It says much for the senators’ patriotic spirit, or perhaps for their fear of Poles and popery, that they decided to forgo this right and give their support to a continuing Vasa dynasty. But, although the Senate stood unanimously behind the little ‘King’, she was not so quickly accepted by the men of the Riksdag, a socially more diverse group with differing views of the perils facing their homeland. The Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, comprised four Estates: the clergy, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants. It was among these last, as Gustav Adolf had feared, that opposition to a female ruler now proved strongest. The story is told that, in March 1633, when the Riksdag was assembled to affirm Christina’s succession to the throne, the marshal was interrupted in the middle of his address by a member of the peasants’ Estate, a man bearing the almost symbolically Swedish name of Lars Larsson. The peasants, it seemed, were not convinced by the senators’ arguments. ‘Who is this girl?’ Larsson demanded. ‘We don’t know her. We’ve never even seen her.’ Larsson was seconded by a growing number of the men, and the child was sent for. Happily for her, and for the senators, Christina’s resemblance to her father was clear. Larsson recognized at once the great King’s forehead, his blue eyes, and, starting out from the solemn little face, his long, distinctive nose. The succession was assured. Christina was unanimously acclaimed Elected Queen and Hereditary Princess of Sweden – ‘elected’ as a warning to the Polish Vasas that their hereditary rights would not be enough to claim a Swedish throne.
The little blonde-headed girl, just six years old, now bore the titles of Queen of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland, Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, the last owing to the Peace of Stolbova concluded with the Russians a few years before. If Christina’s own story is to be believed, she bore them all, even at this early age, with appropriate aplomb. She did not really understand what was happening, she writes, but nonetheless she was delighted to see all the great men of the land – among them the Count Palatine, Johann Kasimir – on their knees at her feet, kissing her hand. Her delight is understandable, for Johann Kasimir was her uncle, and she had already spent a good deal of time in his castle at Stegeborg, in his care, no doubt kindly, but also under his no doubt authoritative eye. Here was a reversal indeed.
Christina has left a description, addressed to God, of the first convening of the Riksdag in 1633, following her acclamation. Before all the men of the four Estates, she ascended the throne of her great father:
The people were amazed by my grand manner, playing the role of a Queen already. I was only little, but on the throne I had such an air, such a grand appearance, that it inspired respect and fear in everyone…You had planted on my forehead this mark of greatness…Everyone said, ‘How can it be that a child inspires such feelings in us after we have seen Gustav Adolf on the throne?’ 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. I never went to sleep during all the long ceremonies and all the speeches I had to sit through. Other children have been seen going to sleep or crying on occasions like this, but I received all the different signs of homage like a grown-up person, who knows they are his due…I remember very well being told all this, and being very pleased with myself about it.4
Writing in her later years, Christina admitted that ‘it doesn’t take much to admire a child, and even less a child of the great Gustav, and perhaps flattery has exaggerated all this’. But in fact ‘all this’ reflects an idea that was to remain absolutely consistent throughout her life, the idea that sovereignty was something which she carried within herself. For Christina, kingship was a personal attribute which had nothing to do with the rights and regalia of monarchy. Her right to rule, she believed, was innate; she could not be divested of it. God Himself had planted ‘this mark of greatness’ on her forehead, and even in her childhood, it had inspired ‘respect and fear’ in all who saw it.
A large delegation of diplomats from Muscovy supposedly observed this inborn sovereignty at about the same time, and, we are told, it left them quaking in their fur-lined boots. The Russians had arrived to offer their condolences on the King’s death and to extend a formal greeting to the new monarch; they had also to ensure that the peace which Gustav Adolf had made with them at Stolbova, after eight years of fighting, would now be ratified.5 According to Christina’s ‘little story’, the regents were anxious that their six-year-old Queen would not be able to endure the rigours of the formal reception with the necessary gravitas:
I was such a child that they thought the Russians would frighten me with their strange clothes and their wild manners. They told me not to be frightened, and I was quite stung by this, in fact quite annoyed. Why should I be frightened, I said. Oh, they said, the Russians were dressed very differently from us. They had great big beards, and they were terrible-looking, and there were lots of them. As it happened, two of the regents themselves had big beards, and I laughed and said to them, Why should I be frightened by their beards? Haven’t you got big beards, too? ‘I’m not afraid of you, so why should I be afraid of them? Just give me the proper instructions, and leave it all to me.6
And when the Russians finally approached the little Queen, seated on her throne, looking ‘so assured and so majestic’, they felt ‘what all men feel when they approach something that is greater than they are’.
Closer to the truth, no doubt, is Christina’s subsequent remark that all her people were ‘overjoyed’ with her behaviour, admiring her delightedly ‘as one admires the little games of a beloved child’. Perhaps, despite her later, inverted interpretation of the event, she was herself awed into good behaviour by the strange-looking visitors and the solemnity of the occasion. Or perhaps she was induced to behave herself by the ‘magnificent presents’ which the Russians had brought for her, ‘according to their custom’. They were rewarded in any case with the ratification they sought, and were ‘sent off with the usual tokens’.
The ratification itself had been agreed by Christina’s regents, the ‘five great old men’ who had accepted the charge of government until their little Queen should reach her eighteenth birthday. Though it had been a mighty blow, Gustav Adolf’s death entailed no difficult transition for those who governed the country. During the King’s frequent absences on campaign, the regular business of government had been left in the hands of ten nominated men of the Senate, and now, despite their loss, they adapted easily to the new situation. The King himself had chosen five of them to form a regency in the event of his death, five noblemen who were also to hold the five great offices of state: Grand Chancellor, Grand Treasurer, Grand Marshal, Grand Admiral, and High Steward. The government was now dominated by what amounted to Sweden’s second royal family, the Oxenstiernas. The premier office of Grand Chancellor was held by Baron Axel Oxenstierna, the late King’s close friend and undoubtedly one of the ablest administrators of the age. The Grand Treasurer was the Chancellor’s cousin, Baron Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstierna, and the High Steward his younger brother, Baron Gabriel Gustavsson Oxenstierna.7 The office of Grand Marshal was held by one of Sweden’s finest generals, Count Jakob De la Gardie; to him Gustav Adolf had lost his former love, Ebba Brahe; their son Magnus was to prove a contentious figure during Christina’s own reign. The Grand Admiral was Christina’s uncle, Baron Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, illegitimate half-brother of the late King. On his broad soldier’s shoulders, and on those of his four fellow senators, the burden of government now lay.
Christina herself has left us a picture of her regents. Of Axel Oxenstierna, primus inter pares, she writes with respect and affection, indeed almost with awe: he was, she says, a man ‘of great capacity, who knew the strengths and weaknesses of every state in Europe, a wise and prudent man, immensely capable, and greathearted’.8 Tireless in the affairs of state, he nevertheless always found time to read, so continuing the studious habits of his youth. She notes that he was ‘as sober as a man can be, in a country and at a time when that virtue was
unknown’, and adds that the Grand Chancellor was a great sleeper, by his own admission having spent the first sleepless night in his life after the death of his beloved friend and King. Christina describes him as an ambitious but loyal man, and incorruptible, if a little too ‘slow and phlegmatic’ for her taste, but she loved him, she says, ‘like a second father’.
The Chancellor’s cousin, Gabriel Bengtsson, Sweden’s Grand Treasurer, Christina regarded as ‘upstanding’, and ‘capable enough’ of his high office. Of the younger Oxenstierna brother, Gabriel Gustavsson, now High Steward, she writes that he was well liked and well spoken, but in the natural way of the Swedes, without the burden of much erudition, since he had ‘only a smattering of Latin’. But he was, she adds consolatorily, ‘a very good man’. The Grand Marshal, Jakob De la Gardie, is described as able and personally courageous; this pre-eminent soldier had distinguished himself in the Swedish campaigns against Poland and Russia. Christina notes that his personality was direct, even brusque, but that he liked to chat. He had been a favourite with her father, she says, and was always competing with Axel Oxenstierna for the King’s favour. In Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, the Grand Admiral, ‘bastard brother of the late King and my uncle’, Christina recognized ‘a good, brave, old-fashioned man, a good Swede, bright enough’, but worn down by the twelve years he had spent in irons in a Polish prison, refusing to abjure his Lutheran faith for the despised Catholicism of his captors.9 He was ‘absolutely devoted to the house of Vasa,’ she writes, ‘and he loved me like his own child’.
For the next twelve years, the ‘five great old men’ were to rule in their little Queen’s name, though in fact Christina may not have been intended to rule at all, or at least not to rule alone. The steps which her father had taken to ensure her succession to the throne had been, as it were, an emergency precaution, anxiously put in place as he himself prepared to go back to the war from which he felt he would not return. The pious King, almost fearful of his extravagant successes in the sight of ‘a jealous God’, had had premonitions of his own death. The succession must be assured if civil war, or worse, were not to overtake his homeland. A long period of regency was certain, but in time the girl would marry; her husband would rule alongside her, or even in her place. Besides, Sweden’s name was now great in Europe; Gustav Adolf himself had made it so. A king’s daughter was an opportunity incarnate to forge new alliances, and shift the balance of power.
Negotiations for the little girl’s betrothal had consequently been in place for some time. The chosen prince was her own first cousin, Friedrich Wilhelm, her senior by seven years, the eldest son of the Elector of Brandenburg, and now, in the summer of 1633, thirteen years of age.10 The boy was Protestant, and seemed promising, and, crucially, he stood to inherit the duchy of Pomerania, whose long coasts were strategically important for both trade and warfare. Pomerania was now, insecurely, in Swedish hands – Gustav Adolf had concluded a treaty with its Archduke Boguslav XIV – but Boguslav’s heir was the Elector Georg Wilhelm, and in time the vital Pomeranian coasts would pass to his son, Friedrich Wilhelm. A marriage between Friedrich Wilhelm and Christina would thus ensure Sweden’s continuing access to them. It would make Brandenburg a safe neighbour and, moreover, would serve as a mighty cornerstone for the new bloc of Protestant powers once envisaged by Gustav Adolf, and now promoted by Christina’s regents. Above all, the marriage would give Sweden at last the almost mythical dominium maris baltici, the mastery of the Baltic Sea which had lain at the heart of Swedish policy for generations.
The King had promoted the match with some energy, travelling to Berlin himself, when Christina was only four years old, to suggest the project personally to the Elector.11 Maria Eleonora, too, had been very much in favour of it. Her nephew, it was planned, would abjure his Calvinist religion and become a Lutheran; this had been agreed by the Elector’s own theologian. The boy would move to Sweden for the rest of his education and for his military training, learning the language and the ways of the Swedes while still in his impressionable years.
The Berlin meeting had not borne much fruit. The Elector distrusted Gustav Adolf; he had not wanted his sister to marry the King, and he did not want his son to marry the King’s daughter. Unwilling to state the matter so plainly, he prevaricated: the religious clause was objectionable, he said; he had hoped instead for some kind of union between Calvinist and Lutheran believers. Besides, his son was too young to be sent away from home, and Gustav Adolf might yet have a son of his own. Privately, Georg Wilhelm had sought the advice of other German princes, most of them still smarting from the Swedes’ riding roughshod over their own territories in the recent years of fighting. Their advice was consistent: the Elector should not pursue the plan; the pair were too young, and the political situation might be different by the time they had come of age. The Swedish climate was too harsh, and the Swedes themselves ‘not very nice people’, who would not welcome a German king. Besides, Sweden’s enmity with the Holy Roman Empire might drag Brandenburg into the same fearful morass. And the marriage would make Sweden much too powerful; the German princes, and many others even within Sweden itself, feared that Gustav Adolf would use it as a stepping-stone to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite encouragement from his own Chancellor and renewed attempts on the part of the Swedes, the Elector had decided to let the matter drift.
At the end of 1632, when the news arrived of Gustav Adolf’s death at Lützen, the Danish King Kristian IV had decided to try his luck in arranging a marriage for his own son, the Archduke Ulrich, now in his early twenties, to the little Queen of Sweden. It was a second attempt on Kristian’s part; the previous year, his hopeful embassy had been rejected by the Swedish King himself. Now, it seemed, a window had opened in the house of his old enemy, through which he might insert some Danish influence. A measure of dissension among the land’s new governors would serve his interests well; an official embassy of condolence would provide the perfect opportunity. Barely a week after the news had arrived, his envoy received instructions to seek a private audience in Wolgast with the late King’s grieving widow.
Kristian hoped, at the very least, to create a rift between Maria Eleonora and Sweden’s five regents, already in office for some time on account of the late King’s long absences on campaign. Early in the new year, Chancellor Oxenstierna, still in Brandenburg, received a letter from the Danish King, relaying his renewed hopes of the match. Oxenstierna, unpleasantly surprised, replied that Christina was too young for any marriage plans to be made for her as yet, and added that there were ‘many other considerations’ besides. But he took the precaution of writing at the same time to the regents in Stockholm to ensure that, if consulted, they would give the same reasons for declining Kristian’s offer. The Danes were near neighbours, after all, and their alliance was very recent. It would be unwise to offend them, for they might also prove to be uncertain friends.
Meanwhile, amid the increasing chaos of the castle at Wolgast, Maria Eleonora was able to master her grief sufficiently to begin negotiations of her own with the Danish envoy. Though Friedrich Wilhelm was her nephew, that did not ensure her constancy now to his cause. As fervently as she had wished for the match while her husband was alive to promote it, so now, in the first months of her widowhood, she turned determinedly against it. She decided, or was persuaded, that it would never do; Christina was the daughter of a king: only a king’s son could be a suitable husband for her.
An anxious Chancellor Oxenstierna wrote to Wolgast, urging the widowed Queen to caution. Denmark was Sweden’s oldest enemy, he reminded her. The two would never be brought together ‘without great bloodshed or the complete extinction of one or the other’. The Queen should speak to the envoy, or indeed anyone else, ‘only in the most general, non-committal terms’.12 She replied, duplicitously, that she had ‘given no yes or no’ to anyone. But throughout the winter and the spring, she kept constant company with the Danes, and the rumour spread that the young Archduke Ulrich himself was soon to visit Wol
gast.
Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 5