Frederick II of Denmark

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Frederick II of Denmark carried a reputation for centuries: an unlettered, inebriated, brutish sot who abandoned his throne for hunting and drink. He was born on the 1st of July 1534. He reigned as King of Denmark and Norway until his death in 1588, a span of nearly three decades. His son Christian IV became one of the most celebrated figures in Danish royal history, and Frederick was largely lost in that shadow. The historian Erik Arup called Frederick "robust and brutal, so hotheaded and gross in his whole way." Arup added that this grossness was "striking even for his contemporaries." Scholars who have revisited his reign in recent years tell a very different story. What gave this king his lasting reputation for folly, and what was he actually doing while that reputation was being written?

• 2. The Dyslexic Prince

  ›

  On the 1st of July 1534, Frederick was born at Haderslevhus Castle. His father was Duke Christian of Schleswig and Holstein; his mother, Dorothea of Saxe-Lauenburg. Three days after Frederick's birth, his father became King Christian III of Denmark, ending a civil conflict that had left the country without a king for over a year. In Denmark, the kingship was not hereditary but elective, and the Council of the Realm had debated for more than a year before settling on Christian as its ruler.

  In March 1538, the Danish Chancellor Wolfgang von Utenhof proposed an educational program for the young prince. Frederick was to learn Latin, German, Danish, French, and other languages, and when old enough, fencing and chivalric exercises. Whether this program was fully executed is not known. In 1541, at the age of seven, Frederick began his formal schooling. His teacher was Hans Svaning, a humanist professor of rhetoric at the University of Copenhagen. The royal boy had a good memory and was clearly bright. But when lessons turned to reading and spelling, the royal student was, in Svaning's own assessment, a disaster. Svaning could explain this only as laziness, and Frederick was punished repeatedly. His strict mother, Queen Dorothea, reportedly intervened when Svaning's efforts fell short. The real cause was severe dyslexia, a condition that would embarrass Frederick and follow him for the rest of his life. His parents kept him under the watchful eye of knowledgeable men at all times. They feared he might speak publicly in ways that exposed his difficulty. His father never entrusted him with any administrative duties.

  Frederick was not allowed to hold his own court until 1554, when he was 20. Malmö Castle in Scania became his residence, under the supervision of the lensman Ejler Hardenberg. Political training was placed in the hands of two driven noblemen, Eiler Rønnow and Erik Rosenkrantz. His years in Scania earned him a nickname: the Prince of Scania.

  In 1557-58, his brother-in-law Elector Augustus of Saxony chaperoned Frederick on a tour throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Some authors later described Augustus as "the only strong emotional support" Frederick received in his youth. He met the new emperor Ferdinand I at his coronation, as well as Ferdinand's heir Maximilian and William of Orange. The experience gave Frederick a taste for military affairs and a lasting appreciation for the complexity of German politics. Christian III died on the 1st of January 1559 at Koldinghus. He left Denmark and Norway to a son whom much of the court had long underestimated.

• 3. A Warrior's Beginning

  ›

  On the 20th of August 1559, Frederick II was crowned at the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen. Nicolaus Palladius and two Norwegian superintendents assisted at the ceremony, symbolizing the bond between Denmark and Norway. Elaborate celebrations followed, said to have lasted a week.

  Within weeks of his father's death, Frederick had already committed to military action. Joining his uncles John and Adolf in Holstein, he launched a campaign to conquer Dithmarschen under the veteran commander Johan Rantzau. His great-uncle, King John, had failed in the same attempt in 1500. Frederick's 1559 campaign was a quick and relatively painless victory.

  Johan Friis, one of the leading councillors, had warned Frederick that a Swedish confrontation loomed. The king had not listened, and had not consulted the Council before acting. The adversarial relationship between king and Council improved relatively quickly. Both sides saw the value of working together, and neither had any desire to return to the instability of the pre-civil war years. Frederick learned to navigate the constitutional demands of a Danish monarchy: showing generosity to the conciliar aristocracy through gifts and concessions. When the German Chancery leader Andreas von Barby died shortly before the coronation charter was signed, his extensive fiefs reverted to the Crown. Frederick carefully distributed them among the Council's leading members, building loyalty that would prove essential in the years ahead.

  From his predecessor, Frederick had also inherited the Livonian War. In 1560, he installed his younger brother Magnus of Holstein in the Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek. In 1562, he concluded the Treaty of Mozhaysk with Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, consolidating an amicable relationship on Denmark's eastern flank. Magnus was later made titular King of Livonia, as a vassal of Ivan IV.

• 4. The Northern Seven Years' War

  ›

  King Frederick's competition with Sweden for supremacy in the Baltic broke into open warfare in 1563. The leading councillors, Johan Friis foremost among them, had feared a Swedish onslaught for years. Frederick's first cousin Eric XIV had recently succeeded to the Swedish throne, and a confrontation appeared inevitable. Few councillors wanted war; Frederick preferred a preemptive strike. Despite the Council's initial opposition, it went along with the king. Frederick gave his councillors a real stake in directing the war, including Holger Ottesen Rosenkrants, Marshal Otte Krumpen, and Admiral Herluf Trolle.

  Admiral Herluf Trolle and his colleagues oversaw a conflict that became ruinously costly for both sides. Swedish forces ravaged Scania, and Norway came close to being lost entirely. Frederick led his army personally on the battlefield, but the overall results were modest. By 1565, Denmark-Norway had made no appreciable gains despite years of fighting.

  In late 1569, after six years of war, the Council of the Realm cut off further grants of taxation. Frederick felt betrayed, and his response was to draft a letter of resignation and leave the capital for the countryside. The king was still unmarried and had no heir. The Council feared another leaderless interregnum and begged for his return, allowing him to summon a Diet to raise further tax levies. The war dragged on until the Treaty of Stettin in 1570, which settled matters on a status quo basis. Denmark-Norway saved face but the settlement also revealed the limits of their military power.

  The war cost some 1.1 million rigsdaler. After state finances collapsed in its aftermath, Frederick recalled Peder Oxe, who had fled to Germany in 1558 after quarreling with Christian III. As lord treasurer, Oxe reduced the national debt considerably and redeemed portions of Crown lands. Councillors of experience, including Niels Kaas, Arild Huitfeldt, and Christoffer Valkendorff, took over the domestic administration. The recovered prosperity gave Frederick something he had lacked since 1563: financial liquidity and the freedom to spend. What he spent it on would define the rest of his reign.

• 5. Builder and Patron

  ›

  Between 1574 and 1585, Frederick rebuilt Kronborg at Elsinore from a medieval fortress into a magnificent Renaissance castle. Its dance hall was the largest in Northern Europe at the time. For the Great Hall, Frederick commissioned 43 tapestries, made in Helsingør by Dutch tapestry makers. They depicted more than 100 Danish kings, from the legendary King Dan all the way to Frederick himself. The final image showed Frederick standing before Kronborg with a young crown prince Christian beside him.

  Hillerødsholm, a North Sealand farm, had already been converted into the Renaissance castle Frederikborg in 1560. Skanderborg Castle was fortified in 1561 with materials from Øm Abbey. Frederick founded Fredrikstad in Norway in 1567. The city's Frederik II Upper Secondary School, one of the largest of its kind in Norway, still carries his name. The crown's improved finances also funded Denmark's first national road network. Frederick called it the kongevej, or King's Road, and it connected the larger towns and royal residences throughout the kingdoms.

  Frederick had claimed naval supremacy in what he called "the king's sound," the waters between his Norwegian and Icelandic possessions. The Danish-Norwegian fleet was developed into one of Europe's largest and most modern during his reign. In 1583, he secured an agreement by which England made an annual payment for permission to sail there; France later followed suit. He also backed the adventurer Magnus Heinason, granting him a monopoly of trade with the Faeroes. Heinason also received royal support for a daring but unsuccessful voyage toward east Greenland.

  One hundred students, selected by the faculty, received room and board free of fee from the Crown at the University of Copenhagen, each for a period of five years. Four especially promising students would be awarded the stipendium regium, covering all costs for study abroad. The only condition was that recipients return to Copenhagen to finish their doctorates.

• 6. Brahe and the Scholarly King

  ›

  Tycho Brahe came from the highest ranks of the Danish ruling elite. His father, Otte Brahe til Knudstrup, was a fiefholder in Scania and a member of the Council of the Realm. After an extensive education abroad, Brahe returned to Denmark and retreated to the monastery at Herrevad. Men of his blood typically entered state service; Brahe chose instead to experiment with papermaking and glassmaking alongside his maternal uncle Sten Bille, while maintaining a private observatory.

  A supernova appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia in November 1572, and Brahe wrote a treatise on it. Published at the request of the rigshofmester Peder Oxe, the treatise brought Brahe's work to Frederick's attention. At the king's insistence, Brahe took up a lectureship at the University of Copenhagen in 1574. Two years later, Frederick granted him the island of Ven as his fief. As a fiefholder, Brahe turned out to be a minor disaster. His observatory at Uraniborg drew students from across Europe. From 1576 until his expulsion by Christian IV in 1597, Brahe supervised the first publicly funded scientific research institute in European history.

  Frederick himself chose the island of Ven as the site for Brahe's work, and he is alleged to have told the astronomer directly: "I will sail over to the island Hven from time to time and see your work in astronomy and chemistry, and gladly support your investigations, not because I have any understanding of astronomical matters... but because I am your king and you my subject.... I see it as my duty to support and promote something like this."

  In 1571, Frederick appointed Johannes Pratensis to the medical faculty of the University of Copenhagen. That same year, Petrus Severinus became the king's personal physician, following the publication of Severinus's Idea medicinæ philosophicæ. Frederick had a strong proclivity for Paracelsian medicine, and Severinus wielded considerable influence among practitioners in that tradition.

  Niels Hemmingsen, Frederick's favourite divine, published the Syntagma institutionum christianarum in 1574. Augustus of Saxony complained profoundly about Calvinist sentiments in the work. Torn between defending Hemmingsen and preserving his brother-in-law's friendship, Frederick dismissed the theologian from the University in 1579. He made sure Hemmingsen kept a gracious salary and the opportunity to continue his studies.

  When Augustus promoted the Book of Concord, a statement of Lutheran orthodoxy, Frederick was less receptive still. In July 1580, he banned the Concord from his lands. Possession or even discussion of the book would be punished severely. The king burned his own personal copies, sent to him by his sister Anne, the wife of Augustus. The Concord, Frederick argued, contained "teachings which are foreign and alien to us and to our churches, and which could easily disrupt the unity which... these kingdoms have hitherto maintained." Frederick's 1582 Marriage Ordinance, inspired by Hemmingsen's writings on matrimony, allowed divorce for a wide range of reasons. Those included infidelity, impotence, leprosy, venereal disease, and outlawry.

• 7. Sophie of Mecklenburg

  ›

  On the 20th of July 1572, Frederick married Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow. She was a descendant of King John of Denmark and Frederick's own first half-cousin through their grandfather Frederick I. Sophie was the daughter of Ulrich III, Duke of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, and Elizabeth of Denmark. Their union came to be regarded as among the most harmonious royal marriages in the courts of Renaissance Europe.

  Renata of Lorraine had been Frederick's father's preferred match throughout the 1550s. Christian III hoped such a union would settle longstanding claimant disputes, but Frederick was indifferent to it and it never happened. Frederick had also been proposed as a suitor for Mary, Queen of Scots. He wooed Queen Elizabeth I of England without success, and was later made a Knight of the Garter. William of Orange and Frederick maintained close confidential correspondence for years. A marriage to William's sister Juliana of Nassau was heavily discussed throughout the 1560s but was blocked by political complications. His aunt Elizabeth of Denmark introduced him to the 17-year-old Margaret of Pomerania. Frederick took an interest not in Margaret but in Elizabeth's own daughter Sophie.

  Sophie is consistently mentioned in Frederick's handwritten diary as "mynt Soffye," meaning "my Sophie." She followed the court as it moved through the Danish countryside, and is described as inseparable and harmonious with her husband. When Frederick fell ill with malaria in 1575, Sophie nursed him personally and wrote many worried letters to her father about his condition. In the first ten years after the wedding, the couple had seven children.

  Anne of Denmark was born on the 12th of December 1574. She married King James VI of Scotland on the 23rd of November 1589, eventually also becoming Queen of England. Christian IV was born on the 12th of April 1577 and would go on to overshadow his father in historical memory. John was born on the 9th of July 1583 and was betrothed to Tsarevna Ksenia, the daughter of Boris Godunov. He died in 1602 before the marriage could take place.

  After Frederick's death, Sophie received a dowager estate: Nykøbing Castle and the islands of Lolland and Falster. She managed her lands so effectively that her son Christian IV borrowed money from her on several occasions for his own wars.

• 8. The Long Misreading

  ›

  On the 5th of August 1588, Frederick was buried in Christian I's chapel at Roskilde Cathedral. His son Christian IV later built a large monument in his honour there. The monument's scale belied what was happening to Frederick's reputation in Danish historical memory.

  Troels Frederik Lund, a cultural historian, founded the prevailing negative portrait in his 1906 biography of Peder Oxe. In Lund's telling, Frederick was a foolhardy young king, saved from his own recklessness by his capable treasurer. This reading persisted through much of the twentieth century. Historians focused on Frederick's documented struggles with drink, his love of hunting, and the dyslexia that had made him seem unlettered to his contemporaries.

  The reversal came largely through the archival work of Frede P. Jensen, born in 1940 and died in 2008. Jensen was among the first Danish historians to undertake a thorough revision of the evidence. Paul Douglas Lockhart later articulated the case plainly: Frederick "may have been a near illiterate (...) but nonetheless he was enlightened as few monarchs of his generation were." Lockhart found it difficult to explain "how Danish historians for so long laboured under the impression that he was little better than a drunken fool."

  The herredag, the annual Council meeting Danish kings were required to hold, was only one part of Frederick's approach to managing the nobility. Most of his Council business was conducted one-to-one, meeting individual members informally in their own home regions. This gave him a close personal bond with each member while minimizing the Council's ability to oppose him as a body. In 1585, he visited Norway for the first and only time as king, traveling no further than Bohuslen.

  The eighteenth-century chronicler Ludvig Holberg recorded a telling detail from Frederick's table. When the king wanted his guests to speak freely, he would announce that "the king is not at home." The phrase signalled that all formalities were suspended. Guests could talk and joke without restraint. Outside observers found the Danish court unsophisticated. Frederick had found it effective.