Memoirs of Leonora Christina, Daughter of Christian IV. of Denmark. grevinde Leonora Christina Ulfeldt
in Dover, where she had arrived on her way back, disappointed in the object of her journey. She had obtained enough and to spare of fair promises, but no money; and by secretly giving her up to the Danish Government, Charles II. in an easy way quitted himself of the debt, at the same time that he pleased the King of Denmark, without publicly violating political propriety. Leonora’s account of the whole affair is confirmed in every way by the light which other documents throw upon the matter, particularly by the extracts contained in the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of Charles II., 1663-64.
Leonora was now conducted to Copenhagen, where she was confined in the Blue Tower—a square tower surmounted by a blue spire, which stood in the court of the royal castle, and was used as a prison for grave offenders (see the engraving). At this point the Memoir of her sufferings in the prison takes up the thread of her history, and we need not here dwell upon its contents.
As soon as Ulfeldt heard that the Brandenburg Government had betrayed him, and that sentence had been passed on him in Copenhagen, he left Bruges. No doubt the arrest of Leonora in England was a still greater blow to him. The Spanish Government would probably have surrendered him to the Danish authorities, and he had to flee from place to place, pursued by Danish agents demanding his extradition, and men anxious to earn the reward offered for his apprehension, dead or alive. His last abode was Basle, where he passed under a feigned name, until a quarrel between one of his sons and a stranger caused the discovery of their secret. Not feeling himself safe, Ulfeldt left Basle, alone, at night, in a boat descending the Rhine; but he never reached his destination. He was labouring under a violent attack on the chest, and the night air killed him. He breathed his last in the boat, on February 20, 1664. The boatmen, concluding from the gold and jewels which they found on him that he was a person of consequence, brought the body on shore, and made the matter known in Basle, from whence his sons came and buried him under a tree in a field—no one knows the spot.
Meanwhile the punishment of beheading and quartering had been executed on a wooden effigy in Copenhagen. His palace was demolished, and the site laid out in a public square, on which a pillar of sandstone was erected as an everlasting monument of his crimes. This pillar was taken away in 1842, and the name was changed from Ulfeldt Square to Greyfriars Square, as an indication of the forgetting and forgiving spirit of the time, or perhaps rather because the treason of Ulfeldt was closely connected with the ancient jealousy between Danes and Swedes, of which the present generation is so anxious to efface the traces.
His children had to seek new homes elsewhere. Christian, who killed Fuchs, became a Roman Catholic and died as an abbé; and none of them continued the name, except the youngest son Leo, who went into the service of the German Emperor, and rose to the highest dignities. His son Corfits likewise filled important offices under Charles VI. and Maria Theresa, but left no sons. His two daughters married respectively a Count Waldstein and a Count Thun, whose descendants therefore now represent the family of Ulfeldt.
Leonora Christina remained in prison for twenty-two years—that is, until the death of Sophia Amalia, the Queen of Fredrik III. This King, as well as his son Christian V., would willingly have set her at liberty; but the influence of the Queen over her husband and son was so strong that only her death, which occurred in 1685, released Leonora.
The Memoir of her life in prison terminates with this event, and her after-life does not offer any very remarkable incidents. Nevertheless, a few details, chiefly drawn from a MS. in the Royal Library at Copenhagen, recently published by Mr. Birket Smith, may serve to complete the historical image of this illustrious lady. The MS. in question is from the hand of a Miss Urne, of an ancient Danish family, who managed the household of Leonora from 1685 to her death in 1698. A royal manor, formerly a convent, at Maribo, on the island of Laaland, was granted to Leonora shortly after her release from the Blue Tower, together with a sufficient pension for a moderate establishment.
‘The first occupation of the Countess,’ says Miss Urne, ‘was devotion; for which purpose her household was assembled in a room outside her bed-chamber. In her daily morning prayer there was this passage: “May the Lord help all prisoners, console the guilty, and save the innocent!” After that she remained the whole forenoon in her bedchamber, occupied in reading and writing. She composed a book entitled the “Ornament of Heroines,” which Countess A. C. Ulfeldt and Count Leon took away with them, together with many other rare writings. Her handiwork is almost indescribable, and without an equal; such as embroidering in silk, gold embroidery, and turning in amber and ivory.’
It will be seen from Leonora’s own Memoir that needlework was one of her principal occupations in her prison. Count Waldstein still possesses some of her work; in the Church of Maribo an altar-cloth embroidered by her existed still some time ago; and at the Castle of Rosenborg, in Copenhagen, there is a portrait of Christian V. worked by Leonora in silk, in return for which present the King increased her annual pension. Miss Urne says that she sent all her work to Elizabeth Bek, a granddaughter of Leonora, who lived with her for some years. But she refused to send her Leonora’s Postille, or manual of daily devotion, which had been given Leonora on New Year’s Day, in the last year of her captivity, by the castellan, Torslev, who is mentioned in Leonora’s Memoir, and who had taught her to turn ivory, &c. This book has disappeared; but amongst the relics of Leonora Christina, the Royal Library at Copenhagen preserves some leaves which had been bound up with it, and contain verses, &c., by Leonora, and other interesting matter.
Her MS. works were taken to Vienna after her death. It is not known what has become of some of them. A copy of the first part of the book on heroines exists in Copenhagen. Miss Urne says that she possessed fragments of a play composed by her and acted at Maribo Kloster; also the younger Sperling speaks of such a composition in Danish verse; but the MS. seems to be lost now.
Several of Leonora’s relations stayed with her from time to time at Maribo; amongst them the above-mentioned Elizabeth Bek, whose mother, Leonora Sophie, famous for her beauty, had married Lave Bek, the head of an ancient Danish family in Skaane. After Ulfeldt’s death Lave Bek demanded of the Swedish Government the estates which Carl Gustav had given to Ulfeldt in 1658, but which the Swedish Government had afterwards confiscated, without any legal ground. Leonora Christina herself memorialised the Swedish King on the subject, and at least one of her memorials on the subject, dated May 23, 1693, still exists; but it was not till 1735 that these estates were given up to Lave Bek’s sons. Leonora’s eldest daughter, Anne Catherina, lived with her mother at Maribo for several years, and was present at her death. She had married Casetta, a Spanish nobleman, mentioned by Leonora Christina in her Memoir, who was with her in England when she was arrested. After the death of Casetta and their children, Anne Catherina Ulfeldt came to live with her mother. She followed her brother to Vienna, where she died. It was she who transmitted the MS. of Leonora’s Memoir of her life in the Blue Tower to the brother, with the following letter, which is still preserved with the MS.:—
‘This book treats of what has happened to our late lady mother in her prison. I have not been able to persuade myself to burn it, although the reading of it has given me little pleasure, inasmuch as all those events concern her miserable state. After all, it is not without its use to know how she has been treated; but it is not needful that it should come into the hands of strangers, for it might happen to give pleasure to those of our enemies who still remain.’
The letter is addressed ‘A Monsieur, Monsieur le Comte d’Ulfeldt,’ &c., but without date or signature. The handwriting is, however, that of Anne Catherina Ulfeldt, and she had probably sent it off to Vienna for safety immediately after her mother’s death, before she knew that her brother would come to Maribo himself. Miss Urne says, in the MS. referred to, that the King had ordered that he was to be informed immediately of Leonora’s demise, in order that she might be buried according to her rank and descent; but she had beforehand requested that her funeral might be quite plain. Her coffin, as well as those of three children who had died young, and whose coffins had been provisionally placed in a church at Copenhagen, was immured in a vault in the church of Maribo; but when this was opened some forty years ago, no trace of Leonora’s mortal remains could be found, though those of the children were there: from which it is concluded that a popular report, to the effect that the body had been secretly carried abroad, contains more truth than was formerly supposed. Count Waldstein