For more than thirty years, all the years of Gustav Adolf’s reign, and all the years of the regency, it worked. But it provided a dangerous precedent for Christina’s extravagant temperament, and in time she came to view the crown’s assets like the loaves and fishes on the Mount of Olives – miraculously renewable, no matter how many hands dipped into the basket. Moreover, she could not distinguish, or would not distinguish, between the crown’s property and what belonged to her personally. It was all endlessly available for public works or for presents to favourites or for libraries or paintings or armies or orchestras. She used it all, sometimes justly, rewarding a soldier’s bravery or a civil servant’s hard work, but more often at random, and always more lavishly than was needed. She had little understanding of finance, and she made no attempt to learn.
Reserves soon dwindled. The quickest way of raising more money, Christina saw, was to sell noble titles, and she began to sell them by the dozen. When all the old ones were gone, she created new ones, handing them out impartially to the high-born and the low, until steady citizens were heard to complain that a man could now ‘leap into the highest posts straight from his pepper-bags or his dung-cart’.1 Within a few years, she had increased sevenfold the number of Sweden’s earls, swamped the nine old barons with forty-one new ones, and almost trebled the number of noble families. ‘We now have arms and escutcheons by the hundred,’ wrote one disgusted courtier. ‘The court is overrun by the mob they call counts.’2 Worst of all, most of the country’s new aristocrats were not even Swedish: artists and merchants and mercenary soldiers arrived to claim their laurels from the Baltic states, from England and Scotland, from Germany and the Netherlands and, especially, from France. Townsfolk and peasants alike muttered that there were altogether ‘too many nobles and too many foreigners’ in the country. Some at least had paid for their new positions, but just as many received them simply as tokens of the young Queen’s regard. Extravagance, it seemed, was her credo. ‘Magnificence and liberality are the virtues of the great,’ she wrote. ‘They delight everyone.’
But there were many who were far from delighted. For with the noble titles went, too often, noble land, or rather, crown land sold to provide an instant family estate for the new-made aristocrats. It seemed that the number of nobles would keep on growing, that the Queen would continue to sell off land or give it away until there was nothing left. At the crown’s land registers, where titles had once changed more slowly than the pace of generations, the clerks could not cope with the sudden flow of transfers. Serious mistakes were made; some land was sold twice over, and one man, with an entrepreneurial spirit lacking elsewhere in the country, made a tidy profit selling land that did not even exist.
As the nobility grew, so the crown’s assets shrank. Christina attempted to redress the balance by raising taxes, a measure that was bound to be of limited effect when there were so few people to be taxed in the first place. Worse, the many ennoblements had been continually reducing the numbers liable to taxation at all; nobles paid no tax, and their peasants paid taxes to them, rather than to the crown. It was a simple equation – more nobles, less tax revenue – but Christina did not master it.
The great families themselves, nobles ancient and modern, did nothing to halt the downward spiral. Official rewards and simple plunder during the long years of war had expanded their understanding of the good life, and they now began to emulate their extravagant young Queen in a hedonistic parade of new wealth. Once modest to the point of discomfort, their homes and their habits were now thoroughly up to date. They lived as fashionably, and owed as much money, as any of their compeers in France or Italy. Over the years of the regency, palaces and manors had been built in town and country to house their new art collections and their new aspirations to cultured living. Most magnificent of them all was the home of Jakob and Ebba De la Gardie, Magnus’ father and mother, which stood proudly in the middle of Stockholm. Adorned in the Italian style with sculptures and fountains, it was named, appropriately, Makalös – matchless. Other magnates tried nonetheless to compete, among them the Chancellor himself, whose own impressive red palace stood boldly facing the city’s cathedral. Inside the great new houses, tapestries warmed the walls, lovely objects drew eye and hand, and many a looted German grandee looked sternly out from his portrait, while the candlelight danced on the new silk gown of his captor’s wife or daughter.
The real problem was that Sweden – isolated, sparsely populated, half-frozen – simply did not produce very much. Although Gustav Adolf and Oxenstierna and Christina, too, had encouraged the potentially valuable mining industry and promoted foreign trade, including the slave trade,3 it was not enough to meet much more than the people’s daily needs. All was consumed in the prosaic traffic of hand to mouth. Except in the leanest years, most simple folk lived better than their counterparts in other lands, but there was no general surplus for the kind of luxuries now demanded in the towns and in the manor houses. Moreover, most Swedes were too used to thinking in terms of farming or soldiering to turn their minds to commerce, and the country owed what modest industrial success it had so far achieved mainly to foreign entrepreneurs, almost all of them Dutchmen.4 Their influence encouraged some of Sweden’s governors to view the innovative and prosperous Netherlands as a possible model for their own economic advancement. A South Sea Company was set up, and an Africa Company, and favourable conditions ensured for adventurous investors at home, but those who might have taken advantage of them failed to do so, and for the huge deficit in Christina’s crown revenues, it was in any case too little, and too late.
The Queen, whether really at fault or no, was an easy target for criticism. Voices were raised against her, and pamphlets slyly printed, and one summer Sunday, as she knelt at prayer in the castle chapel, a man armed with two naked daggers slipped through the congregation and ran towards her. The two guards standing in front of the Queen, despite their spears and battleaxes, were unable to stop him; he knocked them both to the ground, snapping the spear of one before jumping over the other. Their captain, standing beside the Queen apparently in pious reverie, had completely failed to notice the commotion. Christina gave him a shove, and he leapt into belated action, seizing the assailant by the hair. On questioning, he was found to be insane; he was spared punishment, but was carried off to a madhouse.
The attack lent an urgency to the government’s demands that Christina should marry as soon as possible. She was already aged twenty; she had not been free of illness; now there had been an attempt on her life. If she should die without heirs, how would the succession be assured? How could they avoid dissension, civil war, foreign interference, a Catholic king? Christina responded wryly, equivocally, angrily, but always without committing herself. From Brandenburg, her frustrated cousin, the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, continued his suit via envoys and agents, who never in fact managed to see the Queen. She was too often strategically absent on hunting trips, and the men she had designated to deal with the envoys, her uncle, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, and Magnus’ father, Jakob De la Gardie, both appeared to be ‘tending their estates in the country’ with annoying frequency. In Copenhagen, the King’s second son, encouraged by Maria Eleonora, began to hope for success where his brother had failed; in due course, he failed too.
Though she ignored – and worsened – the country’s financial problems, and delayed the question of her marriage, there were other matters which pressed on Christina daily, and which she could not dismiss. Privately and publicly, in court and in government, she encountered the same antagonisms between the crown and the nobles, and between the nobles and the commoners’ Estates, that her father had known, and that he had never fully overcome. During his long absences on campaign, almost every year of his twenty-year reign, Gustav Adolf had left the government in the hands of the great noble families, ensuring their loyalty by allowing them to monopolize the best offices almost as if they were their own personal property. This had maintained a long internal stability, but it had worked
against able men of humbler background, who would have preferred instead some form of meritocracy such as earlier Swedish kings had had, a ‘rule of secretaries’ – essentially, men like themselves who had made their way up through talent and effort, who could govern the kingdom with the monarch’s support, or indeed, without it. During the years of the regency, without the King’s charisma to bind them together, the two sides had diverged more sharply. Many who were themselves of noble birth had become openly hostile to the powerful old families, the Brahes and De la Gardies and the Banérs and the Bielkes and the Sparres and, above all, the Oxenstiernas, who dominated the government and the court. Christina’s own uncles, Johann Kasimir and Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, resented and feared them, and she quickly learned to do the same – not without some reason: when an appeal case between the Oxenstiernas and the Bielkes was brought before the Senate, it quickly became apparent that every single senator was related to one or other of them, or to both.
Christina could not dispense with them, and as yet she lacked the skill to undermine them, but she struck out at them nonetheless, muddling her dislike of their influence with her own continuing rivalry with the Chancellor. In the first months of 1647, soon after her twentieth birthday, her old tutor, Johan Matthiae, now Bishop of Strängnäs and recently ennobled, unwittingly provided an opportunity for the young Queen to test her power.
As the late King had done, and as he had wished his daughter to do, Matthiae supported the idea of a single Protestant Church, uniting both Lutheran and Calvinist creeds. This kind of syncretic thinking was anathema to the adherents of Sweden’s rather narrow form of Lutheranism, among whom the Chancellor himself was counted. From his diocese in Strängnäs, Matthiae had written a book promoting Protestant unity.5 It had infuriated the Chancellor, and at a session of the Senate, he denounced it roundly, calling for the book to be banned and for Matthiae himself to make a formal apology before the 500 men of the Riksdag. Matthiae did so, and the Senate and the Riksdag together then demanded the outlawing of any movement prejudicial to the accepted rites; an old document of 1580, the Liber concordiae, was to set the terms thenceforth for religious observance in Sweden.
Christina seized her chance. Just as her father had done almost forty years before, she rejected their decision and refused to accept the Liber concordiae. There was nothing wrong with the Bishop’s views, she declared; indeed, her own views were the same. The Chancellor remonstrated, the Queen stood her ground, the Chancellor insisted, and the Queen burst into tears. The match was a draw, more or less: the book was not banned, but nor was it reprinted, and the Chancellor went off to his country house, muttering that the Queen was absolutely impossible, that the late King would never have behaved so imperiously, and that the Bishop was not to be trusted.
At the Tre Kronor Castle, Christina’s angry tears were dried by the kindly old Count Per Brahe, who had taken Karl Gustav’s proffered place as High Steward. Her Majesty was young, he said, and with the greatest of respect, had much to learn; she would be wise not to place all her trust in a priest – any priest, even a beloved former tutor. And if he might be so bold, Her Majesty could perhaps exercise a little more discretion in her choice of companions. That Magnus De la Gardie was altogether overstepping the bounds; he needed to learn his place. The Chancellor and the senators were experienced men; they would serve Her Majesty very well, if she could only put aside the pride of youth, and trust their judgement.
In the name of the most holy and individual Trinity: Be it known to all, and every one whom it may concern, or to whom in any manner it may belong, That for many Years past, Discords and Civil Divisions being stir’d up in the Roman Empire, which increas’d to such a degree, that not only all Germany, but also the neighbouring Kingdoms, and France particularly, have been involv’d in the Disorders of a long and cruel War…from whence ensu’d great Effusion of Christian Blood, and the Desolation of several Provinces. It has at last happen’d, by the effect of Divine Goodness, seconded by the Endeavours of the most Serene Republick of Venice…that there shall be a Christian and Universal Peace…between his Sacred Imperial Majesty, and his most Christian Majesty of France…the most Serene Queen and Kingdom of Swedeland, the Electors respectively, and the Princes and States of the Empire…and that there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles, in what place, or what manner soever the Hostilitys have been practis’d…Done, pass’d and concluded at Munster in Westphalia, the 24th Day of October, 1648.6
The peace, like the war, had been years in the making. Since the early 1630s, there had been sporadic attempts to secure it; many smaller truces had been made and broken. A few individuals had laid down arms of their own accord, then taken them up again as their personal interests had shifted. Wallenstein had been the most important of them, but one of Christina’s generals, too, had for a time undermined Swedish strategy by pursuing an independent peace until his attention was distracted by a pretty young German princess – hard drinking had then drained what was left of his private ambition.7 By the 1640s, Bohemia and the German lands had become, as it were, a vast chessboard where the powers played out their alliances and antagonisms, religious or political. Apart from the occasional Scandinavian skirmish, all Europe’s wars had become more or less ‘fused’, in Gustav Adolf’s phrase, ‘into a single war’. But in 1645, a Turkish attack on the island of Crete, then in the hands of the Venetian Republic, had finally concentrated the collective mind of Christendom, forcing the European powers to realize the external peril threatening their territories and their ideals. ‘While the Christians squabble among themselves,’ wrote an anxious Dutch poet, ‘the Turk is sharpening his sword.’8
The Venetians at least had perceived the threat, and had set themselves to broker a general European peace. Now, foreseeing that assistance from their coreligionists might be needed in their own struggle, they redoubled their efforts. And so it was that ‘by the Mediation and Interposition of the most illustrious and most excellent Ambassador and Senator of Venice, Aloysius Contarini Knight, who for the space of five Years, or thereabouts, with great Diligence, and a Spirit intirely impartial, has been inclin’d to be a Mediator in these Affairs’, representatives of the various powers came together at last in the German province of Westphalia. Christina, as Queen of the all-conquering Swedish armies, was a guarantor of peace along with France’s boy King, the ten-year-old Louis XIV.
Even at the negotiating table, it was not considered safe to seat Catholic and Protestant together. In consequence, the treaties were to be discussed and finally signed in two separate cities, 30 miles apart – Münster for the Emperor and his Catholic allies, Osnabrück for the Protestant powers. An exception was made for the representatives of Catholic France: evidently unable to stomach Austrian company, or perhaps Austrian food, they assembled with the Swedes and their Protestant allies in Osnabrück. By early August the main proposals had been agreed, and on the twenty-fourth of October, the treaties were finally signed.
Sweden emerged as a determined victor, with major territorial gains including control of the trade-rich Oder river and the whole of Western Pomerania, as well as huge indemnity payments and permanent representation at the German parliament.9 Many in Sweden felt cheated nonetheless, maintaining that the war should have been continued until the Protestant cause was victorious, or at least until more money could be exacted. Some of the clergy condemned the treaty from their pulpits, stirring up opposition to it until they were formally forbidden to do so. French gains were particularly resented, the more so as they had been largely brought about by Christina’s personal intervention. The whole of the central Rhine area and a dozen Alsatian cities passed into French hands, making a bitter mockery of Gustav Adolf’s last warning, only days before his death, that France must not be allowed to gain control of any German territory.10
France’s star had begun to rise, and its neighbour’s long bright day was drawin
g to a close. In a clear signal of the continuing decline of Spain’s Habsburg Empire, the United Provinces of the Netherlands finally gained their independence, and the city of Amsterdam won an important smaller victory by forcing the end of free navigation on the Scheldt river, so diverting trade away from Spanish Antwerp northward to its own burgeoning wharves. With revolts on their hands to east and west,11 and continuing war with France, the Spaniards could hardly afford to press for better terms.
For the land of the first brave rebellion, it had all been in vain. There was to be no confessional liberty in Bohemia or Moravia, and no restitution of the lands confiscated from the rebels. To Prague’s many exiles there remained two simple choices: embrace Catholicism, or stay away. ‘We are abandoned,’ a despairing Comenius wrote to the Swedish Chancellor. ‘You hold our liberty in your hands, and you are handing it over to our oppressors.’12 In France, too, the boy King Louis was ‘oblig’d to preserve in all and every one of his Countrys the Catholick Religion…and to abolish all Innovations crept in during the War’. Only in the German lands did a partial confessional tolerance prevail, a tolerance for rulers, if not for those ruled. By the principle of cuius regio eius religio, German princes might choose their religion, and their subjects might follow suit. After all the years of fighting, there would be no single faith across the continent. People stopped talking of Christendom, and began instead to speak of Europe.
Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 11