Joakimsdotter Brahe was engaged to riksråd Birger Nilsson Grip. These were the first events Catherine hosted as queen of Sweden. Very little is known about queen Catherine as a person and her tenure as queen. There is no information on her courtiers, though she is assumed to have brought ladies-in-waiting from Germany in addition to her Swedish ones, among whom Margaret Leijonhufvud (the king's future second queen) is likely to have been one. Traditional history describes Catherine as capricious, cold, melancholic and discontent, and the marriage has been described as a stormy and unhappy one. There is, however, no contemporary information on that. On 13 December 1533, she fulfilled her most important task as queen consort by giving birth to an heir to the throne: the future King Eric XIV. In September 1535, during a ball given in honor of her brother-in-law, King Christian III of Denmark, who was visiting the Swedish royal court, Queen Catherine fell while pregnant during a dance with Christian III. The fall confined her to bed and led to complications, and she died on 23 September with her unborn child. At the time of her death, king Gustav was involved in the Count's Feud, and his opponents in this conflict, Lübeck and Rostock, spread the rumor that he had murdered his queen by beating her on the head with a silver cane after a report from a spy that she had slandered him to Christian while dancing. The exhumation of Catherine's skeleton done in the 1940s showed no sign of any such injury, and no accusations were ever made by her family. Furthermore, Christian III himself confirmed the serious fall of Queen Catherine in his private letters, even though he was no friend of Gustav Vasa's. In traditional history writings, queen Catherine was given a bad reputation and often presented as a bad example, by contrast to the second queen of Gustav I, Queen Margaret, who was made out to be a stereotypically and perfectly ideal queen. References Alf Henrikson (1963). Svensk Historia (Swedish history). Bonniers Article in the Svenskt biografiskt handlexikon Wilhelmina stålberg: Anteqningar om svenska qvinnor (Notes on Swedish women) (Swedish) 1513 births 1535 deaths People from Ratzeburg House of Ascania Catherine 1531 Burials at Uppsala Cathedral Duchesses of Saxe-Lauenburg Converts to Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism Royal reburials