King Christian IV charged the couple with having broken the conduct of the royal court and the presence of the monarch, as well as the common law of seduction - an exceptional judgment against two nobles.
His sentence was later softened, through the intervention of astronomer Tycho Brahe, to service in the war against the Ottoman Empire, where he died in 1602.
Rigborg Brockenhuus was sentenced to life imprisonment in a room in her father's castle, Egeskov, thirty miles outside of Odense.
In 1608, the queen dowager Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow obtained permission for Rigborg to leave her room to attend church once a week.
Frederik Rosenkrantz, the father of Holger, was – along with his friend Knud Gyldenstierne – the inspiration for the two treacherous characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare's Hamlet.