Читать книгу Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric - Veronica Buckley - Страница 11

It was Victory which announced my name on the fateful field of battle – Victory, a herald at arms proclaiming me King.¹

So, at least, Christina was to write, many years later, at a time when she needed to call upon her every credential of greatness. She was, she continues, ‘the link, weak as it was, which united so many good men, so many diverse and opposing interests, all dedicated to sustaining the rights of the girl who began to reign at that fatal moment’. All the generals, she says, all the men of the army, and ‘the great Chancellor’, too, submitted to the name of Christina.

In rhetorical terms, there is some truth in this tale, but in reality the crown did not pass to the little girl quite so smoothly. Gustav Adolf’s generals stood firm, and announced their loyalty to his fragile Vasa dynasty from their battlefields in Germany, giving the Chancellor, who now assumed power in the King’s stead, the means to continue the war. But in fact there was no guarantee that Christina would inherit her father’s throne at all. Only five years before, when she was just a year old and no male heirs seemed likely, Gustav Adolf had had to confirm her right, as a female, to succeed him.² His own royal line was not so ancient that he could be sure of its continuance against all odds; his cousin Sigismund, the Catholic King of Poland, had his own, arguably greater claim to the Swedish throne. Moreover, heredity was not enough; for many centuries the Swedish monarchy had been elective, and the principle, established by Christina’s great-grandfather, applied to males only. It was by no means certain that the Estates would accept a woman – indeed, a little girl – as their ‘King’, as the Swedes always formally referred to their sovereign. There were even some who might have preferred to oust the monarchy entirely and install a republic in its place.

In the Senate, or so Christina was later to write, it was a different story. All the senators declared themselves in her favour. They all felt that her right to the throne was ‘incontestable’. They were ‘only too happy’ to have this child, who was ‘their only strength and Sweden’s only hope of salvation at such a dangerous time’.³ Histrionic as the words may seem, they were probably true – indeed, the ‘strength and salvation’ phrase was the Swedes’ very definition of their monarchy. And it was certainly a dangerous time, with Swedish armies exposed in Germany and elsewhere, and the constant threat of the Catholic Poles taking power at home. It was no doubt this double peril which persuaded the senators’ now to support Christina’s succession, for they had much to gain by opposing it. For the noble families from which every senator was drawn, the three generations of the Vasa dynasty had meant, above all, a steady waning of power. Their own grandfathers had only grudgingly accepted the first Vasa King, Gustav I Eriksson. Though he had driven out the Danes by his energy and bravery, they had regarded him as an upstart with no very ancient lineage. Resentment had rankled into the next generation; Gustav’s son Karl IX had been determinedly opposed by the noble families. He had sought support instead from the common people, earning the nobles’ disdainful epithet of ‘the rabble King’. But the people’s support had allowed Karl to govern on his own terms. Power had drained from the noble families and collected around the crown. In 1600, the King had finally secured his position in the infamous ‘Bloodbath of Linköping’, where his five leading opponents, including four members of Sweden’s highest nobility, were beheaded in the town’s market square. It had required the extraordinary gifts and the no less extraordinary personality of Karl’s son, Gustav Adolf, to quiet the outrage of the noble families and persuade them to support their malefactor’s heir. But now the golden-haired King was gone, leaving no son to succeed him. His sole heir was female; the principle of heredity could at last be abandoned, and the nobles could reclaim their ancient right of electing their own grateful and manageable sovereign.

It says much for the senators’ patriotic spirit, or perhaps for their fear of Poles and popery, that they decided to forgo this right and give their support to a continuing Vasa dynasty. But, although the Senate stood unanimously behind the little ‘King’, she was not so quickly accepted by the men of the Riksdag, a socially more diverse group with differing views of the perils facing their homeland. The Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, comprised four Estates: the clergy, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants. It was among these last, as Gustav Adolf had feared, that opposition to a female ruler now proved strongest. The story is told that, in March 1633, when the Riksdag was assembled to affirm Christina’s succession to the throne, the marshal was interrupted in the middle of his address by a member of the peasants’ Estate, a man bearing the almost symbolically Swedish name of Lars Larsson. The peasants, it seemed, were not convinced by the senators’ arguments. ‘Who is this girl?’ Larsson demanded. ‘We don’t know her. We’ve never even seen her.’ Larsson was seconded by a growing number of the men, and the child was sent for. Happily for her, and for the senators, Christina’s resemblance to her father was clear. Larsson recognized at once the great King’s forehead, his blue eyes, and, starting out from the solemn little face, his long, distinctive nose. The succession was assured. Christina was unanimously acclaimed Elected Queen and Hereditary Princess of Sweden – ‘elected’ as a warning to the Polish Vasas that their hereditary rights would not be enough to claim a Swedish throne.

The little blonde-headed girl, just six years old, now bore the titles of Queen of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland, Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, the last owing to the Peace of Stolbova concluded with the Russians a few years before. If Christina’s own story is to be believed, she bore them all, even at this early age, with appropriate aplomb. She did not really understand what was happening, she writes, but nonetheless she was delighted to see all the great men of the land – among them the Count Palatine, Johann Kasimir – on their knees at her feet, kissing her hand. Her delight is understandable, for Johann Kasimir was her uncle, and she had already spent a good deal of time in his castle at Stegeborg, in his care, no doubt kindly, but also under his no doubt authoritative eye. Here was a reversal indeed.

Christina has left a description, addressed to God, of the first convening of the Riksdag in 1633, following her acclamation. Before all the men of the four Estates, she ascended the throne of her great father:

The people were amazed by my grand manner, playing the role of a Queen already. I was only little, but on the throne I had such an air, such a grand appearance, that it inspired respect and fear in everyone…You had planted on my forehead this mark of greatness…Everyone said, ‘How can it be that a child inspires such feelings in us after we have seen Gustav Adolf on the throne?’ They noticed that You had made me so grave and so serious that I wasn’t at all impatient, as is the usual way with children. I never went to sleep during all the long ceremonies and all the speeches I had to sit through. Other children have been seen going to sleep or crying on occasions like this, but I received all the different signs of homage like a grown-up person, who knows they are his due…I remember very well being told all this, and being very pleased with myself about it.⁴

Writing in her later years, Christina admitted that ‘it doesn’t take much to admire a child, and even less a child of the great Gustav, and perhaps flattery has exaggerated all this’. But in fact ‘all this’ reflects an idea that was to remain absolutely consistent throughout her life, the idea that sovereignty was something which she carried within herself. For Christina, kingship was a personal attribute which had nothing to do with the rights and regalia of monarchy. Her right to rule, she believed, was innate; she could not be divested of it. God Himself had planted ‘this mark of greatness’ on her forehead, and even in her childhood, it had inspired ‘respect and fear’ in all who saw it.

A large delegation of diplomats from Muscovy supposedly observed this inborn sovereignty at about the same time, and, we are told, it left them quaking in their fur-lined boots. The Russians had arrived to offer their condolences on the King’s death and to extend a formal greeting to the new monarch; they had also to ensure that the peace which Gustav Adolf had made with them at Stolbova, after eight years of fighting, would now be ratified.⁵ According to Christina’s ‘little story’, the regents were anxious that their six-year-old Queen would not be able to endure the rigours of the formal reception with the necessary gravitas:

I was such a child that they thought the Russians would frighten me with their strange clothes and their wild manners. They told me not to be frightened, and I was quite stung by this, in fact quite annoyed. Why should I be frightened, I said. Oh, they said, the Russians were dressed very differently from us. They had great big beards, and they were terrible-looking, and there were lots of them. As it happened, two of the regents themselves had big beards, and I laughed and said to them, Why should I be frightened by their beards? Haven’t you got big beards, too? ‘I’m not afraid of you, so why should I be afraid of them? Just give me the proper instructions, and leave it all to me.⁶

And when the Russians finally approached the little Queen, seated on her throne, looking ‘so assured and so majestic’, they felt ‘what all men feel when they approach something that is greater than they are’.

Closer to the truth, no doubt, is Christina’s subsequent remark that all her people were ‘overjoyed’ with her behaviour, admiring her delightedly ‘as one admires the little games of a beloved child’. Perhaps, despite her later, inverted interpretation of the event, she was herself awed into good behaviour by the strange-looking visitors and the solemnity of the occasion. Or perhaps she was induced to behave herself by the ‘magnificent presents’ which the Russians had brought for her, ‘according to their custom’. They were rewarded in any case with the ratification they sought, and were ‘sent off with the usual tokens’.

The ratification itself had been agreed by Christina’s regents, the ‘five great old men’ who had accepted the charge of government until their little Queen should reach her eighteenth birthday. Though it had been a mighty blow, Gustav Adolf’s death entailed no difficult transition for those who governed the country. During the King’s frequent absences on campaign, the regular business of government had been left in the hands of ten nominated men of the Senate, and now, despite their loss, they adapted easily to the new situation. The King himself had chosen five of them to form a regency in the event of his death, five noblemen who were also to hold the five great offices of state: Grand Chancellor, Grand Treasurer, Grand Marshal, Grand Admiral, and High Steward. The government was now dominated by what amounted to Sweden’s second royal family, the Oxenstiernas. The premier office of Grand Chancellor was held by Baron Axel Oxenstierna, the late King’s close friend and undoubtedly one of the ablest administrators of the age. The Grand Treasurer was the Chancellor’s cousin, Baron Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstierna, and the High Steward his younger brother, Baron Gabriel Gustavsson Oxenstierna.⁷ The office of Grand Marshal was held by one of Sweden’s finest generals, Count Jakob De la Gardie; to him Gustav Adolf had lost his former love, Ebba Brahe; their son Magnus was to prove a contentious figure during Christina’s own reign. The Grand Admiral was Christina’s uncle, Baron Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, illegitimate half-brother of the late King. On his broad soldier’s shoulders, and on those of his four fellow senators, the burden of government now lay.

Christina herself has left us a picture of her regents. Of Axel Oxenstierna, primus inter pares, she writes with respect and affection, indeed almost with awe: he was, she says, a man ‘of great capacity, who knew the strengths and weaknesses of every state in Europe, a wise and prudent man, immensely capable, and greathearted’.⁸ Tireless in the affairs of state, he nevertheless always found time to read, so continuing the studious habits of his youth. She notes that he was ‘as sober as a man can be, in a country and at a time when that virtue was unknown’, and adds that the Grand Chancellor was a great sleeper, by his own admission having spent the first sleepless night in his life after the death of his beloved friend and King. Christina describes him as an ambitious but loyal man, and incorruptible, if a little too ‘slow and phlegmatic’ for her taste, but she loved him, she says, ‘like a second father’.

The Chancellor’s cousin, Gabriel Bengtsson, Sweden’s Grand Treasurer, Christina regarded as ‘upstanding’, and ‘capable enough’ of his high office. Of the younger Oxenstierna brother, Gabriel Gustavsson, now High Steward, she writes that he was well liked and well spoken, but in the natural way of the Swedes, without the burden of much erudition, since he had ‘only a smattering of Latin’. But he was, she adds consolatorily, ‘a very good man’. The Grand Marshal, Jakob De la Gardie, is described as able and personally courageous; this pre-eminent soldier had distinguished himself in the Swedish campaigns against Poland and Russia. Christina notes that his personality was direct, even brusque, but that he liked to chat. He had been a favourite with her father, she says, and was always competing with Axel Oxenstierna for the King’s favour. In Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, the Grand Admiral, ‘bastard brother of the late King and my uncle’, Christina recognized ‘a good, brave, old-fashioned man, a good Swede, bright enough’, but worn down by the twelve years he had spent in irons in a Polish prison, refusing to abjure his Lutheran faith for the despised Catholicism of his captors.⁹ He was ‘absolutely devoted to the house of Vasa,’ she writes, ‘and he loved me like his own child’.

For the next twelve years, the ‘five great old men’ were to rule in their little Queen’s name, though in fact Christina may not have been intended to rule at all, or at least not to rule alone. The steps which her father had taken to ensure her succession to the throne had been, as it were, an emergency precaution, anxiously put in place as he himself prepared to go back to the war from which he felt he would not return. The pious King, almost fearful of his extravagant successes in the sight of ‘a jealous God’, had had premonitions of his own death. The succession must be assured if civil war, or worse, were not to overtake his homeland. A long period of regency was certain, but in time the girl would marry; her husband would rule alongside her, or even in her place. Besides, Sweden’s name was now great in Europe; Gustav Adolf himself had made it so. A king’s daughter was an opportunity incarnate to forge new alliances, and shift the balance of power.

Negotiations for the little girl’s betrothal had consequently been in place for some time. The chosen prince was her own first cousin, Friedrich Wilhelm, her senior by seven years, the eldest son of the Elector of Brandenburg, and now, in the summer of 1633, thirteen years of age.¹⁰ The boy was Protestant, and seemed promising, and, crucially, he stood to inherit the duchy of Pomerania, whose long coasts were strategically important for both trade and warfare. Pomerania was now, insecurely, in Swedish hands – Gustav Adolf had concluded a treaty with its Archduke Boguslav XIV – but Boguslav’s heir was the Elector Georg Wilhelm, and in time the vital Pomeranian coasts would pass to his son, Friedrich Wilhelm. A marriage between Friedrich Wilhelm and Christina would thus ensure Sweden’s continuing access to them. It would make Brandenburg a safe neighbour and, moreover, would serve as a mighty cornerstone for the new bloc of Protestant powers once envisaged by Gustav Adolf, and now promoted by Christina’s regents. Above all, the marriage would give Sweden at last the almost mythical dominium maris baltici, the mastery of the Baltic Sea which had lain at the heart of Swedish policy for generations.

The King had promoted the match with some energy, travelling to Berlin himself, when Christina was only four years old, to suggest the project personally to the Elector.¹¹ Maria Eleonora, too, had been very much in favour of it. Her nephew, it was planned, would abjure his Calvinist religion and become a Lutheran; this had been agreed by the Elector’s own theologian. The boy would move to Sweden for the rest of his education and for his military training, learning the language and the ways of the Swedes while still in his impressionable years.

The Berlin meeting had not borne much fruit. The Elector distrusted Gustav Adolf; he had not wanted his sister to marry the King, and he did not want his son to marry the King’s daughter. Unwilling to state the matter so plainly, he prevaricated: the religious clause was objectionable, he said; he had hoped instead for some kind of union between Calvinist and Lutheran believers. Besides, his son was too young to be sent away from home, and Gustav Adolf might yet have a son of his own. Privately, Georg Wilhelm had sought the advice of other German princes, most of them still smarting from the Swedes’ riding roughshod over their own territories in the recent years of fighting. Their advice was consistent: the Elector should not pursue the plan; the pair were too young, and the political situation might be different by the time they had come of age. The Swedish climate was too harsh, and the Swedes themselves ‘not very nice people’, who would not welcome a German king. Besides, Sweden’s enmity with the Holy Roman Empire might drag Brandenburg into the same fearful morass. And the marriage would make Sweden much too powerful; the German princes, and many others even within Sweden itself, feared that Gustav Adolf would use it as a stepping-stone to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite encouragement from his own Chancellor and renewed attempts on the part of the Swedes, the Elector had decided to let the matter drift.

At the end of 1632, when the news arrived of Gustav Adolf’s death at Lützen, the Danish King Kristian IV had decided to try his luck in arranging a marriage for his own son, the Archduke Ulrich, now in his early twenties, to the little Queen of Sweden. It was a second attempt on Kristian’s part; the previous year, his hopeful embassy had been rejected by the Swedish King himself. Now, it seemed, a window had opened in the house of his old enemy, through which he might insert some Danish influence. A measure of dissension among the land’s new governors would serve his interests well; an official embassy of condolence would provide the perfect opportunity. Barely a week after the news had arrived, his envoy received instructions to seek a private audience in Wolgast with the late King’s grieving widow.

Kristian hoped, at the very least, to create a rift between Maria Eleonora and Sweden’s five regents, already in office for some time on account of the late King’s long absences on campaign. Early in the new year, Chancellor Oxenstierna, still in Brandenburg, received a letter from the Danish King, relaying his renewed hopes of the match. Oxenstierna, unpleasantly surprised, replied that Christina was too young for any marriage plans to be made for her as yet, and added that there were ‘many other considerations’ besides. But he took the precaution of writing at the same time to the regents in Stockholm to ensure that, if consulted, they would give the same reasons for declining Kristian’s offer. The Danes were near neighbours, after all, and their alliance was very recent. It would be unwise to offend them, for they might also prove to be uncertain friends.

Meanwhile, amid the increasing chaos of the castle at Wolgast, Maria Eleonora was able to master her grief sufficiently to begin negotiations of her own with the Danish envoy. Though Friedrich Wilhelm was her nephew, that did not ensure her constancy now to his cause. As fervently as she had wished for the match while her husband was alive to promote it, so now, in the first months of her widowhood, she turned determinedly against it. She decided, or was persuaded, that it would never do; Christina was the daughter of a king: only a king’s son could be a suitable husband for her.

An anxious Chancellor Oxenstierna wrote to Wolgast, urging the widowed Queen to caution. Denmark was Sweden’s oldest enemy, he reminded her. The two would never be brought together ‘without great bloodshed or the complete extinction of one or the other’. The Queen should speak to the envoy, or indeed anyone else, ‘only in the most general, non-committal terms’.¹² She replied, duplicitously, that she had ‘given no yes or no’ to anyone. But throughout the winter and the spring, she kept constant company with the Danes, and the rumour spread that the young Archduke Ulrich himself was soon to visit Wolgast.

In April, at home in Stockholm, the Senate met to discuss the matter. There could be no better prince than Friedrich Wilhelm, said the Count Per Brahe. Sweden could find no better supporter, and the marriage would make Sweden formidable among all nations. On the contrary, said the Chancellor’s cousin, Gabriel Oxenstierna, it would be better to choose a poor Swedish nobleman who would be more dependent on the Senate. Foreigners in the past had only tyrannized the country. He would rather have a local man. But, said Per Banér, if the foreigner were the husband of a Swedish princess, he would not tyrannize anyone. No foreign ruler had ever married a Swedish princess before. Quite true, said Jakob De la Gardie. A Swedish consort would only sow dissension, having his own support among the local people. However, said Gabriel Oxenstierna, a Swede would be more easily constrained by the law. On the other hand, a royal marriage was an excellent way for a nation to increase its power, and certainly a connection with Brandenburg would be politically advantageous, particularly in relation to Poland. It might be wise, then, said Per Brahe, to come to a decision soon. If the Brandenburgers thought they were being led around by the nose, they would turn their backs on Sweden and embrace the Poles instead.

A letter from the Chancellor, favouring Friedrich Wilhelm, was then read once again to the assembled noblemen. They were duly impressed. Per Banér noted that the boy’s father had been very friendly to Sweden, at least since the beginning of 1632, and Admiral Klaes Fleming wondered aloud whether it would be wise to overrule the wishes and plans of His Holy Royal Majesty, their late lamented King. Various senators now remembered that a Brandenburg marriage would keep Pomerania in Swedish hands jure perpetuo. That would be good security against the Dutch, and against the city of Jülich as well. They reassured one another that Friedrich Wilhelm would have a duty to appoint all his officials exclusively from Swedish families. All things considered, the Elector’s son was to be preferred to any other foreign prince.¹³

In short, the little Queen was to serve as a chattel in the crudest old terms. One senator did remark that she might not actually want to marry Friedrich Wilhelm when she grew up; at only six years of age, she could hardly be consulted now. This was agreed, and a message sent to Axel Oxenstierna in Berlin, conceding him full powers of negotiation, but suggesting that he proceed slowly. He took the senators at their word, and kept the discussions going for a further fifteen years.

In the meantime, the Danish assault continued. From the Brandenburg court, the Chancellor relayed his growing concern to the senators at home: the Danes, he wrote, were trying to bribe the ‘weak women’ in Wolgast with presents and flattery, ‘though I am sure that the Queen would never disgrace Sweden, in word or deed’. And as a gallant, if improbable, afterthought, he added, ‘I am equally sure that of her daughter’s marriage Her Majesty has spoken little or not at all’.¹⁴ He urged the senators nonetheless to send one or two of their number quickly to Wolgast to oversee matters there – the King’s body had still to be brought back to Sweden – and at the end of May 1633, his own cousin Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstierna, Sweden’s Grand Treasurer, presented his hawk-eyed compliments to Her disconcerted Majesty.

It was just as well, for Maria Eleonora was soon declaring, ‘in decided tones’, that the match would never be made between Friedrich Wilhelm and her only daughter: the prince was a Calvinist, and they were too closely related. The first objection could be quickly overruled; the Queen’s own Calvinist father, after all, had permitted his wife and children to be Lutheran.¹⁵ Besides, the Reformed Church in Brandenburg had already given its consent to the boy’s abjuration. The second objection might have appeared more pressing, but in fact no one seems to have been concerned about it at all.

From Maria Eleonora’s point of view, in fact, both objections were simply red herrings. The truth was that she liked the Danish Archduke, and she wanted her daughter to marry the son of a king. Moreover, it was a golden opportunity to undermine the powerful Oxenstierna family, for whom she bore little affection. When Gabriel Oxenstierna reminded her that the Brandenburg marriage had been the deeply held wish of her late husband, she replied that this was not so at all; his letters and envoys and personal visit to the Elector had been no more than a diplomatic tactic, unelucidated then by the King, as now by his widow. Besides, she said, it was her right and her duty as a mother to arrange the marriage. The Baron Gabriel pointed out that the little Queen’s betrothal was a political issue which affected the country in the most profound way. The Swedes should not raise Danish hopes, nor make any promises. It was a matter for the Senate and the Riksdag. It was they who had the greatest interest in the question, as well as the most important voice. Maria Eleonora insisted that her interest as a mother was much greater. Baron Gabriel replied that no arrangement would be ratified, in any case, until both children had come of age and could append their own consent to the match; the Queen Mother should make no promises to anyone, he warned, because the Riksdag would not support it. If, in spite of this, Her Majesty did take steps prejudicial to Sweden’s interests, he added, the ‘warm affection’ that her subjects felt for her would be likely to cool, and there might even be conflict over her daughter’s right to inherit the throne at all.

This altercation, with its thinly veiled threats, does not seem to have made the slightest difference to Maria Eleonora. She had little to lose, in any case. The ‘warm affection’ in which her subjects supposedly held her was a myth, as both she and the Baron well knew. She was in fact exceedingly unpopular among the Swedes. From her earliest days as a young bride, she had made perfectly clear her disdain for her new home, frozen solid in winter, culturally primitive whatever the weather. Surrounding herself with exclusively German attendants, she had aroused the envy and resentment of the Swedish courtiers. Her new kinsmen, defensive and offended, had quickly reciprocated her dislike.

Now, however, she was at least cautious enough to lie to them. She wrote to Axel Oxenstierna declaring that she would not commit Christina to marrying anyone before she had reached the age of twelve and could give her own consent. She did not want her daughter to reproach her, she said, with having forced her into a marriage during her minority, adding disingenuously that she would welcome the Chancellor’s guidance in the matter. Once back in Stockholm, she informed the Elector’s envoy that she favoured the Brandenburg marriage after all. There was no one, she said, to whom she would rather give her daughter than her nephew Friedrich Wilhelm, but the problem was that ‘some people’ were against it. The Chancellor, she claimed, had plans to marry Christina to his own son, Erik, but, in a neat arabesque on her objection to Friedrich Wilhelm himself, she declared that she would never allow her daughter to marry a man of lower social position than she was herself.

By the beginning of 1634, six months after her regal reception of the Russian ambassadors, the betrothal of the now seven-year-old Christina to her Brandenburg cousin was understood throughout Europe to be a fait accompli. Resigned shoulders shrugged in Copenhagen, and an anxious Emperor paced the floors of his palace in Vienna. Only in Stockholm and Berlin did doubt remain, for the two protagonists had in fact reached no agreement at all.

Christina herself was never to mention her father’s plan for the Brandenburg marriage, for it clearly indicated that he had seen no particular ‘mark of greatness’ planted on her childish forehead. He had not intended her to rule alone, nor indeed perhaps even to rule at all. She chose to dwell instead on the instructions that he had left for her upbringing, exaggerating them to accommodate her own profound need to be accepted, not as the little Queen of Sweden, but as its divinely appointed King.

In the two years preceding the King’s death, Christina had seen equally little of her father and her mother. Whether following her husband on campaign or visiting her family in Brandenburg, Maria Eleonora appears to have given little thought to the child left behind. ‘My mother could not bear the sight of me,’ Christina was to write, ‘because I was a girl, and she said I was ugly.’¹⁶ Portraits of Christina in her early childhood depict nonetheless a charming little girl, though most are conventional, and all are no doubt flattering. It is true, however, that she was slightly deformed. As a baby, she had apparently been dropped, and her injuries had left her noticeably lopsided in the upper body, with one shoulder higher than the other; the portraits show her in tactful semi-profile. She herself was later to claim that this ‘dropping’ was no less than an attempt on her life commanded by Catholic sympathizers among her cousins, and at times even suggested that it had been her mother’s own idea. Whatever the truth, the resulting deformity cannot have endeared her to her beauty-loving mother. Had she wished to, however, Maria Eleonora might have seen herself reflected in the appearance of her only child; many extant portraits suggest that Christina owed not only her high forehead and her large, bright eyes to her mother as much as to her father, but also her distinctive, large nose. Like her mother, too, she was of delicate build. The difference between the two, it seemed, was not so much in feature as in nature.

For in those talents most evident in childhood, Christina was her father’s child. In her little person she carried a keen reminder of Gustav Adolf’s own physical hardiness, together with his able and enquiring mind. In both respects she seemed to those about her the very opposite of her frivolous, fluffily pretty mother, whose extravagant behaviour, untempered by any worthy achievement, had earned only disdain. The King had left a trace of his hot blood, too, pulsing in his daughter’s veins; her tendency to emotional outbursts, complete with tearfulness and violence, was a legacy of his own volatile temperament.

In the absence of both mother and father, Christina had spent most of her time with her family of Palatine cousins, who lived in unpretentious comfort at Stegeborg Castle, to the south of Stockholm. Her aunt was the Princess Katarina, the King’s elder half-sister, and her uncle Count Johann Kasimir of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, who had once accompanied Gustav Adolf to Berlin to meet the young Maria Eleonora. The Princess Katarina, aged then in her later forties, was the mother of five surviving children, the youngest still in his infancy; Christina describes her aunt as a woman of ‘consummate virtue and wisdom’. She had settled in easily with the other children; among this lively half dozen, she was fourth in age, with two little countesses, Maria Euphrosyne and Eleonora Katarina, a year or so either side of her. Her eldest cousin, some ten years older, was the Countess Kristina Magdalena, and there was a young boy, too, Karl Gustav, Christina’s senior by four years, and the baby, Adolf.

Her father’s untimely death had wrenched Christina from this comfortable environment and installed her against her will in her mother’s bizarre and gloomy apartments at Nyköping Castle; here she had been closeted for a year or more. ‘It would have been a lovely court if it hadn’t been spoiled by the Queen Mother’s mourning,’ Christina was to complain. ‘There is no country in the world where they mourn the dead as long as they do in Sweden. They take three or four years to bury them, and then when they do, all the relatives, especially the women, weep all over again as if the person had only just died.’¹⁷ Maria Eleonora ‘played the role of grieving widow marvellously well,’ she writes, insisting at the same time that her mother’s grief was sincere. ‘But I was even more desperate than she was, because of those long dreary ceremonies and all the sad and sorry people about me. I could hardly stand it. It was far worse for me than the King’s death itself. I had been quite consoled about that for a long time, because I didn’t realize what a misfortune it was. Children who expect to inherit a throne are easily consoled for the loss of their father.’¹⁸

Consoled or not, in the midst of her mother’s melodrama, Christina fell ill with the first of many maladies attributed by contemporaries, as by later scholars, to her distressed state of mind. She developed ‘a malignant abscess in my left breast, which brought on a fever with unbearable pain. At last it burst, releasing a great flow of matter. That did me good, and in a few days I was perfectly well again.’¹⁹

After the King’s burial in June 1634, Maria Eleonora moved her court to the Tre Kronor Castle in Stockholm, near to the Riddarholm Church where her husband’s body was now entombed. Christina may have sensed a touch of theatricality in her mother’s extravagant mourning, but to the four regents who remained in Sweden, it seemed real enough. Taking advantage of the move to Stockholm, they proposed to place the child in separate apartments within the castle, but the suggestion drew forth ‘pitiful tears and cries’ from her mother. Axel Oxenstierna, writing from Germany where he had remained to continue direction of Sweden’s armies, urged the senators to insist: the child must be taken from her mother; the late King himself had warned that Maria Eleonora was not to be permitted any influence over her. The senators, it seems, were divided; some felt that the child should be left where she was; others wanted to send the Queen Mother back to Nyköping by herself. Every remonstrance with Maria Eleonora was met with fresh hysterics, so that the senators, torn between sympathy and exasperation, came to no conclusion at all; their wavering condemned the little Queen to two further miserably cloistered years. Affording her daughter no respite, Maria Eleonora did claim some at least for herself. With surprising initiative, but little persistence, she made plan after plan for elaborate memorials to her late husband. There was to be a new tomb, then a new chapel, then a new castle, then a whole new city. One French envoy, flattered to be consulted by ‘this charming woman’, recorded his delight in discussing with her ‘the finer points of every branch of architecture, of Doric and Ionic and Corinthian columns’.²⁰ Needless to say, no stone was ever laid.

Christina, meanwhile, did what she could herself to escape. The means at her disposal were slender, but she exploited them, or so she claims, to the full. Her hours of exercise and especially of schooling became her refuge. The mother’s weakness was turned to the daughter’s profit. ‘What I endured with her,’ she writes, ‘made me turn all the more keenly to my books, and that is why I made such surprisingly good progress – I used them as a pretext to escape the Queen my mother.’²¹ The indecisive senators had at least been able to agree on the kind of education the child should receive; in fact, prompted by their absent Chancellor, the entire Riksdag had discussed it, and in March 1635, with Christina already eight years old, they made their conclusions known. Their priorities are revealing. The little Queen must learn, states their preamble, ‘to speak well of her subjects and of the present state of the country and of the regency’. Though she must learn something of foreign manners and customs ‘as becomes her station’, she must also ‘practise and observe Swedish ones and be taught them carefully’. She must learn table manners, too, they declared, without, however, specifying whether these were to be homegrown or of some foreign variety.

The men of the Riksdag were clearly anxious that Maria Eleonora’s widely known disdain for all things Swedish should not be inculcated in her daughter. Other foreign errors were also to be strenuously avoided, notably those of popery and Calvinism. The ‘art of government’ was acknowledged to be important for her to learn, but ‘as this sort of knowledge is learnt rather with age and experience than by the studies of childhood, and as the knowledge of God and his worship is the true foundation of all else, it is most salutary that she should first and foremost study the word of God, the articles of faith and all the Christian virtues’.²² She must also learn ‘to write well and to calculate quickly’, and she must read only those books which had been approved by learned men of suitably moral temper. The programme for her education was to be reviewed as the little Queen progressed.

Gustav Adolf had also been concerned to prevent Maria Eleonora from influencing their daughter adversely. From his campaigns abroad, he had sent back detailed instructions about her upbringing in the event of his own death. The Queen was to be excluded from any regency, and three named men were to be appointed to oversee the child’s education. Her two governors were to be Axel Banér and Gustav Horn, both senators. As tutor she was to have Johan Matthiae, a theologian and former schoolmaster, and the late King’s own chaplain. The two governors were both expert in the use of arms, and both were hard drinkers, but otherwise they were very different men, Banér apparently something of a rough diamond with a penchant for pretty women, Horn more of a courtier, fluent in foreign languages and an experienced diplomat. The tutor, Johan Matthiae, well born and well educated, had studied not only in Sweden’s own university at Uppsala, but also in the German lands as well as in Holland, France, and England. He was a man of calm and kindly temperament, liberal in his thinking, especially in religious matters; in this he reflected, as he had no doubt helped to form, the views of his late King.

Unlike the ‘five great old men’ who comprised her regency, Christina’s governors and tutor were young, all in their thirties at the time of their appointment, Gustav Horn indeed barely so. Two at least had been Gustav Adolf’s beloved friends, Banér even sharing the King’s bedchamber before his marriage and afterwards, whenever the Queen was absent. Johan Matthiae, too, had accompanied the King on campaign. Christina later described them all as ‘capable, good men’. She appreciated the straightforward honesty of Banér, and admired Horn’s foreign polish, but for her tutor she reserved a special fondness. She called him ‘Papa’, and he quickly became the confidant of all her little secrets, a steady and reassuring presence in her difficult young life.

The late King’s choice of guardians, according to their little charge herself, writing many years later, was ‘as happy as it could be, given that none of them were Catholic’. Together, they formed a vital counterweight to the extremities of Maria Eleonora’s court, and provided an outlet for the frustrated energies of a bright and active child. But the Queen Mother’s continuing obsessive behaviour during these years destroyed any chance for a real affection to develop between herself and her daughter. Though Christina claims to have loved her mother ‘tenderly enough’, her respect for her began to fade, she says, when she ‘seized me, in spite of my tutors, and tried to lock me up with her in her apartment’.²³ Three years were to pass before her eventual release, in the summer of 1636, on the return of Axel Oxenstierna to Sweden. More determined and less manipulable than his brother senators, the Chancellor removed Christina at once from her mother’s suffocating embrace, and placed her again in the care of the Princess Katarina, with whose two younger daughters she now continued her schooling. The Queen Mother herself was also promptly removed, and placed under comfortable but tedious guard in the island castle of Gripsholm at Mariefred, some fifty miles from Stockholm. Like her own once imprisoned daughter, Maria Eleonora would do her best to escape.