The Cardinal, at least, had not. In the years since her return to Rome, he had reconciled himself to his own love for her. It was chaste, almost certainly, but it was strong, and his political hopes, now vanished, no longer stood in its way. He seems to have spent most of his evenings with her, and during the day they wrote to each other frequently, sometimes every few hours. One tender note from Azzolino, in the December of 1679, shows the warmth of his love for Christina, a quarter of a century after its beginning: ‘Your sweet little letter arrived just as I was thinking particularly of you. Dearest, I did not enjoy the play so much yesterday evening because it prevented me from being with you as usual…Dearest, I thank you a thousand times for the comfort you have given me, and I embrace you with all my soul.’17
But even after so long, she remained a demanding mistress. Only weeks later, with the Cardinal enduring severe gastric trouble, she accused him of manufacturing the illness to avoid coming to see her. Abandoning his ‘Dearest’ and retreating to ‘Your Majesty’, he wrote snappily to her: ‘Perhaps, Madam, Your Majesty may doubt my condition. I can assure you that no one who had seen me with a beard of five days’ growth, and after an evacuation, could say that I was well.’18 He was aware that the Queen herself was no stranger to the indignities of ‘evacuation’. His letter continues, in the rather exasperated tone of a faithful, but doubted, lover:
I say to Your Majesty, as a man of honour, that I am now well, and I will be there tomorrow, if I live. And if Your Majesty does not believe this, and does not put Her soul at rest and assure me that She has done so, then this very evening, once it is dark, after the Ave Maria, I will pay Her a visit, and She will see that it is absolutely true. For the love of God, Your Majesty, let me know that You believe me, otherwise I am not even going to wait until it’s dark.
But, man of honour or not, the Cardinal was not well, and he did not see her the next day, nor indeed for more than a week. A further evacuation he endured with Christian patience, and the following day, ‘having felt the effects of it and slept very well’, he wrote a rather more timid note to the Queen, expressing his ‘infinite, infinite, infinite thanks’ for her constant concern for him.19
Azzolino had commissioned a history of his family, and Christina now turned back to her own Life, which she had begun so long before in Hamburg. She had evidently not acquired any modesty in the intervening years, except in the most roundabout way – recognizing her ‘many faults’, she blamed herself for having failed to correct them, ‘since among the many talents which the liberal hand of God has bestowed on me, I have such absolute and admirable power over myself that I can make of myself whatever I want’.20 She did not mean it ironically, and it is the more amusing, or the sadder, for that; of her many undoubted talents, self-delusion was not the least.
Her Life has a quality of apology, nonetheless, though it is far from apologetic in tone. She seems to have realized how little she had achieved from a position of so much privilege, and her words are by turns defensive and defiant. She thought again about her great father – great in everything, she admitted, but all the same, ‘too fat, and too quick to anger, and too fond of women, and he drank’ – all of it untrue. She revisited her heroes of the ancient world, Caesar and Alexander and Cyrus; they did not pass muster, either. ‘It’s true they had all the heroic qualities,’ she wrote, ‘but the world was very different then. I’m convinced that if they had lived in our own time, they would never have done anything.’21 In short, there was an excellent excuse for her own lack of achievement, and if she had grown a little portly of late, her father had provided a good historical precedent.
Attempting to redress the balance while life and hope remained, she began a new Accademia for learned debate, and all the cardinals turned up dutifully to discuss such topics as ‘True love lasts till death’, ‘Love exists for its own sake’, ‘Only the stupid are wicked’ – and all the usual suspects which had not progressed since the days of her first academy in Rome, or indeed, of her academy in Stockholm, thirty years before. The Accademia did not last, but the list of topics survived in the form of reflections in the style of La Rochefoucauld, whose own work she had read admiringly, and annotated, too.22 Christina labelled hers at first Heroic Sentiments. From these, she sifted out a set of Moral Reflections, renaming them Reasoned Reflections, then The Fruit of Leisure – the changing titles revealing, perhaps, her own odyssey from tough northern stoicism to a luxuriant garden in sunny Rome. She began the Sentiments with pious declarations about the Catholic faith, but within three pages she was talking of Caesar and Alexander, and of pride and hypocrisy and pleasure – though now and then a Jesuitical strain does sound: ‘Everything we like is permissible,’ she states, ‘but we must not like anything that is not reasonable.’ Given her intelligence and her very ready wit, the little maxims are surprisingly lacking in pungency and often trite, though there are traces of unconscious irony: ‘A minor prince can do much harm, but little good.’ ‘Modesty is the finest virtue of all.’ ‘People are only ever fooled by themselves.’ ‘One must save money, but nobly, not sordidly.’23 Christina did not often take advice, and particularly not from herself.
She worked on her maxims and Sentiments on and off for several years, and they went through no fewer than eighteen drafts. Santini did most of the copying, aided by Anders Galdenblad, a new Swedish secretary who found it hard to penetrate the mysteries of Christina’s atrocious handwriting. He made a good many bad drafts. ‘The King must always be the minister,’ said one. ‘The master,’ the Queen retorted. ‘The King must always be the master.’ ‘Wrongdoers must be secretly punished,’ said another. In the margin came her box on the ears: ‘You’ve written secretly, you idiot. I put severely.’ One way or other, the drafts were produced, though they were never really finished. In the end, the maxims, mostly a single line or two, numbered more than a thousand, and the Sentiments 444, but Christina was not satisfied with them – or with herself, perhaps. There is one pause among the pages, oddly muted after the stentorian tone of the rest, which suggests a moment’s humility on her part. She is speaking of the Delphic oracle: ‘Know thyself, the oracle says. And everyone wants to make of this the source of all human wisdom. But it’s not. It’s the source of all human misery. We can’t help knowing ourselves, and we can’t help being miserable because of it.’24 And she followed it with a sad reflection, which would certainly not have escaped the Vatican censors had she sought to publish it in Rome: ‘Man is a nothing covered in a scrap of life. Knowing this makes him miserable, not wise. And he can’t change it, not for all the philosophy in the world.’25
She did not seek to publish it, in Rome or anywhere else. Her secretaries knew the text, and the Cardinal, no doubt, but otherwise it remained a private testimony to Christina’s illusions, and her disillusion.
Azzolino was writing, too, not maxims or memoirs, but a huge history of the papacy, beginning at the beginning, with the reign of St Peter. He had begun it many years before and had worked on it intermittently, but his appointment as Secretary of State had left him no time to complete it. Now, relieved or bereft of his post, he returned to his book. The Pope was the beneficiary, and he may have permitted himself a moment’s ambivalence when the Cardinal presented him with the completed work – two giant volumes, some 1,400 pages altogether.26 He appreciated the effort, at least, and was also pleased with the Cardinal’s improved behaviour – the ladies were long gone, and as for the Queen, well, they were just good friends. He approved Azzolino’s steady progress in the ranks of the workaday cardinals, and eventually made him Cardinal Bishop of the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, very near to the Queen’s Palazzo Riario – but of course, they were just good friends. Azzolino tried to step a little higher by pretending that he had never really been inimical to Spanish interests. It did not help him, but his administrative capacities kept him in demand, and he continued to live well, with a good salary and, importantly, his rents from Le Marche. He had now no fewer than twelve carriag
es, most of them large six-seaters, including one expensive ‘French’ vehicle. He must have been personally well decked out, too, as he owned – apart from his trousers and shoes and his cardinal’s regalia – 37 shirts of Dutch cloth, 32 pairs of light summer socks, 46 handkerchiefs, 11 nightcaps, and 19 pairs of underpants. No matter if his palazzo was rented. He certainly had enough to make it worthwhile for someone in Geneva – some scandalized Calvinist, or perhaps just a rogue with an eye to the main chance – to attempt to blackmail him over his ‘public concubinage’ with the Queen.27 But the blackmailer had missed his chance. If it had ever been true, it was true no longer.
Christina was almost sixty, and Azzolino older. Their passions were now the quieter passions of later life, gardening and reading and charitable works, and they shared, as much as anything else, their gout and gastric problems and troubles with their teeth. Like a long married couple, they made frequent visits together to the Cardinal’s family in Le Marche; Azzolino had endowed libraries and religious institutions there, and a home for poor unmarried women – thinking, perhaps, of his five sisters who had become nuns, apparently for lack of an adequate dowry. He and Christina read each other’s writings, and signed their own with mutual dedications; even their letters were sometimes written together. They had grown to depend on each other. ‘Fidelity in love,’ Christina wrote at this time, ‘is a necessity. Fidelity alone can distinguish the true from the false.’28
This much the Cardinal had given her. With her garden and her works of art and her musicians and her friends, this love was now her life. All in all, it was a fair consolation for the phantom glory she had pursued for so many fruitless years.
Journey’s End
A Frenchman by the name of Misson, visiting Rome in the spring of 1688, sent home to his family a description of Christina, which, as it happened, was the last:
She is more than sixty years old, very small of stature, exceedingly fat and corpulent. Her complexion and voice and face are those of a man. She has a big nose, large blue eyes, blonde eyebrows, and a double chin, from which sprout several tufts of beard. Her upper lip protrudes a little. Her hair is a light chestnut colour, and only a palmsbreadth in length; she wears it powdered and standing on end, uncombed. She is very smiling and obliging. You will hardly believe her clothes: a man’s jacket, in black satin, reaching to her knees, and buttoned all the way down; a very short black skirt, and men’s shoes; a very large bow of black ribbons instead of a cravat; and a belt drawn tightly under her stomach, revealing its rotundity all too well.1
She was clearly no longer standing on ceremony, at least within the walls of her own residence. Misson had come to the Riario to view her collections as part of his grand tour. Christina welcomed him, remarking that, these days, she herself was more or less one of the ancient monuments of Rome.
She was beginning to feel her age. Sad news had come to mar the comfortable duties and pleasures of her later years, news of illness, and news of death. Heinsius and Vossius had died, scholars from her far-off days as the Pallas of the North; Montecuccoli had died, and le Grand Condé, and her old friend Doctor Bourdelot. ‘How does it feel to be eighty?’ she had written to him teasingly, but Bourdelot had not lived to reply. Gone, too, was Magnus De la Gardie, and his widow, Christina’s schoolfellow cousin, Maria Euphrosyne; on her tombstone was carved a history that might have been Christina’s own – eleven children, eight already buried; there would be no grandchildren at all. In Rome, Bernini had died; in pious hope, he had bequeathed his sculpture of the Salvator Mundi to Christina. She still did not want it, but honoured the memory of her great friend by commissioning his biography.2 And the Marchese Del Monte had made his exit, too, leaving nothing but a whiff of brimstone behind him. At the age of 70 he had begun a new affair with a married lady of the town; bereft of his erstwhile stamina, he had ‘endeavour’d to support his Vigour by Art’, and the concoction had been the end of him – though it was said in Rome that the devil had smothered him at last.
It was time to think of the next life. In her daily writing, Christina was reflecting on how little she had accomplished, but she was reminded, too, of certain things that she had done which she might have been better not to do at all. Monaldeschi’s death was the worst of them. Though she had never publicly excused or regretted it, now, with her own last judgement perhaps not far away, it was on her mind again. A note of understanding, even remorse, had crept into the lines, very different from the stamping and shouting of previous years. ‘Men would never be traitors or liars if they weren’t weak and foolish,’ she wrote. ‘The Emperor Theodosius’ law was just and wise: he said that no one should be executed within thirty days of the sentence of death. It is a safeguard for the prince’s conscience. People can always be put to death, but you cannot bring them back.’3
It was in this reflective and perhaps vulnerable frame of mind that Christina encountered the last and greatest of her persuasive, plausible rogues, the ‘golden-mouthed’ Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos. Suitably enough, he was a priest, a former confessor to a community of nuns, and he preached the newly fashionable doctrine of Quietism, the perfect balm, or so it seemed, for Christina’s ruffled soul. Quietism encouraged a passive attitude to life, abandonment of the will, religious contemplation, and, conveniently, the denial of conscience. Sin belonged to the lower, sensual part of man, said Molinos. It was instigated by the devil, and was not subject to man’s freewill, hence man could not be blamed for it. In short, ‘he would abuse the finest Women and Maids to whom he had access, by perswading them that Whoredom was no Sin’.4
Christina, at least, was seduced, and Azzolino, too, and thousands of others in Rome and elsewhere, including the puritan Pope, ‘who believed him a Saint’, at least for a while. Christina had never liked ostentatious piety or any of the extravagant, Baroque Catholic rituals, whose images and relics and smoky ceremonies offended the Lutheran leavings in her soul. She had been drawn to Quietism since her meeting with François Malaval on her first visit to France, thirty years before. Its simplicity appealed to her, and besides, she did not like being told what to do; a Quietist needed no intermediary between himself and God; he could choose whatever form of devotion he pleased. It all suited Christina very well. ‘To love God and one’s neighbour is real piety,’ she now wrote. ‘All the rest is just farce.’5 Molinos was soon taken into her service, not as her confessor, but as her personal theologian, and the two of them would pass three hours in pious discussion together every Monday morning. She considered him a genuinely holy man, though not a saint – ‘I can’t believe in saints who eat,’ she remarked, for the priest’s appetite was legendary. But it was a small price to pay for the comfort of his words, and the Riario servants did not mind the extra cooking. Molinos had a way of cooling the Queen’s hot temper; his visits always calmed her, and saved them many a beating. In consequence, the apostle of Quietism was always made to feel at home at the Riario, which remained nonetheless, as the French Ambassador wryly noted, ‘the most unquiet house in the town’.
Azzolino went along with it all to a certain degree, but his native Catholicism bordered his enthusiasm. He was not ready to jettison all the time-honoured ways of his faith. Though his writings became markedly pietistic, he clung to his Roman instincts, and went so far as to purchase the bodies of four martyred saints for the Church of Saint Filippo Neri, a St Francis-like figure to whom he was particularly devoted. He warned the Queen to tread warily, but in the end it was the French who exposed Molinos and denounced him to the Inquisition. Christina refused to believe the charges, which were, she was informed, ‘worse than Your Majesty could possibly imagine’. She suspected a plot masterminded by the ‘cursed tribe’ of the Jesuits, and exerted herself to free Molinos from his cell in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Her petitions vanished into the void; she sent food after them; it warmed the prisoner’s stomach and, it is hoped, his heart, but he was not freed.
Molinos was tried ‘in the presence of an immense concourse of people’, c
urious, no doubt, but also encouraged by the undeceived Pope’s promise of indulgences for all who attended the proceedings – they exceeded their brief with a great roar of ‘Chuck him in the Tiber!’ Molinos was duly found guilty, and his teachings declared ‘heretical, suspect, erroneous, scandalous, et cetera’. Among his private papers were found more than a hundred enthusiastic letters signed by the Queen. It is said that Azzolino had managed to destroy a hundred others.
Molinos was not burned, but was sentenced to life imprisonment ‘in penitential garb’, with daily recitations of the creed and the rosary, and confession four times a year. For so devout a gourmand, his bread and water rations must have been the hardest penance of all, but Christina did what she could to sweeten them by sending him regular supplies of jam.
Christina’s last experiment with religion was at an end. She turned back to her tried and truer pastimes, to her paintings, and her garden, and above all, to music, the least expensive, and so the most indulged, of them all. Cicciolino was no more, but his favoured place had not been vacant long. It was now occupied by the young Angelica Quadrelli, ‘a Virgin, incomparable both for Beauty and Wit’, and a fine instrumentalist at harpsichord, lute, and oboe. Angelica was a tall and elegant blonde of ruby lip and sparkling eye, so beautiful, indeed, that Innocent XI, ‘a very severe and angry Pope’, had felt that Rome’s worldly temptations would be the fewer if she were kept out of sight; he decided to put her into a convent. Angelica, alarmed, had at once sought refuge with Christina, who had long admired her voice and who, besides, was very fond of her. She took her at once under her protection, promising the Pope at the same time to see the girl safely into the convent. Forgetting this, or ignoring it, she had soon installed Angelica at the Palazzo Riario, together with her mother and her sister, ‘who was also a most Beautiful Virgin, but had not so great a faculty of Singing’.6
Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 43