Magnus von Wedderkop

Joachim von Wedderkop, a lieutenant colonel in the army of King Philip II of Spain, had left his homeland because of his faith and moved to Franconia.

Joachim's grandson and father of Magnus von Wedderkop, Henning, was a baron in Braunschweig, and served as a royal lieutenant in the cavalry under Wallenstein and came to Husum during the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War.

Similar to the diploma of nobility, his father, Joachim Wedderkop, was a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish army in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years' War and came from the Duchy of Guelders.

From 1661, he worked as a tutor for the patrician Brömbsen family of Lübeck and accompanied two sons of Gotthard Broemse to the Heidelberg University and then on the then common Grand Tour to Italy and France.

As a politician, he was able to preserve the independence of the Duchy of Gottorf, which was threatened by its powerful neighbour, the Danish Realm, and to win imperial favour for this cause in the course of the Treaties of Nijmegen.

Their daughter Anne Wedderkop married Sir Cyril Wyche, 1st Baronet, the British envoy to Hamburg and to the Lower Saxony Imperial Circle, in 1714.

Politically, Wedderkop tried to maintain the stable and friendly relationship with Denmark that had been established by the Peace of Travendal, but this attitude increasingly brought him into conflict with his rising opponent, Georg Heinrich von Görtz, and his pronounced sense of power, to which he eventually fell victim.

Wedderkop was given a temporary boost by an investigation into the duchy's finances initiated from Stockholm, which revealed the extravagance of the administrator and the plundering of the country by Georg Heinrich von Görtz.

With the death in 1708 of Hedvig Sophia of Sweden, the widow of Duke Frederick IV, who had died at the Battle of Kliszów in 1702, Wedderkop felt increasingly in need of protection and retired to his palais at Neuer Wall in Hamburg for safety.

On 19 December 1709, however, Wedderkop was lured to a meeting of the Privy Council at Gottorf Castle, where the 72-year-old was warmly received, but was arrested that night after dinner with the administrator and taken to Tönning Fortress.