Christina would later claim that after everyone realized the he was a she, the terrified nurse carried her wordlessly to her father. Instead of being angry, the king held the infant in his arms, kissed her, and said, “Let us thank God. This girl will be worth as much to me as a boy. I pray God to keep her, since he has given her to me. I wish for nothing else. I am content.” It’s a sweet thought, but it’s probably not at all true.
GIRL PRINCE
The fact was, Christina’s birth complicated matters. King Gustav’s only other child was a boy, but he was illegitimate, so the threat of a dynastic crisis was acute. Making another baby was confounded by the fact that her mother, Maria Eleonora, was on her way to going crazy, and her father was usually on his way to war.
King Gustav tried to make the best of a bad situation. He gave explicit instructions that his little girl should be educated as a prince and get plenty of exercise. Then he went and died in battle when Christina was only 6 years old. Christina was proclaimed queen of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals, great princess of Finland, duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and lady of Ingria, a hefty slew of titles for a little girl who, in a portrait painted at the time, resembled an elderly dwarf.
Christina later claimed that everyone confronted with this grownup child-queen was impressed with her, the same sort of retrospective mythmaking she’d applied to the story of her father’s reaction to her birth. In a letter written to God (because she was like that), Christina declared, “They noticed that You had made me so grave and so serious that I wasn’t at all impatient, as is the usual way with children.” But until age 18, she was queen in name only—Sweden was ruled by five regents handpicked by her late father. The regents hoped that Christina would marry before reaching maturity, so that her husband could rule if not through her, then at least alongside her.
But another wrench was thrown into the works: her mother’s mental state was disintegrating rapidly. When the king died, Maria Eleonora pitched herself headlong into a cult of mourning, becoming a black-draped hysteric who wept constantly. The girl she’d rejected for being female, hairy, and “swarthy as a Moor” was now her most treasured link to her dead husband, and she rarely allowed Christina out of her sight. After suffering through nearly three years of this suffocating mothering, Christina was removed from her mother’s care, and Maria Eleonora was packed off to a castle some 50 miles away.
Christina was then educated according to her father’s wishes and, it seems, took well to the curriculum. One of her tutors found her sufficiently diligent to warrant a report to Parliament that she was “not like other members of her sex” and was “stout-hearted and of good understanding.” As a child, her toys were lead soldiers, which she used to enact military maneuvers. She was a crack shot with a pistol, a keen horsewoman, and versed in sword fighting. She learned statecraft from biographies of Alexander the Great and Elizabeth I; she studied Latin, German, and French to converse with ambassadors; and she received sufficiently large doses of Lutheranism, the state religion.
In November 1644 Christina turned 18, ending the regency. She seized the throne with vigor but was young and inexperienced; she had so often told herself the fairy tale of her own greatness that it blinded her to her faults. Despite her education, she was no master of governance or politics. She was indecisive when she ought to have been resolute; acted out of spite rather than reason; wanted power without earning it; and opened her court to all kinds of intrigues she mistakenly thought she controlled. She also spent the crown’s money as if it were her own, and when coffers dwindled, she started selling titles, flooding the country with earls and barons and reducing the tax base drastically. Before long, the Swedish piggybank had a tinny ring to it. To her credit, Christina spent Sweden’s money mostly trying to buy culture and elevate the provincial tone of the Stockholm court. She amassed a valuable collection of books, paintings, sculpture, and objets d’art and imported legions of scholars from across Europe. The star of her collection was the great French philosopher René Descartes (of “I think, therefore I am” fame), whom she convinced to grace her court. Christina decided he would tutor her three times a week—at five in the morning in an unheated library in January 1650, “the coldest month of the coldest year in an exceptionally cold century.” Descartes soon caught influenza and died. But Christina’s plans for a big memorial to the great man were soon forgotten, and Catholic Descartes was left to molder under a rotting wooden plank in the unbaptized section of a Lutheran graveyard.
Though exceptionally clever, Christina was just a dilettante. She knew a little about a lot, learning only enough about each topic to impress her courtiers, and rarely stuck with anything for long. She was as prideful about her learning as the prince she was raised to be: “I never could stand being corrected,” she once told the French ambassador.
ABDICATION AVENUE
Everyone knew that Christina disliked being a girl. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I despised everything belonging to my sex, hardly excluding modesty and propriety.” Though she was petite—barely five feet tall—and delicate, Christina walked and talked like a man. She strode around in flat shoes, swore like a sailor in a deep gruff voice, and tended to smack her servants around. She slouched, preferred short skirts and trousers to overstuffed female fashions, and had no time or patience for things like embroidery and etiquette. She was often too busy to comb her hair and none too keen on bathing (in her defense, no one really was back then).
Christina was so determinedly boyish that in her own lifetime, she was dogged by a persistent rumor that she was a hermaphrodite. Her mannish ways gave rise to other, more titillating rumors, which she did nothing to quell. She often slept in the same bed as her favorite lady-in-waiting, whom she called Belle on account of the woman’s beauty. This was normal enough for two unmarried women at the time, but Christina liked to insinuate more than just sleeping was going on. She once embarrassed the English ambassador to the court by whispering in his ear that Belle’s inside was as beautiful as her outside.
When Christina was 22, she declared her intention never to marry and even named the man everyone thought she would wed, her cousin Karl Gustav, as her successor. Perhaps she was inspired by Elizabeth I, Britain’s so-called virgin queen with the “heart and stomach of a king,” whose biographies she’d devoured as a teenager. Of course, these actions only made whispers of her lesbianism/bisexuality grow ever louder. But though she talked a good game, there’s not much evidence that she had a sexual relationship with anyone. Her decision not to marry seems more connected to her distaste for sex in general than an aversion to men. She once wrote, “Marriage is the best cure for love, and the marriage bed is its tomb.”
While everyone was talking about Christina’s odd habits and ambiguous sexuality, they completely ignored the most dangerous of her interests: a budding Catholicism. Like her compatriots, Christina was raised Lutheran, and, as queen, she was also nominally the head of the Church of Sweden. At this time in Sweden, Catholicism was punishable by banishment, torture, and death—even for the queen. But Christina was undeterred (or perhaps encouraged). Her attraction to Catholicism was multifold—many of the scholars she’d brought to court practiced that faith, she liked the church’s strict hierarchy, and she appreciated its tradition of learning.
At the same time, Christina was growing bored of being queen. But in 1650, the year she declared she would never marry, she was officially crowned at her coronation ceremony, which had been put off for lack of funds. Yet even as she was being feted, she was contemplating abdication. She hated the restraints that her duties placed on her freedom. The crown was bankrupt, owing in part to her poor management, and the country was suffering from widespread famine, the result of a brutally cold winter. Discontent with the new monarch pervaded the royal court, but Christina would brook no criticisms.
It’s no surprise that Christina wanted to abdicate, but given her unwavering belief in her own greatness, it’s surprising that she did. In 1653, she decla
red her intention to give up the throne but retain the title of queen. (She kept her plans to convert to herself.) Amazingly, the Swedish parliament agreed to her demands, which also included land and income. And so on June 6, 1654, with a ceremony at a castle in Uppsala, Christina gave up her crown.
POSTABDICATION VACATION
Christina’s impatience to leave was obvious. She cleared out of Uppsala the same day she abdicated, even before the banquet celebrating her cousin’s coronation had ended. Making for Denmark, she put on the men’s clothes she would prefer to wear for the rest of her life, shaved her head, slapped on a men’s wig, and strapped on a sword. “Free at last!” she supposedly exclaimed. “Out of Sweden, and I hope I never come back!”
She could have traveled in state by ship wherever she wanted to go, but Christina relished the hard-riding dusty overland approach, especially because such behavior was mildly shocking for a woman at the time (which seems to have become her MO from then on). She eventually made her way to Brussels, where she converted to Catholicism; from there, she went to Rome for her first audience with the pope. Just as she’d wasted no time casting off Lutheranism, Christina quickly engaged in some un-Catholic behavior. The night of her conversion, she was overheard making fun of transubstantiation, which she’d just sworn an oath to respect. She had a habit of talking in church. and her taste for nude paintings and sculptures had little to do with the contemplation of divinity.
Christina was also hemorrhaging money. Ensconced in a borrowed villa in Rome, she was so broke she couldn’t afford to pay her servants, who took to stealing the silver. Even more scandalously, she had fallen in love with Cardinal Decio Azzolino, the pope’s young, clever, not-hard-to-look-at representative. For a short time, she even stopped wearing men’s clothes in favor of dresses, which were cut so low as to earn her a reprimand from the pontiff. Azzolino was seemingly in love with Christina as well, and rumors abounded that she’d borne him a child. In reality, the two probably never slept together, despite all her naughty talk and the claim by her former employee that she was “the greatest whore in the world.”
By now Christina had turned to other worldly matters, including political intrigue. She set her sights on becoming a real queen again by taking the throne of Naples, the southern Italian kingdom, France and Spain were perpetually squabbling over. In early 1656, Christina secretly agreed with French spymaster Cardinal Jules Mazarin to take the Naples throne, with the help of 4,000 French soldiers, and keep it warm for young Philip of Anjou. Excited, she bustled up to the top of Castel Sant’ Angelo and fired off a cannon … only she’d forgotten to aim, and the cannonball lodged itself in the side of a building. Oops.
But political winds shift, and within a year and a half, the plan to make Christina the queen of Naples was shelved. She took out her anger and frustration on one of her own: Gian-Rinaldo Monaldeschi, her master of the horse (an accurate appellation because she really did have just the one horse). While in France awaiting word from Mazarin about the Naples plan, Christina discovered that Monaldeschi was writing letters containing all kinds of evil gossip about her. On November 10, 1657, she pronounced him guilty of treason and ordered her men to execute him that same day. She may have been a queen without a country, but she was still a monarch and therefore had the right of judgment over her “subjects,” including Monaldeschi. Though his murder was legal, it was cruel and horrifying. The pope, once so pleased with his queenly convert, denounced her as a barbarian and refused to receive her in Rome.
At only 32 years old, Christina had worn out the goodwill of most of Europe’s political powers. Her occasional forays into world politics were met with smirks, and she ended up spending much of her time in a garden at her villa in Rome. By the end of her life, she cut a small, portly figure in her men’s clothing, short hair, and wispy lady whiskers. For a woman who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an intellectual, a leader, and a political force, it must have been galling to know that she was viewed as faintly ridiculous.
That is, if she ever realized it. The somewhat admirable thing about Christina was that, throughout her life, she steadfastly believed the myth of her own importance. In her unfinished autobiography she wrote, “My talents and my virtues raise me above the rest of mankind.” When she died in April 1689, her will revealed just how inflated her ego truly was: she left legacies, jewels, and property to various servants, retainers, and ladies-in-waiting. In reality, little of it was hers to give.
In 1933, Greta Garbo starred in a black-and-white film about Christina’s life called Queen Christina. Though also Swedish, the lovely Garbo bears less than a passing resemblance to the hirsute Christina, and the plot bears a less than passing resemblance to the unvarnished truth. But Garbo’s representation of a defiant queen is, in its way, an accurate picture of a woman who never lost conviction in her own legend. It’s pure fiction, but it’s what Christina would have wanted to believe.
Caraboo (a.k.a. Mary Baker)
THE PHONY PRINCESS WHO HOODWINKED ENGLAND
NOVEMBER 23, 1791–DECEMBER 24, 1864
THE (FICTITIOUS) MALAYSIAN COUNTRY OF JAVASU
On the night of April 3, 1817, the overseer of the poor in the English village of Almondsbury, a tiny cluster of houses near Bristol, encountered what must have been one of the weirdest things he’d seen in his entire provincial life. The local cobbler’s wife had come to him with a problem. Apparently, a “young Female” had walked uninvited into her cottage and indicated—by lying down on the sofa—“that it was her wish to sleep under its roof.” She could have been just a vagrant, but she didn’t speak English or any language they’d ever heard. Stymied, the overseer and the cobbler’s wife thought it best to put the matter before their social betters. So the neighborhood gentry, Samuel Worrall, Esq., and his American wife, Elizabeth, trekked the mile into town to figure out what the heck was going on.
MYSTERY WOMAN
What they found was a girl wearing a black gown accessorized with a black and red shawl “loosely and tastefully put on in imitation of the Asiatic costume,” according to a contemporary account. She was petite, standing only about five-foot-two, “attractive and prepossessing,” with dark hair and eyes, and appeared to be around 25 years old. She had little in her possession to offer any clue to her identity, and she communicated largely by making signs. Her behavior was particularly strange. When shown into the parlor of the inn, she seemed affected by an engraving of a pineapple on the wall and communicated to her hosts that it was a “fruit of her own country.” She prayed before drinking her tea and didn’t seem to know what a bed was.
The Worralls decided to put her up for the night at the inn, after which she was taken to St. Peter’s Hospital for the poor and vagrant in Bristol. Local residents, having heard about the strange visitor, brought around other foreigners to try to talk to her. But no one spoke her language, and the woman’s spirits seemed to deteriorate; she refused to eat or drink and barely slept. Mrs. Worrall, moved by pity, rescued the woman and installed her in the family’s townhouse. Through a bit of pantomime, Mrs. Worrall managed to learn the unfortunate creature’s name: Caraboo.
Despite this breakthrough, the Worralls were still no closer to figuring out where Caraboo came from or what had happened to her. Finally, after two weeks, a piece of luck arrived: a Portuguese man, who just happened to be in the area and had been to Malaysia, heard about the lost young woman and stopped by to meet her. Miraculously, he could understand what she was trying to tell them.
Caraboo’s story unfolded in one long dramatic narrative, punctuated by wild hand gestures and weeping. Her Chinese father was a man of rank; her Malaysian mother was murdered by cannibals. While walking in her gardens on her island home, Javasu in the East Indies, she was kidnapped by the crew of the horrible pirate captain Chee-min. Gagged and bound hand and foot, she was dragged aboard their filthy vessel; her father attempted to swim after it, and Caraboo herself fought like a tiger, killing one of Chee-min’s men and injuring ano
ther. But all to no avail. After eleven days aboard the pirate ship, she was sold to the captain of a brig making for Europe. Months later, the brig entered Bristol Channel, and she decided to make a swim for it. On dry land, she traded clothes with an Englishwoman and spent the next six weeks wandering the countryside before she was taken in by the kindly Worralls.
In the two months that followed this revelation, Princess Caraboo of Javasu was treated as a visiting royal, ensconced at the Worralls’ comfortable country home near Almondsbury. Her hosts continued to make every effort to learn more about her, and she obliged, divulging as many details as their limited shared language could allow. She recounted that her mother, before her untimely death at the hands (and teeth) of cannibals, wore a gold chain that extended from her pierced nose to her right temple; her father had three other wives, was carried on a sedan chair, and wore peacock feathers in his hat and a gold chain signifying his rank. The greeting customs of her land involved prostrating oneself; her father’s servants played a kind of clarinet with a built-in harp; the black cannibals, whom she called “Boogoos,” cut off the arms and heads of white people to roast and eat.
Every day, the pretty princess became more theatrical. She carried a bow and arrow slung across her back, which she could fire off with great accuracy while at a full run, and a wooden stick at her right side in imitation of a sword. She prayed to “Allah Tallah” and worshipped the rising sun from the rooftops once a week, as well as the lake every time she passed it. She drank only water and ate only food that she’d prepared herself (she was “partial to curry”). She was extremely cautious around men, refusing to allow them to take her hand; if they brushed against her, she would change her clothes.
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