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

by Buckley, Veronica

  On New Year’s Eve, she made the closer acquaintance of some of the cardinal princes of the Church. They had seen her already, on the day of her formal entry to the city, and on Christmas Day, at her confirmation, but now they were at leisure to speak with her and to form their own opinions of the new prize convert. The Pope had led them to expect a rather pious young woman, and had warned them to be on their best behaviour, since ‘on the other side of the Alps’ Her Majesty may have heard one or two things unfavourable to Rome and her Church. ‘The Protestants keep a keen look out for any scandal,’ he had reminded them. ‘They watch every little thing, and they put it all down in their memoirs.’1 Though none among Their Eminences had disagreed openly, many had been offended at the injunction. A letter of protest had been drawn up against this impugning of their collective reputation, and had been conveyed to His Holiness with dozens of indignant signatures.

  The Pope himself, at least, had nothing to fear from the gaze of Her Majesty’s recently Protestant eyes. Renowned for his high moral principles, Alexander VII was a devout and studious man, personally ascetic, but a lover of the arts nonetheless, a native of the beautiful town of Siena. For his coronation, he had permitted no triumphal arches to be erected, none of marble, none of stone, none of cardboard, and on his arrival at the papal palace, all servants deemed unnecessary had been dismissed. His sparsely furnished personal bedchamber could boast just one superfluous item, the characteristically understated memento mori of a wooden coffin. The Pope’s retiring personality had served him well during his years of diplomacy, but it was perhaps a disadvantage to him now – he was not politically strong, it seems. But he had managed at least to expel his predecessor’s greedy puppeteer, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, and she had soon afterwards died of the plague, humiliated, furious, and sneezing, but very rich – her fortune was said to be two million scudi, enough to have fed Rome’s hungry for centuries.

  Alexander was relieved to be rid of Olimpia and her jewels and her countless relatives. He wanted a simpler pontificate, unencumbered by grasping Papal Nephews. He wanted men of sincerity about him, and through them, he wanted a more pious flock. During his long years of diplomatic service in the German lands, he had learned to admire the austere devotion of northern Catholicism; by comparison, he found devotional practice in his homeland sadly lacking. ‘I remember observing, when in Germany,’ he remarked, ‘that a great silence prevailed in the churches among lay people and even more so among ecclesiastics, so that if anyone was talking, it was held that he must be either a heretic or an Italian.’2 Christina was neither, though it had already been noted that she liked to talk in church. Her piety, and even her sincerity, were still doubted by some, but for the time being the Pope was well pleased with her. On hearing of his arrival at her apartments, she had run ‘with great strides’ to meet him, displaying an appropriate convert’s penitence by throwing herself at his feet. Their mutual interest in the arts had given them an easy link, and, not least, in the humbling aftermath of the Thirty Years War, Christina’s conversion had been a bright victory for the Catholic Church, and an event of the highest importance in Alexander’s own pontificate.

  Alexander’s hopes of good behaviour on the part of his cardinal princes were quickly disappointed. Within a few days, one of them had had ‘the audacity’ to fall in love with the convert Queen, and the imprudence to tell her so. She laughed it off, saying that she had not come to Rome for scandal. A less adventurous young cardinal was now appointed to liaise between Her Majesty and the papal court, and to introduce the Queen to the ways of Roman society. He was clever and charming, and very polished, in the manner of a practised courtier, but as yet he did not attract Christina’s particular interest. He began to be her daily guide, and directed her to the different shrines with their relics of the saints. Rome’s churches concealed myriad items which she was now called on to reverence, including, so it was said, the bodies of St Peter and St Paul, the heads of St Luke and St Sebastian, and the arm of Joseph of Arimathea, as well as one of the 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas for the betrayal of Jesus, and even a piece of barley loaf, said to be one of the five which Jesus fed to the multitude in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Christina did not like any of it; Protestant instincts lurked beneath her new Catholic skin.

  Happily, relief was at hand – secular, indeed pagan, relief. She had spent only a few days within the Vatican, before moving across the river a mile or so to the famous Palazzo Farnese, near the Campo dei Fiori where the flower-growers brought their lovely produce to market. The Palazzo Farnese was a beautiful bloom in itself, a jewel of Renaissance architecture and one of the finest palaces in Rome. It belonged to the Dukes of Parma, the Farnese family, but it had been many years since they had lived in it, and until only a few weeks before, the palazzo had been inhabited by Rome’s previous trophy convert, in fact a distant relative of Christina’s, the Cardinal Landgraf of Hesse-Darmstadt. Il cardinale Langravio had proved of disappointingly little political use to the Farnese family. For years they had been trying to alleviate the harsh terms imposed on them following the ‘Wars of Castro’ which they had waged against successive popes.3 Support of a prominent convert had seemed to be a sure route to the papal ear, but the Landgraf had been unable to help them. A bigger fish, they felt, might be more likely to draw the Pope’s attention, and the Cardinal was consequently transported to a distant villa to make way for the newest catch.

  Christina was pleased with her new abode. On the outside, at least, it was magnificent – Michelangelo himself had had a hand in its design4 – and, even more importantly, it was free. She was shown over the building by the Marchese Giandemaria, the Farnese family’s representative in Rome; he was to see that she was made comfortable, and report her activities back to the Duca. The first reports of this precise little man were innocent enough: Her Majesty was enraptured by the wonderful artworks which filled the rooms, sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome, tapestries and paintings, many installed expressly for her pleasure. But only parts of the building were really habitable, and in some rooms the plaster was even crumbling – it was covered over with trompe-l’œil canvases. There had been some renovation, and Giandemaria had managed to provide four principal apartments, each with a bedroom and three other rooms. These had been newly furnished, but they may not have been very comfortable, despite that, since Christina apparently slept in a different bedroom almost every night.

  One room of the palazzo, at least, was beyond her reproach: the wonderful painted gallery, the work of the great Annibale Carracci.5 Modelled on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted almost a hundred years before, the Farnese gallery had taken Carracci and his assistants eight years to complete. They had painted not only the ceiling, but much of the wall space, too, covering it with frescoes portraying the world of classical legend, a world of violence and of pleasure. When Christina first set eyes on them, the paintings were just 50 years old, their brilliant colours as yet undimmed by the strong Italian sun, a riot of beauty and splendour, revealing Carracci at his blithe pagan best. To Christina, they were the essence of all that Rome had promised her – a full-blooded shout of joy, a laughing jettison of the narrow confines of the north.

  Exhilarated, she jettisoned more – the plaster fig-leaves on the classical nudes, the modest draperies over certain paintings. She hung pictures of her own on the walls, pictures which made Giandemaria draw in his breath, and which elicited an alarmed enquiry from the Duca himself. Christina responded stoutly. She was not going to be bound, she said, by rules ‘made for priests’. But there were quieter moments, too. Frowning among the nudes was a bust of her Stoic hero, Seneca, and, in between rhapsodies, Christina had time to review some of the work of ‘his devoted apostle’, Lipsius – a treaty on dogs.

  The celebrations in her honour continued, but by now she was tired of all the fuss, and was feeling, in fact, rather lonely. Early in January, after only a week at the Palazzo Farnese, she wrote a sad little letter home to
Sweden. It was addressed simply, ‘À la Belle’, and it reveals that as yet Christina had found no one to replace her long beloved friend:

  How happy I would be if I could only see you, Belle, but though I will always love you, I can never see you, and so I can never be happy. I am yours as much as ever I was, no matter where I may be in the world. Can it be that you still remember me? And am I as dear to you as I used to be? Do you still love me more than anyone else in the world? If not, do not undeceive me. Let me believe it is still so. Leave me the comfort of your love, and do not let time or my absence diminish it. Adieu, Belle, adieu. I kiss you a million times.

  Christina Alexandra.6

  Christina’s goal of many years had been reached. She had relinquished her throne, she had converted, she was living in Rome in a beautiful Renaissance palace. Now, in a reflective hour, one at least of the costs of her self-sought exile had been brought home to her. Even had she wished it, there was no way back.

  Something of Seneca’s persevering spirit may have been following Christina through the marble halls of her new home. In any event, she now drew a stoical deep breath, and began to engage herself in Roman life. It was not a difficult time to do so, since it was the beginning of carnival, and it became her carnival, ‘the Queen’s carnival’, coinciding as it did with the many celebrations held to honour her arrival. Her expectations were high, nurtured as they had been on stories from the golden Barberini years of lavish productions in theatre and musical drama. Although the Barberini Pope was gone, his vibrant melody lingered in his wealthy and art-loving nephews. They were handsomely installed in a new palazzo designed for them by Pietro da Cortona, and they managed to meet the Queen’s expectations comfortably. They had begun by commissioning a new opera for her; it was performed in their own private theatre, and Christina watched it from a specially built box from which she herself could not be seen – Roman theatres were segregated by sex, but, as it was a première, and in the Queen’s own honour, the Barberini did not feel they could oblige her to wait for a ladies-only performance. The work had a grand double title – La vita humana, ovvero Il trionfo della pietà7 – and was in fact the last opera of Marco Marazzoli. It starred Bonaventura, Christina’s favourite castrato, and it did not have much to do with piety, including as it did the usual cast of gods and nymphs, though St Peter’s Basilica made a late appearance. The libretto had been written by Giulio Rospigliosi, a talented dramatist and a man of many other gifts besides, as yet a humble monsignore, but destined for a greater role as Pope Clement IX.

  The Barberini faced competition in their bid to impress the Queen from their rival papal family, the Pamphili, whose formidable matriarch, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, had kept the previous Pope in thrall. The Pamphili were hampered by being still in mourning for him, and perhaps, too, for Donna Olimpia, but they did the best they could within the bounds of expensive grief. Their family palazzo was situated on the Corso, and in the weeks before Lent Christina was a frequent guest, watching from their windows the processions and races of Rome at carnival time. Horses raced, and asses, too, and buffaloes, and old men and little boys, and prostitutes, and Jews – the last against their will, and pelted with every available refuse ‘from rotten fruit to dead cats’8 – while anxious Jesuits struggled to contain the flirtatious spirits of the young. Christina loved the races, but felt sympathy for the disdained Jews. She talked of doing something to ease their plight, but the moment passed, and her attention was drawn elsewhere.

  To the chagrin of the Pamphili family, the Barberini were now mounting a spectacle to end all spectacles, not in their palazzo but in an arena specially built for the occasion, and seating 3,000 people. Designed and stage-managed by the famous Grimaldi, the magnificent mixture of pageant and joust took place after dark on the last day of February.9 The Queen had her own special box, and from it she watched as a fabulous Apollo and other assorted deities processed in glittering train around the arena before coming to rest to serenade her in golden-throated chorus. The singers were followed by an army of mounted warriors – two armies, in fact, of knights and amazons, all brilliantly dressed in red and orange, with huge plumes of ostrich feathers blooming from every headdress. They fell to mock battle, then the victorious amazons turned to face an enormous dragon, with flames and fireworks roaring from its mouth – with the Amazon Queen herself in attendance to urge them on, the dragon was naturally defeated. It was all a far cry from the fainthearted lion and the sad old bear which had amused the Stockholm crowds after Christina’s coronation. The bill for the evening’s entertainment-issimo came to some 10,000 scudi, enough to keep a team of grumbling Roman workmen employed for a lifetime.

  If the decorum of mourning prevented the Pamphili from staging an equivalent spectacle, lack of money prevented Christina herself from providing any entertainments at all. She was so short of ready cash that she had not even been able to pay her servants, and they had taken to stealing the silver and pieces of furniture from the Palazzo Farnese – some of the doors had even been broken up for firewood. Christina did nothing about it, and the Marchese Giandemaria, the Duca’s major-domo, was left writing worried letters to his master in Tuscany. The Queen’s dream of a new, lavish court in Rome was proving slow to take wing. For Christina, court life meant cultural patronage, but her ‘royal and bountiful spirit’ lay earthbound by the dreary chains of debt – by now millions of pounds10 – and the money which García de Yllán had lent her was already spent. Even a modest evening of opera which she gave by way of thanks to the Barberini family had in the end to be paid for by the Barberini themselves.

  Christina’s ambitions for the immediate present were consequently shrinking, and she was obliged to contain them in a humble ‘academy’ such as she had had in Stockholm. It was not much more than a regular meeting of local nobles and culturally minded cardinals, though from time to time it did boast some scholarly names. Supposedly a literary society, it featured as much music as anything else. Musicians, even very good musicians, were cheap, and every meeting ended with a concert given by Christina’s own court orchestra, led at different times by Marazzoli himself, by Alessandro Cecconi, or by the young Bernardo Pasquini. The academy had been founded to promote classical ideals, but its subjects of discussion were, if anything, more suited to a salon of Parisian précieuses, and it is hard to imagine the cardinals in Ciceronian mode on such matters as the teasing cruelty of ladies in love, whether night or day was more suitable to poetry, the coup de foudre as a basis for marriage, or, daringly or boringly, the virtues of the Pope. The academy fizzled out into a regular social gathering, but it served Christina well, since its likeminded members formed the heart of a new circle of friends of her own. They joined her every Wednesday evening through Lent to listen to an oratorio, the nearest Christina could get, in her own residence, to the opera and drama she so much wanted to stage. Some were old works and a few were new; composition was a modest art to patronize, and a few more little holes of debt seemed to make no difference in the badly torn fabric of her finances.

  There was entertainment cheaper still in Rome’s many convents, and Christina visited some of them regularly, not with a view to ‘embracing perpetual chastity’, as had once been reported, nor to visit the nun she had fallen in love with, as was reported now, but just to listen to the music. Public performances by women were frowned upon or prohibited outright in Counter-Reformation Rome, and convents had become almost the only places where large numbers of women could gather to make music. Standards were high, despite severe constraints. The nuns were allowed no instrument but the organ or clavier, and any nun wanting to play needed to have spent a studious girlhood, for once inside the convent, she could take no music lessons, even from another nun. Talking about music was forbidden, too, as was singing in harmony – the decadent new ‘figured’ chant, polyphonic music, was prohibited to all nuns, and indeed to all Catholic women. The sisters in consequence were restricted to plainchant. Christina enjoyed its austere beauty, and went regularl
y to hear it, and she may have heard other things besides – it was whispered that, for all the rules and regulations, a note or two of harmony could sometimes be heard escaping through the grilles.

  The nuns managed to compose as well, and often with more encouragement than was accorded laywomen living otherwise less restricted lives. The Church itself, a huge employer in most aspects of city life, employed no women musicians at all; those seeking to work professionally were dependent on private patronage, and even this had limitations – there were plenty of women singers in Rome, but very few women were able to work as instrumentalists or even as music teachers. Christina employed some singers, and might have helped to blaze a trail by supporting those who composed as well: Barbara Strozzi, for example, was for many years actively seeking a patron to protect her from the ‘lightning bolts of slander’ which greeted her arias and her innovative cantatas. Christina also knew the compositions of Leonora Baroni, but although, or perhaps because, Leonora was a favourite of the Queen’s new friend, Giulio Rospigliosi, she did not encourage her.11 Despite her own unorthodox life, despite her flat shoes and her trousers, Christina was never a champion of unorthodox roles for others of her sex. In music, she felt, as in everything else, there was no point in doing so, since there was no overcoming what was in her eyes ‘the worst defect of all’ – the defect of being a woman.