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

by Buckley, Veronica

  Typically, she had not waited for any of them to arrive. Eager to begin her study of biblical languages, she had seized on the first possible tutor – the Royal Librarian, Johann Freinsheim. Freinsheim had already been seconded to teach her Roman history, and his duties were further expanded, and his leisure hours reduced, by Christina’s demand for regular lessons in Greek. He seems to have been several years at the task, before relinquishing his place to Isaac Vossius. Vossius had been persuaded to come to Stockholm by Freinsheim himself, recently demoted, or escaped, to a professorship in Uppsala. Like Freinsheim, Vossius was primarily an historian, but he had been reading Greek since his boyhood, and this was enough for Christina. She certainly gave him no cause to complain of her diligence; there was a lesson every day, and every night she sat up late, reviewing what he had taught her – five hours’ sleep, it seems, was all she needed. Despite this, she does not seem to have made very rapid progress: she had certainly started Greek by the age of eighteen, possibly even fifteen, and at 23 she was still taking daily lessons. But in Greek at least she was persistent; in other languages which attracted her, such as Hebrew and Arabic, she dabbled, but made no progress.

  Dabbling, in fact, was Christina’s forte. She dabbled in philosophy, and dabbled in history; she dabbled in astronomy and alchemy. She dabbled in music and dabbled in dance, and in all areas, with her quick mind and her excellent memory, she picked up enough to make a strong first impression on everyone who met her. Still in her early twenties, she presented already a rich façade of learning, which sparkled with extra gems of gossip from a dozen different courts. She had read about everything, and heard about everyone, and a judicious mixture of boasting and teasing ensured that her visitors were quickly apprised of those facts. They lent her a daunting air, a perfect match for her sense of her own innate majesty.

  One of those most definitely daunted was the French Resident and later Ambassador in Sweden, Pierre-Hector Chanut. He had arrived in Stockholm on the very last day of 1645, and he quickly became one of Christina’s most enthusiastic eulogists. An experienced diplomat, 40 years of age, a devoted Catholic husband and père de famille, Chanut was nonetheless captivated by the clever young Queen with her ‘sweet smile and her big blue eyes’. The very day after his arrival, he sat down to pen a few elated lines to one of his many correspondents: ‘She speaks French as if she had been born at the Louvre, she has a quick and most noble mind, a soul wise and discreet, and she has a certain air about her. Her every pastime is the Senate or her study or her exercise. She speaks Latin very easily and she loves poetry. In short, even without the crown, she would be one of the most estimable people in the world.’8

  Christina had just turned nineteen at the time, and perhaps, at least on formal occasions, she was still somewhat reticent; it is otherwise hard to match the description of her ‘soul wise and discreet’ with what is known of her, both before and after this meeting. But the coup de foudre was mutual: her studious habits answered Chanut’s own bookish tastes, and he, of course, was French, and could also claim a personal link to the world of serious scholarship: his wife’s brother was the translator of the celebrated philosopher Descartes,9 and Chanut himself was a good friend of the great man. The Queen and the Ambassador soon became firm friends, and over the years Chanut continued his infatuated letters from Stockholm, evoking teasing replies from his amused friends. The Queen was ‘a marvel’, it seemed, clever, cultured, virtuous, devoted to duty – and what a memory! She was pretty, too, he wrote, protesting nonetheless that he had not ‘taken the liberty of examining her beauty very closely’. Encouraged to do so, he was obliged to admit that her features were ‘not very regular’, though still, he insisted, they were ‘highly expressive’. The Queen, in any case, he wrote, had ‘no interest in her own feminine allure, and she will not permit the slightest allusion to it’. From Paris, a daring Cardinal Mazarin hazarded a mention, anyway, acknowledging receipt of her portrait with a flattering verse; the Queen’s noble soul and her lovely features, he declared, ‘must do battle with each other for the highest honour’. Susceptible to flattery only where she flattered herself, Christina was on this occasion not deceived. Hearing the translation of the Cardinal’s verse, she displayed a rare modesty, and blushed.

  Ambassador Chanut was an early recruit to Christina’s ‘academy’, a formal, regular meeting of all the scholars and artists, where they discussed such matters as interested the Queen. What is the difference between spiritual and sensual love? she asked. And of love and hate, which is worse if misused? Chanut recorded that Christina seldom gave her own opinion on the subject at hand. Instead, she would wait until the discussion had finished, then provide a neat summary of all the different arguments, and the conclusion, if any had been reached. Her reticence did not stem from intellectual deference; rather, she did not want to expose her own ideas to the possibility of contradiction. ‘I never could stand being corrected,’ she had once remarked to Chanut. Christina had to have, in every sense, the last word.

  The foreign scholars, in any case, set little store by the outcome of the discussions. Used to more meaty fare, they found them trivial, and did what they could to avoid them altogether, feigning illness and arranging tactical sojourns in the country. Despite their lack of interest, through their learning and their very numbers, they dominated the meetings, to the disgust of the local luminaries. Writing to a friend, one Swedish scholar expressed his uneasy mixture of resentment and respect towards them, and defended himself with a hint at his own superior aesthetic sensibilities: ‘It is true that for the natural sciences, for an infinity of languages, and for reading every author in existence, I cannot compete with them. But as for appreciating a poem, one doesn’t really have to know the whole of the Greek Anthology by heart.’10

  Whether to pacify the natives, or to advance her own reputation, Christina now began to talk of a separate academy exclusively for Swedes. Cardinal Richelieu had founded the Académie Française in Paris, after all; with Christina at the helm, Stockholm could surely soon boast the same. It might have done, had Christina been steady enough to stay on deck, but her quicksilver attention darted elsewhere, and for the moment the Swedish academy progressed no further than a few plans and papers.

  The Swedes’ antagonism did nothing to foster unity among the foreign scholars themselves, whose rivalry flourished in the cold, hard soil of exile. The philologists looked down on the philosophers, the artists looked down on the scientists, who looked down on the theologians, the Protestants looked down on the Catholics, who looked down on the freethinkers, who looked down on both of them, the Dutch looked down on the French, and the French looked down on everybody. Most of the tensions, profound or petty, were produced by the smallness of the Stockholm circle, but some had arrived with the scholars, on the same cantankerous winds and tides. The most notorious tale of odium academicum had originated in the famed university of Leiden, where the Frenchman Claude Saumaise and the Dutchman Daniel Heinsius, father of Christina’s schloar Nicolaas, had entered the lists in a typically arcane dispute concerning the language used by the original translators of the Bible into Greek. German students in Leiden had opted to back the Frenchman, and had turfed dozens of Heinsius’ supporters into the town’s unsavoury canals. In a rare display of impartiality, Isaac Vossius, who was a close friend of Nicolaas Heinsius, had publicly agreed with Saumaise, but once they were all in Stockholm, Saumaise had intrigued against him, anyway. Those who did not know biblical Greek, or did not care, suspected professional jealousy, or religious antagonism, or even a financial motive to the dispute, but a decade after its outbreak, feelings were still running high. Christina took no part in it – in the face of such determined erudition, she would certainly have lacked the courage to do so – but from her personal point of view the prim young Nicolaas Heinsius came a very far second to the wicked old wolf, Saumaise.

  No one caused more trouble within Christina’s community of luminaries than Saumaise’s equally disreputable friend,
the talented French physician, Pierre Bourdelot – cook, perfumer, dancer, and zither player extraordinaire. A former employee of the Prince de Condé – le Grand Condé – he had been recommended by Saumaise, and the two made a fine pair of irreverent libertines in stalwart Stockholm, the Protestantism of the one and the Catholicism of the other being of equal amusement to both. Though Saumaise was a really brilliant scholar, Christina had always been most appreciative of his boisterous self-confidence and his earthy sense of humour, and she was delighted to find the same qualities in the new arrival. She appointed him her physician-in-chief, and he was soon in constant attendance upon her. Malicious tongues whispered that he was not a physician at all, but he was, and he cured the Queen of her many longstanding complaints by the simple expedients of lighter food, more rest, and – evidently a new idea for her – regular baths.

  Christina called Bourdelot her ‘lovable ignoramus’. He was in fact a cultivated man who for some years had maintained an excellent academy of his own, with Pascal and Gassendi in regular attendance, but he could not compete, nor did he try, with the vast learning of some of the others now assembled at the court. He disliked their superior ways, and was quick to make fun of them in the jolly fashion that Christina most enjoyed, mimicking their accents and throwing snowballs at them. Bourdelot had done very well for himself, but he may have felt some resentment towards the coterie of highbrows who so disdained him – he had started life as a barber’s son, after all. The king’s daughter was not always comfortable among them, either. Despite her great self-confidence, she was at times intimidated by them, feeling ‘that awe’, as she later wrote, ‘that everyone feels when confronted by something greater’. Her father had been a great man, but she had hardly any memory of him. Chancellor Oxenstierna was a man of vast ability, and she had responded to him with reverence, then caution, then outright hostility. There had been clever and capable people about her, but now, for the first time, she was surrounded by a large number of scholars and savants of the first rank, many with decades of learning behind them. Though she could hold her own in the learned discussions, she had little of the practical scientific experience or the literary skill that most of the scholars, including those of her own age, could take for granted. Even where she most prided herself – her knowledge of languages – almost all of them had comfortably surpassed her. Christina had been brought up with three languages, Swedish, German, and French, and she spoke them all equally well. She read Latin easily, too, though she did not write it well, and she understood some Dutch and Italian and bits and pieces of other, related languages. Enthusiastic admirers among the new arrivals made all sorts of extravagant claims for her: she knew Finnish and Arabic, they declared, and any number of other languages – ‘Seven!’ said one. ‘No, eleven!’ said another, ‘and the swear words, too.’ The claims were not well founded, and even if they had been, they paled by comparison with the eighteen tongues, ancient and modern, eastern and western, which Bochart knew, or the 26 known by Ludolphus, who at least was a professional philologist. Even Bourdelot spoke good Latin.

  Whatever the reason, Christina now threw in her lot with the physician, encouraging his jokes and even on occasions joining in with them. The dignified Ambassador Chanut was spared, but not many others, it seems. One day, fed up with listening to Meibom’s talk about Greek song and Naudé’s about Greek dance, Bourdelot suggested that the elaborate descriptions of the two learned gentlemen might be improved by demonstration. Christina agreed at once, and the two were obliged to appear before the entire court in a song and dance routine revived, supposedly, from the ancient world. The middle-aged Naudé swallowed the humiliation without riposte, but Meibom, a notoriously prickly character and thirty years younger besides, took advantage of his next meeting with Bourdelot to punch him squarely in the nose. Though he was obliged to leave Sweden directly thereafter, Meibom departed with his pride intact.

  But at court, his bruised nose notwithstanding, Bourdelot kept the upper hand, and he did not hesitate to compromise even the Queen herself, when necessary, in order to gain his point. His favourite target was the prim orientalist, Samuel Bochart. Bourdelot loathed the humourless, polyglot pastor with his three doctorates in theology and his games of shuttlecock – apparently his sole amusement, which, it must be said, Christina enjoyed as well. The loathing was mutual. Bochart despised his compatriot’s ingratiating ways and his frivolous attitude to religion; he had once referred to Bourdelot as ‘original sin itself’. Bochart’s masterpiece was his immense and immensely learned Geographia sacra, a study of the age of the world from biblical sources. It was on the strength of this work that he had been invited to Christina’s court, and she had now arranged a private meeting to discuss it with him. An hour or so before the meeting, Bourdelot declared quite suddenly that the Queen’s health required urgent preventive care. As her physician, he said, he could not advise delay, and he administered her directly with an enema. Bochart and his biblical geography were simply obliged to wait. Christina seems to have taken it remarkably well, under the circumstances; she later observed to the disappointed pastor that, anyway, the world was like a woman: after a certain stage, it wouldn’t do to investigate its age too closely.

  She carried on heaping her favourite with riches and honours, while Bourdelot protested disingenuously that it was all ‘really more than I deserve’. At the few official meetings that the Queen now bothered to attend, he accompanied her, standing by her side as the business of the day – the business of state – was discussed. Afterwards, they would retire together to her private apartments, where Bourdelot behaved in the most familiar way, sitting down while the Queen was standing, and now and then even relaxing with his feet up on her sofa. Like all her favourites, he was soon rumoured to be Christina’s lover, and it was even said that she had become pregnant by him, and had ‘found the remedy along with the cause’ – in other words, that he had procured an abortion for her, with the aid of the French surgeon, Surreaux, and Madame Wachtmeister, wife of one of the Queen’s generals. Surreaux was said to have received the huge sum of 30,000 riksdaler for his services; Chanut’s physician, Du Rietz, was supposedly requested to assist him, but refused.

  It is probably impossible to know whether there was really any truth in the talk. Like other unconventional women of her rank, Christina was ascribed many lovers, both male and female. Her love for Belle was widely known, and she was said as well to have taken advantage of Charlotte de Brégy, Saumaise’s niece, during her bright, brief sojourn in Stockholm, forcing the lady ‘to perform immoral acts’. Two daughters were reputedly born to Christina, both fathered by Magnus. And there is a letter from Bourdelot to Georges de Scudéry, which mentions his fondness for the Queen, and adds that she has ‘begun to taste’.11 None of it is conclusive, but if it was only gossip, it must be said that Christina herself provided plenty of material for it. With Bourdelot, she sat up or drove out at all hours, and received him alone in her bedroom – at times, he even stayed through the night. It is likely that they enjoyed no more than a close and easy friendship; certainly, though they were very often together, their feeling for each other seems to have been affectionate rather than passionate. Christina was in her twenties and Bourdelot fifteen years older, but they were, in a way, like a pair of high-spirited students, absorbed in their own amusements, keeping clever secrets behind closed doors, talking about forbidden subjects, poking fun at the dour and doddery professors.

  The professors, for their part, were beginning to find it all rather tiresome. It had been convenient to escape the trouble in France, and they had been paid well, on the whole, and it would be amusing to regale their friends about life at the North Pole, or near enough. But there was nothing they could really do in Sweden, or at least nothing that they could not do more comfortably elsewhere. The Queen had no longer any serious interest in science or scholarship. She had ignored the calculating machine that Monsieur Pascal had so carefully sent to her. She had given no money to Menasseh ben Isra
el for his grand new edition of rabbinical writings. She was not trying to do anything spectacular herself – even her alchemy equipment was beginning to rust.

  One philosopher began to speak of the talented Visscher sisters in Amsterdam. Talking with them had been like discoursing with the angels, he said, not to mention Anna Maria van Schurman, the ‘learned virgin’ of Utrecht.12 There were far cleverer women in Holland, he was sure, than there ever would be in Sweden. And even at home in France, there was Madeleine de Scudéry and all those other précieuses, talking philosophy on their morning walks, sitting in their silks and satins under the shade of a plane tree, reading poetry, dreaming of noble things. The professors breathed a sad, collective sigh, and began to think of leaving.

  Christina’s response was to pay them more, or to replace them with others of their kind. They stayed on while it suited them, and she basked in their reflected glory, effectively buying a reputation as the new Pallas, the Pallas of the North. The dazzling royal mind, which so many of the scholars had expected, was, on closer acquaintance, not brilliant, not original, but only clever in a rather ordinary way. They were disillusioned, and Christina may have been disillusioned, too; she had imagined herself seated in splendour among them, impressing them all, as she had once impressed her teachers, with her intelligence and curiosity and all the facts and figures she had learned. She was sensitive enough to see their disappointment, and she turned from it at once. Other eyes must reassure her by the reverence of their gaze. Newer voices, not yet familiar, must confirm her superiority, her sovereignty, her majesty.