In April, at home in Stockholm, the Senate met to discuss the matter. There could be no better prince than Friedrich Wilhelm, said the Count Per Brahe. Sweden could find no better supporter, and the marriage would make Sweden formidable among all nations. On the contrary, said the Chancellor’s cousin, Gabriel Oxenstierna, it would be better to choose a poor Swedish nobleman who would be more dependent on the Senate. Foreigners in the past had only tyrannized the country. He would rather have a local man. But, said Per Banér, if the foreigner were the husband of a Swedish princess, he would not tyrannize anyone. No foreign ruler had ever married a Swedish princess before. Quite true, said Jakob De la Gardie. A Swedish consort would only sow dissension, having his own support among the local people. However, said Gabriel Oxenstierna, a Swede would be more easily constrained by the law. On the other hand, a royal marriage was an excellent way for a nation to increase its power, and certainly a connection with Brandenburg would be politically advantageous, particularly in relation to Poland. It might be wise, then, said Per Brahe, to come to a decision soon. If the Brandenburgers thought they were being led around by the nose, they would turn their backs on Sweden and embrace the Poles instead.
A letter from the Chancellor, favouring Friedrich Wilhelm, was then read once again to the assembled noblemen. They were duly impressed. Per Banér noted that the boy’s father had been very friendly to Sweden, at least since the beginning of 1632, and Admiral Klaes Fleming wondered aloud whether it would be wise to overrule the wishes and plans of His Holy Royal Majesty, their late lamented King. Various senators now remembered that a Brandenburg marriage would keep Pomerania in Swedish hands jure perpetuo. That would be good security against the Dutch, and against the city of Jülich as well. They reassured one another that Friedrich Wilhelm would have a duty to appoint all his officials exclusively from Swedish families. All things considered, the Elector’s son was to be preferred to any other foreign prince.13
In short, the little Queen was to serve as a chattel in the crudest old terms. One senator did remark that she might not actually want to marry Friedrich Wilhelm when she grew up; at only six years of age, she could hardly be consulted now. This was agreed, and a message sent to Axel Oxenstierna in Berlin, conceding him full powers of negotiation, but suggesting that he proceed slowly. He took the senators at their word, and kept the discussions going for a further fifteen years.
In the meantime, the Danish assault continued. From the Brandenburg court, the Chancellor relayed his growing concern to the senators at home: the Danes, he wrote, were trying to bribe the ‘weak women’ in Wolgast with presents and flattery, ‘though I am sure that the Queen would never disgrace Sweden, in word or deed’. And as a gallant, if improbable, afterthought, he added, ‘I am equally sure that of her daughter’s marriage Her Majesty has spoken little or not at all’.14 He urged the senators nonetheless to send one or two of their number quickly to Wolgast to oversee matters there – the King’s body had still to be brought back to Sweden – and at the end of May 1633, his own cousin Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstierna, Sweden’s Grand Treasurer, presented his hawk-eyed compliments to Her disconcerted Majesty.
It was just as well, for Maria Eleonora was soon declaring, ‘in decided tones’, that the match would never be made between Friedrich Wilhelm and her only daughter: the prince was a Calvinist, and they were too closely related. The first objection could be quickly overruled; the Queen’s own Calvinist father, after all, had permitted his wife and children to be Lutheran.15 Besides, the Reformed Church in Brandenburg had already given its consent to the boy’s abjuration. The second objection might have appeared more pressing, but in fact no one seems to have been concerned about it at all.
From Maria Eleonora’s point of view, in fact, both objections were simply red herrings. The truth was that she liked the Danish Archduke, and she wanted her daughter to marry the son of a king. Moreover, it was a golden opportunity to undermine the powerful Oxenstierna family, for whom she bore little affection. When Gabriel Oxenstierna reminded her that the Brandenburg marriage had been the deeply held wish of her late husband, she replied that this was not so at all; his letters and envoys and personal visit to the Elector had been no more than a diplomatic tactic, unelucidated then by the King, as now by his widow. Besides, she said, it was her right and her duty as a mother to arrange the marriage. The Baron Gabriel pointed out that the little Queen’s betrothal was a political issue which affected the country in the most profound way. The Swedes should not raise Danish hopes, nor make any promises. It was a matter for the Senate and the Riksdag. It was they who had the greatest interest in the question, as well as the most important voice. Maria Eleonora insisted that her interest as a mother was much greater. Baron Gabriel replied that no arrangement would be ratified, in any case, until both children had come of age and could append their own consent to the match; the Queen Mother should make no promises to anyone, he warned, because the Riksdag would not support it. If, in spite of this, Her Majesty did take steps prejudicial to Sweden’s interests, he added, the ‘warm affection’ that her subjects felt for her would be likely to cool, and there might even be conflict over her daughter’s right to inherit the throne at all.
This altercation, with its thinly veiled threats, does not seem to have made the slightest difference to Maria Eleonora. She had little to lose, in any case. The ‘warm affection’ in which her subjects supposedly held her was a myth, as both she and the Baron well knew. She was in fact exceedingly unpopular among the Swedes. From her earliest days as a young bride, she had made perfectly clear her disdain for her new home, frozen solid in winter, culturally primitive whatever the weather. Surrounding herself with exclusively German attendants, she had aroused the envy and resentment of the Swedish courtiers. Her new kinsmen, defensive and offended, had quickly reciprocated her dislike.
Now, however, she was at least cautious enough to lie to them. She wrote to Axel Oxenstierna declaring that she would not commit Christina to marrying anyone before she had reached the age of twelve and could give her own consent. She did not want her daughter to reproach her, she said, with having forced her into a marriage during her minority, adding disingenuously that she would welcome the Chancellor’s guidance in the matter. Once back in Stockholm, she informed the Elector’s envoy that she favoured the Brandenburg marriage after all. There was no one, she said, to whom she would rather give her daughter than her nephew Friedrich Wilhelm, but the problem was that ‘some people’ were against it. The Chancellor, she claimed, had plans to marry Christina to his own son, Erik, but, in a neat arabesque on her objection to Friedrich Wilhelm himself, she declared that she would never allow her daughter to marry a man of lower social position than she was herself.
By the beginning of 1634, six months after her regal reception of the Russian ambassadors, the betrothal of the now seven-year-old Christina to her Brandenburg cousin was understood throughout Europe to be a fait accompli. Resigned shoulders shrugged in Copenhagen, and an anxious Emperor paced the floors of his palace in Vienna. Only in Stockholm and Berlin did doubt remain, for the two protagonists had in fact reached no agreement at all.
Christina herself was never to mention her father’s plan for the Brandenburg marriage, for it clearly indicated that he had seen no particular ‘mark of greatness’ planted on her childish forehead. He had not intended her to rule alone, nor indeed perhaps even to rule at all. She chose to dwell instead on the instructions that he had left for her upbringing, exaggerating them to accommodate her own profound need to be accepted, not as the little Queen of Sweden, but as its divinely appointed King.
In the two years preceding the King’s death, Christina had seen equally little of her father and her mother. Whether following her husband on campaign or visiting her family in Brandenburg, Maria Eleonora appears to have given little thought to the child left behind. ‘My mother could not bear the sight of me,’ Christina was to write, ‘because I was a girl, and she said I was ugly.’16 Portraits of Christina in
her early childhood depict nonetheless a charming little girl, though most are conventional, and all are no doubt flattering. It is true, however, that she was slightly deformed. As a baby, she had apparently been dropped, and her injuries had left her noticeably lopsided in the upper body, with one shoulder higher than the other; the portraits show her in tactful semi-profile. She herself was later to claim that this ‘dropping’ was no less than an attempt on her life commanded by Catholic sympathizers among her cousins, and at times even suggested that it had been her mother’s own idea. Whatever the truth, the resulting deformity cannot have endeared her to her beauty-loving mother. Had she wished to, however, Maria Eleonora might have seen herself reflected in the appearance of her only child; many extant portraits suggest that Christina owed not only her high forehead and her large, bright eyes to her mother as much as to her father, but also her distinctive, large nose. Like her mother, too, she was of delicate build. The difference between the two, it seemed, was not so much in feature as in nature.
For in those talents most evident in childhood, Christina was her father’s child. In her little person she carried a keen reminder of Gustav Adolf’s own physical hardiness, together with his able and enquiring mind. In both respects she seemed to those about her the very opposite of her frivolous, fluffily pretty mother, whose extravagant behaviour, untempered by any worthy achievement, had earned only disdain. The King had left a trace of his hot blood, too, pulsing in his daughter’s veins; her tendency to emotional outbursts, complete with tearfulness and violence, was a legacy of his own volatile temperament.
In the absence of both mother and father, Christina had spent most of her time with her family of Palatine cousins, who lived in unpretentious comfort at Stegeborg Castle, to the south of Stockholm. Her aunt was the Princess Katarina, the King’s elder half-sister, and her uncle Count Johann Kasimir of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, who had once accompanied Gustav Adolf to Berlin to meet the young Maria Eleonora. The Princess Katarina, aged then in her later forties, was the mother of five surviving children, the youngest still in his infancy; Christina describes her aunt as a woman of ‘consummate virtue and wisdom’. She had settled in easily with the other children; among this lively half dozen, she was fourth in age, with two little countesses, Maria Euphrosyne and Eleonora Katarina, a year or so either side of her. Her eldest cousin, some ten years older, was the Countess Kristina Magdalena, and there was a young boy, too, Karl Gustav, Christina’s senior by four years, and the baby, Adolf.
Her father’s untimely death had wrenched Christina from this comfortable environment and installed her against her will in her mother’s bizarre and gloomy apartments at Nyköping Castle; here she had been closeted for a year or more. ‘It would have been a lovely court if it hadn’t been spoiled by the Queen Mother’s mourning,’ Christina was to complain. ‘There is no country in the world where they mourn the dead as long as they do in Sweden. They take three or four years to bury them, and then when they do, all the relatives, especially the women, weep all over again as if the person had only just died.’17 Maria Eleonora ‘played the role of grieving widow marvellously well,’ she writes, insisting at the same time that her mother’s grief was sincere. ‘But I was even more desperate than she was, because of those long dreary ceremonies and all the sad and sorry people about me. I could hardly stand it. It was far worse for me than the King’s death itself. I had been quite consoled about that for a long time, because I didn’t realize what a misfortune it was. Children who expect to inherit a throne are easily consoled for the loss of their father.’18
Consoled or not, in the midst of her mother’s melodrama, Christina fell ill with the first of many maladies attributed by contemporaries, as by later scholars, to her distressed state of mind. She developed ‘a malignant abscess in my left breast, which brought on a fever with unbearable pain. At last it burst, releasing a great flow of matter. That did me good, and in a few days I was perfectly well again.’19
After the King’s burial in June 1634, Maria Eleonora moved her court to the Tre Kronor Castle in Stockholm, near to the Riddarholm Church where her husband’s body was now entombed. Christina may have sensed a touch of theatricality in her mother’s extravagant mourning, but to the four regents who remained in Sweden, it seemed real enough. Taking advantage of the move to Stockholm, they proposed to place the child in separate apartments within the castle, but the suggestion drew forth ‘pitiful tears and cries’ from her mother. Axel Oxenstierna, writing from Germany where he had remained to continue direction of Sweden’s armies, urged the senators to insist: the child must be taken from her mother; the late King himself had warned that Maria Eleonora was not to be permitted any influence over her. The senators, it seems, were divided; some felt that the child should be left where she was; others wanted to send the Queen Mother back to Nyköping by herself. Every remonstrance with Maria Eleonora was met with fresh hysterics, so that the senators, torn between sympathy and exasperation, came to no conclusion at all; their wavering condemned the little Queen to two further miserably cloistered years. Affording her daughter no respite, Maria Eleonora did claim some at least for herself. With surprising initiative, but little persistence, she made plan after plan for elaborate memorials to her late husband. There was to be a new tomb, then a new chapel, then a new castle, then a whole new city. One French envoy, flattered to be consulted by ‘this charming woman’, recorded his delight in discussing with her ‘the finer points of every branch of architecture, of Doric and Ionic and Corinthian columns’.20 Needless to say, no stone was ever laid.
Christina, meanwhile, did what she could herself to escape. The means at her disposal were slender, but she exploited them, or so she claims, to the full. Her hours of exercise and especially of schooling became her refuge. The mother’s weakness was turned to the daughter’s profit. ‘What I endured with her,’ she writes, ‘made me turn all the more keenly to my books, and that is why I made such surprisingly good progress – I used them as a pretext to escape the Queen my mother.’21 The indecisive senators had at least been able to agree on the kind of education the child should receive; in fact, prompted by their absent Chancellor, the entire Riksdag had discussed it, and in March 1635, with Christina already eight years old, they made their conclusions known. Their priorities are revealing. The little Queen must learn, states their preamble, ‘to speak well of her subjects and of the present state of the country and of the regency’. Though she must learn something of foreign manners and customs ‘as becomes her station’, she must also ‘practise and observe Swedish ones and be taught them carefully’. She must learn table manners, too, they declared, without, however, specifying whether these were to be homegrown or of some foreign variety.
The men of the Riksdag were clearly anxious that Maria Eleonora’s widely known disdain for all things Swedish should not be inculcated in her daughter. Other foreign errors were also to be strenuously avoided, notably those of popery and Calvinism. The ‘art of government’ was acknowledged to be important for her to learn, but ‘as this sort of knowledge is learnt rather with age and experience than by the studies of childhood, and as the knowledge of God and his worship is the true foundation of all else, it is most salutary that she should first and foremost study the word of God, the articles of faith and all the Christian virtues’.22 She must also learn ‘to write well and to calculate quickly’, and she must read only those books which had been approved by learned men of suitably moral temper. The programme for her education was to be reviewed as the little Queen progressed.
Gustav Adolf had also been concerned to prevent Maria Eleonora from influencing their daughter adversely. From his campaigns abroad, he had sent back detailed instructions about her upbringing in the event of his own death. The Queen was to be excluded from any regency, and three named men were to be appointed to oversee the child’s education. Her two governors were to be Axel Banér and Gustav Horn, both senators. As tutor she was to have Johan Matthiae, a theologian and former schoolmaster, and the
late King’s own chaplain. The two governors were both expert in the use of arms, and both were hard drinkers, but otherwise they were very different men, Banér apparently something of a rough diamond with a penchant for pretty women, Horn more of a courtier, fluent in foreign languages and an experienced diplomat. The tutor, Johan Matthiae, well born and well educated, had studied not only in Sweden’s own university at Uppsala, but also in the German lands as well as in Holland, France, and England. He was a man of calm and kindly temperament, liberal in his thinking, especially in religious matters; in this he reflected, as he had no doubt helped to form, the views of his late King.
Unlike the ‘five great old men’ who comprised her regency, Christina’s governors and tutor were young, all in their thirties at the time of their appointment, Gustav Horn indeed barely so. Two at least had been Gustav Adolf’s beloved friends, Banér even sharing the King’s bedchamber before his marriage and afterwards, whenever the Queen was absent. Johan Matthiae, too, had accompanied the King on campaign. Christina later described them all as ‘capable, good men’. She appreciated the straightforward honesty of Banér, and admired Horn’s foreign polish, but for her tutor she reserved a special fondness. She called him ‘Papa’, and he quickly became the confidant of all her little secrets, a steady and reassuring presence in her difficult young life.
The late King’s choice of guardians, according to their little charge herself, writing many years later, was ‘as happy as it could be, given that none of them were Catholic’. Together, they formed a vital counterweight to the extremities of Maria Eleonora’s court, and provided an outlet for the frustrated energies of a bright and active child. But the Queen Mother’s continuing obsessive behaviour during these years destroyed any chance for a real affection to develop between herself and her daughter. Though Christina claims to have loved her mother ‘tenderly enough’, her respect for her began to fade, she says, when she ‘seized me, in spite of my tutors, and tried to lock me up with her in her apartment’.23 Three years were to pass before her eventual release, in the summer of 1636, on the return of Axel Oxenstierna to Sweden. More determined and less manipulable than his brother senators, the Chancellor removed Christina at once from her mother’s suffocating embrace, and placed her again in the care of the Princess Katarina, with whose two younger daughters she now continued her schooling. The Queen Mother herself was also promptly removed, and placed under comfortable but tedious guard in the island castle of Gripsholm at Mariefred, some fifty miles from Stockholm. Like her own once imprisoned daughter, Maria Eleonora would do her best to escape.
Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 6