When Jens Kofoed heard it, he sat down and thought things over.  If there was peace, his old captain had no use for him, that was certain; but there might be need of him at home.  What would happen there, no one could tell.  And there were the wife and children to take care of.  The upshot of it all was that he stayed.  Only, to be on the safe side, he got the Burgomaster and the Aldermen in his home town, Hasle, to set it down in writing that he could not have got back to his troop for all he might have tried.  Kofoed, it will be seen, was a man with a head on his shoulders, which was well, for presently he had need of it.

There were no Danish soldiers in the island, only a peasant militia, ill-armed and untaught in the ways of war; so no one thought of resisting the change of masters.  The people simply waited to see what would happen.  Along in May a company of one hundred and twenty men with four guns landed, and took possession of Castle Hammershus, on the north shore, the only stronghold on the island, in the name of the Swedish king.  Colonel Printzenskoeld, who had command, summoned the islanders to a meeting, and told them that he had come to be their governor.  They were to obey him, and that was all.  The people listened and said nothing.

Perhaps if the new rulers had been wise, things might have kept on so.  The people would have tilled their farms, and paid their taxes, and Jens Kofoed, with all his hot hatred of the enemy he had fought, might never have been heard of outside his own island.  But the Swedish soldiers had been through the Thirty Years’ War and plunder had become their profession.  They rioted in the towns, doubled the taxes, put an embargo on trade and export, crushed the industries; worse, they took the young men and sent them away to Karl Gustav’s wars in foreign lands.  They left only the old men and the boys, and these last they kept a watchful eye on for drafts in days to come.  When the conscripts hid in the woods, so as not to be torn from their wives and sweethearts, they organized regular man-hunts as if the quarry were wild beasts, and, indeed, the poor fellows were not treated much better when caught.

All summer they did as they pleased; then came word that Karl Gustav had broken the peace he made, and of the siege of Copenhagen.  The news made the people sit up and take notice.  Their rightful sovereign had ceded the island to the Swedish king, that was one thing.  But now that they were at war again, these strangers who persecuted them were the public enemy.  It was time something were done.  In Hasle there was a young parson with his heart in the right place, Poul Anker by name.  Jens Kofoed sat in his church; he had been to the wars, and was fit to take command.  Also, the two were friends.  Presently a web of conspiracy spread quietly through the island, gripping priest and peasant, skipper and trader, alike.  Its purpose was to rout out the Swedes.  The Hasle trooper and parson were the leaders; but their secret was well kept.  With the tidings that the Dutch fleet had forced its way through to Copenhagen with aid for the besieged, and had bottled the Swedish ships up in Landskrona, came a letter purporting to be from King Frederik himself, encouraging the people to rise.  It was passed secretly from hand to hand by the underground route, and found the island ready for rebellion.