The order came down to the English port authorities in 1663, and Leonora Christina, a king’s daughter by birth, was arrested at Dover and shipped back to the Kingdom of Denmark. She had committed no crime. No charge was ever laid against her. Yet she was taken into custody, transported against her will to her own country, and condemned to spend the rest of her life in prison.

For the next twenty-two years she was locked inside a tower in Copenhagen, cut off from the world, stripped of the freedom she had always taken for granted. She was born on July 8, 1621, at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark. Her father was King Christian IV, who had come to the throne as a child and ruled since 1588. Her mother was Kirsten Munk, a wealthy Danish noblewoman whom Christian had married in 1615.

Unlike his first wife, Anne Catherine of Brandenburg, Kirsten did not belong to a ruling family and held no royal title, which meant the marriage was a morganatic one. In fact, Kirsten’s formidable mother, Ellen Marsvin, had secured a promise from Christian that he would marry her daughter before she would allow the relationship to begin. Christian and Kirsten had fifteen children together, though at least three of them are believed to have been born before the marriage and therefore illegitimate. Only eight survived to adulthood.

Leonora was the couple’s fifth child after their wedding, making her a legitimate daughter of the king and, in practical terms, a princess. But because of her mother’s modest social standing, she did not receive the same royal titles as Christian’s children by his first wife. She was styled instead as a countess. At court, that distinction meant Leonora and her siblings were regarded as socially inferior to the king’s older children.

Her father, however, paid little attention to such differences. He loved Leonora deeply and treated her as the equal of his other children. Most of what is known about Leonora’s childhood comes from her own later recollections, which may not be entirely accurate. She seems to have spent her early years with her parents in the royal palace in Copenhagen, growing up in close contact with her three half-siblings, including the future King Frederick III, the sons of Christian’s first wife, Anne Catherine of Brandenburg.

But her childhood was not confined to Denmark. At some point she was sent to live with relatives in the Netherlands, and the journey itself was disastrous: the ship carrying her was caught in a violent storm and nearly sank. There she contracted smallpox, the most dangerous disease of the age. She survived, but a boy she loved came to visit her while she was ill and apparently caught the infection from her, dying as a result.

This childhood tragedy left deep psychological scars, which she wrote about decades later. In 1630, Leonora’s family life was thrown into turmoil when Christian accused his wife Kirsten Munk of infidelity and divorced her. Despite the scandal surrounding her mother, Leonora’s position at court fortunately remained secure, and she continued to enjoy her father’s favor. Around the same time, when she was only nine years old, word came that she was to marry Corfitz Ulfeldt, a man from the king’s own household who was twenty-four years old.

Because of her youth, the marriage was not formally concluded until October 1636, when she had reached fifteen. There had been many other suitors before the wedding finally took place. The ceremony in Copenhagen appears to have been more lavish than any of her sisters had received, an extravagant display that reflected the special affection her father held for her. Yet the marriage had an inauspicious beginning in other respects.

Leonora quickly discovered that her new husband was drowning in debt. She was forced to sell some of her gold and jewelry to help settle what he owed. At the time, she could hardly have known that this was only the beginning, and that her husband’s actions would eventually drag her into a catastrophe from which she would never recover. Corfitz Ulfeldt had an unusual connection to the wolf.

His surname, Ulfeldt, essentially meant wolf. In 1647, a portrait was painted of Leonora with a small dog beside her, symbolizing her loyalty as a wife, while a wolf stood nearby, representing her husband and his family. The symbolism may have been intended to suggest that the Ulfeldt family remained inferior to the royal house, but as Leonora would soon discover, the wolf was not tame at all. The marriage in 1636 marked the beginning of Ulfeldt’s rise, and that of his family, at first.

Tragically, in the end, it would cause the downfall of everyone involved, especially Leonora. Her husband was intelligent and cultured, fluent in several languages, and possessed of enormous ambition. His marriage to the king’s daughter helped propel him to the top of the Danish government at a critical moment in European history. Both Denmark and Sweden had become embroiled in the Thirty Years’ War then raging across central Europe.

Eventually, the count became governor of Copenhagen and head of the Danish treasury. Then, in 1643, he reached the peak of his political career when he was appointed Lord High Steward, the highest political office in the Kingdom of Denmark. By this stage, Leonora was in many respects the first lady of a Danish court that lacked a queen. Her marriage to Ulfeldt also seemed happy, at least compared to those of her sisters.

But behind their privileged lives, Ulfeldt was exploiting his powerful positions to enrich himself enormously. He manipulated the Danish currency, acquired vast tracts of land, and used his influence to extort money from officials and nobles. Worse still, his corruption extended to the military, with funds meant for the Danish army and navy diverted into his own coffers. The consequences became clear when Sweden attacked Denmark in December 1643.

The Danish forces were completely unprepared, and when the resulting Torstenson War ended in 1645, Denmark was forced to cede several territories, including Gotland, while Sweden emerged as the dominant power in the Baltic. Yet despite the catastrophe, Ulfeldt retained his position, for the time being. But his spectacular fall was imminent. The war with Sweden had been a disaster for Ulfeldt’s faction at the Danish court.

Moreover, the death of Christian IV in February 1648 deprived Leonora’s husband of his most important patron, while also diminishing her own standing in the royal establishment, given the lower status of her mother. The new king, Leonora’s half-brother Frederick III, loathed Ulfeldt and had little inclination to show sympathy toward his half-sister and her husband. Worse still, Frederick’s wife, the new queen Sophie Amalie, began to despise Leonora. The exact reason for her hostility is unknown, though it may have stemmed from Leonora’s refusal to give up her place at court or from petty slights that Leonora was said to have directed at the queen.

Whatever the cause, Sophie Amalie’s hatred had consequences that would pursue Leonora for decades to come. The immediate effect was that Ulfeldt became the subject of an investigation into his time at the head of government, and the crown began stripping him of his properties and assets. Then a strange accusation made matters even worse. A woman named Dina Vinhofvers approached the queen and claimed that Leonora and her husband were plotting to poison the king.

An inquiry followed, which quickly revealed numerous inconsistencies in her testimony, and Leonora and Ulfeldt were not convicted of anything. Nevertheless, the scandal further damaged their reputations at a time when they could least afford it. Then, in July 1651, they made a catastrophic decision. They fled Copenhagen without royal permission.

It was a decision they would soon regret. After leaving Copenhagen, Leonora, ultimately a royal princess, spent twelve weeks wearing men’s breeches and sleeping in peasant beds and barns as she made her way secretly with her husband to northern Germany. She may have embellished these later adventures. For example, at a garrison near the city of Stade, she claimed she won them a considerable sum of money by gambling with some drunken soldiers at cards.

Eventually, they settled in Swedish Pomerania, in what is now northern Germany and northwestern Poland, and Leonora began writing for the first time. Finally, in 1656, Count Ulfeldt believed that the tensions surrounding his role in the Danish government during the 1640s had calmed enough for Leonora to return to Copenhagen. He sent her back to negotiate with her half-brother and secure their return home. But she never reached her brother, King Frederick.

At Korsør, she met another of her half-brothers, Ulrik Christian Gyldenløve, who ordered her to leave Danish territory. It was a betrayal that pushed Ulfeldt beyond the point of no return. When war broke out between Sweden and Denmark once again in 1657, he openly sided with the Swedes, helping to negotiate the humiliating terms that forced Denmark to cede even more territory in 1658. It was not a lasting victory for the disgraced couple, however.

The attitude of the count’s Swedish patron toward him changed within a year, and he was arrested in Malmö in 1659. He suffered a stroke that robbed him of the power of speech, and Leonora found herself acting as his chief defender for months afterward. Eventually, during their trial, they decided to flee Sweden. By that time, the count was healthy enough to take a ship to the city of Lübeck in northern Germany, while Leonora headed once more toward Copenhagen.

Neither journey went according to plan. Instead, they were both detained and shipped to Hammershus on Bornholm, a fortress perched on the cliffs overlooking the Baltic Sea, where the governor, a general named Fuchs, systematically robbed and starved them. They were finally able to escape only in April 1661, with Leonora said to have climbed down a rope of seventy-two feet to freedom, while one of their servants had to be rescued from a ravine. People later claimed that this daring escape was so extraordinary that Leonora must have been a witch.

Afterward, an agreement was reached allowing the couple to live quietly on an estate at Ellensborg. But that arrangement did not last long. Soon the couple were on the run again. The Ulfeldts could not live peacefully at Ellensborg for much more than a year before circumstances changed once more.

In 1662, Leonora’s husband traveled abroad, having obtained permission on the pretext that the warmer air of southern Europe would improve his health. But in reality, he began conspiring to win allies against the Danish crown and to try to secure power there again at some future time. When the Elector of Brandenburg, a relative of King Frederick of Denmark, reported the count’s activities to Copenhagen, Frederick decided that enough was enough. Ulfeldt was tried in absentia, and an effigy of him was symbolically executed by beheading.

In any case, he died near Basel in the Swiss Confederation in early 1664, while fleeing from bounty hunters. By the time of her husband’s death, Leonora’s terrible fate had already been sealed. At the height of their power during the 1640s, the Ulfeldts had lent money to many foreign kings and nobles. Among them was the House of Stuart, which had been in exile as part of the English Civil Wars of that period.

Leonora now went to England to seek repayment from King Charles II, who had been restored to the English throne in 1660. Instead, while Leonora was in England, the Danish government asked the English authorities to detain her because of her husband’s actions on the continent. In 1663, she was arrested and deported from Dover back to Denmark. For Charles II, this had the convenient side effect of getting rid of a woman demanding repayment of a large debt his family owed her.

For Leonora, the consequences were devastating. She returned to Denmark not as a princess, but as a prisoner, and she would remain one for much of the rest of her life. At home, Leonora was sent to the Blue Tower, a square tower with a blue top in the courtyard of Copenhagen Castle, where she was first imprisoned on August 8, 1663. Interestingly, she was only a stone’s throw from where she had grown up.

Leonora was never formally accused of any crime. Six months later, her husband’s death removed any need for the Danish crown to pursue further legal proceedings against the family. Yet Leonora remained imprisoned, not because she had been convicted of anything, but because her sister-in-law despised her, and her half-brother, the king, had little reason to trust her after two decades of scandals and intrigues. In the end, Leonora spent an astonishing twenty-two years behind bars.

Her first cell in the Blue Tower was said to be a room without windows, which she later called the “dark church. ” Leonora later described her imprisonment as a miserable, humiliating life. She claimed her cell was dirty, infested with fleas, and overrun with rats, so numerous that they gnawed at her candle while it burned. She also remembered having almost nothing to write with, forcing her to improvise ink from candle soot and to use the sugar wrappers she received as writing material.

It is difficult to determine how accurate her account is, but there can be no doubt that her conditions of confinement were extremely harsh. As time passed, she adapted to her circumstances and gained greater access to books and the ability to write, turning her years of imprisonment into an unexpected beginning for her greatest literary work. And so she began composing “Jammers Minde,” a memoir whose title can be roughly translated as “Memories of Woe. ” To be fair to Leonora, while it is difficult to distinguish truth from fiction in her memoirs, she was a skilled narrator, and her memoir was not based on self-pity.

It contained entertaining anecdotes about her life as a prisoner and the poor decisions she had made in her youth. Elsewhere, the book contained unusually frank passages, such as her detailed description of passing a gallstone in 1682. The work was often imbued with a biblical character, with Leonora casting herself as a kind of modern-day Jacob, who suffered countless misfortunes, often because of the actions of others. Her great sin, as she portrayed it, was that she had been an obedient Christian wife who refused to abandon her husband despite his flaws and failures.

In 1670, Frederick III died and was succeeded by his son, Leonora’s half-nephew, Christian V. Her treatment improved somewhat under the new king, who sent his ministers to ask the dowager queen, Sophie Amalie, to agree to her release. But if Leonora’s account is to be believed, the dowager queen refused their pleas. Leonora’s imprisonment finally ended after Sophie Amalie’s death in February 1685.

On the morning of May 19, Leonora was informed that a royal order for her release had been issued. The news spread quickly, and crowds of the curious gathered in the courtyard below the Blue Tower, while the queen and her ladies-in-waiting watched from a palace balcony, hoping for a glimpse of the mysterious royal prisoner. But Leonora refused to leave until darkness fell. At around ten o’clock, after nearly twenty-two years of captivity, she finally emerged from the Blue Tower under cover of night, wearing a veil that hid her face from the waiting crowds.

At sixty-three years of age, Leonora Christina was finally free. In her final years, she was granted the former convent of Maribo as a residence and assigned a pension. There she spent her last thirteen years writing and embroidering, carefully tending to her own legacy. She died on March 16, 1698, at the age of seventy-six.

Oddly, when her family’s tomb was opened in the nineteenth century, her coffin was missing. Her son Leo had moved it to Vienna after her death. She and her husband had children during their many adventures, ten in all, of whom seven survived to adulthood. One of her daughters made sure to send the manuscript of “Jammers Minde” to Vienna.

It remained there in the archives for two centuries, until one of her descendants, Count Johann Waldstein, arranged for its publication in Copenhagen in 1869. By that time, of course, the scandalous deeds of Count and Countess Ulfeldt were no longer as politically sensitive as they had once been. In the process, Leonora became a national heroine overnight. Yet some of her descendants claimed that she was a traitor who had colluded with the Swedes during a vital period of Danish history.

Regardless of one’s point of view, it remains an extraordinary testament to a remarkable life, filled with some highs and very, very many lows.