Everything else that Christina had owned, or claimed, now passed to Azzolino’s estate. True to form, she had been far more generous than she could afford to be; there was in fact no money to pay for the chaplaincies, or the servants’ legacies, or the little boy’s pension, nor indeed to redeem the jewels, long pawned. The Cardinal had not been able to sort out the various claims and counterclaims, which now came to rest at the door of his own heir, Pompeo Azzolino, a young cousin, a minor noble, generally known as the Cardinal’s nephew, and whispered to be his son. ‘Who would ever have believ’d,’ wrote one disdainful commentator, ‘that a little Gentleman of Marca d’Ancona should become Heir to the Daughter of the Great Gustavus Adolphus the Terror of Germany’.19 The ‘Great Gustavus Adolphus’ would not have been flattered by the reflection, for the eventual heir had inherited mostly debts, including one of 70,000 scudi which Christina had borrowed from one of the papal library funds; it would have been enough to pay the rent on Azzolino’s palazzo for 150 years. Pompeo had no choice but to sell what he could to discharge the debts and meet the obligations of the will, ignoring the Swedish King’s demand for the return of the paintings and other valuables which Christina had taken with her from Stockholm. The Pope bought her fine collection of books and manuscripts ‘for a piece of Bread’ – in fact for 800 scudi, an absurdly small sum, given that the manuscripts alone numbered almost two thousand.20 A papal nephew bought her coins and medallions, ‘of which there was so fine Setts in all sorts of Metals’.21 The paintings and sculptures found their way to different great houses across the continent; the furniture and plate were similarly dispersed. Nothing was returned to Christina’s distant homeland, but the Swedes at least reclaimed the lands ceded on her abdication to their erstwhile Queen. At the end of it all, there was ‘no great matter’ left for Pompeo Azzolino, which might at least have pleased Christina. She had never liked him much.
Epilogue
Sybil had foreseen Azzolino’s death, as she had foreseen Christina’s, but when she announced that the Pope himself was soon to die, she was seized and thrown into the Castel Sant’Angelo. She proved to be right; the ‘severe and angry Pope’ breathed his last in the fierce dog days of a Roman August, but it did not help Sybil. A later Pope, taking pity on her, transferred her to a convent, where she ‘pin’d away for Grief’.
Christina’s other servants were left to shift as best they could. There was no money for them, so they did as they had always done; they took whatever strong arms or light fingers could take, and went on their way. The Queen’s nobler friends, missing her provocative soul, revived her old academy and made her its spiritual patron, and without her, they actually made something of it. Freed of her long insistence on the time-worn subjects of love, they began to talk of literary reform, and their meetings at the Riario became important cultural events in the new, analytical century.
Sweden’s greatness did not last. Christina’s life had coincided with her country’s time as a major continental power. In 1709, a terrible defeat at the Battle of Poltava drove the Swedes back into the northern periphery of Europe, and left the way clear for the rise of another great northern power – Peter the Great’s Russian Empire. As Gustav Adolf had feared, Russia had at last ‘learned her strength’, and his own land had paid the price of it. Its blaze of glory over, Sweden retired to fulfil a quieter destiny, its King, Karl XII, Christina’s own great-nephew, taking a final ironic refuge with a friendly Ottoman sultan.
In Stockholm, memories of the late Queen began to fade. Those who had known her had grown old and gone; half a century had passed since the drama of her abdication. One spring afternoon in 1697, fire broke out at the Tre Kronor Castle, the home of Sweden’s kings where she had spent her childhood and her youth, where she had fallen in love, and begun her library, and taken her first awkward steps into political intrigue. The flames swept through the buildings, destroying the library, the great hall, the private apartments. What Christina had not smuggled away had now been taken more surely, leaving only ashes, and regrets. Karl Gustav’s own son lay dead in the chapel. Christina’s world was passing away.
She had lived, inescapably, beneath the vast shadow of her great father, the most romantic figure in Swedish history, and in a sense, she had spent her life doing battle with him. But a stronger legacy had driven her, the legacy of her passionate, chaotic mother, stronger within herself than she could ever dare to recognize. She could not look unblinking upon her own nature, for in doing so she would have destroyed her very sense of self.
It is a sad tale, in a way, a tale of promise unfulfilled, and of strength thwarted by weakness. Yet, endearing and exasperating, so much less than she might have been, Christina at the end somehow came into her own, sitting in the sun in her garden, eating her boiled chestnuts, clouting a lazy servant now and then, a ‘plump, shabby, indomitable figure dressed in rusty black’.
‘I don’t know that I ever really tried to overcome my faults,’ she wrote, towards the end of her life. They were the faults of a Queen, and the faults of an unloved child, the faults of a fearful woman, and those of a gifted mind with yet no kernel of genius, and of a desperate, hopeless seeking to be great. Christina was a child of her heroic time, a misshapen pearl of the Baroque, lustrous and precious despite its imperfections. From grand and lovely portraits, her blue eyes gaze out across the centuries, still challenging, still hoping, while the fireworks of her story, at first sight dazzling, at times even lurid, settle at last to a more human glow.
Notes
Birth of a Prince
1 Take her eyes off Your Majesty: Johan Hand, quoted in Berner (1982), Gustav Adolf: Der Löwe aus Mitternacht, p. 184.
2 Been the same: Maria Eleonora’s maternal grandfather was the Herzog (Duke) of Prussia, and her great-uncle the Herzog of Cleves. Gustav Adolf was the nephew of Erik XIV of Sweden and his sister Maria Elisabeth. All four were held to be insane.
3 French was not the least: As well as his native Swedish, Gustav Adolf spoke and wrote German fluently from childhood, and later spoke French, Italian, and Dutch. He also understood Spanish and English, and had some knowledge of Russian and Polish. In keeping with the times, he knew Latin and Greek as well.
4 In his diary: Quoted in Berner (1982), Gustav Adolf: Der Löwe aus Mitternacht, p. 179.
5 Later attempt to forge: The quotation is from Roberts (1973), Gustavus Adolphus and the Rise of Sweden, pp. 52–3.
6 His people to rebel: The union was the 1397 Union of Kalmar. Margareta was Queen of Denmark by inheritance, of Norway by marriage, and of Sweden by election. The Union was shattered in 1523, when Gustav Eriksson Vasa, Christina’s great-grandfather, led the Swedes to revolt against Danish dominance within it.
7 Not so very long before: In 1567, at Kalmar Castle, Sweden’s King Erik XIV, Gustav Adolf’s machiavellian and pathologically suspicious uncle, had murdered one of Sweden’s nobles with his own hands. Erik was deposed the following year, and died in 1577, probably poisoned on the orders of his brother, King Johan III, with the agreement of the Senate.
8 Livonia: Part of present-day Latvia.
9 Quickly back to health: Letter from Gustav Adolf to Johann Kasimir, 29 August 1621, quoted in Berner (1982), Gustav Adolf: Der Löwe aus Mitternacht, p. 201.
10 Pleased God to do this: Letter from Gustav Adolf to Johann Kasimir, 21 May 1625, paraphrased from Stolpe (1966), Christina of Sweden, p. 34.
11 Sickness and panic fall away: Letter from Maria Eleonora to Gustav Adolf’s sister, the Princess Katarina, quoted in Berner (1982), Gustav Adolf: Der Löwe aus Mitternacht, p. 201.
12 Sign of depression: Maria Eleonora appears to have suffered from temporary or periodic phonemic paraphasias in her speech. An acquired aphasia of this kind would be consistent with a stroke, presumably suffered during childbirth, or possibly an aneurism or a benign brain tumour – in 1629, she had a serious illness of the eyes, which may also have been a stroke symptom. A condition of this kind could have improved with time; Charle
s Ogier, for instance, who spoke with Maria Eleonora in French, makes no mention of a language difficulty during his visit to Sweden in the later 1630s. I am most grateful to Anne Buckley for her analysis of the Queen’s abnormal use of language, which, at a distance of centuries, must of course remain conjectural.
13 In the King’s gift: Margareta is more commonly known by her previous married name of Slots (possibly a contraction of Slotsdotter). She was the daughter of a Dutch Kaufherr named Abraham Cabiljau, and was in fact married three times. Her first husband was an officer of engineers named Andries Sersanders, to whom she was married during her affair with Gustav Adolf. Her second marriage was to a papermaker named Arendt Slots, and her third to a fireworks maker, Jakob Trello. All three of Margareta’s husbands were Dutchmen. She is not known to have had any other children. The year of her birth is unknown, but she died in 1669, and was buried in the little church of Vada, north of Stockholm, next to her third husband. Gustav Gustavsson, later the Count of Vasaborg, was to have five children of his own.
14 The eighth of December: The day of Christina’s birth in 1626 according to the Julian calendar, then still in use in Sweden as elsewhere in Protestant Europe. By the Gregorian calendar, already in use throughout Catholic Europe and later to be adopted in Protestant lands, it was already the eighteenth of December 1626.
15 Dared not tell him: Quoted in Raymond (1994), Christine de Suède: Apologies, p. 92.
16 She has deceived us all: Quoted in ibid., p. 92.
17 Kristina Augusta: The Latinate spelling of her first name came into use only after her conversion to Catholicism.
18 For his little daughter: Gustav Adolf’s mother was Christine von Holstein Gottorf (or Gottorp), 1573–1625. She had married Karl IX in 1592, following the death of his first wife, Marie Christine von der Pfalz, in 1589. Gustav Adolf’s grandmother Christine was the daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse, Philipp der Grossmütig (the Magnanimous). Christina was also the name of a daughter of the noble family of Flemingh, in Finland, with whom, before his marriage, the young Gustav Adolf had been in love. Two love poems survive which he appears to have dedicated to her. One of these, written in German, is an acrostic, using the first letter of each line to spell out her name. Very little is known about the Finnish Christina, but although the needs of the Swedish state required him to take a different bride, Gustav Adolf’s feeling for her may have survived in the name he gave to his daughters. It may be significant that both infants were named Christina, rather than Christine, as was their grandmother’s name, but this is more likely to have been simply the use of the usual Swedish version.
19 Such malformations: The most common is Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), which accounts for about 60 per cent of all cases of ambiguous genitalia in the newborn. CAH is the result of a biochemical defect which prevents certain steroids from being produced in sufficient quantities. As the body pushes the adrenal gland harder to increase the steroid level, more and more testosterone is made, encouraging masculinizing traits in females. A female with CAH is technically a pseudohermaphrodite (organically female but in appearance quite masculine). However, if Christina did suffer from CAH, hers would necessarily have been a mild case, since she would otherwise almost certainly have died in infancy through salt wasting or insufficient cortisol. Other intersex conditions can also cause masculinizing traits in female sufferers, particularly after puberty. I am most grateful to Melissa Cull of the UK Adrenal Hyperplasia Network for her help with information on intersex disorders.
20 Longed-for male child: The conjecture of some kind of intersexuality is not discounted by the results of the autopsy following Christina’s death in 1689 (which makes no mention of the external genitals), nor by the examinations of Christina’s remains which were carried out at the opening of her grave in 1965 (see Hjortsjö (1966), The Opening of Queen Christina’s Sarcophagus in Rome). The soft tissues had, of course, disintegrated, and the undoubtedly female skeleton is consistent with a diagnosis of intersexuality.
Death of a King
1Perfect tranquillity: The Diary of John Evelyn (1908), p. 3 (for the year 1624).
2 A window of the Hradčany Castle: The precedent for political change by defenestration had been set in Prague 200 years before, on 30 July 1419, when Hussites (followers of the executed religious reformer, Jan Hus) threw the German mayor out of the town hall window, so sparking the ‘Hussite War’ against German papal armies. The later defenestration of 23 May 1618 was a deliberate imitation of the first. The classic history of the Thirty Years War in English, first published in 1938, is C. V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War. For a Czech-oriented history of the war, see Polišenský (1971), The Thirty Years War.
3 The Catholic Austrian House of Habsburg: Habsburgs had held the throne of the Holy Roman Empire continuously since 1438, and also before this, though not successively. They were to continue to hold the throne until 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by a new emperor, Napoleon I of France. The Habsburg Archdukes, still holding most of their eastern territories, thenceforth styled themselves Emperors of Austria until 1867, the first year of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire continued until the end of the First World War.
4 Union of German Protestant princes: The Protestant Union, also known as the Evangelical League, had been formed in 1608. A Catholic League was formed shortly afterwards in opposition to this.
5 Resisted in good time: Gustav Adolf’s letter to Axel Oxenstierna of November 1627, quoted in Roberts (1973), Gustavus Adolphus and the Rise of Sweden, p. 68.
6 Agreed to a truce: The Truce of Altmark, 16 September 1629. With the corollary Treaty of Tiegenhoff (18 February 1630), Gustav Adolf made a separate peace with the Hanseatic city of Danzig (now Gdansk).
7 In her classic account of the Thirty Years War, C. V. Wedgwood discounts Tilly’s less flattering epithet of ‘butcher of Magdeburg’. See Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1992), pp. 286–91.
8 Fully supplied as well: The logistical systems which Wallenstein had developed for military supply were arguably not to be surpassed until the twentieth century. For a colourful summary of his character and early career, see ibid., pp. 170–3. For an example of his celebrated military supply system, see ibid., p. 316.
9 Tilly’s traditional forward-facing lines: For a brief discussion of Gustav Adolf’s innovations in military tactics, see Roberts (1967), Essays in Swedish History, Chapter 3. For a more detailed discussion of general military advances during the period, see Anderson (1988), War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime 1618–1789.
10 Their own remarkable King: The Battle of Breitenfeld took place on 8/18 September 1631. For an engaging account of the battle, see Wedgwood (1992), The Thirty Years War.
11 Title of Elector: See Wedgwood (1992), The Thirty Years War, p. 315. The precise terms of Wallenstein’s acceptance have in fact never been determined.
12 Your obedient daughter, Christina: Letter from Christina to Gustav Adolf, originally in German, quoted in Arckenholtz (1751–60), Mémoires concernant Christine, reine de Suède, Vol. 4, p. 190.
13 The desperate struggle began: The Battle of Lützen took place on 6/16 November 1632. See Wedgwood (1992), The Thirty Years War.
14 A tardy revenge: In 1600, in the infamous ‘Bloodbath of Linköping’, five prominent Swedes, including four members of Sweden’s noblest families, had been executed on the orders of Gustav Adolf’s father, King Karl IX, to ensure his own hold on power. The Danish King Kristian II had set the precedent in Swedish history by his own ‘Stockholm Bloodbath’ of 1520, in which no fewer than 82 Swedish nobles, rebelling against Danish rule, were beheaded in the market square.
15 Where his King had fallen: It now appears that this is not the precise place where Gustav Adolf died, but that it is within fifty yards or so of that place.
16 In Our miserable existence: Maria Eleonora’s letter quoted in Stolpe (1966), Christina of Sweden, p. 35.
17 To a temporary
rest: Nyköping Castle had been the scene of the ‘Banquet of Nyköping’, a particularly gruesome tale in Sweden’s history. In 1317, King Birger Ladulås invited his brothers, Erik and Valdemar, to a banquet in the castle, but on their arrival, the two were thrown into the castle dungeon, where they were left to starve to death.
18 Suffocated me in her arms: Quoted in Raymond (1994), Christine de Suède: Apologies, p. 130.
19 Sorrow and distress: 1634 Convocation of the Riksdag, quoted in Garstein (1992), Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia, p. 41, note 6.
The Little Queen
1 Proclaiming me King: Raymond (1994), Christine de Suède: Apologies, p. 101.
2 To succeed him: Since 1604, it had been accepted that female heirs, in the absence of male heirs, could inherit the Swedish throne, but in 1627, at the second meeting of the Swedish Riksdag, Gustav Adolf persuaded the parliamentarians to state expressly that, in default of male heirs, his daughter would succeed to the throne after him. Christina herself was to rescind this provision. It would not be until 1980 that female heirs could once again inherit the Swedish throne.
3 At such a dangerous time: Raymond (1994), Christine de Suède: Apologies, p. 110.
4 Pleased with myself about it: ibid., p. 111.
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