Glücksburg Castle

The ground was monastic long before it was ducal. After the double monastery at Schleswig was dissolved in 1192, its monks founded a Cistercian abbey between 1209 and 1210 on the site of present-day Glücksburg. The Rüdekloster and its wide estates were theirs until the Reformation: secularised in 1538, the house passed in 1544 to the Danish king Christian III.

In 1582 Frederick II of Denmark enfeoffed his brother John, known as Hans the Younger, with the old Rüdekloster. A partitioned-off duke whose estates had refused him homage, John built and traded his way to standing instead. On 21 December 1582 he contracted Nikolaus Karies to pull the abbey down and lead the work on a new house beside it, allowing 6,000 Lübeck marks — then about the value of 1,200 cattle. Much of the new house's brick came from the monastery; the castle was finished by 1587, and the old monastic ground was flooded into a pond meant to protect the house and to keep it in fish.

Loophole-like openings in the tower basements and a vanished courtyard drawbridge recall a time when a noble residence still had to be defensible. The letters G G G M F over the portal stand for the builder's motto Gott gebe Glück mit Frieden — God give luck with peace — and from that Glück the castle took its name.

John died in 1622 and the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg was divided among his heirs. His son Philipp took the castle and the lands of Glücksburg, founding the elder line of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, which held the seat for more than 150 years. The titular duchy stayed small, its dukes playing no part in the country's history, yet by the middle of the 17th century the castle and its outbuildings carried a household averaging eighty people. Four dukes followed Philipp; when the childless Friedrich Heinrich Wilhelm died in 1779 the elder branch ended and the fief reverted to the Danish royal house. Anna Carolina, widow of the last duke, kept it as her dower residence until 1824.

In 1825 Frederik VI granted the fief, with castle and title, to his brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm of Holstein-Beck, a direct descendant of the builder John III. With his wife Louise Caroline he founded the younger line of the House of Glücksburg; he did not live at the castle, though she resided there until the first Schleswig war. Among their ten children was the future Danish king Christian IX.

Frederik VII stayed at Glücksburg from 1854 and died there, childless, in 1863; under the London Protocol of 1852 the succession passed to Christian IX of the Glücksburg line. Under him the castle gained its reputation as the cradle of Europe and the king his own as Europe's father-in-law: of his children by Louise of Hesse-Kassel, Alexandra married Edward VII and Dagmar the Emperor Alexander III, the second son became King George I of Greece and the grandson Carl king of Norway.

The Second Schleswig War of 1864 put soldiers in the house: quarters for Charles of Prussia, then a hospital and barracks. The war ended the personal union between the Danish crown and the Schleswig-Holstein duchies, and the castle passed to Prussia.

On 16 September 1868 King Wilhelm I came over from Flensburg to settle its future. The Flensburger Nachrichten counted three gates of honour and peasant girls waiting at the castle with butter, bread, cheese and fruit; the whole visit, it noted, "lasted only a small hour". Neither the king nor the War Ministry wanted it, and in 1869 he gave it back to the ducal family by decree. Duke Karl, a brother of Christian IX, took it as a permanent residence in 1871, and it has stayed in the family's hands since.

Both world wars left the buildings without substantial damage; the first cost them their bells, seized and melted down. In 1922 the family placed the castle in a foundation charged with preserving it and opening it to the public; most of the rooms became a museum.

At the end of the Second World War the Dönitz administration moved the seat of government to Mürwik in Flensburg, and Albert Speer took quarters in the castle, where Allied forces arrested him on 23 May 1945. Until that summer it held 200 former members of the Wehrmacht as a prison. In May 1945 British troops looted it, detaining the ducal family at gunpoint and opening 32 coffins in the crypt, where 38 members of the family lie. Some of the loot came back after Grand Duchess Alexandra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin appealed to Queen Mary. Castle and museum reopened at Pentecost 1948.