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S1. E4.
Danish coup plans
After Kronborg falls into Swedish hands, a small group of Danish "resistance fighters" plan to take back the castle. Their plans are bold and intricate, but fail at the last minute and end in executions and terrible imprisonment for many of those involved. Danish engineer Oluf Steenwinckel, who had been forced into Swedish service but secretly participated in the attempted coup, is convicted as a traitor. As punishment, he is burned alive outside the Kronborg fortress and put on wheels and stilts. The condemned priest Henrik Gerner manages to write a farewell letter to his wife and children before he is pardoned at the last minute. Other prisoners are subjected to extortion while locked up in Kronborg's sinister prisons.
S1, E4. Danish coup plans
26.OCT.2020Meet your host, Nanna Winther
Nanna Winther is a journalist and has hosted a number of history podcasts. In this episode, she joins forces with senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, Poul Grinder, and explores the secrets of Kronborg.
Photographer: Karina Tenberg
Among other things, you will meet
Poul GrinderSenior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark
+45 41 20 61 15About Poul GrinderPoul Grinder
- Poul Grinder
Senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark
+45 41 20 61 15About Poul GrinderPoul Grinder
Secrets of Kronborg 4
Danish coup plans
You probably know Kronborg.
The grand old castle located near Elsinore. It's Hamlet's Castle, it's where Shakespeare set his most famous play. This is where Holger Danske sits in the basement, napping while supposedly looking after Denmark. But it's not really Hamlet and Holger Danske is both a mythical legendary figure and a statue.
In reality, Kronborg was the castle of Danish kings and queens, used to instill fear and impress.
Parties were held here that were talked about all over Europe. The castle was besieged, it burned down. It became the setting for blatant and provocative infidelity, imprisonment, betrayal and theft.
In this podcast, we tackle the real stories that actually took place at Kronborg.
Join storyteller Nanna Winther and senior researcher Poul Grinder-Hansen on a trip to Kronborg Castle. A tour where they lock themselves in tower rooms, go down into the casemates, jump around in the Queen's bedroom, all while telling stories that took place right here in these rooms at Kronborg.
In the fourth episode, we hear about Danish coup plans.
Yes, we can hear an airplane, but we are standing in the barracks.
We are standing in the bomb-proof rooms under the bastions at Kronborg.
The reason we can hear the airplane is that there had to be some light shafts and air shafts for people to stay down here in the depths.
And that's what just transmits an airplane down to us.
We're actually standing inside a cylinder where light comes down from above, and there are some holes for both air and light. And then we can see that there used to be a spiral staircase, but it's no longer here, but you can see in the brickwork, trip stairs all the way.
And then next to us there's a doorway and then you enter the old porter's lodge, because a little further along here there was originally a drawbridge and a gate that led into the fortress, and that's how it was in the 1500s and most of the 1600s. So the porter would have been in there, keeping an eye on who was approaching, who wanted to go out and hoist the bridge up and down.
It's really dark, but we can just try to walk in... And if that sounds weird, it's because we're walking around in sand, gravel... Yeah, and there's loose rubble.
Yes, we have to be careful, because if you step wrong, you go down one floor, where there are also casemates and another layer. So it's very deep and dark down there.
Yeah, like you said. If there's a weird sound, it's just because I've disappeared.
Then it's just us falling down or tripping over something. In the meantime, we've reached the place where the janitor used to live. There's a large window opening and three clearings.
You can see that there were iron bars for the openings, and then there is another opening pointing in the other direction towards where the drawbridge was. The gatekeeper could sit there and keep an eye on who was approaching the fortress and whether to close them or open them up.
And there was exactly the kind of drawbridge you would imagine in a medieval castle, the kind you could hoist up and down.
One that would keep track of who was coming into the fortress and keep people out if that's what you wanted.
And then when people cross the drawbridge and enter Kronborg, they actually get into a long...
Yes, a long, arched hallway that runs in a big S.
A very elongated s actually. They move on a long stretch, like in a vaulted hallway. And then you turn once more in the last curve of the s and suddenly you're in front of the castle.
Nowadays, a new gateway, or new and new, has been made from the 1660s.
But you don't go quite as far into that part of the vaulted hallway. But that's what they did originally, and of course we've chosen the original porter's lodge with the long winding corridor. When we stand here, it's because we need to talk a little about some events that happened. Or rather, some of them didn't happen, even though they were planned, while Kronborg was owned by the Swedes and it was a Swedish castle.
They had simply taken over our castle, to put it bluntly, the Swedes. They have conquered it.
And they sit on it, and they eat on it, and they dance, and they kiss ass, and some people are really unhappy about that. So there is actually a kind of resistance movement in Denmark. Where are we in terms of time?
After 1658, when the castle was conquered, it was Swedish for a few years from 1658 to 1660.
During that period, there was a kind of resistance movement. One of those who was actually active as a partisan leader in North Zealand at the time was called Svend Poulsen, and many people know him because he was also known as Gøngehøvdingen, and novels and movies have been made about him. Yes, he was actually active here. We know this from Swedish letters complaining about the nasty partisans under his leadership. But there were also others who planned to do something about the Swedish presence here at Kronborg.
There is a group planning to take back Kronborg because it would be a symbolic victory, because of course it would also cover military facilities and so on.
Denmark is completely obsessed with the Swedes. We only have Copenhagen. Kronborg is taken, they steal our paintings and they dance on the tables. But whose idea is this? Who is the originator of all this?
The ideas were born in Copenhagen with some of the king's entourage, who said: Can't we find any reliable people here in North Zealand who could be behind such a resistance movement? Then they found a man called Laurits Tuxen, who was employed at Hirschholm Castle. That's Hørsholm today, and he was willing to get involved in the work.
He was probably the main man behind trying to build such a movement. You had to find some reliable people who could help make plans that would help you gain control of Kronborg. It wasn't easy, because these weren't soldiers, the ones we now refer to as resistance fighters, they were ordinary people. After all, the Swedes were armed soldiers and were sitting on a strong fortress with ramparts and bastions and moats of that kind. So how the heck were you supposed to get control of that? It was a challenge that he took on, Laurits Tuxen.
He soon had connections with some other people who became involved. One of them was the priest in Birkerød, Henrik Gerner, who had the advantage of having an English officer, Colonel Hutchinson, living in the vicarage, and he was in Swedish service and with a number of English soldiers. He was very angry with the Swedes and didn't think he was being paid properly. So what they imagined was that his men could take part in the coup against Kronborg. If they got some money for it, of course. So that was also part of the planning. Gerner had the English officer living with him because Gerner could speak English. Not many people could at the time, but he could, and therefore he and the colonel could talk to each other. So up in the Elsinore area there were also people who were involved. In one way or another.
One of the most important people was actually a Danish engineering officer called Oluf Steenwinckel. Yes, we walk straight into the light while we let today's Danes or Swedes, or whatever they are, wander by.
We go to our light shaft. I was talking about Oluf Steenwinckel, who was an engineering officer, and he had helped build the defense of Kronborg against the Swedes. But when the castle was conquered by the Swedes, he did the same as so many others. He switched sides and went into Swedish service instead. And then he was assigned by the Swedes to reinforce the fortifications around Kronborg. To reinforce the fortifications, they used peasants from the surrounding area, who were more or less conscripted.
There were hundreds of peasants, men and women toiling around, dragging earth and driving wheelbarrows etc. These were some of the people they were thinking of involving in the coup against Kronborg. So there were quite a lot of different forces that had to come together for this to succeed. They were actually quite ambitious, because they weren't just thinking about taking down Kronborg. They also wanted to overthrow the Swedish king and queen, who sometimes stayed at Kronborg. So if you imagined that you could pull off a coup when they were present at the castle, you could both get the castle and get your hands on the Swedish king.
So that was also part of the considerations of those coup plotters.
But what would you do with them? Well, maybe you could use them to say: You'll be free if you withdraw from Denmark, or something like that.
Yes, it was a good bargaining chip.
If you had the king just up here at Kronborg, you imagined that you could smuggle him to Copenhagen and somehow get him out of the way so that you had full control over him and the Swedes could not get him back.
So to that plan it also seems to be... For good reasons, we don't know exactly what they wanted, because you don't write down secret plans. That would be pretty stupid to do. We have a few points in what they were planning to do.
They imagined that it would happen in such a way that on a certain day, a wagon would bring supplies into the castle, driving over the drawbridge here where we are standing.
And it had to be prepared so that a wheel fell off or something, so that the wagon stopped on the drawbridge, so that the drawbridge could not be raised. And down in the wagon there had to be hidden rifles and such underneath the more innocent food or whatever it was that you could imagine bringing. And then you had to grab the guns, the conspirators, and gain control of the watchtower. And the guard wouldn't have time to raise the drawbridge when there was a wagon. That way, they had access to the castle, and then more men had to pour in and help try to gain control of the castle.
And they had prepared, for example, explosive charges that they imagined if the Swedes locked the doors inside the castle, they could blast their way through the doors and continue to fight their way from room to room and try to get control of it.
That's the picture that emerges. Based on what we now know. But there's a lot we don't know, because as I said, it wasn't written down. At least it shouldn't have been. But some things were, unfortunately for the coup, written down.
So they managed to keep it a secret for months.
Yes, because we later have Lorentz or Laurits Tuxen. Later he was called Lauritz, but isn't his name more like Lorentz, or is it just me?
Tuxen is certainly the originator, but as you say, perhaps inspired/prompted by someone in Copenhagen, not the king. But do we know anything about how he recruits people? I mean, he's being tapped by a few different people... They involve more and more people in it, right?
You have to assume that it was a one-on-one thing. But someone was approached, and he knew someone who would probably be sympathetic to the idea, and he talked to them, and then it spread like wildfire. So in that way, they had managed to build such a devoted group, but they may not have been quite good enough at keeping things completely hidden. And there were a few too many people who knew each other, which was a risk when you had to make such a secret... But they got as far as just four days before they had planned for this to happen. Then it went wrong.
There was a boat with some secret documents about this coup that was going to Copenhagen, and then it was stopped by a Swedish ship. And whoever was on the boat tied a stone around the papers and threw them into the water. But unfortunately, the stones fell off the letters and they floated to the surface, and the Swedes picked them up, and there were the names of a student named Gregers Hansen in Elsinore, and they realized he was apparently involved in a coup, so they put out an APB on him.
At first, he hid with some of the citizens of Elsinore. But after a few days he was discovered and of course taken to Kronborg, where the Swedes wanted to talk to him. You could say that. Maybe he didn't want to talk to them so much. Then he was taken down here to the casemates, where they had some instruments of torture that could be used to get people to say something.
Henrik Gerner, the priest from Birkerød, was already there because his name had also appeared in the letters, so he had also ended up here, and so you have to believe that the student, in particular, was used as a decoy until he gave up some names of those who were co-conspirators. In this way, the Swedes began to rip up the organization. But no one turned in Tuxen, the man who had been the real mastermind.
He turned himself in. He came and said: Yes, unfortunately I have to admit to you that I have had some things transported to Copenhagen. It was a bad thing, but he was such a nice guy, so he got out quickly, because the Swedes believed him, and now he had been such an honest man who said he had smuggled a letter to Copenhagen. But that was also a mild thing. It was lucky for him that those who knew more about it didn't reveal what they knew. Yes, because they revealed something, but they didn't reveal him.
They revealed Steenwinckel, the engineering officer, who was of Danish origin.
And he also comes down here, and he also knew a lot about the organization. He was also subjected to torture, but he did not say who else was involved.
So the Swedes got a very incomplete picture of what was actually going on. They didn't know what the plans were. A couple were initially sentenced to death. At least three were sentenced to death, because the student Gregers Hansen was sentenced to death and Oluf Steenwinckel was sentenced to death because he was extra guilty because he had entered Swedish service.
And then there was the priest Gerner. And you might wonder why the priest, he hadn't done much beyond being a contact person for someone.
There are indications that they have fed the Swedes a tall tale. Some of those on the torture bench said that we had a plan to blow up the Swedish king, so they did not reveal that they wanted to capture Kronborg. But they claimed that it was an assassination attempt on the Swedish king. And the Swedes believed, at least some Swedes write that the priest he was accused of wanting to blow up the Swedish king. Maybe that's why he was sentenced to death.
It was crazy anyway. They've kept their heads so cool that they've thought that if we say we're planning to conquer Kronborg, it might ruin it for someone else who's thinking of conquering it. So they try to portray it as if they're a bit crazy.
Perhaps they only gave a few names that they knew the Swedes already knew. Because most of those who were caught were not people accused of anything other than hiding Gregers Hansen in Elsinore, they were accused of hiding him from the Swedes. Relatively mild stuff. Apparently they never really discovered, the Swedes, what the coup was really about.
And Tuxen just rolls in and says: By the way, I've done a bit too.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm here. I'm really sorry to have to tell you, because I think we have such a good working relationship... It's not so good, so he quickly got out again. He hadn't really been involved in any of that stuff up in Elsinore, so he was very cold-blooded.
But Henrik Gerner and Gregers Hansen and Oluf Steenwinckel, who actually worked here at Kronborg and saw the Swedes because he had entered Swedish service, they thought he was a traitor.
He got a worse punishment than the others. First and foremost because he was actually executed, but because he was a traitor, he was not just executed as usual by cutting off his head. He was to be burned alive, as it was called.
That is, his body was stretched out on the ground so that he was lying on his back with his arms and legs slightly to the side, and then the executioner took a large, heavy wagon wheel. And then he threw the cartwheel down and broke one arm, and then he threw it on the other. And then on the individual joints. And when you'd broken the wheel, rad is a German word for wheel, when you'd done that, you could be a bit merciful at the end and throw the wheel on his chest, so he died. And then you chopped off his head and put it on a pole. The body parts were then decoratively placed on a wheel on a pole on Galgebakken on the outskirts of Elsinore.
Here the head could hang until the birds had plucked the eyes off it.
It actually happened to Oluf Steenwinckel.
And Henrik Gerner had been told that he was not to be broken, but he was to be executed. He had gotten so far that he had time to write a farewell letter to his wife and children. And then at the last minute, a few hours before the execution, he was informed that he had been pardoned because the Danes had threatened to execute a Swedish officer they had captured. A barter was made to spare his life. Instead, he was lowered into the prison. Wearing some big iron shackles.
Well, they didn't get him out, they got him pardoned.
Yes, they didn't get him out, he just wasn't executed. Then he ended up here, and he could stay here until they had raised enough ransom, so if he could raise enough money, he could be bought free.
Yes, it becomes almost a thing... It will be a thing that the Swedes do with others, so it's almost like a money machine.
Yes, I don't know if it was the Swedish king's idea.
But the Swedish officer in charge of the prisoners apparently saw the chance to make a really good deal. So he kept the prisoners here and treated them quite harshly. And then after a while, they can leave the prison for a while and go out into the city, and then they can tell how miserable they are.
And then you have to raise some money, and then I expect you to come back on Monday. That's how it worked. Then they came out and complained about their distress and showed the marks from the chains. And then the Swedish officer hoped that they could collect enough money, and it would go to the Swedish state or perhaps a little to him as well, one suspects.
Could they do it? Get the money?
There were some who actually raised money, but there were also some who could not raise any money. And Gregers Hansen, the student who was supposed to be executed, was not executed. He stayed in prison. No one was willing to pay a penny for him, because he wasn't an important person, so he had to languish here. He didn't really have anyone, maybe his old mother, but she couldn't get him any money, so they lived in miserable conditions down here, probably in the prison, in the casemates and other places at Kronborg for a long time.
Some could not tolerate it health-wise, and then they died. Others survived and then got out when the war finally ended. And some were able to get the money to pay their way out.
So how long has it been from this coup attempt to the end of the war?
It's probably been a year or something like that. So it probably fits very well. It's been a long time, and they have been scarred for life, many of the prisoners back then.
Henrik Gerner was also marked for life in that way. But he also turned it into a kind of suffering story for himself, so he took the chains around his legs with him when he was released. And to this day, they hang on the wall in Birkerød Church, where he was a priest.
You can go up and see a portrait of Gerner and the chains hanging on the wall next to it. He later became the bishop of Aalborg, so he had a good career after he was involved in this coup.
He recovered from this.
He recovered.
But others died.
But that means that the coup plans and the resistance that existed with the Gøngehøvdingen and so on. Of course, this helped to stress the Swedes. But that's not why Denmark became free again in 1660?
No, it wasn't, because it was due to help from various foreign countries... From Holland and other allies, and of course the Danish army, which gradually became stronger and was able to help hold actual battles against Sweden, including at Nyborg. At Nyborg there was a major battle.
But it was part of it because, just like during the Second World War, if there's something like that in the hinterland, it ties up a whole lot of soldiers every time you have to move from one place to another. A whole lot of people have to come along to take care of what's being moved. And they knew, for example, that they were after the Swedish king.
We know that there was an attempt down by Nivå, where Danish resistance fighters had ambushed the Swedish king with a group of riders on their way from Kronborg down towards Copenhagen, where they were to shoot them down. But the report states that one of the Danes fired too early. That is, before they had gotten close enough, so they shot a button off the uniform jacket and the right hand of the Swede in front. But the Swedes had time to stop.
Here's some dust down in the Casemates. You should have your water.
Yes, I'd better go in and get some water. No, I almost perished down here with the other victims of the war.
It gives you a faint feeling that it wasn't so pleasant to be down here back then.
It must have been worse back then, right?
In terms of temperature, it's been pretty much the same. It's been very cool and a bit clammy.
It's just fresh, as they say. Actually, it's not that fresh. It's disgusting. And chilly.
I don't think it has been advisable in terms of health to stay down here.
I think there's a place where one of the sources that you have in your book where you hear about someone who actually got scurvy from being here, because they didn't get anything proper to eat either.
At times it could be a bad diet. You had salty food in large quantities, and if there were no fresh vegetables, it could cause vitamin deficiency, so you could lose your teeth and everything else. It could be a bit of a challenge to be a soldier here.
After the war ends, you have heroes. Are they also celebrated as heroes, those who survived? Poor Oluf Steenwinckel, but the others who made it.
Yes, he had to settle for the fact that his body was picked off Galgebakken and given an honorable burial in the church in Elsinore. Others received various forms of reward, and so did Tuxen.
One of the minor characters who had been involved, Hans Rosgård, gradually invented a heroic role for himself in the following decades. So when he died, a long poem was published, all about how it was Hans Rosgård who had been behind it all. But in reality, he had only played a very, very modest role. But it was a bit like after the occupation in Denmark.
There were also people who suddenly showed up on the evening of May 4th wearing freedom fighter armbands and thought they were damn good guys.
It was a bit like that with him, I'm afraid. So they got a kind of heroic role afterwards. If you want to remember them nowadays, you can go to Brønshøj in the area where the Swedish king had his big camp, which he called Carlstad. All the residential streets there are named after things related to the Swedish wars. You can find Tuxens Vej, Hans Rosgårds Vej and Svend Gønges vej.
And out by me, right near where I live on Nyholm. There's something called Henrik Gerners Plads. It also exists.
Yes, they are remembered.
But did Frederick III remember them too? Did they get money?
Yes, they got rewards afterwards to the extent that the Danes could afford anything. So they got their reward, they were recognized. And Gerner became a bishop. But I don't know if that's why he became a bishop.
But it was also a big step up from being a parish priest in Birkerød to becoming bishop of the whole of North Jutland. So some kind of reward awaited those who survived in the end.
And then the Swedes finally leave Kronborg. They'll never get it back, right, so there have never been Swedes who have taken Kronborg since?
It hasn't, and neither has Denmark.
No, neither.
Then there was a division where the Øresund became the border between Denmark and Sweden, because that didn't change.
So even though the second Swedish war, the one we're talking about now, ended with the Swedes being driven out of Denmark, the peace treaty that was signed did not rectify the fact that Denmark had lost Scania, Halland and Blekinge. They remained Swedish, and they remain so to this day.
So in a way, this is actually the end of this back and forth between Sweden and Denmark, which was mostly about the fact that part of what we now call Sweden was Danish, which they then got back. And then they tried to take all of Denmark.
But as you say, since 1660, the border has been in the Sound.
Well, not with Denmark's good will, because in 1675-79, the Danish king Christian the 5th tried to reconquer the Scania lands. And again in the early 1700s, Frederik IV tried to recapture Scania, so Denmark made several attempts to regain control of the old Danish provinces.
Do you think we're going to try again?
Ah, I don't think so.
I think it's going to be a bit of a hassle. I think it has to be.
This was just a small part of Kronborg's history.
A little look into the history of Denmark's largest Renaissance castle. The castle has gone through a lot of wild things in the years it has been located where Denmark almost kisses Sweden on the foot.
There's no longer any reason to believe that Kronborg's cannons can shoot ships into the Sound or be used to throw parties for Europe's royalty and nobility, firing them every time someone says cheers.
In return, we now have a castle full of stories whose echoes we can still hear.