From the castle itself were saved a few items of moveable property, but nothing of great value apart from the altar silver from the Castle Chapel, which was sent to the The Royal Silver Vault. Of the other items ”1 old woven cover featuring Queen Margrethe out hunting and Holger The Dane” is worth mentioning. Unfortunately, it was not put to one side when the the castle steward, at the instigation of the exchequer, looked through the saved items ”in order to establish whether there amongst the old fixtures might be pieces that were worth preserving as antiquities”. Instead, it was, together with the saved moveable property, including a number of window frames, iron, and fire damaged wood, sold at two auctions which were held the following year. Later, the buyer's wife sold it on to an itinerant pedlar for next to nothing.
Posterity has been inclined to place the blame for the fire at the feet of the Spanish soldiers at Koldinghus, and it is entirely probable that they, unused to the Nordic winter, fired up all too zealously in the castle's fireplace. The real casue, however, was sooner the fact that the maintenance of the chimneys had been neglected – but whatever the case may be, Jutland's last royal castle, which in 1808 still stood in the Baroque form it had attained through Frederik IV's rebuilding in the years around 1720, had been lost. At the time, however, people were most occupied by the fact that the fire had ruined large amounts of grain. In all it was estimated at 6,000 barrels of rye and oats, which people then made a great effort to salvage in the hope that it could be used as cattle feed.
Koldinghus was not rebuild as a royal castle, and very quickly became one of the romantic ruins which the age loved. In 1813 Christian Molbech passed by, and he writes: “Nature, which so likes to beautify death and destruction, had already here and there adorned the red lots with lively grass growth. The castle bailiff's cow wandered calmly in and out of the windows in search of food on the grass-covered gravel slopes between the walls where courtiers lived in days of old, and in the great, vaulted kitchen where the court was cooked for, a lonely pig had made his spacious dwelling”.