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

by Buckley, Veronica

  Had he waited a week or two, he would have been able to dispel them conclusively, for early in November, Pimentel arrived in Antwerp as envoy from the Spanish King himself. He brought no better news than Montecuccoli had done. Christina wanted to make a grand public profession of faith in the hallowed city of Rome, but this Felipe would not allow. The Pope, Innocent X, was seriously ill, and was not expected to survive the winter. Under the influence of his formidable sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini – la terribile Pimpaccia – he had been a firm supporter of Spain; Felipe now feared a successor friendlier to France. He did not want to lose the credit for this latest Catholic coup, and he ‘commanded’ that, for the time being, the Queen must remain in the Spanish Netherlands, and keep her proposed conversion secret.

  Christina evidently found this hard to swallow, for she pretended loudly that the decision to stay had been her own. In fact she had no alternative but to go along with the King’s wishes, for she could not afford to do otherwise. Hardly out of Sweden, she was already short of money. Her jewels had been pawned to raise some ready cash, but within a few months it was gone, and she now wrote urgently to Johan Holm, her steward in Stockholm, that he must sell her gold and silver services there to provide more ready cash, which, in its turn, would melt away. Apparently, her royal plate was more easily sacrificed than any of the valuable manuscripts which she had brought with her. The steward, now ennobled as Leijoncrona, though until recently Christina’s tailor, opted to pawn the plate instead, and was soon able to buy it back for himself.

  Uncowed by the unroyal measures she had had to take, or by the King of Spain’s reminder of her dependence, she went on spending, bestowing gifts on every passerby, entertaining lavishly, and in between times playing chess and croquet, driving out in her carriage, ‘not listening to any sermons’, as she wrote to Belle in Sweden, and going to the theatre – the last almost every night, and often to see the same play two or three times over.9 Even this was not enough: she had soon hired the entire theatre company for her private entertainment, a luxury which cost her 4,000 borrowed francs per month. Incorrigible, she carried on, declaring gaily that the greatest pleasure money could buy was ‘the pleasure of spending it’. Montecuccoli was a constant companion, to the extent that his old comrade-in-arms, the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, twitted him with the title Maestà, insisting that he must be about to marry the Queen. The Conte laughed it off, but made a bet with ‘Amarantha’ nonetheless that within a year she herself would be ‘passionately in love’.

  One or two serious visitors came to interrupt the fun and games. Klaes Tott arrived from Stockholm, with an invitation from Karl Gustav for the Queen to return home. And a newly appointed Dutch envoy came by to pay his respects on his way to Sweden. The Dutch had recently concluded their war with the new English republic, and the two spoke a while of this, the Queen asking the envoy whether he did not think it strange ‘to cut the king of England’s head off’. The Dutchman replied that he thought it very strange indeed, but Christina disagreed, saying that ‘they had cut him off a member, wherewith he had served himself very little, or very ill’.10 Treachery, like wealth, it seemed, was all a question of attitude.

  One of the continent’s most engaging traitors was in fact now on her doorstep, and eager to pay a visit. Louis de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien, Prince de Condé – le Grand Condé – had just arrived in Antwerp. Once the terror of Spanish armies, he had taken to intriguing within his own country. Imprisoned, then released, he had led the ‘princes’ Fronde’ against Mazarin and marched on Paris, before fleeing to work for the Spaniards in their war against his own country. He was just five years older than Christina, and his praises had long been sung in her ear by his, and her, one-time physician, Doctor Bourdelot. She idolized the young Mars, and sent a swift invitation to him. It was received with a ready hand. ‘I want to see for myself this princess who can toss aside a crown,’ said Condé, ‘while the rest of us spend our whole lives chasing after one.’ But two obstacles stood in the Prince’s way. The first was Pimentel, a frequent visitor to the Queen, who distrusted Condé and sought to undermine him. The second, even less tractable, was the Prince’s own pride, which demanded that royal courtesies be paid him at the Swedish Queen’s little court. Christina would not agree. Though she had invited him herself, he was not entitled to a proper seat, she declared; he would have to sit on a stool. The Prince declined to do so, messengers rushed back and forth, and in the end he came on a private visit, requiring no formalities at all. Christina kept him standing, anyway, and thereafter their mutual enthusiasm was quick to cool.

  The nearby city of The Hague sheltered another Frenchman well known to Christina, a hero of a quite different sort, the diplomat Pierre-Hector Chanut. He was now serving in the capital city as France’s ambassador to Holland, and Christina invited him to visit her – no easy matter for Chanut, since, because of the war, Antwerp was enemy territory. But he came, and Christina repaid her old friend’s efforts by using him for an intrigue of her own. She began to circulate a story that Chanut had come to invite her to act as mediator between France and Spain, and negotiate an end to the war. The story had no basis in fact whatsoever, and it embarrassed Chanut profoundly. He asked her to issue an official denial of it, but this she refused to do. Chanut was eventually obliged to publish a statement of his own, which made it clear that he had come to Antwerp in a private capacity and at the Queen’s own invitation. Christina was outraged, and lied loudly that the French King had had a number of proposals to make to her, if she had only stayed in the neutral territory of Holland, instead of going to the Spanish Netherlands. She subsequently did travel to The Hague, but there were no proposals, and she stayed only one day.

  It may all have been an attempt to extract money from the Spaniards – or even, perhaps, from the French – or it may simply have been that Christina was missing the feel of the reins between her fingers, and wanted to be influential again. Whatever the reason, the concocted story did her no good. Cardinal Mazarin was now convinced that she was in the pay of the Spanish. Furious, he began to finance a series of libellous pamphlets against her: she was a prostitute, a lesbian, an atheist. The pamphlets, irresistibly juicy, made their way to every court in Europe, and tarnished her reputation irretrievably. Her own behaviour was, as usual, enough to lend them credence. Even the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who knew her personally, suspected they might be true.

  Christina was not in the least deterred by the backfiring of her plan. She set to at once to concoct others, some of which revealed that she was already having doubts about the great step she had taken. Her schemes were so wild as to be comical, and yet, in their naivety, rather sad. King Felipe could oust the Emperor’s brother Leopold Wilhelm, and install her as lifetime Regent of the Spanish Netherlands. Or she could become Catholic, then return to Sweden, and take back the crown if Karl Gustav should die. Then she could introduce religious liberty, and finally bequeath her throne to a Catholic Habsburg prince. These were not even the most improbable of her ideas. Religious liberty must be introduced in England, she felt. The easiest way of bringing it about would be for Oliver Cromwell to become Catholic and hand England over to the Pope. His Holiness could then grant the country back to Cromwell, on condition of religious liberty, and Cromwell could then become King Oliver I. She relayed her thoughts to Montecuccoli enthusiastically. He recorded them all dutifully in his diary.

  Christina’s imagination was the likeliest place for Oliver Cromwell’s conversion, but she had her own to dream about, in any case. She wanted it to take place in Rome, and she wanted it to be grand, an exhibition of renunciation to a vast assembly of admirers, a superb display of moral strength to surpass her father’s mere vainglory. But Rome was far away, and a public pronouncement was not in the interests of those who were likely to transport her there. ‘These long journeys cost a lot of money,’ the Archduke remarked to Montecuccoli, and he suggested instead that, for the time being, the Queen would be best to make a much sh
orter one, a journey of just 25 miles, say, from Antwerp to Brussels.

  So, in late December, Christina’s little court packed their bags once again and moved to the capital of the Spanish Netherlands. They arrived in the evening, and fireworks lit the sky as the Queen sailed in on the Archduke’s gilded barge. She was installed in the lovely Palais d’Egmont, where Leopold Wilhelm had in fact vacated his own private apartments to make room for her. The palace also housed his famous collection of paintings; though it was hardly Rome, Christina passed many consoling hours in their company. But greater matters were at hand. The day after her arrival, on Christmas Eve, she was finally received into the Roman Catholic Church. A small chapel adjoined her bedroom, and here, in the evening, attended by the Archduke himself, Montecuccoli, Pimentel, and two Spanish diplomats, she professed her new faith:

  I believe in one God, Father omnipotent, creator of Heaven and Earth…and in Jesus Christ His only son, Our Lord…born of the Virgin Mary…and I believe that the holy Eucharist is the true body and blood of Christ…I believe in one holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church, mother of all Churches…I pledge obedience to the Roman Popes, successors to Saint Peter, Vicars of Jesus Christ…I accept the teachings defined and declared by the Synod of Trent, and I renounce all heresies as the Church has renounced them…I believe in the true Catholic faith, without which none shall be saved.11

  Father Güemes recited a psalm and absolved her from the heresies of Lutheranism, and Christina rose, Rome’s newest and least likely convert.

  Well-timed cannon boomed through Brussels, and fireworks burst above the town, startling and puzzling the local people, who had no idea of what was taking place within the Archduke’s palace. The Jesuit Father Pallavicino later described the event as ‘one of the most memorable and glorious for our Faith ever recorded’.12 Perhaps it was, but it was not what Christina had expected. Her grand gesture of apostasy, intended to stun all Europe, had taken place quite secretly, more or less in her own bedroom. In fact, she did not seem to take it seriously at all. At the midnight mass which followed the ritual, her behaviour was relaxed, even flippant, and she later spoke laughingly of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation – ‘that the holy Eucharist is the true body and blood of Christ’ – of which she had vowed acceptance. No doubt her French friends in Stockholm, Catholic themselves, by culture, at least, had spoken so, and Christina had simply assumed that this was normal practice for sophisticated people within the Church. If so, it was a wide misjudgement. The devout Spaniards were displeased, and a shocked Leopold Wilhelm declared that he did not believe her conversion was even genuine. The Queen, he felt, must be anticipating some political gain. He conveyed his doubts to his brother, the Emperor, who took no further steps to help her, while to Montecuccoli it was whispered that Her Majesty would have done better to remain at home in Sweden.

  In January of the new year, the ailing Pope died, and in April came news of another death, which touched Christina more closely. Maria Eleonora had died in Stockholm, at the age of fifty-five. She had passed her last months in bleak half-mourning, bewailing her daughter’s departure from the land that she herself had taught her to despise. Christina, complaining that ‘there was nowhere in the world where they mourned the dead as long as they did in Sweden’, betook herself to the countryside for just three formal weeks. She spent most of her time hunting, it seems, and at one point returned privately to Brussels for a few less solitary days. It was a modest mourning for a mother whom Christina had loved, in her own words, ‘well enough’, and in any case, there were now more pressing matters to attend to. A new pope had been elected, Alexander VII, the former Cardinal Fabio Chigi, Vatican Secretary of State three years before when the question of the Queen’s conversion had first been raised. He was not very friendly to the Spanish, but he was decidedly unfriendly to the French, and, in a time of war, this was as good as outright support as far as the Spaniards were concerned. King Felipe was delighted, and so was his cousin Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor, and so was Christina, who now imagined a speedy departure for Rome. But the new Pope had found the papal finances in such a state that he could provide ‘no temporal help’, and her appeal to the Emperor for indemnities owed to Sweden was swiftly rebuffed, as the Swedes were demanding the money themselves. She tried to raise a loan from her French banker, Bidal, offering as security some of the lands granted on her abdication. The terms of her agreement, however, had prohibited any such alienation – at the Queen’s death, the lands were to revert to the Swedish crown – and Karl Gustav intervened, for the first time in his life, to Christina’s disadvantage.

  The independence she had longed for, independence from duty, from government, from life in Sweden, was fast melting away to reveal one bare and frightening fact: she had no money. Karl Gustav had blocked her loan from Bidal. The Emperor was distrustful of her. She had alienated the French completely. The Pope could send her nothing, and, despite his flowery assurances, there had been nothing – apart from a bed in Brussels – forthcoming from the King of Spain. Christina was in fact more dependent now than she had ever been. She was at last beginning to realize that, without the crown, she had little real importance, and the realization made her desperate. Montecuccoli must persuade the Emperor to send an army against Sweden, she said, to enforce her claims in Pomerania. She would sell all she had, and lead an army against Karl Gustav herself. The Emperor must incite the Dutch and the Danes, ‘who hate Sweden’, to attack the country, too. She knew of secret treaties with other powers, allowing Swedish soldiers to pass through their territories; these she would reveal along with other confidential matters of state. Evidently believing that Montecuccoli felt more bound to her than to his Emperor, she instructed him to avoid mentioning her name, and to say only that ‘a well-informed person’ would provide this information – an act of desperate naivety to match her desperate treachery.

  In the event, her worst fears were realized. In the middle of July 1655, Karl Gustav led the Swedes into Poland, and the lands that were to sustain Christina fell victim to the travel of a mighty army. The demands of war kept Swedish coffers empty, and for years to come Christina would struggle to claim even a fraction of the money due to her.

  Christina remained in Brussels for several months more. She had made up her mind to leave before the winter set in, and at last she resorted to borrowing from her wealthy Antwerp host, Don Garcia de Yllán. Towards the end of September she accepted some 140,000 riksdaler – two-thirds of her agreed annual income from Sweden – and two-thirds of this were already marked for the costs of her journey to Rome. Don Garcia had evidently no hopes of early repayment. He added the handsome credit to his will for the benefit of his heirs.

  So Christina left the Spanish Netherlands, travelling via the Lutheran stronghold of Augsburg, and up into the mountains of the Austrian Tyrol, to the imperial city of Innsbruck. It had long been a favoured spot for the devout Emperor and his family, and it may have been in the hope of eliciting some help from them that Christina had chosen it as the place where she would make her public profession of Catholic faith. Waiting for her at Innsbruck was the Jesuit Father Malines, ‘Don Lucio Bonanni’, one of the earliest guides on her long religious road. He was accompanied by the Pope’s special emissary, Father Lucas Holstenius, a convert himself and head of the Vatican Library. If Christina was loth to discuss religion, they had at least books to talk of, and talk they did, becoming in the process firm and lasting friends.

  In Innsbruck, she was the guest of the Archduke Ferdinand, Governor of the Tyrol, a nobleman of modest means who had incurred a hefty debt in order to give her a suitably regal welcome – even his silver candlesticks had been borrowed. He had not been informed of the purpose of her visit, and neither had his cardinal brother, also in residence there. Christina spent a few social days, going to the theatre, looking at the fine local art collection, walking in the gardens, and in her honour a new musical drama was performed – L’Argia, a work by Antonio Cesti, a young man
still, but already celebrated as ‘the glory and splendour of the secular stage’. It is a tale of love, betrayal, incest, and lesbian seduction, with a heroine in trousers and a chorus of pirates, a vast corps de ballet and plenty of theatrical wizardry, all perfectly calculated to appeal to Christina’s adventurous imagination. It lasted six hours, and she watched it – twice – ‘with great pleasure and attention’. Cesti, in fact a priest, and recently rebuked by the Pope for his ‘dishonourable and irregular life’, appealed to her, too. Charming and manipulative, he was now treading his path away from Rome just as Christina was treading her path towards it. Feeling hampered by the monastic vows of his pious first youth, he was seeking to be released from them, and the threat of excommunication hung sharp above his head.

  Whatever she thought of Cesti’s intentions, Christina had vows of her own to think of. The real purpose of her visit was now made known to the Archduke, and on the third of November, in his own chapel royal, she was publicly received into the Catholic Church.