On April 7 a young lad escaped from the tower, who had been confined on the lower story with iron fetters round his legs. This prisoner found opportunity to loosen his fetters, and knew, moreover, that the booby Johan was wont to keep the tower key under his pillow. He kept an iron pin in readiness to unlock the door of the room when the tower-warder was asleep; he opened it gently, took the key, locked in the booby again, and quitted the tower. The simple man was placed in confinement, but after the expiration of six weeks he was set at liberty.
In his place there came a man named Olle Mathison, who was from Skaane; he had his wife with him in the tower. Towards the end of this year, on December 25, I became ill of a fever, and D. Mynchen received orders to visit me and to take me under his care—an order which he executed with great attention. He is a very sensible man, mild and judicious in his treatment. Ten days after I recovered my usual health.
In the beginning of the year 1680 Sitzel, Klemming’s daughter, was persuaded by Maren Blocks to betroth herself to one of the King’s body-guard. She left me on November 26. In her place I had a woman named Margrete. When I first saw her, she appeared to me somewhat suspicious, and it seemed to me that she was with child; however, I made no remark till the last day of the month of January. Then I put a question to her from which she could perceive my opinion. She answered me with lies, but I interrupted her at once; and she made use of a special trick, which it is not fit to mention here, in order to prove her false assertion; but her trick could not stand with me, and she was subsequently obliged to confess it. I asked her as to the father of the child (I imagined that it was the King’s groom of the chamber, who had been placed in arrest in the prison governor’s room, but I did not say so). She did not answer my question at the time, but said she was not so far advanced; that her size was owing rather to stoutness than to the child, as it was at a very early stage.
This woman, before she came to me, had been in the service of the prison governor’s wife, and the prison governor had told me she was married. So it happened that I one day asked her of her life and doings; upon which she told me of her past history, where she had served, and that she had had two bastards, each by a different father; and pointing to herself, she added: ‘A father shall also acknowledge this one, and that a brave father! You know him well!’ I said, ‘I have seen the King’s groom of the chamber in the square, but I do not know him.’ She laughed and answered (in her mother-tongue), ‘No, by God, that is not he; it is the good prison governor.’ I truly did not believe it. She protested it, and related some minute details to me.
I thought I had better get rid of her betimes, and I requested to speak with the prison governor’s wife, who at once came to me. I told her my suspicion with regard to the woman, and on what I based my suspicion; but I made no remark as to what the woman had confessed and said to me. I begged the prison governor’s wife to remove the woman from me as civilly as she could. She was surprised at my words, and doubted if there was truth in them. I said, ‘Whether it be so or not, remove her; the sooner the better.’ She promised that it should be done, but it was not. Margrete seemed not to care that it was known that she was with child; she told the tower-warder of it, and asked him one day, ‘Ole, how was it with your wife when she had twins?’ Ole answered: ‘I know nothing about it. Ask Anne!’ Margrete said that from certain symptoms she fancied she might have twins.
One day, when she was going to sew a cloth on the arms of my arm-chair, she said, ‘That angel of God is now moving!’ And as the wife of the prison governor did not adhere to her word, and Margrete’s sister often came to the tower, I feared that the sister might secretly convey her something to remove the child (which was no doubt subsequently the case), so I said one day to Margrete: ‘You say that the prison governor is your child’s father, but you do not venture to say so to himself.’ ‘Yes!’ she said with an oath, ‘as if I would not venture! Do you imagine that I will not have something from him for the support of my child?’ ‘Then I will send for him,’ I said, ‘on purpose to hear what he will say.’ (It was at that time a rare occurrence for the prison governor to come to me.) She begged me to do so; he could not deny, she said, that he was the father of her child. The prison governor came at my request. I began my speech in the woman’s presence, and said that Margrete, according to her own statement, was with child; who the father was, he could enquire if he chose. He asked her whether she was with child? She answered, ‘Yes, and you are the father of it.’ ‘O!’ he said, and laughed, ‘what nonsense!’ She adhered to what she had said, protested that no other was the child’s father, and related the circumstances of how it had occurred. The prison governor said, ‘The woman is mad!’ She gave free vent to her tongue, so that I ordered her to go out; then I spoke with the prison governor alone, and begged him speedily to look about for another woman for me, before it came to extremities with her. I supposed he would find means to stop her tongue. I told him the truth in a few words—that he had brought his paramour to wait on me. He answered, ‘She lies, the malicious woman! I have ordered Tötzlöff already to look about for another. My wife has told me what you said to her the other day.’ After this conversation the prison governor went away. Peder Tötzlöff told me that an English woman had desired to be with me, but could not come before Easter.
Four days afterwards Margrete began to complain that she felt ill, and said to me in the forenoon, ‘I think it will probably go badly with me; I feel so ill.’ I thought at once of what I had feared, namely of what the constant visits of her sister indicated, and I sent immediately to Peder Tötzlöff, and when he came to me I told him of my suspicion respecting Margrete, and begged him to do his utmost to procure me the English woman that very day. Meanwhile Margrete went up stairs, and remained there about an hour and a quarter, and came down looking like a corpse, and said, ‘Now it will be all right with me.’ What I thought I would not say (for I knew that if I had enquired the cause of her bad appearance she would have at once acknowledged it all, and I did not want to know it), so I said, ‘If you keep yourself quiet, all will be well. Another woman is coming this evening.’ This did not please her; she thought she could now well remain. I paid no regard to this nor to anything else she said, but adhered to it—that another woman was coming. This was arranged, and in the evening of March 15 Margrete left, and in her place came an English woman, named Jonatha, who had been married to a Dane named Jens Pedersen Holme.
When Margrete was gone, I was blamed by the wife of the prison governor, who said that I had persuaded Margrete to affirm that her husband was the father of Margrete’s child.
Although it did not concern me, I will nevertheless mention the deceitful manner in which the good people subsequently brought about this Margrete’s marriage. They informed a bookbinder’s apprentice that she had been married, and they showed both him and the priest, who was to give them the nuptial benediction, her sister’s marriage certificate.[145]
In the same year, on the morning of Christmas Day, God loosened D. Otto Sperling’s heavy bonds, after he had been imprisoned in the Blue Tower seventeen years, eight months, twenty-four days, at the age of eighty years minus six days. He had long been ill, but never confined to his bed. Doctor München twice visited him with his medicaments. He would not allow the tower-warder at any time to make his bed, and was quite angry if Ole offered to do so, and implied that the doctor was weak. He allowed no one either to be present when he laid down. How he came on the floor on Christmas night is not known; he lay there, knocking on the ground. The tower-warder could not hear his knocking, for he slept far from the doctor’s room; but a prisoner who slept on the ground floor heard it, and knocked at the tower-warder’s door and told him that the doctor had been knocking for some time. When Ole came in, he found the doctor lying on the floor, half dressed, with a clean shirt on. He was still alive, groaned a good deal, but did not speak. Ole called a prisoner to help him, and they lifted him on the bed and locked the door again. In the morning he was found dead, as I have said.