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S1. E2.
Kirsten Munk and the Rhine Fox
In 1629, King Christian IV's second wife, the Danish noblewoman Kirsten Munk, had grown tired of her royal partner. The king's great campaign in Germany had failed, and the middle-aged man no longer seemed like a powerful and cheerful prince, but a bitter and vulnerable loser. While the king was away, Kirsten began a relationship with Count Otto Ludwig von Salm, also known as Rhingreven. Their affair was not very discreet, and Kronborg also made room for them to be together. There were witnesses to it all, and the king did not escape hearing about the most intimate details.
S1, E2. Kirsten Munk and the Rhine Fox
19.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 can 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 2
Kirsten Munk and the Rhine Fox
You probably know Kronborg, the big old castle near Elsinore, it's Hamlet's castle, it's where Shakespeare set his most famous play. It's where Holger Danske sits in the basement and naps while supposedly looking after Denmark. But it's not really Hamlet, and Holger the Dane 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, captivity, betrayal and theft.
In this podcast, we tackle the real stories that actually took place at Kronborg Castle. Join storyteller Nanna Vinther and senior researcher Paul Grinder-Hansen on a trip to Kronborg, a trip where they lock themselves in the tower room. Going down into the casemates, jumping around in the Queen's bedroom, all while telling stories that took place right here in these rooms at Kronborg.
In the second episode, we hear about Kirsten Munk and the Rhine Fox.
Now we're in one of the guest rooms in the castle. The Duchess of Braunschweig's Room, but it's just named after one of the families. That's what they call it now. Yes, that's what they do now. It's named after some of the relatives of the Danish royal family who stayed here when they visited Kronborg. But the rooms on the second floor were used as guest rooms of various kinds, and thus the room also became involved in one of the more scandalous stories of 16th century Denmark with the story of Christian the Fourth and his wife Kirsten Munk and her affair with the stallion fox, and that's what we'll talk about here.
We simply couldn't leave it at that, so we talk about Kronborg, and then we think about everything else, but some salacious things have been going on with Christian the Fourth's wife Kirsten Munk, who was his second wife and whom he was terribly fond of. And we're standing in a room that they used in their lewdness. You could say some of the naughty things they have done here at Kronborg.
Well, in reality, we were actually standing in a small tower room where we can look out at the Sound. But this is definitely not a small room...
No, it's a nice and presentable guest room, or living room, so there has been a sleeping option up here too. What makes us stand here is this stallion fox that I was talking about. It was actually accommodated here in the castle. And as a guest at one point, the Danish king was busy waging war in Germany and was therefore not present in the castle, but the floor below this room that had it, that was the queen's room. But at the time it was called Kirsten Munk's room, because she was married to Christian without being queen. She came from a Danish noble family, so she wasn't good enough to be queen. So she lived downstairs and you could say, it sounds very innocent, that the stallion fox lived upstairs. It shouldn't have been so dangerous, but the problem was that she had started an affair with this stallion Otto Ludvig, as he was called, who had been in Danish military service, and Kirsten Munk had encountered him and lost her heart to him instead of to the king. The affair had been going on for some time already when they arrived at Kronborg. The king wasn't really aware of it. He was so far away that he didn't suspect his beloved Kirsten Munk at the time, so she installed herself here at the castle, which was comfortable and good.
And then she had the fox up here, and then inside the wall there was a spiral staircase leading down, a hidden spiral staircase leading from this room down to the queen's sitting room.
And this stallion could make use of it. So he could come down from up here and have the queen to himself when he had gotten rid of all the maids, who were servants, she was not the queen, but Kirsten Munk.
We can go the same way in a bit. I think we should, because in the meantime, we'll go up. It's lovely, what's it called, is it octagonal or something? We're down in what's called the Queen's Carnatic Tower, which are very nice rooms where you can stand and enjoy the view of the Sound.
And from here on the second floor there is a door in the wall that leads to a narrow spiral staircase, which the stallion fox used when he went down to Kirsten Munk.
And it may not be the same door as it was back then but it's still actually a pretty nice old oak door that I can't figure out how to open. We even have a bunch of keys around, but okay... so we come out and it's the same kind of spiral or spindle staircase, I can never figure it out... Actually, the one that goes up by the big staircase up to the king's is just a small version.
This one, where people have to imagine a triangular thing that ends in a circular thing if you put them on top of each other and then unfold them like a deck of cards. So it's like, you can't say it like that. You could do that. So it's a small narrow staircase, well, you can imagine that the stingray fox.... Yes, yes, because you don't want new stallion foxes arriving all the time. But then, there's no one inside the Queen's bay window tower, there's an extra little room here that is inserted into the Queen's bay window tower, but no one knows if this has been used for anything. No one knows anything about that. You could well imagine that it's a very cozy and extremely discreet room where no one could follow what was going on.
No, of which there were plenty. If their affair's, whatever it's called, flame and how crazy it was, then they definitely had something going on here too.
I would think so. Because at some point, Christian the Fourth got wind of it, and in the letters he's written, he's written piles of handwritten letters, he returns time and again to this, what happened and so on. Maybe we should let Christian the Fourth himself tell us. He apologizes. It's many years after this happened. He continues to be just as bitter. He complains to Kirsten Munk's mother Ellen Marsvin that she had the nerve to say that the last daughter Kirsten Munk gave birth to looked like Christian IV. And then he said "that can't be true because it's the stallion's daughter". So he doesn't want that stuck to him.
For people who might know the whole story, ellen Marsvin It sounds incredibly strange, but it was the name of Kirsten Marken's mother, who was one of the richest. Not women, but people in Denmark. Yes, a rich landowner's wife who had arranged for her daughter to come into contact with Christian 4. She saw some advantages in having influence over the king in this way, so she presented the king with the then quite young Kirsten Munk.
Not that they have to be about that, but where is Kirsten's father in all this? He was dead a long time ago, alright so Ellen Marsvin. She's the one the king goes to to complain.
So that's why. Then he complained to her, and it must have been written in old Danish. I think you have to read in Sjællandsk. That's how I think Christian the Fourth must have spoken.
It is known to you and every man. In what she lay with the stallion fox, that night and morning she kissed, patted and in other ways for every man's eyes he was surrounded, yes he let himself be drawn by the clothes and put to bed by him, and when he had been long enough had been with her and even left her. Then the girls had to go to her and make the bed again, the honest birds lay so long at Kronborg. Her girls were not allowed to sleep in there with her. When the rhingreven could come down from his chamber through the living room, into her room, and when the devil took her to Copenhagen again, she would not seek bed with me, nor would she rather lie in bed with me.
So there is something for the king to complain about, and he is very well informed about what was going on. You can hear and it's actually also due to Ellen Marsvin, which is a mistake, because the thing was that when Christian came home from his campaign, he gradually found out that something had been going on with Kirsten and this rhingreven and rhingreven had also left Denmark, so he went into service somewhere else. But then Christian IV was visiting Ellen Marsvin at one of her manors, and she thought if I arrange a little affair with the king and the servants we have down here, then you're just as good If not, we can probably work it out, then we can always say Kirsten is unfaithful but so are you.
So she introduced Christian to someone called Vibeke Kruse, and the king was also very pleased with this Vibeke Kruse, but what Ellen Marsvin hadn't realized was that Vibeke Kruse had been Kirsten Munck's maid before she came down to Ellen Marsvin. In other words, she had seen everything that went on with the stallion fox and Kirsten Munk, so she could tell the king all the most salacious details and that's why the king knows everything about what was going on and how the servants had to run away and make the beds and everything like that. That's because he was told by one of the maids who had been present at Kronborg and had seen what was going on, Vibeke Kruse. She remained the king's mistress for the rest of her life. And of course, it was also in her own interest to tell how bad Kirsten Munk had been. And the king certainly didn't forget that.
So it really has been a plan that backfired, it backfired for Ellen Marsvin because she hadn't really imagined that this was what would come out of it.
On the contrary, it just emphasized that the king had become too disappointed with Kirsten. Now she had to go away.
So after this breakup. In fact, Christian IV and Kirsten Munk never got back together, so it's over once and for all.
Yes, it's finally over.
But he's really sad for a long time. He writes this and that and he keeps an eye on everything that's going on.
He keeps saying that he won't forget, he keeps complaining about it one time after another. One letter after another. And thinks of all sorts of things she should have done, she should have tried to get poison to get rid of him and all that sort of thing, but that's also at Kronborg? No, it wasn't. It wasn't at Kronborg. It was somewhere where the king was nearby. It was at Kronborg when the king wasn't there... Oh well...
But there must have been a time when she fell in love with the stallion fox, where perhaps Christian the 4th and the stallion fox were here at the same time because, as you say, the stallion fox was stationed here or ...
He was employed in the Danish service as an officer, but he was not specifically employed at Kronborg, he served somewhere in the Danish forces. But it wasn't on the campaign in Germany with Christian IV, but here in Denmark. And that's where Kirsten Munk ran into him.
But I thought we should try to rewind, because Christian the 4th married who first?
He was first married to a real queen, a real princess daughter like Anne-Katrine of Brandenburg. So it is she who is the mother of the children he will have as the official heir to the throne. So the king who later became Frederik III, for example, and his older brother Christian, who should have been king, but who offered himself so much that he died before his father. So he didn't become king, otherwise we would have had a King Christian.
But he died in 1647, so it had to be his younger brother Frederik who was drafted in instead. What did he die of?
Yes, he drank even more than his father, got even fatter and fatter and more bloated and spent a lot of his time on spa trips around Germany in the hope that it would help his failing health. He lived to the age of 40, but he was the official one, one of the official royal children. But when the queen died, Christian IV fell for Kirsten Munk. And became so fond of her that he actually considered it to be a marriage, even though it wasn't, because she wasn't the queen. There was no marriage, no official ceremony or anything... Nothing ecclesiastical at least, but you could do various things in between, and that was it, so she was his wife, and she bore him countless children. Almost every year she gave birth to a new child, Kirsten Munk, so you can perhaps understand that you get a little tired of it when you reach eleven or twelve. That it might not be quite so appealing to be such a royal wife and birthing machine.
Imagine if they had only known about a little contraception. Then they could have avoided the possibility that a child might have come out of her affairs with either the stallion fox or someone else. In any case, another child was born at a time when Christian IV was absolutely certain that he was not the father of a girl who was born.
Kirsten Munk, Ellen Marsvin. Now we're talking about Ellen Marsvin being one of the richest landowners in Denmark. Did she come from an old noble family or what?
They're called porpoises, a strange name, but they're not those chubby little pets with fur on them. If anything, they're dolphins that leap lightly and elegantly around the Danish waters. But that's what gave the name to the Porpoise family, and they were a fine, old and rich family that she came from, so she wasn't just anyone, because Christian IV had had relationships with lots of women of bourgeois origin throughout his youth, which he dated for a while, and then he was dumped in favor of someone else. But he always took good care of the ones he had a relationship with, so they always had something to live on. It was different with Kirsten Munk because he really fell in love with her. But where does he meet her?
At one of Ellen Porpoise's manor houses, of course, where she makes sure to introduce them to each other. There's no doubt that Ellen Marsvin is the one pulling the strings. If she could get her daughter to become a close personal relation to the king herself, it would make for some good connections, and something good could probably come of it, she thought.
So it's also a business reasoning? But still, when you think about the morals around marriage and adultery at the time. Then you still think that money trumps morality anyway, when you think that she becomes the king's mistress, but the connections are just too good to worry about that kind of thing?
Like all kinds of realpolitik. Then all moral considerations give way, because of course all sorts of other people could be sentenced for adultery and so on. But now the king was a widower. He wasn't married when he had that relationship with Kirsten Munk. She wasn't married either. So you could discuss it, you could probably find some theologians who could explain that it was perfectly fine for there to be this relationship.
But it's true that this is how the strings were pulled. For practical reasons. It applied to all marriages. Even the royal authorized marriages have nothing to do with it. They have nothing to do with love, you could say the relationship with Kirsten Munk actually had something to do with love. The king was very infatuated with her, whether she was equally infatuated with the king, that's harder to say, history doesn't say anything about that.
I was about to ask, do you have any idea if she was like, oh my dearest.
I don't think you do. You can, it's the king writing letters to her. Mon cherie in French as something. But as far as I know, she has not said anything special in that regard.
Maybe it's been terrible, try to imagine. The king has had a crush on her, the mother has been like, you know, the guinea pig family. We need to have more influence, and then she had to give birth to 11 children. It probably hasn't been... So when she finally freaks out with the Rhino fox. She's going to freak out too.
One is that we are standing, and you read out that she did it in front of everyone and then the sheets had to be changed when they were done.
I don't know what it is, but there's another one, if we go down to the Queen's chamber, well, there's a little sordid story there as well. We have to do that, yes.
By the way, this room is really cute. Yes, we can do that. We can lock it.
The guys who have the keys to Kronborg and a view of you can't, you just can't get enough of Øresund when you're here. It's just all over. It's really nice. So now we go further down. Let's see, up from the room we were in. Trippe trippe trippe trippe. So we have to go past the Blue Room, where we were looking down to the Queen's. Then we have to get the keys out, because it's locked with a key. Yes, we did that very well...
We have gone down the stairs, in fact we are standing underneath the room that we believe the rhin Count Otto Ludvig von Salm has been in, and then we exit the very small narrow spiral staircase and enter the queen's living room.
From there a small passageway and then you enter the bedroom. What was built to be the Queen's bedroom, at that time Kirsten Munk's bedroom.
Who was not the queen, let's remember. She wasn't the queen. It was her room, and it was also where things happened. So it wasn't upstairs with the stallion fox that he came down to her and one of the other letters Christian IV wrote, in which he talked to Vibeke Kruse, his new mistress. Who could tell him this and that. It says that the girls or boys, the servants, could keep an eye on what they were doing by looking in a mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door to the bedroom. However it got there, it must have been on one of the window pillars opposite. Where, apparently, you could sit on the windowsills and doors and maybe look in the mirror and then look around the corner and see what was going on in here with Kirsten and the rhingreven.
It's been a bit difficult to keep a secret affair because there have been a lot of servants and witnesses and curious people around.
But if she doesn't bother to close it off or anything and leaves a mirror hanging there, it can also seem a bit like she wants it to be a bit of a fuckface.
Could it be, yes I don't give a shit? Now it just gets all up in your face.
Yes, you're probably right, because it's reckless, she. She's not worried about what the king will think about it at this point. It would be stupid to think that it could be hidden in any way when she did it like that. Then they should have stayed up in the blue room we were in before, where things could happen. Things without there being any witnesses. But when you come down here, there was always... Kirsten Munk was also nice enough that there were always service people around. And that's also what the king writes, you have to boss around servants. Then they have to be chased there and then they have to be called in and cleaned up, and things like that, so they were present and knew what was going on.
It's hard to imagine what they were really like, but in a way, that's often how they are portrayed. Well, not so much in Kirsten Munk's coloring, you get a bit, Christian the Fourth was king, these are his letters, these are his sources. And then it can be a bit like that, and he's so angry and stuff like that. So it seems a bit like you're thinking that Kirsten Munk was a bit of a slut. But we don't get it from her point of view.
No, we don't. She's probably... in many ways it's also unfair. There's no doubt that it hasn't always been appealing. Of course, she lives in the royal palace, and in that way she had a privileged existence. But it has also been exhausting. Giving birth to all those children and always being available to the king when he showed up from time to time, no matter how happy he was for her. As I said, we don't know how happy she really was for him in that sense. It must have been a great relief to finally get a young 30-year-old lover who was completely different from the king, I suppose.
Was Kirsten Munk much younger than Christian the 4th?
Yes, she was. It was, typically just a teenager, I can't remember how old she was when they were introduced to each other, she was probably only 16-17 years old.
As was often the custom back then.
Anyway, it's also, anyway, also a lot, so she's kind of had her whole youth there, so now that she... So she might actually be the same age as the stallion fox when it is.
Yes, that's very true, there can't have been much difference.
When she goes out and they somehow break up. It's something about Christian the Fourth having a stone placed on the road from Fredensborg.
Yes, it's up by Frederiksborg Castle.
It happened at Frederiksborg Castle, where she locks her bedroom door for him and even puts her maids across so that he can't push the doors open. And it makes him so upset that the next day, he goes to the stonemason and says carve a monument over this locked bedroom door, and that stone is still in the castle park at Frederiksborg. It's a stone that has a seat so you can sit on it, and it says C4 on the stone here and then some initials, which are probably for the stonemason or something like that. But it's simply the only monument I think you have in Denmark above a locked bedroom door.
It's also somehow so pathetic.
Now he's just, well, now she's tired of me, and a monument has to be made over it.
Again, it's that violated sense of honor. He has this all the time, which affects him for many years afterwards. He feels really hurt and unfairly treated by her when she wasn't crazy about him anymore.
He simply couldn't live with that. But that's what it will mean. In reality, it's poor Kirsten Munk who has been thrown into this for business reasons. Her mother. If her mother gets what she wanted out of it. Will she get all the connections or will it be?
And or will it be taken away from her again?
No, because she was influential for as long as she lived thanks to all the children Kirsten Munk gave birth to Christian 4. There was a whole string of children, all of whom the king considered his legitimate children, and who were all supported and made careers and so on. One of the most famous is Leonora Christine, who later married Corfitz Ulfeldt, who was part of a completely different story that is even more dramatic.
Which is also dramatic, yes it is.
So it was Kirsten Munk and Christian's daughter. Yes, but if you... and out of what was it nine of them survived, she gave birth to 11. And nine of them, or was it ten.
I can't remember how many survived.
There are always a few who have died, even at births in the royal family. But there was a high infant mortality rate in general.
So they've actually been really viable.
But it was also rich, and they had the best possible conditions, you could say.
So yes, in that sense, the guinea pig family's mission succeeded, even if Kirsten eventually went completely rogue.
And she had to live in a manor house in Jutland. But it wasn't any worse than that. It wasn't like in England, where Henry VIII chops off his wife's head and stuff like that. However, that's not what happened. She was exiled to Jutland. It wasn't the worst thing that could happen after all.
On one of the family estates.
Manors. Very appropriate buns, buns, buns. Maybe he's really thinking. I don't think... I think he pronounced it differently at the time, she was going to bowls so she could bowl with anyone.
Yeah ok, so they had all these kids, so in reality it leaves a huge legacy, are they some, are they called guinea pigs or what were they called?
All of the kings' illegitimate children were called Gyldenløve, at least the boys were called Gyldenløve. It's a tradition that has continued in the following royal generations, their illegitimate children are also all called Gyldenløve. I haven't come across anyone named Gyldenløve yet, but I'm a bit curious about it... I'd like to meet someone.
I don't know if there are any Golden Lions wandering around.
Don't you think they might have changed their names at some point? Maybe they got tired of knowing that they were a descendant of the king's illegitimate children.
But I think when it passed on to the next generations, and we didn't stick with Goldenlover, they got new names. So that's why you haven't met many Golden Lions because there aren't that many illegitimate royal children.
Now they're probably some old rich people running around acting all fancy. You are the illegitimate descendant of the king! Uh, no, okay.
But nevertheless, you could say that Kirsten Munk and the stallion fox will somehow contribute to Christian IV not being happy for the rest of his life.
There is a serious downside to that. And that he makes some bad decisions in his life politically?
He had already made a bad decision before things went wrong with Kirsten Munk by getting involved in the Thirty Years' War. As commander of the Protestant, the Protestant troops. And he had done that, even though there was reluctance to do so in the Danish Imperial Council, i.e. the people he ruled Denmark with, but fortunately he was also Duke of Holstein, which was part of the German Empire... Then I go to war as Duke of Holstein. When I can't go to war as King of Denmark, I'm Duke of Holstein, and so he got... and then it went wrong, he was injured and lost the Battle of Lutter am Barenberg. Enemy troops conquered, took all of Jutland and plundered, ravaged, and it went really badly, so it had already started to go wrong.
And that's actually when she gets tired of him? Yes, she does.
Yeah, now he's actually starting to fuck it up and she's thinking ew
Yes, because once things start to go wrong like that. Maybe he wasn't quite the same man he once was, you could imagine him being more exuberant and charming than he was at the time, when he was stressed and exhausted and insulted and everything else, losing his grip on things. It's rarely the most inspiring, so it was a really bad year for Christian the Fourth in 1629. That's when he lost. He lost that war, participation in the Thirty Years' War. His relationship with Kirsten broke down and Kronborg burned down.
And then he has to start building it up and without his Kirsten and without everything else and losing in, losing in Germany.
You might have lost your spirit completely over that, but he can't do that after all. It's not like he lost his energy anyway. Even though things started to go wrong, so he managed to rebuild Kronborg Castle as his father had built it, for example. And this also says something about Christian the Fourth's understanding of his own father, whom he had only known as a boy. It is because he built the castle. Where it is outside the castle. Nowhere does it say Christian IV. Even though the walls have been restored and rebuilt, and the gables have been chopped up, everywhere it says Frederik and Sofie, it's Christian IV's parents, as it says... They were the ones who had built it. They were the ones to be commemorated in the castle. Inside, you can see Christian the Fourth's name on the fireplaces. Also in ceiling paintings, but on the outside it's his father's castle, so he had such a veneration there, even though he likes to leave his mark on things. So he can also sometimes hold back a little, which he did here.
It's a pretty nice one when you think about it.
Yes, and that's also why we get to experience it today at Frederik the Second's castle.
So even though so much has happened since then...
We can, if we go here....
We've actually gone where you're not allowed, into the Queen's bedroom. Here's the classic floor, a real royal floor, checkerboard marble, it's just to show... we can go straight into the king's room. They also have a passageway between their bedrooms, but... But she didn't want to mess with the stallion fox in the king's bed anyway.
However, he doesn't want to. Then there would have been something to be offended about.
It was close to being beheaded then.
But that's what I said with Christian the Fourth's name tag, that in here on the ceiling. There have been some little fat angels flying around with Christian the Fourth, C4. Originally, the painter had done them all with C4. But then Christian IV said that was wrong. They had to be changed so that they were also with Frederik and Sophie. So if we find it, look in the right place, we will be able to find one of them.
I'll try to find it. So we're in a very large room, which is the king's living room. And if there's someone in the background, it's because there are guests at the castle. You'll have to live with that if you hear it. It's the king's living room and there are the coolest ceiling paintings and over here are Frederik and Sofie. That's where the angels are flying around.
And that's something the painter had to change, because Christian the Fourth said, we need to include my father and mother in the ceiling decoration in here.
Definitely with the little chubby angels.
The way it was fashionable in the 1630s when people loved these little fat angels, of which there are many. There were piles of, that's how it looked in the time of Christian the Fourth when things had to be made from scratch. So even if he had those traumatic memories. Or at least stories about the stallion fox and Kirsten Munk here at the castle, it didn't stop him from rebuilding the castle when it burned down. After all, it was more important than standing as a symbol for all of Denmark and the Danish royal power and for his father's efforts.
This was just a small part of Kronborg's history. A little peek into the history of Denmark's largest Renaissance castle. The castle has gone through many wild things in the years it has been there. 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 every time someone says cheers. Instead, we now have a castle full of stories whose echoes we can still hear.