Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric

by Buckley, Veronica

  Love and Learning

  Christina was once more in the safe and steady care of her Aunt Katarina. With her tenth birthday approaching, she was now taking her lessons in the company of her two cousins, Maria Euphrosyne, aged eleven, and Eleonora Katarina, aged nine. The three girls seem to have shared an easy friendship, though Christina did complain – to their father – that her elder cousin was falling behind in her schoolwork; it would be a good idea, she suggested, if he made her work a bit harder.

  The late King had left instructions that his daughter was to receive ‘the education of a prince’, and to take plenty of exercise, an uncommon emphasis for a girl of the time. He had no doubt seen that, even as a little child, she was physically very active, and perhaps, too, he had wished to distance her from the precious femininity which her mother had evinced. Christina was to be trained to only two conventionally feminine habits: modesty and virtue, though in the former, at least, she was to fail spectacularly. But her schooling with the two little countesses suggests that her academic training was not exceptional for a girl of her position. Though she may have been more capable than either of her cousins, they all read the same texts and wrote the same inkblotted exercises.

  In later years, Christina’s accomplishments were to be the subject of a good deal of extravagant praise, not least from her own pen. It is certain that she was a clever and inquisitive child who enjoyed learning. She welcomed this ‘pretext to escape the Queen my mother’, and claimed that by the age of eight she was already studying twelve hours every day ‘with an inconceivable joy’, though she does not say that by the same age she was given to wild exaggeration. Seen against the background of prevailing standards, her schooling was very good indeed, for until the most recent years, education in Sweden had been deplorable. Only a few years before Christina’s birth, with the country at war with Poland, there was not a single diplomat available with enough Latin to conduct negotiations with the enemy. Many local officials, it seems, ‘could not even write their names’.1 Older men had gone abroad for their education, if indeed they had received any, generally to Leiden, or to one of the German universities. Only the clergy had been schooled at home. A young man might study theology or biblical languages in Sweden, but none of the ‘modern’ subjects of law, history, politics, mathematics, or science; all these Gustav Adolf had introduced as part of his great internal reforms of the 1620s. He had established grammar schools, too, and revived Sweden’s only university, at Uppsala, with endowments of land and with books and scientific instruments, the booty of his German campaigns. But progress had been slow: in 1627 the university had been able to boast just four history students, with five newcomers for law, and two for medicine. Even by 1632, at a vital period of the war in Germany, there had been no one capable of serving as secretary to any of Sweden’s generals in the field – only theologians were available. And Christina was ten years old before the first lektor in modern languages was appointed; German being regarded as almost a native tongue, the new appointee taught French.

  In the light of this situation, it is not surprising that Christina’s contemporaries were impressed by her educational accomplishments. The regents, apprehensive of her mother’s legacy, were relieved to find her a clever and studious child. As she grew to womanhood, foreign diplomats and other visitors were quick to praise, though the scholars who later came to Stockholm were generally disappointed, finding her brilliant reputation undeserved. But if her fame eventually promised more than she merited, it was not for want of good schooling. The late King had prescribed for his daughter a broad humanist education, progressive in some details, but on the whole a legacy of the great Renaissance tradition in which he himself had been brought up. Gustav Adolf’s tutors had been independently minded men, and this in turn did much to shape the education that Christina herself now received. Like her father, she was inquisitive, strong-willed, and eager to learn, but unlike him, she had no particular enthusiasm for the ‘Christian virtues’ which were expected to be the basis of all her learning. By her own admission, the only parts of the scriptures she cared for were the Book of Wisdom and ‘the works of Solomon’ – in short, the most secular parts. She remained unmoved by the Gospels, and her lack of devotion to – indeed, lack of any interest in – the person of Jesus Christ was to remain a curious blank in her dramatic religious development. Nevertheless, for a few years during her girlhood, she was intensely pious, even to the point of bigotry. It was hardly surprising, given the narrow brand of Lutheranism prevailing in Sweden at the time, but it also reflected Christina’s own very determined nature. A touch of self-righteousness, untempered by experience, led very naturally to dogmatism. Not least, for a girl who enjoyed confrontation, a staunch Lutheran conviction was in direct opposition to her tutor’s own evenhanded views; Johan Matthiae’s firm belief was in a future union of all Protestant creeds.

  Christina’s piety, whatever its cause, did not help her to endure the many long and dreary sermons of the Swedish Church. She hated them, she said, with ‘a deadly hatred’, though one of them did inspire her, at least temporarily, with a solid Lutheran fear of the Lord. Its subject was the Last Judgement, and it was preached every year just before Advent, and hence just before her birthday. It was a reliably ferocious tirade, full of hellfire and brimstone, and, to a sensitive and imaginative child, really terrifying. Hearing it for the first time, Christina turned in frightened tears to Johan Matthiae, who comforted her with the promise that she would escape damnation and live forever in Heaven – provided she was ‘a good girl’ and applied herself properly to her lessons. Christina took the warning seriously, and did her best to behave, but the following year, on hearing the same sermon, she found it somehow less menacing. Another year later, the menace had retreated further still, so far, in fact, that she ventured to suggest to Matthiae that it was all a lot of nonsense, and not just the threats of damnation, but all the rest of the stories, too – the Resurrection of Jesus, and everything. Matthiae was alarmed, and warned her in serious tones that thinking of that kind would certainly lead her down the road to perdition. Christina respected her ‘Papa’, and loved him, too, and she said no more on the subject. But the seed of doubt had fallen on fertile ground. By the time she was out of her girlhood, Christina believed ‘nothing at all of the religion in which I was brought up’, and she later declared that all of Christianity was ‘no more than a trick played by the powerful to keep the humble people down’.

  Matthiae was a theologian and a Lutheran clergyman, but his views were liberal. He admired the great humanist tradition, and made it part of Christina’s daily lessons along with the harangues of Roman senators and the dry texts of the Swedish constitution. Christina was particularly attracted to neostoicism, a revival of ancient Stoic thought in a form compatible with Christianity – the inconvenient materialist beliefs of the Romans, for example, had been modified away. In neostoicism, she found a bridge between the Lutheran world that she was gradually abandoning and the classical deism that she was moving towards. The humanists had not gone so far, but Christina read into them what she needed to see, and for now, and for years to come, a deity unhampered by sect or priest or bible was precisely what she wanted to believe in. Besides, the earnest bravery of the neostoics was a perfect complement to the heroic classical tales that she so loved, and it encouraged her enthusiasm for the bookish, boyish virtues – mens sana in corpore sano – of the disciplined Roman Republic. In her fifteenth year, Matthiae introduced her to Lipsius’ Politica, a collection of pithy classical maxims well suited to her own rather apodictical nature. She was never to lose her taste for maxims; from those of ancient Greece and Rome she progressed to those of modern France, and in later life she wrote some of her own, happily contradicting herself with the courage of each changing conviction.

  Christina’s religious studies were conducted in German and Swedish, and also in Latin, which she had begun to study seriously. Matthiae had compiled for her a brief summary of Latin grammar, using a
s his guide Comenius’ recently published Janua linguarum reserata – The Door to Languages Opened.2 Comenius held the then revolutionary idea that lessons should be adapted to the age and ability of the pupil; he was later to produce the first teaching book which combined text with pictures.3 His innovative Latin grammar was built not around abstract rules but around the familiar objects of childhood, but despite this, Christina declared that she hated it so much she almost stopped learning Latin altogether. This she would not have been permitted to do; Latin was essential, a written and spoken lingua franca used everywhere in Christendom. Her father had learned to speak it perfectly before he could read in any language, and Christina claimed the same facility for herself, though this was probably untrue; her progress in Latin was unremarkable, and as a young girl, at least, she was reluctant to speak it. Matthiae wanted her to speak to him only in Latin, but she would not; a brief memorandum on the subject, written shortly before her tenth birthday, reveals the state of the case. In schoolgirl Latin, and using the royal ‘We’, she wrote: ‘We hereby promise to speak Latin with Our tutor from now on. We will hold Ourselves to this obligation. We know We have promised this before, and not kept Our word. But with God’s help, We will keep it this time, beginning next Monday, God willing. Written and signed by Our own hand…’4

  Whether or not she kept her promise ‘this time’ is not known, though she spoke the language well enough in later life. But if she did not like learning Latin, she did enjoy the history accessible through it, and in this she was spurred on by the Royal Librarian, Johann Freinsheim, an authority on Tacitus who taught her most of her Roman history. He seems to have taught her well, for in later years, the French ambassador noted that she seemed to have no trouble with Tacitus, ‘even the difficult passages, which I found hard myself’. But it was not the quality of Tacitus’ writing that attracted Christina. She loved the stories of the ancient world, loved reading of the heroic exploits of Caesar and Alexander, loved the tales of nobility and virtue and the unending quest for glory. They were for her a world of adventure, where bravery and fortitude triumphed, a world of danger and daring where the strong took all and the wisest man was the unflinching stoic. To her they outshone even her own great father, and in her extravagant expectations of what she herself would accomplish, she identified herself with them. Not content with reading about them, she took to writing about them, too: a brief ten pages on Caesar, and a more substantial essay on Alexander, which ran to seven drafts – very little changed from one to the next, however, and all but the first copied out in the weary hand of a court scribe. Alexander remained her greatest hero, and she lived surrounded by his exploits: even the walls of her own room in the castle were hung with tapestries depicting them. Matthiae taught her no Greek, but Christina later persuaded Freinsheim to help her study it, and found a new hero in the Persian Emperor Cyrus, brought to life in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a popular mélange of fact and fiction then widely read by schoolboys. Christina admired the faultless Cyrus, but did not seek to emulate him. Caesar and Alexander, though rougher diamonds, produced, she thought, a greater light.

  Matthiae records that by the time she was eleven, they had read together ‘the usual beginner’s Latin texts’,5 including some of Curtius’ History of Alexander the Great, which the young Diana loved especially. Christina believed that she ‘surpassed the capacity of my age and sex’, but she was very quick to exaggerate her achievements. She wrote, for example, that by the age of fourteen she had learned, ‘with a marvellous facility’, all the sciences, languages, and other studies in which she had been instructed. In the very next breath, she claimed that for modern languages, at least, she had received no instruction at all, any more than she had done for her mother tongue of Swedish. ‘I never had a teacher,’ she writes, ‘for German, French, Italian, or Spanish.’6 In fact, she had spoken German from her infancy; she had used it with her mother and her father, and it seems to have been the first language she learned to write. In French, she had regular lessons for some years. Matthiae records that he began teaching her French grammar when she was twelve years old, but she had learned to speak the language long before then. Living with her Palatine cousins had provided the occasion; they were the first family in Sweden where French was spoken at home – a decided affectation in the eyes of the other nobles, but it gave Christina an easy familiarity with the language, though, even in an age of unsettled orthography, her spelling was quite unusual. French remained her preferred language, and in later years she used it almost always, even when writing to friends and family in Sweden.

  The modern languages, in any case, were not of great interest to her during her girlhood. Her heart was in the ancient world, where all her heroes had fought their battles in field and forum. The classical texts served many purposes; they included literature and philosophy and the history that she loved, but they were also an important part of the young Queen’s political education, tried and tested examples of realpolitik from which a present-day ruler might take counsel. Christina enjoyed this aspect of her training in the ‘art of government’. She likened the ancient political feuds to games of chess in which the shrewdest manipulator took the prize, and liked to think of herself as a master of ‘dissembling’ – it was one of her favourite words – who could always outwit even the cleverest men about her, including Chancellor Oxenstierna himself. He was now spending several hours each day instructing her in practical politics and statecraft. These hours she relished: the Chancellor was a man of vast experience, who knew ‘the strengths and weaknesses of every state in Europe’, and she listened, enchanted, to his first-hand stories of battles planned and bargains struck and enemies undermined. ‘I really loved hearing him speak,’ she writes, ‘and there was no study or game or pleasure that I wouldn’t leave willingly to listen to him. By the same token, he really loved teaching me, and we would spend three or four hours or even longer together, perfectly happy with each other. And if I may say so, without undue pride, the great man was more than once forced to admire the child, so talented, so eager and so quick to learn, without fully understanding what it was that he admired – it was so rare in one so young.’7

  It is not very likely that the Chancellor’s understanding failed him now as he contemplated the talents of his young pupil. Axel Oxenstierna was among the most gifted men of his generation, and he had comfortably taken the measure of the likes of Cardinal Richelieu while keeping the upper hand, 500 miles distant, of his every opponent at home. But he was certainly pleased with Christina’s progress, reporting to the Senate with satisfaction that the young Queen was ‘not like other members of her sex. She is stout-hearted and of good understanding,’ he said, ‘to such an extent that, if she does not allow herself to be corrupted, she raises the highest hopes.’8 The Chancellor did not elucidate the nature of Christina’s possible corruption, but his reference to her ‘allowing herself’ to be corrupted suggests that he had observed some weakness or unwelcome tendency in her nature. It was no outward menace that he feared for her, but rather, it seems, the consequences of her own contradictory self. He may have been made anxious, perhaps even saddened, by the small deceits which she had begun to practise on him through her correspondence with her Palatine uncle, Johann Kasimir. The Count had once served her father as Grand Treasurer, but shortly after the King’s death, he had been given a clear hint to resign from his position and betake himself to the country. The regents and senators disliked his German origins and suspected him of harbouring too great ambitions for his elder son, Karl Gustav. Christina’s ‘wise and prudent’ uncle swallowed the insult and retired without demur, but he kept in touch with her, and she seems to have enjoyed the opportunities for petty subterfuge which his ambiguous position provided.

  As part of her training in statecraft, Christina had studied Camden’s Latin biography of Elizabeth I of England, the Virgin Queen with the ‘heart and stomach of a King’ who had overseen the defeat of the Spanish Armada fifty years before.9 The Protestant Queen Eliza
beth was widely known and admired in Sweden, and during Christina’s girlhood, memories of her were still fresh in many minds. King Erik XIV, Christina’s own great-uncle, had for many years been her suitor, and Christina’s great-aunt Cecilia had made a ‘pilgrimage of admiration’ to her court. Elizabeth’s history was heroic; like Christina, she had inherited an uncertain crown; she had bravely endured five years of imprisonment with the axeman waiting at the door, and in the cold and fearful meantime she had perfected her many accomplishments. ‘Shee was even a miracle for her learning amongst the Princes of her time,’ Camden wrote of Elizabeth. ‘Before she was seventeene yeeres of age, she understood well the Latin, French and Italian tongues.’ She had studied Greek as well, which Christina had not yet done, and she was a good musician, too. Elizabeth’s wide culture, her strength of mind, and, not least, her mastery of statecraft, had framed a golden age for her small country, which, like Christina’s Sweden, had only recently emerged on to the world’s wide stage. It was agreed that a queen like Elizabeth would be a fine successor to the great Gustav Adolf, and her glorious reign seems to have aroused Christina’s envy. In a later rant against all women rulers, she avoided mentioning the legendary English Queen, but Elizabeth’s shadow lingers nonetheless in a series of phrases anticipating the obvious interjection of her name: there have been no good women rulers, or if there have, none ‘in our present century’; women are weak ‘in soul and body and mind’, and if there have been a few strong women, well, that’s not because they were women. For Christina, the capable woman ruler was merely the exception that proved the rule. She took her model of all women from her mother, and declared that, of all human defects, to be a woman was the worst: