At first, Descartes did not mind unduly. He was delighted by her knowledge of French, and encouraged by her cleverness, and quite overwhelmed by her generosity. He felt sure she would be willing to help his talented young friend, a fellow royal bluestocking, the Princess Elisabeth. The Princess, daughter of Bohemia’s deposed ‘Winter King’, a longtime refugee from the Thirty Years War, was at the moment in particularly difficult straits. The Queen was clearly in a mood to give, and Descartes began to drop hints. The Princess was a marvellous woman, he said, modest, virtuous, beautiful, devout, and so brilliant! In the study of metaphysics, he declared, he had never met anyone so gifted. It was quite the wrong thing to say to Christina, who did not appreciate competition, even from distant refugees. While Descartes continued his panegyrics, she sent instructions to her mother, then travelling towards the Princess’ current abode, that she was on no account to receive her.
If Descartes had arrived too early, with the fierce winter still before him, he had also arrived too late, for if Christina’s attention had ever been fixed on philosophy, it was by now engaged elsewhere. Her study of Greek, for one thing, was absorbing a good deal of her time. Descartes was dismissive of it, and of all the occult ideas that lay behind it. The ancients had nothing to tell us, he declared. Studying their writings now was not science, he said, but history. No one could claim to be right, simply by quoting old authorities or finding secret links between one text and the next. Nothing could be known to be true, he said, unless it was proved to be so. Christina took no notice, and ploughed on with her conjugations. She had got him to her court, and he was welcome to stay in an ornamental capacity, but as for all his new ideas, she had read a summary of them which Chanut and Freinsheim had provided for her, and for the time being, that was quite enough. She suggested that he absent himself for five or six weeks, in order to get to know the country better. Descartes, astonished, felt no inclination to trudge around Sweden’s bad country roads with the winter setting in. He opted to stay put, but the Queen’s alternative proposal did not please him any better.
Her birthday was approaching. She would be 23, and in her honour a grand court ballet was to be performed in the castle’s new ballet hall. It was a handsome space, reconstructed from the apartments of an unhappy group of dislodged civil servants. Affairs of state were all very well, but a colourful spectacle, Her Majesty had informed them, was ‘necessary and useful at every court’; they could take their notes and their niceties elsewhere. Christina was excitedly involved in every aspect of the new production, and she stunned Descartes by suggesting that he take part as well. Pleading too little capacity, perhaps, or too much dignity, Descartes managed to escape performing in the ballet, and also composing the music, but, at the Queen’s insistence, he was obliged to write the libretto for it. In the wake of the Westphalia treaty celebrations, still ongoing in Stockholm as elsewhere, it was to be entitled La Naissance de la paix – The Birth of Peace. It was supposed to include both heroic and comic elements, but Descartes indignantly injected a loud and serious note into the proceedings by transforming the usual cast of lovable rogues into a troupe of maimed soldiers and refugees. The festivities of peace, he felt, should not be so joyous that the horrors of war would be forgotten. The libretto was not a masterpiece, and Descartes made several subsequent attempts to destroy it, but each time it was rescued by an undiscerning, or mischievous, Chanut. Despite its limitations, the ballet was received well – too well, Descartes may have thought; he was soon ‘requested’ to produce another work for the stage. This time it was to be a play, and there were to be no maimed soldiers and no refugees: an Icelandic princess would be the heroine; there would be a lover, and there would be a tyrant, and there would be a dramatic escape in attractively rustic disguise. Descartes started the work, but did not finish it. He turned instead to a third request from the Queen, namely, that he prepare the statutes for her long-promised academy for Swedish scholars only, using Richelieu’s Académie Française as his model. He did so, and with great care, but it seems that, along with the jealousy met by other foreign savants, Descartes had encountered a goodly measure of haughty Swedish dogmatism, for among the Academy’s rules he felt obliged to state expressly that ‘everyone must listen to everyone else with respect, without showing disdain for what is being said’. In the event it did not matter, for Christina’s Swedish Academy never saw the light of day.
It was all very discouraging, and Descartes wanted to go home. His apprehensions had proved only too correct. He had served his turn as an exotic elephant in the land of bears, and there was nothing more for him to do. Freinsheim, having eagerly encouraged him to come to Sweden, had taken flight himself to thaw out quietly in warmer climes. Chanut had been a genial host, and had even climbed a little mountain with him to take some atmospheric readings to send to Pascal in Paris, but the Queen was too busy – though not with affairs of state – to pay him any attention. Perhaps Chanut mentioned something about the matter to her; in any case she finally realized Descartes’ despondency, and bestirred herself to spend some studious time with him. With her Greek and her ballets and the Italian paintings and the Senate and all the myriad matters of the court, she had little of it to spare, so little, in fact, that the thrice-weekly philosophy lessons had to be scheduled for five o’clock in the morning.
It was January 1650, the coldest month of the coldest year of an exceptionally cold century. It is possible that Christina suggested this inhuman hour to put an end once and for all to the talk of philosophy lessons; no doubt she had heard from Chanut of Descartes’ habit, cultivated since his boyhood, of spending every long morning tucked up in bed in his ‘stove’, a well-heated, not to say overheated, room where he could read and write and philosophize, whatever the weather. He had found Holland more than cold enough, and had comforted himself in anticipation of the Swedish winter by reflecting that ‘they have better measures against the cold up there’.15 But in the Queen’s library, at least, they did not. It was in fact not heated at all, and moreover, while in the presence of Her Majesty, Descartes was obliged to remain bareheaded. No amount of fur or philosophy could protect him from the fierce cold; lack of sleep and the sharp disruption of the lie-abed habits of four decades made their own cruel contribution, and by the end of the month, Descartes had fallen ill with influenza.
Chanut had succumbed as well, and for some weeks the two looked after each other at the Ambassador’s well-heated residence. Christina sent along one of her personal physicians, but Descartes, trained in medicine himself, declined his help. He had no faith in Swedish physicians, he said – overlooking the fact that the man in question was Dutch – and he resorted instead to a medicine of his own devising: hot drinks of brewed tobacco. They did not help him. His condition worsened; he developed pneumonia, and at the beginning of March, he agreed that the Queen’s physician might attend him after all. He allowed himself to be bled, warning that there should be no wasting of ‘good French blood’, but if the treatment could ever have helped him, it was now too late. On the eleventh of the month, ‘content to withdraw from this life, like a true philosopher and a true Catholic’, he died, not dramatically, as he had once feared, at the hands of robbers or by shipwreck, but quietly and prosaically, from the flu.
Christina was shocked by Descartes’ death, and she determined, perhaps not without a trace of guilt, that the attention she had failed to pay him while he lived should be fully accorded him now. She made plans for a magnificent funeral for him, to be held as soon as she could organize it. He was to be laid to rest in the Riddarholm Church beside all the kings of Sweden. His tomb was to be of marble, inscribed with the noblest references to the noblest mind in the noblest of all the sciences. In the meantime, as he had not been a Lutheran, the great man was hastily buried in Stockholm’s cemetery ‘for the unbaptized’, and his grave marked with a wooden plank. For a week or two, the grand memorial plans absorbed Christina, but soon they were forgotten, and two years later, on his pilgrimage to Descart
es’ grave, the young orientalist, Pierre-Daniel Huet, was shocked to see the paltry memorial, rotting away in the wind and rain. His playful nature quickly got the better of him, however. With a glance behind him, he took out his pen-knife, and to the solemn words ‘Beneath this stone’, he added a mischievous ‘made of wood’.
Christina had taken care to provide a musical accompaniment to all the philosophizing and the talk of belles-lettres. She began by demoting her mother’s German musicians in favour of people of her own choosing. Maria Eleonora had done a good deal to develop Stockholm’s modest court band of lutes and trumpets into an impressive professional ensemble. Some musicians she had brought with her on her marriage journey of 1620, and in the ensuing years of her rather spasmodic influence, she had continued to expand their numbers. Foremost among the Germans were Andreas Düben and his family, a talented group who were to set the pace of musical life in Sweden for more than a hundred years. Düben had revitalized both secular and sacred music in the capital, and was now court Kapellmeister, with years of achievement and a fine following of enthusiasts behind him. Christina could not get rid of the Dübens, but she did her best to lessen their standing. She sent for musicians from France, and once they arrived, prevented them from joining the various ensembles already in place at court. She promoted a rival English group as well, instrumentalists in the entourage of Ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke; they had brought their own music with them from their sceptred isle. ‘Her Majesty would often come to me,’ the Ambassador recorded, ‘and discourse with me of her musicke.’ Christina admired the English music his ensemble performed, and asked him to obtain copies of it for her.
For his part, Whitelocke was impressed by the Queen’s latest imports, particularly by Pierre Verdier and his band of Paris violinists. They were perfectly suited to the task at hand, for, apart from ensuring the dominance of her own people, Christina wanted to move away from the German tradition personified by Düben, towards music composed for the French-style ballets which were now so fashionable in Stockholm, and which she herself adored. From this music and the ballets themselves sprouted a few tentative new works, operatic in style, a mixture of masque and song, entertaining if not memorable. But there was also vocal music of fine quality. At the behest of Alessandro Cecconi, already snugly ensconced in Stockholm as a petted favourite of the Queen, a large company of Italian singers had arrived, with a troupe of actors in tow, and Christina’s attention was soon turned to them. They were led by Vincenzo Albrici, who, like the Dübens, had travelled en famille, and among their number were Pietro Reggio and the celebrated castrati, Domenico and Nicola Melani. They had the usual repertoire of cantatas and madrigals, but also some very different works in the emerging Italian opera style, including one, if reminder were needed, portraying the frenzied grief of Maria Eleonora following the death of her husband. The music at least was new to Christina, and she was enraptured by it. The French musicians quickly fell from grace, though their masques and ballets continued to be staged. The Queen signalled their demotion by allowing them to join forces with the Germans, under the direction of a jubilant Andreas Düben, while the Italians, and Cecconi in particular, continued their rise. Christina came to trust Cecconi implicitly – he had taught her all her best oaths, after all, in French as well as Italian – and before long she sent him off to hunt out banned material from the backstreet booksellers of Florence.
Despite her love of music and her expensive encouragement of all kinds of music-making, Christina does not seem to have been a musician herself. No doubt she had learned to play as a girl, the lute at least, and perhaps a keyboard instrument; she also received dedications of music for viola da gamba and baroque guitar, suggesting that she may have played or particularly liked these instruments. A girl of her rank, even a tomboyish, horsy girl, would certainly have had some lessons, especially as her father and mother were both excellent lutenists. Magnus, as a boy, had spent an hour at his lute every day, and even Chancellor Oxenstierna played passably well. There had been good lutenists to teach her, too,16 but if Christina had learned as a child, she does not seem to have played in her adult life. She may have lacked the patience or the application to become a good instrumentalist, but it is more likely that she was simply not very good at it. Christina did not like to be where she could not shine. If she could not quickly dominate, she withdrew.
With dancing, and the grand theatrical gestures required for the French ballets, the story was very different. She loved it all, and commanded fabulous performances at every opportunity, whether she could afford them or not. She took part herself, always in a starring role, usually as a queen or goddess, often as Diana, pursuing the chase and eschewing marriage with equal vengeance. She brought in specialists from Paris to advise her on the staging and to make the elaborate constumes, and to design the extraordinary machinery required to make the seasons change and the waves move and the gilt sun rise in splendour. It was, in a way, Christina’s element, extravagant, spectacular, with a clear central figure to whom every other character deferred. It was an art of fantastic excess in an age of the same, and to bring it off successfully, for the audience, at least, may have required a touch of distance, or of irony. It is not a touch that Christina could have brought to any grand portrayal of herself, even in allegory, and she may have taken it all a little too seriously. The sophisticated Frenchmen, watching her dancing and posing, chuckled into their lacy sleeves, but they took care that she should not hear them, and she herself never realized the melodrama of her own performances.
It was not for want of good teaching. In her childhood, Chancellor Oxenstierna, ignoring the warnings of his own puritan heart, had engaged a French ballet master to instruct Christina and others at court in dancing and deportment. The Frenchman, Antoine de Beaulieu, was a man of determined spirit, and he had spent many years in Stockholm, waging his elegant battle against the clubfooted Swedish nobles and their keen but clumsy Queen. The arrival of so many of his compatriots, with the outbreak of the Fronde, had vastly improved the possibilities for Beaulieu: stagings grew bolder, steps more elaborate, horizons, painted and otherwise, expanded. He was a favourite of the Queen Mother, who in fact settled two estates on him, but Christina, perhaps because of this, paid him modestly, and often late. Now and then, it provoked a response from the dancing-master. On one occasion, disappointed of his salary, he brandished his cane at the crown cashier, calling him a ‘Swedish cur’, then turned from the room in an attitude of exemplary dignity. The insulted cashier seized a poker from the fireplace behind him, and charged after Beaulieu; forbearing to use the poker, he resorted instead to slapping him – eventually the pair were brought to court. Witnesses admitted they had not really understood what was going on, but all claimed to have distinctly heard the word ‘cur’. Beaulieu denied it, and insisted that it was he who had been treated like a dog. His meagre bone was tossed to him the following day.
Loving music, but not playing, loving to dance, but dancing badly, Christina had yet to come into her own in the difficult world of the fine arts. Her real gift was visual, and as yet it had only barely started to blossom. Sweden itself had not many master painters, though the best of them, Jakob Elbfas, had for some years taught her himself. The hundreds of paintings from Prague, especially those of the Italians, had opened her blue eyes wide at last, and several foreign masters were now invited to Stockholm. From time to time, curbing her restlessness, Christina agreed to sit for them, and many beautiful paintings resulted from the gifted hands of Sébastien Bourdon, David Beck, and Pierre Signac, and from other, lesser artists. They painted all the prominent people of the court: Karl Gustav, and Belle, and the Chancellor, and Johan Matthiae, and Maria Euphrosyne, and – several times over – Magnus.
Hollow Crown
Christina was now aged 22, and still she showed no sign of accepting a husband. Karl Gustav had been packed off to the army, and, after fifteen years of unencouraged wooing, the young Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg had finally gi
ven up, and chosen another princess. In January 1649 came menacing news from the east: Christina’s Catholic cousin, Jan Kazimierz Vasa, step-brother to the late King Wladyslaw, had been crowned Poland’s new King. Despite being a cardinal, Jan Kazimierz had secured the throne after agreeing to marry his step-brother’s widow, Maria Ludwika, an ambitious and popular Queen, much interested in the perilous politics of her adopted country,1 and still young enough to bear many heirs. With a new Vasa marriage in Catholic Poland, the Swedish succession was now a matter of urgency. Christina, repelled by the ‘handing over’ of the royal widow, found herself pressed ever more earnestly to settle the issue of her own marriage once and for all. But she could not bring herself to marry, and for months, even years, she had been slowly coming to a resolution of the dilemma at the heart of her young life.
Despite her proud claims of physical strength and great stamina, she had not been well for some time. She had known illness in childhood, but since her formal assumption of the throne five years earlier, the problems had increased in frequency and in degree. She suffered excessively from menstrual pain, and was prey to frequent headaches and fevers, insomnia, fainting fits, and even heart palpitations. The fevers may have been malarial, but the other symptoms seem to have had a more emotional cause. No one was able to help her: her several doctors between them could suggest only doses of brandy heated with peppercorns. Disliking all forms of alcohol, she cannot have welcomed even this mild remedy, and in any case, it had no effect. Her malaise continued, and in the end, she decided to help herself.
Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 16