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50
SØNDERBORG.
Chap. IV.
1522 he issued a code of laws * by which he rendered
the peasants their own masters—until that time bought
and sold and treated like brute animals—by which
measure he irritated the great lords. He retrenched
the powers and riches of the clergy, and encouraged
the doctrines of Luther, which excited the fury of the
Church of Rome. He desired to advance the commerce
of the burghers, and granted the Dutch prerogatives for
trading in the kingdom, which caused the anger of the
Lubeckers. So Christian found favour with no party.
How he ruled over Sweden is a different matter;
but Christian IL may be accounted, with all his vices,
as one of the most enlightened of the Danish sovereigns.
Pitching the blood-bath of Stockholm against the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, the faggots of Smithfield, and
the doings of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, if
we take his contemporary sovereigns in that century
of blood and violence, when passions ran high, and the
new-born faith of Luther first dawned in the land, I
do not think he was at any rate worse, if so bad as his
neighbours. When Christian delivered himself up, or
was rather betrayed, into the hands of his uncle, from
whom he had received a safe-conduct, he certainly
expected a better treatment, and had little suspicion of
the dreadful fate which awaited him. He writes to
Duke Frederic thus:—
* When Frederic I. ascended the throne this code of laws was burned
as a dangerous book, contrary to good morals. The peasants again
became bondsmen, and remained so until the end of the last century ;
and the lords regained their former rights, for which freedom, says
Hvitfeldt, himself a noble, “ the memory of the King ought to be sacred
to us and our posterity.’’
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