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

by Buckley, Veronica

  Love Again

  Christina’s musical evenings and the meetings of her academy were always richly colourful events, mostly red, in fact, thronged as they were with her new friends, the cardinals. Their number was fixed at 70, of whom about half were resident in Rome, and of these, sooner or later, most found their way to the Queen’s palazzo. As ‘princes of the Church’, they were entitled to a good deal of ceremony, and Christina addressed them all as ‘cousin’, but she was notably relaxed in their company, and allowed them many extra little liberties to do with hats and seats and wineglasses which she would not allow to secular dignitaries. It was unusual behaviour for her, since, always sensitive about her status as a sovereign, she was generally punctilious on matters of diplomatic etiquette. Perhaps she did not take the cardinals very seriously as ‘princes’; certainly her ideas about their status were somewhat hazy – the engaging Doctor Bourdelot had told her that he had ‘only to say the word’ for the Pope to grant him the purple, and she had once promised Montecuccoli that she would make him a cardinal herself if he remained with her until she reached Rome. In any event she enjoyed having them about her. They were able and cultured men, beneficiaries of the Church’s education revival in the years of the Counter-Reformation, and, at least within her own residence, she could move, unchallenged, at their centre.

  Prominent among the cardinals was the Pope’s own representative, Decio Azzolino, a native of Fermo, small-built, dark-haired, strong of feature though not handsome, a subtle, witty man, his personality markedly warm, with a machiavellian twist. He was aged just 32, and of unquestioned ability, but his reputation was somewhat mixed, his name having been tarnished by ‘certain amorous liaisons less than decent, and some other defects’.1 The ‘other defects’ included a possible cheating of his less capable elder brother over the terms of their father’s will, and a reputation for spying, the latter probably responsible for his youthful elevation to the cardinalate. He was a cultured man, but not an intellectual; his talents were essentially practical – fortunately for him, since his family was of no great wealth, and he had always had to live on his wits. Service to the Church had been the family’s financial salvation; of the Cardinal’s nine sisters, five were nuns, and the eldest of his three or four brothers had also taken Holy Orders. Azzolino had maintained strong ties to his native region in Le Marche, but for now his fate and his fortune lay in Rome.

  He had made his swift career within the Vatican Secretariat of State, prodded sharply forward in the days of Innocent X by the Pope’s infamous sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini. Azzolino had obtained his first important position, as head of the Cifra – the section for secret codes – while still in his twenties. Clever and diligent, he was soon made ‘Secretary of Letters to Princes’ as well, an important step which made him a member of the papal household. Powerful patronage would not have been sufficient to ensure this post for him; a good education and, above all, an elegant literary style were also necessary – the post was alternatively designated ‘the Secretariat of Compliments’. With the Cifra and the Letters to Princes, the young Azzolino headed the two most important sub-sections of the Secretariat of State, and within a year, he had been made a cardinal.

  His elevated position had not made Azzolino’s fortune. His salary was a modest fourteen scudi per month, with the useful perquisites of paper and books, candles, fuels, and wine, as well as a pair of horses and two pairs of servants. He was thus counted a cardinale povero, a ‘poor cardinal’, and this entitled him to extra money from the papal coffers, since every cardinal was expected to maintain himself in a manner befitting a prince of the Church. The required clothing alone would have stalled a less ambitious poor boy from Le Marche: vestments in three different shades of red, hooded cloaks of satin and other stuffs, ‘festive liturgical dress’ including a mitre of white damask decorated with gold, and an equivalent set of country clothes, of fabric rougher but still red, to be packed in ‘a custom-made cardinal’s suitcase’ – also red.2 Azzolino’s tastes were elegant, but he husbanded his income astutely. With the extra money allowed him, and the rents from his property near Fermo, he managed to live fairly well; already he was able to keep no fewer than fifteen horses, not counting the ceremonial mule maintained by every cardinal for formal displays of humility.

  Christina said that the Cardinal reminded her of her old Chancellor Oxenstierna, and in the two men’s intelligence and diligence there were no doubt many similarities, but Azzolino was ‘lively and provocative’ where Oxenstierna had been ‘slow and phlegmatic’, and besides, the Cardinal was Italian, and idealistic, and charming, and young. She soon found plenty of things to talk with him about, besides his liaison work for the Pope.

  In his early days in the Secretariat of State, Azzolino had been set to work summarizing the lengthy reports sent from Cardinal Chigi – now the Pope – at the peace negotiations in Westphalia, in which Christina had played her own rather heavy-handed part. His subsequent work at the Cifra had involved creating codes for confidential Vatican correspondence, as well as intercepting and decoding the secret messages of the Pope’s enemies. It was just the kind of intriguing thing Christina loved, and before long she was writing in code herself, mainly to the Cardinal.3 They had literature to talk of, too; Azzolino was well read in the Greek and Latin classics and knew several modern languages as well. Like the Queen, he was interested in both the new scientific thinking and the rival tradition of Renaissance humanism, and he possessed a number of esoteric philological texts of the kind she most enjoyed.

  Presumably they did not discuss the Cardinal’s love affairs, although they were no secret in Rome and Christina would certainly have known about them; she does not seem to have minded. She had been horrified to hear of Karl Gustav’s escapades during his soldiering years, but jealousy, and an open offer of marriage, may have played their part at that point. Perhaps she was reassured by the nobility of the Cardinal’s debauches – Karl Gustav had fathered a child with a prostitute, after all, whereas Azzolino had been most famously, or infamously, linked with a daughter of the princely and papal Aldobrandini family. It was an achievement, in its way, since he himself was only a minor noble, though he could trace his ancestors back more than five hundred years – much further than Christina herself, in fact, at least where her Swedish ancestry was concerned. Perhaps, too, she enjoyed the Cardinal’s notoriety; it gave him a touch of the roguishness to which she was so susceptible. His weakness for women was not shared by his brother cardinals, or if it was, they kept theirs on a tighter leash. This was a time when the priestly vow of celibacy was taken seriously. The Counter-Reformation popes, anxious to avoid Protestant taunts, had renewed the Church’s insistence on it, and the priests, on the whole, had seen fit to comply.

  Azzolino was thus an exceptional man, in more ways than one, and, predictably, Christina fell in love with him. Less predictably, perhaps, Azzolino fell in love with her, whether for her intelligence, her emotional intensity, her beautiful blue eyes, or even her political usefulness. His visits to the Queen quickly exceeded the call of duty, and indeed became so frequent and so prolonged that by the end of March he was obliged to write a letter of reassurance to officials at the Vatican. It was preceded by his own reputation, however, and the Pope decided to take no chances; he dispatched the Cardinal to the country for a few weeks’ solitary reflection. Azzolino went, reflected, and returned unchanged. His devotion to the Queen, and hers to him, began a long, intensifying climb. Christina’s dormant femininity was awakened. She abandoned her manly clothes and took to wearing décolleté gowns – so deeply décolleté, in fact, that they drew a rebuke from the Pope. She kept wearing them, but added a rich pearl necklace to conceal, or to accentuate, the obvious.

  It is impossible to know whether or not Christina and Azzolino were physically lovers. Gossip sheets and memoirs declare that they were, and even that the Queen bore the Cardinal a child. Certainly they fell in love, and remained in love for many years. Both were passion
ate by nature, and Azzolino at least had had love affairs before, despite being in Holy Orders. Christina’s affairs were more a matter of guesswork and scandal than of any certain knowledge, but she was nonetheless very far from being prudish. ‘A girl who wants to amuse herself,’ she wrote, ‘needs a husband first, especially a girl of my rank.’ In general terms, her attitude to sex was broad enough for the roughest soldier. She was fond of lewd plays and ribald jokes, and was known to wink an eye at promiscuity and even rape within her own entourage. But for herself, her attitude was different. She regarded the act of sex as an act of submission of woman to man, and this, as she stated many times, she would not endure. ‘I could never bear to be used by a man the way a peasant uses his fields,’ she wrote. She recognized her own passionate nature, and for once gave thanks to God for her ‘worst defect’, that of being a woman. It had saved her, she believed, from a life of sexual depravity: My ambition, my pride, incapable of submitting to anyone, and my disdain, despising everything, have miraculously saved me. And by your grace, you have added a delicacy so very fine, through which you have protected me from a tendency so perilous to your glory and my happiness, and no matter how close I have come to the precipice, your powerful hand has drawn me back. You know, whatever they may say, that I am innocent of all the things they have conjured up to blacken my life. I admit that if I had not been born a girl, my temperament might have led me into terrible disorder. But you, who all my life have made me love glory and honour more than any pleasure, you have saved me from the misfortunes that I would have been plunged into by chance, by the freedom of my rank, and by the ardour of my temperament. I would no doubt have married, if I had not recognized in myself the strength which you have given me to resist the pleasures of love.4

  There was in Christina a curious squeamishness with regard to sex, ‘a delicacy so very fine’ that a sexual relationship between herself and Azzolino, or any other man, seems unlikely. There had been talk of lesbianism since her girlhood – even those trying to broker her marriage had privately conceded that ‘the Queen will never marry’. If she could love women, she could certainly love men, too; there had been Karl Gustav, and Magnus, and now Azzolino, and many lesser flirtations in between times. But physical love was something else. Even in the bloom of womanhood, loving and beloved, Marvell’s ‘virgin queen’ stood, in the poet’s apt phrase, ‘shrinking from Venus’ captivating toils’.5 Her own native distaste for sex did more than social convention, more even than Azzolino’s priesthood, to turn their passion from its natural course. In its place they built a ‘romantic friendship’,6 intimate and, in the early years at least, heightened by sexuality denied. But their love deepened, and it was to last their lifetimes, in the end not less for never having touched its own physical core.

  Christina and Azzolino swiftly became important to each other for reasons apart from their mutual love. She became politically useful to him, and he, in turn, gave her something to do. Azzolino belonged to a new group of cardinals who wanted to strengthen the papacy and hold it to a politically neutral course in relation to the great Catholic states. For decades, successive popes had depended on either France or Spain for support in their foreign policy. In doing so, they had lost much of their temporal authority, already greatly weakened in the years following the Protestant Reformation. The Westphalian peace treaties had undermined it further – thanks, in part, to Christina herself. Now, with France and Spain at war, neutrality was imperative. The cardinals also wanted to reform the feudal-style administration of the papal states. They wanted to see the kind of modernization which other European countries, including Sweden, had introduced in recent decades, with themselves in the role of senior civil servants. This would put an end to the time-honoured practice of papal nepotism – the position of Papal Nephew was formal and powerful – and it was on this platform that they had come to prominence in the recent election of Fabio Chigi, himself an opponent of nepotism, as Pope Alexander VII.

  That conclave had markedly increased Azzolino’s prestige, but also his reputation for intrigue. It had fallen to him to draw the lottery determining which ‘cells’ the cardinals would live in during the deliberations, and the conclave’s official diarist recorded a ‘curious’ circumstance: the Chigi supporters’ cells adjoined one another. Though a small group, they managed to hold the balance, repaying French and Spanish vetos with an intransigence of their own: in round after round, they returned blank sheets, voting for nemini – no one – before finally ensuring Chigi’s election, as the Venetian ambassador remarked, ‘at the spry age of 56’.

  Their independence from both French and Spanish influence had earned the new group the dashing name of lo Squadrone Volante – the Flying Squadron – swift, energetic, unfixed to any faction. A contemporary described them as ‘vivacious of spirit, acute in judgement, brave of heart’, and all the more inclined to work for the best possible candidate, since as cardinals they had all been too recently elevated to be candidates themselves for the papal throne.7 At 32, Azzolino was the youngest of them, their undoubted leader nonetheless. The Squadrone was a small group, only eleven out of the Sacred College’s 70 cardinals. Most came from fairly modest families, and their sudden success at the recent conclave was not enough to maintain them as a force for the longer term. Other groups had looked to a Papal Nephew, or the Pope himself, or some French or Spanish dignitary, to draw them together and give them a collective public identity. The Squadrone needed a patron of their own.

  Within a matter of weeks, Christina had stepped into the breach. She had known of the Squadrone, and even known some of its members, before her arrival in Rome. Three of them had been sent to greet her on her long journey to the city, and they had talked to her of Vatican politics and of their own aims, and no doubt also of their brilliant young leader. The cardinals’ rebellious stance struck a chord in her provocative soul. She was delighted to become their royal patron, and took up their cause with all the fervour of a recent convert. It was a happy symbiosis. It suited Christina perfectly, allowing her to be politically active without the worry of actual government. She could dabble in intrigues or peddle influence, and any failure could be simply dismissed as the victory of another party – there would be no troublesome financial or political chickens fluttering home to roost. The cardinals were equally delighted. Though their patron had lost most of her power, and more or less all of her money, she was still a Queen, and she conferred a certain social validity, a royal cachet, on them all. She could serve them as an informal ambassador with foreign diplomats and visiting royalty. Not least, her royal status could never be revoked. Her influence would continue, while the long train of greedy Papal Nephews came and went, leaving half the citizens of Rome disgusted in their wake.

  The Spanish dignitaries, Pimentel and others, who still occupied the principal positions at Christina’s little court, were not pleased about the new alliance. If the Squadrone were not exactly pro-French, they were not pro-Spanish either. Azzolino in particular was not a man who would ever sit comfortably in Spanish pockets. This fact pleased Christina as much as it discomfited the Spaniards. She began dismissing some of her humbler Spanish servants, replacing them with local people, and before the spring was out she had managed to oust the Spaniards completely.

  They had not been helped by their inept Ambassador, Diego Tagliavia d’Aragona, the Duque de Terranova. A dull and clumsy man despite his elegant name, Terranova resented the capture of Spain’s prize convert by the smooth Italian cardinals who now surrounded her. He was defensive in their presence, and sorely tried by the Roman practice whereby they took precedence of him – in Spain, an ambassador would have had precedence over any crimson-clad little cardinal. Terranova felt that, in his case, an exception might be made. After all, the Queen owed her very presence in Rome to the Spanish, and she had been known to make exceptions before. Waiting for news of a favourable arrangement, he kept away from the court, but instructions from his King did not permit him to absent himself for long
. Hoping to avoid a public embarrassment, he requested a private audience with the Queen: it was granted him, but he was obliged to seat himself, bareheaded, not in the armchair which he had hoped for, but on a lowly stool. When he heard that the French Chargé d’Affaires had been permitted to keep his hat on in Her Majesty’s presence, Terranova’s humiliation was almost complete. The Queen administered the coup de grâce by publishing an account of it all, whereupon Terranova began a series of anguished letters to his King, demanding remonstrance, retaliation, recall – all to no avail; he was kept in his place.

  Christina enjoyed provoking the dim Ambassador, and she had no qualms about favouring the Frenchman, Hugues de Lionne. He was a clever, witty, charming man, and she liked him. He liked the Squadrone cardinals, too, and between them all they drew her away from Spain’s orbit towards its enemy, France. Christina was more than willing to be drawn. Now that she had reached Rome, the Spaniards had served their turn. She had had enough of them with their elaborate manners and their witless Ambassador, and their King’s flowery letters with no bank drafts enclosed. She began to flout them openly, offending even old friends like Pimentel, who now left Rome to seek refuge on the battlefields of Flanders, a safer and pleasanter place for a Spaniard, apparently, than Christina’s court had become. Pimentel’s noble compatriot, Don Antonio della Cueva, sought to do the same, but he did not escape without tasting a little of the Queen’s bile.

  Della Cueva had been serving as Christina’s Master of the Household, and she had recently replaced him with the acrobatic and otherwise very flexible Francesco Maria Santinelli, who had entertained her at Pesaro on her way to Rome. There was no love, nor indeed any respect, lost between the two men, and Christina could not resist a malicious little twist of the knife at della Cueva’s expense. One day, while he was absent, she commanded his wife to get into a carriage with Santinelli, and go for a drive with him. The lady was obliged to comply, the insult was received most bitterly, and the della Cuevas removed forthwith from the Palazzo Farnese to the Spanish Embassy. Christina seems to have feared a slanderous reprisal; when della Cueva returned to take his formal leave of her, she warned him that if he said anything against her, she would find him and punish him, wherever he might be, adding injury to insult, or so it was said, by declaring that only her respect for his master the King had prevented her from having him beaten. Della Cueva took his fuming leave, then took his revenge in a complaint to the Farnese family, in which he described Her Majesty as ‘the greatest whore in the world’. As the French had supplanted them in the Queen’s favours, so the Spaniards now supplanted the French as chief purveyors of unsavoury gossip about her.