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

by Buckley, Veronica

The next day, a delegation from the delegation appeared ‘very solemnly’ before Christina to make a formal protest. Whether amused or annoyed by all the fuss, the Queen advised them directly to let the matter drop, and added that, if they did not, there would be no further visits from Swedish noblemen to Russian ambassadors – in future, it would be the commonfolk who would be sent to keep them company in their lodgings. Moreover, she warned, if they persisted in their protest, she would lodge her own complaint against them with the Grand Duke himself. This last threat proved to be more than enough. Their indignation evaporated with their courage, and the cowed ambassadors began to plead with the Queen; their master must absolutely not hear of the affair. She promised to say nothing, but the Grand Duke had other sources of information: in the middle of June, the whole story appeared in the Leipzig weekly news-sheet, where the Swedish correspondent noted ominously, ‘What will happen now, no one can tell.’

  Christina should not in fact even have been in Stockholm to hear the Russians’ complaint. She had been expected to leave the city directly after their formal reception, to travel to Fi’holm, a day’s journey away in the bright summer weather, for the funeral of Madame Oxenstierna, the Chancellor’s wife. But the opportunity to spite the Chancellor had proved irresistible to her, more so than any Russian gold or rubies or mink, dead or alive. The night before she was due to leave for Fi’holm, she became suddenly ‘indisposed’; though a large retinue had been sent on ahead to prepare for her arrival, she announced that she would not be able to attend the funeral after all. Her transparent stratagem must have saddened Oxenstierna, or perhaps made him angry; certainly it did not convince anyone else. In Leipzig, it was noted sardonically that, once the day of the funeral had passed, Her Majesty ‘suddenly became quite well again’.

  It was a petty act, unworthy of any Queen, or indeed of any adult. Determined to dim the Chancellor’s prestige, she had succeeded only in offending him, and in making herself look foolish. In so doing, Christina revealed how much she had still to learn about strength and self-indulgence, and the difference between the two.

  Pallas of the North

  In the spring of 1649, the fabulous collection of the Emperor Rudolf, pushed and pulled all the way from Prague, was brought ashore at Stockholm, and Christina found herself mistress of one of the finest cultural treasures in Europe. It was a splendid crowning of many smaller efforts of plunder and purchase, the work of more than a century, as successive rulers had brought home piece after piece of beautiful tinder to stoke the Swedes’ reluctant aesthetic fires. Christina’s father had been the most determined of them, to the extent of leaving two of his best generals hostage in Bavaria for the sake of his newly looted Holbein canvases.1 The Holbeins, along with works by Lucas Cranach and many other German and Dutch masters, were sufficient in number and in quality to form the basis of a first Swedish national collection, installed during Christina’s childhood in the Tre Kronor Castle. Though she was quick to appreciate her father’s methods of acquisition, she was slower to appreciate the works themselves; the restrained northern painters held little appeal for her, and she was able to give many fine canvases away without so much as a backward glance.

  But whether she liked the paintings or not, they were important to her. A certain level of cultural life was necessary if Sweden’s national prestige were to be maintained, or indeed even acquired – there was a vast distance to be covered before the Swedes could compare with most of their northern neighbours, let alone with the richly cultured southern lands of Spain or France or, above all, Italy. Plundering was a quick, but not necessarily cheap, way of building up collections; armies were as costly as marble and canvas, and victory was not always assured. Besides, no one would fight for a sculpture or a painting; booty of this kind was unpredictable, to be seized opportunistically like windfall apples from the highest branches. No monarch could afford to presume upon it, and neither did Christina. Even as a young girl, tantalized by ambassadors’ tales of beautiful and brilliant things, she had sent emissaries abroad to seek out books and works of art. One envoy went as far as Egypt, lending his hand in excavations for the remnants of the ancient world. Others scoured the studios and libraries of Europe, unearthing sculptures and drawings and a great many books and manuscripts for the avid young Queen, whose plundering streak was strong enough for her to leave many bills unpaid.

  It prevented her, too, from building up her collections in any systematic way. Though she did request specific books, to match her developing intellectual interests, her agents scouting for antiquities and works of art bought more or less at their own discretion, often sending back things that were not to Christina’s taste; ten paintings by Gerrit Dou, for instance, bought at considerable cost by her agent Silfvercrona in Holland, were soon passed on to Silfvercrona’s family. The Prague cornucopia did not change her approach to the northern schools of painting, though it contained many eloquent examples of it, but it did provide a concrete elaboration of the Renaissance ideas which had framed the minds of her own teachers. It was largely within that tradition that Christina was now forming her own view of the world.

  The Emperor Rudolf had collected not only paintings and sculptures, but also objets d’art and all sorts of curiosities, sublime and ridiculous, inanimate and live – the lion now brought ashore for Christina was the lonely representative of a once great menagerie. Caravaggio canvases and Dürer woodcuts had overlooked displays of tools and shells and bits and pieces, including nails said to be from Noah’s Ark and a jawbone supposedly belonging to one of the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey. Rudolf had acquired many spectacular pieces, but not primarily so that they might be admired. Instead, the thousands of individual items were all intended to be understood together as a single entity, a complete representation of all the things and ideas in the material world. Together, they were to reveal the harmony of the created universe itself. The myriad items were almost like the words of a lost language; if enough of them could be collected, the links between them might be discerned, and the language of the universe might be finally understood.

  This ‘pansophist’ idea underlying the Emperor’s great collection had been part of the received wisdom of his day, and it had not yet given way to the ideas of the empirical scientists, who instead were learning to think of the natural world as a vast series of discrete phenomena. At a time when it still seemed possible to find and categorize every single thing, whether natural or artificial, a collection served as a kind of ‘encyclopedia of the visible world’. It was important to complete it, for without every piece, the overall meaning of the universe itself could not be deciphered. Collecting was a kind of ‘practical alchemy’ which, in its highest form, could reveal the hidden essence of things.2

  Though she was well versed in pansophist ideas, and she was to look to other aspects of pansophism to guide her own spiritual path, Christina had no wish to build a collection in this grand Renaissance way. In her grandfather’s day, when the Emperor was acquiring his host of objects, any Swedish noble wishing to follow suit would simply have been too poor to do so, and the haphazard selection of items looted or bought en masse in subsequent decades could provide only the remotest equivalent. There was no tradition in Sweden of Rudolf’s comprehensive kind of collecting, and Christina did not now seek to establish one. She accepted what arrived, and she was on the whole delighted with it, above all with the many Italian paintings – Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Polidoro, Correggio – which formed so rich a part of the takings. These, all looted from Prague, were her first exposure to the Italian Renaissance masters, and she responded at once to their rich colours and their vibrant emotional energy. She was soon writing about them with the nonchalant air of a connoisseur:

  I shall send you copies of some of the Italian paintings that have come into my hands since I had the good fortune to take Prague…In fact the whole Prague gallery is here now. There are really a lot of paintings but only thirty or forty of the Italian ones are originals. I don’t count the
others. There are some by Albrecht Dürer and other German masters whose names I don’t know. Everyone likes them very much – everyone except me, that is. I swear I’d give them all for a few Raphaels, and even then it would be doing them too much honour.3

  Christina’s letter reveals a great deal of confidence in the taste of others, or perhaps in her own prejudice. Though she owned several of his drawings, she had never so far set eyes on a painting by Raphael, nor indeed had any Raphael ever been seen in Sweden.

  The paintings that she did see were accompanied by a considerable number of sculptures, which included, by way of late and paltry vengeance, several garden bronzes made for her father’s nemesis, Count Wallenstein. Prominent among them was a Neptune worked by the mannerist master, Adriaen de Vries. The mighty sea-god had been embellished for the Count with a pair of sirens, a pair of tritons, two griffin-heads, two lion-heads, four horse-heads, and two ducks. Christina does not seem to have cared much for it, or indeed for any of the sculptures; within a few years they had all been traded or sold or simply given away. She had been captured, heart and mind, by the Italians. Their dramatic sensuality had struck a chord in her own extravagant nature, and it drew from her an emotional response that was to have loud repercussions. The Italian paintings belonged to another world, to the vibrant, flowering world of the sunlit south, and in them Christina saw all the colour and drama that she had not found in her plain and austere homeland.

  Christina had been doing what she could to enliven the grey palette of Swedish cultural life, mostly with splashes of imported foreign colour. They came in the elaborately dressed persons of French scholars and their satellites, more or less brilliant, fleeing the civil strife of the Fronde,4 and they brought with them the cosmopolitan’s disdain for the provincial. Though Stockholm had undergone a good deal of recent change, its fine town palaces and modern streets did not impress the sophisticated newcomers. One of them was moved to declare it ‘more fun than Switzerland, anyway’, but on the whole they had nothing good to say about Christina’s chilly northern capital, finding themselves by far the most interesting aspect of it. The Swedish courtiers responded with the same resentment that their fathers had shown to Maria Eleonora and her haughty Berliners, and with more reason. Christina had showered the new arrivals with personal gifts purchased with public money, and feelings ran high against ‘this crowd of parasites’ who were seducing the young Queen away from the wholesome ways of her own people. Their feathers and laces and bows and buckles were found so offensive that sumptuary laws were passed in an effort to return the court to the sombre teints of earlier days – the French ignored them, provoking a disgusted comment from one sober Swede: ‘The further they are from their homeland, the more insolent these people seem to become,’ he declared. ‘It seems they travel with no other purpose than to mock other peoples, to insult their customs and to break their laws, and to parade their own pride and extravagance through the world.’5

  Christina quickly aligned herself with the Frenchmen in their disdain for her own country. It may have begun defensively, the reaction of a sensitive and unusual girl who might otherwise have become an object of ridicule herself. But it soon became a source of strength in her ongoing opposition to Chancellor Oxenstierna. It gave her a group to call her own, an alternative to the great old families who surrounded him. Thus, whether consciously or no, the Queen’s circle of exotic favourites developed into a substantial political force.

  Magnus, though homegrown, remained at their centre, as yet unfazed by the new competition. He moved easily among them, aided by his natural flair and the elegant ways he had acquired on his travels, and his example contributed in no small measure to a swift refining of manners at Christina’s court. Elaborate French ways were steadily supplanting the grave, ceremonious traditions which had long characterized the Swedish courtiers – at least before the start of their drinking bouts. Among the younger men in particular, indignation evaporated before the simple wish to be part of it all, and besides, no one wanted to be counted among the country bumpkins. Everything was affected, from hats to handshakes, but not all the changes were frivolous; the young Queen found her own position altered, too. At the beginning of her reign, Christina had had no more than a single chamber to call her own, and had been frequently besieged at her bedroom door by town and country folk seeking an audience with her. Now, a small antechamber was arranged, and order of a kind imposed on the usual mêlée of petitioners. There was an improvement, too, in some of the smaller comforts of daily life, ‘this damnable Swedish cooking’ notable among them. Though the Chancellor missed his honest salmon stews, the Frenchmen found an unexpected ally in the English Ambassador, relieved to find the menu expanded at last from the ‘boiled, roast or fried cow’ that he had too often been served before.

  Though the French now dominated Christina’s court, not all of her visitors hailed from those fashionable shores. There were a goodly number of Germans educated in Holland, and Dutchmen educated in German towns, and a Dane or two, and others from the earnest lands of the north. Among the first had been Christina’s Royal Librarian, Johann Freinsheim; he had been labouring steadily and quite happily until the arrival of the thousands of books and manuscripts brought back as booty from Prague. He had balked at the work of cataloguing all these, and at first the job had passed to Isaac Vossius of Leiden, whose own father’s library was already in the Queen’s possession. Vossius, like his Latinist friend, Nicolaas Heinsius, was eventually felt to be more useful out in the field, buying more books, and Christina sent them both off with a vast budget, at least in theory; in fact, Heinsius found himself paying the bills more often than not. It was a trick that Gustav Adolf had frequently played on Heinsius’ uncle, and there had been money owing for a generation; indeed, the nephew’s own trip to Stockholm had been made with a view to recouping it. He had not succeeded, and though he agreed to continue in the Queen’s service, one at least of his Leiden friends gave vent to his feeling about it all: in an angry pamphlet, Pieter Burman, a professor at the famous university, denounced the Swedish royal parasites who had so abused the trust of a worthy Dutch family. If Christina learned of the pamphlet, it made no difference to her behaviour. She bought on and on, in city after city, and, every now and then, she paid. But some time later, whether from remorse or fear of further pamphlets from Burman, she returned some of Vossius’ father’s books to Leiden.

  Back in the library, Vossius had been replaced by a rather famous figure – physician-in-chief to Louis XIII, former librarian to Richelieu and Mazarin, machiavellian political theorist and presumed atheist, Gabriel Naudé. Though further testimony was hardly necessary, Naudé brought a substantial recommendation along with him in the form of thousands of books from Mazarin’s library, which the Fronde had dispatched, like the Cardinal himself, to a dozen different cities. France’s loss was once again Sweden’s gain. Naudé was relieved to find so many Frenchmen in Stockholm; it saved him the trouble, he said, of having to learn Swedish, and there was plenty for him to do, as Vossius had proved a poor librarian. But Naudé could not be persuaded to stay long. The climate was too severe, he felt, and he lacked the health and strength to withstand it. He was already in his fifties, and he did not wish to grow any older in so harsh a place. In the event, he did not grow any older at all, but took ill on his departing journey, and died in a fevered dream of warmer climes.

  The librarians, good and bad, were vastly outnumbered by erudite birds of a different feather. Most of the early arrivals were philologists, specialists in languages, particularly biblical languages, and these Christina decided to study, not in order to deepen her understanding of the Bible, but in order to pursue her interest in the occult. Christina’s occult was not magic or witchcraft or the ‘black arts’, though traces of them all did remain in it. It was a part of much of the serious learning of her day, indeed a part of natural science, battling for predominance with the new empirical methods which in the end would prove so fruitful. Occult learning was
an older way of investigating the material world, a legacy of the Renaissance, and prominent among its priestly caste were the philologists. Their knowledge of ancient languages gave them access to the esoteric writings of bygone ages, writings which supposedly contained secret knowledge about the nature of the world. The very words and letters themselves, it was believed, concealed the spirit of the universe. Understanding them brought understanding, and also control, of the natural world, for whoever could decipher the alphabet of creation could write with it as well, turning stones into bread, and evil into goodness, and lead into gold. Galileo, the revolutionary, had claimed that mathematics was the language through which the ‘book of the world’ could be understood, but for adherents of the occult, the key was not mathematics but the written word. Like the myriad items of the Emperor Rudolf’s collections, the words of the ancients together held the ultimate truth.

  The study of ancient languages consequently appeared to be of vital importance, even for everyday living. The most important of them all, in terms of occult learning, had been Hebrew, supposedly spoken by Adam, and thus the earliest of all human languages. But in recent years a number of scholars had suggested that there were other, older languages, and – contradicting the biblical story of the Tower of Babel – that there was even a family of related languages, of which Hebrew was only one. Discovering resemblances to Hebrew soon became an international sport among the learned: on the eastern seaboard of America, one determined settler even believed he had unearthed a link between Hebrew and the language of the local Indians.6 Christina herself was quick to join the fray. At the age of only sixteen, she had commissioned Sweden’s national poet, Georg Stiernhielm, to compile an etymological dictionary of the Swedish language, showing that it was the closest of all languages to ancient Hebrew. Stiernhielm was a scholar of more than usual competence – he had been the first to provide a German translation of Shakespeare – and he was steeped in occult ideas of language, but, despite skill, zeal, and a comfortable stipend, his improbable dictionary never progressed beyond the letter A. If Stiernhielm was daunted, Christina was not. She began to make plans for a school of theological linguistics at the new university in Dorpat,7 and by her mid-twenties she had gathered to her court some of Europe’s best philologists, including Christian Ravius, Ludolphus, Samuel Bochart, Claude Saumaise, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Petrus Kirstenius, Johann Scheffer, and Marcus Meibom, several of them also orientalists of the first rank.