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

by Buckley, Veronica

  An intelligent woman more than forty years old might have been expected to see through it all. But Christina’s intelligence and the varied experiences of her forty years were overlain, and too often obscured, by an anxious self-assertion which blinded her to the obvious and led her repeatedly to the extreme. Her unshakeable belief in herself was no more than bluster, a tale full of sound and fury, signifying not very much.

  She made one last attempt to show what she was made of. Among the territories from which she had been drawing her unsteady income was the large Swedish island of Öland, and to her representative there she now gave orders that all trade goods and all ships from Hamburg were to be seized. As there was in fact no trade between Hamburg and Öland, and consequently no trade goods and no Hamburg ships in the island’s harbours, it was largely an academic revenge, but it did inconvenience the very people with whom Christina most needed to be on good terms, namely, the Swedish regents. Angered and embarrassed by this hostile action towards a friendly power, they sent a swift countermand to the island’s governor. Christina retaliated by attempting the same tactic with her representatives in other territories; infuriated, the regents revoked her orders again. The authority was theirs, as the lands belonged legally to the Swedish crown; Christina claimed the rents, but was effectively no more than a landlord. The regents dealt her a final insult by forbidding her to set foot in Sweden again until the boy-King had come of age, leaving her to stew in her own impotence, with only the cool breath of remorse to remind her of what might have been.

  Mirages

  Christina sat stewing in Hamburg for fifteen further months, while envoys struggled vainly to persuade the regents to reconsider. She had not yet given up. There were still financial affairs to settle, and the Riksdag would meet again; if the little King were to die, the people of Sweden would surely want her back. Christina’s hopes were still alive, but it was left to her agents to act on them, for by now she had neither strength nor spirit to do battle again in person.

  She was not well. To her old fevers and fainting fits were added recurrent sore throats and migraine, and ‘a strange pain in my right side, which makes all my movements painful, even breathing. The doctors say there’s no remedy,’ she wrote to Azzolino, ‘but they’re all idiots. You’ll remember I had something similar in Rome, and I cured it with milk. I can’t get goat’s milk here, so I have to make do with cow’s. As for asses, there’s only the two-legged variety in this town.’1 Milk or no milk, she was losing three or four days every week to illness and fatigue. The local water being doubtful, she had taken to adding cinnamon to it and also ice, ‘which leaves the locals absolutely astonished’. She was still drinking the small beer that she made herself, though her physician Macchiati regarded this as the cause of half her troubles. He himself could only suggest bleeding her, and in the end he did so regularly – from the foot, apparently. On each occasion it seemed to do her good, and for a few days she would regain her appetite and walk about confidently, and at night fall easily into a sound and restful sleep. But whatever benefit she may have had from the bleedings, she lost again through the intense cold. Christina’s years in Hamburg were some of the hardest years of the century’s ‘little ice age’; even in the middle of August, the hardy local people were forced to keep fires blazing in their houses. In the winter months, the cruelty of the weather was ‘insupportable’, and Christina had to keep her ink beside the fire as she wrote to keep it liquid at all. ‘My fingers are so frozen,’ she said, ‘that it’s all I can do to hold my pen. I think everything’s freezing, even my soul, in this Godforsaken place.’2 She made things worse herself by refusing to wear a hat or any furs when indoors – ‘I can’t stand wearing furs,’ she said – and by sleeping, and often reading all day, in a room that was barely heated at all – ‘because I can’t stand stoves, either’.

  Christina’s icy rooms may have been a tactical decision, for the many notables who arrived to see her, including one notably fat Farnese prince, confined themselves to the shortest visits politeness would allow. Etiquette required them to keep their heads uncovered in the Queen’s presence, and this they could not bear for long in an unheated room, with temperatures well below freezing. She may have wanted to discourage this kind of formal company, which she had always regarded as a trial and a bore. She was often ill and in pain, and she was melancholy, too, missing the warmth and vibrancy of her rich life in Rome, missing her lively circle of friends, and her daily involvement in the politics of the papal city. A grey trail of boredom seeps from her letters. At one particularly low point she reported a rumour that the Danes were about to invade Hamburg; this she dismissed with a scoff, but added that she wished they would – an invasion would at least enliven the place. ‘It’s the only possible amusement we could get here,’ she complained, ‘and we’re not even going to get that.’3 She took little fresh air and, for once in her life, no exercise at all, preferring to pass her time reading, or writing letters, many to do with her business affairs, but most of them to the Cardinal.

  Christina was miserable. She disliked the city of Hamburg and everything about it. She disliked the weather, the water, the buildings, and above all she disliked the people themselves. ‘Don’t imagine,’ she wrote to Azzolino, ‘that there’s any difference between wild beasts and Germans; and I can assure you that of all the animals there are in the world, there is none that is less like Man than a German.’4 The German Jesuits, she wrote, were old, lazy, and as cold as the climate. As for the German cardinals, they were all drunks. ‘You can’t trust what they say, because if they give their word when they’re drunk they’ll take it back as soon as they’re sober, and everything they do when they’re sober is meaningless to them when they’re drunk.’ The Bishop of Salzburg, she reported, was regarded as a champion among men; he had gained the esteem of his compatriots by drinking a barrel of wine a day to keep sober – when he wasn’t sober, he had no idea at all how many barrels he had drunk. ‘And anyone who drinks less,’ she added, ‘is regarded as an idiot.’5 As for German surgeons, they were more dangerous than sword wounds. Better to be a heretic than a German, since a heretic could at least become a Catholic, whereas ‘a beast can never become a reasonable creature. Curse the place!’ she exclaimed, ‘and the stupid brutes it produces!’6

  Noisily scornful, Christina had overlooked the fact that she was more or less German herself. Her mother had been completely German, and her father German on his own mother’s side. Ethnically, at least, she was much more German than anything else. But this was not the time to be reminded of it. She wanted nothing to do with the place. It was Italy that she was longing for, Italian sun and Italian friends, and one Italian in particular.

  For behind Christina’s frustration with Hamburg, and her many health troubles, lay the deeper ill of a broken heart. The tears she had wept on leaving Rome had been more than the tears of a temporary separation. Her love affair, whatever it had involved, had come to an end. In an unrecorded conversation, or more probably argument, the Cardinal had made clear that, though friendship might continue, amour, and every hint of it, must cease. Christina’s protestations were to no avail, and her distress is palpable. ‘The people who told you I tried to sleep are mistaken,’ she had written to Azzolino on the road that led from Rome. ‘My eyes were filled with tears, and not with sleep.’ He held firm – to a degree, replying that, though he did not really want her to stay in Rome, neither did her want her to remain in Sweden. ‘What!’ she replied. ‘Do you want me to stay away from Rome for good? Can you think that I would ever do so? Your words have wounded me. You have made me really anxious. Tell me what you mean, and believe me, I would rather live on bread and water in Rome with a single servant to attend me than have all the kingdoms and treasures in the world and live anywhere else.’7

  The Cardinal’s reply has not survived, but it is clear that Christina was now a much less welcome presence in his life than she had once been. It may be that he was attempting to live a more pious life, i
n keeping with his priesthood, or he may simply have fallen out of love with her, and wanted to establish some physical distance between them. Certainly their relationship had become something of a political liability to him, particularly in the wake of the Monaldeschi affair. For a time, Christina had been an asset, providing an anchor for his floating Squadrone; she had even steadied him personally, drawing him away from the sexual escapades that had dimmed his brilliant reputation. But her own behaviour was hardly conventional, and besides, the French and Spanish pamphleteers had done their work well: whatever the truth, the Cardinal was widely believed to be, or to have been, the Queen’s lover. Within the morally cautious Vatican of the Counter-Reformation, this might be enough to stop his progress. He was now Secretary of State, the very position the Pope himself had held before his election. It may be that Azzolino thought as Christina did, and regarded himself as papabile.

  Whatever the reason, Christina’s Hamburg letters show that there was now a breach between them, a breach of the Cardinal’s making, which she regretted bitterly. In page after page, she relayed her ‘misfortune’, her ‘misery’, the ‘mortal blow’ of their parting, and the ‘most tender passion’ that she continued to hold for him. She received his letters with ‘an excess of joy’. They were ‘life or death’ to her, and any slight delay in the post, or any hint of indisposition on Azzolino’s part, sent her into transports of anxiety. ‘I fear for your health more than for my life,’ she wrote to him, ‘and I ask God to take from my own allotted days to prolong your own.’8 They wrote to each other every week, Christina always on a Wednesday, sometimes twice in the same day, to catch the weekly post to Rome. Azzolino’s letters were always in Italian, and hers always in French, but their most private phrases were concealed in their own numerical code.9 The Cardinal was also kept informed by two members of the Queen’s household, the Marchese Del Monte and Father Santini, the latter’s elegant handwriting no doubt a welcome contrast to Christina’s impossible scrawl. While Christina continued to protest her love – ‘Everything is frozen in this country except my heart, which is more ardent than ever’10 – Azzolino attempted to divert her thoughts elsewhere – principally, it seems, towards her eternal salvation. He had apparently been saying that their relationship offended religious proprieties, perhaps even that it was sinful. Christina responded passionately: ‘I have no wish to offend God, nor to give you any cause for offence, but that cannot stop me from loving you until death, and since your piety frees you from being my lover, I free you from being my servant, since I want to live and die your slave.’11

  In the time-honoured way of the sympathetic jilter, Azzolino offered the purer flame of friendship in the place of love. Friendship would not compromise their chances in the next life – Christina must think of that. One bitterly ironic response indicates that she was not deceived:

  Thank you for your expressions of friendship. I only wish I could believe them, but you have already made it perfectly clear that I should not read too much into what you say. I am not likely to fall again into the same error that you have so carefully dragged me out of…It is really most edifying to read your religious reflections on everything that happens. I have no doubt that your thoughts were all of God while you were watching those two young actresses at the French Ambassador’s the other night. It must have been mortifying for you to have to look at them. I suppose you went in the hope of converting them…As for me, I think about death all the time, so please stop preaching to me about it. I don’t like sermons.12

  Her grief was real, and she wept many tears, but her active nature saved her from despair. Within a few months she was able to write to Azzolino about returning to Rome ‘in glory and triumph’, and laugh with him about her new admirers in Hamburg, supposedly all captivated by ‘my beautiful big blue eyes’. Besides, there was plenty to distract her. Hamburg was by no means the cultural desert she had pretended, and in any case, there was a good deal of business which still required her attention. Lorenzo Adami, ‘who has surpassed all my hopes with his hard work and capability’, was still looking after things in Sweden, and he had been joined by a new man from Pomerania, Bernhard von Rosenbach, whose impossible task was to persuade the regents to admit the Queen to the next Diet. Her hopes were now pinned on a cash settlement in exchange for the rents she currently claimed. This, she felt, would free her from the uncertainties of war, a threat brought home to her lately by the destruction of 200 Dutch ships, laden with the property of Hamburg merchants, by the enemy English navy. The city was resounding with the ‘terrible uproar’ of new-made bankruptcies.

  She roused herself sufficiently to pen a half-hearted, perhaps half-guilty encomium for an old acquaintance, the philosopher René Descartes. Since his death almost twenty years before, Descartes’ reputation had risen to such heights that, notwithstanding the accusations of atheism that had once been levelled against him, it seemed he might be a candidate for sainthood. It was agreed in any case that his modest grave in Stockholm did not do him justice, and in 1667, his remains were disinterred and transferred to Paris, where they – or most of them – were reburied in the Church of Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont.13 The rumours of canonization had done the philosopher no service: on the long road from Sweden, forward-thinking relic collectors had removed whatever they could bribe or steal from the guards, and by the time the skeleton arrived in France, it was a good deal smaller than it had been in life. The great man’s skull appears to have been returned to Stockholm. It was taken by one of the Swedish guards, who swapped it for another, keeping the original ‘as one of the finest relics of this great philosopher’, while other bones were dispersed to devout homes across the continent. There was no canonization, however. The Church responded to the hopes of the faithful by banning the philosopher’s books on the day of his last arrival in the land of his birth. Christina, at least, composed for him a tardy hymn of praise, not voluntarily, but ‘having been requested to honour the memory of the late Monsieur Descartes with some mark of esteem’:

  While he was staying at Our court, We wanted to receive from so fine a teacher some tincture of philosophy and science, and We employed the hours of Our leisure in this pleasant occupation, as far as Our great and important affairs would permit…And We hereby even certify, that he contributed greatly to Our glorious conversion, and that Providence made use of him, and of Our illustrious friend Monsieur Chanut, to give to Us the first lights; by God’s grace and mercy We embraced the truth of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Religion, which the said Monsieur Descartes always professed, and in which he died with every mark of true piety that Our religion demands of those who profess it.14

  It was a moment to remember as well her late, ‘illustrious friend’, Pierre Chanut, the dazzled and doting ambassador who had turned from her, bewildered, after the death of Monaldeschi. But the tribute is no more than a nod in the direction of the two Frenchmen, both ‘made use of’ by Providence for Christina’s own ends. She did not want to dwell on them too much, for the thought of them rankled a little, reminding her of her greatest failure of mind, and her greatest failure of humanity.

  Pious death was all very well, in any case, but there was life to be lived in the meantime. She was not just going to wilt like a faded rose into the cold Hamburg soil. A new flame had been struck, not love, nor philosophy, nor religion, but an ancient mixture of them all, for Christina had rediscovered alchemy.

  She had learned of it as part of the Renaissance education of her girlhood, but, curiously, given her vivid imagination and her interest in other occult learning, it had never particularly interested her. There had been a large number of alchemy manuscripts in the library which had come to her as booty from Prague, but these she had casually given away. It was not that she doubted the promise of alchemy, not fundamentally, in any case. But it had not been a forte of her old tutor, Johan Matthiae, and the friends she had made since then had been more literary men than anything else. Now, however, excited by stories of fantastic alchemical succe
sses, or simply latching onto a new idea in a dull time, she turned her gaze to ‘the dark world’.

  It was not a world of seances and black magic, though there was smoke, and there was fire. The occult learning of Christina’s day was not much different from the fledgling empirical sciences. There were many charlatans, and some empiricists dismissed the ‘dark arts’ altogether, but many more kept a foot in both camps. It made sense to do so. Occult learning, like empirical science, was a search for understanding of the natural world, and for control of it. Alchemy served as a kind of proto-chemistry; different substances were observed to interact, to change, to form new substances, all of them, so it was believed, expressions of the same essence. With the right knowledge, any substance – such as a base metal – could be transformed into any other – such as gold. This knowledge, the famed ‘philosopher’s stone’, Christina now decided to seek.

  She had already employed an alchemist of her own when the news arrived from Holland of a local peasant who, ‘in the presence of eight Dutch parliamentarians’, had succeeded in converting 500 pounds of lead into 500 pounds of gold – 24 carat gold, at that. He had achieved this feat by melting the lead, then adding to it a pinch of powder ‘the size of a pinhead’ encased in wax. What the powder was exactly, Christina does not say – nor, apparently, did the peasant reveal it – but the veracity of the story was confirmed by all sorts of ‘reliable’ people, and Christina thought it worth relaying to Azzolino.15 He was interested, having dabbled in alchemy himself, but he was not pleased to hear that the Queen had been paying her own alchemist large amounts of money to produce – well, large amounts of money. Putting the cart before the horse, she had borrowed to pay his fee, and word had got back to the Cardinal. In fact it was not such a large sum, but it was enough to frighten the alchemist into fleeing when he failed to produce more. He took himself at speed to Naples, convinced that the Queen intended to have him killed, ‘which was really scandalous,’ she protested to the Cardinal, ‘since I’d never even thought of it – I insist, I’d never thought of it’. She did not hold it against him, and urged Azzolino to take him back into her service if he should show his face in Rome. Christina was not overly credulous, but she had evidently witnessed something of the magic of chemistry, and now, true to her nature, she allowed optimism to overcome scepticism. Tapping at her freezing ink on a bitter February day, she penned her thoughts on the subject: