The decision of Odensee, though not satisfactory to Denmark, did at least settle two important points: the obligation on the part of the dukes to renew the investiture, and the recognition of the military service, which though in itself insignificant, still formed the strong link between the duchy of Schleswig and the kingdom. The ceremony took place on the 3d of May, 1580, on the large square of Odensee, where the royal throne had been erect

discipline of their enemies. The Danes were commanded by the old Count John Rantzau, the head of one of the noblest families of Holstein, to whose military talents the house of Oldenborg was highly indebted for its victories and grandeur. Adolph too was a prince of uncommon bravery and skill, who fought in the hottest of the battle, and thrice rallied his troops, whom the desperate valor of the enemy had forced to give ground. After a violent struggle the victory declared fored. The three dukes at the same time laid the Danes; it was as complete and decisive as they could wish. All the towns and forts surrendered; the vanquished sued for peace, which was granted them. They paid homage to the King of Denmark as their lawful sovereign, and took the oath of perpetual fidelity to him and his successors. They paid the expenses of the war, and delivered up the standards and military trophies taken from King Hans.

Though the victors in apparent concord divided the conquered territory, yet the dispute about the investiture of Schleswig still continued. As no party would yield, the decision of that odious question was referred to the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Duke of Mecklenburg, as umpires. In May, 1579, the sentence was given at the Congress of Odensee. Schleswig was to be considered as a hereditary military fief of Denmark, with which the king was bound to invest the dukes of the Oldenborg family. The king was to consult the dukes about questions of war and peace, and they then pledged themselves to render him military service as their liege-lord, with forty knights and eighty foot-soldiers! This ridiculous act was then signed by the plenipotentiaries of the foreign princes, the vassals, and the sagacious Council of Denmark. The states in the duchies showed far more resolution and perseverance in the maintenance of their rights. They refused in 1563 to recognize the sovereignty of the Duke Hans, the younger brother of King Frederik II., on whom he settled the principality of Sonderborg, on the island of Als, nor did the descendants of this line ever succeed in obtaining the recognition of that dignity to this day.*

*The present Duke of Sonderborg-Augustenborg, and his brother Prince Noer, who have taken arms against their cousin, King Frederik VII. of Denmark, are the direct offspring of that family.

their hands on the banner of Dannebrog, and swore the usual allegiance to their liege-lord as faithful vassals. A few months later, the Hadersleben line became extinct by the death of Duke Hans the elder. All the possessions were now equally divided between Duke Adolph of HolsteinGottorp and the King, while the subdivisions which entailed so many evils on the duchies were put a stop to, in 1608, when the right of primogeniture was established in the ducal part, and, in 1650, extended to the royal province.

Christian IV. reigned with a strong hand, and taught the dukes to respect the feudal rights of Denmark; but tremendous events were forthcoming, which once more overturned the old relations, and at last subjected them to the decision of the sword. In 1618 the terrible thirty years' war broke out between the Protestant and Catholic parties in Germany, and King Christian IV., as chief of the Low-Saxon circle, entered Germany with his Danish army. By the treachery of his Saxon allies he was defeated in the bloody battle of Lutter am Baremberg, in 1626, and the imperial General Wallenstein, pursuing the retreating king, overran the duchies and all the mainland of Denmark with his wild bands. The Duke of Holstein-Gottorp then broke his allegiance and declared against the king, and though he lost all his possessions in the course of the war, they were 10stored to him by the treaty of Lübeck, in 1629, between the Emperor and the King of Denmark. The hatred between the reigning lines had become inveterate. Duke again united with Sweden, and Carl Gustav, crossing the belt on the ice, during the winter, 1658, forced Frederik III., the son and successor of Christian IV., in the treaties of Roeskilde and Copenhagen, the same year, to concede to the Duke and

The

ceded to it in return by the King of Denmark. The completeness of the cession of Schleswig on the part of Russia is still more evident, when compared with her exchange of the counties of Delmenhorst and Oldenborg for the Gottorp share of Holstein. According to the former treaty, Schleswig is ceded to the King of Denmark and his royal successors, while the latter mentions only King Christian VII. and his brother, Prince Frederik, with their male heirs; thus declaring that Russia reserved her rights to Holstein on the extinction of the male descendants of the reigning dynasty.*

By these treaties and later settlements with the lateral lines of Augustenborg and Beck, the house of Oldenborg came at last into undisputed possession both of Schleswig and Holstein. The latter duchy, though a German fief, was incorporated with the kingdom of Denmark in 1806, on the dissolution of the German empire, in consequence of the victories and conquests of the Emperor Napoleon. But at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Holstein again entered into connection with the Germanic confederation. King Frederik VI., as duke of Holstein, obtained a vote in the diet of Frankfort, and bound himself to join the federal army with a contingent of three thousand five hundred troops.

mark had to carry on the contest for more than fifty years. The threatening storm came no longer from Sweden-which, vanquished and weakened during the disastrous wars of Charles XII., had now for a time retreated from the great political theatre-but from the more dangerous Russian Empire. The duke Charles Frederik had taken his residence in Kiel, in Holstein, where he strenuously protested against the cession of Schleswig. He soon after married Anne Petrowna, the daughter of Peter the Great, and became thus, supported by Russia, a formidable enemy to Denmark. Yet the prudent Christian VI., the son and successor of Frederik IV., found the means to frustrate the warlike schemes of the duke, without any rupture with that power. More imminent seemed the war in 1762, when, on the death of the Empress Elizabeth, Peter III., the son of Charles Frederick, succeeded her on the throne of Russia. The first act of his reign was a declaration of war against Frederik V. of Denmark. As the head of the house of Holstein-Gottorp, he renewed his claims to the ceded part of Schleswig. Immense armaments were undertaken in Denmark; a fine fleet of sixty men-of-war was sent cruising in the Baltic, and an army of seventy thousand combatants was advancing upon the Russians in the environs of Wismar, when the news of the At the general peace in 1815, all the revolution at St. Petersburg, the violent different nations, which formed the coaliabdication and murder of Peter, put a sud- tion against France, had been the gainers. den stop to the military demonstrations. Denmark alone, as the faithful ally of the Catherine II., his successor, did not prose- Emperor Napoleon, had been almost crushcute the quarrel of her hot-headed hus-ed under the weight of accumulated disband. She recalled the Russian troops from Mecklenburg and concluded a treaty with Denmark, which was confirmed by her son, the Emperor Paul, in 1773, in accordance with which, the house of Holstein-Gottorp forever renounced all claims upon Schleswig, and by a second treaty of the same date, exchanged its possessions and rights in the duchy of Holstein for the counties of Oldenborg and Delmenhorst,

* Mr. D'Israeli, M. P., said in his speech on the 19th of April last, in the House of Commons: "When Russia was about to invade Denmark, and the latter having applied to this country, England signified her intention to carry out the provisions of her guaranty, and in consequence of that notification, Russia did not invade Schleswig."

asters, and from a flourishing kingdom of the second rank, with a numerous army, a gallant navy and extensive commerce, she had then, in her isolated position, dwindled down to a small state, of a third or fourth rank among the victorious nations around her. Her capital had been burnt; her fleet carried off; her colonies, credit and commerce nearly destroyed-and to crown all, Norway had been surrendered to the Swedes, who at that time were still her enemies. Norway, which for nearly four centuries and a half had been united to her,

*This important fact demonstrates that the Russian emperor, as a direct descendant of the Dukes of Holstein-Gottorp, has a nearer claim to the duchy of Holstein, than the Duke and Prince of Augustenborg.

miles and 45,000 inhabitants. The poor Lauenburgers remained six days Prussian subjects, and were then, on the 4th of June, 1815—“ à perpétuité et en toute souveraineté et propriété"-transmitted to the King of Denmark. The Frankfort deputy Weleker, has lately had the most hopeless difficulty in persuading the quiet and industrious Lauenburgers that these treat

Germans, belonging to the common glorious fatherland, were to take up arms against their former Danish liege lord.

and whose people bore in origin, language, history and manners, the closest affinity to the Danes, was now violently severed from her sister kingdom. Denmark received, by way of compensation, another small slice of German territory, cut away with the large pruning-hook of the imbecile soulvenders at Vienna, from the newly liberated bulk of Germany. What injustice and blunders were committed by the self-ies are null and void, and that they, as ish and short-sighted diplomatists of the Holy Alliance at Vienna! Poland, Italy, Belgium, Norway and Lauenburg dismembered and shuffled about at the mere whim and caprice of gambling politicians! And now-in 1848-they have either freed themselves with the sword, or are still fighting and bleeding for their freedom. Lauenburg alone must now, by the German Parliament at Frankfort, be forced to renounce an alliance, which Denmark so unwillingly acceded to in 1815. The circumstances which brought that German duchy under the Danish crown are very remarkable. When King Frederik VI. was obliged by the treaty of Kiel, in 1814, to cede the kingdom of Norway to the crown of Sweden, the king of that country, on his part, offered as an indemnity to the King of Denmark and his successors, the duchy of Swedish Pomerania and the principality of Rügen, with seventy-five and a half German square miles and 160,000 inhabitants.

Prussia now stood forward and demanded the cession of these maritime provinces, proposing to give Denmark an equivalent territory, which it did not possess. But in order to fulfil its promise, Prussia then persuaded the King of Hanover-George III. of Great Britain--to cede the duchy of SaxeLauenburg, with nineteen German square

Such were the relations between Denmark and the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg in 1815. There did not at that time exist any party spirit, any Schleswig-Holstein separatistic tendencies, which might have prognosticated any hostile conflict between the two different nationalities of the monarchy.

That movement began later, and originated not with the people, but with the nobility-the Ritterschaft-and the swarm of German employees, forming a bureaucracy, who by the ambitious intrigues of the princes of Augustenborg, were led to hope that by a final rupture with Denmark, they might deprive her both of Schleswig and Lauenburg, and thus form an independent state of their own, which by its important maritime position on the Baltic and the North Sea, might, as they said, become the handle of the sword, which Germany was to throw into the scales of fate on the Northern Seas.

A second article on this imperfectly understood, but interesting subject, will relate these movements in the duchies, and the events of the civil war they have oc|casioned.

THE WAR OF CHIOZZA.

[CONTINUED FROM PAGE 410.]