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

by Buckley, Veronica

  The newest eyes, and the darkest, and the longest-lashed, belonged to a handsome Spanish diplomat, in whose honour Christina had founded a new order of merit, the Order of the Amaranth, named for the legendary flower whose petals of royal purple were said to bloom eternally. Wicked tongues whispered that the new Order’s emblem, an entwined AA, signified two lovers, Antonio and Amarantha, a name which Christina slyly began to accept.

  Christina bestowed the Order on everyone whom she wished to please or to patronize. The gossips may have been deterred, or perhaps even encouraged, by its principal requirement: a vow of perpetual celibacy. Prospective members who were already married – in practice, almost everyone but Christina herself – were obliged to swear that, if widowed, they would not remarry. The English Ambassador, Bulstrode Whitelocke, though three times married, was one accommodating recruit. ‘Three times married!’ declared the Queen. Then how many children did His Excellency have? His Excellency had three children – ‘one per wife’. ‘By God!’ said the Queen. ‘You’re incorrigible!’

  The motto of the Order might have suited Whitelocke, and others equally steady of purpose, but it was a singularly inept reflection of Christina’s own volatile nature: Alltid Densamme, read its golden letters – always the same. In fact, her inquisitive and responsive nature left her constantly at the mercy of the latest new idea. Her need to dominate made things worse, and she wasted time and money that she could not spare, on project after project which never came to fruition. She planned a vast reform of education in Sweden and Finland; her father had begun the work, the Chancellor had continued it, but she vowed to outdo them both. Her father had set up a new university in Dorpat; she would crown it with a great school of theological linguistics, and all the philologists from the Pole to Constantinople would speak her name with reverence. The French had their Académie, and proud institutions for painting and sculpture; Christina’s Swedish Academy was to surpass them all with ribbons flying, leaving the French and everyone else admiring and gasping in its wake. She was alight with grand ideas, but none of them could sustain her interest for long, and she lacked the stamina even to see them brought to fruition by others. Few ideas lasted beyond their first, fine, careless rapture, and too often she found herself with unpaid bills for fireworks which had long since fizzled out. Christina was a creature of impulse. Lacking a kernel of self-confidence, she lived in a constant swirl of defensive responses to the people around her, swamping them with gifts, lying to them, lashing out, undermining them, withdrawing from them completely. Only her image of herself remained the same: brilliant, powerful, authoritative – even, in the face of the clearest evidence, tall. It was no more than the thickest layer of bravado, and it concealed an interior world of fearful fragility. Christina almost always managed to convince herself of the truth of her own illusion. ‘To attack me,’ she once wrote, ‘is to attack the sun.’ She was surprised and hostile towards those, like the Chancellor, who did not accept her at her own estimation, but she would reserve her bitterest revenge for those who attacked her sense of self.

  Tragedy and Comedy

  The sundry stories of the scholars who came to Stockholm have long since faded beside that of the greatest of all those whom Christina lured to her court. He was a physician, and, like many of the others, a refugee from France’s troubled times. He was a mathematician, too, and a pioneer of the new scientific learning that was to sweep away the old world in a succession of mighty strokes. Though most of Christina’s scholars admired his work, and some knew him personally, it was through Ambassador Chanut that she came to know – and in a sense, to kill – the most famous of them all, the great French philosopher, René Descartes.

  Descartes had been living in the little village of Egmond on the northern coast of Holland. Here he had retreated after years of increasing difficulty in France and in the Dutch cities, working in the shadow of the Inquisition, pricked and poked by the smaller demons of Calvinist bigotry. Secluded in Egmond, he had at last been able to work in peace, seeing only friends, and refusing to publish anything new.

  Descartes’ translator, Claude Clerselier, was Chanut’s brother-in-law, and through him the Ambassador himself had become a close friend of the great man. Descartes was not a freethinker, but he had earned the displeasure of the Catholic authorities by his rationalist analysis of matters which they regarded as their own preserve. Chanut himself, though a dutiful son of the Church, admired Descartes’ philosophy and was proud of their friendship, and from the beginning of his stay in Stockholm he had maintained an eager correspondence with him on metaphysical and moral questions, relaying his enthusiasm for the philosopher to the Queen, and his enthusiasm for the Queen to the philosopher.

  Christina was soon drawn into it. Convinced that she would be enraptured by Descartes’ ideas, Chanut requested his brother-in-law to send a copy of the as yet unpublished Metaphysical Meditations to present them to her. Descartes hesitated. He had had some experience with clever young women. The Swedish Queen, he felt, was no doubt like the young Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. He had been corresponding with her already for years. She was more interested in moral questions. No doubt Queen Christina would be, too. On the other hand, he was not eager to begin a discussion of such subjects with so prominent a person. The Church in France would certainly get to hear of it: ‘If I publish anything about morals,’ he wrote, ‘they’ll never give me a moment’s peace.’1 He decided, philosophically, to write about the natural world instead.

  Christina’s response to his ideas was soon made known to him through the Ambassador’s own letters. Descartes had written that he considered the universe to be so vast as to have no definite limits, or at least none that could be perceived by Man. Chanut recorded the Queen’s response:

  If the universe is so vast as you say, then Man himself can be of no great importance within it. He and the entire earth that he inhabits can be no more than a tiny and insignificant part of the whole. If this is so, it is just as likely that the stars are inhabited, or the planets peopled with better and more intelligent beings than Man himself. Man can no longer believe that the universe is made for him, or that it can serve his purposes at all.2

  Descartes replied, through Chanut, ‘I am not inferring that there are intelligent beings in the stars or anywhere else…I leave these sorts of questions undecided, without affirming them or denying them’, but he conceded, ‘I am not sure that Man is the final purpose of creation’.3 The Ambassador then conveyed a question which Christina had raised in her academy: what makes us love a person, she had asked, before we know his true merits? Descartes’ surprisingly personal reply arrived in due course:

  Love is a disposition of parts of the brain, although it may derive from the objects of the senses…These pass through the nerves to reach the brain…and they leave a sort of imprint, so that the next time we encounter a similar object, we respond to it in the same way…When I was a boy, I fell in love with a girl who had a bit of a squint, and for a long time afterwards, whenever I saw someone with a squint, I felt the passion of love…So, if we love someone without knowing why, we can assume that that person is somehow similar to someone else whom we loved before, even if we don’t know precisely how.4

  Happily, it seemed, the philosopher had not been doomed from his boyhood to fall indiscriminately in love with every squinting woman he encountered. ‘Once I recognized what was happening,’ he added, ‘I was able to cure myself of it.’

  Chanut continued talking of the philosopher to the Queen, and of the Queen to the philosopher, and in the autumn of 1647, Christina asked him to include in his next letter a direct query of her own. It was indeed a moral question: what was Monsieur Descartes’ opinion on the nature of the Sovereign Good – not in a religious sense, but ‘in the sense that the ancient philosophers have spoken of it’.5 Despite his unwillingness to write of moral matters, Descartes replied quickly, adding, in a note to Chanut, ‘I hope that what I write will be seen by no other eyes than Her Majesty’s and
your own’. To the Queen, he responded as she had wished: the ancient philosophers, he wrote, ‘being without the light of faith, knew nothing of supernatural blessings’, and therefore in his reply he would consider only ‘what good we might have on this earth’. For an individual, he wrote, physical well-being and the blessings of fortune were not always at one’s command, nor was the knowledge of good. There remained only the will to do good, the ‘firm and constant resolution to do exactly what one judges to be the right thing, and to use all the strength of one’s mind to determine what that is. Then, although one can still act wrongly, one is at least assured of having done one’s duty.’ And he added, ‘As I am sure Your Majesty sets more store by her virtue than by her throne, I am not afraid to say here that it is only virtue that deserves praise. All other good should be merely esteemed…Only virtue is obtained by the right use of free will.’

  Christina was later to say that she owed to Descartes her first thought of rejecting the Lutheran faith of her fathers and embracing Catholicism, and it is perhaps here, in this letter, that the first seed of courage or justification was sown. Ironically, despite his own adherence to the Catholic Church, Descartes’ insistence on ‘the will do to good’, ‘to do exactly what one judges to be the right thing’, was very far from the unquestioning acceptance of its dictates which the Church enjoined upon its flock. Little wonder that he had been called a sceptic, and even, as he complained to Chanut, an atheist, ‘just because I tried to prove the existence of God’.6

  Perhaps the philosopher’s November letter had set the Queen to thinking. If so, she remained thoughtful for a very long time. In February, Descartes wrote to Chanut to express his misgivings about the letter; it was not a good explanation, he feared; he might have reworked it to better effect. And he added, ‘I am really very eager to know what Her Majesty will make of it.’7 In May, still without a reply, he wrote again to the Ambassador. ‘I think it cannot have pleased her, because although she has read it, or so you say, she still has not told you what she thinks of it. But you say that she intends to look at it again. No doubt she will like it better on a second reading.’8 In the event, it was not until the following February that Descartes received the Queen’s cursory reply, requesting a copy of his Principles of Philosophy to read. He acknowledged the letter swiftly. ‘Madam,’ he wrote, ‘If a letter was sent to me from heaven, and I saw it descend from the clouds, I could not be more surprised, and I could not receive it with more respect and veneration, than I have received that which it has pleased Your Majesty to write to me.’9

  And he concluded by declaring that he could not be more zealously or more perfectly devoted to obeying the Queen’s every command, ‘even if I had been born a Swede or a Finn’. On the same day he wrote to Chanut, relaying a few hints for the Queen about his Principles, and revealing, perhaps, a touch of pique at her delay of ‘several’ – in fact fifteen – months in replying to him: ‘Of course you are quite right. It is enough to wonder at that a Queen, perpetually engaged in affairs of state, should have recalled, after several months, a letter that I had had the honour to write to her, and that she should have taken the trouble to reply at all, let alone to reply sooner.’10

  The Queen’s attentions were at once too little and too much. Having kept Descartes waiting for more than a year, she now suggested that he come to Sweden to wait upon her. Descartes was startled and dismayed, and he replied to the invitation immediately with two letters, both addressed to Chanut. The first, which was full of courtesies, was in fact intended for the Queen’s eyes: ‘I have so much veneration for the rare and lofty qualities of this princess, that I regard the least of her wishes as an absolute command. In consequence, I will not pause to consider this journey; I am simply resolved to obey.’11

  But in the second letter, Descartes revealed to his friend what he really felt about the prospect of the visit:

  I am sorry to give you the trouble of reading two letters at the same time, but I thought you might want to show the other one to the Queen. I have reserved for this one what I do not think she needs to see, namely, that I am myself surprised at how very little I wish to undertake this journey. It is not that I do not wish to be of service to this princess…if I could really believe that my journey would be of some use to her…but I have learned by experience that even among people of good understanding, even when they are really eager to learn, there are very few who can take the time to comprehend my ideas fully, and I certainly cannot expect this of a queen, who has so many other claims upon her time.12

  He did not want to go. Stockholm was too far away, and too cold, and the journey would not be an easy one, and he was ‘getting lazier and lazier all the time’. He had no interest in Sweden ‘with its rocks and ice and bears’. He wrote to Freinsheim in Uppsala, asking whether a Catholic would really be welcome among the Lutherans. The Dutch had proved less tolerant than they had appeared, after all; so might the Swedes. Freinsheim reassured him, declaring besides that there would be no lack of furs and fires to protect him from the cold, and promising to arrange a dispensation from the usual tiresome routines of court etiquette. Descartes was not encouraged. He was only recently back in Egmond, anyway, after a very disappointing journey to Paris at the command of the King himself, or at least at the command of his regents. They had sent all sorts of promises and guarantees of what he might expect at the court, all written formally on parchment, and in the end, as he told Chanut, he had even had to pay the postman for delivering the invitation:

  It was like being invited to dinner with friends, and arriving at their house only to find the kitchen in disorder and the pot turned upside down…It was the most expensive and useless piece of parchment I have ever had in my hands…But what really disgusted me was that none of them wanted to know anything more about me than what I looked like, and I came to the conclusion that they just wanted to have me in France like some sort of elephant or panther, on account of my rarity…I am sure it would not be the same where you are, but after all these unhappy journeys of the past twenty years…I could be set upon by robbers, or be shipwrecked and lose my life…All the same, if you are really convinced that this incomparable Queen still wants to study my work, and she can take the time to do so, I shall be more than happy to be of service to her. But if it is only a question of curiosity which will not last, please make some kind of excuse for me, and spare me this journey.13

  It was not that Descartes doubted the capacities of the young Queen. Apart from Chanut’s endless praises, his predecessor in Stockholm, the former ambassador, Monsieur de la Thuillerie, had also spoken ‘very flatteringly’ of her – despite her trick with the bawdy soldiers’ ballads. Nor was the philosopher averse to female students: great abilities might be found anywhere, he maintained. He had long insisted that all his own work be translated from Latin into French, so that ‘even women’ could read it. Above all, Descartes’ correspondence with the Princess Elisabeth had convinced him that ‘persons of high birth, regardless of their sex, can surpass other men in learning and virtue even if they are very young’.14 In fact it was Christina herself who had made him hesitate, and given him reason to fear that he would be no more than just one more ‘elephant or panther’ in her collection of scholars and artists. Her tardy reply to his letter implied a lack of real interest in his ideas, or perhaps simply a lack of time to study them – in either case, he felt, a visit to her court would be pointless.

  In the event, Christina made the decision for him, not by any royal command, but by the simple expedient of sending a small militia down to Egmond to collect him. They were headed by Admiral Herman Fleming, son of one of Sweden’s greatest heroes, but, although Fleming was an officer and a gentleman, Descartes was not eager to entrust himself to his hands. He sent off an urgent message to Chanut. ‘What shall I do?’ he wrote. ‘The Queen has sent one of her admirals to get me. What sort of thing should I expect from a Swedish admiral?’ Chanut urged confidence, Fleming kept smiling, and so the philosopher was captured.


  They set off on the first day of September 1649, and after six hard weeks of travel by land and sea, with the ship’s captain dazzled by Descartes’ knowledge of astronomy, they arrived in Stockholm, just in time to see a few last rays of sunlight, and to watch the tardiest autumn leaves drifting along the slowly freezing river. Christina was impatient to meet the new arrival, and she arranged to receive him the very next day. She waited in some excitement, preparing herself for the encounter, imagining his noble mien, his commanding presence, and all the distinguished fixtures and fittings that must naturally accompany so great a mind. Into this heightened expectation, the great man toddled at last, shortish, fattish, mildly spoken, uncomfortable in his new pointed shoes, thoroughly unprepossessing. His hair had been curled in honour of the occasion, but it did not help him. Christina was sadly disappointed. A great man should look like a great man, or so she thought. What was the point of being great at all, if no one was likely to recognize it? Devotion to science was all very well, but greatness must be reflected in one’s bearing, in one’s pose, in one’s attitude to lesser mortals.

  Descartes was in need of visible promotion, and Christina decided to arrange it. His grandeur would certainly be increased by a title – no doubt there would be one or two available, and if not, a new one could easily be created. He would need more money, too, and a suitable establishment; he could not lodge with the Ambassador indefinitely. If nothing could be found for him, something would have to be built, something big, something fitting. In short, Christina promised everything to her trophy philosopher – everything, that is, but the chance to philosophize.