What or who inspires you?
The sea and wide-open spaces. People who work hard.
What’s your guilty reading pleasure or favourite trashy read?
Poetry, which never has anything to do with work. Bridget Jones (though I don’t think she’s trashy).
About the book
Queen Christina’s Myth
by Veronica Buckley
FIRST THOUGHTS OF Queen Christina today, at least outside Sweden, are generally thoughts of Greta Garbo, feisty and fabulous in the title role of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 film. A flirtatious cross-dresser in trousers and high boots, Garbo’s Christina is tough, amusing, clever, brave, and always, always gorgeous. Battling the odds, defying the rules, she is everything to all unconventional men, and to unconventional women, too. No wonder Garbo’s Christina became an instant icon for those who dared – and for those who didn’t dare – to be different.
Was it true? Was Queen Christina really the kind of woman that Garbo so unforgettably portrayed? Did she drink and joke and fight with men, and then sleep with them? Christina certainly liked men. She liked their company, their manners, the things they talked about – grand politics, soldiering, sex. Her attitude to sex in the abstract was broad enough for the roughest seventeenth-century soldier. She staged lewd plays and told ribald jokes, and was known to wink an eye at promiscuity and even rape within her own household. But when it came to herself, personally, her attitude was very different. She regarded the act of sex as an act of submission of woman to man, a power contest and nothing more, with the woman always the loser. There is some truth in Garbo’s seductive, even predatory Queen. ‘I am passionate by nature,’ Christina said. But she couldn’t imagine surrender without submission. ‘I could never bear to be used by a man,’ she wrote, ‘the way a peasant uses his fields.’ She did fall in love, first with one of her courtiers and then, more scandalously, with a Roman Catholic Cardinal. The gossipmongers said she had several children by both men, but it doesn’t seem likely; the children never came to light.
Did she sleep with women, then? There was always a great deal of talk about Christina’s supposed lesbianism. She is said to have seduced young girls at court, diplomats’ wives, opera singers and even nuns. She often shared her bed with other young women, no unusual matter in the seventeenth century, but Christina enjoyed the provocative possibilities of the situation. She liked to write suggestive letters, beyond the limits of précieuse effusiveness, to the pretty women she met, and the rooms in her Roman palazzo had paintings and sculptures of women, all determinedly naked despite repeated protestations from the Pope. She was widely believed to be lesbian or bisexual, or possibly, in mitigating afterthought, a hermaphrodite. Her declared reluctance to marry added weight to the charge, and there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to be brought to bear: her mannish way of walking, her love of hunting, her gruff voice, her flat shoes – to her contemporaries, it all betokened clear sexual aberration. Three hundred years later her reputed bisexuality (and Garbo’s, too) ensured an anxious time for the censors of Mamoulian’s film script. But nothing crept in. Hollywood in the 1930s simply wasn’t ready for it.
Was the real Christina, like Garbo’s Queen, strikingly proud and confident?
Garbo’s Christina is supremely sure of herself. She never falters. She maintains an absolute self-confidence until the end of the film, standing on the deck of her ship, staring into the far distance, ‘thinking’, as Mamoulian insisted,’of nothing’. But the 1933 film, ending as it does with the Queen’s voyage away from Sweden, evades the tragedy inherent in her going. Life in Sweden meant a crown, a court, wealth, power, respect. The real Christina mistook the accidents of her birth for personal qualities that she could retain, no matter what she did, to the end of her life. Until this point, standing on the ship’s deck, she was supremely confident, too. Just 27 years of age (Garbo was also 27), she had no notion – and because of that, no fear – of the troubles and compromises that a life without power or money would bring.
Christina wanted to determine things for herself, but she was born to a life in which the smallest details were already determined for her, as a matter of state policy. Christina put up a stiff resistance. She had her own way of doing things, and on the whole she held to it. Her absolute determination to run things for herself, to reject the straightjacket role of a dynasty-bearing princess, has turned her, in our day, into something of a feminist icon. Her rejection of the role prepared for her was genuine: appalled by the idea of conceding authority to a husband, and especially by the prospect of childbearing, she refused outright to marry. But it’s too much to claim that Christina was a feminist, or that she held any kind of proto-feminist ideas. If anything, she was an anti-feminist. She despised most women, and was bitterly resentful of being a woman herself – ‘my greatest defect’, she called it – and all the many failures of her life she laid to its account. She was not especially farsighted in social or political terms. She was simply different by nature from most of her contemporaries, and she was headstrong, and the result of both was her loudly unconventional life.
Christina was clever and perceptive, but she rarely dared to think in any way critically about herself. That would have been too expensive psychologically. She would have had to examine the myth she had created of herself, for herself. The myth sustained her, but at the same time it undermined her ability to accomplish anything real. Christina was the fortunate, and unfortunate, daughter of one of the century’s most dazzling figures, a legend even while he lived, King Gustav Adolf the Great. To match him, to surpass him, was her driving need. It was impossible, and she took refuge in an extravagant myth of her own personal greatness. It was the most destructive element of all in her impulsively destructive life.
What remains of Queen Christina? Where do our myths of her, and her contemporaries’ myths, and her myth of herself coincide and, perhaps, merge into truth? In her exuberance, in her difference, never quite fitting in, in her star quality, keeping everyone interested, keeping us still interested, after hundreds of years. In her trousers and her high boots – she really did wear them – and in her irrepressible hope, her way of looking forward, into the far distance. Perhaps it’s this above all that Mamoulian managed to capture, and I can’t help thinking that Christina would have been delighted to see herself resurrected in the glorious person of Greta Garbo.
Read on
If You Loved This, You Might Like…
Veronica Buckley recommends further reading…
The Emerging City: Paris in the Age of LouisXIV
Leon Bernard
Rome in the Age of Bernini
Torgil Magnuson
The Thirty Years War
C.V. Wedgwood
A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654
Bulstrode Whitelocke
Shelley: The Pursuit
Richard Holmes
Virginia Woolf
Hermione Lee
Jane Austen: A Life
Claire Tomalin
Stalingrad
Antony Beevor
The Dark Valley
Piers Brandon
A People’s Tragedy
Orlando Figes
…and places to visit
Gripsholm Castle, on Lake Mälaren, near Stockholm (where Maria Eleonora was imprisoned)
Livrustkammaren (Royal Armoury), Slottsbacken 3, 111 30 Stockholm
Storkyrkan (Cathedral), Stockholm (where Christina was crowned), one of the oldest buildings in the city where many Swedish kings were married.
Tre Kronor Museum, Kungliga Slottet, 111 30 Stockholm (under the Royal Palace) www.stockholmtown.com/templates/Museum ____5889.aspx
Uppsala Castle, Uppland, Sweden (where Christina abdicated) www.uppsalaslott.com/eng
Vasa Museum, Stockholm (Gustav Adolf’s great warship salvaged and restored) You can visit it online at www.vasamuseet.se but, to get a sense of the true enormity of a seventeenth-century warship, see it up cl
ose at Galärvarvsvägen 14 on the island of Djurgården.
Palazzo Corsini, Rome (Christina’s home from 1659 to 1689) Visiting information can be found at www.romecentral.com, but there are few pictures available online. Palazzo Farnese, Rome (Christina’s first home in Rome, now the French Embassy; pre-booked access only)
St Peter’s Basilica, Rome (for Christina’s memorial, and her tomb in the crypt) See www.aviewoncities.com/rome/ sanpietro.htm or www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/ St_Peters_of_Rome.html for more information and pictures
FIND OUT MORE
Visit www.royalcourt.se for more information on the Swedish monarchy and the royal palaces. The website has a good map of the palaces’ locations, photographs and visiting information as well as some detail about royal duties and events and the history of the monarchy.
Visit www. stockholmtown.com for a comprehensive guide to the city and practical tourist information.
If you go to Uppsala to visit the Castle don’t miss the University Museum which contains Celsius’ thermometer and one of the oldest and best-preserved anatomy theatres dating from the seventeenth century. www.gustavianum.uu.se/ english
Watch Queen Christina (1933), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Garbo pulled rank, in true Christina style, to have Laurence Olivier thrown out of the role of Don Antonio Pimentel, replacing him with Gilbert, a silent movie idol and her real-life lover.
Author’s Notes
During Queen Christina’s lifetime, the Julian calendar was still in use in Sweden, as in other Protestant lands. By the modern Gregorian calendar, already in use in Catholic countries and gradually adopted throughout Europe, the date was advanced by ten days. Hence, for example, the Battle of Lützen, in which Gustav Adolf the Great was killed, was recorded in Sweden as 6 November 1632, but elsewhere in Europe as 16 November 1632. The locally recorded dates have been used throughout the text.
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s own.
Acknowledgements
I first encountered Queen Christina 25 years ago, when I was a young student preparing an essay on the moral philosophy of Descartes. My tutor, the late Dr Alec Baird, introduced me to the correspondence between the two – I believe it took me years to return the books – and since then I have had a hundred reasons to maintain my interest in the Queen and the philosopher, and a hundred more to be grateful to Alec Baird and to his wonderful wife, Katherine – I owe them both many thanks for many kindnesses.
There are other debts which I would like to acknowledge: first, to my agent, Victoria Hobbs, to my editor at Fourth Estate, Nick Davies, and to my copy editor, Carol Anderson. I must also thank the staff of the following libraries and archives: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, the manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (La Nordique) in Paris, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, and Svenska Porträttarkivet, with particular thanks to Elisabeth Höier, Eva Karlsson, Emilia Ström, Sussi Wesstrom, and Kerstin Wiking; I am most grateful to them all for their help with so many of the illustrations.
Thanks are also due to the following people for their kind assistance along the way: Catherine Blyth, my editor during the early stages of the book; Dr Jan Gerard Boecker, Director of the Internationale Komponistinnen Bibliothek Unna, for kindly sending me information about women and music in seventeenth-century Rome; Michel Brisson and David Carey, for very kindly permitting me the use of their house in Montpellier during my stay in that lovely city; my dear sister, Anne Buckley, for her analysis of Queen Maria Eleonora’s use of language; Jean-David Cahn, for drawing my attention to a late 1680s Roman bust of Queen Christina; Dr Görel Cavalli-Björkman and Louise Hadorph-Holmberg of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; Mercedes Ceron and Paul Gardner of the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings; Thierry Demarquest, for kindly providing a photograph of Queen Christina’s adult handwriting; Dr Mary Frandsen of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, for information concerning Queen Christina’s music patronage, and for bringing to my attention a letter in the Sächsische Hauptstaatsarchiv concerning Queen Christina in the Spanish Netherlands; Kristina Hagberg and Britt-Marie Toussaint of the Centre Culturel Suédois in Paris; Lars Holmblad of Stockholm’s Historika Museet; Anniina Jokinen, for drawing my attention to Marvell’s poems of praise to Queen Christina; Malin Lindquist of the Gotlands Fornsal; Steve Lum, for precious encouragement along the road; Klas Lundkvist of Stockholm’s Stadsmuseet; Anastasia Mikliaeva of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Dr Françoise Monnoyeur of the University of Linköping and the Kungliga Tekniska Högskola in Stockholm; Dr Stephen Paterson for kindly reading parts of the manuscript; Signore Giovanni Pratesi, for his information pertaining to the Roman bust of Queen Christina sculpted in the late 1680s; Antoinette Ramsay of Stockholm’s Kungliga Biblioteket; Mariella Romagnoli of the Biblioteca Comunale Planettiana in Jesi, for kindly providing me with the catalogues of the Archivio Azzolino; Kristiina Sepänmaa of the Swedish Institute; Dr Ulrich Sieg of Marburg University; Christina Sievert for information about the musicians of seventeenth-century Rome; Dr Marja Smolenaars of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek at The Hague; Elizabeth Westin Berg of the Skoklosters Castle Library. My particular thanks are due to Karsten Thurfjell for his warm Scandinavian hospitality during my visit to the beautiful city of Stockholm.
I owe a special debt to my husband, Philipp Blom, without whom, I am sure, the manuscript would never have been finished – nor indeed started.
Finally, I would like to thank my dear friend and unwitting benefactor, Gerard Richardson, the ‘ideal reader’ whom I kept in mind as I made my way through the book. I hope he will enjoy it.
Paris, August 2003
About the Author
Veronica Buckley was born in New Zealand. She has worked in diverse fields from music to the oil industry, and now lives in Paris with her husband, writer Philipp Blom. This is her first book.
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Praise
From the reviews of Christina, Queen of Sweden:
‘A stunning debut and an absorbing page-turner. Veronica Buckley writes with immense style, vitality and great humanity. As compelling as the most riveting of novels’
ALISON WEIR
‘Her book is much less a debut than the highly polished work of a writer who has been thinking about and loving her subject for years, and her enjoyment in the writing of Queen Christina’s life is wonderfully translated into our pleasure in reading it’
STELLA TILLYARD, Sunday Times
‘Veronica Buckley has a flair for description and relates this extraordinary life with sympathy and engaging panache’
JOHN ADAMSON, Sunday Telegraph
‘This is a splendidly robust and colourful account of a remarkable woman and the turbulent age in which she lived. Astonishingly, this is Veronica Buckley’s first book. May she write many more’
PHILIP ZIEGLER, Daily Telegraph
‘A wonderfully rich and poignant book’
FRANCES WILSON, Guardian
‘A remarkable debut. Filled with tragedy, farce and absurdity as popes, regents, mavericks, losers, philosophers and soldiers all involve themselves in Christina’s wayward and eccentric progress’
Literary Review
‘A wonderful biography. Christina lived the most extraordinary life in the most extraordinary times and this engaging book does her full justice’
Observer
Copyright
Harper Perennial
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This edition published by Harper Perennial
2005
FIRST EDITION
First published by Fourth Estate 2004
Copyright © Veronica Buckley 2004
PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005, except
‘Queen Christina’s Myth’ by Veronica Buckley © Veronica Buckley 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Veronica Buckley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Page 53