On the 19th of May 1685, a royal order arrived at the Blue Tower in Copenhagen. After 8,000 days locked inside its stone walls, Leonora Christina, daughter of a king, was free. She did not walk out at once. The news spread, a crowd gathered in the courtyard below, and the new queen and her ladies stood on the palace balcony, waiting to catch a glimpse of the mysterious prisoner who had vanished from the world almost a quarter of a century earlier.

Leonora made them wait. She refused to leave until nightfall. At around ten o’clock, after nearly twenty-two years, she stepped out into the dark, a veil covering her face. She was sixty-three years old, and the world she had known when the door first closed behind her was gone.

To understand how a king’s favorite daughter ended up there, the story has to begin much earlier, with three numbers that only make sense at the end. The first is seventy-two. The second is ten. The third is nineteen.

One of them explains an escape that stunned a hardened soldier, another counts the children she carried through a lifetime of flight, and the last is the date she finally walked free. One of them, as it turned out, would remain a mystery for nearly two hundred years. Leonora Christina was born on the 8th of July 1621 at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark. Her father, King Christian IV, had sat on the throne since 1588, so on the day she was born, he had already ruled for thirty-three years.

He was a king who had seen everything and believed he could control everything. Her mother was Kirsten Munk, a wealthy Danish noblewoman whom Christian had married in 1615. But there was a problem in that marriage, a small detail that would matter enormously later. Kirsten was not royal.

She came from no ruling family and no titled family. That made the marriage what people at the time called morganatic. The king could marry her, but she could never be a true queen, and her children could never be true princes and princesses. Kirsten’s own mother, a tough woman named Ellen Marsvin, had gotten the king to promise to marry her daughter before the relationship even began.

Christian and Kirsten went on to have fifteen children, though not all were counted the same way. Some historians believe at least three were born before the wedding, which would make them illegitimate, and only eight of the fifteen lived into adulthood. Leonora was the fifth child born after the marriage, a legitimate daughter of the king. In practice she was a princess.

On paper, she was not. Because her mother was not royal, Leonora was not allowed the royal title. At court, she was called a countess, and that mattered. Her father’s older children from his first marriage, the offspring of Anne Catherine of Brandenburg, had the proper titles, and they never let anyone forget it.

But Christian did not care. That was what made Leonora special. He doted on her, treated her as the equal of any of his other children, and showed his pride in her in front of everyone. Most of what is known about her childhood comes from Leonora herself, who wrote about it decades later from inside a prison tower.

Memories change and stories grow, so the details must be read with care. Even so, her childhood reads like something out of a novel. She grew up in the royal palace in Copenhagen, playing with her three older half-brothers, the sons of the king’s first wife. One of them, a boy named Frederick, would one day become King Frederick III, and that same boy who shared her games would be the man who kept her in prison.

At some point she was sent to live with relatives in the Netherlands, and the trip nearly ended her life before she arrived. The ship carrying her was caught in a violent storm and almost sank. She survived the sea, but the real danger waited on land. In the Netherlands, she caught smallpox.

In the seventeenth century, this was the deadliest disease in Europe, and millions died from it. Leonora survived. But what happened next was far worse than the illness. A boy she loved came to visit her while she was sick.

He sat near her, wanting to comfort her, and he caught the disease. He died from it. Decades later, when she wrote about this moment, the pain is still there in her words. She never forgot it.

It left a scar on her mind that never fully healed. By the time she was a young girl, Leonora had survived a storm at sea, a deadly disease, and the death of someone who died because he loved her, and her life had barely started. Then came 1630. Leonora was nine years old, and her family fell apart.

Her father accused her mother, Kirsten Munk, of being unfaithful and divorced her. It was a huge scandal, and all of Denmark was talking about it. One might think this would destroy the children of the disgraced woman, but it did not. Leonora’s place at court stayed safe.

Her father still loved her, and that was enough. But around the same time, when she was only nine years old, a man was chosen to be her husband. His name was Corfitz Ulfeldt. He was a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber, a trusted man close to the king, and he was twenty-four years old.

She was far too young to marry, so the wedding did not happen right away. There were other suitors, talk, delays. It was not until October 1636, when Leonora was fifteen, that the marriage was formally made. The wedding was held in Copenhagen and it was grand, more lavish than the weddings of any of her sisters.

Everyone could see how much the king loved her. But the marriage began with a warning sign nobody saw. Soon after the wedding, Leonora discovered something terrible about her new husband. Corfitz Ulfeldt was drowning in debt.

Enormous debt, not small loans but huge ones. The fifteen-year-old bride sold her own golden jewels to help pay them off. She was a girl barely out of childhood, already rescuing her husband from his own mistakes. At that moment she could not have known it, but this was only the beginning.

Her husband would pull her into disaster again and again, and she would never fully escape it. There was, strangely, a wolf in the family story. The Ulfeldt name comes from an old word meaning wolf. In 1647, a painter made a portrait of Leonora.

In the picture she stands with a small lap dog at her side, a symbol of her loyalty as a wife, and right next to it stood a wolf, representing her husband and his family. Some say the painting was meant to show that the Ulfeldts still stood below the royal family, powerful but knowing their place. As Leonora would soon learn, this wolf was not tame at all, and a wolf does not stay loyal to anyone for long. At first, though, the marriage looked like a great success.

It made Ulfeldt and lifted his whole family. He was clever, cultured, spoke several languages, and above all he was ambitious. Being the son-in-law of the king opened every door, and it happened at the perfect time. Europe was burning.

The Thirty Years’ War was tearing through central Europe, and both Denmark and Sweden had been pulled into the fighting. A kingdom at war needs strong men at the top, and Ulfeldt moved up fast. He became governor of Copenhagen. Then he became head of the Danish exchequer, which meant he controlled the money of the kingdom.

In 1643 he reached the top, named Lord High Steward, the highest political office in all of Denmark. Only the king stood above him. Denmark had no queen at that time, so in many ways Leonora, the king’s own daughter, became the first lady of the court. She was admired and respected, and her marriage, at least in those years, seems to have been a happy one, much happier than the marriages of her sisters.

But behind the glitter, something rotten was growing. Ulfeldt was using his power to make himself very rich. He debased the Danish currency, lowering the quality of the coins. He bought huge estates.

He used his offices to squeeze payments out of officials and nobles. Anyone who wanted something from the government had to pay him first. And it got worse. Money meant for the Danish army and navy was being sent straight into his own pockets.

Soldiers and ships needed that money, and the man in charge of it was stealing it. In December 1643, Sweden attacked Denmark, and the Danish forces were not ready. They were badly prepared, short of supplies, short of everything. The war that followed, called the Torstenson War, ended in 1645 with a disaster for Denmark.

The kingdom had to give up several territories, including Gotland, and Sweden rose as the main power in the Baltic Sea. One might think a man who helped cause such a defeat would fall right away. But Ulfeldt did not. He kept his job, his power, and his wealth, for now.

It took three years for his protection to disappear. In February 1648, the one man who kept the wolf safe died. King Christian IV passed away, and the whole world of Leonora and her husband started to crumble. With her father gone, Ulfeldt lost his greatest protector.

But Leonora lost something too. She lost her place. While her father lived, she was the favorite. After he died, she was just the daughter of a lower-ranked mother, and the court remembered that very quickly.

The new king was her half-brother, Frederick III, the boy who had played with her in the palace. He had grown up, and he did not like Ulfeldt at all. He had no wish to help his half-sister or her husband. The childhood friendship was over.

But the king was not the real danger. The real danger was the woman standing next to him, his wife, the new queen, Sophie Amalie. Sophie Amalie came to hate Leonora, and historians cannot fully explain why. Some think it was because Leonora refused to give up her position at court.

She had been the first lady for years and did not want to step aside for the new queen. Others say it came from acts of cruelty that Leonora allegedly directed at the queen. There is no proof either way. But whatever the reason, this one woman’s hatred would follow Leonora for decades, thirty-seven years if counted from 1648 until the queen’s death, and that hatred would decide the end of the story.

Right away, things started to fall apart. Ulfeldt came under investigation for everything he had done while he ran the government. The crown began taking away his estates, lands, money, and assets, all of it started to slip away. Then something bizarre happened.

A woman named Dina Vinhøv walked up to the queen and made a shocking claim. She said Leonora and her husband were plotting to poison the king, poison the king, their own family. An investigation began at once, and it did not take long to find a huge problem. The woman’s story was full of mistakes.

Her testimony did not match, details changed, facts did not line up. In the end, Leonora and Ulfeldt were not found guilty of anything. One might think that should have been the end of it. They were cleared.

But that is not how a court works. Once the word poison is whispered about you, it never fully goes away. The scandal damaged their name when they needed it most. And that was when they made the worst decision of their lives.

In July 1651, Leonora and her husband ran. They fled Copenhagen without the king’s permission. They did not ask. They did not wait.

They simply left in the night. It was the kind of decision that feels like freedom in the moment, but it was really a trap, because once you run from a king without permission, everything you do afterward looks like guilt. For twelve weeks, Leonora, a royal daughter, wore breeches, men’s trousers. She slept in rough beds and in barns wherever she could find shelter.

She and her husband moved in secret across the land, heading for northern Germany. She later wrote about the trip, and it is full of adventure. In one story, at a military post near the city of Stade, she says she got money for the two of them by playing cards with drunken soldiers. Is it true?

Maybe, maybe not. Historians think she may have added some color to her tales. She was a gifted storyteller after all. But even if half of it is true, it shows how far she had fallen and how strong she was.

Eventually the couple settled in Swedish Pomerania, in what is now northern Germany and northwestern Poland. And there something important happened. Leonora began to write for the first time. That habit would one day be the only thing that saved her name.

For a few years they lived in exile, but Ulfeldt never stopped dreaming of coming home. He still believed he could fix everything. In 1656 he thought the time had come. He believed the anger over his role in the government during the 1640s had cooled down.

So he made a plan. He would send Leonora back to Copenhagen first. She would speak to her half-brother, King Frederick, and ask permission for the family to return home. She was the perfect messenger, a king’s daughter, clever, with a way with words.

But she never even reached the king. At a place called Korsør, she was stopped by another of her half-brothers, Ulrik Christian Gyldenløve. He gave her a cold order. Leave Danish land right now.

It was a betrayal, and it pushed her husband over the edge. Ulfeldt now felt he had nothing left to lose. In 1657, war broke out again between Sweden and Denmark. And this time Ulfeldt did the unthinkable.

He openly joined the Swedes. A Danish Lord High Steward, the former second man in the kingdom, was now working for the enemy. He even helped negotiate the terms of peace in 1658, and those terms were brutal. Denmark was forced to give up even more land.

To many Danes, this was the moment he became a traitor. Leonora was married to him, tied to him by her vows, and she would not let go. But the Swedes did not trust him for long either. Within a year, his Swedish friends turned on him.

In 1659 he was arrested at Malmö. Then his body gave out. He suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak. So who spoke for him?

Leonora did. For months she became his voice, his lawyer, his defender. The woman who once sold her jewels to pay his debts was now fighting for his life in a foreign court. Eventually, in the middle of a trial, they decided to escape from Sweden.

The count was well enough to travel by then. He took a ship to the city of Lübeck in northern Germany. Leonora once again tried to head for Copenhagen. Neither journey went as planned.

Both of them were caught and sent to the same terrible place, a fortress called Hammershus on the island of Bornholm, standing on tall cliffs above the Baltic Sea. The governor, Major General Fuchs, did not treat them like nobles. He robbed them. He starved them.

He took what little they had left and made them suffer. For more than a year, this was their life, locked in a cold stone fortress, cut off from the world. And then came the escape. This is where the first of the numbers comes in.

Seventy-two. Seventy-two feet. In April 1661, Leonora and her husband finally broke free. According to the story, Leonora slid down a rope seventy-two feet long, higher than a six-story building.

A woman who had grown up in palaces, nearly forty years old, was hanging from a rope on the side of a cliff fortress. One of their servants did not make it so smoothly and had to be rescued from a ravine. But the main escape worked. When Fuchs later told the story, he was so shocked that he said something remarkable.

He claimed that nobody could have done what she did. He even said Leonora might be a witch. A witch. That was how a hard soldier explained a woman who simply refused to give up.

After all of this, an arrangement was made. The couple was allowed to live quietly on an estate called Ellensborg. For a short time it looked like peace. They had a home, no guards at the door, and it looked like the storm was over.

But it was only a pause. A little over a year later, everything changed again. In 1662, Ulfeldt asked for permission to travel abroad. His reason was his health.

He said the warmer air of southern Europe would help him, and the authorities said yes. But it was a lie. In truth, he was using the trip to build allies against the Danish crown, looking for powerful friends who would help him seize power again one day. The wolf had not changed.

He had only learned to hide his teeth. Someone noticed. The Elector of Brandenburg, a relative of King Frederick, wrote to Copenhagen and told them everything about what the count was doing. The king had heard enough.

Ulfeldt was put on trial in his absence, and at the end something truly strange happened. The court held a ceremony, and a model of Ulfeldt, an effigy, was symbolically beheaded. It was a public way of saying he was already dead to the kingdom. He did die in the end.

Early in 1664, near the city of Basel in the Swiss Confederacy, while running from bounty hunters, a man who once controlled a whole kingdom died on the run with a price on his head. By then, Leonora’s fate was already sealed. And here is the cruel part. She did not know it.

Long ago, when the Ulfeldts were at the height of their power in the 1640s, they had loaned out large sums of money to foreign kings and nobles. One of the families who borrowed from them was the House of Stuart, living in exile during the English civil wars. Years later the Stuarts had returned to power. Charles II had been restored as king of England in 1660.

Leonora thought, here is a king who owes my family a debt. He will pay. He must. So she went to England to ask for the money.

But there was a problem. While she was there, the Danish government sent a request to the English authorities, asking England to arrest her because of what her husband had done on the continent. England said yes. A woman was standing in his kingdom demanding that he repay a huge debt, and Denmark was offering to take her away.

It was very convenient. In a way, the debt left the country with her. In 1663, Leonora was arrested, taken to the port of Dover, and sent back to Denmark. She had left as a woman seeking justice.

She returned as a prisoner. On the 8th of August 1663, Leonora was locked inside the Blue Tower, a square tower with a blue spire standing in the courtyard of Copenhagen Castle. It was only a stone’s throw from the place where she had grown up as a happy child. She was never formally charged with a crime.

Not even once. Six months later, her husband died, and the Danish crown no longer had any reason to go after the family. The case was over. And yet the door stayed locked.

Why? Because her sister-in-law, Queen Sophie Amalie, still hated her. And her half-brother, the king, had little reason to trust her after twenty years of scandal. So the princess stayed in her cell.

Her first cell, she later said, was a room without windows. She called it the dark church. She described it as filthy, full of fleas, and so full of rats that they gnawed at her candle while it burned. She had almost nothing to write with, so she made ink from the soot of her candle and wrote on the paper wrappers from the sugar she was given.

How much of this is exactly true, nobody can say. But one thing is certain. The prison was harsh. And yet, step by step, she adapted.

She won more access to books. She won the right to write. And from that dark room came her greatest work. She called it Jammers Minde, which means roughly a memory of lament.

What surprises many readers is that the book is not full of self-pity. Leonora was a wonderful storyteller. She told funny stories about her life in prison. She laughed at her own bad choices.

She wrote with shocking honesty, even describing in detail the time she passed a gallstone in 1682. Her faith ran through the whole book. She saw herself like Job, the man in the Bible who lost everything and still kept his faith. She believed her troubles came mostly from the actions of others.

And she said her greatest sin was being a faithful Christian wife who refused to leave her husband even when he was wrong. Then came the year 1670 and a glimmer of hope. King Frederick died, and his son Christian V took the throne. Her treatment got better.

The new king even sent his ministers to ask the dowager queen, Sophie Amalie, whether Leonora could be freed. If we believe Leonora, the old queen said no. Fifteen more long years passed. And now at last comes the third number.

Nineteen. The 19th of May. Sophie Amalie died in February of 1685. And on the morning of the 19th of May, a royal order arrived.

Leonora was free. She was given the old convent at Maribo on the island of Lolland, along with a pension. She spent her last thirteen years there, writing and embroidering, shaping the story of her own life. She died on the 16th of March 1698, at seventy-six years old.

Then came the mystery. In the nineteenth century, when people opened her family’s vault, they found something shocking. Her coffin was missing. It was not there.

So where had it gone? It turned out her son Leo had taken it to Vienna after she died. And the second number, ten, explains another part of the legacy. Leonora and Ulfeldt had ten children through all their wild journeys.

Seven of them lived to adulthood. It was one of her daughters who made sure the manuscript of Jammers Minde was sent to Vienna. There it sat in an archive for two hundred years. Then a descendant, Count Johan Waldstein, arranged for it to be printed in Copenhagen in 1869.

By then the old scandals no longer burned, and Leonora became a national heroine almost overnight. Not everyone agreed. Some still called her a traitor who had worked with the Swedes at a critical time for Denmark. But whichever side one takes, one thing is clear.

She was a remarkable woman. A life full of a few highs and so many lows.