Paul Douglas Lockhart. Frederik II and the Protestant Cause.

Denmark’s Role in
the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004. Pp. xxii, 350.
Of all the major powers of the early modern period, Denmark has been least well

served by the English-language literature. Given its strategic importance, controlling

access to the Baltic until the 1650s, and its frequent and close links with Britain, this

omission is striking; thankfully in recent years this situation has started to change,

with the work of Steve Murdoch, Jason Lavery and Professor Lockhart himself, who

has already brought the crucial reign of Christian IV into much clearer focus for those

who do not read Danish or German.

In his latest monograph, Lockhart steps back in time to examine in impressive

detail Danish foreign policy in the reign of Christian’s equally important—if rather

less flashy—father, Frederik II (1559-1588), and, briefly, in the period of regency

(1588-1596) for Christian after Frederik’s death at the relatively early age of 54. The

book fills an immense gap for, apart from the work of E.I. Kouri, there is almost

nothing available in English for the period which has made any use of Scandinavian

sources, despite the fact that, in the age of the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch

Revolt, Denmark’s position in northern Europe was of tremendous strategic and

economic significance. As Professor Lockhart points out, with a navy roughly

equivalent to that of England—after its reconstruction in the 1570s following the

Scandinavian Seven Years War, it displaced approximately 13-15,000 tons—

Denmark had just as much claim as Elizabeth’s England to be regarded as the leading

Protestant power in Europe. Yet Frederik’s Denmark has, on the basis largely of

English sources, been dismissed as, at best, a nervous and vacillating cipher, and at

worst a closet Hispanophile power lacking the backbone which led England to stand

up to the Armada.

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 To be fair, such an assessment largely reflected that given in traditional

Danish historiography, which saw Frederik as a weak, indecisive king dominated by

his council. Professor Lockhart builds impressively on the revisionist work of Frede

P. Jensen to present a very different picture of a ruler who, ‘within the context of

Denmark’s limited monarchy…was a far greater success than his son would be.’ (p.

30) Far from being the unlettered, boorish soak as which he has long been

characterised, Frederik, though undoubtedly a man who liked his drink, was a

sensitive dyslexic who conducted shrewd and effective domestic and foreign policies

in which he carried his council with him, unlike his much less patient son.

The book is based on an impressive array of sources: Professor Lockhart has

used extensive archival material from Denmark, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Marburg,

Dresden, Schwerin and Naumberg, which lends the work a pleasing solidity, at least

when dealing with Denmark’s relations with the Protestant powers which is the main

focus of the book. The picture that emerges is one of a pragmatic, cautious ruler who

sought not only to secure Denmark’s position in an age of great religious and political

tension, but to provide a lead in uniting Protestant Europe against what Frederik

increasingly came to see as a powerful and united Catholic conspiracy. His

inclinations, after the early experience of the Scandinavian Seven Years War (1563-

1570), were to defend Protestantism where possible by diplomacy rather than warfare.

It was not an easy task, not least because of the serious religious tensions that

increasingly bedevilled international Protestantism. Professor Lockhart paints a

convincing portrait of Frederik as a king who demanded not so much religious

uniformity as universal outward conformity at home, while pursuing a more

pragmatic line abroad, in which he sought to unite Gneiso-Lutherans, Philippists and

Calvinists in a common front against the Catholic foe. His efforts reached a climax in

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the 1580s when the French Huguenots, for whom Frederik showed much more

sympathy than the Dutch rebels, were under serious and mounting pressure, yet

ultimately Frederik was to be disappointed. The book demonstrates well how the

inability to compromise on purely religious issues helped to cripple all attempts to

construct a workable Protestant coalition and often soured personal relationships, as in

the case of Frederik’s relations with his brother-in-law August of Saxony, whose

insistence on pushing the Formula of Concord in the 1570s ruined what had been a

close and cooperative friendship. Frederik may not have succeeded, but at least he

passed on a powerful, united state to a son whose impetuous disregard for political

realities was to have momentous consequences. This is a convincing and important

study which adds much to our knowledge of a complex period.

Robert I. Frost

University of Aberdeen