Peder Griffenfeld

Count Peder Griffenfeld (before ennoblement Peder Schumacher) (24 August 1635 – 12 March 1699) was a Danish statesman and royal favourite. He became the principal adviser to King Christian V of Denmark from 1670 and the de facto ruler of the dual kingdom of Denmark-Norway in the first half of the 1670s. In 1673 he was appointed as Chancellor of Denmark, elevated to count, the highest aristocratic rank in Denmark-Norway, and received the Order of the Elephant, the country's highest order. At the behest of his enemies at court, Griffenfeld was arrested in early 1676 and convicted of treason, a charge that historians agree was false. He was imprisoned for 22 years, mainly at Munkholmen in Norway.

Born at Copenhagen into a wealthy trading family connected with the leading civic, clerical and learned circles in the Danish capital, he was prepared for university (at the age of ten) by Jens Vorde. Vorde praises his extraordinary gifts, his mastery of the classical languages and his unnerving diligence. The brilliance he showed in his preliminary examination won him the friendship of the examiner, Bishop Jasper Brokman, at whose palace he first met King Frederick III of Denmark. The king was struck with Schumacher; and Brokman, proud of his pupil, made him translate a chapter from a Hebrew Bible first into Latin and then into Danish, for the entertainment of the scholarly monarch.

In 1654 young Schumacher went abroad for eight years, to complete his education. From Germany he proceeded to the Netherlands, staying at Leiden, Utrecht and Amsterdam, and passing in 1657 to the Queen's College, Oxford, where he spent three years. The epoch-making events that occurred in England while he was at Oxford profoundly interested him. Coinciding with the Revolution in Denmark, which threw open a career to the middle classes, it convinced him that his future was in politics. In the autumn of 1660 Schumacher visited Paris, shortly after Mazarin's death, when the young Louis XIV of France first seized the reins of power. Schumacher seems to have been profoundly impressed by the administrative superiority of a strong centralised monarchy in the hands of an energetic monarch who knew his own mind; and, in politics, as in manners, France ever afterwards was his model. The last year of his travels was spent in Spain, where he obtained a thorough knowledge of the Castilian language and literature. He is said to have brought home easy morals as well as exquisite manners.

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