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Prince Ulrik of Denmark (2 February 1611 - 12 August 1633, in Schweidnitz) was a son of King Christian IV of Denmark and his consort Queen Anne Catherine of Brandenburg. As the fourth-born son he bore the merely titular rank of Duke of Holstein and Schleswig, Stormarn and Ditmarsh. In 1624 Ulrik was appointed administrator of the Prince-Bishopric of Schwerin as Ulrich III. However, in 1628 Albrecht von Wallenstein's conquest of the prince-bishopric de facto deposed him. His father had to renounce all his family claims to prince-bishoprics in 1629. When in 1631 Swedish forces reconquered the prince-bishopric Ulrik failed to reascend as administrator.
On 11 August 1633, while at a meeting in Schweidnitz (modern-day Świdnica, Poland), Ulrik was shot by an imperial horseman, and died the following day.
Ulrik of Denmark in 1632[]
Thanks to the information in Grantville's histories, Ulrik's fate in the OTL was known well in advance, and he was able to avoid it. In 1633, he was traveling, officially incognito, on behalf of his father. In August of 1633, that took him to Grantville. While there, he had been able to visit the town's libraries, and had even been allowed to examine the personal library of one of the residents. He realized that, while there was a fair amount of information about his father, Christian IV, there wasn't much about the history of Denmark itself, as it was not a significant player in later centuries. He remained in Grantville until October of 1633, after which he went to Magdeburg, and then to Schwerin. While in Magdeburg, he saw the American ironclads, which were under construction, and thought they were formidable looking.
In January of 1634, Christian IV called him back to Denmark, and placed him in charge of researching and producing new, more effective weapons, a project which had already started under the Norwegian adventurer and tech-whiz Baldur Norddahl. The two men quickly became fast friends. Ulrik also befriended American Eddie Cantrell, who had been captured at the Battle of Wismar.
While he was willing to work on the weapons projects, or at least keep his father out of the way while Baldur worked on spar torpedoes and mines, he was opposed to his father's decision to join the League of Ostend and remain in it. Not only was he aware of American technology and what it could do, he expected that Denmark would bear the brunt of any USE response. During the Battle of Copenhagen, he and Baldur managed to disable the SSIM Monitor with a spar torpedo, though they only survived because the Monitor did not sink and took them aboard.
Following the end of the Ostend War, in the accords which annexed Denmark to the reconstituted Union of Kalmar, it was arranged for him to marry Kristina when she came of age. Ulrik didn't mind the betrothal not only because he was raised with the knowledge that he would marry for political reasons, but also Kristina's perceptiveness and intelligence at a young age banished his fears of marrying a dull woman.
By the time of the USE civil war, Ulrik had become a private adherent to the "Soft Landing," going so far as to believe that the new Oldenburg-Vasa Dynasty he hoped to foster with his betrothed Kristina should be a principally German dynasty, and should spend its tenure gradually ceding, even encouraging the democratic movement in the USE, and did not object to an eventual end of the monarchy in the USE.