There was in fact a suggestion that some of her own men had joined in the fight on the Corsicans’ side. Certainly they had a reputation for ready brawling; Christina had maintained a remarkably tolerant attitude towards it, shocking Roman society, and particularly the Pope, in the process. Whatever the case, her mediating stance did not last long. A haughty reply arrived from the French Ambassador, disdaining Her Majesty’s intervention. Christina at once transferred her efforts to a higher authority, and letters were soon flying from her determinedly intervening pen to the French King and his Chargé d’Affaires, Lionne, urging them to ‘paste over’ the dispute, and put an end to the whole business.
In due course she received their response. Her Majesty’s arguments had left them unmoved. The King’s letter was markedly cool, and it included a piquant reference to the Queen’s own behaviour in the Monaldeschi affair:
It is all very well to counsel moderation when one does not behave with moderation oneself. If Your Majesty had been ill treated by even the least of Her servants, even if the injury had been of no consideration whatever compared to the injury done to me in the person of my Ambassador, I am sure that Her Majesty would have sufficient spirit and sufficient care for her reputation that She would by no means follow Her own counsel to me to ‘paste over’, as She puts it, this disagreeable picture.4
The Chargé d’Affaires, less succinct than his master, required twelve florid pages to explain to Her Majesty that she should practise what she preached, and mind her own business.
Christina took immediate umbrage. She abandoned the middle ground forthwith, and began a noisy support of the Roman party. She sought out the Roman Governor, Cardinal Imperiali, official employer of the Corsican Guards. Imperiali had in fact had nothing to do with the incident – on the evening in question, he had been enjoying a good meal with a convivially named brother prince of the Church, Cardinal Aquaviva – but Christina deemed him nonetheless a suitable local hero, and he was soon installed at the Palazzo Riario as an icon of all that was anti-French. Farces were staged at the palazzo, mocking King Louis and his ministers, with the audience comprising every noble or cleric who had ever been heard to mumble any remotely anti-French sentiment. Azzolino played his part behind the scenes, urging the Pope to make further difficulties, and within a matter of weeks Ambassador de Créquy had left Rome to nurse his wounded pride and await further instruction in the quiet hills of Tuscany. Few of his servants attended him in his indignant exile; the greater part of his household was left behind, fed up in all but the most literal sense, for the Palazzo Farnese had been placed under embargo, and no food could be delivered there.
Retaliation was not long in coming, and it came in a blaze befitting the ambitions of the rising Sun King. Louis sent his troops to Avignon to seize the papal garrison there, and in order to get it back the Pope was obliged to accede to the King’s every outrageous demand: Cardinal Imperiali was demoted from his hero’s throne at Christina’s palazzo, and sent into exile; the Corsican Guard was disbanded, and on the site of the incident, outside the Palazzo Farnese, a great pyramid was erected, relaying the whole story in all its ignominious detail – ignominious, at least, to the Pope, who was obliged to send his nephew all the way to Paris to make obsequious apologies in person. Christina herself narrowly escaped a serious reprisal: Louis wrote to the regents in Stockholm, making clear his displeasure at the Queen’s behaviour, and suggesting that a reduced allowance might bring Her Majesty to heel. Her already limited finances were saved by the calming counsel of Louis’ Stockholm Ambassador, the Chevalier de Terlon, an habitué of Swedish court circles for more than two decades. Terlon knew the Queen well, and, despite the many provocative traits of her character, he remained fond of her. He now wrote to the King, advising him, in effect, to ‘paste over’ this matter, too. ‘Your Majesty should know,’ he wrote, ‘that the Queen is the most blustering princess in the world, and at the same time she is the most timid. She respects only those who speak to her boldly.’5
Louis relented, instructing only that the goodwill which must be maintained between France and her ally, Sweden, need no longer be extended to Sweden’s former Queen. The Duc de Créquy, returned to Rome, was to make no further calls upon Her Majesty, whether she offered him an armchair or not. The Duc was only too happy to comply, and appended his own touch by declining to acknowledge the Queen or her supporters even when they met by chance: should his carriage come upon hers in the street, he would draw an indignant curtain.
Louis kept Christina in her Roman Coventry for the best part of three years, and finally indicated that he would be prepared to accept a conciliatory letter from her. She sent one through her secretary, but the King replied in his own hand. The clear victor, he could afford to be magnanimous, and besides, as he himself added in a perfectly calculated insult, it was not his custom ‘to do battle with the ladies’.
The lady in question had by now, in any case, turned her attention elsewhere. She had a home to attend to, a lovely palazzo, and a large garden – almost a park – and many, many pictures to hang. Most had been lying for years in their boxes; Christina had not seen them since they had been smuggled onto the ships in Stockholm harbour, more than ten years before. She hung them now in a grand first-floor gallery, where visitors to Rome were invited to view them, the Queen viewing the visitors themselves, with no less pleasure, through a peep-hole in the wall. The same floor housed the other public rooms, including a throne room, and Christina’s private apartments. Though she claimed not to care about material comforts, her suite was decorated sumptuously with Persian carpets and silk tapestries, including the Alexander series which had hung in her rooms in the Tre Kronor Castle. Her bed was made of Indian wood and covered with a canopy of crimson brocade, and there was a luxurious bathroom, with not one but two marble baths, running water, hot and cold, and elegant little niches in which stood statues of Venus and Cupid, and a bust of Christina herself. It was a surprising priority for a woman who had recently greeted the Pope ‘with her unkempt hair tied up with ribbons of various colours, and her face powdered with dust from the roads’,6 but so it was. It replaced the simple lead-lined wooden bath and the old copper water cans that had served her before. Evidently she had not forgotten Bourdelot’s advice, and was still taking ‘regular baths’, or at least giving the appearance of doing so. The rest of the first floor was decorated with wallhangings of crimson and green. Christina had revealed the simpler tastes of her northern home by choosing furniture of carved wood rather than the gilt then fashionable in Rome, but she had a number of cabinets inlaid with ivory, and many lacquered ‘Indian’ pieces – things from more or less anywhere outside Europe. There were a lot of stools, but very few armchairs; most visitors, it seems, would know their place.
On the top floor, she installed her handsome library, 2,000 manuscripts alone,7 and many more books in many languages, ancient and modern, all beautifully bound, and even one manuscript in Japanese, which, however, only a few local Jesuits could read. She had wanted the orientalist Marcus Meibom to be her royal librarian – evidently she had admired his spirited stand against Bourdelot in the Greek-dance nose-punching episode in Stockholm – but Meibom had declined, so Lucas Holstenius came across from the Vatican Library to put things in order for her. He was succeeded by a train of loyal and capable people; though rogues came and went elsewhere in her household, Christina’s library remained terra virginalis. On the top floor, alongside the library, was the sala, a large hall where her learned friends met to talk, and concerts and plays were performed. The English traveller Edward Browne attended one of these soirées during the carnival season of 1665, and relayed his impressions in a letter home:
I was the other night at the Queene of Sweden’s, she is low and fat, a little crooked; goes commonly with a velvet coat, cravat, and man’s perruke; shee is continually merry, hath a free carriage with her, talks and laughs with all strangers, whom she entertains, once in a weake, with musick, and now this carnivall every o
ther night with comedies.8
Though she does not seem to have played herself, Christina possessed some fine musical instruments, six keyboards in all – two spinets, two organs, and two harspichords – and numerous strings. One of the organs in fact belonged to Azzolino, but this deficit was countered by extra putti, fat and golden, on one of Christina’s harpsichords. Musicians were cheap, and she employed them in plenty, keeping most of them under the wing of Alessandro Cecconi. Once a singer at her court in Stockholm, he had risen to be leader of all her musicians, and had gradually become a favoured personal attendant and the Queen’s confidant. Others within the household derided him as ‘a servant now become a gentleman’, but he was as loyal as he was talented, and he was to remain with the Queen all his life. She kept as well a flutter of young female songbirds, who lived in nunlike confinement on the little entresol above her own bedroom. There were other birds, too – a parrot, a sparrow, and several nightingales; these lived in rather greater splendour downstairs, chirruping through the bars of handsome cages in blue and gold.
There was no separate room for dining, but tables of all sizes lay about, ready to be moved wherever they were needed within the palazzo or out into the garden. Christina herself did not much care for formal dining, ‘though she was a huge Eater, as the Northern people are’ – so one of her servants records. ‘She lov’d rathr Colliflower,’ he writes, ‘or boil’d Chestnuts with her Maids, for which she would slip into their Chambers on purpose, rather than eat the delicate Morsels which were prepar’d for her with royal Magnificence.’9 On her first arrival in Rome she had begun to drink wine, whether out of courtesy to her new hosts, or in play of sophistication, but the experiment did not last, and now she drank almost none. There was juice to hand, in any case; she had planted some 300 orange and lemon trees, and now the brilliant little circles and ovals stood out against the lush green, with a quieter chorus of pink and white jasmines – 200 new plants – behind them.
Gardening was for her a genuine – and for once, harmless – pleasure. Even as a girl of fifteen, she had summoned the famous André Mollet to lay out gardens for her, but Sweden’s climate had worked against them both. Ten years later, Ambassador Whitelocke had taken a disappointing stroll through the royal garden in Stockholm. ‘Few flowers were to be seen there,’ he recorded, ‘and most of these were tulips not extraordinary…No fruit-trees were there, nor are they common in this cold country, only…in some places they have a few trees of plums, and small cherries, and of apples…nor do many people in these parts delight in gardens or in planting fruits or flowers, this climate not encouraging thereto.’ As for the Queen’s garden in Uppsala, it had ‘scarce deserved that name’ at all.10 Now, in the warmth and light of the south, one of Christina’s dreams at last began to blossom. The essayist Montaigne, visiting Rome in the days of her grandfather, had described the gardens on the Gianicolo as ‘the most beautiful in the city’. Christina had made them even lovelier, and among the plants and flowers she built a stable for her 45 horses, all named after noble heroes, and her eight mules, all named after Jesuits.
The Palazzo Riario was now a beautiful and impressive place, and full of life. Christina had a large household of some 170 people, higher and lower servants and their families. For formal appearances, she was almost always accompanied by men, but there were many women living in the palazzo, too, kitchenmaids and laundrymaids and maids of all work, and a few ladies-in-waiting as well. Christina preferred them to be single women, since ‘she hated, or pretended to hate Marriage. She affected to pass for a Maid,’ one of her servants wrote, evidently not believing it himself, ‘and the word Woman offended her horribly.’ She could not always avoid the wives of her menservants, but she did not like to see them pregnant. When Francesca Landini, the wife of her Captain of Guards, ‘was big with Child’ – not her husband’s child, however – she generally refused to admit her at all. ‘If she had occasion for her,’ wrote the servant, ‘she would say, Bring the Cow hither, and send her away again as soon as she had done.’ When another of her menservants came to present his new wife to her, ‘then (says she to the Woman), If you come to shew like a Cow, do not come to see me in that condition.’ Christina showed greater kindness to the fruits of their labours; with children she was often tender. She was particularly fond of one little boy of the household, and she would ask for him to be brought to her, ‘and Caress the child, and sometimes hold it in her Arms; and when the little Child began to go, and came to the Table to embrace her Feet, she would fill his little Apron with Fruits and Comfitures’.11
Azzolino had done what he could to ensure a stable household, but Christina needed occasional zest in her steady domestic diet. To get it, she opened her doors to a number of unsavoury characters who might have been better left outside. Among them was one Vanini, an Italian priest of ‘some birth, little merit, and much vanity’.12 He was known to have raped one young woman already, but Christina’s tolerance was wide, and she allowed him to frequent the Riario with impunity. In due course, his eye fell on one of her servants, and before long, ‘poor Jovannina found her self with Child, which affrighted her, and made her perfectly desolate’. Christina supplied the wherewithal to help her, and Jovannina ‘had Remedies given her to take it away’, to worse than no avail: the girl died. With ghastly irony, she was buried in a nun’s habit, a crown of virgin’s flowers on her head. ‘The Queen wept as much as if she had been a Relation’, but Vanini was not dismissed. Nor did he reform, being only annoyed that he had not been able to keep the whole affair secret. In this hope he had bribed the Queen’s new chamberlain, Santinelli’s replacement and almost as much of a rogue, the Marchese Orazio Del Monte, or as he preferred to be known, the Marchese Orazio Bourbon Del Monte, an addition which linked him – just possibly – to the French royal family. Del Monte had accepted the money, but had talked anyway, excelling, as he did, at both activities. The Queen liked him enormously, and whatever business she could keep from Azzolino’s drones, she delivered into his hands. They were large hands, and quick to grasp, and as ready to wield a dagger as to seize a purse of gold. He had married his son, at the point of a blade, to the wealthy but notably unattractive niece of the late Mondaleschi, but the young man had not managed to contain himself for long ‘within the Duties of Marriage’. Christina found it all hugely amusing, and liked to tease him about his ‘charming’ wife. His father, meanwhile, took his own amusements at the Queen’s expense, by selling his ‘protection’ in the streets around the Riario. Day by day, the district grew livelier, attracting all those who could find no welcome elsewhere, until at last Christina’s palazzo stood surrounded, a Renaissance island in a bright Baroque sea of smugglers and thieves and prostitutes.
Débâcle
As the Marchese Del Monte’s pockets grew heavier, so Christina’s own grew lighter. Azzolino’s reforms kept the wolf from the door, but remittances from Hamburg were dwindling. The agreed 8,000 riksdaler per month had dropped to 5,000, partly through the fault of her banker, Texeira, but mainly through the incompetence and worse of her Swedish agents. Of the 200,000 per year that she had expected following her abdication, she was now receiving less than a third. Her household was large, her tastes were lavish; more money must somehow be found. From France, Bourdelot wrote of the King’s plans to complete the great palace of the Louvre, and suggested that the marble for it might be quarried from Christina’s island of Öland. A sample was duly sent, and Louis had a look at it, but he found it ‘too melancholy’ for Paris, and Bourdelot’s idea went no further. Azzolino then presented an idea of his own, characteristically practical and risk-free: the Queen should send someone to look into things. He proposed Lorenzo Adami, one of his own many capable relatives, and already a member of the Queen’s staff. Adami set off in the middle of 1665, stopping in Hamburg for a few days to speak with Texeira and to hire an interpreter, and in August he arrived in Stockholm.
He proved to be worth his weight in riksdaler. The Queen’s Governor-General, Sev
ed Bååt, had been taking no notice of her estates, other than to ensure his relatives an income from them. Months’ worth of remittances lay uncollected, and in Pomerania, her representative Peter Appelman had grown rich on outright theft. Before the end of the winter, Adami had sorted out everything and doubled Christina’s income. For his own splendid services he charged a modest price, the largest of his expenses being his interpreter, at two pounds a month.
Greater powers than Adami’s, however, were also at work. Since 1664, the English had been once again at war with the Dutch, and were pressing the Swedes to launch an attack of their own. When they declined, the Danes joined the fray on the Dutch side. Sweden now had two good reasons to go to war: the old Danish enemy was in league with the new competitor for the trade routes in the Baltic; defeat of either one would be to the Swedes’ advantage. But they held to a precarious neutrality, announcing that the Riksdag would be summoned shortly to debate the matter. When Christina learned of it, she decided at once that she must attend the session. If Sweden went to war again, Adami’s careful work could be undone in a moment. She must ensure neutrality. The French Ambassador was working for it already in Stockholm. Christina must lend her influence. And she must start making regular visits to her estates. That would keep the managers honest. But for this she would need the ban on her priests to be lifted. She could not forgo a daily mass on her sorties into Lutheran territory. The subject must be raised at the Diet. She must be there to push it through.
Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 36