Peder Griffenfeld - Trial

Trial

On 11 March 1676, while on his way to the royal apartments, Griffenfeld was arrested in the king's name and taken to the citadel, a prisoner of state. A minute scrutiny of his papers, lasting nearly six weeks, revealed nothing treasonable; but it provided the enemies of the fallen statesman with a deadly weapon against him in the shape of an entry in his private diary, in which he had imprudently noted that on one occasion Christian V in a conversation with a foreign ambassador had spoken like a child. On 3 May, Griffenfeld was tried not by the usual tribunal, in such cases the Højesteret, or supreme court, but by an extraordinary tribunal of 10 dignitaries, none of whom was particularly well disposed towards the accused. Griffenfeld, who was charged with simony, bribery, oath-breaking, malversation and lèse-majesté, conducted his own defence under every imaginable difficulty.

For forty-six days before his trial he had been closely confined in a dungeon, without lights, books or writing materials. Every legal assistance was illegally denied him. Nevertheless he proved more than a match for the prosecution. Finally, he was condemned to degradation and decapitation; though one of the ten judges not only refused to sign the sentence, but remonstrated in private with the king against its injustice. And indeed its injustice was flagrant. The primary offence of the ex-chancellor was the taking of bribes, which no twisting of the law could convert into a capital offence, while the charge of treason had not been substantiated.

Griffenfeld was pardoned on the scaffold, at the very moment when the axe was about to descend. On hearing that the sentence was commuted to lifelong imprisonment, he declared that the pardon was harder than the punishment, and vainly petitioned for leave to serve his king for the rest of his life as a common soldier. For the next twenty-two years Denmark's greatest statesman was a lonely prisoner, first in the fortress of Copenhagen, and finally at Munkholmen on Trondhjem fjord, where he died. Griffenfeld had married Kitty Nansen, the granddaughter of the great Burgomaster Hans Nansen, who brought him half a million rix-dollars. She died in 1672, after bearing him a daughter. Griffenfeldsgade in Nørrebro, Copenhagen is a street named after him.