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

H-German Whaley on Lockhart, 'Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark's Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596'

Review published on Friday, July 1, 2005

Paul Douglas Lockhart. Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark's Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004. xxii + 350 pp. $124.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-13790-5.

Reviewed by Joachim Whaley (Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge) Published on H- German (July, 2005)

Failure as Success?

The kingdom of Denmark rarely features as a significant actor in accounts of European politics in the second half of the sixteenth century. Like Poland and Saxony, Denmark paid the historiographical price of failure. The grand narrative is dominated by England, Sweden, France, Spain, and Brandenburg. Furthermore, generations of historians underestimated Frederik II (r. 1559-88) as an allegedly indolent ruler who was in thrall to his noble estates. It was the reign of his son Christian IV (1596-1648) that seemed to represent the acme of Danish power and prestige. For it was Christian who emerged as leader of a grand Protestant coalition in the 1620s, though he failed in that role and his reign ended in disaster in 1648.

In this fascinating study Paul Douglas Lockhart extends the recent revisionist work of Danish scholars such as Frede P. Jensen and presents a further (and convincing) corrective to the traditional view. He suggests that Frederik has been misunderstood and that the driving forces behind his policies have been ignored. In particular, even the Danish revisionists have failed to do justice to Frederik's confessional aims or to the links between his personal piety and his "grand strategy." His many projects failed to come to fruition, but he nonetheless played a leading role in the international politics of his day. His interventions were significant because he was the leading Lutheran ruler at a critical juncture. His position was based on his control of the Sound, which both generated significant revenue for him and gave him the power to seal off the Baltic trade upon which much of northern and northwestern Europe depended. As Duke of Holstein he was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and his royal position and international contacts made him a natural potential leader of the German Protestants. A study of his diplomatic endeavors thus sheds important light on the whole drift of central and west European politics during his reign.

Lockhart specifically addresses three questions. First, he seeks to show how religion or religious identity shaped foreign policy. In this respect his book addresses the debate over the significance of religious or political motives and it proceeds from the assumption that, at least before 1648, it is futile to "divorce the study of international politics and the making of foreign policy from their confessional backgrounds" (p. 7). Second, he assesses what impact Denmark had on the confessional conflicts in France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire before 1618 and asks why, given its international prominence, the kingdom did not play a greater role. Third, he focuses on the more specific question of why Frederik, like Elizabeth I and all other Protestant rulers of the period, failed

The first step, Lockhart suggests, must be a re-examination of Frederik's personality and domestic policies. The framework for both was the foundation laid by his father Christian III, whose reign brought stability and prosperity after the turbulence of the 1520s and 1530s. Christian III may have established himself as ruler by force of arms, but his reign ushered in a golden age. He pursued cautious and conservative policies. He dealt with the bishops by securing control over the Church and made concessions to the nobility. His court was characterized by an austere piety and he studiously avoided all foreign conflicts. Above all, Christian III kept well clear of the treacherous internal politics of the Holy Roman Empire.

At first glance, Frederik's accession in 1559 might appear to represent a significant change of direction. The young king was inexperienced and belligerent. There was little doubt that he was poorly educated and almost certainly severely handicapped by dyslexia. By way of compensation, perhaps, he had developed an early passion for hunting and outdoor pursuits, and for feasting and drinking. These skills and interests were refined in the company of German nobles, and unlike his father, Frederik felt very much at home in the Holy Roman Empire.

His first actions as king seemed to presage a stormy reign. The invasion and annexation of the peasant republic of Dithmarschen in May 1559, was cheap and successful, but the Danish Council was alarmed that it simply diverted attention and resources away from the potential threat of Sweden. The following year, his purchase of the Livonian island of Oesel for his younger brother Duke Magnus placed him in the midst of the developing Swedish-Russian struggle for hegemony over the eastern Baltic. When Magnus attempted to establish himself in Estonia, conflict with Sweden was more or less inevitable. The Seven Years' War of the North that ensued brought little gain to either party and, although Denmark technically "won," both sides incurred heavy losses and costs. The treaty concluded at Stettin in 1570, with the help of Maximilian and the German estates, ushered in forty-one years of peace between the two Baltic powers.

The implications were not all negative. In some ways the problems of the war years paved the way ahead. The effective closure of the Sound in 1565 in an attempt to impose a blockade against Sweden provoked strong protests from England, France, and the Netherlands, but it also drew attention to Denmark's status as a considerable regional power. It also underlined the significance of the Danish crown's most valuable asset, which Frederik subsequently exploited by changing the way in which the Sound dues were assessed in 1567, taking the weight and value of cargoes into account. Furthermore, the tension between crown and nobility generated by the Dithmarschen campaign and exacerbated by the Swedish conflict reached a point where a new accommodation became possible. From now on, indeed, it seems that the king achieved a lastingmodus vivendi with his nobles, a relationship cemented by his habit of restless travel and by the social activities that he pursued with vigor until his death. His rule was more often than not based on consensus generated by a peripatetic kingship rather than by the establishment of an elaborate court structure.

For all the bellicosity of Frederik's first decade, he also devoted himself to the steady development of the church as an agency of government at home. A constant stream of measures promoted religious uniformity both within and between the various parts of his kingdom. At the same time, Frederik

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Whaley on Lockhart, 'Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark's Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44248/whaley-lockhart-frederik-ii-and-protestant-cause-denmarks-role-wars Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German refrained from adopting a constricting statement of faith, preferring a rather ambiguous official theology that could accommodate a variety of tendencies. He feared civil discord more than anything else. And while his anti-Catholicism was unwavering, he was, Lockhart suggests, an "irenicist" in Protestantism as long as no one tried to import "foreign" inner-Protestant disputes.

Lockhart presents clear evidence of Frederik's strong interest in military and political developments in France and the Netherlands, and an undoubted sympathy for the plight of the Protestants both there and elsewhere. On the other hand Frederik did not act on those sympathies. He maintained a neutral and restrained stance, and he certainly had little truck at this stage with the more radical Protestants in the Reich, who nurtured rumors of Catholic ambitions to upset the settlement of 1555 or who called for solidarity with the Dutch nobility against Spanish oppression.

Events in 1572 brought about a change of attitude. Frederik's marriage to Sophie of Mecklenburg strengthened his ties to the north German nobility and drew him closer into the Protestant political networks in the Empire, with their strong links to the Netherlands and France. Secondly, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris inflamed Frederik as it did other northern rulers and renewed fears of a general Catholic conspiracy. In the Danish case, those fears were reinforced by French intrigues over the Polish throne. The election of Henry III in 1574 proved short-lived, but it was accompanied by French overtures to Sweden, whose Erasmian ruler Johann III seemed interested in negotiations with the papacy. The Valois threat receded when Henry succeeded his brother in France only weeks after his coronation in Cracow and, despite energetic diplomacy by his mother Catherine de Medici, he failed to keep hold of the Polish crown. In 1575, however, the staunchly Catholic Stefan Bathory was elected, which simply reinforced the sense of a growing Catholic threat in the Baltic.

France failed to secure Poland. French talks with Sweden as well as Swedish talks with the Papacy and Spain came to nothing. A Polish collaboration with Sweden was unlikely. Yet in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre anything seemed possible. That included even the fantastical scheme put about by Anders Lorichs, the Swedish ambassador in Poland, for a Spanish-Swedish- Polish maritime attack on the Sound and the partition of the Danish monarchy between those powers and the Gottorp dukes. For good measure, he added the proposal that any Dane who refused to convert to Catholicism would be shipped off to New Spain to labor as a slave in the silver mines.

From then on the international Catholic threat became the focus of all Frederik's endeavors. He worked ceaselessly to forge links with other Protestant powers. He became actively involved in repeated attempts to forge an effective alliance of German Protestant princes. He committed himself whole-heartedly to the cause of Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots in their struggle against the house of Valois. He became similarly engaged in the cause of the Dutch Protestants and developed close links with the English crown from the late 1570s. From around 1570 Frederik was a firm believer in the cause of an international Protestant union.

Those who entered into talks with him generally entertained high hopes that he might intervene directly and that he might throw the considerable resources into the struggle against Catholicism. Yet they were continually confounded. Frederik's perennial aim was a defensive or passive alliance. He aspired in the first instance to mediate between warring factions: between Navarre and the French crown, between the Spanish, Dutch, and English. The very existence of a Protestant consensus, he seemed to believe, was the best form of defense against even the thought of a Catholic

Hence he opposed the Formula of Concord on the grounds that it merely reinforced the division between Lutherans and Calvinists. Then in 1583 he refused to become directly involved in the Cologne war. His response to the Dutch crisis was to seek to mediate between Spain and the rebels in the hope of averting a conflict between Spain and England. He hoped that might enable him to come to the aid of Henry of Navarre, though that desire in turn was frustrated by the perennial inability of the German Protestants to agree on a common approach.

By the end of his reign in 1588 Frederik had achieved nothing concrete. In 1587 even his attempts to thwart a Swedish-Polish alliance failed with the election of Sigismund Vasa to the Polish throne. On the other hand the very fact of Frederik's active involvement in the great conflicts of his age in Germany, France, and the Netherlands had raised expectations and made both him and his kingdom into significant factors in the plans and calculations of both Protestants and Catholics. To some extent, as Lockhart makes clear, most of Frederik's European policies were predicated on the threat of a Catholic grand design that in reality never existed. Yet he was by no means alone in that belief and his commitment to the idea of a passive, defensive Protestant alliance as the best way of countering the threat was not unrealistic.

Lockhart's rich study illuminates new dimensions of the tortuous complexity of European politics in the late sixteenth century. He gives a vivid sense of the inextricable link between religious and political motivations as actors sought to navigate a successful course through a scene wrought with tension and beset by myriad febrile rumours. His book restores a major political figure of the time to his rightful place at the center of events. If Frederik II failed to achieve his wider ambition as a Protestant leader he certainly pursued the strategic interests of the Danish monarchy successfully while enhancing its reputation as a regional great power.

The catastrophic consequences of Christian IV's policies demonstrated how unfounded the hopes placed in Danish intervention were. For all the prestige built up by the monarchy under Frederik, Christian clearly over-reached himself in trying to lead an international coalition during the Thirty Years War. In doing so he both damaged the regional interests he was trying to promote and undermined the stable relationship between crown and nobility that had been the hallmark of Frederik II's reign. Many were frustrated in their hopes of what Frederik might be able to achieve for the Protestant cause. Yet Frederik in some sense knew his limitations as the ruler of a regional power. The disastrous failure of Christian IV's attempt to behave as if he were the ruler of a great power merely underlines the achievement of his more modest predecessor.

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Citation: Joachim Whaley. Review of Lockhart, Paul Douglas, Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark's Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2005. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10708

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