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.A year later, after Duke Christianhad sealed the treaty with Lübeck in Hamburg and the conspiratorshad disbanded, the ringleaders were arrested.It was announced thatthe conspiracy had included the king s assassination, seizure and par-tial demolition of the castle, an attack on the aristocracy, and unionwith the Hanse.Eight men were executed, seven of them Germanresidents.92 Other names associated with the plot were stored in theroyal memory for future action.The consequences for Stockholmwere serious.The town lost its separate status in the kingdom of Swe-den.Magistrates were no longer permitted to chart an independent88Ibid., 142 44.89Ibid., 142 43.90Ibid., 143.91Grevefeidens Aktst, II, 51, 55.92Grevens Feide, II, 295 97. The Fall of Copenhagen 387course, or to play a decisive role in the politics of the kingdom.Control was placed in the hands of the crown commandant and thecastle garrison.The town was well on the way to becoming a royalcapital dominated by the castle of Tre Kronor.In the kingdom of Sweden all conflict, internal and external, movedaffairs in a single direction, toward further consolidation of the powerof the crown.At a single stroke His Grace had cancelled the debt,financial and spiritual, left over from the struggle for independence.The ensuing conflict with Lübeck revealed an unexpected increase incrown resources.A Swedish fleet went to war with Lübeck with shipsLübeck had originally sold Sweden, and with money that was rightlyLübeck s.Swedish silver helped finance Duke Christian s campaign;in 1535 and 1536 Gustaf Vasa loaned the duke sums that surpassed hisdebt to Lübeck, without apparent inconvenience.Duke Christian s conquest of Denmark was hardly a triumph.Neitherhe nor his opponents had much to boast of.Three years of war hadlaid waste to the kingdom.Thousands had perished, towns had beenplundered and burned, farming and trade were at a standstill.Aprofound and bitter weariness lay over the land.Farmers and townsmen had struggled to assert themselves, notalways with any clear notion of what that entailed.Violence, theft,arson, and murder had accompanied the unrest.Commoners werenot happy with the result, but further resistance was impossible.Theyhad no leaders left.Nobles, in defending the status quo, had not covered themselveswith glory.They had used their privileges to justify all sorts of arro-gance, rapacity, spinelessness, and disloyalty.The noble mentality wasso thoroughly rooted in particularism that many, though not all, foundit difficult to conceive, let alone participate, in any undertaking whosegoal lay beyond their limited horizons.Prelates of the old church had outdone themselves in their effortsto remain above the battle.Their estate, formally the highest in thekingdom, was a sacred trust to be preserved intact.The contendingparties had quickly and efficiently eliminated churchmen from anysay in the resolution of the troubles.Leaders of the reformed faithhad not offered much more than populist agitation.These were the unpromising materials from which the kingdomof Denmark would have to be rebuilt.The war had shown that akingdom so divided could not withstand aggression from outside.Itwas not yet clear who would make the sacrifices needed to attain asemblance of unity.The victorious Duke Christian was not withoutspots.He was an outsider, a Holsteiner, speaking a foreign tongue, andan aristocrat known to favor those great landed interests from whom 388 Civil War, 1533 1536Danish commoners had learned to expect nothing.His religion wasa wedge issue.The new faith was acceptable to townsmen and somenobles, but a source of apprehension to many others, nobles, church-men, and farmers.The duke had waded to power through riversof blood, and had shown himself from time to time as ruthless andunrelenting as his Holstein commanders.He had earned the grudgingsubmission of his subjects, but only for his tenacity and astuteness.Atthe conclusion of hostilities, the duke of Holstein s greatest asset wasa large and powerful army.The immediate future of the kingdom ofDenmark was anything but promising.During the conflict Duke Christian had not concerned himself over-much with Norway
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