The fortitude of the Norsemen had saved Denmark from a great danger. Frederick IV. rewarded their staunchness and intrepidity by subjecting them to further pillaging. In order to raise money for Danish needs, he sold all the churches of Norway to private parties, contending that, if the people owned them, they must have deeds and papers proving their right of property. By this miserable quibble, he pretended to give a show of legality to his spoliations. The trade with Finmark he sold to three citizens of Copenhagen, who interpreted their monopoly as a license for unlimited extortion. The population sank into misery and degradation.
During the reign of Frederick IV. lived the Norseman Ludvig Holberg, who was born in Bergen, 1684. He spent his life, however, in Denmark, writing a great number of excellent comedies, in Molière's style, mock-heroic poems, satires and historical works. The life of the first half of the eighteenth century is vividly portrayed and satirized in his writings.
Christian VI. (1730-1746) was an extreme pietist, and surrounded himself with Germans who sympathized with his morbid and lugubrious religion. He was lavish in his expenditures, built costly palaces, and introduced a rigid ceremonial at his court. The one meritorious act of his reign was the issue of a decree ordering confirmation in the Lutheran faith, and thus indirectly compelling all classes of the people to learn to read. Well-meant, but misdirected, were his efforts to encourage trade and manufactures, and positively disastrous was his decree forbidding the inhabitants of southern Norway to import grain from any other country than Denmark.
CARVED LINTEL, STABBUR, OR STORE-HOUSE; CARVED BEER-MUGS.
Frederick V. (1746-1766) was a man of kindly nature, but limited intelligence. He opened the theatres, which his father had closed, and abolished the many arduous regulations for the keeping of the Sabbath. He came within a hair of having war with Russia, and was only saved by the murder of the emperor, Peter III. But the great preparations he had made necessitated an increase of taxation, which especially fell heavily upon the poor Norse peasants. In Bergen, the "extra-tax" led to a revolt. The peasants broke into the city, and insulted and maltreated the magistrates, whereupon the tax was abolished. The Norwegian Military Academy in Christiania was founded during the reign of this king, as also the Academy of Sciences in Drontheim.
Christian VII. (1766-1808) succeeded to the throne at the age of seventeen, and wasted his youth in the wildest dissipation. His vitality was accordingly used up before he reached mature manhood, and insanity followed. During a journey abroad, he became much attached to his body physician, a German, named Struensee, and, after his return, made him prime-minister, and left the government entirely in his hands. Struensee was a man of great ability, penetrated with the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau, and rather headlong in the reforms which he introduced. The nobles and the queen-dowager, Juliana Maria, hated him, and, by their influence, the king was induced to sign an order for his arrest. From the prison to the block the road was short. A favorite of the queen-dowager, named Ove Guldberg, carried on the government during the next twelve years, and revoked all Struensee's liberal measures. He endeavored to abolish the very name of Norseman, insisting that no such nationality existed, all being citizens of the Danish State.
During the reign of the last three kings, Norway had, owing to the peace, steadily advanced in material prosperity. The population had, in one hundred years, nearly doubled, being, in 1767, 723,000; and the merchant marine had, since the destruction of the Hanseatic monopoly, grown from 50 to 1,150 ships. A class of native officials, educated at the University of Copenhagen, began to replace the Danish, and, by the sale of the estates of the crown, the number of freeholders among the peasants was largely increased.