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

by Buckley, Veronica

  In the cold and gloom of a January day, Christina made her way to the Riksdag hall, and there, to a startled and disbelieving audience, she announced that she wished to nominate a successor to the throne: her cousin, the Count Palatine Karl Gustav. She had not made the decision impulsively, she said. It was the fruit of long and careful consideration. But she needed, and now she asked for, the Riksdag’s agreement to it.

  A great roar of consternation grew from the benches. What could Her Majesty mean? What need was there to nominate a successor? Her Majesty had already agreed to marry Karl Gustav. It was on that understanding that he had been appointed Commander-in-Chief. The marriage would surely be blessed by children, and if not, Her Majesty’s consort would naturally succeed her. Her Majesty was clearly unwell; she must still be suffering from the effects of her recent fever. The whole idea was preposterous. They would certainly not agree.

  Christina departed, and shortly afterwards, in her private apartments, a deputation of Riksdag men arrived to remonstrate further with her. Her Majesty was young, they said, and understandably nervous, but there was really no need for this latest idea. The Count was a fine young man, a good soldier, and a loyal subject. He would make a fine husband, and a fine consort for Her Majesty. All would be well once the marriage had been settled.

  In an echo of her earlier confrontation with the Chancellor, Christina at first responded diffidently, then suddenly turned on the deputies, declaring that she did not intend to marry at all. ‘I am telling you now,’ she said, ‘it is impossible for me to marry. I am absolutely certain about it. I do not intend to give you reasons. My character is simply not suited to marriage. I have prayed God fervently that my inclination might change, but I simply cannot marry.’2

  The men of the Riksdag departed, shaking their heads, but reassuring themselves that it was all just the apprehension of a young girl, admittedly rather an unusual girl, that Karl Gustav, though admittedly German, was sound enough, and clearly very fond of Her Majesty, that in due course the two would marry, and all would surely be well. In February, they issued a formal refusal of the Queen’s proposal.

  A sudden gust of chill wind from the west obliged them to reconsider. In March, the court received a visit from Patrick, Lord Ruthven, the Scottish ‘General Reduving’ who had once served, along with many of his countrymen, in the armies of Gustav Adolf. Lord Ruthven came on desperate business, seeking Swedish help for the English King imprisoned by Cromwell’s parliamentary government. He came too late: within days of his arrival, the court learned the astounding news that Charles I had been executed. Weeks before, in Whitehall, he had been led to the block, fortified by ‘bread and a little red wine’, and wearing two shirts so that he would not shiver and be thought a coward in the bitter winter afternoon. There, before thousands of silent and bewildered spectators, the English King had ‘bow’d his comely Head down’.3

  The civil war in England had been followed with interest and some approval in Sweden, where Charles’ absolutist stance had not been well regarded; the Chancellor for one had been heard to state in round terms that the Stuart King had brought his troubles upon himself by his own intransigence. But Charles’ execution destroyed any real Swedish sympathy for Cromwell’s parliamentarians. Christina herself was reportedly so affected by it that she determined to contribute personally to the punishment of the regicides and the re-establishment of the Stuart monarchy. Her indignation passed quickly, however, and she was in fact the first of Europe’s monarchs to send formal greetings to the new government in London. Cromwell modestly accepted a translation of it from one of his more learned accomplices, his Latin being, by his own admission, ‘vile and scanty’.

  From Poland in the east to England in the west, the Swedes saw rebellion. To the south, too, tremors shook the once sure powers of France and Spain. Catalonians and Portuguese and Neapolitans had taken up arms against their Spanish Habsburg overlords, and in France the boy-King Louis had fled his capital in the middle of the night in the first fearful months of the Fronde. Comparisons were soon being made in Stockholm, and talk of foreign uprisings began to be followed with less eager interest and much more anxiety. The need for stability now seemed paramount. If Her Majesty could not be persuaded to marry quickly, the succession should at least be assured. At all costs, the Swedes must avoid having to elect a new monarch until the country’s financial crisis had been settled; an election would certainly bring dissension, and might even lead to civil war. And so, in the same month of March 1649, the Riksdag reconsidered Christina’s proposal, and finally agreed to accept Karl Gustav as her formal successor to the Swedish throne. To most of them, it seemed a formality in any case; the two would surely be married, they felt, once the Queen had overcome her girlish reluctance. And Karl Gustav would have no hereditary rights; he would be replaceable, by election, if that need should arise in the future. But to Christina, the acceptance of a formal successor was a major victory. She believed that she had finally succeeded in balancing her strong desire to rule with her antipathy to marriage: while she lived, she would remain on the throne, but she would have no need to marry or bear children; that distasteful duty could be left to Karl Gustav’s eventual bride.

  Reassured for the moment, the men of the Riksdag turned once again to their own concerns. The main concern now of the three commoners’ Estates was to reduce the power of the nobles, while the main concern of the nobles’ Estate was, naturally enough, to protect it. Since the Queen’s accession, the nobility itself had greatly expanded, and the sale and donations of crown land and other sources of revenue had been accelerating. The nobles were not only gobbling up the best land, but were also monopolizing crown offices: the burghers’ sons, beneficiaries of the country’s improved education system, could find few outlets for their raised aspirations; all the best positions, it seemed, had already been granted to some young count or baron. Magnus noted the problem succinctly: ‘There are more learned fellows than jobs to provide for them,’ he remarked, ‘and they are growing desperate.’4 The discontented chorus was swelled by the voices of the many thousands of young men who had returned to Sweden at the end of the war, expecting some reward for their years of service abroad. The clergy was no better pleased. A good deal of church land had been alienated, too, and they resented the nobles’ new high-handed manner, learned from the German aristocracy during the war – even bishops complained they were being treated ‘like stable boys’. The peasants’ Estate had a particular grievance. Its own members were drawn only from those who worked the crown’s land and those who were themselves freeholders; those who served the nobility were not represented in the Riksdag. As the nobles gained more land, so they gained more peasants to work it; a shrinking crown and freehold peasantry was gradually depleting the peasants’ political strength. The Archbishop of Uppsala stated the problem angrily: ‘When the nobility have all the peasants subject to themselves,’ he declared, ‘the Estate of Peasants will no longer have a voice, and when the Estate of Peasants goes under, the Bourgeoisie and the Clergy may easily go under too. The Nobles have all the land in the kingdom under their control. And where is the crown’s power? He who owns the land is the ruler of the land.’5

  The longstanding demands for an end to the alienation of crown assets were now intensified. It was no longer enough to stop them; that wrongfooted path must be retraced; the crown must take the land back. The question of ‘resumption’ now became the subject of heated debate in the Riksdag, with the three commoners’ Estates – the clergy, the burghers, and the peasants – ranged against the nobles, whose votes nonetheless outweighed them all. Across the country, the same matter was raised; at every social level, the same passions swelled. Those who had most to lose convinced themselves that they could hear the distant roar of revolution: ‘They want to do as they have been doing in England,’ declared Jakob De la Gardie, ‘and make us all as like as pigs’ trotters!’ Even the Chancellor, a longstanding champion of peasant rights, felt that armed suppression might be n
ecessary, and in an uncharacteristic outburst to his fellow senators, he urged, ‘The only recourse is a hand of iron!’ Christina herself had begun to side with the commoners’ Estates, though not from remorse over the alienations, and not because any democratic principle had swayed her autocratic head: ‘Neither King nor parliament have their proper power,’ she said, ‘but the common people, the rabble, rule as they like.’6 It was not true. By now, neither ‘King’, nor parliament, nor yet the common people, had the power to solve the crisis and rule the country in peace. If the Chancellor and the senators and the 500 men of the Riksdag were overwhelmed by the troubles besetting them, so was their young, already weary Queen.

  A new year dawned: 1650, a year of bitter weather and failing harvests. Sweden’s farms were producing less than they had done for fifty years, and less than they would do for fifty to come. By the spring, Stockholm’s bakers were fighting one another at the gates of the town, desperate to get their hands on the scanty supplies of flour arriving from the countryside. Anxiety fed wild rumours: it was said that the Queen herself had no money for firewood, and at times no food in her larders. The rumours were false, exaggerations no doubt of delayed payments to tradesmen or reduced courses at formal dinners, but the people’s hardship was real enough. Bad weather was partly to blame, but bad management contributed, too: the most productive land had by now been sold or ‘donated’ away, and of the little revenue that it did produce in these slim years, even less made its way back to the crown coffers. Of the Stockholm bakers who did get their hands on some flour, many found that the loaves they baked could not be sold, or at least could not be paid for: the crown’s servants had been too long without wages.

  Christina, Nero-like, passed the desperate months preparing for her coronation. She was now aged 23, and had been a reigning Queen for more than five years, and still she had not been crowned. Celebrations had been planned and delayed and planned again; the continuing war, lack of money, disagreement about suitable forms, and for a long time her own disinterest, had prevented any formal decision being made. The six months of preparation initially deemed sufficient had been doubled, then trebled, then extended indefinitely while courtiers rushed from city to city and funds were scraped together or borrowed to pay for the great event.

  The date was finally fixed for the twentieth of October.7 It was to be a splendid day, a day that would announce to the rest of Europe that Sweden was no longer a cultural backwater, that its artists as well as its armies could hold their own in a European field. Impressing the neighbours was not Christina’s wish alone: despite a great deal of grumbling about escalating costs, the Estates and the Senate, and the Chancellor, too, agreed that it was time for Sweden to reveal another, more refined face to the world. In Stockholm, the magistrates voted hefty sums to add to the general splendour, though the Riksdag clergy, condemning anew the exchange of ancient crown land for quick cash revenues, jeered that Christina had better be crowned Queen of Swedish Tolls and Excises.

  In March, she fell ill once again, and for many weeks she remained so, recovering only with the weak spring sunshine in the last days of May. She soon set off for Nyköping to visit Maria Eleonora, and so did not see the arrival of the great ship containing the fireworks – and a decorative cardboard castle – for her forthcoming coronation. As the festive load arrived in Stockholm, another ship sailed out of the harbour with a different and more extraordinary cargo: a letter from the French Ambassador Chanut to Cardinal Mazarin in Paris, relaying the Ambassador’s astounding belief that, despite all the preparations for her coronation, the Swedish Queen did not intend to remain long on her throne.

  Chanut’s belief was well founded, for he had received the information from the Queen herself. For some time, she had been sighing over the difficulties of governing, whispering to him of her dissatisfaction with Lutheranism, hinting at a possible abdication. Her evident distaste for marriage had added to its likelihood, and by the time of her visit to Nyköping in the spring of 1650, the Ambassador was well and truly convinced. It was ‘a tremendously bold step’, he thought, but Her Majesty would not be without other resources. Concealed within her own soul she harboured ‘treasures of happiness and joy’, which would be forever at her disposal; the retreat she was preparing was ‘greater,’ he wrote, ‘than all the kingdoms of this earth’. For the devout Ambassador, the Queen’s concealed treasures were all religious; a potentially Catholic heart, he was sure, beat in her unhappy Protestant breast.

  It was no doubt the question of religion which had prevented Christina from confiding in any of her determinedly Lutheran compatriots. She had many intimates with whom she might otherwise have shared her thoughts: Karl Gustav himself was still in Nuremberg, leading the Swedish delegation at the long series of discussions which followed the peace treaties, but her cousin, Maria Euphrosyne, was close to hand, and so was Magnus, and Johan Matthiae, and Belle, and even Salvius, recently returned from diplomatic service abroad. She may have felt that outsiders would be more impartial in the matter – they had less to gain, after all, and also less to lose, if she should abdicate. In any case, it was Chanut, and the Emperor’s recently arrived ambassador, the Conte Montecuccoli – significantly, both Catholic – who were first to learn of the step she was now considering. Montecuccoli, sizing up the Queen’s likely successor with an earthy Italian eye, reported that Karl Gustav was ‘a very easy and friendly fellow, and a great drinker, all qualities much appreciated in these northern countries’.8

  While Cardinal Mazarin and the Habsburg Emperor were kept abreast of developments by their dutiful ambassadors, no one else had the least idea that the Queen was thinking of renouncing her throne. In July 1650, the Riksdag assembled to discuss the country’s parlous financial situation, and for two months they talked of alienations and resumptions, of ancient rights and modern needs. It was late in September when the Queen finally interrupted them with a new subject for discussion: Karl Gustav, she declared, must be made hereditary prince of the realm. To Christina, it was an interim subject, a stepping stone to the real matter of her intention to abdicate, but to the men of the Riksdag, it was a shocking idea, and altogether without reason. They had already accepted Karl Gustav as the Queen’s eventual successor; in the event of her death, the crown would pass to him, and in due course, some other King could be elected, some Swedish prince of their own choosing. Karl Gustav was a soldier, and might again see military action – in theory, at least, an election might not be so far away. It would all be very different if he were made hereditary prince, if his heirs were entitled to claim the throne after him. It would mean the end of the Vasa dynasty, and a German king on the Swedish throne. The patriotic men of the Riksdag issued a staunch refusal.

  Christina staged a tactical retreat, but she did not give in. The Riksdag’s unity on this new matter had not overcome their older divisions, and the young Queen now revealed how much she had learned since her first clumsy interventions in the great affairs of state. The three commoners’ Estates wanted a resumption of crown lands; the nobles’ Estate insisted that the status quo must be maintained. The commoners wanted to increase their rights and decrease their obligations towards the nobles; the nobles wanted to maintain their power. The commoners’ hope was the nobles’ fear, and Christina played on both. She took none of their causes really to heart, but she was sufficiently astute, and now sufficiently experienced, to exploit them for her own purposes. To the commoners she promised resumptions of land and relief from the most pressing of their obligations; to the nobles she promised protection against the commoners’ more extreme demands. In return she demanded, from all of them, that they accept Karl Gustav as Sweden’s hereditary prince.

  Within a fortnight, she had achieved it. On the ninth of October, the Riksdag capitulated. At their last session before the coronation, the Queen sat triumphantly beneath her silk canopy, with the new prince, just returned from Nuremberg, seated in unsought glory at her right hand. All parties believed that victory was theirs. No o
ne thought to raise the matter of the financial crisis.

  Christina’s coronation was a fabulous affair. But although the Swedes may have earned some cultural standing by its magnificence, in the event, as with so much else connected with her reign, it was the French who gained the most.

  From France came Christina’s coach, her throne, her wonderful robe and all her other coronation clothes, her coronation canopy of velvet and gold and silver, a marvellous saddle for her favourite horse, and liveries and gifts for hundreds of people. All had been made for her in Paris, and much had been years in the making. The coronation robe, arriving via Amsterdam, had lain in careful storage at the home of an ambassador for more than a year, awaiting the completion of other, less magnificent preparations. It was an extraordinary creation of ‘violet-brown’ – purple – velvet, lined with ermine, trimmed with pearls, and laden with circles of solid gold crowns.9 It was twelve feet long, and with the weight of the crowns was difficult to manage; it obliged Christina to ride in a coach rather than on horseback as her ancestors had done. It seems that even she was unnerved by the enormous cost of the robe. Many of the bills from the unidentified Paris tailor were quickly lost, or hidden, or destroyed. Later monarchs, facing their own financial troubles, would turn to the robe to help them out, removing the gold crowns and melting them down for reuse.

  Christina’s crown at least required only a modest outlay. It was the same crown that her mother had worn for her coronation as Queen Consort 30 years before. Unlike her own jealous mother-in-law, Maria Eleonora had handed over her crown quite willingly, though arches were now added to indicate the higher standing of her sovereign daughter.

  Very tardily, Christina sent to The Hague for an erudite book on emblems and heraldic devices; her own had yet to be decided. The throne room at Uppsala was looking the worse for wear: Christina commissioned 35 paintings from Jacob Jordaens in Antwerp, who packed off a series of classical scenes, conveniently to hand in his studio.10 Christina’s private apartments in the castle, she felt, should also be redecorated for the occasion, and the bare cathedral walls must be covered with tapestries depicting the great events of Swedish history, the uprising against the Danes and Gustav Adolf’s victories and other grand, inspiring scenes. The order was sent for scores of them to be woven especially, but it was much too late, and the tapestries retold instead the usual tales of gods and nymphs and hunting. The arches at least were to be original, splendid triumphal arches through which she would drive – her coronation could certainly not proceed without one or two, at least.