Chapter IX: Preface: To My Children (4)

Some time after the departure of the Electoral Prince it was determined that a wooden effigy should be subjected to capital punishment, and on the forenoon my chamber was opened, swept, cleaned, and strewed with sand.[75] When it was opened, towards noon, and the woman had been on the stairs, talking with the coachman, she came in, and walking up to my bed, stood as if startled, and said hurriedly, 'Oh, Jesus! Lady, they are bringing your husband!' The news terrified me, which she observed; for as she uttered it, I raised myself in the bed and stretched out my right arm, and was not able to draw it back again at once. Perhaps this vexed her, for I remained sitting in this way and not speaking a word; so she said, 'My dearest lady, it is your husband's effigy.' To this I said, 'May God punish you!' She then gave full vent to her evil tongue, and expressed her opinion that I deserved punishment, and not she, and used many unprofitable words. I was quite silent, for I was very weak, and scarcely knew where I was. In the afternoon I heard a great murmuring of people in the inner palace square, and I saw the effigy brought across the street by the executioner on a wheelbarrow, and placed in the tower below my prison.

[75] The Queen wished that this wooden statue should be brought into my outer chamber, and so placed in front of the door that it would tumble into me when my inner door was opened; but the King would not permit it. [Addition in the margin.]

The next morning, at about nine o'clock, the effigy was wofully treated by the executioner, but no sound came from it. At the mid-day meal the prison governor told the woman how the executioner had cut off its head, and had divided the body into four quarters, which were then placed on four wheels, and attached to the gallows, while the head was exhibited on the town hall. The prison governor stood in the outer chamber, but he narrated all this in a loud tone, so that I might hear it, and repeated it three times.[E28] I lay and thought what I should do; I could not show that I made but little of it, for then something else perhaps would be devised to trouble me, and in the hurry I could think of nothing else than saying to the woman with sadness, 'Oh, what a shame! speak to the prison governor and tell him to beg the King to allow the effigy to be taken down and not to remain as it is!' The woman went out, and spoke softly with the prison governor; but he answered aloud and said, 'Yes, indeed, taken down! There will be more put up; yes, more up;' and kept on repeating these words a good while.

[E28] The execution took place on November 13. The King's order concerning it to the prison governor, Jochum Waltpurger, exists still. It is to this effect: 'V. G. T., Know that you have to command the executioner in our name, that to-day, November 13, he is to take the effigy of Corfitz, formerly called Count of Ulfeldt, from the Blue Tower where it is now, and bring it on a car to the ordinary place in the square in front of the castle; and when he has come to the place of justice, strike off the right hand and the head, whereafter he is to divide the body into four parts on the spot, and carry them away with him, whilst the head is to be placed on a spike on the Blue Tower for remembrance and execration.' The order was afterwards altered in this particular, that the head was to be placed on the town hall, and the four parts of the body one at each of the gates of the city. The executioner was subsequently ordered to efface the arms of Corfitz and his wife wherever they occurred in the town; for instance, on their pews in the churches. Leonora states in her Autobiography that the prison governor some time after told her that the Queen had desired that the effigy should be placed in the antechamber of Leonora's prison, and that she should be ordered to see it there; but that the king refused his consent.

I lay silently thinking; I said nothing, but indulged in my own reflections. Sometimes I consoled myself, and hoped that this treatment of the effigy was a token that they could not get the man; then again fear asserted its sway. I did not care for the dishonour, for there are too many instances of great men in France whose effigies have been burnt by the executioner, and who subsequently arrived again at great honour.

When the door was unlocked again for the evening meal, there was a whispering between the prison governor and the woman. A lacquey was also sent, who stood outside the outer door and called the prison governor to him (my bed stands just opposite the doors, and thus when all three doors are opened I can see the staircase door, which is the fourth). I do not know what the woman can have told the prison governor, for I had not spoken all day, except to ask her to give me what I required; I said, moreover, nothing more than this for several days, so that the prison governor grew weary of enquiring longer of the woman; for she had nothing to communicate to him respecting me, and she tormented him always with her desire to get away; she could not longer spend her life in this way.

But as she received no other consolation from him than that he swore to her that she would never get away as long as she lived, for some days she did nothing else than weep; and since I would not ask her why she wept, she came one day up to my bedside crying, and said, 'I am a miserable being!' I asked her why? what ailed her? 'I ail enough,' she answered; 'I have been so stupid, and have allowed myself to be shut up here for the sake of money, and now you are cross with me and will not speak with me.' I said, 'What am I to say? you wish perhaps to have something to communicate to the prison governor?' Upon this she began to call down curses on herself if she had ever repeated to the prison governor a word that I had said or done; she wished I could believe her and speak with her; why should she be untrue to me? we must at any rate remain together as long as we lived. She added many implorations as to my not being angry; I had indeed cause to be so; she would in future give me no cause for anger, for she would be true to me. I thought, 'You shall know no more than is necessary.'

I let her go on talking and relating the whole history of her life--such events as occur among peasants. She had twice married cottagers, and after her last widowhood she had been employed as nurse to the wife of Holger Wind, so that she had no lack of stories. By her first husband she had had a child, who had never reached maturity, and her own words led me to have a suspicion that she had herself helped to shorten the child's days; for once when she was speaking of widows marrying again, she said among other things, 'Those who wish to marry a second time ought not to have children, for in that case the husband is never one with the wife.' I had much to say against this, and I asked her what a woman was to do who had a child by her first husband. She answered quickly, 'Put a pillow on its head.' This I could only regard as a great sin, and I explained it to her. 'What sin could there be,' she said, 'when the child was always sickly, and the husband angry in consequence?' I answered as I ought, and she seemed ill at ease. Such conversation as this gave me no good reason to believe in the fidelity which she had promised me.

The woman then took a different tack, and brought me word from the coachman of all that was occurring. Maren Blocks sent me a prayer-book through her, and that secretly, for I was allowed no book of any kind, nor any needles and pins; respecting these the woman had by the Queen's order taken an oath to the prison governor. Thus the year passed away. On New Year's day, 1664, the woman wished me a happy year. I thanked her, and said, 'That is in God's hands.' 'Yes,' she said, 'if He wills it.' 'And if He does not will it,' I answered, 'it will not be, and then He will give me patience to bear my heavy cross.' 'It is heavy,' she said, 'even to me; what must it not be to you? May it only remain as it is, and not be worse with you!' It seemed to me as if it could not be worse, but better; for death, in whatever form, would put an end to my misery. 'Yes,' she said, 'is it not all one how one dies?' 'That is true,' I answered; 'one dies in despair, another with free courage.' The prison governor did not say a word to me that day. The woman had a long talk with the coachman; she no doubt related to him our conversation.

In the month of March the prison governor came in and assumed a particularly gentle manner, and said, among other things, 'Now you are a widow; now you can tell the state of all affairs.' I answered him with a question, 'Can widows tell the state of all affairs?' He laughed and said, 'I do not mean that; I mean this treason!' I answered, 'You can ask others about it who know of it; I know of no treason.' And as it seemed to him that I did not believe that my husband was dead,[E29] he took out a newspaper and let me read it, perhaps chiefly because my husband was badly treated in it. I did not say much about it--nothing more than, 'Writers of newspapers do not always speak the truth.' This he might take as he liked.

[E29] The date of Ulfeldt's death is variously given as the 20th or the 27th of February, 1664. The latter date is given in a letter from his son Christian to Sperling, and elsewhere, (for instance, in a short Latin Biography of Ulfeldt called 'Machinationes Cornificii Ulefeldii,' published soon after); but the better evidence points to the earlier date. Christian Ulfeldt was not, it seems, at Basle at the time, and may have made a mistake as to the date, though he indicates the right day of the week (a Saturday), or he may have had reason for purposely making a misleading statement. In Copenhagen the report of his death was long suspected to be a mere trick.

I lay there silently hoping that it might be so, that my husband had by death escaped his enemies; and I thought with the greatest astonishment that I should have lived to see the day when I should wish my lord dead; then sorrowful thoughts took possession of me, and I did not care to talk. The woman imagined that I was sad because my lord was dead, and she comforted me, and that in a reasonable manner; but the remembrance of past times was only strengthened by her consolatory remarks, and for a long time my mind could not again regain repose. Your condition, my dearest children, troubled me. You had lost your father, and with him property and counsel. I am captive and miserable, and cannot help you, either with counsel or deed; you are fugitives and in a foreign land. For my three eldest sons I am less anxious than for my daughters and my youngest son.[E30] I sat up whole nights in my bed, for I could not sleep, and when I have headache I cannot lay my head on the pillow. From my heart I prayed to God for a gracious deliverance. It has not pleased God to grant this, but He gave me patience to bear my heavy cross.

[E30] Ulfeldt and Leonora had twelve children in all, of which seven were alive when Corfitz died; and it so happened as, explained before, that the youngest, Leo, was the only one who continued the name. It is from him that Count Waldstein, the owner of the MS., is descended.

My cross was so much heavier to me at first, as it was strictly forbidden to give me either knife, scissors, thread, or anything that might have beguiled the time to me. Afterwards, when my mind became a little calmer, I began to think of something wherewith to occupy myself; and as I had a needle, as I have before mentioned, I took off the ribands of my night-dress, which were broad flesh-coloured taffeta. With the silk I embroidered the piece of cloth that I had with different flowers worked in small stitches. When this was finished, I drew threads out of my sheet, twisted them, and sewed with them. When this was nearly done, the woman said one day, 'What will you do now when this is finished?' I answered, 'Oh, I shall get something to do; if it is brought to me by the ravens, I shall have it.' Then she asked me if I could do anything with a broken wooden spoon. I answered, 'Perhaps you know of one?' After having laughed a while, she drew one forth, the bowl of which was half broken off. 'I could indeed make something with that,' I said, 'if I had only a tool for the purpose. Could you persuade the prison governor or Peder the coachman to lend me a knife?' 'I will beg for one,' she answered, 'but I know well that they will not.' That she said something about it to the prison governor I could perceive from his answer, for he replied aloud, 'She wants no knife; I will cut her food for her. She might easily injure herself with one.'[76]

[76] In the margin is this note: 'Once when I asked the prison governor for some scissors to cut my nails, he answered, and that loudly, "What! what! her nails shall grow like eagles' claws, and her hair like eagles' feathers!" I know well what I thought--if I had only claws and wings!'

What she said to the coachman I know not (this I know, that she did not desire me to obtain a knife, for she was afraid of me, as I afterwards discovered). The woman brought the answer from the coachman that he dared not for his life. I said, 'If I can but have a piece of glass, I will see what I can make that is useful with the piece of spoon.' I begged her to look in a corner in the outermost room, where all rubbish was thrown; this she did, and found not only glass, but even a piece of a pewter cover which had belonged to a jug. By means of the glass I formed the spoon handle into a pin with two prongs, on which I made riband, which I still have in use (the silk for this riband I took from the border of my night-dress). I bent the piece of pewter in such a manner that it afterwards served me as an inkstand. It also is still in my keeping. As a mark of fidelity, the woman brought me at the same time a large pin, which was a good tool for beginning the division between the prongs, which I afterwards scraped with glass.

She asked me whether I could think of anything to play with, as the time was so long to her. I said, 'Coax Peder, and he will bring you a little flax for money and a distaff.' 'What!' she answered, 'shall I spin? The devil may spin! For whom should I spin?' I said, 'To beguile the time, I would spin, if I only had what is necessary for it.' 'That you may not have, dear lady,' said she; 'I have done the very utmost for you in giving you what I have done.' 'If you wish something to play with,' said I, 'get some nuts, and we will play with them.' She did so, and we played with them like little children. I took three of the nuts, and made them into dice, placing two kinds of numbers on each, and we played with these also. And that we might know the {circled dot} which I made with the large pin,[77] I begged her to procure for me a piece of chalk, which she did, and I rubbed chalk into it. These dice were lost, I know not how; my opinion is that the coachman got possession of them, perhaps at the time that he cheated the woman out of the candles and sugar left. For he came to her one day at noon quite out of breath, and said she was to give him the candles and the sugar which he had brought her from Maren Blocks, and whatever there was that was not to be seen, as our quarters were to be searched. She ran out with the things under her apron, and never said anything to me about it until the door was locked. I concealed on myself, as well as I was able, my pin, my silk, and the pieces of sewing with the needle and pin. Nothing came of the search, and it was only a _ruse_ of the coachman, in order to get the candles that were left, for which she often afterwards abused him, and also for the sugar.

[77] I removed my nails with the needle, scratching them till they came away. I let the nail of the little finger of my right hand grow, in order to see how long it would become; but I knocked it off unawares, and I still have it. [Marginal note.]

I was always at work, so long as I had silk from my night-dress and stockings, and I netted on the large pin, so that it might last a long time. I have still some of the work in my possession, as well as the bobbins, which I made out of wooden pegs. By means of bags filled with sand I made cords which I formed into a bandage (which is worn out), for I was not allowed a corset, often as I begged for one; the reason why is unknown to me. I often beguiled the time with the piece of chalk, painting with it on a piece of board and on the table, wiping it away again, and making rhymes and composing hymns. The first of these, however, I composed before I had the chalk. I never sang it, but repeated it to myself.

A morning hymn, to the tune, 'Ieg wil din Priiss ud Synge'[E31]:--

[E31] This hymn-tune is still in use in the Danish Church.

I

God's praise I will be singing
In every waking hour.
My grateful tribute bringing
To magnify his power;
And his almighty love,
His angel watchers sending,
My couch with mercy tending,
And watching from above.

II

In salt drops streaming ever
The tears flowed from my eyes;
I often thought I never
Should see the morning rise.
Yet has the Lord instilled
Sleep in his own good pleasure;
And sleep in gracious measure
Has his command fulfilled.

III

Oh Christ! Lord of the living,
Thine armour place on me,
Which manly vigour giving,
Right valiant shall I be,
'Gainst Satan, death, and sin.
And every carnal feeling,
That nought may come concealing
Thy sway my heart within.

IV

Help me! Thy arms extending;
My cross is hard and sore:
Support its heaviest ending,
Or I can bear no more.
Too much am I oppressed!
My trust is almost waning
With pain and vain complaining!
Thine arrows pierce my breast.

V

In mercy soothe the sorrow
That weighs the fatherless;
Vouchsafe a happier morrow,
And all my children bless!
Strength to their father yield,
In their hard fate respect them,
From enemies protect them;
My strength, be Thou their shield.

VI

I am but dust and ashes,
Yet one request I crave:
Let me not go at unawares
Into the silent grave.
With a clear mind and breast
My course in this world closing,
Let me, on Thee reposing,
Pass to Thy land of rest.

I composed the following hymn in German and often sang it, as they did not understand German; a hymn, somewhat to the air of 'Was ist doch auff dieser Welt, das nicht fehlt?' &c.:--

I

Reason speaketh to my soul:
Fret not Soul,
Thou hast a better goal!
It is not for thee restricted
That with thee
Past should be
All the wrongs inflicted.

II

Why then shouldst thou thus fret thee,
Anxiously,
Ever sighing, mournfully?
Thou canst not another sorrow
Change with this,
For that is
Which shall be on the morrow.

III

Loss of every earthly gain
Bringeth pain;
Fresh courage seek to obtain!
Much was still superfluous ceded,
Nature's call
After all
Makes but little needed.

IV

Is the body captive here?
Do not fear:
Thou must not hold all too dear;
Thou art free--a captive solely;
Can no tower
Have the power
Thee to fetter wholly?

V

All the same is it at last
When thou hast
The long path of striving past,
And thou must thy life surrender;
Death comes round,
Whether found
On couch hard or tender.