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

by Buckley, Veronica

  As a young girl I had an overwhelming aversion to everything that women do and say. I couldn’t bear their tight-fitting, fussy clothes. I took no care of my complexion or my figure or the rest of my appearance. I never wore a hat or a mask, and scarcely ever wore gloves. I despised everything belonging to my sex, hardly excluding modesty and propriety. I couldn’t stand long dresses and I only wanted to wear short skirts. What’s more, I was so hopeless at all the womanly crafts that no one could ever teach me anything about them.10

  Christina’s ungenerous attitude towards her own sex had been long fomenting. The hyperfemininity of her unloving mother cannot have helped, but her distaste for all things feminine was mostly, it seems, the result of her own very masculine nature. The late King’s instructions that she should have a ‘princely’ education consequently accorded very well with what she herself most enjoyed. Even her dolls, it seems, were the classic toys of little boys. They were ‘pieces of lead which I used to learn military manoeuvres. They formed a little army that I set out on my table in battle formation. I had little ships all decked out for war, little forts, and maps.’11 Whether they were really her own toys, or whether they were inherited from her cousins, Karl Gustav and Adolf, Christina does not say, but her enthusiasm for them was genuine enough; she loved cannon and swords and all things military. She loved being outdoors, too, and loved animals, especially horses and dogs; when Karl Gustav went off to university, he left his gun-dogs in her particular care. She believed that every animal possessed its own individual soul, and was prepared to contradict the opinion of the great Descartes on the subject. For Descartes, a quintessentially indoor philosopher, animals were no more than living machines, but Christina’s experience of the different temperaments of her own horses and dogs convinced her otherwise.

  ‘I can handle any sort of arms passably well,’ she wrote, ‘though I was barely taught to use them at all.’ From this it seems that she must have learned to fence, but if she did not receive much instruction, this is not surprising. Fencing was an aspect of military training, and consequently not something that any girl, even an honorary prince, would be expected to need. Perhaps Christina persuaded one of her governors, both expert swordsmen, to give her a few lessons, or perhaps her two cousins, happy to display their boyhood skills, passed on to her some of their own instruction. Christina did not keep up her fencing, though from time to time in her adult life she liked to wear a sword.

  Hunting, by contrast, was a noble sport of long standing for both men and women, and fast and furious riding was an integral part of it. Christina loved it all. Whether or not she was ‘barely taught’, she was a very good shot; the French Ambassador remarked that she could ‘hit a running hare faster than any man’, though as she herself insisted, ‘I wasn’t cruel and I have never killed an animal without feeling real sympathy for it.’12 She was a very fine horsewoman, too, though she used a lady’s side-saddle, and was probably taught by her governor Axel Banér, himself a superbly skilled rider. Christina admitted that she had been taught to ride ‘a bit’, but in fact she received a good deal of instruction, and she spent many exhilarating hours on horseback in the royal hunting grounds of Djurgården, across the lake from her castle home. In short, she was perfectly suited to the vigorous princely upbringing which her father had commanded for her. In the young girl racing on horseback through the forest, the Swedes saw their great King’s own active spirit embodied once again:

  Between what I was taught and what I wanted to learn myself, I was able to learn everything that a prince should know, and everything a girl can learn in all modesty…I loved my books with a passion, but I loved hunting and horse-racing and games just as much. I loved horses and dogs – but I never lost a moment of my study or my duty to any of that…The people who had to look after me were at their wits’ end, because I absolutely wore them out, and I gave them no rest, day or night, and when my women wanted to slow me down, I just made fun of them, and I said to them: If you’re tired, go and lie down; I don’t need you. Every hour of my days was occupied with affairs of state, or study, or exercise.13

  It is a rather boastful account, and a touch defiant, but Christina’s description of her girlhood self is more or less true. She was clever, and generally hardy, though given to sudden illnesses, most apparently emotional in origin, and she did spend her days more or less charging at the world, infuriating and exhausting those about her.

  The Princess Katarina died a few days after Christina’s twelfth birthday, in the December of 1638. Christina had been fond of her kindly aunt, and she missed the company of her cousins, most of whom now returned to their own castle at Stegeborg. Only the youngest girl remained with her in Stockholm, and she stayed for four years, a companion ‘suitable for my age’ in schooling and at play. Both Christina’s governors died within these years, and they were not replaced. Johan Matthiae was to remain until Christina was sixteen, and from then on, for all but her political education, she was to be left to her own devices.

  While Christina had been poring over Caesar and Alexander, a latter-day hero had been making his way, in less martial mode, through other lands. In 1641, Karl Gustav returned to Stockholm, aged just nineteen, with the happy weight of student life and foreign travel on his broad young shoulders. If his portrait is to be believed, he had grown into an exceedingly handsome young man, with dark eyes and dark hair, and fine but manly features. He was well liked among his peers and well regarded by those above him, liberal but not extravagant, courageous, and very capable, a young man full of promise, but with no settled future as yet before him.

  It had been more than three years since Christina had last seen her cousin. She was now fifteen, and she found at once that her former easy, boyish talk of fencing and hunting no longer felt appropriate when she was with him. Awkward chatter soon gave way to whispers and sighs and secret glances, as the friend of her childhood metamorphosed into her first love. It became a conspiracy. With chaperones in the way, the two resorted to impassioned notes, delivered by an excited Maria Euphrosyne, cousin and sister to the lovers, or a surprising alternative go-between, Christina’s learned old tutor, Johan Matthiae. There need not have been much intriguing. For a girl of her rank, Christina was now of marriageable age, and the match would have been welcomed by Karl Gustav’s family – it had in fact been a long-held wish of his mother, Christina’s Aunt Katarina. Chancellor Oxenstierna would have been less pleased. He disliked the Palatine family and suspected them of manipulating Christina’s affections for their own advancement. But as head of the regency council, he could in any case have forbidden any marriage until Christina had formally attained her majority at the age of eighteen. This was almost three years away; by then the youthful romance would surely have run its course.

  The Chancellor had miscalculated the strength of Karl Gustav’s affections, but where Christina herself was concerned, he need not really have worried. She seems to have enjoyed the subterfuge as much as the romance itself. She wanted to write in code, and though she often enough swore ‘eternal love’ and ‘faithfulness unto death’, she spent as many lines trying to keep the young man calm, and urging him to think of his professional future. ‘I will wait for you,’ she wrote, ‘but for now you need to think about the army. All good things come to those who wait. We can marry once I have become Queen in fact as well as in name’ – an event still several years distant. The eager young lover could be packed off to the wars, and the game of love continue to be played without danger of any real involvement.

  In a roundabout way, Christina ensured this herself, probably by accident, but possibly in order to keep Karl Gustav at bay. An important position had fallen vacant at the court. The Chancellor’s brother had recently died, and the Senate was debating who might succeed him as High Steward and member of the regency council. Christina had proved a keen and able student of politics, and it was thought that, as she was now aged fifteen, she might add her voice to those of the senators – her father, after all, had beg
un to attend Riksdag sessions at the age of only twelve. The senators suggested she might like to nominate her cousin, Karl Gustav, for the newly vacant position. It was welcome news to the young man himself; he had no other employment, and his family had no wealth beyond what they could earn through the grace of the court. Johann Kasimir was delighted. He had himself once been a member of Sweden’s highest Council. Now, despite his German blood, his son would take his own place there. They could count on Christina, he knew – but he had reckoned without her paradoxical support.

  Excited by this first foray into real politics, she devised a small subterfuge, apparently to persuade the Senate that she was not especially predisposed towards her cousin and his family. In fact, Chancellor Oxenstierna seems to have been her real target. Though she hung on his every word and ‘never tired of listening to him’, she had begun to resent the great man’s power; he was her regent, after all, and not the King. The Chancellor disliked her uncle Johann Kasimir, regarding him as an untrustworthy foreigner who had come to the country with nothing and who intended to take from it whatever he could. He disliked the fact that Karl Gustav had his own claim to the Swedish throne – like Christina, he was a grandchild of Karl IX – and he disliked the evident fondness that existed between the young Queen and her Palatine family. Christina’s own growing jealousy of the Chancellor was reason enough for her to strike against him, but the vacant position of High Steward provided the opportunity which until then had been wanting. She would win the Chancellor’s confidence by pretending to stand on his side against the Palatines, and in future would use this trust to further her cousin’s interests, and her own – the senators might even appoint Karl Gustav anyway. She set her mind to scoring this first political point, and in so doing managed to harm the very person whom she most wished to help.

  To the senators’ invitation to nominate Karl Gustav, Christina replied that she could not do so, for the improbable reason that his own father would not approve of the appointment. More sensibly, she added that it was not suitable for her to choose one of her own regents; the matter, she wrote, should be referred to the Chancellor. Her cousin was astonished, her uncle dismayed. How could she have declined so valuable a position on their behalf? More than once she was obliged to point out herself how clever she had been. ‘If I had nominated Karl Gustav,’ she wrote to her uncle, ‘the other regents would have thought I was only wanting to plant a spy among them.’14 It seems she had not stopped to consider how useful such a spy might have been to her, almost as useful indeed as the powerful and well-paid post itself would have been to her impoverished cousin. Instead, the noise of her self-congratulation quickly drowned out the sound of his own puzzled disappointment. Years later she would describe the episode as evidence of her capacity for ‘profound dissimulation, which even in my early youth deceived the most astute people’.15

  The ‘most astute people’ were, of course, the Chancellor, but it is not very likely that her ruse persuaded him of any sudden lack of fondness on her part for the Palatine family. Christina’s ‘dissimulation’, whether profound or no, was of no benefit to Karl Gustav, and indeed cost him a great deal. It cost the Chancellor nothing, and left Christina herself, in the eyes of her nearest relatives, with an aura of immaturity, or unreliability, or untrustworthiness.

  It is a measure of Christina’s naivety at this stage that she believed she had somehow outwitted the Chancellor. It is revealing, too, of her great confidence in her own powers that she regarded the little ploy as an exercise in ‘profound dissimulation’, a capacity to which she would always lay extravagant claim. But above all it is significant that Christina’s first attempt at political influence was an attempt to deceive. Just fifteen years old, in a position of extraordinary privilege, with a hundred hardened greybeards awaiting her response, she might have revealed a precocious wisdom or even simple humility. She might have made a bold stand to assist the family to whom she owed so much. Instead, she responded deviously, leaving Karl Gustav to bear the risk.

  Christina’s ploy did not help her cousin, but quite by chance, it may have helped her country. The new High Steward, chosen by lottery, was the senator Count Per Brahe, a cousin of her father’s former love, and a man of immense experience and talent in military and civil affairs. Per Brahe was no doubt better suited to the position than any nineteen-year-old, no matter how handsome, could ever have proved to be. The adverse effects of Christina’s clumsy subterfuge had been prevented, quite literally, by the luck of the draw.

  Johan Matthiae’s reports on Christina’s education ended in her seventeenth year, when Matthiae left Stockholm for Strängnäs, some fifty miles away. Here, despite his lukewarm Lutheranism, he had been given a bishopric. Christina had been a good pupil, talented and studious, but Matthiae’s efforts to educate her ‘as a Christian prince’ in the way of Erasmus must be said, on the whole, to have failed. In her adult life there would be little trace of the humanist virtues which her tutor had so exalted. Christina was not without admiration for them, and apt quotations were never to be far from her fluent tongue. But, although in her earnest girlhood she embraced some of their values, it was not in her nature to pursue them beyond these years. She would be seldom stoical, often unprincipled, and generally, at least where her personal affairs were concerned, rational only ex post facto. On the rock of her own ebullient temperament, the fine-wrought vessel of her education was doomed to break apart, nature triumphant over nurture.

  During these years of her girlhood, Christina saw her mother hardly at all. Confined at Gripsholm Castle, Maria Eleonora made only one brief appearance in Stockholm, and it seems that the visit was never reciprocated. Christina approved of her mother’s exclusion from the regency, regarding it as ‘a most sensitive mark of my father’s love’ to have insisted upon it. If her mother had had a hand in ruling the country, she wrote, ‘she would no doubt have ruined everything, like all the other women who have tried it’. ‘But,’ she added, ‘though I praise the regents for keeping her away from the business of governing, I must admit it was rather harsh of them to separate her from me completely.’16

  It is hard to say whether Maria Eleonora really missed her daughter; her maternal interest had been erratic, after all. It is certain, in any case, that she was miserably unhappy at Gripsholm Castle. Perched on an island in the sparkling lake, to the Queen Mother’s mind it was the bleakest fortress imaginable. For four bored and angry years, she had stewed inside its red brick walls, her coterie of German ladies-in-waiting simmering about her. Unmoved by the loveliness of her surroundings or by her daughter’s occasional pleas for calm, she had taken consolation in a secret correspondence with King Kristian of Denmark, himself no friend to Sweden’s governors. In this she gave full vent to her resentment of the Chancellor and his men – adding insult to injury, Oxenstierna had dismissed her to Gripsholm with the suggestion that she ‘learn to grow old gracefully’. Gradually, with cunning and charm, she laid her plans for a vengeful escape.

  She was now aged 40, and still, it seems, despite the Chancellor’s injunction, in full possession of all her womanly assets. Only a few years before, her widow’s weeds notwithstanding, she had been described by two French visitors as ‘the most beautiful, radiant woman we had ever seen. We were,’ writes one, ‘quite dazzled by her beauty.’17 The Frenchmen, apparently, were not the only ones to admire Maria Eleonora’s ‘charming features’ and her ‘truly royal figure’. Her official captor was now captivated in his turn. Marshal Nilsson, whose army days had no doubt accustomed him to less insinuating prisoners, had been readily acceding to Her Majesty’s wishes: she had such a passion for Homer, it seemed, that she wished to spend her days on the shores of the island, reading the majestic lines of the Iliad, listening to the majestic sound of the waves. Maria Eleonora must indeed have been a woman of many charms; after four years of confinement, during which she had evinced no interest whatsoever in classical literature, her improbable ploy worked perfectly. She was soon aboard a Danish sailin
g ship en route to Helsingør, a latter-day Chryseis returned to friendlier shores.18

  In France, delighted tongues whispered that Maria Eleonora and the Danish King were lovers; to join him, she had braved the seas, defying the wrath of mighty Sweden. Kristian does not seem to have appreciated the irony of the rumours; his wife, after bearing him twelve children, had braved his own wrath for the embraces of a German count. The cuckolded King, though as yet still in possession of both his eyes – he was soon to lose one in battle against the Swedes – was now aged 63; his gallantry towards the lady had been prompted more by politics than by love. He duly received a protest from the outraged Swedes, and sent them a cool apology, but he soon turned his energies to ridding himself of his turbulent guest. Her brother, the ailing Elector Georg Wilhelm, flatly refused to permit her return to Brandenburg, and by Christmas, an exasperated Kristian was applying to the new Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, to take her off his hands.

  The young Elector was not pleased. Brandenburg had recently been at war in the Emperor’s service, and Friedrich Wilhelm was now suing for peace with the hard-pressing Swedes. He had no wish to embrace a major diplomatic embarrassment in the person of his volatile aunt. The refugee herself was apparently happy enough to go; indeed, she had little choice, since the Swedes had rescinded all her rights to income and had confiscated the many personal belongings she had left behind her. Perhaps her nephew had also heard of her objections to him as a suitor to her daughter – though now an Elector, he could still never be the son of a king. Whatever his reasons, he kept her waiting for almost two years, while the Swedes were gradually persuaded to restore her income, and the Danish King descended into desperation. Maria Eleonora would remain four years at her nephew’s court in Brandenburg, returning to Stockholm at last to find her daughter fully grown, and a reigning monarch.