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 to have flinched from his allegiance. But the spoliations in Norway now made him feel that the Church would be safer under Christian, or at any rate that they could get on better without Frederick. He was by no means the only man in Norway who held this view; and Christian himself was at this very time seeking an opportunity of invading Norway. Before long it came. The Bishops and the Danish nobles in Norway were summoned to a Herredagto meet in Copenhagen in June, 1531; the Archbishop, being provided with a good excuse in a great fire which devastated Trondhjem and almost destroyed the cathedral, remained behind. On November 5 Christian reached the Norwegian coast with a fleet of twenty-five ships and a considerable army, and the next day he issued a proclamation to the people of Norway in which he put himself forward as their deliverer, and summoned them to gather round him at Oslo. The Archbishop accepted and proclaimed him, as did the Bishops, but in a somewhat lukewarm fashion; and Christian dissipated his energies and wasted his opportunity to such an extent that the following year he was compelled to make overtures to his uncle, which, as we have seen, ended in his imprisonment. Frederick was far too wise to push matters to an extremity, and the Bishops were glad to purchase their safety by paying him fines; but two monasteries which had given help to Christian were secularised, and Knud Gyldenstjerne carried off no small amount of Church plunder to Denmark.

The death of Frederick I and the wars which followed once more plunged Norway into disorder. The Archbishop was at the head of the Norwegian Council, and had he only known his own mind, it is possible that he might have chosen his own King, or even secured the independence of Norway. But he hesitated until Duke Christian had won his first victories, and then it was too late. In May, 1535, the Bishops of Oslo and Hamar, together with the chief nobles of the south, signed a manifesto by which they accepted Christian III as King, provided that he would promise to be faithful to the ancient laws of Norway; and they sent this to the Archbishop and the northern lords for their signature. By this time Olaf was beginning to recognise the fact that anything was better than a Lutheran King; and just then he received a letter from the Emperor urging him to support the claims of Frederick, the Count Palatine, who was about to marry the daughter of the imprisoned Christian II. He therefore temporised in the hope that matters might settle themselves. Soon, however, there came two emissaries of Duke Christian to Norway with instructions to press forward his cause, whereupon the members of his party decided to go northwards to Trondhjem. They arrived towards the end of December, 1585, and a Council was at once summoned, at which were present the Bishops, the chief Danish nobles in Norway, and a considerable number of the bonder of the northern provinces. Vincent Lunge, the chief adherent of Duke Christian, at once demanded that he should be elected