Born at Copenhagen into a wealthy trading family connected with the leading civic, clerical and learned circles in the Danish capital, he was prepared for university (at the age of ten) by Jens Vorde.

The king was struck with Schumacher; and Brokman, proud of his pupil, made him translate a chapter from a Hebrew Bible first into Latin and then into Danish, for the entertainment of the scholarly monarch.

Schumacher seems to have been profoundly impressed by the administrative superiority of a strong centralised monarchy in the hands of an energetic monarch who knew his own mind; and, in politics, as in manners, France ever afterwards was his model.

On his return to Copenhagen, in 1662, Schumacher found the monarchy established on the ruins of the aristocracy, and eager to buy the services of every man of the middle classes who had superior talents to offer.

During these years, he had a notorious love affair with Mette Trolle[1] On the death of Frederick III (9 February 1670) Schumacher was the most trusted of all the royal counsellors.

He alone was aware of the existence of the new throne of walrus ivory embellished with three silver life-size lions, and of the new regalia, both of which treasures he had, by the king's command, concealed in a vault beneath the royal castle.

On 25 May 1671 the dignities of count and baron were introduced into Denmark-Norway; a few months later the Order of the Dannebrog was instituted as a fresh means of winning adherents by marks of favour.

Both the higher and the provincial administrations were thoroughly reformed with the view of making them more centralized and efficient; and the positions and duties of the various magistrates, who now also received fixed salaries, were for the first time exactly defined.

It is difficult to form a clear idea of this, first, because his influence was perpetually traversed by opposite tendencies; in the second place, because the force of circumstances compelled him, again and again, to shift his standpoint; and finally because personal considerations largely intermingled with his foreign policy, and made it more elusive and ambiguous than it need have been.

He proposed to accomplish this by carefully nursing its resources, and in the meantime securing and enriching the country through alliances, which would bring in large subsidies while imposing a minimum of obligations.

Despite his open protests and subterraneous counter-mining, war was actually declared against Sweden in 1675, and his subsequent policy seemed so obscure and hazardous to those who did not possess the clue to the perhaps purposely tangled skein, that the numerous enemies whom his arrogance and superciliousness had raised up against him, resolved to destroy him.

A minute scrutiny of his papers, lasting nearly six weeks, revealed nothing treasonable; but it provided the enemies of the fallen statesman with a deadly weapon against him in the shape of an entry in his private diary, in which he had imprudently noted that on one occasion Christian V in a conversation with a foreign ambassador had spoken like a child.

On hearing that the sentence was commuted to lifelong imprisonment, he declared that the pardon was harder than the punishment, and vainly petitioned for leave to serve his king for the rest of his life as a common soldier.

For the next twenty-two years Denmark-Norways's greatest statesman was a lonely prisoner, first in the fortress of Copenhagen, in Denmark and finally at Munkholmen in Trondheim Fjord, in Norway, where he died.