1663: Corfitz Ulfeldt, in effigy

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On this date in 1663, Danish noble Corfitz Ulfeldt — then a fugitive abroad — was executed in effigy.

Ulfeldt (English Wikipedia page | Danish) is notorious as his country’s greatest traitor.

To commit great betrayals, one needs to begin with great trust. Ulfeldt was the son of a chancellor and was married off to Leonora Christina, the daughter of King Christian IV.

When Christian died, Ulfeldt was the de facto ruler of the realm or a few months in 1648 while the elective monarchy sorted out where to pass the crown next.

The choice ultimately fell to the late king’s son Frederick III, but this saturnine prince was distrusted by the Danish nobility, who forced on him as the price for his power a Haandfaestning — a sort of temporary Magna Carta circumscribing a monarch’s power for the period of his individual reign. It set a less than comradely tone for the two men’s relationship.

In 1651, an accusation surfaced that Ulfeldt was in on a plot to poison the king — an accusation that cost Ulfeldt’s lover her own head. Deciding that he didn’t need to be around when the next specious regicide allegation made the rounds, Ulfeldt pre-emptively fled the country.

From there, Ulfeldt’s lust for power and personal enmity for Frederick would light his path to infamy.

He signed up with Sweden’s King Charles X — Denmark’s greatest foreign rival — and mounted an invasion of his native country, possibly even financed by stolen Danish treasure. Rewarded with a Swedish noble title, he promptly began double-dealing against them, until his disgusted new sovereign dispossessed him, leading Ulfeldt to return hat in hand to Copenhagen.

Imprisoned there for that whole leading-an-enemy-invasion incident, Ulfeldt again managed to wriggle out and immediately tried to raise a German army against Denmark. Really — enough, dude.

Frederick certainly thought he’d seen enough too. Not having the compulsive traitor available to execute bodily, he resorted to the weird ritual of punishing a mannequin, and ordered the prison governor:

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.

A few months after, the hunted Ulfeldt was reported to have died in Switzerland, a report considered highly suspicious in his native land. Nevertheless, he was never captured or heard from again, so whenever or however he died, it seems he managed to cheat the executioner of his flesh. As to the judgment of posterity: that, he had long since squandered.

The royal and loyal widow Leonora Christina enjoys a reputation quite a bit more favorable than her husband. She swallowed every draught of his exile, and more — remaining imprisoned under harsh conditions long after Corfitz’s death, only released in 1685 with the passing of King Frederick’s wife, her vengeful personal enemy. In that time, and in between fending off in her dungeon the local vermin, lecherous jailers, and the poison of personal bitterness, she wrote voluminous and well-regarded memoirs.

On this day..

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