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

by Buckley, Veronica

  Cérisantes’ place as Christina’s representative in Paris was taken by a nobler but otherwise no more likely contender, Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie. Scion of a prominent Franco-Swedish family, he was in fact a cousin of sorts to the Queen – his great-uncle was her own uncle, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, illegitimate half-brother to Gustav Adolf. Magnus’ father was the Grand Marshal General Jakob De la Gardie, who had served as military instructor to the boy Gustav Adolf, and his mother was none other than Ebba Brahe, the beauty who had once captured the young King’s heart; Magnus, her ‘dear and noble son’, was the eldest of her fourteen children. In 1645, just 22 years of age, he returned to Stockholm after almost ten years of study and travel in Sweden and abroad, including a lengthy and expensive sojourn in Paris. He had rounded it all off with a tour of duty in the Danish war, adding a soldier’s dash to his courtly accomplishments.

  Christina was delighted with him. He was tall and muscular, handsome, charming, extravagant, the son of her father’s old favourite, and, above all, very fluent in the elegant ways of France – in short, perfectly calculated to annoy the Chancellor. They became intimate friends, and she soon made him Colonel of her Guard. It was a swift advance for so young and inexperienced a man, and few doubted that Christina had fallen in love with him – some even whispered that they were lovers. It is not likely to have been true, not least because Magnus was himself in love with Christina’s schoolfellow and favourite cousin, Maria Euphrosyne. He soon made a proposal of marriage to her; she soon accepted.

  Christina responded by separating them. In the spring of 1646, she announced that Count Magnus had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to France – ‘extraordinary’ thanks were owing to the French, she felt, for their involvement in the Danish treaty. There was in fact no political need for any such appointment to be made, and the Chancellor opposed it strongly, adding to Christina’s determination with his every objection. Magnus was to go, and he was to go in splendour such as no Swedish envoy had ever before enjoyed, splendour which was to impress even the extravagant French. A carriage of gold and silver was prepared for him; some three hundred persons were to form his personal retinue; his allowance would be enormous. For three months she delayed his departure with fond excuses, so that those about her, ‘not wishing to cast aspersions on Her Majesty’s conduct’, assumed that, despite his engagement to her cousin, Magnus would soon be married to the Queen. The infuriated Chancellor could only look on, kept company by a sad Karl Gustav, whose promising romance had evaporated into the perfumed air surrounding his rival. Towards the end of July, Magnus finally set out for Paris. Christina took to her room, and wept.

  She might have wept more bitterly if she had learned what Magnus had to say of her once he arrived at Mazarin’s court. At first, he spoke of her ‘in passionate terms’, and ‘so respectfully’ that the French, too, suspected that his feeling exceeded that of a normally dutiful subject for his Queen. But the matter was soon made clear: Christina was an extraordinary monarch, wonderfully learned, but not very feminine – in fact, not like a woman at all, not in her appearance, not in her behaviour, not even in her face – a surprisingly ungallant remark from so suave a tongue. Magnus made full use nonetheless of her continuing indulgence of him, exceeding his huge allowance three times over, referring his debts to the Queen without her leave, and perversely raising Sweden’s reputation as a land of some financial resource, while her soldiers remained unpaid in their garrisons and camps. Little wonder that Christina’s former man in Paris, the incorrigible Cérisantes, thought it worth his while to protest that he himself had not been reappointed.

  The French appointment served a multiple purpose. It gave Christina time to recover from her love for Magnus. Alternatively, it gave Magnus time to recover from his love for Maria Euphrosyne, and to reconsider what the love of a queen might bring in its train; the costly embassy in Paris was an obvious indication. In either case, it made the point that it was Christina’s voice, and not Axel Oxenstierna’s, that was now to be decisive. The link between Sweden and France would, at least formally, be strengthened, though in fact Magnus’ inexperience only weakened Sweden’s standing in the eyes of the French.

  Magnus remained in Paris just seven months, capably discussing French poetry with the court précieuses, while political matters passed beyond his ken. In Stockholm, Christina exchanged daily visits with his mother, and together they sang the praises of their absent idol. Magnus’ fiancée herself does not seem to have been included in these laudatory soirées, but she was there readily enough when he returned, ‘preceded by the sound of his expenses’, to celebrate an unrepentantly lavish wedding. Christina managed to upstage bride, bridegroom, and priest: placing the couple’s hands together, she declared to Magnus, ‘I hereby give you the most precious thing I have.’ Precious things continued to flow in the same direction, so that within a year, while Christina’s Treasury limped along, Magnus, at the happy age of 24, was believed to be the richest man in Sweden.

  Magnus was married, and Karl Gustav rejected, but Christina’s affections were not long idle. This time they took a different turn, which kept the gossips as busy as they had ever been with Magnus or Marc-Duncan de Cérisantes. The Queen’s attention was now fixed on one of her own ladies-in-waiting, a quiet young beauty who had been left in her care on the death of her courtier father some years before. Her name was Ebba Sparre, but in compliment to her loveliness, Christina called her Belle.

  Apart from their age, the two had little in common. Belle was timid, feminine, and sedentary, with no particular interest in learning or high culture, but she accepted Christina’s attentions, and seems to have returned her affection. They commonly shared a bed, no unusual matter at the time for two young unmarried women, but Christina enjoyed the provocative possibilities of the situation. She drew deliberate attention to it before the prudish English Ambassador, Bulstrode Whitelocke, whispering into his reddening ears that Belle’s ‘inside’ was ‘as beautiful as her outside’. Her insinuations quickly ossified into supposed fact, and before long it was widely believed that the Queen was a lesbian, or possibly, in mitigating afterthought, a hermaphrodite. Her reluctance to marry added weight to the charge – had not the Count Palatine been trailing on his leash, unfed, for years behind her? – and there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to be brought to bear: her mannish way of walking, her love of hunting, her gruff voice, her flat shoes – to a roomful of courtiers eager for scandal and impatient for an heir, all betokened clear sexual aberration.

  Christina did nothing to quench the little flames, declaring in round terms her aversion to the idea of sex with a man. ‘I could not bear to be used by a man the way a peasant uses his fields,’ she said. At the same time, it was clear that neither modesty nor timidity had prompted her attitude. Her coarse language, though she herself regarded it as a natural Swedish defect, was the cause of frequent comment. She was fond of bawdy jokes, too, and was not above teasing the maidenly Belle. She led her one day to the chamber of Claude Saumaise, a Frenchman and a favourite of the Queen who had absented himself from some scholarly rendezvous on the pretext of illness. They found him sitting up in bed with a risqué book in his hand. Recognizing its title, Christina disingenuously asked Belle to read a passage aloud from it. Belle began confidently, but was soon blushing and stammering, to a loud roar of laughter from the Queen, and a quiet smirk from Saumaise.

  Christina was clearly fond of Belle, and may even have loved her, but she did not refrain from making use of this most innocent friend in her ongoing battle with Chancellor Oxenstierna. For some time Belle had been engaged to his son, Bengt, but Christina persuaded her to break off the engagement, and to marry instead Jakob Casimir De la Gardie, Magnus’ younger brother. A story went the rounds that, during the wedding celebrations, the Queen ordered all the guests to take off their clothes and dance – at least – in the nude. The story is mere gossip, but that it could even be suggested reveals something of the reputation that Chri
stina had by now acquired.

  Belle’s own epitaph was not happy. There was no real affection between Jakob and herself, and even after the wedding, she continued to live with the Queen. She had three children, but all died in infancy, and within a very few years she became a widow. Thereafter, despite Christina’s continuing affection for her, Belle’s young life declined into illness and sadness.

  Talk of Christina’s lesbian tendencies, meanwhile, did not recede. It was grounded in at least partial truth, which was recognized, if reluctantly, by some of those closest to her. Her two uncles, Count Johann Kasimir and the Grand Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, had long hoped that she would marry Karl Gustav. But by the time Christina was twenty, Gyllenhjelm at least had acknowledged that the marriage was unlikely. He urged Christina instead to seize her chance to choose an heir if she would not choose a husband. ‘If Your Majesty does not marry,’ he wrote, ‘you must act in good time to secure the succession for a certain family.’ His reference was to the Queen’s Palatine cousins: the bridegroom manqué, Gyllenhjelm hoped, might yet wear a Swedish crown. In either place, he would be a powerful counterweight to the great noble families, and in particular the Oxenstiernas, who might otherwise mould the monarchy to their own liking, or even dispense with it altogether. Moreover, it was they who had ousted Karl Gustav’s German father from his position as Grand Treasurer. The father’s revenge would be rich indeed if the son after all should ascend the Swedish throne, not as the Queen’s consort, but as King in his own right. Christina did not disagree. She was very willing to assume her uncle’s attitude, which put a rational face on her own antagonism towards the Chancellor, and she wrote to her uncle that there were some, she believed, who would be only too happy to feed Karl Gustav ‘a dose of Italian soup’ to get rid of him once and for all. She made no formal statement about the marriage, but allowed it to be generally understood, by all but the would-be bridegroom himself, that in due course it would take place.

  In due course the anxious Chancellor challenged her on the subject. The talk had been going on for long enough, he declared. Was there really any substance to it? The Queen’s marriage was a matter of the greatest importance to the state. The Senate should have a say in it. They should at least be kept properly informed, and not have to wait to hear the latest story from the fishwives and gossipmongers about the town.

  The Queen began with a denial, or rather with a confirmation. It was true that she had intended to marry Karl Gustav, but she had changed her mind. She was not going to marry him. She had in fact no wish to marry at all. However, she did intend to make him Commander-in-Chief in Germany. The Chancellor called her bluff. The Count was German himself, he objected, or at least his father was, which amounted to the same thing. Command of the Swedish armies could not be entrusted to a foreign hand. The only way his loyalty could be assured was for the Queen to marry him. Christina stumbled: she was not going to marry the Count, she declared, indeed she was not going to marry anyone. However, if she did marry anyone, it would be the Count. In fact, yes, since the Chancellor was asking, yes, she was going to marry him, in fact, yes, they were already engaged.

  The news was soon out, leaving no one more surprised than the fiancé himself. He had time to take a few elated steps before being interrupted by a private communication from the Queen, informing him that the supposed engagement was no more than a ruse to increase his own public standing. If he were generally believed to be her future husband, his appointment as Commander-in-Chief would be the more readily approved.

  He quickly sought a clarifying interview with her, to which she slowly agreed. It took six months to bring it about, and it was not, in the end, the private discussion that Karl Gustav had requested. Instead, Christina insisted that Magnus De la Gardie and Johan Matthiae, her former tutor, should be present throughout. With two other men in the room, it seems, the Count was less likely to become passionate or desperate. Here, as on the battlefield, there was a precarious safety in numbers.

  She managed one decisive statement. She was not going to be bound by promises she had made as a young girl. At the same time she didn’t want to take away the Count’s last hope, but she was not going to marry him unless reasons of state made it absolutely necessary. If she didn’t marry him, she would see that he became her successor, though if she couldn’t persuade the Estates to agree to this, she would marry him after all. In any case she would give him a final answer within the next five years.

  Karl Gustav’s response was manly. He protested his love for the Queen, and declared that the succession proposal was of no interest to him. He would accept no consolation prizes. If she would not marry him, he would leave Sweden and never return.

  The Queen told him not to be ridiculous. He was indulging in romantic fantasies, she said. He should count himself honoured that she had even considered him as a possible husband. Even if he died before she made up her mind, it would still have been a great honour for him, as everyone would acknowledge. But she accepted that he was fond of her, and agreed in the end that he could continue to plead his cause – though not in person. He was to declare his love in letters to his father and to Johan Matthiae. They could pass the messages on to her. And he must leave immediately to assume command in Germany. And above all, he must pretend that she had agreed to marry him. This would make it easier for him to succeed her, if she should die.

  Karl Gustav’s response was human. He became ill, plagued with constant headaches and fainting fits. Christina did not relent, and so, defying the Chancellor’s anti-German insinuations, he sought consolation in the time-honoured Swedish way: he took to drinking heavily, then turned his mind to soldiering.

  But from his post in Germany, the young Commander-in-Chief sent pleading and desperate letters, not to Christina but, as she had instructed, to his father and to Johan Matthiae. If the Queen would not marry him, he wrote, he would exile himself from Sweden, seeking a sad alternative fortune at the hands of kinder princes. Some, at least, believed that his suit was not yet lost. He received encouraging letters from Magnus De la Gardie, the friend of his youth and now his brother-in-law, who had much to gain if the marriage could be achieved. ‘You must risk everything to win her,’ wrote Magnus. ‘Remember, fortune favours the brave!’ It was easy advice from a man who had never himself risked very much, and Karl Gustav had no need of it in any case. By threatening to leave Sweden forever, he had already risked everything. Apart from his country, his family, the castle at Stegeborg, the promise of wealth, the crown itself, he had nothing else to risk, save his own life, and this he had already risked many times in battle in Christina’s name.

  Christina’s hesitancy was not the result of callousness. It was not a cat-and-mouse game that she was playing for her own perverse pleasure. There were gains to be made in championing the Palatine family in the teeth of opposition from Axel Oxenstierna and his supporters. Karl Gustav’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief was a slap in the Chancellor’s face, just as Magnus’ appointment to Paris had been. But the hardest slap that Christina could give would have been to marry Karl Gustav. Unlike her, he had brothers and sisters. His own rise would be followed by a train of honours and riches for them all, advancing them at once from dependency to dynasty and demoting the Oxenstiernas to a permanent second place.

  Christina hesitated to marry Karl Gustav not because she did not love him, but because she did. It was not the love of a woman for a man, and so it could not be the love of a wife for her husband. Rather, it was the sturdy old love of a childhood friend, of a comrade-in-youthful-arms, of a brother in all but name. It was a love that continued despite things, not because of things. Christina saw, as clearly as anyone, how advantageous the match would be to the family that had been in effect her own family, to the uncle who had welcomed her as one of his own, to the girls and boys who had played with her and fought with her and grown to adulthood with her, to the people who had given her her only sense of belonging. Marriage to Karl Gustav would have been a perfect end
ing to her childhood’s only idyll, and it would have made him happy, too. This she saw as she told him to wait, to keep his hope alive, to do this or that beforehand, to prepare the way. But she could not marry, and this she saw at the same time, saw it as she told him that she had changed, that she could not keep her girlish promises, that she would console him with an army, with a fortune, with a crown.

  Karl Gustav loved Christina in the same unassailable way. Because of it, he endured more than ten years of her ebbing and flowing, endured the prodding of his friends and the sniggering of his enemies. He may have loved her, too, in the simpler way that a man loves a woman. He may have wanted her for his wife, to found a family, to be with him through his days and his nights. Whatever its nature, Karl Gustav’s love for Christina was a very great love. In the years that followed, its urgent flame would fade to the quieter glow of loyalty, of kindness, protectiveness, and patience, but despite myriad gusts of provocation, it was never to be extinguished.

  Warring and Peace

  Karl Gustav’s dogged love was not the only recurrent theme of Christina’s early reign. Problems of state recurred, too, on a larger scale and at a faster pace than the young Queen could hope to manage them. Pride in her own capacities and resentment of older and wiser heads made the problems worse than they might have been, and hindered their solution.

  The first problem was money, or rather, a serious lack of it. It was not all Christina’s fault. It had begun nobly enough, years before, with the drive to improve public services. Her own great father had set it in train, building schools and hospitals, endowing universities, developing the post office, laying new streets, boosting local industries. In every enterprise he had been assisted by his eminently capable Chancellor, who had carried on the work through the years of the regency, creating in the process a proud and beautiful city worthy of its standing as a European capital. To raise the money for such vast reform, Gustav Adolf had sold what belonged to the crown: land, industries, the right to raise revenue. He fully expected to regain what he had sold by way of indirect taxation – the land and the industries and everything else would be more productive, it was presumed, in any hands other than the crown’s. His Chancellor approved the sales, calling them ‘pleasing to God and hurtful to no man – and not provocative of rebellion’. They seemed to be a way of modernizing the state’s finances, replacing the old herring-and-rawhide payments with efficient cash in hand.