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

by Buckley, Veronica

  Acorn Beneath an Oak

  Christina’s kingdom was now her own. On a cold November day in 1644, shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she summoned her ‘five great old men’ to give a formal account of the twelve years of their regency. They spoke of the past, and also of the future. From now on, Christina would be Queen in fact as well as in name. Once the war had been concluded, there would be a spectacular ceremony of coronation to confirm the beginning of a glorious new reign, and in the meantime she was to take into her own hands the governance of the realm.

  It was a curious young woman who stood before the regents now. She was fairly small, not quite five feet tall, and her habit of wearing flat shoes made her seem even smaller to her high-heeled contemporaries. Her delicate upper body was marred by a pronounced unevenness of the shoulders, the result of her fall in infancy, but her arms were round and womanly, tapering to fine, small hands. Her face was finely made and oval-shaped, framed by straight fair hair, and her forehead was high. Her long, hooked nose led to a small mouth, from which most of the back teeth, it seems, were already missing, narrowing the delicate jaw, and emphasizing the small, pointed chin. All accounts agree that her large, blue, close-set eyes were beautiful, lit with intelligence and humour; they revealed pride, too, and often anger, and at times a kind of penetrating stare which seems to have alarmed every recipient into quick submission, but their expression does not seem to have ever been cold. Despite her small stature and fairly delicate build, the young Queen’s movements and gestures were far from feminine. She walked like a man, sat and rode like a man, and could eat and swear like the roughest soldier. Her voice was deep and gruff, and her temper warm – her servants were no strangers to blows or bruises. She was clever and well read, but she liked best to talk of manly things, and whenever she spoke of military action, she adopted a sort of martial pose, planting one foot in front of the other. Her many unusual traits notwithstanding, she formed an impressive figure, and she left her old counsellors broadly reassured for the future of their country.

  Not the least anxious observer of the young Queen’s development had been the remarkable Baron Axel Oxenstierna, whose own premier position of many years’ standing was about to encounter its first challenge. Since his first appointment as Chancellor in 1612, at the age of only 29, he had served Sweden with great distinction in every field from military logistics to city planning. A lawyer by training, an outstanding administrator and diplomat, he was also an able politician, and for more than thirty years he had steered a well-judged course between Sweden’s longstanding adversaries of crown and nobility. It was Oxenstierna who had curtailed the power of the crown after the death of Christina’s ferocious grandfather, ‘the rabble King’ Karl IX, wresting agreement for a balance of power from the new King, Gustav Adolf; it is a measure of his abilities, and of the sixteen-year-old King’s perspicacity, that Oxenstierna was nonetheless appointed Chancellor only a few months afterwards. His years as Chancellor to Christina’s father had been a turning-point in the life of his country; the two had worked together to transform their homeland from a backward outpost on the cold periphery of Europe to a major power on the continent’s centre stage. Oxenstierna’s considered temperament had provided a perfect complement to the exuberant genius of Gustav Adolf, epitomized in a famous exchange between them: ‘If we were all as cold as you are,’ the King had once exclaimed, ‘we should freeze.’ ‘If we were all as hot as Your Majesty is,’ replied the Chancellor, ‘we should burn.’ After Gustav Adolf’s early death, it was Oxenstierna who had supported the vulnerable Vasa dynasty, defending the child Queen against the importuning nobles who had sought greater power for themselves. He had assumed the leadership of the civil government, introducing major administrative reforms and initiating a second phase of tremendous development within the country. Sweden’s wideranging military effort had also fallen to his charge, and not least, he had become guardian to Christina and to her illegitimate half-brother. Over decades of service, he had revealed not only his abilities and his strength of mind but also his profound patriotism, a golden thread running through the many antagonisms of his public life, in Sweden and abroad.

  Oxenstierna’s achievement had been phenomenal. By the end of the regency in 1644, there was no stone of state that he had left unturned, and his rare combination of vision and pragmatism had earned him admiration and respect and, in the areas of Swedish military action, no small fear. To the senators and the men of the Riksdag, his remarkable partnership with the late King remained a vibrant memory, and in the years after Gustav Adolf’s death, Oxenstierna’s own powerful aura had only shone the more brightly.

  Now, in the small firmament of the Swedish court, there was no longer room for two stars of equal brilliance. In the eagerness and arrogance of her eighteen years, Christina felt it was her turn to shine. She was intimidated by the Chancellor’s achievements, and mistrustful of his reforms, seeing in them a threat to her own power. Despite his long years of service and his championing of the Vasa dynasty, she convinced herself that he was taking advantage of her inexperience to weaken the crown and advance his own authority instead. Her tutelage, she decided, was at an end. During the years of his guardianship, she had listened to him attentively, but now she would speak, and he would listen. She did not seek the fruitful equipoise of monarch and chancellor which had served her father so well. In her mind, this was only history, after all; for the twelve years of her girlhood the Chancellor had ruled alone, seconded and supported by his ubiquitous family. But the right to rule was not his at all; he had used it while he could, but he would not usurp it now that she was of age. It was her own right, and she would exercise it.

  The Chancellor thus appeared less a complement than a foil to Christina’s own designs, and his prominent position merely a conspicuous target for her keen and jealous eye. Her concern became to oppose him, and from a wilful principle it grew into a habit. His great abilities, his vast experience, and, not least, his own majestic presence, so often remarked upon by contemporaries, all struck deeply at the defensive heart of an uncertain girl, not even five feet tall. She responded by perversely attacking the great oak which might have sheltered her own tender growth, developing at the same time an attitude of terrific outward pride, insistent to the point of comedy and even pathos.

  Though the Chancellor had now formally ceded his place as first power in the land, his position remained immensely strong. He stood supported by his own men, with wealth and patronage at his disposal, and about him a wall of skill and influence three decades thick. He was not without enemies, old rivals for office and riches, and those envious of his family’s great standing, but they were not as yet a solid flank to be used in opposition to him, and Christina in any case lacked the experience to manipulate them to that end. She began instead on her own, cautiously, and her plan of attack was simple: the mighty old oak was, above all, a northern oak; it flourished best under its own wintry skies, mistrusting the dazzling sun and the rich soil of the south – most particularly, the soft, sticky soil of France. This soil, in gleeful handfuls, Christina now determined to spread.

  In 1635, under the Chancellor’s leadership, the Swedes had entered into a cautious alliance with France against the Habsburg Empire. It had not been a happy partnership. Both sides were wary of each other, the Chancellor looking down his noble nose at the French with their devious and frivolous ways, and Richelieu raising his eyebrows at the majestic Swede – ‘very astute,’ he thought, ‘but a bit Gothic’. The replacement of Richelieu by his protégé, the never ordained but nevertheless Cardinal Mazarin, had not improved relations between the two countries. For almost a decade their awkward alliance had remained in place, with the French offering but not always paying subsidies for Sweden’s armies, expecting in return a biddable northern ally, and the Swedes accepting the offers, and the money when it was forthcoming, but continuing to make their own decisions, watching their backs the while. The Chancellor’s personal experience negotiating in
Paris had confirmed his prejudices, and he had not modified them in the ensuing years. The French were unreliable, he believed, and too concerned with fashion, and they ate too much, and none of their fancy food could bear comparison anyway with a good stew of sundried salmon with plenty of pepper. Though he knew French well, in recent years he had not been heard to speak that capricious tongue; with more courtesy than candour, he insisted that he could not favour any one country over another.

  No such scruples had restrained him from unleashing new conflict with a nearer neighbour. At the end of 1643, in supposed outrage at the Danes’ involvement in Maria Eleonora’s flight from Gripsholm, Swedish forces had invaded and quickly overrun vital coastal areas of Denmark. The Queen Mother’s escape had proved a useful pretext for attacking a hostile power whose control of the Baltic trade routes was altogether too strong for Sweden’s liking. By the spring, the Swedes had secured access to the routes for themselves, taking an eye in the process from the bold but ageing Danish King. An ancient balance had once again been tipped, this time in Sweden’s favour.

  The Danish war was the Chancellor’s war. For him, Sweden’s deadliest enemy would always be the Danes, once ferocious overlords, still dangerous neighbours, inevitably competing for domination of the great thoroughfare of the Baltic Sea. The Habsburg Empire, by comparison, was a distant threat, drawing precious men and money away from the northern lands. The French, naturally enough, took the opposite view. For them, the Danish conflict was a peripheral matter, requiring a swift conclusion so that Sweden’s men could return to the field against the Emperor. To this end, Cardinal Mazarin had dispatched a peacemaker in the guise of a new ambassador to Sweden, a Monsieur de la Thuillerie, who quickly brought the eighteen-year-old Queen around to the French way of thinking.

  For Christina, it was a golden opportunity to take a stand against the Chancellor. The Danes were suing for peace, but Oxenstierna hoped to continue the war until they had acceded to Sweden’s territorial demands for the southern peninsula; it was still in Danish hands, preventing Swedish access to the crucial Sound. Christina allowed herself to be persuaded that if the Danish terms were not accepted at once, she would be ‘blamed by posterity’ for her ‘unbounded ambition’. To this effect she wrote several times to the Chancellor, defensively couching her argument as the wish of the Senate – evidently she had not yet the courage of France’s convictions. ‘Most of them feel quite differently than you and I do,’ she wrote. ‘Some of them would give their hands to end the war.’

  In the late summer of 1645, a treaty was finally signed between the two old enemies.1 Though advantageous to Sweden, it did not cede all that the Chancellor had wanted. To add insult to injury, Christina suggested that a double celebration be held to mark not only the signing of the treaty but also a recent victory of the French army over imperial forces. As the French had just been discovered in secret negotiation with Sweden’s Bavarian enemies, the idea progressed no further. Christina suggested a slighter alternative: she arranged for a group of her ladies-in-waiting to entertain Monsieur de la Thuillerie with some songs in his own language, apparently having trained the ladies herself. The unsuspecting choir performed a series of bawdy soldiers’ ditties in appropriately colourful French, the Ambassador maintaining a diplomatic poker-face throughout. He could afford to laugh – or not to laugh; he had gained his point, Cardinal Mazarin was satisfied, and the young Swedish Queen, whether she realized it or no, had begun her steady transformation into France’s creature.

  None of it was lost on the Chancellor. His regard for Christina was now being severely tested, and exchanges between them became markedly cool. Despite her formidable adversary, Christina did not retreat, but as the stubborn days wore into tired months, the strain of her opposition to Oxenstierna began to undermine her health. Within a year of the regency’s end, she had fallen seriously ill and was, or so she believed, in danger of her life. She attributed her illness to ‘the great exhaustion’ of managing the affairs of state, though in fact she had assumed little responsibility beyond continuing to attend the sessions of the Senate. The Chancellor was still very able and very willing to continue at the helm, had Christina been content for him to do so. Her recuperation once begun, she relapsed into illness again, and then succumbed to a serious case of the measles, but it was emotional distress, then as later, which seems to have caused the greater part of her illness. ‘I loved him like my own father,’ she said of Axel Oxenstierna, but like her father, too, the gifted Chancellor cast a long shadow over Christina’s sense of her own greatness. Inexperienced as she was, delighting in any intrigue, attracted by the sophisticated ways of a foreign people whom Oxenstierna disliked and mistrusted, she burrowed ever more deeply into a self-deluding syllogism, harmful to herself as to her country: the Chancellor opposed the French; Christina must oppose the Chancellor, therefore Christina must support the French.

  It was a simplistic hostility, but it did not relent, and it left her exposed to easy manipulation by the less scrupulous figures about her. Soon after her recovery, she allowed it to govern a second clumsy foray into the country’s foreign affairs, at the same time revealing her susceptibility to a particular type of artful and persuasive opportunist who was to feature prominently in her public and private life.

  The first adventurer appeared to take his advantage just as the regency was ending, a Monsieur Marc-Duncan de Cérisantes, brawler and seducer extraordinaire, former gentleman of Constantinople, future Catholic aristocrat, current Huguenot diplomat-conveniently-at-large. In earlier incarnations he had been known by the prosaic appellation of Mark Duncan, but Christina accepted him at his own aggrandized word, and before long she had dispatched him to Paris, to ‘assist’ Sweden’s permanent minister there, the celebrated jurist, Hugo Grotius. Grotius had occupied this post since his appointment by Axel Oxenstierna almost a decade before, and had overseen a long period of cautious alliance between the two states. Needless to say, he did not appreciate the encroachment, and was soon penning outraged letters, complaining that he was being spied on. If so, no good report of him was making its way back to Stockholm. The French disliked Grotius as heartily as he disliked them. A staunch Protestant Dutchman, Grotius could not conceal his disdain for the frippery and popery of Mazarin’s court, and he refused to extend the usual diplomatic courtesies to France’s ‘Prince of the Church’, claiming that the rank of Cardinal was unrecognized by those who were not Catholic. His dour comportment became quickly comical in the company of his wife, whose advancing years had enveloped her sturdy frame with an excessive rondeur. In her youth a heroine of political resistance, Madame Grotius had since declined into all but physical obscurity, so that one refined newcomer to the court was obliged to ask her identity. ‘Who is that bear?’ he asked of the young lady standing beside him. Unhappily, his unknown companion was Mademoiselle Grotius. ‘It is my mother, sir,’ she replied.

  Inelegance was as good an excuse as any. At the end of December, only weeks after the regency had ended, Christina recalled the minister, awarded him his pension, and shortly afterwards appointed Cérisantes chargé d’affaires in his stead. Grotius was among the most learned men of his day, theologian, historian, the ‘father of international law’, and one of Gustav Adolf’s own heroes. His replacement by the conniving Cérisantes was a fall from the sublime to the ridiculous, which left Cardinal Mazarin and his government puzzled and amused. As might have been expected, Cérisantes rendered the Swedes no service; eventually he actually deserted his post. Christina rewarded this by offering him a position in the Swedish army, but, being then on the way to Rome, he declined, and was soon collecting a handsome sum for his noisy public conversion to Catholicism.

  Cérisantes had duped Christina, and he provided an archetype for later artful characters who would dupe her in their turn. Always men, always plausibly capable, always of doubtful origin, they were to form an infamous row of lovable and not so lovable rogues in the gallery of her life. She would be repeatedly defrauded b
y them, repeatedly forgive them, repeatedly refuse to hear a word spoken against them. Their crimes would run the gamut from petty theft to abduction and murder – she would tolerate, indeed defend, it all.

  It is hard to see how Christina could have been so readily ensnared by Cérisantes and his ilk. They were none of them subtle characters, and few other people were taken in by them for long. At the start, perhaps, Christina enjoyed the subterfuge, sharing the thrill of deceiving, or supposedly deceiving, her sturdy, straightforward compatriots. Perhaps, too, she recognized in each opportunist the genuine dissembler that she believed herself to be. For decades they would take advantage of her, stealing, lying, blackening her reputation; her response would be to reward them with her own defrauded hands. Christina’s pride was enormous, and it would never have been easy for her to admit that she had made an error of judgement, but her intelligence was considerable, too, and it should not have been easy to deceive her. It would have been hardest of all for her, perhaps, to accept that she herself was not party to the joke, but instead the butt of it, that the deceiver’s ground had been whisked out from under her, and that she, too, could find herself, bereft and foolish, among the barefoot deceived.