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

by Buckley, Veronica

So ended Christina’s ‘ten-year rule’, and so began the six-year rule of the ‘most dear cousin’, who had loved her and served her so loyally. Christina had a medallion struck to mark his coronation; it bore the motto A Deo et Christina – From God and Christina. The new King was to be in no doubt about the origins of his great good fortune, though some still doubted his entitlement to it. They included the Catholic Poles and their Vasa King, Christina’s cousin, Jan Kazimierz, who protested at once, attempting to have himself declared King of Sweden in Karl Gustav’s place. The long truce of twenty years between the two countries was soon at an end. By the end of the year, Swedish troops were occupying Warsaw, their brave new soldier-King at their head. His brief reign had begun, as it was to continue, marked by warfare. Poland, and the old enemy of Denmark, would absorb him for the rest of his life.

  Chancellor Oxenstierna did his best to serve him, his sense of duty overcoming his dislike of the new King’s German blood. But his great old heart did not beat long; within six months he was dead, unable to bear, or so Christina said, the ‘grievous blow’ of her abdication. More prosaic pens recorded that the Chancellor had been ill for some time, with influenza, with the ague, with the sad and simple illness of old age. But it may be that, after all the arduous years of war and peace, after a lifetime’s strivings for his beloved friend and King and for his royal line, his spirit was broken by Christina’s abandonment of it all. She said once that, if there had been no Axel Oxenstierna, ‘this unique remedy to so many misfortunes’, the death of her father and her own extreme youth ‘would have been fatal to Sweden’.10 It is almost certainly true. The Chancellor was indispensable to Sweden’s age of greatness. It could not have continued, as it could not have begun, without him. But the Vasa crown was at the heart of it all, and it was Oxenstierna’s personal tragedy to see the choicest fruit of all his labours cast, unwanted, to the ground.

  As for Christina, she could hardly contain her impatience to be gone. She was young, and she was free, and all the world was before her. At 27 years of age, she had cast off the burden of her birth, the stifling constraints of duty, the dullness of her quiet northern homeland. She was not going to Spa or any other Pomeranian town, nor to Denmark, nor to India, nor anywhere she had spoken of as a more or less likely refuge. She would forsake the lovely islands of Stockholm for the lovely hills of Rome, and Rome, to Christina, meant more than the Church, more than freedom, more than truth. Rome was the centre of the sunlit southern world, glistening with marble, effervescent with talk in a hundred tongues, the vibrant heart of European culture. There, at last, her fabulous paintings would reflect their wonderful native setting. There she would encounter hearts and minds of her own kind. There she would be as she had longed to be, and begin at last the great adventure of her life.

  PART TWO

  Crossing the Rubicon

  It certainly began adventurously enough. Christina’s impatience to leave was made abundantly, not to say embarrassingly, clear within hours of her cousin’s coronation. Hardly waiting for the celebratory banquet to be concluded, before the clocks had struck midnight she had set out for Stockholm, the new King riding alongside her, no doubt with very mixed feelings, as far as the first staging-post. In Stockholm she spent a few hurried days in last-minute preparations, finding time nonetheless to attend a public Lutheran service, where she received communion for the last time in the faith of her fathers. It may have been a tactical appearance, designed to dispel suspicions of a possible apostasy, for she needed to confound every rumour that might persuade the tenaciously Lutheran Riksdag to renege on their financial commitments to her.

  Travelling at breakneck speed, she then headed for the Danish border with a harried group of officials in tow. At Halmstad she took her leave of them and also, significantly, of her Lutheran chaplain. It was an unwise move, given her continuing need to conceal her intentions, but Christina was in no mood for caution. With only four gentlemen to accompany her, and none in any official capacity, she rode on to Laholm, effectively as a private person. Here, at this little border town, she paused to make the final changes she had longed for. Casting off her dress, she put on the men’s clothing that from now on would be her preferred attire. She sat down only long enough to have her hair cut off, and soon it hung loosely to her chin in the male fashion of the day. To complete the picture, she buckled on a sword. It is said that, as she did so, a rider arrived, dusty from the road, with a letter for her from his new King, Karl Gustav. It contained a last plea for Christina to marry him, and it must have raised a sad smile as she stood there, in her trousers and boots, a masculine little figure with short hair and a short sword at her side.

  But her spirits were high. ‘Free at last!’ she exclaimed, running across to the Danish side of a little stream that marked the border between the two countries. ‘Out of Sweden, and I hope I never come back!’ So at least ran one French report, but the stream was a fiction, and so too, most probably, were Christina’s exclamations, embellished now, as often in the future, by a malicious Gallic pen.

  Her incognito, at least, was genuine enough, and a good family tradition as well. Her father had gone disguised on his courting journey to Brandenburg, and long ago her great-grandfather, Gustav Eriksson, Sweden’s first Vasa King, had travelled the land in the clothes of peasant or miner, stirring up rebellion against the Danes. Nearer to hand, there was Leonora Ulfeld. If a tall Danish woman might travel the world in trousers, so might a little Swede, and there was no lack of scurrilous talk to claim that Christina was pregnant, too.

  In any case, to complete the picture, she now adopted the name of one of her companions. Perhaps it was the similarity of their names which led her to decide which of the four to choose, or perhaps their nearness in age – perhaps, too, the fact that the young Count Christoph von Dohna was, of all the four, the only one nobly born. Christina found the whole subterfuge tremendously exciting, but it did not deceive the many spies who followed her out of Sweden. Her disguise was in fact, more than anything else, a revealing of her true inclinations and her real personality. Christina was now 27 years of age. From now on, she would be reluctant to wear women’s clothes or a woman’s hairstyle. She would appear in public wearing flat men’s shoes, often boots, and frequently a sword; princes and popes would greet her with her legs showing and her feathered hat in her hand. Her speech would grow coarser and her habits rougher – even her voice would deepen. Love would come, too, and with it a brief rediscovery of her fragile femininity, but for now, there was nothing but the excitement of escape and the sublime exhilaration of freedom and movement. Formalities and responsibilities lay discarded along with her long hair and her high shoes and her trailing, hindering robes. The already frenetic pace of her journey increased, and her formal itinerary was soon useless. Across the Kattegat Strait, in the little town of Kolding, the King and Queen of Denmark arrived to prepare a welcome for her after a hundred-mile journey of their own by land and sea from Copenhagen. They found only remnants of her baggage, a few tired servants, and traces of the dust left by Christina’s flying horses. The Danes were left to shrug their shoulders while the Swedes stammered apologies, but Christina, irrepressible and unrestrainable, was already five days’ ride ahead. It was a thoughtless and even dangerous thing to do, given the delicate diplomatic relations between the two countries; indeed, within two years they would be once again at war. But Christina’s eagerness to be gone had overridden every other consideration.

  There had been no need at all for her to travel in this way, hasty and unattended. Karl Gustav had placed an entire fleet of ships at her disposal, and she might have travelled in state across to northern Germany, escorted by 5,000 soldiers making their own journey onward to Bremen. But Christina had preferred a more dramatic alternative. The spies of sundry European powers reported her progress at every stage, and at every stage the reports became more extraordinary: she was travelling almost alone, she was wearing trousers, she had walked into an inn with a firearm dangling from her
neck. By the middle of July, she had reached Hamburg. It was to be the first of several sojourns for her in this busy port, and she lost no time in showing her mettle. The city’s magistrates had prepared a house for her, but this she eschewed unceremoniously, opting instead to stay at the home of her new banker, Diego Texeira, whose invitation had been earlier arranged by Don Antonio de Pimentel. As if the snub to the magistrates were not enough, Texeira was a Jew – indeed, he was also known as Abraham. His family had arrived from Portugal some decades before, and had prospered in the relatively tolerant environment of this cosmopolitan trading city. But that tolerance did not extend far enough to permit a queen of Europe’s foremost Protestant power to take up residence in Texeira’s house, and those who had endured her trousers in silence now began to protest. Christina may have felt the need to defend Texeira; certainly she did not often trouble to justify her own behaviour, but she now responded with a neat parry to the affronted Christian critics. Jesus Christ himself ‘had always conversed with Jews,’ she said. He himself ‘was come of their seed’, and ‘had preferred their company to the company of all other nations’.1 The riposte was not dictated solely, if indeed at all, by cynical financial considerations. Christina’s disdain for religious bigotry was genuine, and the Hamburg pastors could not budge her.

  While there, she took it upon herself to visit the Duke Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, a relative of Christina’s on her grandmother’s side. The Duke lived in the nearby town of Neumünster, and there was talk of a marriage between one of his daughters and the newly crowned Karl Gustav; the King’s brother, Adolf, was in Hamburg to further the negotiations at this very time. Christina met both sisters, and advised Karl Gustav to marry the elder one. Seeing portraits of both, however, he chose the pretty blonde younger sister, and before the year was out Hedvig Eleonora had taken her place as Sweden’s new Queen. Whether her efforts had helped or hindered the marriage, Christina did not think much of it, and later insisted that Karl Gustav regretted his choice of a wife. ‘I shall be miserable all my life,’ she supposed him to have said, ‘since Christina has refused me the glory of possessing her. Nothing can console me for it.’2

  Christina consoled herself, at least, with a lively sojourn in Hamburg, courting controversy at every step. She pranced about, inside and outside the town, with scarcely any escort, and twice returned so late in the night that the city gates had to be opened especially for her. When an envoy from the Emperor came to relay Ferdinand’s good wishes, she paid him the honour of donning a short skirt – on top of her trousers. An English spy reported to London the tales he had heard of her ‘amazonian behaviour’. ‘It is believed,’ he wrote, ‘that nature was mistaken in her, and that she was intended for a man, for in her discourse, they say she talks loud and sweareth notably.’3 She received visits and paid visits, accepted lavish gifts and ladled them out in return, and she took the time as well to relive girlhood days with her cousin and old schoolfellow, Karl Gustav’s sister Eleonora, now married and a German countess, and resident nearby.

  Very early one morning, with no more thought to the local dignitaries than she had given to the King and Queen of Denmark, Christina left the city. The magistrates woke up to find that she had gone, without bothering to take her leave of them or of anyone else. All that was left of her was one last, small insult: a copy of Virgil in the pew which she had occupied in one of the city’s Lutheran churches; she had taken it up to read during the sermon, and, inattentively or provocatively, had left it behind.

  Christina had set off westwards, and if the gentlemen of Hamburg were indignant, one gentleman in London, at least, was pleased. From Ambassador Whitelocke, Cromwell had learned that the Queen was headed for Spa, the very town where the executed King’s son waited in anxious exile. Charles was now aged 24, and as yet he was unmarried. A match between him and the renegade Queen of Sweden might revive the Stuart dynasty and persuade its many sympathizers to revolt against England’s new protectorate. But Spa was a Pomeranian town, and it lay to the east. Whitelocke had clearly been mistaken. It could not be the Queen’s destination, after all.

  Had Cromwell known it, a quite different marriage was also being considered for the Queen. His own good lady wife had not been feeling at her best, it seems, and as she sat palely in bed, glancing through her cherished portrait collection of the many crowned heads of Europe, she came across a picture of Christina. ‘If I were to die,’ Mrs Cromwell mused, ‘here would be the one to replace me.’ The thought of the match, warts or no, ‘still beggars the imagination’.4

  Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land, As but the Off-scouring of the Brittish Sand;…This undigested vomit of the Sea…5

  So at least thought Andrew Marvell, writing from an England at war with its watery neighbour. Christina passed through Holland in the July of 1654, and whether or not she agreed with the poet, her passing through was swift. She stopped only twice in the space of 200 miles, and both were scholarly pauses. In the eastern town of Deventer, she met the philologist Johann Gronovius, then travelled on to the lovely town of Utrecht, where she visited a famous scholar of her own sex, ‘the learned virgin’, Anna Maria van Schurman. A native of Cologne and some twenty years older than Christina, Anna Maria was a brilliant linguist and a mistress of philosophy, too; she was soon to publish a celebrated essay ‘on whether a maid may be a scholar’. Descartes had admired her, and the scholars at Christina’s court had spoken of her in the most glowing terms. What Christina thought, or felt, is not recorded, but she had never welcomed competition, and the little bud of friendship between the two bluestockings blossomed no further. The Queen got into her carriage, and sped her horses southward, away from Marvell’s ‘land of the drowned’, to the Catholic Spanish Netherlands. At the beginning of August, she arrived in Antwerp, where she passed her first few days as the guest of Madame Pimentel, before taking up residence on the Rue Longue Neuve at the home of García de Yllán, Baron of Bornival. Yllán, a Jewish banker, was known to Christina through Pimentel, his personal friend, and also through Diego Texeira in Hamburg. She settled in at his magnificent house to await her invitation from Rome.

  It was not so bad a place to have to wait. Once Europe’s premier trading and financial centre, Antwerp had by now entered a period of steep commercial decline. The Westphalian Peace had signalled its demise by ending free navigation on the important Scheldt river, so diverting trade away from the city and northward to Amsterdam. But its long period of prosperity had ensured it a thriving artistic life, and when Christina arrived its riches were still everywhere to be seen. It had been the home of Rubens and van Dyck. Jacob Jordaens, now the leading painter of the Flemish school, was still working in Antwerp; it was he who had provided the thirty five paintings for Christina’s throne room at Uppsala. Jan Boeckhorst was there, too, an artist known to Christina through one of her own agents, Michel Le Blon, a former spy for Oxenstierna and a superb engraver himself. Advised by Le Blon and her second agent, Johan-Philip Silfvercrona, she began to acquire new paintings and objets d’art which she could not afford, including a Rubens ivory of the goddess of love, and she sat for her own portrait – two portraits, in fact, as Minerva and as Diana – by Justus van Egmont.

  The city itself held much to interest her. There had been nothing in Stockholm to equal its beautiful churches and its lovely market square. The Storkyrka where Christina had been crowned would have been dwarfed by Antwerp’s great Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame, ‘the most magnificent church in northern Europe’ with its spire 400 feet high.6 Inside, the master hand of Rubens glowed from the altarpieces, their wonderful red colours a noblest transcendence of the blood of the local pigeons. Christina loved their vibrancy and passion, though their subject matter, the descent of Christ from the cross, was very much less to her taste. Her years of spiritual quest and her imminent conversion had brought her no closer to the person of Jesus. The vital heart of Christian belief remained, for her, unbeating.

  This did not prevent her from
making frequent visits to the Jesuit Fathers, and to their spectacular new church with its paintings by Rubens and the young van Dyck. The church had been built with a view to enhancing the Society’s reputation, but instead had invoked only censure. The opulence of the building was said to be out of keeping with the spirit of religious poverty; massive debt was to tarnish it for decades. But debt had never deterred Christina. Lavish spending, she believed, was more or less a duty for all noble hearts, and the church’s splendour reassured her that she had cast her newest lot among her own kind. Antwerp could boast as well the spiritual splendour of Christian poverty, and Christina did taste of it, making several visits to a Carmelite convent. Here, the nuns walked barefoot and in silence, in a pure and pious atmosphere conducive to prayer, if not to emulation. Though Christina’s plan of conversion was officially still secret, her visits to the Jesuits and Carmelites increased the rumours markedly. From Strasbourg it was reported that she had become a nun herself, and vowed ‘perpetual chastity’.7 And in London, Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster received his own startling report: ‘Advysed hether from Rom,’ wrote his agent, ‘that the queen of Sweden intents thither to imbrace that religion. How lykly, I know not.’8

  In the middle of September she encountered a familiar face from Stockholm days: the Conte Raimondo Montecuccoli, Duca di Melfi, diplomat and generalissimo, hero of the Thirty Years War, ambassador imperial, diarist of distinction. It was he whom Christina had persuaded to carry her jewels and coins out of Sweden, and to his dazzling martial plumes she had added her own small feather, the Order of the Amaranth.

  Though Montecuccoli had travelled from Vienna expressly to see the Queen, the two in fact came upon each other by chance as they were driving through the streets of Antwerp. Christina at once invited the Conte into her own carriage, where he found two other gentlemen already seated – one a young prince, the other the disgraced former governor of Norway, and a relative, in fact, of Leonora Ulfeld – the two neatly confirming Christina’s dual penchant for royalty and roguery. Once in private with the Queen, Montecuccoli revealed his mission: he had been sent by the Emperor Ferdinand himself, and indeed carried a personal letter from His Imperial Highness. The letter was gracious but promised nothing, and the Conte’s mission was of similar ilk. He soon set off for a holiday in England, though not before Christina had alarmed him by declaring that she was about to marry King Felipe of Spain – all of Protestant Holland was convinced of it, she assured him. The King was married already, admittedly, but he had no son; some kind of annulment was expected, and Christina could not forbear teasing the supposedly fearless generalissimo. The rumours were false, but Montecuccoli thought it best to convey them to the Emperor, just in case.