‘The first occupation of the Countess,’ says Miss Urne, ‘was devotion; for which purpose her household was assembled in a room outside her bed-chamber. In her daily morning prayer there was this passage: “May the Lord help all prisoners, console the guilty, and save the innocent!” After that she remained the whole forenoon in her bedchamber, occupied in reading and writing. She composed a book entitled the “Ornament of Heroines,” which Countess A. C. Ulfeldt and Count Leon took away with them, together with many other rare writings. Her handiwork is almost indescribable, and without an equal; such as embroidering in silk, gold embroidery, and turning in amber and ivory.’

It will be seen from Leonora’s own Memoir that needlework was one of her principal occupations in her prison. Count Waldstein still possesses some of her work; in the Church of Maribo an altar-cloth embroidered by her existed still some time ago; and at the Castle of Rosenborg, in Copenhagen, there is a portrait of Christian V. worked by Leonora in silk, in return for which present the King increased her annual pension. Miss Urne says that she sent all her work to Elizabeth Bek, a granddaughter of Leonora, who lived with her for some years. But she refused to send her Leonora’s Postille, or manual of daily devotion, which had been given Leonora on New Year’s Day, in the last year of her captivity, by the castellan, Torslev, who is mentioned in Leonora’s Memoir, and who had taught her to turn ivory, &c. This book has disappeared; but amongst the relics of Leonora Christina, the Royal Library at Copenhagen preserves some leaves which had been bound up with it, and contain verses, &c., by Leonora, and other interesting matter.

Her MS. works were taken to Vienna after her death. It is not known what has become of some of them. A copy of the first part of the book on heroines exists in Copenhagen. Miss Urne says that she possessed fragments of a play composed by her and acted at Maribo Kloster; also the younger Sperling speaks of such a composition in Danish verse; but the MS. seems to be lost now.

Several of Leonora’s relations stayed with her from time to time at Maribo; amongst them the above-mentioned Elizabeth Bek, whose mother, Leonora Sophie, famous for her beauty, had married Lave Bek, the head of an ancient Danish family in Skaane. After Ulfeldt’s death Lave Bek demanded of the Swedish Government the estates which Carl Gustav had given to Ulfeldt in 1658, but which the Swedish Government had afterwards confiscated, without any legal ground. Leonora Christina herself memorialised the Swedish King on the subject, and at least one of her memorials on the subject, dated May 23, 1693, still exists; but it was not till 1735 that these estates were given up to Lave Bek’s sons. Leonora’s eldest daughter, Anne Catherina, lived with her mother at Maribo for several years, and was present at her death. She had married Casetta, a Spanish nobleman, mentioned by Leonora Christina in her Memoir, who was with her in England when she was arrested. After the death of Casetta and their children, Anne Catherina Ulfeldt came to live with her mother. She followed her brother to Vienna, where she died. It was she who transmitted the MS. of Leonora’s Memoir of her life in the Blue Tower to the brother, with the following letter, which is still preserved with the MS.:—