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

by Buckley, Veronica

  A curse or two might also have been heard elsewhere that week, when the Queen made known her desire to visit Cardinal Mazarins private apartments. They contained a large and important collection of artworks which the Cardinal had amassed over the years, and which very few visitors were permitted to see. Christina was determined to be one of them, and demanded permission to visit the apartments. She was informed, diplomatically, that it could not be granted, since His Eminence was not in Paris. Christina insisted; permission must then be sought from His Eminence, wherever he might be. Her Majesty was informed that His Eminence was at Compiègne. In that case, she replied, permission must be sought there. Reluctant courtiers conveyed the request, and in due course permission arrived, but it was permission for the Queen alone. She could not be accompanied into the apartments; their treasures must be veiled from any other gaze, kept safe for the jealous eyes of their possessor.

  Mazarian was a genuine connoisseur and his pleasure in his collection was intense. Years later, as he lay dying, one young courtier took advantage of the moment to creep into the apartments and lay impertinent eyes on the many lovely things he found there. He was lost in admiration of a beautiful tapestry, he tells us, when he heard the door creaking open, and he quickly hid behind it. In came the Cardinal, shuffling along in his slippers, making his way with great difficulty through the room. Pausing for breath after each step, and touching each piece as he passed it, he was heard to whisper, ‘Il faut laisser tout ça. Il faut laisser tout ça – And I have to leave it all. I have to leave it all.’ The young man recorded that he was deeply moved to hear the Cardinal making this farewell, but it is a wicked little tale nonetheless.9

  In the middle of September, Christina set out for Compiègne, where she would meet the King at last. She was to pause in her journey at the château of Chantilly, seat of the Prince de Condé, who, however, would not be there to welcome her, being away attending to the business of war on behalf of the King of Spain. The Prince’s absences had been frequent, but they had not deterred him from making many improvements to his beautiful property, outwardly in the gardens and the wonderful octagonal stables, and inwardly in his vast collection of books and artworks – all of it far beyond the enjoyment of the few brief hours now allowed Christina.

  Chantilly was about halfway between Paris and Compiègne, and consequently was a good place to spend a night en route. She arrived at about seven in the evening to find Cardinal Mazarin already there. She had anticipated their meeting by a number of letters, sent via Chanut, in which she had urged the Cardinal to make more haste with the Naples plan. She was too ‘zealous in the service of the French,’ she wrote, to want to wait any longer. If she had hoped for an opportunity of furthering the plan that evening, however, she was to be disappointed, for in her honour Mazarin had arranged what he coolly referred to as ‘an intimate dinner’ – in fact a banquet for forty or fifty people. It allowed him to do her honour, which he did most attentively, providing all sorts of delicate fruit juices for her in place of the wine she disdained, but it made private conversation impossible. Hence he was able to observe her and keep her dangling in expectation, while committing himself to nothing in particular; the agreement they had already made was no more than a piece of paper, after all.

  But at least at Chantilly Christina received a flattering token of the King’s eagerness to see her. Unwilling to wait until the meeting arranged for the following day, Louis and his brother Philippe had ridden at a gallop the 40 miles from Compiègne, and now presented themselves in supposed incognito, dressed as ordinary gentlemen. Having studied their portraits in the Louvre only days before, Christina recognized them at once, but she played along, and when Mazarin introduced them to her as ‘two of the most accomplished gentlemen in France’, she remarked with a smile that one of them at least looked born to wear a crown. She later confided, rather dismissively, to la Grande Mademoiselle that she had found Louis ‘a very handsome, decent fellow’, and his brother ‘very pretty, though rather bashful’ – he was in fact a flamboyant transvestite, despite his gentlemanly attire that evening.

  Christina left Chantilly the following morning, but she found time before she went to demonstrate the fishing technique of the cormorant to those gathered to bid her farewell. She had apparently seen the bird standing on one leg in the middle of a pond, leaning down to pick up its catch; so did she now, before hopping into her carriage.

  It was a substantial journey and the weather was hot, and Christina, always happiest on horseback and with the King’s example before her, may have ridden some of the way rather than travelling inside the bumpy coach. Approaching the château, she saw her way well lined with four companies of royal guards, a company of Scots guards and Scots gendarmes as well, 200 cavalrymen, two companies of mounted musketeers, the King’s own gendarmes, and detachments of noblemen from four regions of France. At the end of the garde d’honneur, half the members of the French court awaited her. Famed throughout Europe for the quality of even their everyday dress, today they were arrayed in splendour. The King himself was wearing a suit that actually glittered, covered with gold and silver and precious stones. His brother stood beside him, scarcely less magnificent, with a line of superbly dressed noble lords stretching away behind him. At a slight distance was the stately figure of the Queen of France, Louis’ mother, Anne of Austria, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting.

  If Christina had chosen to ride some of the way from Chantilly, she had certainly got into the coach at some point, for she now got out of it, to the absolute astonishment of all those waiting. In contrast to the beautiful, trailing silk gowns of the French ladies, she was wearing a short skirt, revealing her ankles, and a man’s shirt fastened with vague decorum at the neck. Her bodice had slipped off one shoulder, and the rest of her couture, apart from her determinedly mannish footwear, was her usual uncertain mixture of men’s and women’s clothing. On her head was perched an ill-fitting dark wig, left uncurled, and now flying in all directions on account of the wind. Her face was covered with dust and sweat, and her hands were filthy. A stunned Madame de Motteville, the Queen Mother’s confidante, recorded the scene in her memoirs:

  We saw the arrival of the Queen of Sweden, of whom we had heard so many extraordinary things. I was one of those closest to the royal persons, and I must admit I was very surprised at first. She had not taken care of her complexion and she was sunburnt, and she looked like a sort of Egyptian street girl, very strange, and more alarming than attractive. But once I had looked at her for a bit, and got used to her clothes and her odd hairstyle, I saw she had beautiful, lively eyes, and a sweet expression, also rather proud. To my surprise I found that, from one moment to the next, my impressions had completely changed – I realized I liked her. She seemed taller than we had heard, and less hunchbacked; but her hands were not so fine as people had said, though it’s true they were nicely shaped, but really so dirty it was impossible to see any beauty in them.10

  With pomp and fanfare the Queen was led to her rooms in the château. The pomp was as borrowed as the fanfare, for she had brought nothing and no one with her, ‘no ladies-in-waiting, no officers, no retinue, and no money’ – the very servants to dress and undress her had to be provided by the King. Madame recorded that she did have ‘two or three poor-looking fellows’ with her, ‘who were called counts, out of courtesy, but really, she might have been taken for nobody, because apart from them, we saw only two women with her, and they looked more like secondhand shopkeepers than ladies of any quality’.

  The three ‘poor-looking fellows’ were none other than the Santinelli brothers and the Marchese Monaldeschi. About the two women, Italians whom Christina had brought with her from Rome, Madame was very close to the mark. They were Donna Barbara Rangoni, who was not in fact a donna – a countess – at all, and Signora Orsini, who was no relation whatsoever to the illustrious family of the same name. The two had already proved rather good at dealing in secondhand goods, particularly those that had belonged to Ch
ristina, and in addition to what they could steal, each of them was paid, or at least promised, a salary of 70 scudi per week. Christina had clearly not chosen the ladies as court adornments. Donna Barbara was approaching fifty; she was short and fat, with hair apparently ‘more dead than alive’, and one conspicuous black tooth. She had the advantage, however, of Signora Orsini, painted up ‘like one of the old banners of the Landgrave of Hesse’, who was even older, and with no teeth at all. Signora Orsini had at least the merit of being devout, attending confession and taking communion every week. Donna Barbara had no such merit; perhaps she was a good shot.

  Christina’s visit to Compiègne lasted a week, during which she was entertained by a round of dinners, plays, clever conversation, and visits to local churches and other buildings of distinction. She soon managed to cock a snook at the Jesuits, who had apparently been boasting of their role in her conversion, and whose General had failed to offer her his personal welcome on her arrival in Rome. Knowing her love of the theatre, the Fathers had arranged a play for her entertainment, and she was quick to denounce it, in loud and self assured tones, as a poor piece of work, with nothing to recommend it either religiously or dramatically. As the Duc de Guise had noted, she was well informed about all the current intrigues and scandals, and she managed to tease some of the courtiers about their love affairs, and offend others about theirs. And in respect of the most important of these affairs, that of the King himself, she managed to put her foot in it quite spectacularly.

  Among Cardinal Mazarin’s family living at court were his three young Mancini nieces, one of whom, Marie, was Louis’ paramour. The Cardinal had for some time been trying to discourage this romance, considering a marriage between the two as unlikely to serve his own interests. It was only a few years, after all, since the end of the Fronde, during which he had twice fled into exile with a price on his head. He had still too many enemies who resented his vast power, and who might be prompted into action if he should marry his niece to the King. By all accounts, the King’s young love was the least attractive of the Mancini sisters, at least as far as looks were concerned – one ungenerous contemporary described her as ‘ugly, fat, short, and with the look of an innkeeper’s wench’,11 though he did add that she had ‘the wit of an angel, so that when you listened to her speaking, you could forget how ugly she was’. Whatever the reason, the young King loved her passionately, though for the time being in perfect innocence. Christina herself reported to Azzolino in Rome, ‘I doubt if he’s even touched the tip of her finger’. The lady was introduced to the Queen at a grand dinner held on her first evening at Compiègne. Christina at once declared her so beautiful that she must certainly marry the King, adding to Louis that, if she were in his place, she would certainly marry for love. Amid a flurry of coughs, the Cardinal swiftly turned the conversation in a different direction.

  Christina had not genuinely admired the girl. She later remarked to la Grande Mademoiselle that it was ‘a shame Louis couldn’t be in love with someone more attractive’. And to Azzolino she wrote that nothing would come of the romance, since Mazarin would never be such a fool as to allow his niece to marry the King. ‘Marriage is the best cure for love,’ she wrote, ‘and the marriage bed is its tomb’ – the Cardinal would never risk losing his influence in this way. She had been rather foolish herself in her own remark to the King, however. Whether impulsive or mischievous, it had not endeared her to the Cardinal, for, as Mademoiselle noted, ‘at court, people don’t like it when you meddle in things that don’t concern you’.12

  She was at least entitled to a private opinion about the great Cardinal, and this she conveyed in a letter to Azzolino, describing him as a man possessed by a single passion, and that ‘the finest of all’ – ambition. The war with Spain suited his own interests, she felt, ‘but he knows how to make the right people believe he wants peace’. He was respected by the King, and adored by the Queen Mother, but, despite a great deal of gossip about his relationship with the latter, Christina swore ‘by all the Saints’ that there was nothing illicit between them. ‘The Queen is the most virtuous woman in the world,’ she wrote, ‘and quite incapable of doing anything dishonourable.’13 Of the King himself, she had formed a surprisingly mild impression. She had found him very handsome, and very polite, though shy, and ‘incapable of any very strong feeling’. It is an unlikely picture of the great Sun King, but he was, after all, only eighteen years old, still very much in thrall to Mazarin, and even, to a degree, to his mother. He was aware of the Naples plan, however, and he knew that the Queen was to serve as a kind of stand-in sovereign until he had produced an heir. This of course was a secret matter, but the two shared other passions which they might have discussed easily in company at Compiègne: both loved hunting and horsemanship, and all things military, and music and ballet and the theatre. Louis may have been shy, but perhaps he simply did not care to reveal much of himself to this curious little woman with her men’s shoes and her dirty hands.

  Christina’s week at Compiègne passed sociably, but before she could leave, la Grande Mademoiselle, in the nearby village of Pont, ‘was seized by an impulse’ to see her again. It was the eve of the Queen’s departure, and Mademoiselle arrived at ten o’clock, only to be told by an Italian servant that Her Majesty had already gone to bed. ‘I pretended I couldn’t understand Italian,’ wrote Mademoiselle, and she gave instructions in French, ‘several times’, that Her Majesty should be informed she was there. She was eventually shown into Christina’s room, where she found her sitting up in bed, a candle beside her on the table, and ‘a kind of towel around her head in place of a bonnet’, since she had just had her head shaved. She was wearing a collarless shirt with a big flame-coloured bow on it, and her legs were covered by a ‘villainous’ green blanket. In short, ‘she was not looking very nice at all’.14

  Christina welcomed Mademoiselle warmly, and insisted on seeing her companion, Madame de Thianges, who had not followed Mademoiselle in. She was evidently very taken with this lady, and tried to persuade her, only half in jest, it seems, to leave her husband and return with her to Rome. ‘Even the best husband isn’t worth staying with,’ she declared, going off into a rail against marriage in general and the ‘abominable’ business of having children, before beginning to talk of the Roman rites ‘in rather a liberal way’. She left Compiègne the following morning, setting off in a carriage with Santinelli and two other men. ‘How odd it is,’ wrote Mademoiselle, ‘for a Queen to be without a single woman of her own.’ She had not a penny of her own, either. The King had lent her the carriage, and given her money for the journey, ‘and off she went, this Swedish Amazon, followed only by her pathetic little troupe, without any retinue, without any grandeur, without a bed, without any silver plate, without any mark of royalty’.

  She left a mixed impression behind her. Her intelligence and learning had made her some admirers, but her sharp wit and her frequent jokes had left many embarrassed and resentful, and they now took their revenge in gossip and pamphlets, describing her as a stocky little hunchback, an ill-bred savage, a lesbian, a clown, a whore. It would not be for the last time, nor would those epithets be the worst. France was to prove Christina’s place of nemesis, a nemesis brought on by her own impulsive hand.

  Fontainebleau

  Christina was now expected to leave France, not with any show of travelling on to Sweden, for this pretence had been forgotten, but simply to make her way back to Rome, and thence, eventually, to Naples. Her grand diplomatic venture was behind her; the call to arms would be sounded soon. ‘The treaty we made at Compiègne’ would ensure her a sparkling new throne before the new year was old, and she departed the country in the highest spirits. At the border she bestowed an unnecessarily generous gift on the French envoy who had accompanied her. It was a large diamond, and one of her last, but she was confident of reinforcements. Mazarin had already given her money for her present journey, and he had promised to press Karl Gustav, ‘as a matter of Franco-Swedish friendship’,
on the subject of her remittances. The throne itself would bring Spanish wealth and French subsidies for the rest of her days. There was no need for parsimony now, and Christina gave in to reverie, picturing herself already installed in the city by the sea, surrounded by her guards in their new violet uniforms. Her court would be a mecca for the good and the great; her patronage would know no bounds; the Barberini star would dim with envy; the new Queen of Naples would dazzle the world, bestowing ever grander gifts, ever wider. Overexcited, she wrote to urge Mazarin onward, suggesting that his rewards would be scarcely less than her own: ‘Your Eminence should not forget that you are Italian, and a member of the Sacred College, and a cardinal, so that wherever you are and whatever should befall you, you can never be greater than you could be in Italy. Your Eminence understands me, and I salute you.’1 As she had once promised Montecuccoli to make him a cardinal, so now she was promising Mazarin that she would make him Pope.

  The Cardinal took it all in his stride. He had done a lot of listening, but not a great deal of talking; he had read a good many letters from the Queen, but had not replied with many of his own. ‘The treaty we made at Compiègne’ was for him, less conclusively, ‘the treaty which the Queen proposed at Compiègne’. He would bide his time, uncommitted. If this bird was in the hand, there were others in the bush that might still be caught – Spanish birds, singing of peace, and English birds, squawking of more war. It did not occur to Christina that Mazarin might be playing a double game. Machiavellian tactics were her own prerogative, she believed. Dissembling was her self-acclaimed forte; let others be swindled and duped.

  Confidence got the better of her. Defying the Pope’s express wishes, on the first day of October she made a jaunty visit to the convent at Lagny, not to pray, nor to listen to the music, but to pay her compliments to Ninon de Lenclos, a notorious courtesan who had been more or less imprisoned for flaunting her charms too openly. Christina was enchanted by Ninon, and reputedly wrote to Louis that only she was lacking at his otherwise perfect court. The Pope, still besieged by plague, had time only to roll his eyes to heaven on hearing of it, but a flash of anger escaped them at the next news: the Queen had declared herself an unbeliever, a materialist, a follower of Lucretius. She had no religion but that of the ancient philosophers, she had said; the rest she could not approve of. Then, dismissing the courtly etiquette she had learned in Rome along with the Roman religion, she began to develop an elaborate code of her own which would be de rigueur at her new court in Naples. It accorded maximum ceremony to herself as sovereign, while permitting her favourites many privileges at the level of hats and armchairs. The code was so complicated that none of her courtiers could follow it. Visiting dignitaries were baffled, and at times it was too much even for the Queen herself – on several occasions the precise choreography could not be worked out at all, and she was obliged to retire, defeated, to a feigned sickbed.