK TKIA/A.95 II, Ulrich to Frederik, 8 February 1585; LHA Schwerin, Best. 2.12–2/1. Auswärtige Beziehungen Nr. 577, Philippus Sabinus to Ulrich, 4 February 1585, and to Frederik, n.d.

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Duke Ulrich was appropriately alarmed. It is difficult to tell if he believed any part of Sabinus’ story or not. The narrative had all the trappings of an authentic conspiracy story: secret documents hidden under mattresses, sacred blood-oaths binding the conspirators together, encoded correspondence written in reverse with the aid of a mirror. Perhaps it was too tidy, and Sabinus’ role in the whole affair too vague. Ulrich was skeptical, but did not take any chances. Hurriedly he penned a summary of Sabinus’ revelation, in his own hand, and sent it, along with one of his most trusted courtiers and Sabinus himself, along to Frederik II at Copenhagen Castle. Exactly how Frederik reacted to Sabinus and his story is, unfortunately, hard to determine. He discussed the matter only with Duke Ulrich, and there is no reference to the conspiracy in the letterbooks of the German Chancery. If his closest advisers knew anything, they kept silent about it. From the two letters he sent to his father-in-law, however, it is clear that Frederik did not swallow all of Sabinus’ account. It was easy for him to accept that there might be a plot against his life, for that was the tenor of the times in which he lived. Frederik knew of the many conspiracies against Elizabeth I, a subject he had discussed with his inner circle of advisers.38 It had been less than a year since William of Orange had fallen to an assassin’s bullet. Indeed, the States-General had warned the king, immediately after the assassination of Orange, that they had reason to believe that Frederik would be the likely target of a similar plot.39 Since the time of the Lansac episode, Frederik had enjoined his local administrators to keep a close eye on foreigners entering or leaving the realm, and the king reiterated this warning in July 1584. Less than a year before Sabinus arrived in Copenhagen, Ulrich of Mecklenburg had forwarded to the king some disturbing intelligence: some of his own officials had accosted several individuals who purported to be ambassadors or servants of the king but who did not have passports or other necessary paperwork upon their persons. Ulrich suspected that these people were up to no good, and were possibly planning some mischief within Denmark. Frederik agreed; fearing that a plot was afoot, ‘either to set afire the warships anchored at Copenhagen 38

RAK PA.6487 (Valkendorf ) pk. 2, Kaas to Valkendorf, 27 February 1584. RAK TKUA/SD/Ned A.I.1, Louise de Coligny to Frederik, 22 November 1584; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1584–85, fol. 157–9v, Frederik to Ulrich, 6 September 1584. 39

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[or to wreak havoc within Denmark] in some other fashion’, he set new restrictions on travel within Denmark. Foreigners could not enter the realm without documentation; suspicious foreigners, especially those of French, Spanish, or Italian origin, were to be detained; no foreigners, under any circumstances, were to be allowed on board Danish warships or within the naval compound at Bremerholm.40 Both king and kingdom were on high alert for the presence of aliens with evil intentions well before Sabinus arrived at Copenhagen castle in late February 1585. There is enough documentary evidence to show that Sabinus’ wild tale unnerved and angered Frederik II. Sabinus related his story in person and via a rambling twenty-three page written account. His oral relation of the conspiracy must have been even more chilling than the written statement. As Frederik wrote to Duke Ulrich, Sabinus implicated not only Farensbach and Warnicke—men who had good reason to hate the king—but also ‘more important persons and several of our most prominent and faithful Councillors, servants and subjects’. This the king could not or would not accept, and it made him distrust Sabinus all the more. Sabinus was quietly incarcerated— probably at Kronborg—and interrogated further. The nature and results of the interrogation are unfortunately lost. From prison, Sabinus wrote a plaintive and almost unintelligible letter to the king, protesting his innocence and begging mercy on behalf of his impoverished wife, one Antonia von Pallen, who in the meantime also travelled to Helsingør to beg clemency. Frederik’s investigation of Sabinus’ claims, however, proved to the king that the Prussian was lying. He did believe that there was a conspiracy, but that Sabinus—not the accused members of his council and court—was behind this ‘devilish act’. A man with such an ‘evil heart’ could not be allowed to go free. Philip Sabinus thence disappeared from the record, his ultimate fate noted in a single ominous line scribbled on the packet of documents concerning his case: ‘executed with the sword at Kronborg in the year 1585’.41

40 KB 1584–88, pp. 115–16, Frederik to Valkendorf, 15 July 1584. Frederik actually used the word vælske (German welsch), meaning anyone of Romance or Mediterranean origins. 41 The date of Sabinus’ execution is unknown. It may have occurred in April 1585, since Heinrich Rantzau wrote to the king early in May to inquire about the execution of an unnamed nobleman. The inquiry is so vague, however, as to preclude anything but speculation. In the same letter, however, Rantzau made intentionally cryptic references to ‘den Mecklenburgischen sachen’, regarding which the king had

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What are we to make of Sabinus and his ‘foul plot’ of 1585? Outwardly it appears to be an interesting incident but not one directly tied to Frederik’s perception of events abroad. The men implicated by Sabinus, with the exception of the Polish secretary Conopatzki and the Swedish soldier Köller, were not attached to any foreign government, nor did they claim to be working on the behalf of any of Frederik’s political rivals. The king, however, may have believed differently. Sabinus’ letter of protest to Frederik, in which the hapless prisoner complained of the many ‘untruths’ heaped upon him since his arrival in Denmark, hints that he had been accused of having ties to Spain. In the absence of any records pertaining to his interrogation, this is impossible to substantiate, but it would certainly help explain Frederik’s understandably visceral reaction to this plot against his life and his family. Within days of Sabinus’ arrival in Copenhagen, Frederik II announced a complete ban on ‘papists, Zwinglians, Anabaptists and [members of ] other such sects’ settling within the realm. In July, three months after the probable date of Sabinus’ execution at Kronborg, the king reminded his local authorities not to permit foreigners without passports to enter Danish territory ‘on account of the war and these acts of conspiracy that one hears about everywhere’. The royal family was also now off-limits to visitors; Frederik’s sons, Prince Christian and Duke Ulrik, then studying at Sorø Cloister, were prohibited contact with anyone except their schoolmates and members of the Council.42 After the Sabinus plot, Frederik developed a newfound appreciation for the danger in which his English counterpart lived daily. When Sir Thomas Bodley visited Frederik II on an errand from Elizabeth I in the summer of 1585, the king pumped Bodley for the details of William Parry’s plot against the queen in 1584. Borrowing the ambassador’s copy of an English tract on the Parry plot, Frederik had the pamphlet translated into German and printed by his court printer. He also gave previously asked Rantzau’s advice; Rantzau promised to send his interpretation of the ‘acten undt mappen’ which Frederik had entrusted to him. Unfortunately, neither this other letter, nor Frederik’s original letter to Rantzau (apparently dated 15 April 1585), are to be found within Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen. RAK TKIA/A.77/10, Rantzau to Frederik, 2 May 1585. 42 KB 1584–85, pp. 254–5, Frederik to Valkendorf and Axel Gyldenstjerne, 5 March 1585; KB 1584 –85, pp. 337–8, open letter, 10 July 1585; ‘Nogle Kong Frederik den Andens Breve og Befalinger, angaaende Hans Sønners, Prindserne Christians og Ulriks Opdragelse’, DM, Series 2, 4 (1823), 165–6, Frederik to Peter Retz, 14 July 1585.

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Elizabeth blunt advice on dealing with the constant threats against her life: if Elizabeth ‘would . . . live a life without feare’, she should have Mary Queen of Scots executed immediately. ‘If the other had Her Majesty at the like advantage’, Frederik reasoned, ‘she should quickly feel the smart.’43 The Sabinus plot had rattled Frederik II’s self-confidence. He may not have believed all of the lurid details that Sabinus had related to him, but he believed enough to feel vulnerable. It awakened in him a feeling of kinship with the English crown that had been lacking up to this point. Spain and the papacy were suspected to have had some part in many of the attempts on Elizabeth’s life; Sabinus’ testimony hinted at Polish involvement in the plot against Frederik, and Frederik may well have believed that Spain was involved, too. Frederik II’s sympathies for the Dutch and for Navarre had grown significantly over the past five years. Navarre enjoyed a new degree of dynastic legitimacy after Anjou’s death in June 1584, making his cause more palatable to would-be supporters like Frederik. But the conflicts in France and the Netherlands—even those within the Empire—were still distant threats to Denmark. The Sabinus plot made these conflicts personal.

The English initiative, 1585 From the English perspective, the Sabinus plot could not have been better timed. There is no evidence that anyone besides Frederik II, Ulrich of Mecklenburg, Sabinus himself, a couple of trusted courtiers at Copenhagen and Güstrow, and perhaps Heinrich Rantzau knew anything of the conspiracy, but it worked to England’s advantage nonetheless. In the summer of 1585, as England’s conflict with Spain was escalating rapidly from a ‘cold war’ to open hostilities, Elizabeth I was more in need of strong allies than ever before. The string of successes that the Army of Flanders had enjoyed since Parma had taken over did not show any signs of abating, and Philip II’s involvement

43 PRO SP71/1/125–30, Bodley to Walsingham, 28 June 1585. The pamphlet on the Parry plot was printed by Laurentz Benedicht as Warhafftiger unnd einfeltiger Bericht/ von der grewlichen Verreterey/ so ein Schelmischer Verreter/ Willem Parry genent/ wider der Königin zu Engeland Mayt: furgehabt . . . Aus Engelendischer Sprache/ ins Deutsch gebracht . . . (Copenhagen, 1585).

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in the French civil wars was no longer a matter of speculation. The queen, encouraged especially by her principal secretary Walsingham, committed her kingdom and its resources to defend the Dutch rebels, culminating in the Treaty of Nonsuch that August.44 Elizabeth dispatched English troops to help prevent Antwerp from falling into Parma’s hands, and Sir Francis Drake embarked on a ‘search and destroy’ mission against Spanish shipping in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. By years’ end, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, would arrive in the Netherlands to represent the queen, and would shortly thereafter take the office and title of governor-general. War between England and Spain was close, tangibly so, in the summer of 1585. Creating a Protestant alliance centered around England had been a frustrating diplomatic exercise in 1568, 1577, and 1580; now it was a matter of survival. England did not have the requisite military strength, on land or at sea, for an open confrontation with the empire of Philip II. An alliance with Denmark would not offset Spain’s considerable advantage in resources, but it would go a long way towards levelling the odds. ‘I could wish her Majesty would in time . . . join to her the navy of Denmark and other places’, Lord Cobham had written in 1580, ‘for I would be loath that too great opinion of your powers should deceive you, considering how many great parties are confederate against you.’45 And as before, friendship with Frederik II offered the only plausible hope of bringing in the greater German princes. Even before the Sabinus plot had been uncovered, Frederik II and his advisers had shown themselves to be amenable to Elizabeth’s diplomatic overtures. During his negotiations with Ségur in 1584, the Danish king had begun to exhibit a species of diplomatic thought, characteristic of Protestant statesmen in the latter part of the sixteenth century, that Frede P. Jensen has appropriately likened to the ‘domino theory’ of international relations during the Cold War. According to this way of thinking, international Catholicism, like international Communism in the post-World War II era, was a widespread but centrally-directed phenomenon with a well-defined ideology and grand strategy: to topple and swallow its intended victims, one by one, starting with its weakest opponents. Frederik II had embraced this theory by the time he first entertained Navarre’s proposals for an 44 45

Adams, ‘The decision to intervene’, pp. 22–7. Cal. SP For. vol. 14, p. 449, Cobham to the secretaries, 12 October 1580.

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alliance, but in 1584 Frederik had seen solidarity as a means in itself of guarding against Catholic aggression. After the Sabinus plot, Frederik II was ready to take the next step: to take active measures to stop the Catholic advance, to view Protestant solidarity as nothing more than the groundwork upon which an active alliance could be built, an alliance that would not hesitate to resort to arms if necessary. None of this was lost on Elizabeth’s ministers, especially Walsingham. Commercial disputes between Denmark and England had all but evaporated since the successful conclusion of the trade negotiations at Haderslev in 1583. Frederik II’s admirers on the Continent, like Sturm in Strassburg, continued to promote a Danish alliance to their friends at the Tudor court.46 Perhaps the most articulate proponent of an Anglo-Danish alliance was Ségur, who returned to England in October 1584 with nothing but praise for Frederik II. The Dane, Ségur told Walsingham, was Navarre’s only true friend east of the Rhine, not to mention the best means of resolving the theological gap within Protestantism or of winning the support of the Protestant electors. The ambassador saw his visit to Denmark as the sole bright spot in his otherwise fatiguing and fruitless embassy: ‘God grant that all the princes in Germany were of like mind regarding the common cause; then I could leave Germany with great joy and satisfaction.’47 Elizabeth had committed her resources to the war in the Netherlands, and though the Huguenot cause was important to English interests she hoped to shift the burden of supporting that cause to Continental Protestants. In this she had no choice: if she wanted to create a Protestant alliance in defense of Navarre, then she would have to work with Frederik II. To this end, Elizabeth dispatched yet another ambassador to the Danish court in the spring of 1585. The embassy of Sir Thomas Bodley, who arrived in Copenhagen in mid-June, was fundamentally identical in purpose to Ségur’s the year previous: it was part, perhaps the most important part, of a wider diplomatic campaign to rally support for Navarre. Bodley was sent only to visit with Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and then to treat with Frederik II. To the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg Bodley was only to deliver letters from his royal mistress. Like Ségur before him, Bodley was 46

Cal. SP For., vol. 19, p. 253, Davison to Walsingham, 20 February 1585. Resen, Krønicke, p. 461, Ségur to Frederik, 28 August 1584; Cal. SP For., vol. 18, pp. 441, 546, Ségur to Walsingham, 29 March and 8 June 1584. 47

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to emphasise the determination of the papacy and Philip II to enforce the Tridentine edicts, that Navarre’s cause was presently in mortal danger, and that the survival of Protestantism depended on a wellorganised response to Catholic aggression in France. To this was added a more personal note of caution: Bodley was instructed to point out to the king that the Guise family, who led the League and consequently were tied intimately to Spain, were also connected directly to the house of Lorraine and were therefore Denmark’s enemies.48 The Bodley embassy marked the culmination of the rapprochement between England and Denmark that had begun with the Garter ceremony three years before. It also provides a rare and fascinating glimpse into the workings of the Danish court under Frederik II. The king granted Bodley audience at Kronborg only three days after the ambassador’s arrival—unusually prompt by Frederik’s standards— and proceeded to treat Bodley as if he were an old friend. The king saluted Bodley’s arrival at Kronborg with a volley of thirty-three ‘great shot’ from the castle’s ramparts; he took Bodley to church services at the castle chapel, seating the ambassador beside him in the royal pew and arranging for the mass to be said in Latin, so that Bodley would understand it; he incorporated the Englishman into the informal and boisterous everyday activities at court, without putting on a show of royal pomp. Frederik held several banquets in Bodley’s honour, with the ambassador seated next to the king; and though Frederik spoke little Latin, and Bodley no German, the pair chatted away for hours. The king’s curiosity about the character of Elizabeth’s court was seemingly insatiable. He questioned Bodley intently about the Parry plot, as well as the relationship between Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots. He repeatedly toasted Elizabeth’s health, vowing ‘if it were possible, he loved [the queen] better than his wife’, and declaring his intention to visit Elizabeth personally in England. To be sure, much of this discourse may well have been ‘drunk talk’; as was customary at the Danish court, alcohol—provided in literally staggering quantities—served as both equaliser and social lubricant. After a few toasts drunk in Elizabeth’s honour, Bodley admitted, for ‘the rest of that daye, [I] was fitte to doe nothinge’. It was not all drinking and feasting, though, and Sir Thomas had 48 PRO SP75/1/108–11, instructions for Bodley, 17 April 1585; BL Cotton Mss, Jul. F. vi, fol. 68, addendum to Bodley’s instructions, 27 April 1585; StAM 4f. Frankreich 629, Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel to Wilhelm IV, 22 May 1585.

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several opportunities to discuss business of a more serious nature with the king in the intervals between parties. He was meant to be more messenger than negotiator, and therefore there was no overt discussion of an alliance. Frederik nonetheless did not debate a single point covered in Bodley’s instructions. The king, too, believed that the unity of the Protestant princes was utterly necessary, but he offered little hope of attaining this end. The German princes had proven to be so stubborn in this regard that ‘he for his owne part, was resolued longe agoe, to lette it alone as a desperat cause, to give him self to quietnes, to defende his owne contries, & to put his confidence in God, for preserving of his churche’. If Elizabeth were determined to pursue an alliance, then Frederik II would do his best to see it succeed. The king promised to forward Elizabeth’s letters to the foremost Protestant Reichsfürsten, accompanied by an appeal of his own. Frederik may even have made a tentative offer of financial support to the amount of 100,000 Thaler. As an added token of goodwill, Frederik made a gift of a fine coach and six horses to the queen before Bodley’s departure.49 Bodley’s detailed (and glowing) account of his stay in Kronborg sheds some light on the process by which foreign policy was made in Frederik II’s Denmark. Bodley describes a lively court with many nobles in attendance on the king, but with only a privileged few taking part in the discussions between Frederik and the ambassador. Christoffer Valkendorf was on hand to greet Bodley upon his arrival in Helsingør, and Niels Kaas rushed from Odense to Kronborg to meet Sir Thomas; Walsingham, after all, had personally asked Kaas to help Bodley in any way that he could.50 But during Bodley’s audiences with the king, only the senior secretary of the German Chancery, Heinrich Ramel, was present, possibly because of his linguistic skills. Prior to the final meeting with Frederik, when the king promised to try to persuade the German princes to consider alliance with England, the king spent an entire day ‘in counsail’. Bodley, however, could not have meant by this that the entire Council of State met with the king. Summoning a meeting of the Council required time and preparation, and most members of the Council were too deeply 49 PRO SP75/1/125–30, Bodley to Walsingham, 28 June 1585; BN, Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 73–73v, anonymous to Ségur, 1585; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 700–1, Frederik to Elizabeth, 14 June 1585. 50 Cal. SP For., vol. 19, p. 428, Walsingham to Kaas, 26 April 1585.

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involved with their duties as royal lensmænd. Presumably, the king met with those advisers—like Kaas and Ramel—who travelled with him and were accustomed to discussing foreign affairs. Bodley had not presented Frederik with new suggestions or fresh ideas. The king was already a proponent of Protestant solidarity, within the Empire and without, well before Bodley set foot in Denmark. Frederik II had good reason to doubt that yet another appeal to Saxony and Brandenburg would yield anything but flat rejections, but Bodley’s entreaties (and possibly the support of his Council as well) restored his faith, at least enough for another try.51 He made good on his word to bring the matter up before the leading German princes in July 1585, shortly after Bodley’s departure. Writing to the recalcitrant electors as well as about a dozen lesser Lutheran princes on 4 July, the king gave his full endorsement to the proposals recently sent to them by Bodley, while adding a few of his own. In order to prevent the papists from subjugating Navarre and his followers, and in order to preserve ‘the freedom of religion in the Empire’, Protestant Germany would have to act, and act quickly. Not only should they form an alliance, to include England, for the defense of Protestant liberties at home and abroad, but they should also stand ready to defend these liberties by force if the need arose. At the very least the princes should prohibit recruitment of troops within their lands for Catholic armies, and physically prevent the passage of these armies through their lands. Frederik’s letter was careful in some ways—the king implicated neither the emperor nor Philip II directly in his outcry against Catholic aggression—but otherwise it was unusually daring in its wording: behind all the troubles of Protestantism were the ‘Roman Antichrist’ and its ‘illegitimate, unprecedented thirst for tyranny’.52 Frederik’s appeal, though impassioned, was nothing more than a new spin on an old argument, and though this time the call for collective action came from one of their own, the German princes did not change their stance. Most of them waited to see what August of Saxony would do, and he made his position quite clear. The elector 51 RAK TKUA/AD/1:104 Koncepter, Frederik to Ulrich, 5 February 1585 (draft, never sent); RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 701–3, Frederik to Willoughby and Walsingham, 14 June 1585. 52 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1584–85, fol. 379–85, Frederik to August, Johann Georg of Brandenburg, Julius of Braunschweig, the administrator of Magdeburg, Wilhelm IV, et al., 4 July 1585.

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had rejected Ségur with some contempt, and he had already flatly refused to cooperate with Elizabeth I; his response to Frederik II was no more encouraging. Frederik’s intercession on behalf of Elizabeth and Navarre had had no effect whatsoever. When Ségur returned to the Empire in the summer of 1585, hoping that the relentless diplomatic pursuit of Saxon support might have softened August’s hardnosed attitude towards Calvinists, he found the elector just as uncooperative as before if not more so. The only thing that had really changed by the summer of 1585— besides the nervousness of activist Protestant states, Elizabeth’s resolve to go to war with Spain, and Navarre’s newfound dynastic legitimacy— was the much warmer relationship between the two largest Protestant kingdoms, England and Denmark. Elizabeth and Frederik exchanged gifts several times over the next few months, and the English—rather than presenting Frederik with the customary complaints over the treatment accorded English merchants in Danish waters—instead made voluntary concessions. In July 1585, for example, Elizabeth’s government promised to curb some of the more obnoxious actions of English fishermen working the waters off the coast of Iceland, practices that had earlier caused no small amount of friction between the two crowns.53 There seemed to be no hindrances in the path towards a closer partnership between England and Denmark. As Bodley expressed it, after Frederik II had made his offer to visit Elizabeth in person, ‘. . . if twentie yeres ago, there had bin that amitie, betwene her Matie and him, as there was at the present, this motion at this time, had bin but superfluous’.54 England and Denmark might not see eye-to-eye on commercial issues, but with their shared perception of the dangers of international Catholicism the two monarchs seem to have found a perfect diplomatic match in each other. And none too soon, for in France the outlook for the survival of the Huguenots was worsening daily. Something, however, cooled Frederik II’s ardor during the summer of 1585. Tokens of affection exchanged between the English and Danish monarchs were indeed good signs, but it was not a stable base upon which to build an alliance. Sooner or later, one of the two states would 53 BL Cotton Mss Nero B.iii, fol. 207–8, ‘An act to be established . . . for redressing the abuses and wrongs offered to the kinge of denmarks subiects of Iceland etc. by englishemen that fishe there’, 15 July 1585. 54 PRO SP75/1/125–30, Bodley to Walsingham, 28 June 1585.

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have to make a firm offer of men or money with which to build a military alliance, or at least to suggest an alternative course of action— like mediation—to end the conflict in France. Either course, however, would require a broad consensus among the Protestant princes of the Empire. Even an attempt at a mediated peace would demand the implicit threat of force through collective action if it were to succeed. Neither Frederik II nor Elizabeth I proved willing to go very far without the backing of the German princes, even if that backing took the form of only a few thousand troops. Nor would either monarch make a commitment of resources to such an alliance unless the other did so first. Elizabeth’s priority was the war in the Netherlands; Frederik could not afford a solitary confrontation with the Catholic powers that might endanger the Sound. With neither Frederik nor Elizabeth willing to make the first move, and with the greater German princes reluctant to move at all, the forging of a pan-Protestant alliance would prove to be an almost impossible task, no matter how enthusiastic its most powerful proponents were. Compounding this problem was the fact that the governments of England and Denmark were not entirely of one mind in their approach to the struggle against Catholicism in France and the Netherlands. Walsingham, and by extension Elizabeth, looked to a military solution; Frederik II, on the other hand, favoured mediation as a necessary first step. The British historian Lawrence Stone dismissed the Dane’s cautious approach as ‘futile and time-wasting’.55 Futile it may well have been, and the passage of time certainly proved it to be so; but then so were Elizabeth’s attempts to cajole the German princes to act in league with England. Within the framework of German princely politics, Frederik’s position was the more realistic one. Saxony, Brandenburg, and the states that followed their example were notoriously cautious, and would never contemplate risking war until all options for a peaceful solution had been exhausted; their common devotion to the Peace of Augsburg made them wary of any course of action that might incur the wrath of the emperor or of the Catholic princes. The Germans, on the whole, did not understand or appreciate Elizabeth’s foreign policy objectives. England could not bankroll Navarre and the Dutch simultaneously. Having devoted her energies to the Netherlands by 1585, Elizabeth had little to spare for the Huguenots. Elizabeth would disappoint Ségur as well. The Huguenot cause 55

Stone, Palavicino, pp. 132–3.

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was in trouble as never before by the summer of 1585. In France, the League had openly criticised Henry III for his failure to eliminate the Huguenots, and in their manifesto drafted at Péronne in March 1585 they excluded Navarre from the line of succession. The French king, left with few options and no funds, caved into League pressure in the Treaty of Nemours ( July 1585), which renounced toleration of Protestantism throughout France. Navarre sent Ségur to England once more in the summer of 1585. Although the Nemours settlement had not yet been signed when Ségur arrived in England, it was still plain from the activity of the Spanish-supported League that the Huguenots were in dire straits, and Ségur was accordingly desperate. But Elizabeth’s involvement in Dutch politics precluded extensive assistance to Navarre. Earlier, Elizabeth had proffered £100,000 as her contribution towards a German army in France; now she would not pay more than 50,000 écus, or about one-quarter of the earlier offer. The reduced amount was not unconditional, but was dependent on a positive response from Denmark and the German princes. Walsingham explained the reasons for the policy change to Ségur, but the ambassador was furious nevertheless. Fuming that ‘in England they wish to content their friends by good words without deeds’, Ségur grumbled to Walsingham, ‘I am basely treated. I deserve better things.’56 The successful alignment of the German Protestants behind Navarre would depend primarily on the Danish response. Here, too, Ségur would be frustrated. Frederik II’s retreat from his earlier, outwardly belligerent stance became apparent when Ségur returned to Denmark in September 1585. Ségur had spent much of the summer of 1585 making the rounds among the German princely courts. It had been a singularly disappointing and futile venture; Ségur’s repeated visits had not effected any change in the caution of the Saxon and Brandenburg electors, and consequently neither in that of the lesser princes. All of their responses were the same: they did not want to disrupt the peace of the Empire by involving themselves in a foreign confessional conflict.57 This was no surprise, but 56 Anquez, Henri IV et l’Allemagne, p. 11; BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 120, Ségur to Walsingham, summer 1585; Cal. SP For., vol. 19, pp. 584–5, 587–8, 588–9, Ségur to Walsingham, 5 July, 6 July, and 7 July 1585. 57 BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401: fol. 145–7, August to Ségur, 31 July 1585; fol. 166–8, Johann Georg of Brandenburg to Ségur, 15 August 1585; fol. 163–3v, Otto of Braunschweig-Lüneburg to Ségur, 22 August 1585; fol. 188–8v, Johann of NassauCatzelnbogen to Ségur, 1 October 1585.

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both Navarre and Ségur expected a great deal more from Denmark. Navarre believed that Frederik II could be counted on to provide troops, especially cavalry, and munitions for his cause.58 Ségur spent much of the autumn of 1585 in Denmark, meeting with the king and with several members of the Council. Frederik treated him with his accustomed hospitality, and when Ségur left Denmark he was in high spirits, but the king had made no promises of the sort he had communicated to Bodley earlier that summer. Instead, Frederik indicated only his good wishes to the Huguenot cause, but protested that without German princely support his hands were tied. Danish support, as much as that of England, appeared to be contingent on the inclinations of the German princes.59 There was, however, a difference between English and Danish strategies in the war against Catholicism, and this did not become a matter of common knowledge until December 1585, when yet another English ambassador arrived on Danish soil. The success of the Bodley mission had raised hopes of an alliance built upon a London-Copenhagen axis, but by autumn Walsingham felt that the time had come to establish something more concrete than mere words. The principal secretary still believed that Frederik II could work magic with Saxony and Brandenburg, and as late as November he had even begun to make plans for an allied army whose upkeep would be borne by equal contributions, totalling 200,000 to 300,000 écus, by England and Denmark.60 Walsingham felt sorry for Ségur— who ‘came without money and without Latin, and had only hopes [to offer] as support’—and he sought to ameliorate the Frenchman’s bad luck among the German princes with the aid of his own agents on the Continent. To this end, in October 1585, Walsingham sent Horatio Palavicino—the Italian financier who would become Elizabeth’s diplomatic workhorse on the Continent—to make the rounds of the German princely courts, and dispatched Lord Willoughby once more

58

BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 169–70, Navarre to Ségur, 25 August 1585. BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 185–5v, Frederik to Navarre, 4 September 1585; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85: pp. 708–9, 710–16, Frederik to Ségur, 30 August and 2 September 1585; pp. 709–10, Frederik II to Navarre, 2 September 1585; ‘Correspondance’, pp. 308–16, 319–24, Dançay to Henry III, 10 September 1585 and 10 January 1586; Richard, Charles de Danzay, pp. 154–5. 60 ‘Considerations to be weighed concerning the negotiation of Germany and Denmark’, November 1585, Cal. SP For., vol. 20, pp. 134–6; BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 196, Walsingham to Ségur, 16 October 1585. 59

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to Denmark. Palavicino and Willoughby were to remind their intended audiences of the urgency of Navarre’s plight, and to seek financial or military commitments to the cause. Willoughby, like Walsingham, had great hopes for the success of his embassy. His initial reception at Frederik’s court confirmed and bolstered those hopes. As during Bodley’s visit half a year earlier, the king fêted Willoughby lavishly, heaping praise upon Elizabeth for her endeavors on behalf of the Dutch rebels and the Huguenots. Willoughby reported back to Walsingham and to Leicester that the prevailing mood at Frederik’s court was favourable to the purpose of his visit. Frederik, of course, was dismayed by the negative responses of many of his German princely counterparts, but all was not lost in the Empire. Shortly before Willoughby’s arrival in Denmark, Electress Anna of Saxony had died in Dresden. This was taken as a good sign, for it was widely rumoured that ‘Mutter Anna’ had been the driving force behind the Concord; she controlled August’s every move, and poisoned his mind against Calvinists.61 Frederik, Willoughby noted, had grown to dislike his sister, and ‘meurneth for her death in ceremonie only’. With Anna gone, it was believed that August might become more cooperative. Personally, the English ambassador looked forward to August’s imminent demise; it would be ‘very happie that so great an enemy to all relligion, and good causes, might in so good a time take his leave’. If Saxony came around to embrace the ‘common cause’, bringing the bulk of the Protestant Reichsfürsten in its train, then the plight of the Huguenots could be resolved neatly and quickly. According to Willoughby, Frederik and his court were confident that it would take nothing more than a brief show of force to compel Henry III to turn his back on the Guise faction and end his war against Navarre. If each of the German states contributed only a small amount of men or money, they could raise a substantial army for a short period of time, but long enough to give teeth to an embassy sent from England, Denmark, and the princes to France. Willoughby had no reason to doubt Frederik II’s intentions. He and much of his nobility were ‘good Calvinists’. The king was a man of ‘good disposition’ towards Elizabeth; he ‘would rather declare in action, than publishe in words his redines to doe for her’.62 61 Cal. SP For., vol. 20, pp. 89–91, Thomas Tenneker to Walsingham, 16 October 1585. 62 PRO SP75/1/153, Willoughby to Walsingham, 25 October 1585; PRO

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After these promising beginnings, Frederik’s official answer to Willoughby and the proposals he brought from Elizabeth must have been disappointing indeed. The Garter ceremony in 1582 had marked the beginning of a gradual diplomatic wooing of Denmark, and the Willoughby mission was clearly meant to be the culmination of that wooing. Willoughby did not come to Denmark to discuss the necessity of action on behalf of Navarre—that had already been established— but rather to arrange the physical creation of an army for Navarre. ‘The question is more about how one will engage in this matter’, Willoughby announced to the king, ‘than it is [of the nature] of the matter itself ’. Willoughby came straight to the point: Elizabeth wanted a firm and immediate commitment of troops or cash. ‘It appears that there is no suitable way of rendering aid other than through an advance of cash, or the sending of troops. . . . If Your Majesty would send troops, the war cannot last long.’63 Frederik would have been naïve not to have anticipated this request, but it was not precisely what the king envisioned as an appropriately prudent means of backing Navarre. Even with the death of the Electress Anna, the German princes had yet to give signs of anything other than reluctance in joining a military alliance, nor had Willoughby made any mention of what Elizabeth would be willing to contribute. Frederik’s responses to this unvarnished demand for military aid depict the king as being sympathetic to Navarre and Elizabeth in principle, but not willing to stick out his neck without assurances that he would not be left in the lurch. Mediation was what Frederik intended to try first; military action was—except in the last resort—only to be a means of making an effective mediated peace. The war with Sweden, though nearly fifteen years in the past, had devastated Denmark, and neither the king nor his subjects were ready to risk that kind of calamity again. The Catholic danger had to be fought on all fronts, not just in France, and this would require a coalition that was not limited to Denmark and England. The German princes, at least, would have to be involved.

SP75/1/155–56, to Leicester, 25 October 1585. Frederik had recently shown some optimism to Elizabeth concerning the stance of the German princes. ‘Time will reveal the fruit of [your] embassies’. RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, pp. 726–7, Frederik to Elizabeth, 8 September 1585. 63 RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.10, Willoughby to Frederik, late 1585.

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When, however, the other potentates once awaken from their ancient sleep, and are convinced to take up this common cause, then Her Majesty will have no cause to doubt the goodwill of the German princes, and that there will be nothing lacking in their friendliness and duty—which they have by now promised so often—towards Her Majesty. .

The king must have thought that this sounded weak, for the very next day, 15 December 1585, he issued yet another statement to Willoughby, this one more militantly anti-Catholic than the first. Proclaiming his loyalty to Navarre’s cause and that of all oppressed Protestants, Frederik pointed again to the reticence of the German princes. ‘It is more to be wished for than hoped for that . . . the Protestant princes will take notice of the power and cunning of the Whore of Babylon and her adherents’, he told Willoughby. It was even more dubious that they would consider the means of countering the Catholics’ ‘thirst for blood’. But because these princes ‘refused to lend a helping hand to our dear brother, the honourable King of Navarre’, Frederik could not very well risk his own kingdom in a solitary struggle against the Catholic powers. He did, however, promise to continue in his efforts to cajole the German princes. If he were successful in this, then he would be willing to discuss specific military aid.64 This was actually a consistent application of the foreign policy Frederik II had envisioned since the beginning of the Cologne crisis in 1583, but it was a far cry from what Willoughby felt he had been led to expect. The Englishman, tired and broke, immediately left Denmark for the Netherlands, where he intended to seek a commission under Leicester. He admitted to Leicester that he had neither the means nor the patience to carry out negotiations. Willoughby complained bitterly to Walsingham of his disappointment in Denmark, placing most of the blame for his failure on August of Saxony, who was becoming ‘popish and Spanish’ from his friendship with the emperor. Frederik, however, was not the man Willoughby had first thought him to be. ‘Tho this k. standeth not wth ye ubiquitaries [i.e., the gnesiolutherans] in opinion yet doth he in resolution of affaires.’ The king’s affection for Elizabeth was genuine—he frequently carried with him a portrait of the queen, encased in a golden

64 RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.10, Frederik’s response to Willoughby, 14 December and 15 December 1585; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, p. 737, Frederik to Elizabeth, 15 December 1585.

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frame, and kept German translations of her letters to him in a special coffer—but pro-Spanish officials at court restrained Frederik’s good intentions. Valkendorf, for example, ‘spared not openly to wishe ye Spaniard lor[d] of ye Low countrie: ye good k. is undoubtedly of another affectionn yet held back wth avarice and opinion of proffit wch this mony scraper [Valkendorf ] bewitcheth him wth’. Overall, Willoughby depicted the king as a weak man dominated by his ministers: ‘His will is good but yet he is overruled.’65 No sooner had Willoughby left Denmark than the king had a change of heart—or at least of tactics. As Frederik later confessed to Willoughby, he could not sleep after dismissing the ambassador; in his ‘night thoughts and daye cares’ he pondered endlessly ‘ye perills imminent how daungerous a neighbour he should have of Spaine if all things succeded not well wth har matie’. The king took the unusual and impetuous step of recalling Willoughby, who was already well on his way to Flanders, back to Kronborg, so that the king could discuss with him a proposal for helping Elizabeth without ‘empeaching his state’. Miraculously, Frederik’s couriers were able to locate the ambassador and escort him back. Perhaps Frederik’s response was not all that Willoughby wished, but it went far beyond his earlier answers. The king proposed to offer himself as mediator to both Spain and France, setting down specific requirements for a peace settlement with each. Philip II would have to grant freedom of religion to the Netherlands, remove all Spanish troops, and restore the Low Countries to the ancient liberties they had enjoyed in the days of Charles V; Henry III would similarly have to guarantee the Huguenots full freedom to practice their religion. If these terms, or the offer itself, were refused, then Frederik would take drastic measures to punish the Catholic kingdoms: he would close off the Sound to Spanish and French traffic, as well as to all shipments of grain and other essentials bound for ports in either kingdom. The king offered less indirect help as well: as Willoughby related to Leicester, Frederik ‘wyll mak warr uppon any prince, and ys content, uppon any least word from [Leicester], to lett ijm [2000] of the best horsmen in all his countrey to com to me’. As a token of his personal commitment to an English alliance, the king even put his son, presumably the eight-year-old Prince Christian, at Leicester’s personal disposal.66 65 66

PRO SP75/1/169–70, Willoughby to Walsingham, 15 December 1585. RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.10, notes dated 17–18 December 1585, at end

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These were generous terms, for closing off the Sound to Spain would be tantamount to a declaration of war. It would hobble both Spain and France economically, at least for a short while, and it would be an insult to Spain that Philip II would not likely overlook. Frederik II was openly courting the kind of risk he had been trying to avoid all along. Just what prompted him to do so, and in this particular fashion, is impossible to say. Dançay may have been of some influence. At the time of the Willoughby mission, Dançay had not received any pay from his home government for several years, and he feared that he would be sent to debtors’ prison by his creditors. This changed his loyalties; while he was reporting, falsely, to Henry III and Catherine de’ Medici that Frederik had all but ignored all advances made on behalf of Navarre, secretly he was doing his utmost to aid Ségur, Bodley, and Bertie. Dançay kept Walsingham well apprised of the state of affairs in the Danish court. His services were so valuable to proponents of the ‘common cause’ that in October 1585 Thomas Tennecker, an English agent in Denmark, recommended to Walsingham that the impoverished French ambassador be made a pensioner of the English crown.67 Whatever his motive, Frederik II was extraordinarily secretive about his revised offer to Willoughby. The king did not put down his proposal in writing; it appears in Danish records only in the form of a brief, scribbled note written by Heinrich Ramel. Christoffer Valkendorf, for one, was not let in on the secret. When Frederik ordered Valkendorf to find suitable apartments for Willoughby’s return to Kronborg at the end of December 1585, he stipulated that all of the embassy’s expenses would be paid from the royal coffers, but did not offer a straightforward explanation for the ambassador’s recall. All he told his trusted rentemester was that Willoughby had been ‘hindered and detained on his journey’, and had been forced to turn back. This was a outright lie. Obviously the king felt the need to conceal the truth from everyone except Willoughby and Ramel. There was good reason for the king to be secretive.

of response of 14 December 1585; PRO SP75/1/173, Willoughby to Walsingham, 23 December 1585; John Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leycester, during his government in the Low Countries, in the years 1585 and 1586 (Camden Society, Old Series, vol. 27; London, 1844), pp. 128–9, 133, Leicester to Walsingham, 21 February and 22 February 1586. 67 Cal. SP For., vol. 16, p. 283, Dançay to Walsingham, 29 August 1582; Cal. SP For., vol. 19, p. 544, Dançay to Walsingham, 18 June 1585; Cal. SP For., vol. 20, pp. 89–91, Tenneker to Walsingham, 16 October 1585.

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Even Niels Kaas, regardless of his political sympathies, might find the possibility of war with Spain unsettling to say the least.68 Frederik II had finally promised a real commitment to the cause of international Protestantism. Willoughby, after his initial disappointment, crowed over his success.69 Willoughby’s triumphant optimism had its effect on Leicester, who thenceforth would be Frederik’s greatest proponent among those close to Elizabeth. ‘The king of Denmark doth marvellously love hir majesty, as my lord Wyllowby telles me’, Leicester wrote Walsingham in February 1586. The nature of the Danish offer—negotiations for a mediated peace, backed up with the threat of economic sanctions and force—fit English interests precisely: ‘And bycause [Elizabeth] hath alwayes harped uppon a peace, let all wyse men judge whether ther be any way in the world for hir majesty to have a good peace but this way; yea, and the more show of princes good wylles that she may procure, the better and surer must yt be for hir.’ Frederik II produced other, more subtle, tokens of his English sympathies as well. In 1586, he arranged for the court printer, Laurents Benedicht, to publish an official German translation of Elizabeth’s 1585 apologia for her intervention in the Netherlands.70 Rumours freely circulated throughout northern Europe in the early months of 1586 that Frederik had already acted on his promise to close the Sound to grain shipments bound for Spain; these confirmed, albeit falsely, that the Danish king had made a firm commitment.71 Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to encourage Frederik by showing her own hand. As Willoughby advised Walsingham in March 1586, ‘I think the King would have proceeded more soundly, if he had been solicited according to his offer made in my last advertisement. He may perhaps make squeamish to join in war on our side, before it be openly proclaimed by us or that he had sent to the King of Spain 68 ‘Kongelige Breve og Befalinger til Christopher Walchendorff fra 1558 til 1600’, DM, Series 2, 1 (1794), 143, Frederik to Valkendorf, 22 December 1585. 69 BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 229, 240, Willoughby to Ségur, 24 December 1585 and 20 January 1586. 70 Erklerung aus was Vrsachen die Königin in Engelland, den beschwerten vnd bedruckten Niederlendern etlich Kriegs Volck zu hülff geschickt (Copenhagen, 1586), a translation of A Declaration of the cavses mooving the qveene of England to giue aide to the Defence of the People afflicted and oppressed in the lowe Countries (London, 1585). See P.M. Stolpe, Dagspressen i Danmark, dens Vilkaar og Personer indtil Midten af det attende Aarhundrede (4 vols, Copenhagen, 1878–82), vol. 1, p. XV. 71 Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 406, rumors from Spain, February 1586; Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 597, Lord North to Burghley, 2 May 1586; Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 659, foreign intelligence, May/June 1586.

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to know how conformable he would be to his request in those points her Majesty setteth down; but as it is, I hope God will continue his mind so well affected as I left him, that good success shall follow.’ Heinrich Rantzau had intimated to Willoughby that Spain and her allies would do their best to weaken Frederik’s resolve. The queen would have to take action to show the Dane that his offer was taken seriously.72 It was a promising start to a relationship that would never be fully consummated. Willoughby and Leicester understood what the Danish king was offering to their royal mistress: not a resolution to make war upon Spain (or France) immediately, but rather the recommendation that all avenues towards a peaceful resolution of the religious struggles be explored first, even if only as a matter of show. On the other side of the Channel, however, Frederik’s proposition was misinterpreted as a promise to go to war at a time of Elizabeth’s choosing. It was by no means the first time that the Tudor court would dangerously misread Frederik’s intentions; it would not be the last.

72 Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 133, Leicester to Walsingham, 22 February 1586; Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 433, Willoughby to Walsingham, 12 March 1586. The only published account of the Willoughby mission in the secondary literature is in Stone, Palavicino, pp. 115–20; it should be used with caution.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE THIRD PERIL, 1586–1588

The security of all the Christian reformed churches makes it absolutely necessary that we muster as much secular might as is possible, so that the arrogance of the papists, like a pernicious fire that expands and [threatens] to take hold of a neighbour’s house, might be warded off. Frederik II, 15871 I pray God, Your Majesty may hold good and stryckt amyty with that king [Frederik II]; he ys ye fyttest for ye of all others and lett no men perswade you otherwyse and Your Majesty must use him kindly. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1587 2

In traditional Danish historiography, Frederik II is renowned for several qualities and achievements, nearly all of them of dubious merit: a predilection for war, especially early in his reign; lack of moderation in drink; low intelligence and weak governance; and a well-intentioned if unsuccessful desire to mediate confessional disputes throughout Europe in the latter part of his reign. Thanks to recent attempts to ‘resurrect’ Frederik’s deplorable reputation, nearly all of these assumptions about the king—deeply entrenched in Danish historical literature, but based in the main on little or no evidence—have been pushed aside in favour of a more deeply nuanced view of the father of Christian IV. Instead, Frederik II is now generally portrayed as a competent administrator, who—after 1570, at least—ruled Denmark during its most prosperous and peaceful decades in the early modern period, who hoped to adjudicate the internecine confessional struggles in western Europe as he carried out a thoroughgoing reform of his state church at home. But even this portrayal of Frederik II is flawed. For Frederik, mediation of religious controversies was a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and the role as mediator was not one that he 1 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 416v–17v, Frederik II to Joachim Friedrich of Magdeburg, Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg, and Wilhelm IV, 28 June 1587. 2 H. Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley Graaf van Leycester en andere documenten betreffende zijn gouvernement-generaal in de Nederlanden 1585–1588 (3 vols, Utrecht, 1931), vol. 3, p. 245, Leicester to Elizabeth I, 15 October 1587.

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actively courted. In defending his realms against what he saw as the pernicious influence of the Concord, the king unwittingly carved out for himself a reputation as a Protestant leader who yearned for a reconciliation between Lutherans and Calvinists. He did indeed hope for this, but only as a means of combatting Catholicism on an international level. He preached religious toleration to other sovereigns, both Lutheran and Catholic, but by no means could Frederik be said to have been an advocate of toleration at home. Outward conformity, not heterodoxy, was what Frederik sought to achieve within the Oldenburg state. While the king viewed international cooperation with Calvinist communities as vital to the defense of the true faith against the encroachments of post-Tridentine Romanism, Calvinists and other non-Lutherans were not welcome within Denmark—unless they at least made the pretense of being good and obedient Lutherans. The dictates of this confessional ‘security policy’ similarly motivated Frederik II’s offers to help settle the conflicts in France and the Netherlands through mediation in 1586 and 1587. The king’s words and actions indicate that his proffered services as mediator were not meant to be taken at face value. Frederik II did indeed want the wars between Catholics and Protestants to come to an end, but the peace he envisioned was one that was upheld through force or at least the threat of force. The result of this policy was that Denmark did indeed enjoy a prolonged period of peace, starting in 1571, but the kingdom came very close to the brink of war, especially so during the last two years of Frederik’s life.

To spare the blood of thousands . . . Frederik II’s anti-Catholic foreign policy had so far been a subtle one. While Elizabeth provoked Spain through her open support for the Dutch, Frederik ‘would [rather] lie under the floor and make Friesland and the other territories more powerful’.3 The surprising offer he made to Lord Willoughby de Eresby at Kronborg in Christmas 1585 was the closest he had come to promising to go to war on behalf of a fellow Protestant sovereign. The king was not about to embark upon such a dangerous path alone. A coalition of German Protestant 3 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 296–7, Dr. Christoph Ehem, Johann Casimir’s chancellor, to Georg von Sayn-Witgenstein, provost at Köln cathedral, 17 October 1585.

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princes was still a vital part of Danish foreign policy. Undeterred by the failure of every attempt to do this in the four decades since the tragic conclusion of the Schmalkaldic War, the king redoubled his diplomatic efforts in the Empire. There was some reason for optimism here; the death of his sister Anna of Saxony the previous October presaged further political and confessional changes within electoral Saxony. Only three months after Anna’s death, August remarried. His bride, Agnes Hedewig of Anhalt, was the daughter of Prince Joachim Ernst of Anhalt, an associate of princes like Johann Casimir and Wilhelm of Hessen. It was rumoured that August’s young wife was transforming him into a radical himself, or at least making the elector more anti-Catholic and less anti-Calvinist; the irascible old elector, it was said, had even given signs of encouragement to Ségur, and had lodged the French ambassador in sumptuous quarters in the electoral residence at Dresden.4 It was a moot point, for only a few weeks later, on 11 February 1586, August followed his first wife to the grave. His successor was his eldest son, now Elector Christian I (1586–91). Frederik genuinely mourned the passing of his old companion and brother-in-law, but Christian I’s succession was a decided diplomatic boon, for the new elector was said to have Calvinist sympathies.5 In the king’s eyes—and in the eyes of many of his contemporaries—Calvinist meant militant; hence it was assumed that Saxony would side with Johann Casimir and his allies, and that the lesser German princes would follow Christian’s lead. The Danish king wasted no time. As he offered Christian I his condolences over the death of August, Frederik reminded his nephew of the blood ties that bound Saxony and Denmark together, and of the common determination of Spain, the papacy, and the ‘so-called Holy League’ in France to enforce the Tridentine decrees throughout Europe. Observing that both England and Spain were preparing for war, and that he was prepared to close off the Sound to Spain if need be, the king

4

Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 133, Leicester to Walsingham, 22 February 1586. 5 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1584–85, fol. 417–19, Frederik to Ulrich, 20 October 1585; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 389–91, Horatio Palavicino to Ségur, 15 June 1586. There is a good summary of Christian I’s early confessional inclinations in Karlheinz Blaschke, ‘Religion und Politik in Kursachsen 1586–1591’, in Heinz Schilling (ed.), Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland—Das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation” (Gütersloh, 1986), pp. 79–85.

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pointed out that a major war was brewing; the German princes would be involved whether they liked it or not.6 Frederik II did not wait for Christian I’s reply, nor for any sign that a German princely alliance would be feasible. He instead made immediate preparations for the three diplomatic missions that would set the mediation process in motion: first, to Elizabeth I, to discuss in detail the offer the king had made to Willoughby in late December; second, to Philip II, to make formal offer of his services as mediator and to present his terms for peace in the Netherlands; and finally to Henry III, to determine if the French king could be cajoled or pressured into granting religious liberty to the Huguenots. Frederik pinned his highest hopes on the embassy to England, which is probably why it proved to be such a disappointment. It was certainly the most lavish. No single diplomatic errand of Frederik’s entire reign was so carefully prepared. No expense was spared; Leicester pronounced it ‘the greatest that euer went out of the east countreys’.7 Frederik chose Heinrich Ramel for the job. Ramel was the most experienced diplomat in Danish service; he was also renowned for his linguistic skills, and he had been one of the few—perhaps the only one—who had been privy to all the details of the negotiations with Willoughby. Because of the sensitive nature of the mission—any discussion that involved the possibility of closing off the Sound was bound to raise eyebrows—the king tried his best to shroud Ramel’s departure in secrecy: the king temporarily halted all shipping bound for Dutch or English ports until twelve hours after Ramel’s departure, so that no word of the embassy would leak before Ramel was safely in English waters.8 The Ramel embassy was intended to be a royal spectacle as much as it was a diplomatic errand, a visible display of Danish military strength and of the king’s majesty. Ramel’s entourage of some two hundred persons, which included a company of musketeers in full royal livery, sailed for England aboard Denmark’s three newest and finest warships: Gideon (34–38 guns), Josafat (50 guns), and Rafael 6 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 28–31, 36–9, Frederik to Christian I of Saxony, 5 March and 26 March 1586. 7 Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, pp. 259–60, Leicester to Walsingham, 6 May 1586. 8 Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfield House (24 vols, London, 1873–1976), vol. 3, p. 139, Arthur Sendye to Walsingham, 20 April 1586.

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(18–32 guns). Ramel’s arrival was clearly intended to impress. After a voyage made rough by foul weather, the flotilla moored in the Thames on 6 May 1586, and two days later Ramel was received at the Tower. For her part, Elizabeth was no less determined to show off the dignity and splendour of her court. Prior to his audience with the queen, the ambassador was treated to a church service and a banquet at Greenwich, in the company of such dignitaries as Lord Admiral Howard and Lord Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports. The court staged more common entertainments for Ramel’s benefit as well, including bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and the unique spectacle of ‘the horsse with the ape on his backe’.9 Though these expressions of mutual joy over the new and favourable turn in Anglo-Danish relations must have come as a relief to both sides, the celebrations were a bit premature, as Ramel’s stay in England did not live up to the hyperbole that had preceded it. Through Ramel, Frederik II expressed moral solidarity with Elizabeth I in her struggle against Spain: the Spanish presence in the Netherlands was a threat to the security of both England and Denmark; the Dutch deserved assistance also for reasons of ‘Christian empathy’. In his instructions to Ramel, the king characterised the revolt of the Netherlands as a ‘defensive war’. Ramel gave a fine speech on the subject, declaring Denmark’s intent to help England, ‘lest the Enemy of Mankind [Philip II] should any longer water the Seed of War, which he had sown in the Netherlands, with the Bloud of men’.10 But there was little discussion of the things that Frederik had promised to Willoughby at Kronborg the previous December. Ramel reminded the queen about the Speyer treaty of 1544, which prohibited Denmark from making any league against Spain, and showed great reluctance to close the Sound specifically to Spanish shipping for fear of breaking this treaty. Apparently, Ramel hinted at his master’s willingness to close the Sound to all outbound shipments of grain and foodstuffs, but he recognised that this would cause economic distress to all nations that depended on Baltic grain, not least England and the Dutch rebels themselves. Ramel offered Frederik’s services as mediator, but there was no mention of direct military aid for the war against Spain.11 9 Jensen, ‘Truslen’, pp. 255–6, 273–4; Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1808), vol. 4, pp. 394–5. 10 Camden, History, p. 331. 11 RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.10: Frederik’s instructions for Ramel, 19 April 1586; Ramel to Frederik, 23 April, 26 April, and 13 May 1586.

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Taken together, the Ramel embassy and the response to the Willoughby mission constitute a perfect example of what Frederik II’s hopeful allies found to be so frustrating about Danish foreign policy in the 1580s: bold and warlike intent, later conditioned by cautious reflection. Walsingham believed, and probably with good reason, that the king stood back a little from his earlier offer to bar Spanish and French trade from the Baltic because of his reluctance to alienate his Council of State. Frederik may have made foreign policy unfettered by his Council, but he was still sensitive to the concerns of his conciliar aristocracy, many of whom might have been anti-Spanish but were not yet ready to risk war with Spain. The fact that Elizabeth did not venture any offers of assistance to Denmark should it come to a Spanish war—either in men, money, or ships— did not help Ramel. There were those, like Walsingham, who still took Ramel’s embassy as a good sign. Walsingham believed that Frederik II was still inclined to help England, and deserved to be encouraged; Leicester remained as enthusiastic about the Danish king as ever. It may be that Frederik was unwilling to make any public commitment to England, for as late as September 1586 Leicester was under the impression that Frederik was ready to send several thousand troops to the Netherlands, a sign of the king’s ‘good devotion’ to Elizabeth and her cause.12 Not all of Elizabeth’s servants were so generous or patient as Walsingham and Leicester, however, and Frederik’s reluctance to come out openly in support of English foreign policy would help give rise to a new species of distrust in the months to come. The aim and intent of Danish foreign policy should not be measured solely by the yardstick of the Ramel embassy. The choice of words used by Ramel and by the king were nothing less than a public declaration that Spain was the acknowledged enemy of all Protestant states, including Denmark. Frederik’s approach to Philip II, moreover, which occurred simultaneously with the mission to England, revealed the Dane to be anything but an impartial spectator, much less a friend to Spain. While Ramel visited England with all of the pomp and martial display that Denmark could muster, a single and relatively unimportant Danish courtier brought nothing more to Philip II than a straightforward, even curt, letter from Frederik II. Wilhelm von der Wentze,

12 Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 653, Walsingham to Stafford, 23 May 1586; Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, pp. 407–8, Leicester to Walsingham, 4 September 1586.

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an ordinary courtier and one of the king’s hunting companions ( Jagtjunker), arrived in Madrid in late May 1586. Wentze brought no warships or crowd of distinguished guests with him, only his master’s unadorned proposal: to end the war in the Netherlands and to defuse the impending clash with England through Danish mediation. ‘We do not wish to dispute the truth or falseness of the Roman religion’, Frederik announced to Philip, but rather to put such things in their proper place. It is with terror and pity that a Christian heart hears that so many thousands, even tens of thousands, of people should lose their lives, property, and blood, only because of their religious opinions, about which they doubtless (because they have suffered so many misfortunes on account of [these opinions], and they scarcely notice that everything that was valuable, noble, and lovely in this world has been blown before the wind) are entirely in earnest, and must keep their convictions in their hearts, their consciences, and before the law . . .

Obviously the Dutch Protestants, Frederik II argued, would not compromise on issues of faith, and were prepared to lose everything if need be. Frederik went on to lecture Philip about the duties of a true Christian monarch: that issues of faith could not be resolved with the sword; that the example of other monarchs—Frederik cited the actions of Emperor Maximilian II in particular—demonstrated the political efficacy of allowing freedom of conscience; that the papacy was exploiting religious conflict for its own gain. Imploring the Spanish king to follow the policies of his father, Charles V, in allowing the Netherlands their ‘ancient liberties’, freedom of conscience and freedom from military occupation, Frederik offered his services as mediator.13 Frederik’s letter to Philip II, as Frede P. Jensen has pointed out, had a patronising tone that was absent in the embassy sent to England. The method of its delivery did not give the impression that Frederik expected to be seen as an impartial mediator. At any rate, it is highly unlikely that Philip II would be interested in a peace settlement mediated by Denmark, especially given the terms that Frederik proposed. With Parma in command, Spain was at the peak of its success in quelling the rebellion in the Netherlands, and Philip II was too determined to press on with a war against England to contemplate 13 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 42–50, Frederik to Philip II, 1 April 1586.

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such a humiliating conclusion to his endeavors. Denmark’s military strength was not enough to compel Philip to rethink his policies.14 Moreover, Philip II had no reason to trust Danish mediation. In October 1585, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Bernardino de Mendoza, had reported that a Danish embassy had gone to Edinburgh to propose an Anglo-Danish-Scottish alliance directed against Spain. By the time Wentze had arrived in Madrid, Mendoza had informed his king about the Ramel embassy in England, claiming that Frederik had promised to make war on Spain if Philip rejected the proposed peace settlement.15 Philip treated the Danish offer accordingly. He did not grant Wentze a personal audience, but delegated to Cardinal Granvelle the task of meeting with him. Wentze returned to Denmark with no reply from Philip. Instead, Philip passed the Danish proposal on to Parma in Brussels, allowing Parma to pursue this if he perceived any advantage in doing so, but making it clear that the terms Frederik II offered were unacceptable. To the Danish king himself Philip penned a polite but carefully-worded letter of thanks. Philip reminded Frederik of the diplomatic understanding that had existed between Spain and Denmark since the Speyer treaty. Depicting the Dutch insurgents as faithless rebels against royal authority, Philip argued that the toleration of dissident religions was not commensurate with good or stable government.16 Frederik’s intent to play peacemaker between England, Spain, and the Dutch rebels was not off to a promising start, though it would be some time before the hope of a Danish-mediated peace would die out completely. In the meantime, the king had not forgotten about Navarre’s cause. In the view of most Protestant statesmen, the issue of the French succession had superceded the Dutch revolt in international significance Frederik certainly felt that way. During the last three years of his life, whenever the king tried to urge the German 14 Lefèvre (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II, vol. 3, p. 80, Philip II to Parma, 7 February 1586. 15 Alexandre Teulet (ed.), Relations politiques de la France et de l’Espagne avec l’Écosse au XVI e siècle (5 vols, Paris, 1862), vol. 5, pp. 342–4, Bernardino de Mendoza to Philip II, 16 July 1585; Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 3, p. 582, Mendoza to Philip II, 30 May 1586. 16 RAK TKUA/SD/Spanien A.I.1, Philip II to Frederik, 22 July 1586; HHStA Staatenabteilung Spanien: Diplomatische Korrespondenz 11 Konvolut 6, Khevenhüller to Rudolf II, 17 June and 26 July 1586 NS; Poullet (ed.), Granvelle, vol. 12, pp. 451–2, Philip II to Parma, 18 July 1586; Lefèvre (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II, vol. 3, p. 156, Philip II to Parma, 19 October 1586.

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princes to unite in defense of Protestantism, it was the plight of the Huguenots to which he pointed as the greatest threat to international peace. Frederik never explained exactly why this was so. Perhaps it was that he feared French reprisals far less than he did the wrath of Philip II; perhaps he sensed that his Council of State felt the same way; perhaps he thought that the German princes, like Saxony, were more likely to be moved to action by Navarre than by the Dutch. Any such interpretation would, of course, be nothing more than speculation. Frederik’s correspondence does indicate, however, that he had a greater personal interest in the unrest in France. The Guise faction—who appear in the king’s letters as the authors of all that was wrong in France—was intimately tied to the house of Lorraine, a dynasty that had plagued Frederik ever since he ascended the throne of Denmark. Accordingly, Frederik II’s mediation offer to Henry III of France actually preceded those he made to England and Spain. Frederik dispatched two ambassadors, Heinrich Rantzau’s son Breide and Dr. Veit Winsheim, a jurist and secretary in the German Chancery, to bring his proposals to the Valois court in February 1586. Their message to Henry III was very similar to that later presented to Philip II: a formal offer of Danish diplomatic assistance in resolving the conflict with the Huguenots, accompanied by a series of stern, patronising lectures on the obligation of a Christian monarch to safeguard the liberties and promote the welfare of his subjects. Frederik suggested that Henry III consider implementing a religious peace patterned on the 1555 settlement in the Empire. Perhaps the Augsburg ‘system’ hardly recommended itself as a model worthy of emulation, but it would offer decided advantages to the Huguenots. Since the Treaty of Nemours in July 1585, it was illegal for Protestants to practice their religion anywhere within France, and a peace modelled after Augsburg could at least grant the Huguenots a permanent measure of official toleration. Unlike in his approach to the Spanish king, Frederik showed little reserve in his message to the Valois. He admonished Henry III about the dangers and consequences of collaboration with the papacy; he scolded Henry for breaking his promises of toleration to the Huguenots; he warned that further persecution of French Protestants would likely result in foreign military intervention in France, first and foremost from the German princes. Rantzau and Winsheim did not accomplish much. Henry III granted them two

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audiences in mid-April 1586; he treated the ambassadors graciously, lavishing them with banquets and compliments. But the French king’s reply—he did nothing more than to express friendship for Denmark and to promise to take Frederik’s ‘friendly and brotherly warnings’ into consideration—was vague. Rantzau and Winsheim characterised this scornfully as a hofantwort—a polite but meaningless answer.17 It is probable that this was, in fact, precisely the kind of answer that Frederik II expected and desired—an excuse for action, in other words, rather than an earnest attempt at resolving conflict through peaceful means. The instructions given to Rantzau and Winsheim were worded in such a way as to almost guarantee failure at the Valois court. The behavior of the two ambassadors was similarly strange for two experienced diplomats who hoped to get a positive answer to their proposals. Edward Stafford, Elizabeth I’s agent in Paris, met with the Danish ambassadors on several occasions, offering his advice on how best to win over Henry III. Much to Stafford’s frustration and chagrin, Rantzau and Winsheim flatly refused to take advantage of the Englishman’s suggestions, which were quite reasonable and based on Stafford’s extensive experience in French politics. They declined to make minor editorial changes that would have made their speeches more agreeable to the king; they refused to request an audience with Catherine de’ Medici, a neglect that could be taken as an insult; they would not depart from the very specific and limited instructions that had been given to them by their king. Even worse was the way that they casually spouted threats when in the presence of French courtiers and ministers during the banquets given in their honour. ‘If the king will not make peace then he shall see how the Germans will set things straight with a rod of iron’, Winsheim proclaimed openly, assuring all who would listen that Navarre had no lack of potential benefactors within the Empire. These were not the words of men—or of a king— who genuinely wished to make peace; they were the words of a king who wanted peace to fail. Stafford may have been a biased observer: from 1587 he would be serving Philip II as a spy, and was perhaps

17 RAK TKUA/AD/1:112 (Instructiones, Werbunge), fol. 66v–74, instructions for Breide Rantzau and Veit Winsheim, 8 February 1586; RAK TKUA/SD/Frankrig A.II.6, Rantzau and Winsheim to Frederik, 20 May 1586; Pierre de l’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux de Pierre de l’Estoile (5 vols, Paris, 1875), vol. 2, p. 334, entry for 24 April 1586.

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already in Spanish pay in 1586. Though Stafford’s questionable loyalties may have tinged his reports, he stood to gain nothing—from England or from Spain—by misrepresenting the attitude of the Danish ambassadors.18

Towards Lüneburg The Danish embassy to France attracted the interest of the German princes, especially the radicals, far more than did the missions to England and Spain. The fate of Navarre was of great concern to men like Wilhelm IV of Hessen and Johann Casimir, not only because of their sympathy for Calvinism but also because of their physical proximity to the French frontier. Heinrich Rantzau had informed Wilhelm IV of the diplomatic mission to France well before it was sent in March 1586, arranging it so that the Danish ambassadors would pass through the Palatinate and Hessen en route to Denmark after their meeting with Henry III.19 Breide Rantzau and Veit Winsheim were treated to a hero’s welcome first by Johann Casimir at Kaiserslautern, then by the Hessian landgrave at Kassel. Ségur, too, was anxious to hear of what the mission had accomplished in Paris, and rushed from Hamburg to meet with the two diplomats. Rantzau and Winsheim told all three of their hosts precisely what they wanted to hear: that the embassy had been a failure, that Henry III was not inclined to tolerate the Huguenots or to recognise Navarre as his successor to the French throne.20 The failure of the Danish embassy to France in 1586 was a timely opportunity rather than a setback for Navarre’s friends in the Empire. To Frederik II, it constituted irrefutable proof that ‘the Roman Antichrist, our declared enemy and that of all Christians, has endeavored so fiercely, seeking all ways and means, that he might strengthen his godless empire, so that he can suppress and extirpate all Christians

18 Cal. SP For., vol. 20, pp. 566–7, Stafford to Walsingham, 23 April 1586. On Stafford’s treason, see Parker, Grand Strategy, pp. 221–3. 19 BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 293–4, Heinrich Rantzau to Ségur, 5 April 1586; StAM 4f. Frankreich 675, Rantzau to Wilhelm IV, 17 February 1586; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, p. 374, Johann Casimir to Frederik II, 6 May 1586. 20 StAM 4f. Frankreich 675, Johan von Rolhausen and Hans Ludwig von Harstall to Wilhelm IV, 12 May 1586; StAM 4f. Frankreich 683, Dr. Johann Gruys to Wilhelm IV, 23 May 1586; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 734 n. 2.

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and all those who would reject his doctrines’.21 Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV, aided by Ségur (and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth’s agent Palavicino), had not wavered in their advocacy of German military aid to Navarre. All three continued to press the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg for support through the winter of 1585–86. The change of regime in Saxony that February had been an encouraging sign, but the failure of the Danish embassy was perhaps even more valuable to them. Now they could make the argument that a peaceful diplomatic solution had been tried and was found wanting. Saving Navarre—and by the logic of the ‘domino theory’ the entire Protestant cause in Europe—would require at least the threat of force; that, in turn, would require a Protestant coalition within the Empire, affiliated with England and Denmark. Wilhelm and Johann Casimir unashamedly exaggerated the details of the Rantzau-Vinsheim embassy, claiming that Henry III had treated the Danish ambassadors in a ‘shameful’ and ‘contemptuous’ fashion. The time would soon come when Navarre’s supporters would get a chance to see if the Protestant electors found any merit to their arguments. For years, those who advocated a Protestant coalition had endeavored to bring the major Protestant Reichsfürsten together for a personal meeting, in hopes that this would bring more substantive results than the endless stream of ambassadors and agents that flowed from court to court in the late 1570s and early 1580s. Their patience paid off in the spring of 1586. That April, the new and more sympathetic elector of Saxony informed Johann Casimir that he would be willing to participate in such a conference. Where Saxony led, the other Protestant states followed, and—together with Wilhelm IV— Johann Casimir began to make tentative arrangements for a meeting that summer, to be held in the Lower Saxon town of Langensalza.22 The conference that Johann Casimir envisioned was to something of a departure from those proposed earlier. It was not to be a ‘general synod’ by any means; indeed, theologians would not be welcomed. The Palatine regent hoped that a personal meeting between the foremost Protestant princes and their principal advisers would be able to focus exclusively on the security issues presented by a resurgent

21 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 83v–6, Frederik to Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg, 20 May 1586. 22 StAM 4f. Pfalz 209, Johann Casimir to Wilhelm IV, 13 April and 5 May 1586.

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Catholicism, without dissolving into a pointless doctrinal free-for-all between Lutherans and Calvinists.23 It was a good idea, and with Saxon backing it found an unprecedented degree of support among the Protestant princes. By June, the rulers of Saxony, Brandenburg, Anhalt, Hessen, BraunschweigLüneburg, and several lesser princes had agreed to attend. At first, there was no mention of Danish participation in the proposed conference at Langensalza. On his own initiative, Frederik had been trying to get the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony together for a personal meeting at his castle at Segeberg in Holstein. This never came to pass; but either Frederik must have invited himself to the conference organised by Johann Casimir, or he must have been invited, for by early July 1586 the two proposed meetings had merged into one. This conference, scheduled to take place at the city of Lüneburg in late July 1586, would be the first meeting of the major Protestant princes of the Empire since the Naumburg Fürstentag of 1561.24 The outlook for a successful conference at Lüneburg was promising. In addition to advantage brought about by the change in Saxon leadership, the Danish king had also demonstrated an unprecedented degree of militancy. The offer of military support that he had made to Willoughby the previous December was now well known outside of England. In private letters to Wilhelm IV, Heinrich Rantzau had even begun to discuss the funding of a hypothetical German force to be sent to Navarre’s aid, to which—he asserted—his king would be willing and able to contribute 40,000 Reichsthaler, towards the total of 200,000 Reichsthaler that Rantzau considered to be necessary for raising an effective army.25 After a leisurely two-week journey from Haderslev, Frederik II arrived in Lüneburg on 16 July 1586. Neither Kaas nor any of his ministers accompanied him; only a handful of secretaries from the German Chancery, like Hans Blome, made the trip. Within three days most of the other invited princes—Christian I of Saxony, Johann Georg

23

StAM 4f. Pfalz 209, Johann Casimir to Anhalt, 22 June 1586, and Johann Casimir to Wilhelm IV, 22 June 1586. 24 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 94v–6, 100–1, Frederik to Christian I, 4 June and 11 June 1586. Tjaden, ‘Frederic II’, p. 371, claims that Palavicino organised the conference at Lüneburg. This seems highly doubtful; Palavicino knew little of the conference before it took place, his name was never mentioned in connection with the conference, and he did not attend. 25 StAM 4f. Frankreich 675, Rantzau to Wilhelm IV, 10 March 1586.

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of Brandenburg, Joachim Ernst of Anhalt, Wilhelm IV of Hessen, and Margrave Joachim Friedrich of Brandenburg, the Administrator of Magdeburg—had arrived as well. Johann Casimir, for reasons he did not disclose, pointedly absented himself, perhaps recognising that his presence might create some friction with his Saxon brother-inlaw.26 The princes attending tried, in vain, to keep the details of their discussions a secret; they excluded even their ministers from the more substantive and sensitive negotiations. The attendees went over a number of issues in Imperial politics: Wilhelm IV put in a plea for the liberation of the captive Saxon duke Johann Friedrich II, and someone apparently again proposed Frederik II’s candidacy as King of the Romans and successor to the Imperial throne. But in the main the discussion focused on the formation of a coalition and the provision of military aid to Navarre. Here Frederik II took control of the proceedings. Reminding his colleagues of the dangers that a League victory in France would present to the Protestant states of the Empire, he intimated that he had brought along 50,000 Reichsthaler in cash. He would gladly hand over this money to Ségur on behalf of Navarre if the other princes would make some financial contribution to the cause. In this he was to be disappointed. Wilhelm IV, and possibly the prince of Anhalt and the administrator of Magdeburg as well, was ready to contribute, but Christian I unexpectedly wavered. The Saxon elector agreed that the Huguenots were in danger, and that Henry III had demonstrated neither ability nor inclination to stand up to League and Spanish pressure. Since the princes agreed that Henry III had good intentions, and continued to make war upon the Huguenots only because he was forced to by Spain and the Guise, it was resolved to send a German princely delegation to Paris to give the French king one last chance.27 Christian I hoped that perhaps such a delegation might be able to succeed where the Winsheim-Rantzau embassy had failed; either way, he would wait upon the results of this endeavor before he would commit himself to any belligerent action. Johann Georg of Brandenburg, predictably, echoed Christian’s

26 Ulrich of Mecklenburg was absent, too, but not for lack of trying. RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.9, Ulrich to Frederik, 8 July 1586. 27 This had been discussed at the Reichsdeputationstag at Worms earlier in the year. Thomas Fröschl (ed.), Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Reichsversammlungen 1556–1662. Der Reichsdeputationstag zu Worms 1586 (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 127–31, instructions from August of Saxony to his delegates, 23 December 1585.

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passive response, though shortly after the meeting ended the Brandenburger assured Frederik that he hoped to aid the king ‘not merely in words and letters’, but also ‘in deeds’ should the opportunity present itself. The conference concluded on 22 July, having neither concluded an alliance nor organised any assistance for Navarre.28 The failed Lüneburg conference demonstrated two things: first, that while Christian I—unlike his father—viewed the Huguenots as something other than heretic rebels who deserved their fate, seeing them as the hapless victims of a papist conspiracy, so far his foreign policy was as cautious as August’s had been. This would change—too late, as it turned out—but for now the Saxon elector would not undertake anything that might offend the emperor.29 Second, the meeting confirmed that Frederik II was truly committed to the Protestant cause in Germany and in France. He had pledged financial support—albeit conditionally—to the cause, and was fast becoming the most outspoken critic of Spanish and Catholic aggression in France. Prior to the Lüneburg meeting, even Johann Casimir had questioned the seriousness of Frederik’s intent; the course of the conference quickly removed all doubt. To Johann Casimir, Wilhelm IV, and even Ségur, Frederik II was the only foreign prince who truly supported Navarre. In Ségur’s eyes, Elizabeth I’s vacillation rendered her promises of English assistance meaningless.30 As a result, Frederik drew closer, politically and personally, to the radical princes, especially Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel. The two were already well acquainted, and were even distantly related by marriage: Wilhelm’s sister Christina was married to Duke Adolf of Holstein, Frederik II’s uncle. After Lüneburg, Frederik II and Wilhelm IV became fast friends, a bond no doubt encouraged by Heinrich Rantzau. Wilhelm would become Frederik’s 28 Gräf, Konfession und internationales System, p. 154; StAM 4f. Frankreich 643, Ségur to Wilhelm IV, 22 July 1586; StAM 4f. Sachsen-Gotha 25: Wilhelm IV to Johann Casimir, 14 July 1586; Dr. Wilhelm Rudolf Meckbach to Wilhelm IV, 12 July 1586; Wilhelm IV’s instructions for Meckbach, 17 July 1586; StAM 4f. SachsenGotha 33, Wilhelm IV to Ludwig of Hessen-Marburg, 1 August 1586; RAK TKUA/ AD/AusReg 1586–88: fol. 135v–9, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 24 July 1586; fol. 133–5, Frederik to Christian I and Johann Georg of Brandenburg, 23 July 1586; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Brandenburg A.I.2, Johann Georg to Frederik, 27 August 1586. 29 Thomas Klein, Der Kampf um die zweite Reformation in Kursachsen 1586–1591 (Cologne, 1962), pp. 129–33; GSPK I. HA Rep.14 Nr.8b Fasz.1, Christian I to Johann Georg of Brandenburg, 23 April 1586. 30 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 385–6, Johann Casimir to Walsingham, 26 May 1586.

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confidante and most prolific correspondent in the Empire for the remainder of the king’s life. By early 1587, the two princes were discussing the possibility of a marriage alliance between Frederik’s daughter Augusta and Wilhelm’s eldest son Moritz. The degree of their mutual affection is mirrored in the king’s touching postscripts, written in his own hand, with which he concluded his letters to Wilhelm after the Lüneburg meeting. These closing words—‘Your Highness’ true friend and cousin as long as I live’—were a rare token of friendship from a king who was so self-conscious about his writing. Previously Frederik had only honoured August of Saxony and Ulrich of Mecklenburg in this way; now he bestowed this honour upon Wilhelm IV as well.31 Despite the princes’ best efforts at secrecy, word of the proceedings at Lüneburg soon leaked out. The simple fact that the Protestant electors were meeting with the king of Denmark and Navarre’s ambassador made them suspect, but an intelligence leak ensured that the rest of Europe would know of the negotiations. A printed broadside, published in Lübeck at the beginning of August, provided a detailed account of the meeting.32 Dançay, in a subtle attempt to put pressure on Henry III, informed the French court about the meeting in August 1586.33 Within days, the results of the Lüneburg conference were known in London and Amsterdam; by October, the most prominent Catholic leaders—including Henry III of France, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria, Parma, the emperor, and even the pope—were acquainted with what had happened there. Curiously, the chief point of interest about the conference was not the proposed Protestant alliance, but rather what was seen as Frederik II’s bid to become emperor— something that could not have done much credit to the king with either his friends or his enemies. The newly-crowned Pope Sixtus V offered to help Rudolf II thwart the Dane’s ‘plan’ to gain the Imperial

31 StAM 4f. Frankreich 717, Frederik to Wilhelm IV, 10 January, 26 February, and 12 June 1587. On Wilhelm and his foreign policy, see: Gerhard Menk, ‘Landgraf Wilhelm IV. von Hessen-Kassel, Franz Hotman und die hessisch-französischen Beziehungen vor und nach der Bartholomäusnacht’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte 88 (1980–81), 55–82; Senta Schulz, Wilhelm IV., Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel (1532–1592) (Leipzig, 1941). 32 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 397–8. 33 ‘Correspondance’, pp. 336, 340, Dançay to Henry III and Catherine de’ Medici, 18 August 1586; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, p. 71, Johann Schulte to Burghley and Walsingham, 19 August 1586.

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succession.34 The general Catholic reaction was one of relief over Saxony’s caution, but Frederik could not have welcomed the unexpected attention, especially so because it painted him in an unfavourable light. Those of Navarre’s supporters who had not attended the meeting had expected much of the Lüneburg Fürstentag, and greeted the news with some dismay. ‘This meeting of thes great princes at Luneburg was noe more sudden then strange to us here’, wrote Leicester to Walsingham. ‘Litle we here but a flying tale that the king of Denmarke shalbe king of Romaines, a matter I thinke not possible, for want of some more ellectors, being but three onlie there.’35 Johann Casimir found his hopes dashed once again, but put the blame for the failure of the conference on Saxony.36 No one, though, was more disappointed in the anticlimatic Lüneburg conference than Frederik himself. The decision to wait upon the German embassy to Henry III frustrated him, especially so since his own embassy there had demonstrated—or so he felt—the futility of a diplomatic approach. Like Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV, however, Frederik was undeterred. While the Count Palatine and the Hessian landgrave resumed their wearying travels from court to court, trying in vain to patch together a coalition of lesser German princes, the king launched into even more vitriolic philippics about the Catholic threat. It should be noted that Frederik II did make a distinction, albeit a subtle one, between the two main issues addressed at Lüneburg: support for Navarre and the creation of a German Protestant coalition. The two were certainly intertwined, but one was more urgent than the other. A coalition would be part of a long-term solution to the general problem of Catholic resurgence throughout Europe, especially if such a coalition could enlist support outside of the Empire, and unquestionably a coalition would vastly increase the amount of aid he could offer to Navarre. He was willing to wait—for a little while, at least—for the conservative electors of Saxony and Brandenburg to find out that diplomatic appeals to Henry III, no matter how finely worded, 34 Joseph Alexander, Graf von Hübner, The Life and Times of Sixtus the Fifth, trans. H.E.H. Jerningham (2 vols, London, 1872), vol. 1, pp. 419–21; Hansen (ed.), Der Kampf um Köln, p. 779. 35 Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 390, Leicester to Walsingham, 7 August 1586; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/2, p. 219, Pietro Bizari to Walsingham, 7 November 1586. 36 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, p. 449, Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV to Frederik, 3 December 1586.

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would not resolve the matter in Navarre’s favour. They had agreed at Lüneburg, after all, to wait upon the outcome of the German embassy to Paris before taking any further action. Frederik honoured their decision, even though it displeased him to do so. The Huguenot cause itself, however, could not wait. Johann Casimir and Ségur urged haste before it was too late, asserting that without foreign aid the cause of Navarre would be lost; since Elizabeth I was not forthcoming with money or troops, they hoped Frederik would perhaps take her place as the champion of international Protestantism. Frederik found himself facing a dilemma: his inherent caution prevented him from intervening openly and alone in French affairs, but the need to do so, he felt, was pressing. Spain was still very much to be feared, and Philip II had a stake in the outcome of the French war; without the support of a larger Protestant coalition, Denmark would be vulnerable. Yet the king had to make some effort to assist Navarre, if only to maintain Huguenot morale. As a temporary solution in the autumn of 1586, Frederik II decided to offer covert aid to Navarre’s German protagonists. In late September 1586, Fabian von Dohna, now Johann Casimir’s second-in-command and agent in the German states, arrived in Copenhagen to plead Navarre’s cause once more.37 He was not received in the customary manner. After a meeting with Heinrich Ramel at Frederiksborg, Dohna was hurried off to ‘Warpurg’, where the king granted him a private audience. Without giving Dohna a reply, Frederik had Dohna sent to Antvorskov while he himself went to his hunting lodge at ‘Schangor’.38 Shortly thereafter, the king sent for Dohna. The accommodations were primitive but private. The king, Ramel, and Dohna were the only individuals present. It was so remote from prying eyes that Frederik dropped all the attendant ceremonial of diplomatic protocol. Upon his arrival at Schangor, the king visited Dohna in his private chambers late at night to apologise for the meanness of his quarters and to explain his unusual reception. ‘Herr Fabian’, the king said almost sheepishly to Dohna, ‘you have been sent here by two princes; unfortunately 37 StAMarburg 4f. Frankreich 675, Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV to Dohna, 15 September 1586. 38 I cannot determine the precise location of either of these lodges. The copybooks of the Danish Chancery, which usually record the king’s location on any given day, show that the king was at Gedesgaard on 18 October 1586, and then at Antvorskov on the 22nd. Both of these lodges must have been somewhere within a day’s ride of Antvorskov, and therefore were probably in the western half of Sjælland.

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you are poorly lodged, and you must not take it badly, for it cannot be otherwise’. The next day Dohna met with Frederik and Ramel, and the king poured out his frustration with Saxony and Brandenburg. He would help Navarre ‘if only the others would’; he had come to Lüneburg prepared to pay 50,000 Reichsthaler to Ségur, but with the refusal of Saxony and Brandenburg to contribute he had decided to hold on to the cash. Then Frederik did something wholly unexpected: saying that he ‘wanted to do something in Navarre’s best interests’, the king handed the astounded Dohna 25,000 Reichsthaler in cash, to use on Navarre’s behalf as he saw fit. Once dismissed, Dohna hurried across the islands to Jutland and thence south to Heidelberg, presumably bringing the royal gift to Johann Casimir.39 Frederik’s grant to Dohna was, perhaps, not enough to make or break Navarre. It was, however, a sizeable chunk of the king’s income, in a year when Frederik’s personal expenditures totalled less than 16,000 rigsdaler.40 The secrecy that attended Dohna’s meetings with the king, the ambassador’s convoluted journey from castle to castle that culminated in a personal meeting in a dilapidated hunting lodge, implies also that Frederik did not want anyone but Ramel to know about it. The unwritten silence of Frederik’s ministers and of the Council precludes a definitive analysis of the king’s actions. It could be argued, however, that Frederik—a sovereign who endeavored to rule by wellmanaged aristocratic consensus—sensed that he might be overstepping his constitutional bounds. At Lüneburg, he had suffered no qualms about publicly offering a much larger sum on the condition that the German princes also do their part, yet an offer of cash made without the promise of a Protestant coalition required a furtive approach, one made without the knowledge of anyone but a trusted German underling who was in no position to object. In short, the Council—or at least those councillors upon whom Frederik depended the most— would not grant the king carte blanche. Like the lesser German princes, they would consent to a belligerent foreign policy only if a broader coalition existed, so that Denmark would not stand alone to face the wrath of Spain and the papacy. Frederik’s contribution to Navarre was a significant token of encour39 C. Krollmann (ed.), Die Selbstbiographie des Burggrafen Fabian zu Dohna (*1550–+1621) nebst Aktenstücken zur Geschichte der Sukzession der Kurfürsten von Brandenburg in Preussen (Leipzig, 1905), pp. 59–60. 40 Grundtvig, Frederik den Andens Statshusholdning, table 17, p. clxxvii.

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agement, freely given, at a time when such encouragement was sorely needed. The project to form a German princely coalition and to defend Navarre had suffered nothing but setbacks in the months since Lüneburg. When the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg met at Küstrin in early September 1586 to discuss the impact of the French war on the Empire, Johann Casimir and Dohna attempted yet again to win the electors’ support for Navarre. Denmark, England, Hessen, Margrave Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg, and others had already pledged financial support should Saxony and Brandenburg give them so much as a nod; what were the electors waiting for? As at Lüneburg, both electors resolutely refused to take immediate action, but this time harsh words were exchanged. Christian I of Saxony, his opposition bolstered by the caution of his chancellor Nicholas Krell, could not hide his personal dislike for Johann Casimir. The Count Palatine had alienated his brother-in-law as surely as he had his father-in-law.41 Frederik II had undoubtedly learned of the Küstrin meeting at the time of Dohna’s visit to Denmark the following month, and once again he tried his hand at rousing the electors to action. By this time the fate of the German princely embassy to Henry III of France was well-known: like the earlier Danish embassy, it was a failure.42 The fact that this did not soften the electors’ steadfast refusal to help Navarre angered Frederik, and this time he addressed both Christian I and Johann Georg with the most indignant language he had ever used in an official communication. Navarre’s army was in imminent danger of collapse, and Spanish troops were reported to be within a day’s march of the river Weser; the wars in France and the Netherlands, Frederik argued, were expanding into the Empire. A diplomatic solution was now impossible. As the electors should have known from the well-publicised accounts of the recent embassy to the Valois court,43

41 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 409–11, Johann Casimir’s ‘Werbung und Beantwortung’ for Christian I and Johann Georg, 2 September 1586. On the Küstrin meeting, see Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 410 n. 2, 419–20 n. 1. 42 On the failed German embassy to Henry III, see the correspondence in: StAM 4f. Frankreich 673, HStaM 4f. Frankreich 674, HStAM 4f. Frankreich 685; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.9, Ulrich to Frederik, 13 December 1586; Chevallier, Henri III, pp. 589–90; G. Labouchère, ‘Guillaume Ancel. Envoyé résident en Allemagne (1576–1613)’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 27 (1923), 168–71. 43 Säch. HStA GH Loc.9304/8, fol. 111–13, Frederik to Christian I, 25 October 1586. See also: StAM 4f. Frankreich 675, Frederik to Christian I and Johann Georg, 13 October 1586; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 223–4, Frederik to Christian I and Johann Georg, 18 October 1586.

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chapter seven the same embassy was seated on the long bench, and they were toyed with, so that they could be taken advantage of, and [it could be] kept hidden that [the Catholics] seek the suppression not only of the king of Navarre, but rather of the entire church. . . . We have to come to the conclusion that, if the damned pope should be successful in this goal, [it will be because] a few differences of doctrine between our church and that [of the Huguenots] keep us in discord, so that these people will be persecuted—not because they are called Calvinists, but rather because they are not papists, that is to say they do not serve the revealed Antichrist and do not want to bear his yoke. And we, for their sake, await . . . the execution of the [edicts of ] the Tridentine Council, and therefore after the burning of our neighbour’s house [to await] also a similar fire started from within by the pope, after his disruptful manner. We can hope for almost nothing from France other than . . . a long and rambling answer, which Your Highness may by now have received, just as we received such [an answer] through our emissaries.

Both Christian I and Johann Georg were appropriately cowed by the tongue-lashing; their replies to Frederik were humble and conciliatory. They did, however, reveal that there was more to their reticence than a mere desire to wait upon the results of the French embassy. Christian I timidly pointed to the necessity of upholding the Augsburg settlement. If the German Protestants were able to bring about a Huguenot victory, neither the emperor nor the Catholic princes would sit by passively and allow Navarre to triumph unchallenged; the result would be a German civil war. Brandenburg’s rejoinder was more eloquent and detailed. The Huguenots, he argued, might be victims of religious persecution, but they were still rebellious subjects of a legitimate sovereign and therefore deserved no help; unnecessary wars were unchristian, and likely to incur God’s wrath; for now the attentions of the papacy were turned elsewhere, but an intervention would quickly draw papal retribution; Navarre was more concerned with securing his succession to the French throne than he was with freedom of conscience for Protestants; the Huguenots were Calvinists, as different in theology from Lutherans as were the Catholics they were fighting. More important, Navarre’s war was a foreign war, in which peace-loving German princes had no business meddling.44 The moderate Lutheran princes of lesser rank continued to follow the electors’ lead. Even Ulrich of Mecklenburg, who pre44 BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 401, fol. 383–94, Johann Georg to Frederik, 18 November 1586 (copy); Säch. HStA GH Loc.9304/8, fol. 133–6, Christian I to Frederik, 18 November 1586.

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viously had shared Frederik’s concern—though not his passion—for the fate of Navarre, felt compelled to defend the reticence of Saxony and Brandenburg to rush into a war in France. After giving his sonin-law a long-winded sermon on the magnitude of the doctrinal differences that separated Lutheran from Calvinist, he too indicated that he did not want the Lutheran princes to be the ones who broke the sacred ‘religious peace’ of Augsburg. Ulrich suggested that passivity had its advantages: ‘The papists and the Calvinists should be allowed to fight it out among themselves until they are exhausted, and we alone remain at peace. And therefore we would be dependent on neither party, until we are given good cause to defend our own true Christian religion, which we could then do with a clear conscience if we are forced to. In such a case there would be no doubt that the Holy Word of God the Almighty would safeguard us.’45 It was hard to argue with this logic. Frederik II had no counterargument to give. Despite his best efforts, not to mention the constant labours of Ségur, Johann Casimir, Wilhelm IV, Dohna, and Palavicino, and despite the passing of the Elector August, the two most prominent princes of the Empire had reverted to the old objections to intervention: distrust of Calvinists as heretical rebels, and fear of disturbing the now-shaky balance of power created at Augsburg three decades before. It is hard to see what kept the Danish king from giving up at this point, unless it was the undiminished fear of papal and Spanish aggression in the German states, following closely on the heels of Catholic triumph in France. The blandishments of the radical princes and the constant encouragement of Ségur must have soothed Frederik as well. As Wilhelm IV lauded the king,46 We must say that Your Majesty understands the Cause thoroughly, and that your intentions towards it are faithful and true. For this, God— who does not let even the gift of a drink of water given in His name go unrewarded—will richly reward Your Majesty now and in all eternity, and the members of your line who hold your royal seat will prosper for many generations. God grant that other potentates would view the common cause as you do, and would perceive—as you have demonstrated in your letters—the great . . . hatred that the pope and his

45

RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.9, Ulrich to Frederik, 31 December 1586. 46 StAM 4f. Frankreich 717: Wilhelm IV to Frederik, 20 March 1587, and the administrator of Magdeburg to Frederik, 24 November 1586. See also: Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 1, Ségur to Frederik II, 1 January 1587.

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chapter seven adherents harbour against all of our co-religionists, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, with equal zeal. We hope that this is a sign that God will preserve the [Holy] Roman Empire for us Germans for a while.

But the princes who had negotiated, feasted, and drunk so fraternally together at Lüneburg only months before were now as deeply divided as they ever had been, or ever would be. Saxony and Brandenburg refused to intervene in what they saw as a foreign war, no matter how much money or men Denmark and England promised to supply. The others—Johann Casimir, Wilhelm IV, the prince of Anhalt and the administrator of Magdeburg —formed the interventionist opposition. Johann Casimir might have been their field-marshal, but Frederik II was their leader, whether he wanted the job or not. Copies of the Dane’s defiant letters to the pusillanimous electors circulated freely between the chanceries of the activist princes as if they were inspirational writings. With Saxony and Brandenburg refusing to be party to a German military action in France, Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV soldiered on, reshaping their plans to raise a Protestant army in the Empire based primarily around Danish and English support. As late as December 1586, the Hessian chancellor Wilhelm Meckbach was confident that Frederik II would provide no less than 1000 cavalry and two regiments of infantry for a full year at his own expense.47 Frederik II did not abandon his hope for a united Protestant front, but he did not pursue it with any great ardor for several months. He had no lack of other problems confronting him. The king still hoped to force the city of Hamburg to acknowledge Danish suzerainty, over the strenuous objections of nearly all the Hanse; the dispute resulted in numerous naval confrontations on the Elbe estuary, and necessitated that Frederik maintain a measure of friendliness with the emperor. Of greater concern was the revival of a plausible Polish threat to Denmark’s dominium maris Baltici. Stefan Bathory had died childless in 1586, and of the several candidates considered by the sejm none was more potentially disruptive to Baltic peace than the leading man: Duke Sigismund, eldest son of Johan III, heir apparent to the Swedish throne, son of a Jagiello princess, and a devout Catholic. United under one crown, Sweden and Poland would constitute a real challenge to Denmark’s mastery of the Baltic; affiliated with 47 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 450–1, Wilhelm Meckbach to Wilhelm IV, 12 December 1586.

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Rome, and therefore ostensibly with Spain, this Vasa empire could easily deflate Frederik’s aspirations in the west and compromise Denmark’s territorial integrity. Frederik tried, in vain, to counter this potential threat early in 1587. When the Archduke Matthias, younger brother of Emperor Rudolf II (and later emperor himself ), paid an unexpected visit to Frederik’s court at Skanderborg in February 1587, the confessionally-flexible Habsburg discussed the possibility of his betrothal to Frederik’s eldest daughter Elisabeth.48 The plan would have proven to be at least momentarily advantageous to Danish interests, for it would have once again linked Oldenburg and Habsburg by dynastic ties, obviating the tensions between the two dynasties that had persisted since the Speyer treaty four decades before. Moreover, Matthias had demonstrated his sympathies for Protestantism, most notably through his brief career as governor-general of the rebellious Dutch provinces (1577–81), and if elected king of Poland the archduke might well have neutralised Poland as a threat to Danish security. But the match with Elisabeth never took place, and anyway Matthias was not fated to wear the Polish crown. The Poles instead elected Sigismund Vasa on 19 August 1587. The Swedish-Polish union was troubled and ineffectual from the very beginning, and would never amount to being much more than an occasional annoyance to the Oldenburg State, but in 1587 it was sufficiently frightening to compound Frederik’s already crushing burden of worries.49 Even when Frederik II did not make overt efforts at alliance-building in the Empire, the political disputes of the German princes had a way of drawing in Danish involvement. So far, Frederik had successfully eluded entanglement in any one of the host of minor constitutional and confessional disputes that pitted German Protestants against the emperor and the Catholic princes, but early in 1587 he found himself unable to do so any longer. In December 1583, less than a year after the opening phases of the dispute in Cologne, a clash of a much more prosaic nature afflicted the large and prosperous southwestern bishopric of Strassburg. In Strassburg, as at Cologne, Protestant and Catholic nobles sat side-by-side as canons 48 Bernd Rill, Kaiser Matthias. Bruderzwist und Glaubenskampf (Graz, 1999), p. 43. In his calendar, Frederik noted his discussions with ‘the emperor’s brother . . . whose name is Duke Matty Matschy’! Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 570, entry for 15 February 1587. 49 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.10, Ulrich to Frederik II, 4 May 1587 and 29 January 1588.

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in the cathedral chapter; they contributed equally to—and profitted equally from—the ecclesiastical wealth of the diocese. Following Gebhard Truchsess’ apostasy in 1583, Pope Gregory XIII had excommunicated the Protestant canons at Cologne, and the Catholic canons immediately shut out their Protestant colleagues. The Catholic canons at Strassburg followed suit. Fearing that this action was the harbinger of a Catholic takeover of the largely Protestant city, Strassburg’s municipal government sided with the deposed Protestant canons, who withdrew their allegiance to the bishop. Like Gebhard Truchsess, the Protestant canons sought to wed their cause, which had more to do with the rich revenues of the diocese than it did to religious passions, to the cause of Protestant solidarity in the Empire. The ensuing struggle—the so-called ‘chapter strife’ (Kapitelstreit) of 1583–92— was a sensitive issue, given the close proximity of Strassburg to the fighting between Navarre and the Catholic League.50 The chief proponent of the Strassburg Protestants was Joachim Ernst, prince of Anhalt, father of the same Christian of Anhalt who would play such an important role in German politics immediately prior to the Thirty Years’ War. When Joachim Ernst first approached Frederik II about the crisis in Strassburg, in the autumn of 1586, the Danish king evinced little interest in involvement. Like the Cologne War, the confessional dispute in Strassburg might have been yet another sign that the German Catholic princes, the emperor, and the pope were all working together to force the Tridentine decrees upon law-abiding German Protestants. Strassburg was, however, geographically distant from Denmark, and the conflict there was peripheral to Frederik’s main goal: the unification of the German Protestant princes in their own self-defense and for halting the Romanist advance in France. The enterprising Protestant ‘secessionists’ in the cathedral chapter found a different and much more effective way to promote their cause: offering seats on the new Protestant cathedral chapter to members of prominent princely families. By the end of 1586, they had offered canonries to younger sons of the houses of Anhalt and Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel; in January 1587, a delegation from Strassburg went north to visit the Danish court. Representing both 50 Aloys Meister, Der Strassburger Kapitelstreit 1583–1592. Ein Beitrag zu Geschichte der Gegenreformation (Strassburg, 1899), pp. 18–174. For a briefer English introduction, see: Lorna Jane Abray, The People’s Reformation. Magistrates, Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500–1598 (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 96–103.

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the Protestant faction from the cathedral chapter and the estates of Lower Alsace simultaneously, Counts Ernst of Mansfeld and Herman Adolf of Solms met with Frederik II and Heinrich Rantzau at Skanderborg. Here they offered to Frederik’s second son—Duke Ulrik, not yet nine years old—not only a canonry at Strassburg, but something far more prestigious as well: candidacy for the position of bishopadministrator of what they hoped would soon be a completely reformed Strassburg diocese.51 Solms and Mansfeld were skilled diplomatic salesmen, and their proposal was a brilliant one, for it played upon Frederik’s desire for Protestant unity while appealing to Danish dynastic interests. Germany had not yet entered the ‘golden age’ of trafficking in secularised bishoprics that would occupy the northern Lutheran princes so intently in the first two decades of the next century, but the Strassburg proposal was alluring to Frederik II for the same reasons that the next generation of princes would engage in this practice. It provided an easy way of dealing with the problems of inheritance presented by younger sons. Much earlier in the reign, Frederik II had attempted to find a Livonian patrimony for his younger brother Magnus, since a sinecure outside the realm would obviate any further partitions of the Duchies, already divided between the Danish royal line and the brothers of Christian III. Duke Ulrik was Frederik’s second son; a bishopric in southwestern Germany, especially one so rich as Strassburg, would provide Ulrik with a comfortable income while bringing greater prestige to the Oldenburg dynasty. It helped, too, that Mansfeld promoted the offer by pointing to the advantages that a securely Protestant Strassburg would give to Navarre’s cause in France. With Heinrich Rantzau’s encouragement Frederik took the bait. Ulrik was not yet of age to stand for election to such a lofty position as coadjutor of the diocese, but the king made preparations to send him to Strassburg, where he could take up his new canonry and continue his education.52 Duke Ulrik never took up his promised canonry. The little boy was seriously ill for much of 1587, and in no condition to travel such a 51 Resen, Krønicke, p. 349; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.1: Joachim Ernst of Anhalt to Frederik, 16 October 1586, Solms and Mansfeld to Frederik, 11 January 1587, and the report of Mansfeld and Solms, 8 February 1586; Meister, Kapitelstreit, pp. 175–206; Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 569, entries for 20–22 January 1587. 52 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 70–1, Mansfeld to Ramel, 16 September 1587; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.1, Rantzau to Frederik, 8 January 1587.

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long distance; moreover, his father fretted over the proximity of Strassburg to the frontier of war-torn France, where the armies of Guise and the Catholic League threatened to take their fight into Lower Alsace. Strassburg was, Frederik admitted, an ‘unsafe place’.53 Frederik’s death in April 1588 would put an end to Denmark’s involvement in the affair. While he lived, however, his interest in Strassburg never abated. The king continued his negotiations with Mansfeld and Solms when they returned to Denmark in August 1587, and he attempted to intercede with the emperor on behalf of the Protestant canons.54 As late as December 1587, Frederik was making tentative arrangements to send Ulrik to Strassburg so that the boy could complete his ‘education’.55 The dispute in the distant southwestern bishopric also breathed new life into Frederik II’s alliance project. It provided confirmation of what he had been predicting to the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg since the time of the Lüneburg conference: that the international Catholic conspiracy would not be satisfied with victories in France and the Netherlands, and intended to pick off the fragmented Lutheran estates of the Empire one by one. Previously he had shown little but scorn for the dispossessed elector of Cologne, Gebhard Truchsess, but now he viewed the situation in Cologne as being one and the same with that in Strassburg. Once again the king sounded the alarm, hoping against hope to sway Saxony and Brandenburg. If the German Protestants would unite, especially if they could do something to save Navarre, then the papacy would not be able to impose ‘the Babylonian yoke’ on any Protestant ruler; if they did nothing, then all was lost. The electors could no longer hide behind the Augsburg settlement, for that was as good as dead. ‘Our deadly enemy the Pope’ had never recognised the validity of the 1555 peace, and the Catholic princes regarded it only as a temporary expedient whose usefulness had expired. While the Protestant princes squabbled over minor points of doctrine, their Catholic adversaries in the Empire had successfully formed a coalition—the Landsberger Union, organised and led by the militantly Catholic duke of Bavaria. Nor could 53 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.3, Frederik to Wilhelm IV, 6 February 1588 (original, never sent). 54 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88: fol. 316–25, Frederik to Christian I, Johann Georg, et al., 3 February 1587; fol. 454v–64v, Frederik to Rudolf II, 9 August 1587; Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 574, entries for 2–7 August 1587. 55 ‘Nogle Kong Frederik den Andens Breve . . . angaaende Hans Sønners . . . Opdragelse’, p. 167, Frederik to Carl Brysk, 24 December 1587.

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the emperor be trusted; Maximilian II had tolerated all Christian religions, but Rudolf II did not, nor did the current emperor have any respect for ‘the ancient well-established German liberties’. Rudolf ’s complicity with Spain was obvious, for he did not even protest when Parma’s troops overran Ostfriesland—a sovereign territory within the Empire—in the winter of 1586–87. The ‘domino theory’ could not have been articulated any more eloquently. First Navarre would fall; then the lesser Lutheran states; before long the ‘pope with all his might and [body of ] adherents, both foreign and domestic’ would pay a visit to Dresden and Berlin.56 For the remainder of the winter and spring of 1587, the king continued to harangue Christian I and Johann Georg, reminding of them of the dire fate that the papist conspiracy had in store for them if they did not join with the other Protestant princes, assuring them that both he and Elizabeth I would bear the vast bulk of the costs involved if only the German princes would each make a small financial contribution. At times, Frederik could not resist the urge to resort to what can only be described as nagging. When invited to attend the christening of Christian I’s second son, the future elector Johann Georg I, in April 1587, Frederik II politely excused himself. He could not attend, he told Christian I, because there were too many troubles that required his presence at home: Spanish and other foreign troops were within striking distance of his kingdom; Spain, England, France, and the Dutch were preparing their fleets for action, so that the North Sea was no longer safe; Poland and Sweden were about to be united under one Catholic crown. Much as he would like to, the king could not in good conscience enjoy something so frivolous as a baptism when the ‘Roman Antichrist’, through ‘plots and bloodthirsty conspiracies’, was busy imposing the Tridentine decrees on good Protestants throughout Europe.57 As unlikely as it must have seemed, Frederik’s exaggerated admonitions did not fall on deaf ears. On the surface, the elector of Saxony had not strayed from his chosen course of complete neutrality since Lüneburg. In 1586, Christian I had issued a blanket prohibition on 56 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 316–25, Frederik to Christian I, Johann Georg, et al., 3 February 1587. See also: RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 338v–42, Frederik to Johann Casimir, Wilhelm IV, Christian of Anhalt, the Margrave of Ansbach, and the Administrator of Magdeburg, 20 February 1587. 57 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 373–8v, Frederik to Christian I, 26 April 1587.

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all foreign military recruitment within his realm, a policy which caused some resentment among Navarre’s supporters when the elector arrested several Huguenot recruiters in March 1587. When Frederik II approached Christian I about the situation in Strassburg, Christian had urged caution. The elector had appealed to the emperor to enforce the Augsburg settlement there, and the issue had been a major item on the agenda at the Reichsdeputationstag at Worms in 1586; Christian suggested close adherence to ‘the proper process’.58 Wilhelm IV of Hessen, disgusted with the vacillatory politics of Christian and his colleague in Brandenburg, derided the electors as ‘Ubiquitarians and Flaccianists’.59 Early that same year, however, Christian I set in motion the ecclesiastical reforms that would culminate in his personal conversion to Calvinism later in 1587. The elector and his primary accomplices, his chancellor Krell and his minister Andreas Paull, manifested a greater degree of empathy for the Huguenots in France as they drew nearer to the Reformed faith themselves.60 Frederik’s sharp chidings and the tireless diplomatic activity of Palavicino gradually wore down the elector’s objections, and in late spring he consented once again to participate in a conference of Protestant princes. This second Fürstentag, slated to take place at the Saxon town of Naumburg in June 1587, was to be a much different type of meeting than the Lüneburg conference. Reflecting a growing distrust of the emperor, the meeting was meant to be far more secretive than Lüneburg had been. Ostensibly, the Naumburg meeting of 3–8 July 1587 was intended for something other than a Protestant alliance. Instead, its advertised purpose was the renewal of the Saxon-Hessian ‘fraternal alliance’ (Erbverbrüderung) of 1457, a formal pact of friendship between the two houses, of ancient standing but now largely meaningless. The extensive invitation list, however, revealed that this meeting would be something more than just the renewal of a medieval princely bond. In addition to Elector Christian I of Saxony, Landgrave Wilhelm IV (Hessen-Kassel) and his brother Ludwig (Hessen-Marburg), most of the prominent Protestant rulers of central and eastern Germany attended as well: Elector Johann Georg of Brandenburg, Administrator 58 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.1, Christian I to Frederik, 9 March 1587. The elector of Brandenburg echoed this sentiment: RAK TKUA/ SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.3, Johann Georg to Frederik, 16 March 1587. 59 StAM 4f. Frankreich 717, Wilhelm IV to Frederik, 18 March 1587 (draft). 60 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 325–7, news from the Empire, June 1587; Klein, Kampf um die zweite Reformation, pp. 68–90, 129–31.

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Joachim Friedrich of Magdeburg, Prince Christian of Anhalt, the dukes of Sachsen-Weimar and Sachsen-Coburg, and several lesser princes. Frederik II was expected to attend; if he did, it is not recorded.61 To be sure, it would not have been prudent for the king to have made the journey to Naumburg, as published newsletters all over Germany proclaimed that the Protestant electors were plotting to withdraw their allegiance to Rudolf II, electing Frederik or one of his sons to take his place. Frederik did, however, ask Wilhelm IV and Joachim Friedrich of Magdeburg to speak on his behalf, and to do their utmost to convince the two electors of the urgency of Navarre’s need.62 At Naumburg Wilhelm IV dominated the proceedings, trying to convert this purely ceremonial league into a defensive military alliance, and enjoining those in attendance to intercede with Rudolf II on behalf of the captive duke of Saxony, who was also a member of the Erbverbrüderung. It was not until the attending princes met alone, without secretaries or advisers, in the Naumburg Rathaus towards the end of the conference that there was any frank discussion of a German alliance on behalf of Navarre. The conference culminated in a wild, drunken, furniture-wrecking party in Wilhelm’s apartments.63 This helped to soothe the strained relationship between Wilhelm IV and his more conservative allies, but otherwise the Naumburg conference accomplished nothing. The Hessian landgrave’s impassioned pleas on behalf of Navarre, his terrifying prognostications of impending papist aggression in the Empire, did nothing to move the two electors present. ‘Although we pointed out to [the electors] that it should be the universal endeavor of Christendom—regardless of place or nation’, Wilhelm griped to Johann Casimir immediately after the conference, ‘to offer a helping hand to those for whom the pope sought destruction, not only the Huguenots but all those of our confession

61 StA Naumburg a.d.S., Beschliesbuch des Rathes, 1586–87, 1587, fol. 67v–68, 73v; StA Naumburg a.d.S., Sa 32: Annales Numburgenses, pp. 367–81; Karl Peter Lepsius, Kleine Schriften, Beiträge zur thüringisch-sächsischen Geschichte und deutschen Kunstund Alterthumskunde (Magdeburg, 1854), pp. 173–5. One English source claimed that Frederik attended, accompanied by six hundred horsemen, but this is not mentioned anywhere else: Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 325–7, news from the Empire, June 1587. 62 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 28 n. 1; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 416v–17v, Frederik to Joachim Friedrich of Magdeburg, Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg, and Wilhelm IV, 28 June 1587. 63 StA Naumburg a.d.S., Copialbuch des Rathes 1587–89 pt. 2, fol. 23v–4v, Naumburg city council to Hansen Beckern, Wilhelm IV’s Pfenningmeister, 29 July 1587.

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(or Lutherans, as we are called) as well’, the electors did not see any advantage in aiding Navarre. If they did so, they would receive little thanks, and no foreign power would help them when the papists sought retribution against the German Protestants.64 Christian I and Johann Georg still could not be convinced that a Protestant alliance would do anything but cause further damage to Germany’s fragile peace. The Naumburg conference marked the end of Frederik II’s active efforts to create a Protestant alliance based on Saxon and Brandenburg participation. He showed no great shock after hearing of its failure from Wilhelm IV. He did not display any lingering bitterness towards the two electors who had consistently foiled his plans—plans that would have worked as much to their benefit, and to all of European Protestantism, as well as to his own. Indeed, during the few months that he had yet to live, Frederik kept in close touch with Christian I, occasionally passing on friendly warnings that the failure of Navarre’s cause might mean the death of Protestantism and of princely liberties within the Empire. With the conclusion of the Naumburg meeting, however, the king resigned himself to the fact that if a German Protestant coalition were ever to emerge, it would not owe its existence to his strivings. Frederik may have made one more attempt to bring the electors together for a personal meeting. According to Ségur, the king invited Christian I and Johann Georg to meet with him and Navarre’s intrepid ambassador at Lübeck in November 1587; if so, it was a half-hearted proposition, and the conference never took place.65 By the late autumn of 1587, Frederik II had concluded that such face-to-face appeals for Protestant solidarity were a wasted effort. He did what little he could to help Navarre from his own pocket: having promised Johann Casimir and Wilhelm IV that he would no longer be held back by the irresoluteness of the two electors, Frederik deposited a further 20,000 Reichsthaler at Hamburg for Johann Casimir to use on behalf of Navarre.66

64

StAM 4f. Frankreich 740, Wilhelm IV to Johann Casimir, 8 July 1587; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 42–3, news from Naumburg, 6 July 1587. 65 StAM 4f. Frankreich 760, Ségur to Wilhelm IV, 25 September 1587; Anquez, Henri IV et l’Allemagne, pp. 23–4; BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 402, fol. 271–2, Johann Georg to Ségur, 18 May 1588. 66 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Pfalz A.II.13, Johann Casimir to Frederik, 30 September 1587; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88: fol. 446v–8v, Frederik to Joachim Friedrich of Magdeburg, Georg Friedrich of Ansbach, Johann Casimir,

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The Dutch quagmire To the king of Denmark, as to Wilhelm IV and Johann Casimir, the problems of providing succour to the king of Navarre and of creating an Evangelical alliance were the most important security concerns of the mid-1580s. To Elizabeth I, on the other hand, such considerations were secondary, and rightly so. Sir Francis Walsingham may have been in favour of a general English commitment to Continental Protestants; but then Walsingham, unlike his royal mistress, saw the various conflicts on the Continent as part of one vast confessional struggle, all of which deserved England’s attention and involvement. Elizabeth, whose primary concern was ridding the neighbouring Netherlands of hostile foreign presences, whether Spanish or French, was less worried about the fate of Protestant communities on the Continent except insofar as the Continental Protestants might be able to help her achieve her goals in the Netherlands. A German Protestant coalition, especially if it managed to provide substantive support to Navarre, would be a useful asset, a bargaining chip in England’s war with Spain. Most important, England could not afford direct involvement in both wars. Horatio Palavicino, who worked directly under Walsingham’s supervision, strove valiantly to bring the Protestant Reichsfürsten together, but he can hardly be said to have had much of an impact on Protestantism in the Empire. Although Palavicino emerges in Elizabethan historiography as a statesman of considerable influence, in the world of German princely politics he was little more than a well-intentioned amateur. Among the German Protestant princes, Elizabeth’s influence did not carry nearly so far as did that of the king of Denmark. That, of course, was little consolation to Frederik II in 1587; by then it must have been painfully clear to the king just how far his influence would take him in accomplishing his foreign policy objectives. Conversely, Frederik II did not allow himself to be drawn into the Dutch revolt as deeply as he did into the wars of religion raging in France. He contributed no money to the Dutch cause; he promised unofficially to provide troops for the Netherlands, but never made good on that promise. In short, after the Ramel embassy to England and Wilhelm IV, 8 August 1587, and fol. 466v–7v, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 18 August 1587; StAM 4f. Frankreich 773, Johann vonn Relßzaußenn, Alexander vonn der Thann, and Hermann Vulteus to Wilhelm IV, 3 September 1587.

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in the spring of 1586, he did not put the same effort into the AngloSpanish-Dutch conflict as he had into the Navarre-Valois-Guise struggle. Just why this was so is impossible to say with any authority. It was not that the progress of the Dutch revolt did not interest the king, nor did Frederik feel that Denmark was securely distant from the theatre of war in the Low Countries. The Dutch war concerned the king deeply, and he constantly sought out the details of the campaigns there, carrying on a lively correspondence with men like the counts of Hohenlohe and Neuenahr-Moers. Like the Huguenots in France, the Dutch rebels constituted another precariously balanced domino in the teetering series of such that stood between a ‘bloodthirsty Roman Antichrist’, England, the German states, and ultimately the Scandinavian kingdoms. The Dutch and the Huguenots were all part of the same struggle between Protestant and Catholic. The possible presence of Spanish troops in the easternmost provinces of the old Burgundian inheritance was just as much of a threat to Denmark as it was to England, and as long as Philip II maintained a foothold in the Netherlands the Sound—the key to Danish power, wealth, and survival—was not truly safe. Both England and Denmark would be well suited by a stable and quasi-autonomous Netherlands, devoid of a foreign military presence. Frederik’s greater manifest passion for the Navarrese cause may have been due to the simple fact that the Dutch already had a powerful ally in England. Navarre had none. There was also a certain intangible distance between Frederik and the Dutch rebels. Frederik counted William of Orange among his friends, but Orange was a prince of ancient and distinguished lineage. With William dead, and his son Maurice not yet in his prime, the Netherlands as a political entity was a different story altogether. As C.H. Wilson has demonstrated so well, Elizabeth I, on more than one occasion, treated the representatives of the ‘merchant republic’ with aristocratic disdain. Later on, Christian IV of Denmark would manifest an even more intense dislike for the Republic, whose affairs were determined by base-born bankers and shipping magnates. Frederik II, too, would repeatedly demonstrate a certain measure of this same prejudice. The steady influx of Dutch emigrées into Denmark during the late 1570s and 1580s did not help to endear the Netherlanders to the king; no single group of people caused more trouble for Frederik and for the town governments of Copenhagen and Helsingør than did the Dutch refugees. Even minor German noblemen, like Fabian von Dohna, could count on a warm, fraternal reception

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at the Danish court. Dutch ambassadors to Denmark, on the other hand, frequently met with a frigid welcome, both from members of the Council and from the king himself. On occasion, Frederik pointedly ignored Dutch embassies, enjoying the pleasures of the hunt while keeping the impatient ambassadors waiting. It was the same kind of treatment Frederik accorded to ambassadors from the other great merchant republics of the late sixteenth century, namely the Hanseatic cities. Yet Frederik’s relaxed attitude towards the plight of the Netherlands in 1586–88 stemmed more from Denmark’s troubled and complex relationship with England than it did from snobbery. The initial enthusiasm and warmth that followed the Willoughby embassy of December 1585 wore off quickly in the wake of Ramel’s visit to England the next spring. Frederik’s bold promise of a Sound closed to Spanish shipping was modified in Ramel’s negotiations with the Tudor court. Up to the end of Frederik’s reign, Leicester still believed that Denmark was the most valuable ally that Elizabeth could hope to find, and for a very long time he persisted in his hope that Frederik would send at least a token force to fight Parma’s tercios alongside Dutch and English troops. Walsingham also urged patience with Frederik, recognising that Denmark would be vulnerable to attack by Spain if Frederik proceeded too quickly.67 But there were other, more impatient and less charitable, persons in Elizabeth’s court and in Leicester’s camps. At the very least, Frederik II should have been able to rally the German princes to Elizabeth’s side, and he had not been able even to accomplish that. The apprehensions of several English and Dutch statesmen went much deeper than this. To them, Frederik II was not only an ally of no better than marginal utility, but perhaps even an insidious enemy to the Dutch and to Queen Elizabeth. Rumours that Frederik II was accepting bribes from Philip II became current shortly after Ramel made public the Danish offer to mediate a peace with Spain. It did not matter that the terms proposed by Frederik through Ramel— the restoration of the Netherlands to their ancient liberties, with freedom of conscience but without the presence of Spanish garrisons—were largely the same conditions that Elizabeth wanted to see in her crosschannel neighbour. As Anna Tjaden has argued, Frederik’s position was perhaps more highly ‘principled’ than Elizabeth’s, for to Frederik

67

Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 653, Walsingham to Stafford, 23 May 1586.

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the issue of religious toleration for the Dutch was non-negotiable.68 The mere fact that Frederik would not close the Sound to Spanish grain transports unconditionally, and that he proclaimed himself to favour a peaceful settlement rather than a military one, made the Danish king suspect. One of the most damaging rumours surrounding Frederik’s Dutch policy was that the Danish king sought to usurp Elizabeth’s protectorship over the Netherlands. This rumour originated with Paulus Buys, a member of the Dutch Raad van Staat, former Landsadvokaat of Holland, and an ally of Leicester. Buys, like many Amsterdam merchants, saw commercial advantages in a closer relationship with Denmark. He had supported Leicester faithfully, but the reversals that the Dutch had suffered during Parma’s governorship made Buys an impatient man, who heartily disliked Elizabeth’s vacillating support for the Dutch rebels. By the spring of 1586, Elizabeth’s and Burghley’s interest in a compromise peace with Spain—made without consulting the Dutch themselves, and possibly not to insist upon religious liberty for the rebellious provinces—had become known in the Netherlands, much to the dismay of the rebel leaders. Buys knew that the rebels needed a great deal of foreign military assistance if Spanish troops were to be forced out of the Netherlands, even if that meant surrendering nominal sovereignty of the provinces—or at least of Holland and Zealand—to a foreign lord. If Elizabeth I would not fulfil this role, then, Buys reasoned, the Dutch should turn to another ruler, but not a useless figurehead like Anjou. Frederik II of Denmark would be a natural choice. His fleet was the equal of Elizabeth’s, and Denmark’s geopolitical significance was greater than England’s. Under the distant and benign rule of the Danish king, the master of the Sound, the Netherlands would be safe, since Frederik would not close off the Sound to his own subjects. Dutch commerce would prosper, too, since—as subjects of the Danish crown—Dutch merchants would not have to pay the steep duties that were extracted from them every time they entered or departed the Baltic. Ordinarily Leicester thought highly of Frederik II, but his first loyalty was to his queen. When in the spring of 1586 Buys informed Leicester ‘flatly . . . that the King of Denmark were the fittest lord for them in Christendom next to [Elizabeth]’, Leicester reported

68

Tjaden, ‘Frederic II’, p. 372.

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immediately back to the queen that Buys was a dangerous man. Whatever Frederik’s intentions, Denmark could not be suffered to have control over Holland and Zealand: ‘. . . [Frederik II] will be lord and commander over the narrow seas and all your traffics east and northward wholly under his restraint, for he will be the only mighty prince by sea.’ Leicester’s concern bordered on paranoia; he suspected Gert Rantzau, who had recently visited Amsterdam, of trying to make contact with Buys, and believed that Buys was looking for an excuse to negotiate directly with Frederik. There was little evidence that Buys ever acted on these sentiments, but Leicester would take no chances. In July 1586, he had Buys arrested and silenced, and the matter ended there.69 Frederik himself had no role in this. Indeed, the Netherlands were probably more valuable to him as an independent state, as an English protectorate, or under Spanish rule. It would be difficult to compensate for the loss in commercial revenues that would result if the Netherlands were to subject themselves to Danish suzerainty, and the risks and expenses of defending the Dutch against Spain were greater than Denmark alone could bear. To be sure, Frederik II still had friends in high places at the Tudor court, notably Walsingham and Leicester. Both men recognised the lengths to which the Danish king had gone to defend Navarre, and both continued to advocate an Anglo-Danish alliance to the queen. The Buys episode, fortunately, did not spoil Leicester’s good-will towards Denmark. ‘I pray God, Your Majesty may hold good and stryckt amyty with that king’, Leicester wrote to Elizabeth in October 1587, over a year after the arrest of Buys. ‘He ys ye fyttest for ye of all others and lett no men perswade you otherwyse and Your Majesty must use him kindly.’70 Walsingham seems to have understood the rationale behind the Danish mediation offer to France, for when Stafford complained bitterly about diplomatic clumsiness of Winsheim and Rantzau in Paris, the Principal Secretary warned him to keep quiet. Insisting that Frederik II was ‘very constantly affected towards [Elizabeth]’, Walsingham advised Stafford that in his dealings with the Danish ambassadors he 69 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/2, pp. 38–9, Leicester to Elizabeth, 20 June 1586; Tjaden, ‘Frederic II’, pp. 355, 372–5; ‘Verslag van Wilkes’, July 1587, in Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 2, p. 426; Willem van Everdingen, Het leven van Mr. Paulus Buys, advocaat van den lande van Holland, (Leiden, 1895), pp. 142–3. 70 Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 3, p. 245, Leicester to Elizabeth, 15 October 1587.

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‘rather . . . take a mild and temperate than a violent course; for if you should use any threatening speeches, upon the mislike that might grow of it there, your doings would besides be disavowed here, which must subsequently fall out to your own discredit’.71 Leicester and Walsingham, however, were not the only ones who had the queen’s ear. In July 1586, Burghley composed a memorandum that portrayed Frederik not as a potential ally, but rather as a likely enemy. Describing the ‘perils’ that faced Elizabeth in her dealings with the Netherlands, Burghley accorded Frederik a prominent position: the ‘third peril’—after the possibility that the Dutch would reject any foreign rule and that the States-General would object to Leicester raising taxes—was that the Dutch rebels would place themselves in the willing hands of Frederik II.72 The States-General, however, had not yet lost hope of reaping the benefits of Frederik’s friendship. In this they were encouraged, no doubt, by Leicester. Frederik’s proposed mediation in the war with Spain, which Leicester announced to the Dutch Raad van Staat in May 1586, might have been unsettling news to those who wanted no part of a negotiated settlement with Philip II, but it was not enough to cause a breach with Denmark. At Leicester’s behest, the States-General sent the ambassador Reinier Cant to Denmark, with the purpose of encouraging Frederik to provide direct military support against Spain. Leicester reinforced this with a personal appeal to the Dane, requesting Frederik’s aid in the recruitment of troops in the Empire, and for the king to allow one of Heinrich Rantzau’s sons to serve under Neuenahr-Moers with a company of horse.73 Nor were the Dutch above flattery. The national synod of the Dutch Reformed congregations sent two delegates of their own to meet with Frederik. They met with the king at Hamburg, while he was heading home from the Lüneburg meeting at the end of July 1586; hosting a worship service in his honour, the Dutch ecclesiastics saluted Frederik as ‘you who are foremost among the princes who profess the true Faith of the Gospel’.74 71

Cal. SP For., vol. 20, p. 653, Walsingham to Stafford, 23 May 1586. ‘A brief of the perils’, Burghley, 9 July 1586, Cal. SP For., vol. 21/2, p. 82. 73 Tjaden, ‘Frederic II’, p. 372; RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.9, Leicester to Frederik, 8 July 1586; RSG vol. 5, p. 274, 17 May 1586. Leicester mentioned ‘Friedrich Rantzau’; it is impossible to state with any certainly exactly who Leicester meant, since Heinrich Rantzau had no son by that name. 74 Tjaden, ‘Frederic II’, pp. 372–3. I have been unable to locate Tjaden’s source for this. The reference she gives in her article is in error. 72

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Frederik, however, did not respond as hoped. He offered nothing to the States-General, not even encouraging words. His evident coolness towards the Dutch rebels compounded Anglo-Dutch suspicions of the king’s motives. The Buys affair had compelled Elizabeth and Leicester to investigate Danish intentions further, and to this end Leicester sent one of his Dutch allies, Noël de Caron, to meet with Frederik in September 1586. Caron’s report was discouraging: proSpanish sentiment, he claimed, had taken root at the Danish court. Upon his return to The Hague, Caron informed Elizabeth’s agent Sir Thomas Wilkes that this sentiment was not limited to Valkendorf, as was usually alleged. Frederik and his ‘principall counsellors’—whose loyalties had clearly been swayed by Spanish bribes—had become ‘so Spanishe’ that it was no longer wise to trust the Danish mediation efforts. Frederik was little more than a puppet of his Council, and the ‘principall drifte of his negotiacion tendeth to make a peace for the king of Spaign’. The Dane was allowing Philip II to use him as a means of diverting English support from the rebel war effort.75 Frederik II had indeed been conducting negotiations with Spain, or at least with Parma. Philip II had already made it clear to his governor-general that Frederik’s conditions for peace—especially that concerning freedom of conscience—were unacceptable, yet nonetheless he allowed Parma to entertain the proposed Danish mediation. In doing so, it was hoped, Parma might be able to lull both Elizabeth and Frederik into inaction, while driving a wedge between England and the Dutch. In short, it would keep Spain’s enemies occupied (and divided) while Spain prepared for further military offensives, including the Grand Armada. For his part, Parma did not trust Frederik, whom he characterised as an ‘obstinate heretic’ who ‘will do everything to further [the cause of ] his religion’. Parma’s distrust is understandable. Frederik’s role in orchestrating the meetings at Lüneburg and Naumburg was well-known in the courts of Europe, mostly because of the persistent and unflattering rumours concerning the Imperial ambitions of the Oldenburg house. A printed newsletter from Strassburg went so far to speculate that the Dane was raising a large army with the intention of going to Frankfurt and intimidating the electors into electing either himself or one of his sons as king of the Romans. Parma lumped England and Denmark together 75 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/2, p. 136, Wilkes to the Privy Council, 20 August 1586; Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 1, pp. 291–3, Wilkes to Walsingham, 3 December 1586.

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as Spain’s ‘enemies’, and pressed upon his master the necessity of keeping an eye on the size and strength of the Danish fleet. But in his correspondence with the Danish king, Parma remained outwardly friendly, polite, and accommodating. When Frederik approached the prince, hoping to make arrangements for Anglo-Spanish peace talks, Parma did not hesitate to invite Danish participation.76 These contacts were not unknown to the English, and even the States-General was well aware that Frederik hoped to broker a peace settlement. Frederik II, however, had not been open with either party about the nature of his initial negotiations with Parma. When this was revealed—entirely by accident—in the beginning of 1587, therefore, it proved to be something of a shock, particularly to the Dutch. Early in January 1587, Heinrich Rantzau’s son Kai, who had been acting as liaison between Frederik and Parma, ran afoul of a cavalry patrol from the Dutch garrison at Bergen-op-Zoom. He was not immediately recognisable as a personage of any importance, for he was but meanly attired and accompanied by a single manservant. Rantzau did not identify himself, and when accosted by the Dutch troops he drew his sword and attempted to defend himself. The soldiers quickly subdued him, beating him badly and seizing his baggage. Among his possessions were letters from Parma to Frederik II, which Rantzau had been in the process of bringing back to Denmark. Rantzau was arrested, and his papers examined in detail; they included documents that showed plainly ‘a purpose betwene the king and [Parma] to treate of a peace’. Copies of Rantzau’s papers quickly found their way into the hands of the States-General and of Elizabeth herself.77 Once they realised who they had in their custody, the Dutch released Kai Rantzau immediately. The contents of his personal papers, however, could not be suppressed. Neither Elizabeth nor her Privy

76 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 46–7, Georg Hans von Veldenz to Charles of Lorraine, 15 July 1587; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 70–1, Mansfeld to Ramel, 16 September 1587; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 28 n. 1; Lefèvre (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II, vol. 3, pp. 169–70, 193, Parma to Philip II, 10 January and 2 March 1587; Poullet (ed.), Granvelle, vol. 12, pp. 451–2, Philip II to Parma, 18 July 1586; Lefèvre (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II, vol. 3, pp. 156, 158, 172, Philip II to Parma, 19 October 1586, Frederik to Parma, 28 October 1586, and Parma to Philip II, 30 October 1586 and 12 January 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 182–3, Parma to Frederik, 7 January 1587. 77 Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 2, pp. 41–3, 45, 50–1, Wilkes to Elizabeth, Leicester, and Walsingham, 19 January 1587.

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Council could have been very surprised, but the States-General was collectively taken aback. The overall attitude of the States-General was that any peace with Spain would involve unacceptable compromises, especially with regard to freedom of religion, and would therefore not be in their best interests. That Frederik II would undertake to negotiate such a peace with their enemy, without consulting the States-General, they took as a great insult. Sir Thomas Wilkes reported that the rebel leaders were ‘not well pleased with the king’, not least because they feared that rumours of peace negotiations would undermine the will of the war-weary Dutch people to continue the fight against Spain.78 The States-General did not reproach Frederik for this; on the whole, they were quite forgiving. Their feeling of betrayal, and their anger, was directed more against Elizabeth than against Frederik.79 The king, however, was not so easily mollified. In retaliation for the ill-treatment suffered by his ambassador, Frederik arrested a large number of Dutch ships in the Sound, seizing their cargoes and holding the vessels for ransom.80 It was a potentially explosive situation, not least because it forced Elizabeth to show her hand. Like Parma and Philip II, Elizabeth had her reasons for giving her outward blessing to peace negotiations mediated by the Danes: if the negotiations led to an acceptable settlement—which did not appear likely—then her problems would be solved; even if they failed, then there was no harm done. In fact, by not rejecting Frederik’s diplomatic aid, Elizabeth had gained numerous advantages. Peace negotiations would allow her to stall for time while Philip prepared to launch the Armada against England. They would also absolve her of blame should war with Spain result, for she could show to the world that she had tried every avenue towards peace, thereby painting Philip as the aggressor. Moreover, given England’s desperate need for powerful allies, it was important to humor Danish sensibilities, for Frederik II had already made it clear that he wanted to pursue a negotiated peace before he would commit

78 RSG vol. 5, pp. 534–5; Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 2, pp. 41–3, Wilkes to Elizabeth, 19 January 1587. 79 M.L. van Deventer (ed.), Gedenkstukken van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt en zijn tijd (3 vols, The Hague, 1860–65), vol. 1, pp. 149–50, the States of Holland to their deputies in England, 5 February 1587. 80 Cabala, Sive Scrinia Sacra, Mysteries of State and Government (2 vols, London, 1691), vol. 2, p. 30, Buckhurst to Walsingham, 11 May 1587.

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Denmark to a war against Spain. With the Danish offer revealed to the rest of Europe, however, Elizabeth would have to reassure the Dutch that England would not agree to a negotiated peace that would compromise Dutch interests, and that England would do its utmost to protect the provinces against Spain. To do otherwise would shatter Dutch confidence—already severely shaken—in England’s friendship, and would be to risk losing the Netherlands forever. The Buys ‘plot’ had demonstrated very eloquently that there were those in the StatesGeneral who were ready to throw off English protection in favour of Danish, which would be disastrous to English interests. Fortunately this tense situation was easily defused. The StatesGeneral, faced with the prospect of a commercial war with Denmark, soon made amends for their rough treatment of Kai Rantzau. After appealing to Elizabeth I for her intercession, they appointed an embassy of their own, which departed for Denmark in late May 1587. The Dutch emissaries offered the contrition of the StatesGeneral for Rantzau’s arrest, as well as monetary compensation so that Frederik would release the Dutch ships he had seized in the Sound. They hoped, however, to sway the king away from his planned mediation; explaining their grievances against Philip II, the ambassadors argued that it would be impossible to negotiate a lasting peace with Spain, especially on confessional grounds. The Dutch ambassadors asked Frederik instead to declare himself more openly in favour of the rebel cause: to assist in recruiting troops in Lower Saxony for rebel service, to allow Dutch merchants to pass unhindered through the Sound, and yet to be tolerant of Dutch seizures of Danish ships in the North Sea. The four-man delegation, led by Reinier Cant, must have been terribly disappointed at their reception. They were not the only embassy to be visiting Denmark in June 1587; Georg van Westendorp of Groningen, who had visited Denmark before on Requesens’ behalf, had come to see Frederik II on an errand from Parma. Westendorp’s instructions were nearly diametrically opposite that of Cant and his companions: to request the closing of the Sound to Dutch and English shipping. If Denmark were to continue to show favour to the Dutch rebels, Westendorp threatened, then it would only be a matter of time before Philip II would be forced to consider Frederik as his enemy rather than his friend. While Frederik granted Westendorp a personal audience, with all of the customary diplomatic niceties, at Antvorskov, he did not meet personally with the Dutch delegation. Cant and his fellows met instead with Gert

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Rantzau, Axel Gyldenstjerne, and Niels Krag—hardly the most distinguished or influential of Frederik’s advisers—at Kronborg.81 Frederik’s response to the two simultaneous embassies from the Low Countries—the one from the States-General, the other from Parma—highlights the king’s confusing and seemingly contradictory stance vis-à-vis the Dutch Revolt. He had shown much greater honour and hospitality to Parma’s emissary, though rejecting Westendorp’s proposals outright, while snubbing the ambassadors from the StatesGeneral. He did not grant their requests, either, but he did release the impounded Dutch vessels, and through his delegates he expressed his devotion to the anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish cause. Perhaps Frederik sought to avoid any public display of partisanship, but if so the gesture was an empty one. His actions on behalf of Navarre, not to mention the current rumours about his aspirations for the Imperial crown, would spoil any aura of impartiality. Neither Parma nor Philip II was fooled. It may be, instead, that Frederik could not hide the fact that his political and confessional sympathies for the Dutch cause coexisted simultaneously with a personal dislike for the merchant republic. Whatever his motivation, Frederik II pushed ahead with his plans to orchestrate an Anglo-Spanish peace conference during the remainder of 1587 and into early 1588. Both parties, for their own reasons, gave the king a measure of cooperation. As neither Parma nor Elizabeth had made definite arrangements for their representatives to meet, Frederik made his own: he would, he informed Parma, send his delegates to Emden, where just four years before the English and Danish delegations had hammered out their commercial treaty. The king expected Parma and Elizabeth, unless they could suggest a more efficacious place and time, to send their delegates to meet there at the end of August. Both parties agreed, though neither Walsingham nor Elizabeth thought that Emden was the best choice of venue; ultimately they decided upon Bergen-op-Zoom as the location for the negotiations, promising to provide safe-conducts for the Danish delegation should they arrive in Emden. Assured that everything was set, Frederik dispatched

81

Tjaden, ‘Frederic II’, pp. 388–9; RAK TKUA/SD/Nederlandene A.II.8, Maurice of Nassau to Frederik, 1 June 1587, and Buckhurst to Frederik, 31 May 1587 ns; RAK TKUA/SD/Ned A.II.8, Brederode, Casembroot, Cant, and van Warck to Frederik, 1 July 1587 ns; RSG 5:578–86; Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 2, pp. 277–8, States-General to Elizabeth, 10 May 1587.

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an emissary to the Low Countries, who arrived at Parma’s L’Écluse headquarters at the beginning of August 1587.82 The negotiations, however, never took place, at least not under Danish supervision. Well into 1588, both Parma and Elizabeth continued to express their acceptance of Frederik’s proffered mediation. Such expressions were, to be sure, fatuous, but Parma was much more skilled at feigning interest than Elizabeth was. As late as December 1587, Elizabeth would instruct her diplomats in the Low Countries to cooperate with Frederik’s chosen mediators,83 but in the meantime Elizabeth’s subordinates gave little indication that Danish involvement was either expected or desired. André de Loos reminded Burghley in September 1587 that ‘when we were on this subject before your lordship bid me take notice that [Elizabeth and her ministers] cared little whether this King meddled much in it, seeing that the business had already taken another course’. De Loos concluded that even if Frederik decided against participating in the peace negotiations ‘it would not do any harm’.84 Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, a member of the Privy Council, observed that the queen had no intention of making use of Denmark’s services; where it came to ‘the Proceeding of the King of Denmark’, he told Walsingham, ‘as far as I understand, her Majesty is onely a Hearer, and no Dealer’.85 Burghley, no admirer of Denmark or its king, regarded Frederik’s efforts on behalf of international Protestantism with contemptuous indifference. A memorandum from July 1587, bearing Burghley’s endorsement, dismissed Frederik and the German princes alike as useless for England’s purposes. Though ‘so much thought of by many’, neither the Dane nor his German compatriots would ever come to England’s aid, for they felt they had no reason to fear Spain. Not even religious arguments would move them; the divisions within German Protestantism were so great, and the greed of the 82 Lefèvre (ed.), Correspondance de Philippe II, vol. 3, pp. 209, 228, Frederik to Parma, 21 May 1587 ns, Parma to Frederik, after 24 May 1587, and Parma to Philip II, 6 August 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 323–4, Elizabeth to Frederik, June 1587; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 388–9, 432–3, Frederik to Parma, 14 May and 17 July 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/3. p. 111, Walsingham to Buckhurst, 13 June 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/3, p. 314, Andrea de Loos to Burghley, 13 September 1587. 83 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/3, pp. 474, 476, Elizabeth’s instructions to her peace commissioners, December 1587. 84 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/3, p. 314, André de Loos to Burghley, 13 September 1587. 85 Cabala, vol. 2, p. 29, Buckhurst to Walsingham, 11 May 1587.

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princes so strong, ‘so that who has most money in that land shall have most part of the German people’.86 Frederik II was aware that neither Elizabeth nor Parma welcomed Danish participation with as much warmth as their words implied, but the greater part of his suspicions fell on Elizabeth. At one point, in July 1587, Frederik demanded that Elizabeth tell him bluntly whether he should continue his efforts or not, and several months later he complained to Parma that the queen had not shown much cooperation in making the final arrangements.87 The king had other reasons for doubting the sincerity of the two adversaries he hoped to reconcile. Both Parma and Elizabeth, Frederik complained to the count of Hohenlohe, had wasted valuable time vacillating over the proper time and location for peace negotiations, and in the meantime neither party had demonstrated much inclination towards peace. Parma’s warlike posturing alarmed but did not surprise Frederik; from Elizabeth, however, he expected more restraint. Sir Francis Drake’s naval actions against Spanish ports and shipping, Frederik felt, were unnecessary irritants, likely to backfire and bring about an all-out Spanish assault on England. Should Spain once gain the upper hand over England, the peace negotiations would have been all for naught. It would then be only a matter of time before the rebellious provinces were returned to Spanish rule, a situation fraught with danger for all of Protestant Christendom. In all fairness, neither Elizabeth nor her ministers had much confidence in the negotiations, but Frederik seems to have been unaware of this.88 Elizabeth I, however, could not simply shrug off the Danish mediation offer. Walsingham and Leicester still favoured Frederik, and in the summer of 1587 England was in no position to alienate potential allies. As early as May 1587 the queen and her principal secretary had sent yet another embassy to Denmark, this time under the

86 ‘Discourses to move the King of Spain to enterprise some force against England’, July 1587, Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, p. 345. 87 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 335–6, Frederik to Elizabeth, 17 July 1587; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 582v–5, Frederik to Parma, 7 February 1588. 88 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 79, Frederik to Philip von Hohenlohe, 13 October 1587; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1586–99, fol. 18–21, 34v–5v, 42–6, 58–9, Frederik to Elizabeth, 28 October 1586, 14 June, 17 July, 12 August, 26 August, 9 September, 11 December 1587, and 28 February 1588; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1586–99, fol. 22–2v, 46–6v, Frederik to Leicester, 30 October 1586, 11 December 1587.

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direction of Daniel Rogers.89 Rogers, son of the Marian martyr John Rogers, was well-suited to this mission of reassurance and reconciliation: as a child, he had spent several years at Meldorf in the Ditmarschen, where his father was pastor for a time, and had accompanied Willoughby on his embassy to Denmark in 1585. Rogers had strong pro-Danish sympathies, as demonstrated by his assertion that Danish commercial grievances against England were justified; it is surprising that Elizabeth had not employed him in this capacity earlier.90 Rogers met with Frederik II, the ubiquitous Heinrich Ramel, and several members of the Council at Haderslevhus at the beginning of December 1587. On Elizabeth’s instructions, Rogers inquired about the likelihood of a Scottish-Danish marriage alliance and pleaded with the king to support Navarre and to convince the other German princes to do the same. Most important, he assured Frederik that England relied on his mediation with Parma, hoping that the king would— as he had promised two years before—join England in making war upon Spain should Parma reject the religious conditions that Frederik had set down as the basis for any negotiated peace. Frederik received Rogers well, treating him to the same informal and fraternal hospitality that he had lavished upon Bodley and Willoughby. Rogers sent back to London nothing but praise for Frederik II, noting the king’s financial contribution to Navarre the previous August. Altogether, the Rogers embassy was not—as has been suggested elsewhere—a failed attempt at forging an Anglo-Danish alliance; it was a mere gesture of reassurance made in hopes of receiving reciprocal reassurance. The plea for aid to Navarre must have sounded vaguely insulting, given Elizabeth’s own inaction on that front; at the very least it manifested a certain measure of insensitivity to Frederik’s tireless endeavors on behalf of the Huguenots and a German Protestant coalition. If the proposal gave offense, Frederik did not show it. He reminded Rogers that he had already contributed ‘more than any in the Empire, yea that he would continue to contribute’ support to Navarre, and that 89 Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 2, pp. 347–8, Walsingham to Buckhurst, 13 June 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/3, p. 65, Walsingham to Buckhurst, 17 May 1587. 90 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 371–2, Rogers to the ‘Lord Chancellor’, 22 September 1587; Arthur J. Slavin, ‘Daniel Rogers in Copenhagen, 1588: Mission and Memory’, in Malcolm R. Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin (eds), Politics, Religion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe. Essays in Honor of De Lamar Jensen (Kirksville, MO, 1994), pp. 246–59.

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he was still working to cajole the princes to do the same. Possibly with a slight trace of sarcasm, he enjoined Rogers to set down in writing any additional arguments that Elizabeth thought might prove effective in moving the German princes to action. Regarding the mediation with Parma, Frederik told Rogers that he had not wavered in his dedication to reaching a settlement. Although the king vented his frustration over Elizabeth’s failure to accommodate his delegates, he vowed that ‘he would doe as his high beloued Sister should requiere’.91 There had been nothing unpleasant about Rogers’ embassy, but Elizabeth’s trust in Frederik—built up gradually between 1582 and 1586—was fraying. Frederik inadvertantly contributed to this distrust through a poorly-timed effort to further his own dynastic interests. In June 1585, the king sent Heinrich Below and the councillor Manderup Parsberg to Scotland to negotiate the return of the Orkney and Shetland Islands to Danish suzerainty. The islands had been pawned to the Scottish crown in 1468 as security for the bridal dowry of Margrete of Denmark, betrothed to James III of Scotland. Margrete’s father, Christian I, failed to pay the dowry, and possession of both island chains reverted to Scotland. All of the Oldenburg kings since Christian I had tried to get the islands back, as did Frederik II in 1561, but in vain. Frederik’s attempt in 1585 was likewise unsuccessful. James VI refused the request, and he treated Parsberg and Below poorly during their stay at Dunfermline Abbey. The Scots, however, took the opportunity to initiate discussions over a marriage alliance between James VI and one of Frederik’s two eldest daughters. They pursued the idea well into 1587. The Scottish ambassador Peter Young broached the topic unofficially with Frederik when he visited Kronborg in August 1586—ostensibly to propose an anti-Catholic alliance— and Young returned to Denmark in June 1587 with a formal offer of marriage between the two crowns. Frederik, however, bore a grudge against the Scots for their inhospitable treatment of Parsberg and Below. The king treated each of Young’s embassies with casual disdain. On Young’s second appearance in Denmark, Frederik refused to pay for the Scots’ accommodations and made the ambassadors 91 Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, p. 576, entries for 3–10 December 1587; PRO SP75/1/241, Rogers to Walsingham, 26 November 1587; BL Cotton MSS Nero B.iii, fol. 320–3, relation of Rogers, 1 January 1588; PRO SP75/1/232–237, draft instructions for Rogers, 20 September 1587; Cal SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 369–71, instructions for Rogers, 20 September 1587; RAK PA 6487 (Valkendorf ) pk. 2, Huitfeldt to Valkendorf, early 1588.

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wait in Helsingør for three weeks while the king enjoyed the hunt at Antvorskov. Frederik summoned several of his noblemen to deal with the Scots, and since Young did not have the authority to discuss the return of the Shetlands and Orkneys, he was sent home without a formal audience or even a written reply. The Danish-Scottish marriage would have to wait until Frederik was cold in his grave.92 The idea of such a marriage was not new, nor was it controversial. Elizabeth, who kept a close watch over James VI since she had unofficially accepted him as her successor in England, preferred a Danish match to any of the other alternatives. But the queen distrusted James, and she expected a degree of control over James’ marriage negotiations. The frequent diplomatic contacts between Denmark and Scotland in 1585–87 aroused her suspicions that a marriage was being arranged behind her back. Reports from English informants in Denmark and Hamburg fueled these suspicions: it was rumoured that a marriage contract had already been signed, and that a Danish naval squadron escorted Young on his return to Scotland in July 1587, bringing with them one of Frederik’s daughters so that the marriage ceremony could be held in Scotland. Even Leicester expressed alarm over these reports. The issue was soon sorted out. Daniel Rogers aired the issue directly with Frederik during his embassy in the autumn of 1587, explaining that while Elizabeth would approve of a Danish-Scottish match she would feel ‘strangely used’ if she were not consulted in the matter. Much to Rogers’ relief, Frederik honestly replied that he had no interest at all in marrying one of his daughters to James unless the Scots returned the disputed islands.93 On the surface, Anglo-Danish cooperation appeared at the end of 1587 to be as strong as it had been in the early months of 1586. Inwardly, however, English distrust of Frederik II—or at least of his

92 PRO SP75/1/63, Tenneker to Walsingham, 16 October 1585; ‘Correspondance’, pp. 286–8, Dançay to Henry III, 10 May 1585; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1571–85, p. 693, Frederik to James VI, 4 May 1585; DNT vol. 3, pp. 1–9; P.W. Becker, ‘Instruction for de skotske Gesandter, som sendtes til Kong Frederik den Anden Aar 1587’, DM, Series 3, 2 (1845), 230–5; Carøe, ‘Kalenderoptegnelser’, pp. 572–3, entries for 8–29 June 1587. 93 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, p. 372, report of Friedrich Gans, 22 September 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1. pp. 348–49, Richard Saltonstal and Dr. Fletcher to Walsingham, 1 August 1587; Brugmans (ed.), Correspondentie van Robert Dudley, vol. 3, p. 83, Leicester to Burghley, 24 August 1587; Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, pp. 369–71, instructions for Rogers, 20 September 1587; BL Cotton MSS Nero B.iii, fol. 320–3, relation of Rogers, 1 January 1588.

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court and advisers—was as pervasive as it had ever been. Frederik was responsible in part for this. His seizure of Dutch ships in retaliation for the arrest of Kai Rantzau did not give the impression that the king was inclined to support the Dutch rebels, and his reluctance to close the Sound to Spanish shipping—though he had made such an action conditional upon the failure of peace negotiations—gave rise to rumours of pro-Spanish sentiment among his advisers. Even at the end of 1587, there was talk in London that Denmark was freely supplying grain and naval stores to Spain, at a time when the imminent departure of the Grand Armada was an established fact. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that suggests that Frederik was anything but pro-Spanish. In the last months of 1587 and the first few of 1588, for example, Danish authorities at Copenhagen and Helsingør arrested a disproportionately large number of Spanish merchant vessels passing through the Sound, acts which drew a series of recriminating letters from Parma.94 Even the young Prince-Elect Christian absorbed some of his father’s anti-Spanish sentiment. Among his Latin exercise-books and other papers from his tutelage in the late 1580s there is a pen-and-ink drawing of a naval battle between Danish and Spanish warships, readily identifiable by their banners; the drawing is believed to have been executed by the prince himself.95 Such things would have been seen as encouraging signs in England had they been known, but they were not. England is not to be faulted for its suspicions of Frederik. Frederik II was a good ally but a poor publicist, who did an inadequate job of making his sympathies and policies clear, at least to England. By the time of Frederik’s death, the issue of Danish mediation in the Low Countries wars was a dead letter. The king’s voluminous correspondence with people like Hohenlohe and Neuenahr-Moers attests to his steady interest in the progress of the rebellion. But the level of his interest—stemming either from fear of Spanish retaliation or frustration with two belligerents who seemed weakly motivated to attempt negotiations—did indeed diminish. Until the autumn of 1587, Frederik poured his energies into the creation of a German alliance on behalf of Navarre, a goal to which he apparently attached more 94 Cal. SP For., vol. 21/1, p. 416, Ottywell Smith to Walsingham, 17 November 1587. See the many grievance letters from Parma to Frederik, in RAK TKUA/SD/ Span Ned A.I.2. 95 RAK KRA A2., Christian IV, Stilebøger 1583–93.

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importance than to the resolution of the Anglo-Spanish conflict. By the beginning of 1588, exhausted and disheartened by his unsuccessful diplomatic efforts for the Huguenot cause, the king was beginning to lose his passion for this goal, and perhaps even for life itself. Frederik’s robust health was beginning to fail him; he had only three months to live.

I have little hope . . . The conclusion of Frederik II’s reign as king of Denmark and Norway bears no comparison to the tragic last few months of his son’s reign, some sixty years later. When Christian IV died in February 1648, he had the great misfortune of witnessing the decline and diminution of his crown right before his very eyes. Christian IV would be in the unenviable position of leaving behind him a kingdom that was lesser in size, wealth, and reputation than it had been when he had inherited it from his father. Frederik II, on the other hand, could die in peace, knowing that the Oldenburg state was if anything wealthier, more powerful, and more secure than it had been in 1559. The last vestiges of popery had been excised from Danish religious life, and a Catholic resurgence in Denmark—unless imposed from without—would have been all but impossible after Frederik’s stern reforms. Frederik II also had the comfort of a loving wife at his side and affectionate children at his feet, something that would be denied his son and successor. Where it came to foreign policy, at least as it involved the western states, King Frederik could not help but feel a certain amount of disappointment in his own accomplishments. In other areas, the king had enjoyed satisfying if minor successes. After years of commercial disputes with the Hanseatic city of Hamburg, he had finally succeeded in compelling the city to acknowledge Danish suzerainty. The date for the city’s formal homage to the king was set for July 1588. The king would already be three months dead by that date; forty-five years would pass before Christian IV would manage to force Hamburg into the Oldenburg orbit. The troubles in Livonia, and hence with Russia, ended neatly if ignominiously with the death of Frederik’s brother Duke Magnus, who had escaped captivity in Moscow to die an impoverished exile in Poland in 1584. Relations with Sweden had been quite calm up until the 1587 election. Frederik and Johan III did not see eye-to-eye, but Johan’s troublesome younger

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brother, Duke Karl of Södermanland—later to seize the Vasa crown as King Karl IX—maintained a surprisingly cordial correspondence with his Danish neighbour. From the early 1580s, however, Frederik had dedicated his political energies to the creation of a Protestant alliance that would bring the German princes to the defense of Navarre, and of themselves, against what the king saw as a united Catholic effort to destroy Protestantism; he had sought to end the seemingly inevitable war between Spain and England over the Netherlands, at least through mediation. Both were cautious approaches to the defense of the faith, but realistic ones as well. A union of the German princes would be a necessary precondition for any military action on behalf of Navarre if that action were to have the slightest chance of success. Frederik did not want the enmity between Spain and England to erupt into open warfare, at least not yet, since Denmark stood at risk of losing everything in a war with Spain. Yet such mediation, even if halfhearted, was a necessary first step, if only to justify a defensive alliance with England to the world and to his own subjects. Neither policy had shown positive results. Neither Spain nor England took the mediation offer seriously, and the English—their protestations to the contrary aside—took Frederik’s efforts as a sign of cowardice, indecision, or even of collaboration with Spain. The German princes obdurately refused to make even a token move towards alliance. By the end of 1587, Frederik’s last full year of life, the king had little to show for all his exertions but a canonry at Strassburg and a closer relationship with Hessen. Frederik II did not give up entirely after Naumburg, nor did the radical princes in the Empire cease to look to Denmark for leadership.96 In later years but similar circumstances, Christian IV would react to such bad fortune with a petulant fatalism, losing hope and interest in the Protestant cause altogether when it seemed that no-one would back his efforts. Frederik’s concern over the political defeats of Protestantism and the apparent erosion of princely liberties in the Empire, however, was more international, and less parochial, than his 96 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Hessen A.I.4, Wilhelm IV to Frederik, 1 April 1588; BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 402, fol. 243, Ségur to Frederik II, 22 February 1588. In August 1587, Ségur wrote to his assistant in England that, as far as Navarre was concerned, Saxony and Brandenburg were no longer at the core of a possible Protestant alliance; instead, Frederik II, Wilhelm IV, and the administrator of Magdeburg were to considered those whose support was absolutely necessary. Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 66–8, Ségur’s instructions for d’Averly, 26 August 1587.

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son’s would be in the 1620s. Conditions in France in particular continued to alarm Frederik, and with good reason, for Navarre’s cause was approaching its nadir at the end of 1587. Johann Casimir had used the few financial contributions he had managed to scrape together to raise an army in the spring of 1587, but that army—led, poorly, by Fabian von Dohna—had met with nothing but disaster. Invading Alsace, Lorraine, and then Champagne in July, Dohna’s rampaging army of Swiss and Germans met stiff resistance from the local Guisard population, and nearly tore itself apart with its own lack of discipline. Guise’s League army, confronting Dohna at Vimori (October) and Auneau (November), did the rest. The defeat made laughing-stocks of Dohna and Johann Casimir, and triggered a destructive split among those who had done so much to promote Navarre’s cause in the Germanies: Ségur and his assistants, including his successor Jacques de Bongars, became involved in a bitter war of words with Johann Casimir and Dohna. But Dohna’s defeat was only the beginning of a monumental slump in Protestant fortunes in 1587–88. At the end of 1587, following up on the victory at Auneau, Guise and the Marquis de Pont-à-Mousson invaded and sacked the county of Mömpelgardt (Montbéliard in French), an Imperial territory and a possession of the Lutheran duke of Württemberg. Meanwhile, Parma’s Army of Flanders had taken up winter quarters in the vicinity of Bonn, and Rudolf II had authorised the recruitment of 22,000 troops within the Empire to aid Parma in subduing the Dutch rebels. Frederik and the activist princes could take cold comfort in the fact that what they had been predicting—that the wars in France and the Netherlands would spill over into the Empire, and that a fragmented Protestantism would quail before the united forces of the ‘Roman Antichrist’—was in fact becoming reality. The sad state of affairs in France and the western Germanies temporarily reinvigorated the Danish king’s passion for the cause. Having been alerted to the invasion of Mömpelgardt in January 1588, Frederik penned yet another appeal for Protestant unity and action to the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg.97 Guise, he wrote, had ‘laid

97

RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Magdeburg A.I.1, Joachim Friedrich to Frederik, 22 January 1588; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Mecklenburg A.I.10, Ulrich to Frederik, 31 January and 13 February 1588; M. Berger de Xivrey and J. Guadet (eds), Recueil des lettres missives de Henri IV, (9 vols, Paris, 1843–76), vol. 2, pp. 323–7, Navarre to Frederik, 29 December 1587.

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waste’ to the lands of a sovereign German prince ‘with murder, thieving, and fire’, yet the emperor would do nothing. Instead, Rudolf was sending Germans to help Parma in the Netherlands. It was a situation calculated to bring on a civil war within the Empire; German would be pitted against German ‘as if we were mad dogs’. The Catholic princes in the Empire were preparing for battle, but it was the League in France that first must be stopped ‘before they come straight to our own doors’. There was only one sure means of defense: the Protestants must follow the Catholic example, countering the ‘Papists and their godless league’ with a ‘Christian league’ of Protestant princes. Frederik did not find it necessary to promote Navarre. The presence of foreign troops on sovereign German soil, he felt, was justification enough.98 But it was not enough to move the electors, and Frederik knew it. Christian I, still struggling to maintain Saxon neutrality in an increasingly polarised Empire, preferred to trust in the emperor and the institutions of the Empire to resolve any violations of princely sovereignty in accordance with the Peace of Augsburg. He wrote to inform Frederik that he was sympathetic but could not, in good conscience, undertake any action that might lead to civil war. The situation in Mömpelgardt, the elector argued, required ‘Christian moderation’.99 The letter did not arrive at Antvorskov until three weeks after Frederik’s death, but the king predicted Christian’s response even before it was sent from Dresden. ‘It is most certainly high time that the Lutheran electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Roman Empire gave their attention to these matters and to the subterfuges of the papists, and to the ways and means by which the fire might be stopped before it spreads too far’, he wrote to Wilhelm IV on 26 March. This, however, was not likely to happen. The electors did not care that—according to rumour—Guise’s army was poised to invade the Rhine valley and the Palatinate, nor that allegedly either Navarre or Condé had been assassinated by means of a poisoned tennis racket.100 98 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 591–6v, Frederik to Christian I and Johann Georg, 21 February 1588. See also: RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 566v–9, Frederik to Christian I, Johann Georg, Wilhelm IV, et al., 20 January 1588; RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.11, Christian I to Frederik, 12 February 1588. 99 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.I.11, Christian I to Frederik, 11 March 1588; Säch. HStA GH Loc.9305/1, fol. 21–5, Christian I’s instructions for Dr. Wolffgang Eilenbecken, 30 November 1587. 100 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1586–88, fol. 623–3v, Frederik to Johann Casimir, 19 March 1588.

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Parma and his army had trodden upon German land before, and no-one had raised so much as a finger—or even a single voice in protest—to stop them; why should they do so if the prince were to invade now? We have already seen . . . how such small numbers [of the enemy] can do so much damage in such an unforeseen and unexpected invasion, when no-one is in a great hurry to rise up and come to the defense; therefore it will be an easy matter for the entire papist horde, both within and without the Empire, to invade Germany either in one place or in several simultaneously, and they [the Protestant princes], unprepared, sit still. Since they have done nothing up to now but send embassies, deliberate, and make resolutions, their lives—by their own intentions—are made forfeit, whatever resistance is made for their sake against [the papists].

Two years of the king’s time and effort had not produced any obvious result in the Netherlands, either. Parma had no genuine desire to make peace, Frederik complained, and Elizabeth I had done little more than to quibble over the time and place of the proposed negotiations. Well aware that the Armada would soon be on its way, but uncertain as to its intended goal, Frederik began the task of preparing his fleet to meet the onslaught; in late February 1588, he ordered Valkendorf to make the warships Gideon, Michael, and Gabriel ready for battle and to dispatch them immediately to the Sound.101 All in all, the king had resigned himself to the fact that nothing could be done, and that all his efforts had been in vain. ‘This is but the judgement and punishment from God, which not only they [the Huguenots] but all of us have well deserved, and therefore must repent our manifold sins . . . in true humility.’102 There was good reason Frederik had lapsed into despair. He was dying. The king had grown ever more mindful of his mortality since the end of 1587, when a pair of remarkable omens were brought to his attention. Two unusual fish, mistakenly identified as ‘herring kings’ (sildekonger), were caught in the skerries off Bohuslen in November 1587 and sent to Copenhagen so that the university faculty could examine them. The faculty were befuddled by the strange fish, which bore on their heads red scales resembling a crown and, on their

101 ‘Kongelige Breve og Befalinger til Christopher Walchendorff ’, p. 168, Frederik to Valkendorf, 21 February 1588. 102 StAM 4f. Frankreich 796, Frederik to Wilhelm IV, 26 March 1588.

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bodies, what appeared to be inscriptions written in Latin characters. Frederik then personally examined the fish while celebrating Christmas at Haderslevhus, and found them most disturbing. A Huguenot mathematician in Ségur’s entourage, one Ananias Ieravcurius, argued that the message borne by the ‘wonderfish’ signified the impending destruction of Catholicism and the triumph of the Huguenot cause in France. As the news of the miraculous fish spread throughout Germany and even as far away as Rome, other scholars put forward their interpretations; most of them believed the fish to be a sign of the coming Apocalypse and of either the triumph or defeat of the Roman faith. Frederik II, however, believed that the fish bore a personal message for him, specifically that either he or Sofie would soon meet their deaths.103 As it turned out, Frederik was half right. The king had rarely taken ill over the course of his adult life. To be sure, he had been a heavy drinker, as was fashionable in German and Scandinavian courts at the time, but he had also been physically active and his consumption of wine had diminished considerably since the early 1570s. The outdoor life, which he enjoyed so much, agreed with him, and at age 53 he was still fit and trim. Since his return to Denmark after the Lüneburg meeting in 1586 the king began to exhibit symptoms of serious illness, in particular a persistent dry cough, difficulty in breathing, and unusual fatigue. Frederik, as one scholar has postulated, may have been suffering from cancer of the lungs; the prognosis offered by the court chaplain Vedel—that the king’s health had been ruined by his drinking—does not appear to be confirmed by his symptoms. Whatever the cause, it was not until February 1588 that the end appeared to be drawing near. Early in that month he had travelled with his court to Sønderborg Castle to attend the wedding of his youngest brother, Duke Hans, to Agnes Hedwig of Anhalt, the second wife and widow of Elector August of Saxony. Frederik began to feel ill shortly after the ceremony, but decided to travel back to Sjælland in the company of Philip of Braunschweig-Grubenhagen and Prince Christian of 103 J. Lindbæk, ‘Den vidunderlige Fisk fra 1587’, Vor Fortid. Tidsskrift for dansk Kultur-Historie, (1917), 145–50; ‘Nogle Aarbogsoptegnelser’, 552; Henrik Sandblad, De eskatologiska föreställningarna i Sverige under Reformation och Motreformation (Uppsala, 1942), pp. 223–4. On the importance of ‘wonderfish’ in early modern European culture, see: Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 86, 172–3.

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Anhalt, in hopes that a vigorous ride through the countryside would cure him of his ills. It did not, and while staying at Odense en route he took holy communion in his chambers rather than attend church service in public, an unusual act for a man who so enjoyed attending church. His entourage hurried him along towards Sjælland. At Nyborg, he was forced to wait several days for a royal ship to ferry him across the Storebælt to Korsør. By the time he reached his beloved Antvorskov, in mid-March, the king was quite weak, suffering from a high fever and refusing to eat or drink. He struggled to keep up-to-date with his international correspondence, but his letters now had a peculiarly anguished and resigned quality that had not been detectable before.104 Even before his physician had informed the king that there was nothing more he could do to help him, Frederik knew that he had little time left. Wilhelm IV of Hessen, who had become quite close to the king since the Lüneburg conference, had hoped to visit Frederik in Denmark in May; although Frederik sincerely looked forward to the visit, he wrote to Wilhelm on 25 March to warn him away. Expressing his regrets that he and the landgrave had not become better acquainted in their youth, Frederik candidly admitted that ‘now for nearly three weeks the beloved God has visited upon me leibs schwacheit, and from this time I have only a few days left . . . my strength to live has departed me. . . . I have little hope that in this world I will again be able to visit or talk with Your Highness or my other friends. . . .’105 The king’s dour prognosis was shared by all who waited on him, including the chancellor Niels Kaas, who did not leave the king’s side. The king’s chaplain, Christoffer Knoff, read the king a few psalms; Queen Sofie, who hurried as best she could to Antvorskov, arrived late in the night of 3 April. She found her husband resigned to death but lucid, inquiring about the details of her journey and the welfare of their children. The next day, 4 April 1588, was Maundy Thursday, and Knoff brought in a group of the king’s singers to provide Frederik with a suitably ornate church service. Much to the surprise of all those around him, the king joined in, singing with a firm and unwavering voice. Knoff read Frederik Psalm 103, his 104

BN Fonds Vc de Colbert 402, fol. 268–8v, Frederik to Ségur, 16 March 1588; RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1586–99, fol. 59v–60, Frederik to Navarre, 16 March 1588; Karker, ‘Kong Frederik 2.s død’, pp. 277–9. 105 StAM 4f. Dänemark 30: Frederik to Wilhelm IV, 25 March 1588, and Wilhelm IV to von Döringbergk, 30 March 1588.

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favourite psalm of David, and when Knoff reached the verse ‘Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him’, the king replied ‘That is true, that is true’, his last public utterances. After talking briefly with the inconsolable Sofie, who refused to be separated from her husband, Frederik indicated at around 4:30 PM that he wanted to get up, and he dismissed all those in attendance but his wife and a few privileged servants. Frederik endeavored to rise, but could not; he sank back into his bed, and died quietly within a few minutes.106

106 ‘Kong Frederik den Andens sidste Levetid’, DM, Series 3, 3 (1851), 72–3, Kaas to Valkendorf, 9 March 1588; Resen, Krønicke, pp. 352–7; Karker, ‘Kong Frederik 2.s død’, pp. 270–7.

CHAPTER EIGHT

RETREAT

The funerary ceremonies for Frederik II were unlike any observed previously in the Oldenburg monarchy. On Easter Day 1588, the king’s lifeless body was anointed and placed in an ornate coffin, which had been decorated with gold nails, a silver crucifix, and golden plates which bore the king’s twin mottoes: Mein Hoffnung zu Gott allein (‘My hope is in God alone’) and Treu ist Wildbrat (‘Faithfulness is game’). He lay in state within the castle chapel at Antvorskov, watched day and night by twelve courtiers and halberdiers of the king’s guard, until 24 May, when the funeral procession began. The procession, which slowly made its way through Ringsted to the cathedral at Roskilde, was enormous. More than three hundred people made up the deceased king’s train: heralds, trumpeters, drummers, courtiers, guards, noblemen bearing flags, horses draped in costly ‘black English’ cloth, clergymen, faculty from the university in Copenhagen, and even those students who held university stipends from the king. Immediately behind the carriage which bore Frederik’s coffin followed the new king, Christian IV, the remainder of the grieving royal family, Ulrich of Mecklenburg, the entire Rantzau clan, a host of foreign delegates, and of course the Council of State. Christoffer Knoff presided over the elaborate funeral mass on 5 June, and in his sermon compared Frederik to Jehoshaphat, the pious and upright warrior-king of Judah. Shortly thereafter, Frederik was interred in the Oldenburg crypt at Roskilde, taking his final rest in an opulent sarcophagus of carved alabaster. The king, whose court had been the very archetype of an informal German Fürstenhof, departed this life in a spectacle of princely majesty that rivalled the ceremonial of the most lavish courts of western Europe.1 The pageantry of the royal funeral belied the overall feeling of uncertainty that pervaded the Oldenburg State in the spring of 1588. The king had not died without issue, but the prince-elect—the as yet uncrowned Christian IV—was still a mere boy, only eight days away from his eleventh birthday when his father died. Denmark was 1

Resen, Krønicke, pp. 357–65.

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once again in an interregnum—not an especially dangerous situation, since unlike in 1533 the succession was undisputed—but an interregnum nonetheless. The leading members of the Council of State hurried to patch together a workable regency government. Of the councillors, only Niels Kaas and Arild Huitfeldt—who usually accompanied the king on his journeys—were present at Antvorskov when Frederik II died. In little more than a week, however, nineteen of the twenty councillors had assembled at the palace. On 15 April, the Council of State appointed a regency of four of its own members to rule in the king’s stead: Kaas, Admiral Peder Munk, Jørgen Rosenkrantz, and finally Rentemester Christoffer Valkendorf. This new Regency Council agreed to remain in Copenhagen, there to take on the duties of governance normally carried out by the king, and to look after the education and preparation of the boy-king Christian. Niels Kaas was the unofficial leader of the new government, in part by virtue of his position as Chancellor, and in part by the close relationship he had enjoyed with Frederik: shortly before the king’s death, Kaas had promised him that he himself would place the crown on the head of the prince-elect when the time came for the coronation. The transition from a strong individual monarch to a four-man Regency (often called ‘governors’ or ‘senators’ by foreign governments) was effected smoothly and without any significant disruption. The transition was so smooth, in fact, that foreign statesmen scarcely recognised that anything had changed at all. Word of Frederik’s death had spread quickly; letters of condolence from England, France, and the German princes began to pour in by mid-May 1588. Knowledge of the king’s passing did not, however, occasion any great changes in the attitude these states demonstrated towards Denmark or its role in the Protestant cause. Some of the German princes— those who had been most active in promoting Protestant solidarity, like Wilhelm IV and Johann Casimir—genuinely bemoaned the loss of their Danish ally, realising that Frederik’s departure weakened their case significantly. Parma greeted the news with considerable relief; Frederik II had been troublesome, and his absence eliminated yet another problem that might have faced his planned assault on England. Khevenhüller, Rudolf II’s ambassador in Madrid, hoped that without Frederik’s participation a Protestant alliance against Spain would be unlikely.2 In the Netherlands and in England, however, 2 Parker, Grand Strategy, p. 363 n. 77; HHStA Staatenabteilung Spanien: Diplomatische Korrespondenz 11 Konvolut 7, Khevenhüller to Rudolf II, 13 July 1588 NS.

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Frederik’s death caused no change in policy. In early June, the StatesGeneral dispatched a large embassy to Denmark, led by Frederik’s old friend Philip of Hohenlohe, to ask for military assistance against Spain, pointing (unnecessarily, it could be argued) to the imminent danger of an all-out Spanish assault on Protestant Europe; in July, Daniel Rogers returned to Copenhagen to offer Elizabeth I’s official condolences, iron out a number of commercial disputes and grievances, and finally to ask for Danish support against Spain and the Catholic ‘conspiracy’. Other embassies and appeals would soon follow. What the States-General and the English government—not to mention the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg who lent their endorsement to the Hohenlohe embassy—failed to realise was that it had been Frederik II, not Denmark, who had supported their previous appeals. It had been the king who had provided the drive and impetus for a pan-Protestant alliance; his advisers, with the exceptions of Ramel and Rantzau, had acquiesced to the king’s foreign policies more out of a sense of duty and loyalty to the king than from any ideological imperative. The Regency government was a different matter altogether. Bereft of Frederik’s leadership, or at least of his passion for the Cause, the Regency had little inclination to follow their late king’s foreign policies. Most important, the Regency had its hands full with a series of domestic problems that surfaced within days of Frederik’s death.

The Regency and isolationism For all of his successes as a ruler, Frederik had indeed made some poor or questionable decisions in his twenty-nine years on the throne. None, perhaps, was as unfortunate as the time he had chosen to die. His eldest son was not only still a minor, but for all of Frederik’s careful supervision of Christian’s education, Frederik had not begun to prepare Christian for rulership in a practical sense. Prince-Elect Christian had not been old enough to bear any political responsibilities of his own, and while Frederik—a doting father—tried to spend as much leisure time with his children as he possibly could, Christian’s education had kept the prince immersed in his studies at Sorø Cloister or with private tutors at Skanderborg. The prince, in short, never had much opportunity to observe his father at work. In terms of foreign policy, Frederik’s death was poorly timed simply

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because the Catholic assault on Protestant Europe, which Frederik had feared so much during his lifetime, was just beginning to take shape in the first few weeks following his death. The peace negotiations between Spain and England, after tentative beginnings in March 1588, commenced in earnest at Bourbourg late in May without Danish participation. Less than one week later, the Grand Armada set sail from Lisbon for its fateful rendezvous in the Channel. This was no time for the guardian of the Sound to have a boy king at the helm; it certainly was no time for a brand-new regency government to make rash diplomatic decisions while the largest fleet ever assembled in Europe moved slowly but surely towards the English Channel. The nervous regents recognised their vulnerability. To guard against a possible Swedish attack, even though relations with their northern neighbour and rival had been almost friendly since the mid-1580s, the regents ordered that the border fortifications in Norway and the Scanian provinces be fully manned, victualled, and prepared for action. The approach of the Armada occasioned the greatest concern. Frederik had made no overt moves against Spain, nor even entered into any alliance directed against Philip II, but the king’s anti-Spanish sentiments were well-known outside of England. Even had Frederik not manifested any ill-will towards Philip, the regents knew well that the Sound would be a tempting target, and a resource that Philip II had never ceased to covet. Would not the conquest of the Sound be as likely the intended goal of the Spanish fleet as would England? Valkendorf mobilised the fleet in anticipation of a confrontation in the Sound, but overall the Regency prepared to follow the same policy that would become the byword of Danish foreign policy when faced by the threat of Nazi aggression nearly four centuries later: ‘watch, wait, capitulate’. In reality, there was nothing to fear. Though one anonymous Dane claimed that a portion of the fleet had been briefly visible from the Jutland coast, not a single Spanish ship showed itself near the Sound. Dutch sources reported to the Regency that at least five Spanish ships had been sighted off Trondheim, apparently in good condition and sailing northwards in formation. At least one ship—the supply hulk Santiago, known as the ‘ship of the women’ because of the relatively large number of female passengers aboard—ran aground at Mosterhavn on the island of Moster, not far from the port of Bergen, in September 1588. The Spaniards were in no condition to be hostile; according to one source, they were practically starving, having been reduced to eating the

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mules and horses on board. The crew wanted nothing more than return passage to Spain. There may have been other wrecks as well. A 1590 map of the Armada wrecks depicted two Spanish ships foundered off Bergen, and local folklore tells of Norwegians claiming Spanish descent.3 Still, the intelligence that reached the Regency in Copenhagen via Dutch merchants were sufficiently frightening to cause some stir. Hearing that a Spanish warship, ‘armed and carrying a complement of Spanish troops’, had arrived in Bergen harbour, Niels Kaas enjoined the local administration to offer no resistance; indeed, the local lensmand, Niels Bilde, was instructed to treat any Spaniards he met with kindness, providing them with whatever they needed and, above all, to help them leave Norway as soon as possible, free and unhindered. Kaas also demanded immediate reports on the nature of the Spanish presence in Norway, if indeed the rumours proved to be true.4 The caution of the Regents would have come as no surprise to the English court. There, the lingering distrust of Denmark, the belief that Philip II had bribed King Frederik into collaboration with his designs on England and the Netherlands, surfaced again during the Armada crisis. Rumours still persisted that Danish merchants had supplied ships and crews to the Armada.5 As the defeated Armada limped eastward following its defeat by the English fleet, Elizabeth’s naval commanders were certain that the Spanish ships were sailing straight for the Sound—not to conquer it, but to seek Danish aid. Lord Howard of Effingham thought that the Armada would seek shelter in Danish or Norwegian harbours, and that the Danes would in all likelihood provide new ships for the Spaniards.6 Sir Francis Drake 3 ‘Nogle Aarbogsoptegnelser’, 552. The tale of the Santiago survivors is well-documented, but there is little evidence to substantiate the rumors of other Spanish wrecks on the Norwegian coast. In 1989, archaeologists began an investigation of an old shipwreck, eighteen meters underwater, in Mosterhavn, but it has not been positively identified as that of Santiago. See Torbjørn Ødegaard’s two books on the subject: Den spanske armada og Norge (Fredrikstad, 1997), and Alonso de Olmos’ etterlatte dokumenter. Om det spanske armadaskipet “Santiago” som forliste i Sunnhordland i året 1588 (Fredrikstad, 2001). 4 NRR vol. 3, pp. 17–19, Regency to Christen Friis til Borreby and Niels Bilde, 6 November 1588. 5 ‘Relation of the Spanish Armada’, 30 May 1588, Cal. SP Spanish, vol. 4, p. 306. 6 John Knox Laughton (ed.), State Papers relating to the defeat of the Spanish Armada anno 1588, (2 vols, London, 1895–1900), vol. 2, pp. 54, 59, 92, Howard to Walsingham, 7 August, 8 August, 9 August 1588. See also: Laughton (ed.), State Papers, vol. 2, pp. 13, 40, 45, Wynter to Walsingham, 1 August 1588; Thomas Fenner to Walsingham, 4 August 1588; Seymour, Wynter and Palmar to the Privy Council, 6 August 1588.

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believed that there was no other logical destination for the Spanish fleet. The Spanish ships had been too badly damaged in battle, he informed Walsingham; no other place in northern Europe could provide the Spaniards with what they required: The only thing which is to be looked for is, that if they should go to the King of Denmark, and there have his friendship and help for all their reliefs, none can better help their wants in all these parts than he; for that he is a prince of great shipping, and can best supply his wants which now the Duke of Medina the Sidonia standeth in need of, as great anchors, cables, masts, ropes and victuals.

Drake doubted that the Danish government would deny Spanish requests for assistance: ‘what the King of Spain’s hot crowns will do in cold countries for mariners and men, I leave to your good Lordship, which can best judge thereof ’.7 Elizabeth and her ministers agreed. At the end of August, Elizabeth resolved to send Sir Thomas Bodley to Copenhagen, practically on the heels of Daniel Rogers, to ask the regents ‘to Forbeare to yeeld reliefe to the Spaniards’ should they appear in the Sound.8 Except for Santiago, Danish authorities would make no contact with the scattered remnants of the Armada. With the defeat and departure of the Armada Denmark was relatively safe from attack, at least from Spain. Still, the Regency in Copenhagen had its reasons to be cautious, and within months that caution would evolve into insularity and isolationism in foreign affairs. To a degree, this reflected the personal prejudices of the regents themselves, including their collective desire to keep military expenditures from getting out of hand. Above all, however, this isolationist stance stemmed from the domestic difficulties that troubled the Oldenburg lands between 1588 and 1592. From the viewpoint of the Regency, the need to create an international Protestant coalition was the least of Denmark’s problems after the spring of 1588. The first and most troubling of these domestic problems came from within the Danish nobility. Officially there was no ranking of the noble estate; there was no peerage per se, and there would be 7 Laughton (ed.), State Papers, vol. 2, pp. 68, 97–9, Drake to Elizabeth, 8 August 1588, and Drake to Walsingham, 10 August 1588. 8 BL Cotton MSS Nero B.iii, fol. 333–4, ‘A Memoriall for Mr. Thomas Bodley sent by her Matie. unto the king of Denmarke’, 31 August 1588. Bodley never actually left England, finding passage from England all but impossible in the wake of the Armada.

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no titled nobility in Denmark until 1671. But the Danish nobility was hardly homogeneous. The greatest rewards that noble status could earn—membership on the Council of State and lucrative positions as lensmænd—were restricted to no more than a handful of wealthy aristocratic families. The vast majority of Denmark’s noble families were not so highly privileged, and many were quite poor, a group that Knud Jespersen has so accurately described as a ‘noble proletariat’.9 They had kept quiet after the Count’s War, and only raised a few objections to heavy taxation during the course of the Seven Years’ War. After the death of Frederik II they found their voice, and the result was a political backlash from the nobility.10 The staggering cost of the royal funeral in 1588, for which the dowager queen Sofie had been largely responsible, they found especially objectionable. Consequently a group of 71 noblemen—of whom all but nine were men without significant royal fiefs—issued a petition of grievance to the Council of State the day after Frederik’s funeral, demanding more equitable distribution of noble privileges and of royal fiefs. Most disturbing, perhaps, was the xenophobic tone of the petition. It demanded the immediate disenfranchisement of foreignborn lensmænd, and the removal of Heinrich Ramel from his position as Christian IV’s hofmester. In Ramel’s place, the nobility wanted a ‘native-born Danish nobleman, since [Christian IV] is an elected king in the realm of Denmark’. The Council, taken aback at such demands made at a time when Denmark was beset by foreign enemies, and when ‘the grave of our gracious sovereign has not yet been sealed shut’, rejected nearly all of the proposals.11 Ramel, the Council pointed out, had been appointed by Frederik himself; it would be unconscionable to go against the late king’s will so soon after his death. The nobility persisted in their demands, however. Two years later, at the annual herredag held at Kolding, they pressured the Council into relieving Ramel of his duties as hofmester, replacing him 9

Jespersen, Rostjenestetaksation. Daniel Rogers detected it during his visit to Denmark in the summer of 1588; he noted that the nobility resented the heavy taxes and the highly restrictive hunting privileges that were characteristic of Frederik’s reign. Cal. SP For., vol. 22, pp. 77–80, Rogers to Walsingham, 24 July 1588. 11 Kristian Erslev (ed.), Aktstykker og Oplysninger til Rigsraadets og Stændermødernes Historie i Kristian IVs Tid (3 vols, Copenhagen, 1883–90), vol. 1, pp. 18–20, protest articles of the nobility at Roskilde, 6 June 1588; Erslev (ed.), Aktstykker, vol. 1, pp. 20–5, declaration of the Council, 14 June 1588. 10

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with the Scanian councillor Hak Holgersen Ulfstand.12 Hak Ulfstand had had a good relationship with Frederik II, dating back to the carefree days at Malmøhus in the late 1550s; and although he may not have been the uncouth illiterate that the dowager queen made him out to be, he was by no means as nearly so learned as Ramel. The nobility was not satisfied with Ramel’s fall. Christoffer Valkendorf had also fallen into their disfavour. Valkendorf was a native Dane, but he was not a popular man. Most likely, as rentemester, he was saddled with the blame for heavy taxes and the central administration’s exclusionist distribution of fiefs. The Council removed him from his position as co-regent at the Kolding herredag in August 1590. Hak Ulfstand took Valkendorf ’s place in the regency government at the same time that he replaced Ramel. Neither Ramel nor Valkendorf had fallen into complete disgrace. Both kept their len; Valkendorf retained his seat on the Council of State and his position as rentemester, and since Frederik II’s death Ramel had become the dowager queen’s most trusted adviser. Christian IV would reward both of his loyal servants after his formal coronation in 1596: Ramel by elevation to membership in the Council of State, Valkendorf by his appointment to the post of rigshofmester, an office which had been vacant since the death of Peder Oxe in 1575. The simultaneous fall of Ramel and Valkendorf portended troubling developments within the Oldenburg State. It demonstrated that, with Frederik II’s personal influence now gone, the general social harmony that Denmark had enjoyed in the 1570s and 1580s was beginning to unravel. It also had specific implications for the future of Danish foreign policy. The nobility-at-large was uninterested in, even antipathetic towards, foreign entanglements, and felt that their late king had listened too closely to German advisers. They wanted their new king to be free of such pollution. Moreover, the nobility’s attack on Valkendorf indicated that their acquiescence to a continued and onerous tax burden—which would be necessary if Denmark were to participate in any kind of Protestant coalition— was out of the question. The nobility had spoken, and the Council of State listened, albeit reluctantly. As long as Christian IV remained a minor, the central government would be compelled to follow a

12 Erslev, Aktstykker, vol. 1, p. 39; DBL vol. 19, p. 82; Troels Lund, Christian den Fjerdes Skib paa Skanderborg Sø (2 vols, Copenhagen, 1893), vol. 1, pp. 51–9, 124–7.

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policy of non-involvement in the affairs of England, France, the Netherlands, and the German princes. The dissolution of Frederik II’s carefully orchestrated political harmony did not end with the Kolding herredag of 1590. The bereaved Queen Sofie would prove to be a thorn in the Regency’s side as well. Sofie was well provided-for, and on many issues saw eye-to-eye with the Council. She had not been an unpopular queen while her husband lived, but she quickly made herself a nuisance. Encouraged by Ramel and by her protective father, Ulrich of Mecklenburg, she demanded financial support commensurate with her status, as Frederik and the Council had promised her. There were no grounds for her complaint; her inheritance—the productive islands of Lolland and Falster, with a beautiful residence at Nykøbing Castle—was generous, but Sofie wanted all of her husband’s liquid assets put at her disposal. This the Council appropriately refused. The demarcation between the assets of the king and those of the state was not clearly drawn, but by Danish tradition the state and its income were not the personal property of the ruler. Generously though grudgingly, the Council granted Sofie a large sum of cash (30,000 rigsdaler) and an annual income (8,000 rigsdaler) to be drawn from the proceeds of the Sound dues. In 1590, as the Council made preparations for the weddings of Princess Elisabeth (to Duke Heinrich Julius of BraunschweigWolfenbüttel) and Princess Anna (to James VI of Scotland), it levied taxes in Denmark and Norway to the amount of 150,000 rigsdaler for the marriages and for general state expenses. Sofie promptly spent 50,000 rigsdaler of the income from the new tax in order to purchase jewelry for the two royal brides. The Council protested but ultimately conceded defeat, graciously avoiding an unnecessary internal conflict. A more serious contest between Sofie and the Council soon broke out over the constitutional situation in the Duchies. A complicated succession issue emerged when Duke Friedrich, son of the late Duke Adolf of Holstein-Gottorf, died in 1587, leaving behind a seventeenyear-old heir, his younger brother Philip. Philip’s mother, Christina of Hessen, demanded that the Holstein nobility recognise her son’s full succession in spite of his age. The nobility, led by Heinrich Rantzau, objected to this as a violation of their traditional privileges. In this matter, Rantzau—who in many ways thought of himself as a Dane—found an ally in the Danish Council of State; should Christina refuse to moderate her demands, the Holstein nobility would be willing to disinherit Philip and recognise Christian IV as

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duke of all Holstein. The scheme did not work. Rantzau and the Council could not agree on the constitutional status of Slesvig, and Christina ultimately backed down from open confrontation with the Holstein nobility. Holstein would remain divided, as before, into ‘royal’ and ‘ducal’ portions; the local estates (Landtag) would administer both portions until Duke Philip and Christian IV reached their respective majorities. It was a victory for the Holstein nobility, but a decisive defeat for Sofie. Sofie had hoped that the disinheritance of Adolf ’s line would allow the further subdivision of the Duchies between Christian IV and his younger brothers Ulrik and Hans. In vain Sofie attempted to contest the dominance of the Holstein nobility by siding with the Gottorf line: in 1590, she arranged the marriage of her daughter Augusta to Duke Johann Adolf, who had succeeded his brother Philip as duke upon the latter’s premature death that year. A series of disputes over ecclesiastical jurisdiction and other minor issues pitted Sofie and her new son-in-law against Rantzau and the Holstein Landtag, while Sofie’s ambitions for her younger sons set her in opposition to both Rantzau and the Council of State. In the process, she made enemies of nearly everyone involved, and created untold disruption within the Duchies. The emperor himself intervened, briefly, on the dowager queen’s side, but to no avail. The Council of State refused to be moved from its stance that the Duchies could not be divided further. Sofie’s cause died completely when the king, her son, stood with the Council against his own mother. In 1593, Christian IV received the homage of the Landtag as ruler of the royal portion of Holstein.13 Whether resisting the demands of the disgruntled lesser nobility, or trying in vain to satisfy the claims of the unhappy royal widow, the Council of State and the Regency government had its hands full of problems that were more pressing, in its view, than the question of an international Protestant alliance. Frederik II’s governance had been characterised by at least outward calm; the Regency, so far, had the great misfortune of watching this concord degenerate into a series of bitter personal disputes among Frederik’s family and former subordinates. The young king was now estranged from his own mother and maternal grandfather, while Sofie had grown hostile towards the

13 Heiberg, Christian 4., pp. 41–4; Troels Lund, Christian den Fjerdes Skib, vol. 1, pp. 59–67, 211–286, vol. 2, pp. 1–183.

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Regency, which had in all fairness done its best to please her. Neither the Council, nor Sofie, nor the Rantzaus had gotten what they wanted in the Duchies. Here, too, there was bitterness. The clash between Heinrich Rantzau and Sofie had been so acrimonious that Hans Blome, now one of Sofie’s allies in the Duchies, challenged Gert Rantzau to a duel. This violent confrontation between two of the late king’s foremost German diplomats was eloquent testimony to the damage that Frederik’s early death had caused to the Oldenburg monarchy.14

But our pious king of Denmark has passed over to God too soon . . . Denmark was not the same state in 1592 as it had been in 1588, nor was Protestant Europe in the same dire straits in which it had found itself before the defeat of the Armada. It is impossible to discern with any accuracy how the Regency or Council perceived the condition of international Protestantism during the eight-year period prior to Christian IV’s coronation. Leading political figures like Niels Kaas and Arild Huitfeldt had been loyal servants to Frederik II; they had been privy to nearly all of his diplomatic maneuverings on behalf of the elusive Protestant coalition, and had raised no known objections to Frederik’s foreign policies. Whether they did so out of a shared perception of the confessional balance of power and the imminence of the Romanist threat, or merely out of a sense of duty to their king, cannot be determined from the extant archival materials. After April 1588, however, their motivations were irrelevant. While Frederik was alive, Denmark would have been hard-pressed to counter the might of Philip II’s Spain. With the king’s moderating influence gone, and the Danish state drifting into constitutional disarray, any kind of meaningful involvement in a Protestant coalition would be far beyond Denmark’s capabilities. Then, too, the urgency for such involvement had largely evaporated by the early 1590s. Europe was not at peace, but the situation in each of the major areas of confessional conflict—France, the Netherlands, and the Empire—had stabilised somewhat. In 1589, Navarre succeeded to the French throne as Henry IV following the assassination of Henry III. The League remained a force to be reckoned with, yet the loss of the Guise lead14 Heiberg, Christian 4., pp. 41–6; Troels Lund, Christian den Fjerdes Skib, vol. 2, pp. 65–72.

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ership—Henry of Guise and his cardinal brother having themselves been assassinated the previous year—robbed the Catholic opposition of much of its vigor. After 1593, Henry IV was no longer fighting an uphill battle. The death of Parma in 1592 and the ascendancy of Maurice of Nassau to his sainted father’s place at the head of the Dutch revolt meant that Spain no longer held the upper hand in the northern provinces of the Low Countries. The latent hostilities between the Protestant princes of the Empire, their Catholic counterparts, and Rudolf II had temporarily subsided as well, and would not re-emerge until the end of the 1590s. Above all, the defeat of the Armada in the Channel in 1588 gave northern Europe a brief respite from the dangers of open warfare between England and Spain. Philip II, of course, would never resign himself to the loss of his possessions in the Netherlands. Spain still posed a threat to the security of the North and Baltic Seas, but the immediacy of that threat had all but disappeared. In short, Denmark was reasonably secure by the early 1590s; there was no pressing reason for the Regency to take up where Frederik II had left off. Frederik’s erstwhile partners—willing or unwilling—had not as yet given up hope of creating a Protestant alliance. Ironically, the conditions for forging such an alliance were much better after 1588 than they had been at any point in the sixteen years between the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres and the death of Frederik II. During that period, Frederik’s support for international Protestantism had been unflagging, particularly so after 1582, so that for at least two years after the king’s death Protestant statesmen still took Danish support for granted. Between 1588 and 1590 a series of foreign embassies from England, France, Scotland, the Netherlands, and several of the German princes met with the Regency in Copenhagen to propose a Protestant coalition in various forms. These were the kind of proposals that Frederik II had longed to hear during his lifetime, but he was no more, and the Regency had neither the time nor the passionate attachment to the ideal of Protestant solidarity that their deceased king had exhibited. The Regency’s response to each of these embassies was the same: cautious expressions of sympathy combined with tacit rejection. England and the States-General were the first to send embassies to Denmark after Frederik II’s death, hoping to assure themselves that the new government would be as cooperative as the late king had been. They were to be disappointed. Daniel Rogers, it will be recalled,

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came to Copenhagen in 1588 to urge the Danes not to render any aid to the survivors of the Armada, to express Elizabeth’s official condolences on the death of the king, and to present the usual list of commercial grievances. He had another purpose as well: to remind the Regency of the urgent need for Denmark’s support in the war against international Catholicism. The Regents listened politely, but had nothing to say where it came to the issue of a Protestant alliance. Several of those who met with Rogers indicated their personal support.15 Rogers reported to Walsingham that Frederik II’s enthusiasm for the Protestant cause could still be found in Heinrich Ramel and Gert Rantzau. Rogers also found an ally in Dr. Paul Knibbe, a minor secretary in the German Chancery, who maintained a brief correspondence with Rogers over the next two years.16 These men, however, were Germans, and hence their influence in the new government was declining rapidly; they were not, contrary to the assertions of Arthur Slavin, the ‘real power brokers’ within the regency government.17 Real authority rested with the Regents and the Council of State, and they were not inclined to involve Denmark in a war with Spain. By 1591, all talk of a Protestant alliance centered around a LondonCopenhagen axis had ceased. When Elizabeth I sent Palavicino back to the Germanies with renewed hopes of fashioning a Protestant coalition there, she asked for Denmark’s endorsement, but not for an alliance with Denmark. The two states would exchange many embassies and voluminous correspondence over the next decade, but the sole topic of discussion would be mutual commercial grievances and disputes.18 15 RAK TKUA/AD/Kop Lat 1586–99, Kaas to Walsingham, 13 July 1588 (unpaginated). 16 BL Cotton MSS Nero B.iii, fol. 254–5b, instructions for Rogers, June 1588; BL Cotton MSS Nero B.iii, fol. 333–4, ‘A Memoriall for Mr. Thomas Bodley’, 31 August 1588; BL Cotton MSS Nero B.iii, fol. 335b, draft instructions for Rogers, 1588; Cal. SP For., vol. 22, pp. 75–80, Rogers to Walsingham, 24 July 1588; PRO SP75/1/92, Paul Knibbe to Daniel Rogers, 3 September 1590; Cal. SP For. vol. 23, pp. 285–86, Paul Knibbe to Walsingham, 25 May 1589. See also the documents regarding Rogers’ 1588 embassy in RAK TKUA/SD/England A.II.10. 17 Slavin, ‘Daniel Rogers in Copenhagen’, pp. 259–64. Slavin incorrectly asserts that the members of the Regency served for one-year terms, and that therefore Rogers was well-advised to focus his attention on the German bureaucrats. 18 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 410, Elizabeth to Christian IV, 15 November 1590; R.B. Wernham (ed.), List and Analysis of State Papers, Foreign Series, Elizabeth I, Preserved in the Public Record Office (6 vols, London, 1964–93), vol. 1, pp. 433–6; R.B. Wernham, After the Armada. Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588–1595 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 256–9.

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The States-General also tried their hand at enlisting the aid of the Regency. A five-man diplomatic team, headed by Hohenlohe, arrived in Copenhagen almost simultaneously with Daniel Rogers. Employing the same ‘domino theory’ rhetoric that Frederik II had so often used before, they described in exaggerated terms the threat that the Catholic powers presented to England, the Netherlands, and the German princes. 120,000 Spanish and League soldiers, they asserted, were poised to crush the Dutch and then the German princes, one by one; with papal assistance, Philip II intended nothing less than the establishment of a Spanish universal monarchy and the enforcement of the Tridentine decrees. The Regency replied with a brief, friendly, but non-committal letter to Maurice of Nassau, stating only that they wished to remain on good terms with the StatesGeneral.19 In this regard the Regency government proved to be as good as its word. This did not, however, extend to offers of support for the Dutch. The Regency would observe the same reserve when dealing with Spain. When asked in 1590 to cut off Denmark’s commercial dealings with the Provinces, they gently refused, on the grounds that such an action would have a devastating effect on the Danish economy; at the same time, the Regents reminded Philip II of the Speyer treaty, and referred to the Dutch as ‘Your Majesty’s rebellious subjects’.20 An unexpected call for Protestant solidarity came, in 1590, from Scotland. Frederik II had had little use for James VI, but Sofie favoured a Scottish match. On 23 November 1589, James and Princess Anna were married at Oslo. James took the opportunity to press for a Protestant alliance of his own design. Already the Scottish king was beginning to fancy himself as the peacemaker of Europe. In the summer of 1590, he too made an attempt to build an anti-Catholic, or at least anti-Spanish, coalition. At the urging of William Stewart, a minor laird who had provided long service to Denmark as a mercenary commander, James sent an embassy to meet individually with several German princes, the States-General, Henry IV, and the 19 RAK TKUA/SD/Nederlandene A.II.8: Instructions for Philip of Hohenlohe et al., 1588, and Aerssens to Christian IV, 7 June 1588; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1588–91, fol. 87v–8v, Regency to Maurice of Nassau, 12 December 1588. 20 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, p. 324, Philip II to Christian IV, 13 May 1590; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1588–91: fol. 139v–40, Kaas to the Spanish ambassador, 18 June 1589; fol. 285–9, Regency to Philip II, 1 November 1590; fol. 291–2, Regency to Mansfeld, 1 November 1590.

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Danish regency government. William Stewart and his partner, Sir John Skene, set foot in Stade in July 1590. After a pleasant but unproductive visit with Ulrich of Mecklenburg at Güstrow, Skene and Stewart called upon Heinrich Rantzau at Segeberg. Rantzau and his sons greeted the two Scots as if they were old friends, and escorted the ambassadors to Kolding, where the Council of State was in session. Their reception was cordial but their errand fruitless. The Rantzaus and Niels Kaas showered Skene and Stewart with a great deal of helpful advice on how best to approach the German princes, yet gave no indication that Denmark wanted any part of the alliance. Kaas met with both ambassadors personally, expressing his personal devotion to the Protestant cause; he made it clear, however, that the Regency could not pursue any course of action that might give offense to Spain.21 The most obvious turnabout in Danish foreign policy after April 1588, however, was in Denmark’s relationship to Navarre and the activist Protestant princes of the Empire. This is where Frederik had been most active, and the king’s death dealt the project to form a German alliance on behalf of the Huguenots a crushing moral blow. To Johann Casimir, Wilhelm IV, and Navarre’s agents, Danish participation in the alliance politics of the 1580s had been invaluable. As Elizabeth I tried in vain to reassemble a coalition in the spring of 1588, Johann Casimir—not yet aware of the king’s death—urged the queen to focus her energies on Frederik II, ‘from whom alone there is any hope’ of aid.22 The ageing Palatine soldier did his best to cajole or frighten the Regency to continue the policies of their late king, for example by passing along a rumour in 1590 that Philip II was preparing to seize the Sound by force. He lent his personal endorsement to the Hohenlohe embassy in 1588, and worked with Palavicino and Jacques Bongars, Henry IV’s new agent in the Empire, to convince the regency government in Copenhagen that the danger of an all-out confessional war in the Germanies had not passed. Nothing worked. Bongars visited Denmark twice—towards the end of 1589 and again in the spring of 1591—to announce the succession of Navarre to the French throne and to emphasise the magnitude of 21

NLS MS.2912, Diary of Sir John Skene, fol. 10–10b, 29 July 1590. Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 135–40, Johann Casimir’s instructions for D. Petrus Denais, ambassador in England, 16 April 1588; Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 111–16, Johann Casimir’s notes on the Protestant alliance, January/February 1588. 22

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the League-papist threat in France. Bongars presented a powerful argument, namely that those Catholics who refused to acknowledge Henry IV as their king were the rebels now.23 But all Bongars’ strivings were to no avail. Niels Kaas, apparently, was polite and sympathetic, but otherwise Bongars received nothing for his troubles save ‘empty promises’. The Regents insisted that Bongars’ request for aid to Henry IV be referred to the herredag scheduled to meet at Copenhagen in the spring of 1590. None of the herredag held in Denmark between 1590 and 1592 ever discussed the topic of Bongars’ mission; the problems presented by a troublesome nobility, an unhappy dowager queen, and the constitutional troubles of the Duchies dominated all political activity in Denmark. Nor did personal appeals from Henry IV have any noticeable effect. Upon returning from his first visit to Denmark, Bongars complained to Palavicino that ‘my voyage has been long, tedious, and not without danger, but entirely without fruit’.24 In Strassburg, the Regency stood to gain real material and political advantage from Frederik’s policies, not least because a canonry or coadjutorship there would provide Duke Ulrik with a sinecure, and therefore might go a long ways towards satisfying the dowager queen’s ambitions for her younger sons. Yet even here the Regency backed cautiously away from involvement in German politics. The regents did send Veit Winsheim to Prague, as a member of a German Protestant delegation that met with Rudolf II in September 1589, to beg a peaceful resolution of the ‘chapter strife’ in favour of the Protestants there.25 The regency government did not, however, send Ulrik to take up his promised seat at Strassburg, and repeatedly (in 1590, 1592, and 1594) turned a deaf ear to Strassburg’s appeals for financial and military aid. Again, Kaas and his colleagues were cordial in their dealings with Strassburg’s delegates, voicing their sympathy for the Protestants there, but they asserted that they would follow the example of the Protestant electors and hope for a peaceful resolution of the dispute.26 23 StAM 4f. Frankreich 914, Joachim Friedrich of Magdeburg to the Regency, 6 October 1589. 24 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 268–9, Bongars to Palavicino, 13 January 1590. 25 RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Sachsen A.II.21, instructions to Heinrich Below and Dr. Nikolaus Theolphilus, 26 August 1588; Meister, Kapitelstreit, pp. 313–16. 26 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1588–91: fol. 11–12, Kaas and Ramel to the council of Strassburg, 15 April 1588; fol. 293–4, Regency to the administrator of Magdeburg,

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From the standpoint of those who still laboured to create a Protestant alliance in the Empire, Frederik II—as Johann Casimir observed in 1589—had indeed ‘passed over to God too soon’. Nothing illustrated this better than the dramatic change that time had worked in Saxon foreign policy. Prior to 1589, Elector Christian I had held tenaciously to the strict neutrality that his father had observed, even though his confessional leanings were far different than August’s had been. By the end of that year, however, Christian had changed his mind. The Guise invasion of Mömpelgardt finally convinced the elector that ‘the pope and his minions [think] no better of the Lutherans than of the Calvinists’, and that the Protestants could protect themselves much more effectively against the Catholic threat ‘if we stand together as one’. Frederik, of course, had tried ceaselessly to convince Christian I of that very fact, to no avail. Now the king was nearly two years in his grave, the Regency’s attentions were directed elsewhere, and Christian I was the leading protagonist of Protestant solidarity. The elector convened a meeting of the greater Protestant princes at Torgau in January and February 1591. At the Torgau conference, Saxony, Brandenburg, Wilhelm IV of Hessen, Johann Casimir, and a host of lesser princes finally managed to achieve what Frederik had sought the previous decade at Lüneburg and Naumburg: a military alliance to defend Protestant interests. All of the participants agreed to provide money or troops to the cause, and the assembly elected Christian of Anhalt—later to gain notoriety as the leader of the Evangelical Union at the dawn of the Thirty Years’ War—as military commander. Danish representation was visibly absent, though Wilhelm IV gave whistful expression to his hopes that Denmark might join after the fact. The belligerent resolve of the Torgau Union to take aggressive military action against the League in France did not last long; within months of the meeting, two of its three primary architects—Christian I and Wilhelm IV—would be dead, and Johann Casimir would follow soon thereafter. There were no similarly-inclined

1 November 1590; RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1592–95: fol. 102–3, Regency to Ulrich of Mecklenburg, 2 October 1592; fol. 320v–1v, Christian IV to the administrator and chapter of Strassburg, 6 June 1594; RAK TKKUA/SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.2: Rantzau to Christian IV, 26 February 1592, Johann Casimir to Christian IV, 2 December 1592, Elector Palatine Friedrich IV to Christian IV, 15 December 1592. The administratorship of Strassburg diocese was ultimately offered to Margrave Johann Georg of Brandenburg; see RAK TKUA/SD/Tyskland: Strassburg Stift A.II.2, Strassburg cathedral chapter to Christian IV, 2 June 1592.

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leaders to take their places. Johann Georg of Brandenburg was relieved at the opportunity to back out of this assertive but risky alliance, and in Saxony Christian I was succeeded by his eight-yearold son. Not until the upheaval at Donauwörth in 1607, and the failed Diet at Regensburg that followed it, would the Protestant princes of the Empire again be motivated to set aside their confessional differences and unite.27 The Danish Regency was not rejecting the Protestant cause, nor did it mean any ill-will to Denmark’s co-religionists. Instead, the regents were rejecting entanglement in foreign affairs that did not press directly on Danish territorial interests. They were equally dismissive of diplomatic advances from the Habsburgs, whether Spanish or Austrian. The Regency refused to aid Philip II in his efforts to reclaim the Low Countries, and in 1592 it gently turned down Rudolf II’s request for Danish assistance in his war against the Turks.28 There were too many domestic difficulties with which the Regency had to contend. The goodwill of statesmen like Heinrich Rantzau, Heinrich Ramel, and Niels Kaas counted for nothing during the intrigueridden first years of Christian IV’s reign. Bowing to the pressure of an isolationist nobility, the Regency had become isolationist itself. Vigorous involvement in international politics would have to wait for Christian IV’s direction. The Regency had safeguarded the monarchy as best it could given the problems that beset it, and when it began to decay, as Frederik II’s former advisers began to age and die, the young king was well into his adolescence. The strain of governing Denmark in such difficult times proved to be too much for Niels Kaas, the heart and soul of the Regency. By 1593 Kaas was quite ill, and on 29 June 1594 he followed his king to the grave at the age of sixty. Hak Ulfstand would also die that same year. Gradually, Christian IV began to assume an increasing burden of responsibilities within the regime. In 1595 he paid personal visits to a number of German princely courts, in search of a suitable consort, and finally reconciled with his mother at Güstrow. The Council of State agreed that Christian was now of age to govern independently.

27 Bezold (ed.), Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 431–58, minutes of the conference at Torgau, 19 January–2 February 1591; Klein, Der Kampf um die zweite Reformation in Kursachsen, pp. 135–6. 28 RAK TKUA/AD/AusReg 1592–95, fol. 110–15, Regency to Rudolf II, 13 December 1592.

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The elaborate coronation ceremonies, unquestionably the most lavish royal spectacle Denmark had ever witnessed, took place at Copenhagen on 29 August 1596. Christian IV, at age nineteen, was now ruler of the largest Protestant state in Europe. As king, Christian IV would follow a different path than the one his father had chosen, especially where it came to foreign policy. In his early years, Frederik II had been an ambitious, even aggressive, monarch, but the Seven Years’ War with Sweden curbed most of his drive to conquer. Only in his attempts to force the city of Hamburg to bow to his will could Frederik II be said to have maniested anything other than caution and conservatism in foreign affairs after 1570. Christian IV, on the other hand, did not hide his desire to make Denmark known before the world. His efforts to augment the reputation of the Oldenburg State and of himself as ruler permeated nearly every aspect of his governance, not merely his diplomatic endeavors. In the greater splendour of court culture, in the state’s proto-mercantilistic economic activities, and in the rebuilding of the military establishment, Christian IV’s regime was one that seemed bound and determined to carve out for itself a place among the great monarchies of the Continent. In the direction of foreign policy, this entailed a distinctly aggressive stance in maintaining Denmark’s control over the Baltic. The Hanseatic cities, though suspicious of Denmark’s intentions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had had little cause to complain about Frederik II; with the notable exception of Hamburg, he largely left them to their own devices, and continued to observe their ancient and extensive trading privileges. Christian IV was not quite so civil. Gradually Christian withdrew recognition of the Hanse’s privileged status. He was far less kind to the Dutch than his father had been, quickly earning the unspoken enmity of the leaders of the Republic. Men like Oldenbarneveldt, who had admired Frederik II and looked to him for assistance, began to regard Denmark as a foe, or at least as an obstacle to Dutch trade in the Baltic. By the second decade of the new century, the United Provinces were looking to Sweden as a valuable diplomatic counter to Danish control of the Sound. Danish ambitions in that direction also led to a greatly heightened level of rivalry with Sweden. Before he displaced Sigismund III as king of Sweden, Duke Karl of Södermanland had exchanged nothing but kind words with Frederik II; as King Karl IX, the ambitious new Vasa monarch and his Danish counterpart Christian IV were

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fixed on a collision course. After a forty-year stretch of largely peaceful relations, Denmark and Sweden would again go to war with one another in 1611. In the Germanies, Christian IV’s policies would be both aggressive and self-aggrandising before 1625. Frederik II’s involvement in the fashionable princely practice of secularising Catholic bishoprics in the Empire was limited to his invited participation in the Strassburg controversy of the 1580s. Christian’s Stiftpolitik, on the other hand, was active, assertive, and lucrative. Stettin, Bremen, Verden, and Halberstadt would all be in Danish hands before Christian IV made the fateful decision to take up arms against the emperor in 1625. This is not to say that Christian IV had no interest in western European politics, especially where confessional issues were involved. Indeed he did; but where Frederik II saw the conflicts in the Netherlands and France as directly relevant to the fate of Protestantism everywhere, Christian IV found Catholicism threatening only when it encroached directly on his own political, territorial, and dynastic interests. Frederik II’s confessional concerns were international; Christian IV’s were parochial. Thus the Hinrichsson ‘plot’ of 1603–04, a rumoured Polish-Spanish-papal cabal which aimed at the recatholicisation of Sweden and ultimately of Denmark—a reincarnation of Lorichs’ machinations in the 1570s—elicited a sharp reaction from the Danish king, while the Dutch Revolt and the various crises leading up to the Thirty Years’ War held relatively little interest for Christian. Much of this detachment from religious conflict must be attributed to the differences in confessional leanings between father and son: Frederik was an avowed Philippist, with irenicist inclinations, who did not hesitate to cooperate with Calvinists; conversely, Christian IV, an orthodox Lutheran who favoured such gnesioLutheran divines as Hans Poulsen Resen, found Calvinism distasteful and political alliance with Calvinist states unimportant. To be sure, Danish mediators played a limited role in the peace talks that led to the Twelve Years’ Truce in the Netherlands in 1609, and in the disputes over the controversial Jülich-Kleve succession. Christian viewed these mediation attempts, however, as obligations—his duty to act as a great and generous Christian monarch in the first, to uphold peace between the German princes in the second—rather than as actions on behalf of a ‘common cause’ to which he was passionately attached. When Christian IV was finally moved to take his place as leader of an international Protestant coalition in the earlyto-mid-1620s, he did so because Habsburg and Catholic forces

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menaced his position as a prince of the Lower Saxon Circle of the Empire, thereby threatening both the confessional integrity of his realms and the ‘liberties’ he enjoyed as a prince of the Empire. It could be argued that Frederik II was motivated more by an ideological attachment to the Protestant cause than his son would be. That, however, would not be entirely correct. It would be more accurate to assert instead that Frederik was more ready to accept the existence of an international Catholic threat, a characteristic and an underlying assumption of Protestant politics in the late sixteenth century. This was an age of reciprocal confessional paranoia, and Frederik II had much about which to be paranoid. Frederik’s legitimacy as a monarch, like that of Elizabeth, had been called into question. He did not labour under the burden of papal excommunication, nor did anyone label him a bastard. But as the grandson of a man who had usurped the throne from a legitimate king who had been bound by marriage to the Habsburgs, and as the son of a king who had seized the crown by force of arms, Frederik could be considered a usurper himself. The legitimacy issue was one of the avenues by which confessional politics and dynastic politics merged, for rivals of opposing confessions could—and did—easily exploit it. Only the Speyer treaty stood between Frederik and illegitimacy, and the house of Lorraine never ceased to remind him of this fact. The ambitions of Lorraine could not, in and of themselves, cause much harm to Frederik and his kingdom, but if Spain backed these ambitions from a position of strength in the Netherlands the result could well have proven disastrous. Most important, Frederik simultaneously enjoyed the geopolitical advantages and suffered from the misfortune of holding the keys to the Baltic. Since he held in his hands the means by which the Dutch rebels and Protestant England could be either brought to their knees or saved, he could not simply ignore the conflicts between Catholic and Protestant to his west. The foreign policy of Frederik II vis-à-vis the European ‘wars of religion’ constitutes a perfect example of what historians of early modern Europe mean when they write that religious and political motivations were inextricable in the century following the Reformation. Frederik II was not ideologically motivated in the sense that he was, or perceived himself to be, a crusader for a religious cause. Within his own state he was conservative in matters of faith, favouring Philippist clergy but desiring harmony and outward conformity. Frederik II was not a tolerant man where it came to public devia-

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tion from the accepted religion of the state. Neither was Frederik interested in extending his faith to lands outside the Oldenburg monarchy. He was perfectly willing to leave them alone. The simple fact that Spain and Poland were Catholic, and France largely so, did not bother him, nor did the existence of a multitude of sects and creeds in the Netherlands. Frederik II did, however, strongly resent those who endeavored to impose their religious doctrines on his lands, or even to suggest changes in Danish religious practices. Frederik insisted publicly that Denmark observed the true and unrefined doctrines of the Augsburg Confession, and would not contemplate any changes in the faith of his father. Hence his almost visceral reaction to the Concord: August, Andreae, and all its proponents, in Frederik’s view, had implied that there was something latently foul in accepted Danish theology. Their efforts on behalf of the Concord also threatened to give rise to even greater confessional upheaval, when Frederik treasured harmony—domestic and international— above all other things. To borrow a phrase from students of the French Wars of Religion, Frederik II did not fear Catholicism as a ‘body of beliefs’, but rather as a ‘body of believers’. Even that statement is not entirely accurate. The Danish king feared Catholicism as an entity primarily because of the international political agenda that—in his own view, and in that of many of his Protestant contemporaries—it embraced. The papacy, armed with the Tridentine decrees, orchestrated a vast array of temporal forces, all aimed at the extirpation of the Protestant states and communities. In Frederik’s correspondence, the popes appear not as statesmen or even as individuals; the king rarely mentioned them by name. Instead, they were nebulous and almost unearthly, graced only with sobriquets like ‘Roman Antichrist’. It was the secular agents of this unholy power—Philip II of Spain, Catherine de’ Medici and the last Valois kings of France, Stefan Bathory of Poland, even Johan III of Sweden—who aroused the king’s ire and inspired his fear. Had the Valois pursued a more subtle course of action against the Huguenots, or had Philip II left the Netherlands alone, it is doubtful that Frederik II would have done so much as to have raised an eyebrow in response. Even the king’s proud and haughty response to the Commendone mission in 1561 appears to have been predicated upon rumours that the papacy intended some kind of attack on the German princes at Naumburg. Catholicism was offensive to Frederik because it acted as a destabilising

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force that threatened to engulf all of Europe. His ideological distaste for Catholic doctrine followed his fear of Catholic political aggression, and not the other way around. This could lead one to conclude that the motivations behind Frederik’s foreign policy in the 1570s and 1580s were predominately political and secular, and not ideological. Regional security concerns were indeed important factors. Safeguarding the Sound had to be, and would be until the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century, Denmark’s foremost goal in security policy. Sweden and Poland threatened Denmark’s dominium maris Baltici; the unrest in the Netherlands, and the troubled relationship between England and Spain, only meant that Denmark had one more potential enemy—Spain—who coveted Denmark’s geopolitical advantage. To view Denmark’s foreign policy during the reign of Frederik II as motivated entirely by the need to defend the Sound, however, would require ignoring all other aspects of Frederik’s diplomacy. It would not explain, for example, the depth of Frederik’s commitment to Henry of Navarre, or his delight when the Valois made their periodic compromises with the Huguenots. Nor does such an interpretation explain Frederik’s travails in pursuit of an alliance of German Protestant princes. No-one in the Empire, not even the emperor himself, was poised to compromise Denmark’s territorial interests. Neither was France, at least not after the abdication of Anjou in Poland. Even in Denmark’s relations with its Baltic rivals, Sweden and Poland, confessional paranoia played a significant role. Sweden and Poland were already established threats to Denmark’s security. Frederik required neither an excuse nor a means of legitimising his hostility towards either power, but the possibility that either might contemplate partnership in an international Catholic conspiracy clearly heightened the king’s belligerence in his dealings with both states. Religious factors helped to determine the course of Denmark’s relations with its fellow Protestant states as well, particularly within the Empire. Frederik was hardly the only Lutheran sovereign who watched the advance of the Catholic conspiracy with trepidation and alarm. Frederik’s personal inclination towards Philippism, and that of his court and ministers, meant that his approach to confronting the Catholic peril would be different from those of most German princes. A few lesser Reichsfürsten—irenicists like Wilhelm IV and Calvinists like Johann Casimir—shared the Danish king’s attachment to the ideal of Protestant solidarity as a means of countering Catholic-

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ism. Most, however, including the influential electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, did not. Frederik II, Wilhelm IV, even Ulrich of Mecklenburg might look upon Calvinists merely as erring brethren, but to August of Saxony and those who followed him they were insidious enemies who provoked rebellion and unrest. Denmark’s alliance politics, like those of Navarre, Walsingham, and the Palatine Wittelsbachs, required that August of Saxony and the other conservative Lutheran princes be convinced that Catholicism exceeded Calvinism in odium and menace. Sometimes this necessitated resorting to constitutional arguments in place of religious ones, by depicting the resurgence of militant Romanism as a movement that violated the spirit of the ‘Religious and Secular Peace’ of 1555 and indeed was likely to destroy the fragile balance created at Augsburg. Like Johann Casimir and the Hessian landgrave, Frederik II occasionally employed the language of constitutional dysfunction in his appeals to the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, contending that Catholic triumph in the Empire would ultimately result in the loss of their accustomed liberties. Christian IV would make extensive use of such rhetoric during the 1620s, but these words meant far more to Christian than they did to his father. The language of princely opposition to a centralising Habsburg imperium appeared but rarely in Frederik’s writings, and then only very late in the reign. It was an overzealous Church, not an overmighty emperor, that haunted Frederik’s dreams. If we look beyond the English sources, it is not hard to make the case that Protestant solidarity against a perceived Catholic threat was at the heart of Danish foreign policy during the years between the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the death of Frederik II. It should be equally clear that for all his strivings, Frederik II did not have a noticeable effect on the course of the ‘wars of religion’, either in the Netherlands, in France, or in the Empire. This should prompt an obvious question: why not? Why was it that the Oldenburg State, with all the resources at its disposal, with the ability to choke off access to the Baltic Sea region, and with a navy that was the equal of England’s, fail to accomplish even what little Elizabeth I managed to achieve in the Netherlands? Several factors—both internal and external—account for this failure. Most obvious is the fact that the potential success of Frederik’s foreign policy hinged upon the diplomatic joining of states that had no interest whatsoever in taking part in a cooperative effort. A successful coalition of German states would require the active engagement of electoral Saxony and

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Brandenburg, but neither of the pair wanted any part of Frederik’s proposed coalition. Frederik may have had more luck in his efforts to create an alliance in the German states than Elizabeth I did, simply because the Danish king —as a Lutheran and as a German Reichsfürst—was ‘one of them’, while Elizabeth was an outsider. But even Frederik’s influence could not offset the two considerations that held back Saxony, Brandenburg, and the host of smaller states that looked to Dresden for leadership: their stern distrust of Calvinists, and their stubborn attachment to the Augsburg settlement. In retrospect, the ‘Religious and Secular Peace’ of 1555 might appear to be riddled with contradictions, loopholes, and a plethora of latent flaws, but it was the only guarantee of safety that the Lutheran princes had. For over twenty years, until the death of Emperor Maximilian II in 1576, the Augsburg peace had kept them safe; to break that peace on their own initiative was simply unthinkable. The building of princely coalitions, to be sure, was a salient feature of political activity within the Empire in the decades after 1555. As Jason Lavery has pointed out, the raison d’être of these coalitions was ‘to protect the internal order [of the Empire] from destabilising forces, both foreign and domestic’. ‘[A] united approach to an outside crisis’, Lavery writes, ‘had to foster the preservation of internal stability.’29 The specific coalition towards which Frederik II laboured was, on the other hand, likely to encourage destabilising forces. As the rise and demise of the Evangelical Union of 1608 would demonstrate, it would take a lot more than crises like the Cologne War to convince the Lutheran princes that standing side-by-side with Calvinists was worth risking the destruction of that peace. In 1588, or at any point between 1555 and that date, the crisis in the Empire was not sufficiently immediate to warrant such a risk. Frederik II was not capable of changing the confessional outlook of the Lutheran princes or of convincing them that the Peace of Augsburg could not protect them if their adversaries should decide to discard the settlement themselves; no-one could have effected such a change in mindset. To do so would have required a miracle. In the failure of the second major component of Frederik II’s foreign policy during the 1580s—Danish involvement in the SpanishDutch-English conflict—Frederik himself must bear much of the

29

Lavery, Germany’s Northern Challenge, pp. 4–5.

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blame. The manner in which the king pursued his proposed mediation between the three belligerents indicates that Frederik intended the negotiations to be a diplomatic device—not to stall for time, in the way that Parma hoped to use the negotiations, but rather as a means of justifying war should hostilities prove to be inevitable. Finding a legitimate justification for acts of war was of great importance to early modern monarchs. In order for Frederik to justify war against Spain, or even hostile actions like the closing of the Sound to Spanish shipping, Frederik would first have to exhaust all other avenues to the resolution of the conflict in the Netherlands. The peace negotiations were a necessary step in the process of demonstrating that a Spanish war was a bellum justum to both foreign and domestic audiences. After all, the Council of State and Frederik’s subjects, whose welfare the Council was supposed to safeguard, would have to be convinced that a war against Spain—which would almost certainly ensue if Denmark were to ally itself with England—was worth the risk, let alone the heavy tax burden that accompanied war. The war with Sweden in the 1560s had been difficult enough; a war with Spain promised to be a much more painful ordeal. Even if the peace negotiations did not fail, Frederik II would have accomplished his objectives. If Philip II were to agree to Denmark’s conditions for peace, especially that regarding freedom of conscience in the Netherlands, then both Frederik and Elizabeth would have achieved their primary goal: the end of strife in the Low Countries. Only once, however—when Willoughby was recalled to Denmark at the end of 1585—did Frederik II openly state the purpose of his strategem. In a thousand ways, the Danish king gave expression to his anti-Spanish sentiments, but that was not enough to overcome English suspicions of Denmark. His intentions were hidden to all but himself and, presumably, his closest advisers. Little wonder, then, that the king appeared to have more enemies and detractors in England than in anywhere else in Europe, or that Tudor historians have long suspected Frederik of being little more than a pensioner of Philip II. Even E.I. Kouri, one of the very few historians of Elizabethan foreign policy who has worked in Scandinavian archives, detected a ‘growing friendliness between Copenhagen and Madrid’ in Frederik’s attempts to broker a peace settlement in the Netherlands. Indeed, just the opposite development was taking place: Denmark was distancing itself from the very dynasty that had guaranteed the legitimacy of the Oldenburg line in 1544. Parma played along with

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Frederik because prolonged peace negotiations suited his military strategy; Frederik persisted in offering his services because it suited his own diplomatic goals. Only England felt it had nothing to gain, largely due to Frederik’s unwillingness or inability to articulate his long-range plans. The forces limiting Denmark’s success in achieving its foreign policy goals in the 1580s were predominately external, but Frederik could not avoid one significant internal factor: the possible and likely objections of his nobility and of his Council of State. The noble reaction of 1588 showed very clearly the antipathy which the Danish nobility had for foreign engagements and even for the presence of foreigners in the central administration. Many, if not most, of the core members of Frederik’s government shared the king’s perception of international Catholicism and his estimation of the threat that Catholicism posed to peace on the Continent. Even if they had not, they were loyal servants of the king, and the king was an effective political manager. We know little of how people like Niels Kaas, Heinrich Ramel, or Christoffer Valkendorf counselled the king in private, but they voiced no public objections to his policies. They had little reason to do so; except for a few minor skirmishes with Poland and a number of blusterings directed against Hamburg, Frederik did not make or threaten war after 1570. Had Denmark come close to joining England in a war with Spain, the Council could well have acted in a much different fashion. Christian IV would later clash repeatedly with his Council of State over foreign and military policy. The Council’s refusal to sanction Christian’s war against Ferdinand II in 1625 hobbled the ‘royal adventure’ in Lower Saxony, more so than the failure of Denmark’s allies to provide the support they had promised. The ensuing conflict between king and Council would be the central political issue of Christian’s reign after 1629, leading ultimately to the failure of adelsvælden and the institution of hereditary absolute monarchy in 1660. The Denmark of Frederik II, however, would never experience such internal strife. In part, this must be attributed to Frederik’s superior skill in ruling by consensus, in manipulating limited monarchy to suit his own ends, but in all fairness to his successor it should be remembered that Frederik II did not actually commit his kingdom to the defense of Protestants on the Continent. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Frederik did take the possible objections of his Council into consideration: in his cautious approach to the Anglo-Spanish conflict, and in the secrecy in

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which he gave a large cash donation to Fabian von Dohna. There is also the testimony of Lord Willoughby upon visiting the Danish court in 1585: ‘his will is good but yt he is overruled’. Frederik may have had a much better chance of success in achieving his foreign policy goals had he lived another four or five years. As we have seen, the diplomatic climate shifted dramatically on the Continent after the spring of 1588. Among the German princes, at least, Frederik II’s arguments in favour of a Protestant coalition would have found a more receptive audience after Elector Christian I reversed his earlier, conservative, stance. The Torgau Union of 1591 was precisely what the Danish king had sought to achieve in the mid-to-late 1580s. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding the formation of the Torgau coalition, its existence was ephemeral and its impact on confessional politics negligible. Even had Christian I and the other creators of the Torgau Union survived a while longer, such alliances rarely worked. If all the historiography of the ‘military revolution’ has shown us one thing, it is that very few early modern states had the requisite resources, or the mechanisms for mobilising these resources, to engage in long-term military action. The fiscal inability of the early modern polity to make war, or at least to make war effectively, increased exponentially rather than decreased when commitment to military action required the collective resources of several states acting together in concert. The process of asserting a common will was more problematic still. The sad fate of the Evangelical Union of 1608—its pusillanimous dissolution in 1621—is a telling object-lesson in this regard. Several members of the Torgau Union, like electoral Brandenburg, were both short on cash and full of reluctance to do anything that might bring on a general war in the Germanies. The kind of general alliance that Frederik II aspired to create was also impractical. Although the Danish king did indeed hope to provide direct military assistance to Navarre, the ostensible purpose of the coalition he envisioned was to defend the interests of the Protestant princes, and therefore to uphold peace in the Empire, by the mere threat of force that such an assemblage would imply. In other words, the mere fact that the major Protestant princes of the Empire would make common cause with Denmark and possibly with England, and that each of the members had vowed to provide troops and money, would be enough to convince their German and non-German Catholic foes to leave them alone. The falling ‘dominoes’ would stop there. It was hardly an idea that was unique to Danish foreign policy. It

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had been a cornerstone of Palatine policy under Friedrich III, and provided the rationale behind both the Schmalkaldic League and the Evangelical Union. As E.I. Kouri has stated, ‘A strong Protestant league would therefore not only be necessary in case of war but also effective in forestalling it.’30 The central flaw in this line of reasoning was this: a passive pan-Protestant alliance was predicated on the existence of an international Catholic conspiracy, but no such conspiracy actually existed. It is easy to see why so many Protestant statesmen believed firmly in the reality of such a plot, and from their perspective the oftentimes astounding political and military successes of the Counterreformation Church must have appeared to be the constituent elements of one vast, overarching cabal. There were incidents of collusion between Catholic states and instances of Catholic political unity—Philip II’s sponsorship of the Holy League in France and papal, French, and Spanish intrigues in Poland stand out as the most obvious examples—but these were exceptional events. The formation of a Protestant league, within or without the Empire, was actually counter-productive, for it only served to breed in Catholic rulers the same kind of paranoia that inspired such alliances in the first place. Again, the Evangelical Union serves as an evocative casein-point. Born from the belief that the emperor and the German Catholic princes were bent on the demise of Protestantism following the notorious upheaval at Donauwörth in 1607, the creation of the Union did little more than to frighten the Catholic Reichsfürsten into creating a league of their own the following year. The Catholic conspiracy existed only in the minds of Protestant statesmen and sovereigns. It was a dangerous, if understandable, delusion. The legacy of Frederik’s involvement in the ‘wars of religion’ for Denmark requires less speculation. Through his foreign policy, and through his actions in the war against Sweden, Frederik II had proven to the world that Denmark was a major power. It had a powerful fleet, commanded the Baltic sea-lanes as well as a great deal of influence over the German princes, and its Protestant credentials were impeccable. Danish foreign policy, moreover, manifested a deep and abiding interest in the welfare of international Protestantism. Regardless of Frederik’s failure to achieve anything concrete during 30 E.I. Kouri, ‘For True Faith or National Interest? Queen Elizabeth I and the Protestant Powers’, in Kouri and Scott (eds), Politics and Society in Reformation Europe, p. 415.

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his lifetime, and despite the discouraging signs of isolationism that the Regency government emitted, Denmark had established for itself a reputation as a leading, even militant, great power in Protestant Europe. Well into the reign of Christian IV the following century, those Protestant and anti-Habsburg statesmen who hoped to give form to Protestant solidarity against the perceived Catholic threat essayed to enlist Danish participation or leadership. Unfortunately, these were expectations that the Oldenburg State could not fulfil. It did not have the population or resources to serve in this capacity for very long. Denmark may have equalled Elizabethan England in prestige and reputation, but it did not match England in vital resources. There was a constitutional aspect to Frederik’s legacy as well, with implications that were no less crippling to the Danish monarchy than its inability to live up to its reputation. Frederik II had proven to be a successful political leader in peace and in war. His style of political management, though informal, was effective. His methods of dealing with his conciliar aristocracy individually, rather than as a group, allowed him to fashion his own policies without having to confront much opposition. When opposition arose, as it did in the abdication crisis of 1570, his quick mind found expedients that enabled him to manipulate the Council of State without arousing much bitterness or hostility. He was a master of government by consensus, involving his aristocracy in governance yet not allowing them the upper hand. In many ways, Frederik II had managed to master the complicated art of making limited monarchy work; under his governance, adelsvælden functioned in the way it was supposed to function. Unfortunately for Denmark, the lessons that could be derived from his kingship were lost on his successor, Christian IV. Christian cannot be blamed for this; he was far too young when his father died, and never had much opportunity to see his father at work. The Regency and the Council supervised Christian’s political education. Frederik’s old advisers might have loved their late king, but they could not teach Christian the art of kingship from the perspective of a king. Christian IV, for his part, revered the institution and the ideology of adelsvælden, as he knew no other system. Even after he and his Council parted ways in 1629, he refused to dismantle it, though he had many opportunities to do so. But because of his unfamiliarity with his father’s methods of governance, Christian IV never learned the art of compromise, of the give-and-take maneuvering that was so vital to the success of limited monarchy. When

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the Council did not give him what he wanted, he resorted to the only means he knew of getting what he wanted: open confrontation. It was a political strategy that did not work in his dealings with the Council of State, and it would contribute directly to the failure of Christian’s foreign policies. This would all be revealed, dramatically, when Denmark was dragged into the complicated web of civil wars and international conflicts we know today as the Thirty Years’ War. Deserted by its allies and afflicted by constitutional gridlock at home, Denmark was bound to fail when faced by the overwhelming resources of the Habsburgs and their allies. That failure cannot be pinned on Frederik II. It was, however, largely because of Frederik II that Protestant Europe looked to Denmark, in vain, for salvation.

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INDEX

Aachen, 197 Aalborg, Christian, Danish captain, 147–8 Aarhus, Denmark, 142 adelsvælden, 26–8, 45–6, 50–1, 324, 327–8 Adolf, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, brother of Christian III of Denmark, 20–2, 36–7, 98, 139, 174, 182, 256, 306–7 Agnes Hedewig of Anhalt, second consort of August of Saxony, 244, 295 Akershus, Norway, 23 Alba, Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, duke of, Spanish governor-general in the Netherlands, 95–9, 131, 146, 149 Älvsborg, Sweden, 39–40 Älvsborg, ransom of (1570), 40 Anabaptists, 74, 78, 140, 164 Andreae, Jacob, Lutheran theologian, 159, 164–5, 169, 171 Anhalt, principality of, 167 Anjou. See Francis (Hercule-François) of Valois, duke of Alençon and Anjou; Henry III, king of France Anna of Denmark, daughter of Frederik II, consort of James VI and I, 103, 306, 311 Anna, consort of August of Saxony, sister of Frederik II of Denmark (‘Mutter Anna’), 35, 101–2, 133, 162–3, 166, 173, 235–6, 244 Anna, princess of Saxony, wife of William of Orange, 90, 152, 155 Antonio of Avis, Dom, pretender to Portuguese throne, 203 Antvorskov, palace of, 47, 259, 282, 296, 298 Archangel, Russia, 185, 188 Aremberg, Jean de Ligne, Count of, 21 Armada, Spanish (1574), 132, 136 Armada, Spanish (1588), 1–2, 56–7, 279, 281, 294, 301–3, 309 Arras, Union of (1579), 181 Assens, Denmark, 142 Augsburg Confession (1530), 75, 84, 161, 163–4, 166–7

Augsburg, Peace of (1555), 40, 85, 175, 199–200, 211, 250, 262–3, 268–9, 293, 321–2 Declaratio Ferdinandea, 154–5, 197–8 Augsburg, Reichstag at (1555), 40 Augsburg, Reichstag at (1582), 197–8 August, elector of Saxony, 40, 61, 80, 84–5, 92–3, 97, 100, 104–10, 114–16, 120, 127, 133, 151–6, 178–80, 182–3, 198–201, 204–5, 209–10, 215, 235, 237, 244, 257 relations with Frederik II, 35–7, 85–93, 101–4, 132, 158–74, 194–7, 230–1 Augusta, daughter of Frederik II, consort of Johann Adolf of Holstein-Gottorp, 103, 174, 196, 257, 307 Auneau, battle of (1587), 292 Axtorna, battle of (1565), 39 Baden, duchy of, 154 Baltic Sea, 3–4 control over (dominium maris Baltici ), 3–4, 9, 40–1, 63, 264–5, 320 naval stores from, 24, 57 trade and commerce in, 3, 9, 23–5, 40–2 Barby, Andreas von, German Chancellor under Christian III and Frederik II, 37–8 Beale, Robert, English agent in Germany, 179–80 Beaulieu, Edict of (1576) (Peace of Monsieur), 133–5 Below, Heinrich, councillor under Frederik II, 55, 192–4, 287 Benedicht, Laurentz, Danish court printer, 144, 240 Bergen, Norway, 2, 23, 74, 78, 148, 191–2, 301–2 Bergen-op-Zoom, The Netherlands, 280, 283 Bergerac, Peace of (1577), 180, 212, 214 Bergisches Buch. See Concord, Formula and Book of

340

index

Bertie, Peregrine, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, English ambassador to Denmark and the German states, 61, 75, 187–9, 234–41, 243, 245, 246–7, 286 Bilde, Niels, lensmand at Bergen, 302 Bille, Peder, councillor under Frederik II, 44 Bjørn, Bjørn Andersen, councillor under Frederik II, 82 Blekinge, Danish province, 23 Blome, Hans, member of Denmark’s German Chancery, 192, 308 Bodley, Sir Thomas, English ambassador to Denmark and the German states, 224–5, 227–30, 234, 239, 286, 303 Bogbinder, Ambrosius, mayor of Copenhagen, 16 Bongars, Jacques, French agent in Germany, 292, 312–13 Bornholm, island of, 39 Bothwell. See Hepburn, James Bourbon, Anthony of, king of Navarre, 90 Bourbon, Charlotte de, wife of William of Orange, 155 Brahe, Tyge (Tycho), Danish astrologer, 80, 107, 145, 191 Brandenburg, electoral, 10, 84, 121, 230 relations with Denmark, 22 Braunschweig, duchies, 84, 266 Braunschweig-Grubenhagen, Philip, count of, 295 Bremen, 20 Bremerholm (Holmen), Danish naval facilities at, 57–8, 138, 191, 223 Brockenhuus, Frands, councillor and rigsmarsk under Frederik II, 45 Brockenhuus, Laurids, fiefholder under Frederik II, 79 Bruchofen, Henrik von, Danish theologian, 160 Brussels, 18, 21 Budde, Matthias, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, 183 Bugenhagen, Johannes, Lutheran theologian, 17, 76 Burghley. See Cecil, Sir William Buys, Paulus, landsadvokaat of Holland, 276–80, 282 Caligari, papal nuncio in Sweden, 129 Calvinism, 9, 74–5, 140, 146, 150, 153, 156, 163–9, 171, 195, 201, 235, 244, 252, 262–3

Cant, Reinier, Dutch ambassador to Denmark, 278, 282–3 Carlos of Austria, Don, son of Philip II of Spain, 95 Caron, Noël de, Dutch ambassador to Denmark, 279 Cassander, Georg, Catholic theologian, 125 Cateau-Cambrésis, Peace of (1559), 29, 64, 111 Catherine de’ Medici, dowager queen of France, 90, 104, 106, 108, 111–15, 117–18, 123–4, 135, 239, 251 Catholic (Holy) League, in France, 203, 228, 233, 244, 293, 308–9 Catholicism, 74, 145 “conspiracies” against Protestant Europe, 9, 99–100, 107, 109–12, 120, 128–42, 157–8 in Denmark, 66, 71, 81–3 in Sweden, 126–8 Cecil, Sir William, Lord Burghley, chief minister of Elizabeth I, 146, 149–50, 152, 214, 277, 284 Charles IX, king of France (1560–74), 64, 89, 99, 104, 106–10, 113, 115, 117–18, 123 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1519–58), 14–15, 18–21, 35, 61, 72, 109, 129, 131, 248 Charles, duke of Lorraine, son of Christine of Lorraine, 19 Chemnitz, Martin, Lutheran theologian, 165 Christian I, elector of Saxony, 244, 253–6, 261–2, 269–72, 293–4, 314–15 Christian II, king of Denmark (1513–23), 14–17, 63 Christian III, king of Denmark (1536–59), 13, 15–29, 47, 51, 59, 89, 131, 165–6 and Frederik II, 29–36 and the Reformation, 16–17, 29, 65–7, 70, 72 as duke of Holstein, 15–16 foreign policy of, 18–21, 64, 109 Christian IV, king of Denmark (1588–1648), son of Frederik II, 1, 3, 9–13, 21–2, 27, 30, 46–7, 49–50, 57, 58, 63, 73, 83, 103, 144–5, 147, 158, 187–8, 216, 220–1, 224, 274, 289–91, 298–328 passim Christian, prince of Anhalt, 271, 295–6 Christina of Hessen, consort of Adolf of Holstein-Gottorp, 256, 306–7

index Christine of Lorraine, daughter of Christian II of Denmark, 18–21, 52, 91–4, 111, 135, 157 Christoffer, Count of Oldenburg, 16, 20 Chytraeus, David, Lutheran theologian, 165, 167, 172–3 Clerk, John, Scottish agent in Denmark, 148 Colding, Niels Nielsen, Danish theologian, 46, 75 Cölestin, Georg, Lutheran theologian, 167 Coligny, Gaspard de, Admiral of France, 64, 105, 108 Cologne, 153, 198–9 Cologne War (1583–85), 199–201, 202, 204–6, 208, 212–15, 265–6 comet of 1577, 132, 145 Commendone, Giovanni Francesco, papal emissary to Denmark and the German princes, 85–87, 136 Concord, Formula and Book of, 159, 163–7 disputes over, 165–74, 178, 180, 183, 194 Concordia incident (1573), 119–23 Condé, Henri de Bourbon, prince of, 293 Copenhagen, Denmark, 15–16, 44, 47, 48–50, 57, 67–8, 74, 78, 81, 102–3, 117, 119, 122, 130, 142, 148, 259, 289, 299 Copenhagen, university of, 68, 80, 294–5 theological faculty, 67, 69, 76–7, 79, 144, 159–63 Cornejo, Pedro, Spanish agent in the Baltic, 195 Council of State, Danish, 11, 15–16, 18, 25, 26–7, 101, 103, 108, 134, 299, 304–8, 310, 315–16, 327–8 Count’s War (1534–36), 16–19, 21 Cracow, Dr. Georg, Saxon chancellor, 152, 156 Croze, French ambassador to Denmark, 118 Cryptocalvinism. See Philippism Dançay, Charles de, French ambassador in Denmark, 48–9, 60, 80, 107–8, 112, 115–19, 122–4, 134–5, 167–8, 173, 182, 187, 207, 215–17, 239, 257 Danzig, 24, 127, 136, 138, 181–2 Darnley, Robert, consort of Mary, Queen of Scots, 89, 148

341

De la Gardie, Pontus, Swedish ambassador to the papal curia, 128 Declaratio Ferdinandea. See Augsburg, Peace of Delfino, Zacharia, papal nuncio in Germany, 85 Delmenhorst, 96 Denmark: absolutism in, 12 aristocracy of, 11, 13, 59 bureaucracy and administration, 190–4 chanceries, 28, 53 kansler, 27 officers of state (rigsembedsmænd ), 27, 51–3 rentemester, 191 rigshofmester, 27, 51, 54 rigsmarsk, 27–8 commerce and trade, 146–7, 240 constitution, 11–12, 45–55 coronation charter (håndfæstning), 26 diets (stændermøder), 49–50 herredag, 27, 48 kongens retterting, 27, 48 duties and tariffs, 25, 41–2, 98. See also lastetold; Sound dues fiefs and fiefholders (len/lensmænd ), 48, 51, 59–60, 304 finances and state fisc, 25, 41–3, 58–60, 138–9, 207, 306 military institutions, 42–3, 55–60, 138 fortifications, 56, 117, 139–40 knight service (rostjeneste), 55 mercenaries, 55–6 native troops and conscription, 55 navy, 2–3, 56–8, 116, 138–9, 207, 280, 294 monarchy and kingship in, 13–14, 17–18, 26–7, 46–55 nobility of, 59 protest of 1588, 303–6 peasantry in, 16–18 Reformation in, 14–17 resources, 23, 57–8 royalist revolution in (1660), 12, 25 state church, 65–83 and heterodoxy, 74–8, 140–2, 224 and social discipline, 70–3, 141–2 censorship, 141–2 clergy, 66, 68–72 Foreigner Articles (1553, 1569), 78 kirkebøn, 71–3 landemode, 69–70 Ordinance of 1537, 17, 66–7, 69

342

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Ordinance on Church Discipline (1629), 70 prayer-days (bededage), 71–3, 206 proposed ordinance of 1561, 67 taxation in, 42–4, 58–60 Dernbach, Balthasar von, prince-bishop of Fulda, 153–4 Deventer, Rolf of, 144–5 Ditmarschen, 36–8, 286 Danish conquest of (1559), 36–8, 83, 98 Dohna, Achatius von, Calvinist activist, 194 Dohna, Christoph von, councillor under Frederik II, 134, 157, 168–9, 187, 194, 218 Dohna, Fabian von, Calvinist soldier, 194, 213, 259–61, 274, 292 Donauwörth crisis (1607), 315 Dorothea, consort of Christian III of Denmark, 30, 35, 101, 159 Dorothea, daughter of Christian II of Denmark, 18–19 Dorothea, daughter of Christine of Lorraine, 19, 157–8 Dragør, Denmark, 139 Dragsholm, castle at, 148 Drake, Sir Francis, English naval commander, 203, 226, 285, 302–3 Dresden, purge of Calvinists at (1574), 156, 159, 164 Duchies, 21–2, 42, 61. See also Slesvig; Holstein Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, minister under Elizabeth I, governor-general in the Netherlands, 210, 226, 238, 240–2, 245, 247, 258, 275–8, 285, 288 Dunfermline Abbey, Scotland, 287 Dybvad, Jørgen, Danish theologian, 145 Edzard, count of Ostfriesland, 139 Egmont, Lamoral, Count of, 95 Ehem, Christoph, councillor to Elector Palatine Friedrich III, 149 Eichsfeld, 154, 158 Eitzen, Paul von, bishop-superintendent in Holstein, 169 Elbing, 24 Elisabeth of Denmark, consort of Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg, 102, 162–3 Elisabeth of Saxony, wife of Johann Casimir, 97, 133 Elisabeth Vasa, daughter of Johan III, king of Sweden, 124

Elisabeth, daughter of Frederik II, 103, 265, 306 Elizabeth I of England, 5, 29, 49, 64, 81, 84, 89–92, 98, 111–12, 142, 146, 149–52, 210, 214, 222 and German affairs, 169–71, 211, 213, 256, 258 foreign policy of, 137, 177, 203, 226, 232–6 relations with Frederik II, 148, 169–72, 181–3, 187–9, 226–32, 235–41, 243–4, 273–90 Emden, 283 England, 1–3, 4, 10, 24, 97, 129 and the Protestant alliance, 146, 149–53, 177–89 navy, 56–7 participation in Baltic commerce, 147, 150–1, 179, 185, 246 relations with Denmark, 41–2, 60, 63 139, 146–53, 176, 179–89, 227, 231, 245–50, 273–90, 300, 309–10 Eraso, Francisco de, 129, 131, 136 Erbverbrüderung, Saxon-Hessian alliance (1457), 270–1 Erich II, duke of Braunschweig-Calenberg, 157–8 Erik of Pomerania, king of Denmark, 25, 139 Erik XIV, king of Sweden (1560–68), 38–9, 87, 89, 92–3, 125 Ernst of Wittelsbach, son of Wilhelm V of Bavaria, 198–200 Ernst, archduke of Austria, son of Maximilian II, 113 Estonia, 38–40 Eucharist, disputes over, 8, 74–5, 78, 80–1, 159–74 Færø Islands, 66 Farensbach, Georg ( Jürgen), Danish courtier and soldier, 220–4 Fecht, Petrus Mikaelis, Swedish theologian, 125 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor (1558–64), 35, 37, 85, 88–90, 154 Feyt, Florentius, Catholic activist in Sweden, 126 Flensburg, 57, 81 Fontainebleau, Treaty of (1541), 109 France, 4, 10, 24, 29, 39, 64, 139, 167 relations with Denmark, 41, 114–24 Wars of Religion in, 132–3, 169, 178, 203, 212, 232–3, 268, 292–3

index Francis (Hercule-François) of Valois, duke of Alençon and Anjou, 124, 180, 203–5, 207, 210 Francis I, king of France (1515–47), 20, 106, 109 Francis II, king of France (1559–60), 29, 89 Frankfurt, Reichstag at (1558), 35 Frankfurt-am-Main, conference at (1577), 167 Frederik I, king of Denmark (1523–33) (Duke Friedrich of Holstein), 14–15 Frederik II, king of Denmark (1559–88): abdication crisis of 1570, 43–45 aid to Protestant states, 204, 229, 234, 236–41, 254–57, 259–60, 264, 272 and Catholicism, 9–10, 81–3, 109–12, 127–8, 136–7, 143–5, 157–8, 164–5, 205, 269, 319–20 and clergy, 67–73, 79–82, 160–1 and Council of State, 11, 37–8, 42–55, 79, 190–4, 229–30, 327 and Danish aristocracy, 33–4, 53–5 and hunting, 48–9, 52–3, 119–20 and Paracelsianism, 80 and piracy, 121, 147, 207 and state church, 65–83, 172–3 and the ‘wonderfish’ of 1587, 294–5 and the Dutch Revolt, 95–9, 109–10, 135–7, 141–2, 183–5, 238–41, 246–50, 273–90, 320, 322–4 and the Formula of Concord, 166–74 and the Order of the Garter, 187–90, 236 and the wars of religion in France, 110–24, 133, 182–3, 206, 218–19, 230, 235–6, 238, 249–51, 252–61, 273–4, 320–2 as candidate for Holy Roman Emperor, 87–90, 136–7, 255–8, 271, 279, 283 as Prince-Elect, 29–36 children of, 103–4 coronation charter, 38, 45, 79 court culture and life under, 50–5, 144–5, 228–9 death, 1, 295–7 drinking habits of, 34–5, 53–4, 295 dyslexia, 31–2 education of, 30–3 foreign policy of, 5–12, 44–5, 83–100, 242–3, 290–2, 317–28

343

funeral ceremonies for, 298–9, 304 infatuation with Anna Hardenberg, 32–3, 91, 101, 103 marriage negotiations for, 32, 88, 93, 97, 101–2 marriage to Sofie of Mecklenburg, 102–4 mediation offer to England and Spain, 246–50, 280–91, 294 motivations of foreign policy, 5–12, 317–21 personality and character of, 30, 33–6, 242–3 piety and theological stance, 75–83, 160–5 Frederiksborg, palace of, 47, 108, 259 Friedrich III, Elector Palatine, 85, 87, 94, 97, 132, 146, 149–51, 153, 155 Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, 306 Friis, Johan, kansler under Christian III and Frederik II, 18, 29, 37, 38, 45, 47, 51, 82, 190 Fulda, 153–4, 158 Fyn, Danish island and province, 16, 23, 42, 68 Gabriel, Danish warship, 294 Gans, Adam, herr zu Putlitz, agent of Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir, 212, 215 Garter, Order of the, 98, 181, 210 Geneva, 162 Georg Friedrich, margrave of Brandenburg, 172, 261 Ghent, Pacification of (1576), 177 Gideon, Danish warship, 57, 245, 294 Glad, Rasmus (Erasmus Laetus), Danish poet and panegyrist, 83, 107 Gnesiolutherans, 74–5, 153, 156 Goech, Antonius de, Flemish tapestry-maker, 50 Gøje, Christoffer, fiefholder under Frederik II, 99 Gøje, Falk, Danish nobleman, 99, 105 Gøje, Mogens, Danish nobleman, 99, 105 Gotland, Baltic island, 40, 191 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, Cardinal, Spanish minister in the Netherlands, 90, 94, 97, 151, 249 Great Belt (Storebælt), 23 Greenwich, England, 246 Gregory XIII, Roman pope (1572–85), 111, 125–7, 130, 153–4, 199, 266 Grevens fejde. See Count’s War

344

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Grotzky, Stanis∑av, Polish ambassador to France, 119, 122 Grumbach, Wilhelm von, German nobleman, 92–3, 101, 157 Guise faction, in French Wars of Religion, 52, 106, 108, 228, 235, 250, 292–3, 308–9 Guise, Francis, duke of, 108 Gustav I Vasa, king of Sweden (1523–60), 19 Gustav II Adolf, king of Sweden (1611–32), 55 Güstrow, 172–4, 180, 219, 221 Gyldenstjerne, Axel, councillor under Frederik II, 283 Habsburg dynasty, 4, 64 Haderslev/Haderslevhus, 104, 188, 216–18, 286, 295 Halland, Danish province, 23 Hamburg, 97–8, 182, 264, 278, 291, 316 Anglo-Danish trade negotiations at (1577), 179 Hans of Denmark, brother of Frederik II, 295 Hans the Elder, duke of Holstein, brother of Christian III of Denmark, 22, 34, 36–7, 174, 182 Hans, Duke, son of Frederik I of Denmark, 16, 18 Hans, king of Denmark (1481–1513), 37 Hanseatic League, 9, 21, 24, 41–2, 45, 63, 150, 316 Hardenberg, Anna, mistress of Frederik II of Denmark, 32–3, 91, 101, 103 Hardenberg, Eiler, rigshofmester under Christian III and Frederik II, 32 Hardenberg, Erik, councillor under Frederik II, 32 Hegelund, Peder, Danish bishop, 144–5 Heide, battle of (1559), 37 Heinrich Julius, duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, 306 Helsingborg, 129, 132 Helsingør, 3, 24–5, 41–2, 47, 50, 56, 57, 60, 74, 78, 116, 121, 123, 129–30, 132, 139–42, 187, 289 Hemmingsen, Niels, Danish theologian, 65, 70–1, 76–9, 159–69, 190 disciplining and fall of, 160–3 and the Syntagma, 159–63 Henry II, king of France (1547–59), 29, 106, 129

Henry III, king of France (1574–89) (Henri de Valois, duke of Anjou), 60, 112, 133–5, 158, 169, 203, 213–14, 216, 218, 233, 235, 238–9, 255–9, 261, 308 as king of Poland, 60, 113–24 relations with Frederik II, 245, 250–1 Henry IV, king of France (1589–1610) (Henry of Navarre), 104, 171–4, 182–4, 203, 212–19, 226–7, 232–7, 249–51, 252–6, 258–61, 271–2, 283, 286, 293, 308–9, 312–13 Henry of Valois, king of Poland. See Henry III Hepburn, James, Earl of Bothwell, consort of Mary, Queen of Scots, 147–8 Herbert, John, English ambassador to Denmark, 48–9, 188 Herle, William, English agent in Germany and the Baltic, 185 Hessen-Kassel, landgraviate of, 84, 154 Hildesheim, 158 Hinrichsson plot (1603–04), 317 Hohenlohe, Philip, count of, 61, 274, 285, 289, 300, 312 høilærde. See Copenhagen, university of, theological faculty Holár, Iceland, 66, 71 Holle, Jürgen von, German soldier-of-fortune, 36, 45 Holstein, 2, 16, 21–2, 28, 86, 167, 169, 306–7 Holstein-Gottorp, duchy of, 22 succession dispute in, 306–8 Holy Roman Empire, 22, 139 Protestant princes of, 2, 20, 72–3, 84–93, 99–100, 106–7, 149–57, 175–6, 194–201, 210–12, 214–17, 232–41, 243–4, 252–7, 261–72, 291–4 Reichskammergericht, 154 Homburg, Daniel Brendel von, archbishop-elector of Mainz, 154 Hoorne, Philippe de Montmorency, Count of, 95 Huguenots, 29, 74, 134–5, 149, 178, 212–19, 232–3, 250–1, 256, 262–3, 270, 289–90, 294 Huitfeldt, Arild, councillor under Frederik II, 45–6, 52, 192, 299, 308 Hven, Danish island, 80

index Iceland, 17, 21–3, 57, 66, 71, 81, 191 Iconoclastic Fury (1566), 41 Ireland, 129 irenicism, 80–81 Isabella of Habsburg (Elisabeth), consort of Christian II of Denmark, 18 Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’), tsar of Russia (1533–84), 113, 137 Jagiello dynasty, in Poland, 112 James VI and I, king of Scotland (1568–1625) and England (1603–25), 81, 146, 287–8, 306, 311 Jenkins, Anthony, English ambassador to Denmark, 179 Jesuit order, 126–7, 143–4, 153–4, 186 Joachim Ernst, prince of Anhalt, 195, 244, 255–6, 266 Joachim Friedrich, margrave of Brandenburg, administrator of Magdeburg, 195, 197, 255–6, 271 Johan Georg I, elector of Brandenburg, 254–6, 261–2, 269–72 Johan III, king of Sweden (1569–92), 39–40, 43, 113, 124, 129–30, 136, 181, 213–14 and the ‘Red Book’ (1576), 125–7 and Catholicism, 124–8 Nova Ordinantia (1575), 125 Johann VI, count of Nassau-Dillenburg, 198–9 Johann Adolf, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, 307 Johann Casimir, Pfalzgraf, count of Pfalz-Lautern, 61, 97, 132–3, 145–6, 152, 155–6, 164, 178, 180–1, 189, 194–5, 199–201, 204, 208–14, 217–18, 244, 252–61, 271–72, 292, 299, 312, 314 Johann Friedrich II, Ernestine duke of Saxony, 92–3, 218, 255 Johann Georg, elector of Brandenburg, 178–80, 200, 314–15 John of Austria, Don, 158, 177–8, 180 Josafat, Danish warship, 57, 245 Juliane of Nassau, sister of William of Orange, 97 Julius, duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, 35–6, 227 Jutland, Danish province, 2, 16, 23, 129 Juul, Absolon, councillor under Frederik II, 192

345

Kaas, Niels, til Taarupgaard, kansler under Frederik II, 51–3, 68, 77, 80, 82, 107, 134, 161, 168, 181, 187, 189, 190–1, 210–11, 216, 229–30, 240, 296, 299, 302, 308, 312–13, 315 Kalmar Union (1397), 14, 22, 64 Kalundborg, 20 Karl IX, king of Sweden (1604–11) (Duke Karl of Södermanland), 127, 290–1, 316–17 Katarina Jagiello, consort of Johan III, king of Sweden, 125, 127 Khevenhüller zu Aichelburg, Hans, imperial ambassador to Spain, 299 Killigrew, Henry, English ambassador in Germany, 150–1 Klosterlasse. See Norvegus, Laurentius Nicolai Knibbe, Dr. Paul, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, 310 Knieper, Hans, Flemish painter and tapestry-maker, 50, 53 Knoff, Christoffer, court chaplain for Frederik II, 75, 80, 103, 163, 168, 296, 298 Kolding Recess (1558), 18 Kolding, herredag at (1590), 306–7 Koldinghus, palace of, 29, 32, 35, 47, 86, 118, 122, 312 Köln. See Cologne Königsberg, 24, 220 Krag, Niels, Danish diplomat and scholar, 107, 283 Krell, Nicholas, minister of Christian I of Saxony, 261, 270 Krogen, Danish fortifications at Helsingør, 25, 139 Krognos, Oluf Mouritzen, councillor under Frederik II, 101 Kronborg, palace and fortifications at, 47, 50, 58, 140, 188, 223, 228–30, 238, 283, 287–8 Krumpen, Otte, councillor and rigsmarsk under Frederik II, 33 Küstrin, 261 Landsberger Union, 268–9 Landskrona, 142 Langensalza, proposed princely meeting at (1586), 253–4 Languet, Hubert, Saxon diplomat and humanist, 94, 106

346

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Lansac, Guy de, seigneur de Saint-Gelais, minister of Anjou and Catherine de’ Medici, 129–30 and the Concordia incident, 52, 119–22, 139 lastetold, 42, 58, 139, 147, 152, 188. See also Sound dues Lauréo, Vincenzo, papal nuncio in Poland, 129 League Manifesto (1585), 233 League of Schmalkalden, 20 Leicester. See Dudley, Robert Leonora of Habsburg, daughter of Ferdinand I, 89, 91 Liegnitz, Georg von, 134 Little Belt (Lillebælt), 23 Livonia, 137, 290 Lorichs, Anders, Swedish agent in Poland, 129–32 Lorraine, 19–21, 37, 45, 52, 64, 228 Danish marriage negotiations with, 21, 63, 91–2, 101–2 intrigues against Denmark, 20–1, 52, 91–4, 130, 135, 157–8, 250 Louis of Nassau, brother of William of Orange, 97 Lower Saxon Circle, 22, 37, 63, 157–8, 282 Lübeck, 14–16, 21, 39, 86, 272 Ludwig VI, Elector Palatine, 132, 167, 178, 199–200, 210 Ludwig, landgrave of Hessen-Marburg, 270–1 Lüneburg, conference at (1586), 254–61, 278–9, 295 Lutheranism, 15–17, 66–7, 74–5, 80–1, 156. See also Philippism; Gnesiolutheranism Lykke, Jørgen, til Overgård, councillor under Christian III of Denmark, 89, 94–5, 109 Madrid, 94, 248–9 Madsen, Jacob, Danish bishop, 68 Madsen, Poul, Danish bishop, 67, 79, 168, 206 Magnus, Duke, brother of Frederik II, 35, 38–9, 137–8, 220, 267, 290 Mainz, electorate of, 121, 154, 199 Major, Georg, Lutheran theologian, 76 Malmø, 15–16, 57 Malmøhus, palace of, 32–4, 36, 101, 148, 193

Mansfeld, Count Ernst of, Strassburg ambassador to Denmark, 267–8 Margarethe of Pomerania, daughter of Philip I of Pomerania, 102 Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Henry II of France, consort of Henry of Navarre, 104 Maria, princess of Kleve-Jülich, 102 Maribo, cloister at, 66 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–87), 29, 89, 91, 111, 146–8, 225 Matthias, archduke of Austria, later Holy Roman Emperor (1612–19), 265 Maurice of Nassau, son of William of Orange, 274, 309, 311 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor (1564–76), 35, 40, 88, 90, 93, 99, 121, 123, 152, 154–5, 197, 248, 269 Meckbach, Wilhelm, minister under Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel, 264 Mecklenburg, duchy of, 22, 28, 51, 84, 103 Melanchthon, Philip, Lutheran theologian, 74–7, 194 Meldorp, battle of (1559), 37 Mendoza, Don Bernardino de, Spanish ambassador to England and France, 249 Mespelbrunn, Julius Echter von, archbishop of Würzburg, 154 Michael, Danish warship, 294 Middelfart, 142 Mömpelgardt (Montbéliard), 292–3 Mondoucet, Claude de, French ambassador in the Netherlands, 137 Monluc, Jean de, bishop of Valence, Anjou’s agent in Poland, 113, 119 Monsieur, Peace of. See Beaulieu, Edict of Montbéliard. See Mömpelgardt Moray. See Stuart, James Moritz (Maurice), elector of Saxony, 35, 106 Moritz of Hessen, son of Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel, 257 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis, Huguenot statesman, 173–174, 180, 182, 212, 215, 217 Mosterhavn, Norway, 301 Münchhausen, Hilmar von, German soldier-of-fortune, 45 Mundt, Christopher, English agent in the German states, 149

index Munk, Peder, councillor and rigsadmiral under Frederik II, 144, 299 Muscovy. See Russia Narva, 137, 185 Naumburg, conference at (1587), 270–2, 279 Naumburg, princely meeting and colloquy at (1561), 67, 77, 84–7, 153, 155 Navarre. See Henry IV, king of France Nemours, Treaty of (1585), 233, 250 Netherlands, the, 4, 24, 41, 98–9, 167 States-General of, 222, 278–83, 311 participation in Baltic trade, 93, 195–6, 246, 282 relations with Denmark, 42, 146–7, 273–90, 300, 311, 316 revolt of, 64, 129–30, 158, 177–8, 180–1, 202–5, 246 Neuenahr-Moers (Nieuwenaer-Meurs), Adolf, count of, 274, 278, 289 Nonsuch, Treaty of (1585), 226 Norvegus, Laurentius Nicolai (‘Klosterlasse’), papal agent in Scandinavia, 126–7 Norway, 1–2, 14, 17, 21–3, 40, 47, 66, 71, 81, 98, 121, 138, 147–8, 191 Nyborg, 34, 42 Nykøbing, Falster, 102, 306 Odense, 142, 174, 296 Oldenbarneveldt, Johan van, advokaat of Holland, 316 Oldenburg, county of, 96 Oldenburg State. See Denmark Orkney Islands, 287–8 Øsel, island of, 40–1, 137, 220 Oslo, Norway, 23, 57, 311 Osnabrück, 86 Ostfriesland, county of, 96, 269 Ottoman Empire, 197–8 Oxe, Peder, til Gisselfeld, rigshofmester under Christian III and Frederik II, 47–8, 50–4, 68, 80, 82, 91–2, 96, 103, 109, 118–22, 124, 131, 134, 138, 157–8, 161, 190, 191 Oxe, Pernille, Danish noblewoman, 50 Palatinate, electoral, 64, 84, 121, 149–151 Palavicino, Horatio, English diplomat, 234–5, 273, 310, 312–13

347

Palladius, Niels, Danish theologian and bishop, 76 Palladius, Peder, Danish theologian and bishop, 65, 72, 76 papacy, 111, 130–1, 134 reconversion efforts in Scandinavia, 126–8 Congregatio Germanica, 126, 153 missio suetica, 126–8 Paris, 104–6 Parma, Alexandre Farnese, prince of, 130, 180, 195, 200, 202–3, 206–7, 226, 248–9, 257, 269, 275, 279–87, 289, 293–4, 299, 309 Parry, William, conspiracy of, against Elizabeth I, 224–5, 228 Parsberg, Manderup, councillor under Frederik II, 287 Paselich, Caspar, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, 102, 187 Paull, Andreas, minister of Christian I of Saxony, 270 Perpetual Edict (1577), 177–8, 183 Philip I, duke of Pomerania, 102 Philip II, king of Spain (1556–98), 2, 7, 10, 19, 27, 29, 49, 52, 94–9, 149, 158, 225–6 and the Dutch Revolt, 95–9, 111, 175–8, 202–3, 238–40, 248–50, 309, 311, 315 Baltic ambitions of, 128–32, 175–6, 183–4, 195, 219, 265, 312 relations with Frederik II, 94–9, 130–1, 134–7, 184–5, 195–6, 206–7, 245, 247–50, 274–6, 279–81, 302 Philip, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, 306–7 Philippism, 9, 74–7, 153, 156, 163 Pinart, Claude, de Cramailles, French minister under Charles IX, 124 Pius IV, Roman pope (1559–65), 84–7 Pius V, Roman pope (1565–72), 111, 125 Poland, 10, 99, 139 relations with Denmark, 9, 39, 63, 138, 181–2, 264–5 royal election in (1573), 112–18, 129, 134 royal election in (1587), 264–5 Pont-à-Mousson, Marquis de, Guisard general, 292 Possevino, Antonio, papal nuncio in Sweden, 126, 129–30

348

index

Pratensis, Johannes, Paracelsian physician in Denmark, 80 prayer days. See Denmark, state church Rafael, Danish warship, 57, 245 Ramel, Heinrich, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, councillor under Frederik II, 52, 55, 192, 229–30, 239–41, 259–60, 286, 300, 304–6, 310 embassy to England (1586), 245–7, 275, 315 Rantzau, Breide, Danish diplomat, son of Heinrich Rantzau, 61, 194, 250–1, 252–3, 255, 277 Rantzau, Daniel, Danish military commander, 39 Rantzau, Gert, Danish diplomat, son of Heinrich Rantzau, 61, 184–5, 187, 192, 277, 282–3, 308, 310 Rantzau, Heinrich, Danish Statthalter in the Duchies, 21, 61, 86, 88–91, 95–6, 99, 105–6, 109–10, 112, 114, 131–2, 135–6, 145, 168–9, 179, 183, 186, 192, 204, 215–17, 225, 252, 254, 256, 267, 278, 300, 306–8, 312, 315 Rantzau, Johann, Danish military commander, 16, 20–1, 61 Rantzau, Kai, Danish diplomat, son of Heinrich Rantzau, 61, 192, 280–2, 289 Regency government, Danish, of 1588–96, 1–2, 298–315 foreign policy of, 301–5, 308–15 Regensburg, Reichstag at (1576), 139 Religion, as motivation for foreign policy, 5–10 Renée of Lorraine, daughter of Christine of Lorraine, 19, 21, 91, 101–2 Requesens, Don Luis de, governor-general in the Netherlands, 131, 177 Riga, 24 Rigsråd. See Council of State Rogers, Daniel, English ambassador to Denmark, 143, 178–9, 286–8, 300, 309–11 Rønnow, Eiler, councillor under Christian III and Frederik II, 32 Rosenkrantz, Erik, councillor under Frederik II, lensmand at Bergen, 32, 148 Rosenkrantz, Jørgen, councillor under Frederik II, 161, 299

Rosenkrantz, Holger Ottesen, councillor under Frederik II, 33, 38, 44, 103 Roskilde, 163, 298 Rostock, 58, 68, 116, 162, 172 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor (1576–1612), 155, 181, 195, 197–200, 215, 217, 257–8, 265, 269, 271, 293, 299, 309, 313, 315 Russia, 39, 63, 290 Sabinus, Philip, conspiracy against Frederik II, 219–26 Sachsen-Coburg, duchy of, 271 Sachsen-Weimar, duchy of, 271 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, English privy councillor, 284 Santiago, Spanish warship, 301 Saxony, electoral, 10, 22, 39, 84, 230. See also August of Saxony Schleswig. See Slesvig Schlochau, 221 Schmalkalden, League of, 20, 106 Schmalkaldic War, 72 Schomberg, Caspar von, French agent in the German states, 106–7, 114–15, 117 Schöneck, Gaspar, Imperial ambassador to Denmark, 85–7 Schwarzburg, Günther von, German soldier-of-fortune, 36–7, 45, 84, 97 Scotland, 89, 110, 129 marriage negotiations with Denmark, 286–8, 311 relations with Denmark, 41, 249, 311–12 Segeberg, 132 Ségur-Pardaillan, Jacques de, Navarre’s agent in Germany, 202, 212–19, 226–7, 231, 232–4, 239, 244, 255–7, 259–60, 263, 292, 295 Seven Years’ War of the North (1563–70), 3, 39–45, 55, 59–60, 64, 83, 92–3, 137–8, 207, 304 Severinus, Petrus, court physician to Frederik II, 80 Shetland Islands, 287–8 Sigismund Augustus, king of Poland (1548–72), 112, 125 Sigismund III, king of Sweden (1592–1604) and Poland (1587–1632), 113, 126, 264–5 Sixtus V, Roman pope (1585–90), 111, 257–8 Sjælland, 23, 82 Skálholt, Iceland, 66

index Skanderborg, palace of, 47, 116, 173, 196, 265, 267, 300 Skåne, 23, 32, 40, 99, 123. See also Blekinge; Halland Skene, Sir John, Scottish ambassador to Denmark, 312 Skipper Clement, rebel leader in the Count’s War, 16 Skøtt, Søren, Danish pastor, 105 Skovgaard, Hans, councillor under Frederik II, 52, 133, 192 Slesvig, 21–2, 307 Sofie of Mecklenburg, consort of Frederik II of Denmark, 102–4, 107, 172, 295–7, 304, 306–8, 311, 315 Solms, Herman Adolf of, Strassburg ambassador to Denmark, 267–8 Sønderborg, palace at, 20, 47, 295 Sound dues, 3, 25, 41–2, 58, 98, 146–7, 184–5 Sound, the, 1–2, 23–4, 40–2, 116–17, 123, 129–30, 139–40, 175–6, 195–6, 232, 238–9, 244, 246, 275–6, 281–2, 289, 301 Spain, 1–2, 10, 11, 24, 175–6, 244 in Baltic trade, 93, 240 relations with Denmark, 93–9, 176, 182, 279–81 Spes, Guerau de, Spanish ambassador to England, 97 Speyer, Peace of (1544), 20–1, 63, 109, 131, 175, 184, 246, 249, 311, 318 Speyer, Reichstag at (1570), 99, 139 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), 9, 104–7, 115, 131, 215 reaction to, in Denmark, 105–9, 112 reaction to, in Protestant Europe, 64, 106–7 St. Germain-en-Laye, Peace of (1570), 106 St. Oluf, Danish warship, 138 Stafford, Edward, English agent in France, 251–2, 277 Stefan Bathory, king of Poland (1575–86), 128–30, 136, 138, 181–2, 195, 221, 264 Stettin, Peace of (1570), 4, 40, 44–5, 48, 64, 99 Stewart, William, Scottish ambassador to Denmark, 311–12 Strassburg, 105, 291, 313 ‘chapter strife’ (1583–92), 265–70, 313 Stuart, James, earl of Moray, regent of Scotland, 147–8 Sturm, Johann, Strassburg theologian, 179, 181

349

Svaning, Hans, 30 Sweden, 2, 4, 10, 14, 23, 24, 37, 38–41, 45, 49, 55, 87, 97 relations with Denmark, 9, 19, 63, 91–5, 149–50, 157, 181–2, 264–5, 316–17 relations with France, 112, 123–4 relations with Poland, 129–30 relations with Spain, 127–8 Tausen, Hans, Danish Lutheran reformer, 15 Tennecker, Thomas, Danish agent in England, 60, 239 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), 4, 11–12 Thøgersen, Peder, bishop-superintendent of Viborg, 173 þorláksson, Guäbrandur, bishop in Iceland, 71 Throckmorton, Nicholas, 34 Throndsen, Anna, 148 Torgau, Saxony, 35, 165 Union of (1591), 314–15, 325 Trent, Council of, 84–6, 153 Trier, 154, 199 Trolle, Herluf, councillor and rigsadmiral under Frederik II, 45 Trondheim, Norway, 22, 301 Truchsess von Waldburg, Gebhard, elector of Cologne, 198–200, 205–6, 208–11, 214–18, 266, 268 Turks. See Ottoman Empire Ulfstand, Hak Holgersen, councillor under Frederik II, 193, 305, 315 Ulrich, duke of Mecklenburg, 60, 164–5, 182, 201, 214–15, 257, 298, 306, 312 relations with Frederik II, 102–3, 107, 109–10, 116, 119–20, 123, 132, 153, 162, 167, 172, 195, 204–5, 207, 217, 219, 221–5, 263 Ulrik, son of Frederik II, 103, 224, 267–8, 307, 313 United Provinces. See Netherlands Uraniborg, Tyge Brahe’s research facility on Hven, 80 Utenhof, Wolfgang von, Prince Frederik (II)’s hofmester, 31 Utrecht, Union of (1579), 180–1 Valkendorf, Christoffer, til Glorup, rentemester under Frederik II, 51, 181, 186, 190–3, 229, 238, 239, 279, 299, 301, 305

350

index

Vaudémont, Louise de, consort of Henry III of France, 124 Vedel, Anders Sørensen, court chaplain to Frederik II, 31–2, 75, 79, 80, 82, 107, 143–4, 163, 168, 191, 295 Veldenz, Pfalzgraf Georg Hans von, 139 Viborg, Jutland, 15 Vimori, battle of (1587), 292 Vitré, Huguenot synod at (1583), 212 Vor Frue Kirke (Church of Our Lady, Copenhagen), 67–8, 103 Walsingham, Sir Francis, English secretary of state, 75, 177, 214, 226–7, 229, 232–5, 237, 240, 247, 258, 273, 275, 277, 284–5 Warnicke, Paul, traitor, courtier under Frederik II, 221, 223 Warsaw, Confederation of (1573), 113 Wentze, Wilhelm von der, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, diplomat, 247–50 Westendorp, Georg van, syndic of Groeningen, ambassador to Denmark, 131, 282–3 Wettin dynasty, in Saxony, 84–5, 92–3 Wilhelm IV, landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, 35, 109, 120, 154, 157, 167–9, 178, 180, 195, 200–1, 208, 218, 244, 252–8, 261, 263–4, 270–2, 293, 296, 299, 312, 314 Wilhelm V, duke of Bavaria, 102, 198–9, 208, 257, 268–9

Wilkes, Sir Thomas, English diplomat, 279, 281 William of Nassau, Prince of Orange (‘the Silent’), leader of the Dutch Revolt, 35, 90, 94–8, 142, 152, 155–6, 171, 178, 199, 203, 220 assassination of, 222 relations with Frederik II, 96–8, 136–7, 183, 274 Willoughby, Lord. See Bertie, Peregrine Winsheim, Dr. Veit, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, diplomat, 192, 250–1, 252–3, 255, 277, 313 Wittenberg, 68, 76 Worms, 154 Reichsdeputationstag at (1586), 270 Wullenwever, Jürgen, Bürgermeister of Lübeck, 16 Württemberg, duchy of, 84 Würzburg, 154 Young, Peter, Scottish ambassador to Denmark, 287–8 Zamoyski, Jan, Polish statesman, 113 Zasius, Johann Ulrich, diplomat under Emperor Ferdinand I, 90 Zitzewitz, Jakob, secretary in Denmark’s German Chancery, 102 Zobel, Melchior, archbishop of Würzburg, 92

THE NORTHERN WORLD NORTH EUROPE AND THE BALTIC C. 400-1700 AD PEOPLES, ECONOMIES AND CULTURES

Editors Barbara Crawford (St. Andrews) David Kirby (London) Jon-Vidar Sigurdsson (Oslo) Ingvild Øye (Bergen) Richard W. Unger (Vancouver) Przemyslaw Urbanczyk (Warsaw) ISSN: 1569-1462 This series provides an opportunity for the publication of scholarly studies concerning the culture, economy and society of northern lands from the early medieval to the early modern period. The aims and scope are broad and scholarly contributions on a wide range of disciplines are included: all historical subjects, every branch of archaeology, saga studies, language topics including place-names, art history and architecture, sculpture and numismatics.

1. Schutz, H. Tools, Weapons and Ornaments. Germanic Material Culture in Pre-Carolingian Central Europe, 400-750. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12298 2 2. Biggs, D., S.D. Michalove and A. Compton Reeves (eds.). Traditions and Transformations in late Medieval England. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12341 5 3. Tielhof, M. van The ‘Mother of all Trades’. The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12546 9 4. Looijenga, T. Texts & Contexts of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12396 2 5. Grosjean, A. An Unofficial Alliance. Scotland and Sweden 1569-1654. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13241 4 6. Tanner, H.J. Families, Friends and Allies. Boulogne and Politics in Northern France and England, c. 879–1160. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13243 0

7. Finlay, A. Fagrskinna, A Catalogue of the Kings of Norway. A Translation with Introduction and Notes. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13172 8 8. Biggs, D.L., S.D. Michalove and A. Compton Reeves (eds.). Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13613 4 9. Etting, V. Queen Margrete I (1353-1412) and the Founding of the Nordic Union. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13652 5 10. Lockhart, P.D. Frederik II and the Protestant Cause. Denmark’s Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13790 4 11. Williams, G. and P. Bibire. Sagas, Saints and Settlements. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13807 2