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

by Buckley, Veronica

  Angelica’s musicianship was a decided asset at Christina’s frequent musical parties. Her sweet temper and her flaxen beauty recommended her likewise, reminding the Queen, perhaps, of her long lost Belle. She came to love Angelica, and kept her in daily attendance.

  One afternoon Christina was holding court at a sort of musical picnic in the lovely gardens at the Riario, in the company of ‘a great many Ladies, Knights and Gentlemen’. It was a hot summer’s day, and they had all seated themselves in the shade of some leafy branches, where they nibbled fruits and sipped wine as the various numbers were played. One of the servants described the scene:

  It was about the time that the Song of Flon, Flon was in request; and the Trumpets…being posted upon a little Hill in the same garden, sounded the same Tune. The Eccho’s repeated the last Words. All the World Sung it, and the Queen her self sung Flon, Flon…A thousand fits of Laughter accompanied the Musick, insomuch, that others of the Queen’s Maids walking in the Garden, were drawn thither by the Noise.7

  Angelica took a star turn, extemporizing on her ‘Guitarre’, and afterwards, when all the guests were gone, Christina sent for her so that they might sit together quietly for an hour or two. It is a happy glimpse of ‘a happy Season’, the Queen sitting round and contented in a great armchair, reading in the candlelight, looking up now and then to smile, like a fond grandmother, upon the gentle young beauty at her side.

  It did not last. Christina, perhaps feeling unwell, began to have presentiments of her own death. In the autumn of the same year of 1688, with no trust left in priests, she sent for her tailor, and had him make for her a white satin gown of her own design, with gold buttons and gold lace, and embroidered all over with flowers. On Christmas Eve she tried it on, walking about in her dressingroom, with a tall looking-glass in front of her and another one behind. For some time she said nothing, but walked, and looked, in silence. The tailor was present, and some of the servants, among them the curious Giulia, a young girl once believed to have been a boy, now serving as assistant to the Queen’s alchemist, but better known for her foretelling of the future; for this reason, Christina called her Sybil. She turned to her now. ‘This gown makes me very thoughtful,’ she said. ‘I believe I shall soon have call to wear it at one of the greatest events of my life. Can you guess, Sybil, what that might be?’ Sybil looked uncomfortable, but the Queen pressed her, and at length she answered. ‘I can guess,’ she said, ‘but I do not wish to say the words.’ Christina insisted. ‘Then,’ said Sybil, ‘Your Majesty thinks she will soon be buried in this gown.’ The others remonstrated, but Christina confirmed that Sybil had guessed what she had been thinking. ‘We are all mortal,’ she said, ‘and I as well as another.’ The tailor, looking for levity, then declared he would make a cover to match the gown, ‘since if Your Majesty is correct,’ he said, ‘you will have to take care the worms do not eat it’. Christina ‘fell a Laughing, and was well pleas’d with the Repartee’.8

  She remained defiantly stout-hearted. A letter arrived from a German astrologer, advising her to take care; the first three months of the coming year would be, he wrote, a time of serious illness for her. The prediction did not trouble her, and in fact, a second warning left her roundly amused: when a soothsayer advised her to dispose of her ‘indecent’ paintings before she died, her only response was a loud burst of laughter. She left them hanging on the walls of the palazzo, and set off for a short winter tour of the warmer southern provinces.

  For once, it seems, she found the travelling strenuous; in any event, it did not do her good. In February, shortly after her return, she began to have fainting fits; she became feverish, and a dropsy swelling, which had often troubled her, now returned to add its familiar nuisance to her other ills.9 Her physician Spezioli diagnosed an infection; it was severe, and it was not soon to pass. Though Christina had dismissed it, the astrologer’s prediction had been correct: for many weeks she lay gravely ill, feeling close enough to death to dictate a new will, confirming Azzolino as her principal heir. Towards the end of March, she lapsed into unconsciousness. The Cardinal kept a prayerful watch beside her, but revival seemed impossible.

  Quite suddenly, with the first days of spring, she awoke. The fever had abated; the swelling was reduced; the danger, it seemed, had passed. Azzolino commanded three masses of thanksgiving, and the Comte d’Alibert, summoning all his impresario skills, arranged the performance of his life, with celebrations across the city in church and street: trumpets sounded, fireworks blazed, cannon fired off. The rejoicing was general, for Christina had many dependants, and moreover was a notoriously generous benefactress – notorious, that is, among her creditors, who had long stood the cost of her easy charity. She leaped back into life with a bound, and was soon penning a characteristically ebullient letter to her administrator Olivecrantz in Sweden: ‘I had given up hope,’ she wrote, ‘and had resigned myself to making the last journey of all, but God has snatched me from the embrace of death. I am now full of life again, thanks to the combined miracle of God’s grace, my own nature, and the physicians’ art. Together they have given me back my health. The strength of my own temperament has pulled me through a sickness strong enough to kill twenty Hercules.’10 Olivecrantz was soon to visit Rome, and she wrote that he would find her in her usual high spirits, ‘plump and happy’. And so indeed she remained, for a fortnight or so.

  Christina was aged 62, a fullness of years, but no great age, even for her day. The spring had arrived, the spring of 1689. Christina was in good heart; with care and time, she might have recuperated fully, or so at least her servants thought. But a violent incident, occurring beneath her own roof at this very time, undermined her sanguine mood and dealt a fatal blow to her recovery. While she had been convalescing, a vicious plan had been hatching within the palazzo against her lovely protégée, Angelica Quadrelli. The girl’s own mother had effectively sold her, for a thousand silver crowns, to the Abbé Vanini, seducer extraordinaire’, who years before had caused the death of another young woman of Christina’s household. The Abbé had long laid siege to Angelica’s virtue, but to no avail: ‘All his Presents were rejected’, it seems, ‘and his Sighs despis’d.’11

  One day, as the Queen lay resting, Angelica’s mother led her into a small chamber on one of the upper floors of the Riario. Angelica was ‘extreamly surpriz’d’ to find the Abbé waiting there for them, but her surprise turned to horror when her mother quit the room, leaving her alone with the Abbé, who was quick to take his advantage. The girl did her best to defend herself, crying out, and knocking over tables and chairs in her struggle. The noise brought help, though too late to save her. The Abbé was surrounded, and a hasty command given that he should be ‘hewed in Pieces’, but, on consideration of his many high connections, the guards’ hands were stayed, and he was permitted to escape. The ordeal left Angelica in despair, and she kept to her room for many weeks, stricken and grieving.

  Christina, meanwhile, had begun to recuperate. She was accustomed to seeing Angelica often throughout the day, and she asked for her repeatedly, only to be told that the girl was unwell and could not attend her. Concerned that the shock of the news would hinder the Queen’s recovery, Azzolino had forbidden the servants to tell her what had happened, but at length, ‘either by Accident, or out of Malice’, the alchemist’s assistant, Giulia, hinted to her that Angelica was not ill after all. The girl was immediately sent for. She came weeping to the Queen, but could not be persuaded to say what was the matter. Christina questioned Azzolino, and then each of the servants, and gradually, by threat and inveiglement, she discovered the truth.

  She fell into ‘an horrible Passion’, and sent for ‘Captain Merula her Bravo’ – recent killer of one of the Pope’s men – and commanded him in raging tones to bring her the Abbé’s head. Merula’s scruples were not dainty, but this time, it seems, he preferred a less bloody transaction. He accepted payment from some of the Abbé’s friends to do nothing while his supposed quarry decamped to Naples. When he r
eturned to the Queen with only his own head to show, she fell into a fury. She ‘Scratch’d him in the Face, and gave him twenty blows with her Fist, reproaching him with Perfidiousness, and had certainly Strangled him, if she had not wanted Strength’. Too weak to kill her faithless captain, Christina was also too weak to endure the shock of Angelica’s assault and the girl’s continuing distress. As the Cardinal had feared, she quickly relapsed into fever.

  Sure now that her death was near, Christina made her confession and a final act of contrition. She received communion, and sent to the Pope to ask his blessing and his forgiveness for all the differences they had had. A letter of absolution was duly brought, and Christina passed her last few days telling stories of bygone days, praising her old rival, Chancellor Oxenstierna, resurrecting him for an hour or two from his long oblivion in the grave. She spoke, too, of the ‘incomparable’ Cardinal, of his great merit, and of his devotion to her. She wanted him to know of her affection for him, and her esteem, and her gratitude. Towards the end, she became unconscious, and on the nineteenth of April, she breathed her last. She lay as if sleeping, leaning on one side, her hand resting at her throat.

  It was six o’clock in the morning. Azzolino had been at her bedside through the night, and now he turned awáy, the many small, sad duties of bereavement before him. The first of them was to inform the Church authorities, and to this effect he took up his pen. His mind was elsewhere, it seems, for he began this first, formal letter with a date awry by many days:

  The Queen is dead, and she has died in all holiness, a true and faithful child of God and daughter of the Catholic Church. She has done me the honour of making me her heir. She wished to be buried privately, without any undue ceremony, but the glory of God and His Church and the honour of His Holiness demand otherwise. A simple funeral would be a triumph for the heretics, and a scandal and disgrace to Rome.12

  He went on to suggest instead a grand public ceremony, with a formal procession, in the presence of the whole Sacred College of Cardinals. In a second letter, he wrote that the Queen had bequeathed to the Pope her Bernini sculpture of the Salvator Mundi. ‘I beg His Holiness to accept it,’ he wrote. ‘It is among the very finest of all the master’s pieces.’ It was a fine irony, too, for Christina had disliked the sculpture almost as much as she had disliked the Pope. She had also left instructions that three chaplaincies be founded at St Peter’s. This, the Cardinal felt, was ‘a very strong motive’ for laying the Queen’s body to rest in the Basilica itself. All the priests at St Peter’s wanted it to be so, he wrote, and all the townspeople, too; many of them had approached him about it before, and there would be ‘a good deal of discontent, and a good deal of bitterness’ if it did not come to pass. There was little precedent for it, or indeed for any woman to be buried within the confines of the Vatican, but, by surprising the cardinals and by pushing them to make a quick decision, Azzolino gained his point. Within a day, the Pope had given his permission, though without having learned of Christina’s final, characteristically extravagant demand: the three new chaplains at St Peter’s were to say no fewer than 20,000 masses for the repose of her soul.

  Though written only hours after Christina’s death, Azzolino’s two letters contain many details of the proposed funeral. It seems that he had considered it quite carefully, perhaps during her last days, when she had lain unconscious. He knew very well that she herself had wanted ‘no pomp or exhibiting of the body or other vanity’, but if he had hesitated at first to override her wishes, no doubts remained by the time he sat down to relay the news of her death. Christina had been too public a figure, too great a convert, too noisy a sinner, to disappear without the final grand embrace of the Church.

  Thus, Christina’s departure from Rome was as splendid as her arrival had been, more than thirty years before. For four days, her embalmed body lay exposed at the Palazzo Riario. The Carmelite brothers kept a silent watch, while half of Rome and folk from the nearby country towns filed past, sorrowful, awed, and curious. Christina had been dressed in her new white satin gown, ‘stitch’d with Flowers’, and a purple cloak embroidered with gold crowns and trimmed with ermine, like the mantle she had worn on the bright, distant day of her coronation. A crown she had on this day, too, a small crown of silver, and a silver sceptre in her cold hand, and a silver mask covering her face.

  On the fourth day, her body was carried from the palazzo to the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the Oratorians’ Chiesa Nuova, which Christina had long admired. Its entrance was decorated with sheaves of wheat in homage to the Vasa Queen, and inside, its beauty was made glorious by the light of 300 torches, flaming from silver mounts. Through the night, she lay surrounded by wreaths and candles, and the next day her requiem was said, with hundreds of members of the sixteen brotherhoods and seventeen ecclesiastical orders in attendance, and ‘the whole Colledge of Cardinals’, save only Azzolino, who had not the strength, nor perhaps the heart, to endure this farewell to his most beloved friend.

  As night fell, the Queen’s body, ‘with her Face discover’d’, was carried across the river to St Peter’s, with the cardinals and other clergy and the Roman nobility and diplomats and scholars and artists and ‘all her Domesticks’ processing before and after in a vast train of mourning. There, in the great Basilica, it was placed in a coffin of cypress wood, then inside another made of lead, engraved with her name and her coat of arms, and finally in a third, wooden coffin, bearing her effigy in large medallions. So, this vital, vibrant, brilliant figure, the northern star who had compared herself to the very sun, was enclosed at last in the darkness.

  Christina’s funeral had been magnificent, but her memorial was not. ‘She was poorly Interr’d,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘in a Cave of the Sacrasty of Saint Peter.’13 This was partly true: she had in fact been buried in the crypt of the Basilica, alongside the cardinal archbishops of that great church, but for some time there was barely a stone to record her last place of rest. In her last will and testament, she herself had stated that she wanted nothing but the simplest epitaph: For Almighty God, it was to read, Christina Lived Sixty-Three Years. For a long time, she did not have even this. The Pope eventually commissioned a marble relief, but the money was lacking to complete it, a wryly fitting memorial in itself to an incorrigibly spendthrift Queen. Finally, in the early years of the new century, a new Pope, one of Christina’s last surviving friends, decided that the sculpture would be paid for from the Basilica’s own building fund.14

  She might have had a memorial sooner had Azzolino lived to oversee it, but the Cardinal did not long outlive the Queen. He had time to attend to some of the matters pertaining to her will, and to make his own, and from time to time he was seen walking slowly through the streets, ‘in deepest Mourning, with the greatest Lowliness and Dejection’.15 Christina’s papers were transferred from the Riario to his own residence on the Borgo Nuovo, and there, with the help of her secretary and his own, the Cardinal sifted through them, setting aside the official documents, and, as the Queen had wished, burning all her private correspondence. In so doing, he revealed his own temperament, both systematic and sentimental, for it seems that, before burning her letters, he read them all chronologically, through them living once again the excitement of Christina’s early days in Rome, the thrill of their political intrigues, and the first fine, careless rapture of their love. The letters included many that he himself had written to her; despite his frequent injunctions that she should burn them, Christina had never found it in her heart to do so, and they remained to the Cardinal now, fragile, futile remnants of a friendship which had been, as he wrote, ‘my greatest glory’.16 But what Christina’s love had forbidden, so death would now prevent. Azzolino’s worsening illness interrupted the quiet work of destruction. A small, yellowing treasure would survive him.17

  He was by now very unwell, and he seems to have known that his own end was approaching. For his own peace of mind, and perhaps on Christina’s belated behalf as well, he attempted to bring about a
reconciliation with the French Ambassador, who had long detested them both, but this took the last of his strength, and his efforts were in any case unsuccessful. The French court repaid them with the rumour that he had killed the Queen in order to come the more quickly into his inheritance.

  If Azzolino heard of it, it made no difference to him. Christina’s death had left him oblivious to smaller wounds, no matter how vicious. ‘I am inconsolable,’ he wrote, ‘and I shall always be inconsolable.’18 His loss, he said, had been ‘appalling’, and he could recover neither health nor spirits. Now, with the lovely Roman spring blossoming around him, Azzolino began to fade. He died on the eighth of June, just fifty days after Christina, having received a last blessing from the Pope.

  His funeral was held, as hers had been, in the Chiesa Nuova, and there he was buried, next to the chapel of St Filippo Neri, to whom he had been so long devoted. Romolo Spezioli, Azzolino’s physician and Christina’s, provided a marble tablet to mark his grave.

  The Queen’s last will and testament had been read only hours after her death, at ten o’clock in the morning, by the notary who served her household. Azzolino had not waited to hear it, nor had he needed to; he knew already that he had been appointed her heir, and the Pope, Innocent XI, her executor. There were a few particular bequests: the three chaplaincies at St Peter’s, Bernini’s marble bust to the Pope, jewels to the Kings of France and Spain, and jewels, too, to the Habsburg Emperor, grandson of her father’s old enemy, and to Friedrich, the Elector of Brandenburg, son of ‘the Great Elector’ who might once have become her husband. To the young King of Sweden, the son of Karl Gustav, who had loved Christina so long and so well, she left nothing at all. But there were various sums for the servants, and linen for the ladies-in-waiting, and laboratory equipment for her alchemist, and for one little boy of her household, of whom she had been especially fond, a substantial pension of 200 scudi per annum.