Читать книгу Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric - Veronica Buckley - Страница 12

Christina was once more in the safe and steady care of her Aunt Katarina. With her tenth birthday approaching, she was now taking her lessons in the company of her two cousins, Maria Euphrosyne, aged eleven, and Eleonora Katarina, aged nine. The three girls seem to have shared an easy friendship, though Christina did complain – to their father – that her elder cousin was falling behind in her schoolwork; it would be a good idea, she suggested, if he made her work a bit harder.

The late King had left instructions that his daughter was to receive ‘the education of a prince’, and to take plenty of exercise, an uncommon emphasis for a girl of the time. He had no doubt seen that, even as a little child, she was physically very active, and perhaps, too, he had wished to distance her from the precious femininity which her mother had evinced. Christina was to be trained to only two conventionally feminine habits: modesty and virtue, though in the former, at least, she was to fail spectacularly. But her schooling with the two little countesses suggests that her academic training was not exceptional for a girl of her position. Though she may have been more capable than either of her cousins, they all read the same texts and wrote the same inkblotted exercises.

In later years, Christina’s accomplishments were to be the subject of a good deal of extravagant praise, not least from her own pen. It is certain that she was a clever and inquisitive child who enjoyed learning. She welcomed this ‘pretext to escape the Queen my mother’, and claimed that by the age of eight she was already studying twelve hours every day ‘with an inconceivable joy’, though she does not say that by the same age she was given to wild exaggeration. Seen against the background of prevailing standards, her schooling was very good indeed, for until the most recent years, education in Sweden had been deplorable. Only a few years before Christina’s birth, with the country at war with Poland, there was not a single diplomat available with enough Latin to conduct negotiations with the enemy. Many local officials, it seems, ‘could not even write their names’.¹ Older men had gone abroad for their education, if indeed they had received any, generally to Leiden, or to one of the German universities. Only the clergy had been schooled at home. A young man might study theology or biblical languages in Sweden, but none of the ‘modern’ subjects of law, history, politics, mathematics, or science; all these Gustav Adolf had introduced as part of his great internal reforms of the 1620s. He had established grammar schools, too, and revived Sweden’s only university, at Uppsala, with endowments of land and with books and scientific instruments, the booty of his German campaigns. But progress had been slow: in 1627 the university had been able to boast just four history students, with five newcomers for law, and two for medicine. Even by 1632, at a vital period of the war in Germany, there had been no one capable of serving as secretary to any of Sweden’s generals in the field – only theologians were available. And Christina was ten years old before the first lektor in modern languages was appointed; German being regarded as almost a native tongue, the new appointee taught French.

In the light of this situation, it is not surprising that Christina’s contemporaries were impressed by her educational accomplishments. The regents, apprehensive of her mother’s legacy, were relieved to find her a clever and studious child. As she grew to womanhood, foreign diplomats and other visitors were quick to praise, though the scholars who later came to Stockholm were generally disappointed, finding her brilliant reputation undeserved. But if her fame eventually promised more than she merited, it was not for want of good schooling. The late King had prescribed for his daughter a broad humanist education, progressive in some details, but on the whole a legacy of the great Renaissance tradition in which he himself had been brought up. Gustav Adolf’s tutors had been independently minded men, and this in turn did much to shape the education that Christina herself now received. Like her father, she was inquisitive, strong-willed, and eager to learn, but unlike him, she had no particular enthusiasm for the ‘Christian virtues’ which were expected to be the basis of all her learning. By her own admission, the only parts of the scriptures she cared for were the Book of Wisdom and ‘the works of Solomon’ – in short, the most secular parts. She remained unmoved by the Gospels, and her lack of devotion to – indeed, lack of any interest in – the person of Jesus Christ was to remain a curious blank in her dramatic religious development. Nevertheless, for a few years during her girlhood, she was intensely pious, even to the point of bigotry. It was hardly surprising, given the narrow brand of Lutheranism prevailing in Sweden at the time, but it also reflected Christina’s own very determined nature. A touch of self-righteousness, untempered by experience, led very naturally to dogmatism. Not least, for a girl who enjoyed confrontation, a staunch Lutheran conviction was in direct opposition to her tutor’s own evenhanded views; Johan Matthiae’s firm belief was in a future union of all Protestant creeds.

Christina’s piety, whatever its cause, did not help her to endure the many long and dreary sermons of the Swedish Church. She hated them, she said, with ‘a deadly hatred’, though one of them did inspire her, at least temporarily, with a solid Lutheran fear of the Lord. Its subject was the Last Judgement, and it was preached every year just before Advent, and hence just before her birthday. It was a reliably ferocious tirade, full of hellfire and brimstone, and, to a sensitive and imaginative child, really terrifying. Hearing it for the first time, Christina turned in frightened tears to Johan Matthiae, who comforted her with the promise that she would escape damnation and live forever in Heaven – provided she was ‘a good girl’ and applied herself properly to her lessons. Christina took the warning seriously, and did her best to behave, but the following year, on hearing the same sermon, she found it somehow less menacing. Another year later, the menace had retreated further still, so far, in fact, that she ventured to suggest to Matthiae that it was all a lot of nonsense, and not just the threats of damnation, but all the rest of the stories, too – the Resurrection of Jesus, and everything. Matthiae was alarmed, and warned her in serious tones that thinking of that kind would certainly lead her down the road to perdition. Christina respected her ‘Papa’, and loved him, too, and she said no more on the subject. But the seed of doubt had fallen on fertile ground. By the time she was out of her girlhood, Christina believed ‘nothing at all of the religion in which I was brought up’, and she later declared that all of Christianity was ‘no more than a trick played by the powerful to keep the humble people down’.

Matthiae was a theologian and a Lutheran clergyman, but his views were liberal. He admired the great humanist tradition, and made it part of Christina’s daily lessons along with the harangues of Roman senators and the dry texts of the Swedish constitution. Christina was particularly attracted to neostoicism, a revival of ancient Stoic thought in a form compatible with Christianity – the inconvenient materialist beliefs of the Romans, for example, had been modified away. In neostoicism, she found a bridge between the Lutheran world that she was gradually abandoning and the classical deism that she was moving towards. The humanists had not gone so far, but Christina read into them what she needed to see, and for now, and for years to come, a deity unhampered by sect or priest or bible was precisely what she wanted to believe in. Besides, the earnest bravery of the neostoics was a perfect complement to the heroic classical tales that she so loved, and it encouraged her enthusiasm for the bookish, boyish virtues – mens sana in corpore sano – of the disciplined Roman Republic. In her fifteenth year, Matthiae introduced her to Lipsius’ Politica, a collection of pithy classical maxims well suited to her own rather apodictical nature. She was never to lose her taste for maxims; from those of ancient Greece and Rome she progressed to those of modern France, and in later life she wrote some of her own, happily contradicting herself with the courage of each changing conviction.

Christina’s religious studies were conducted in German and Swedish, and also in Latin, which she had begun to study seriously. Matthiae had compiled for her a brief summary of Latin grammar, using as his guide Comenius’ recently published Janua linguarum reserata – The Door to Languages Opened.² Comenius held the then revolutionary idea that lessons should be adapted to the age and ability of the pupil; he was later to produce the first teaching book which combined text with pictures.³ His innovative Latin grammar was built not around abstract rules but around the familiar objects of childhood, but despite this, Christina declared that she hated it so much she almost stopped learning Latin altogether. This she would not have been permitted to do; Latin was essential, a written and spoken lingua franca used everywhere in Christendom. Her father had learned to speak it perfectly before he could read in any language, and Christina claimed the same facility for herself, though this was probably untrue; her progress in Latin was unremarkable, and as a young girl, at least, she was reluctant to speak it. Matthiae wanted her to speak to him only in Latin, but she would not; a brief memorandum on the subject, written shortly before her tenth birthday, reveals the state of the case. In schoolgirl Latin, and using the royal ‘We’, she wrote: ‘We hereby promise to speak Latin with Our tutor from now on. We will hold Ourselves to this obligation. We know We have promised this before, and not kept Our word. But with God’s help, We will keep it this time, beginning next Monday, God willing. Written and signed by Our own hand…’⁴

Whether or not she kept her promise ‘this time’ is not known, though she spoke the language well enough in later life. But if she did not like learning Latin, she did enjoy the history accessible through it, and in this she was spurred on by the Royal Librarian, Johann Freinsheim, an authority on Tacitus who taught her most of her Roman history. He seems to have taught her well, for in later years, the French ambassador noted that she seemed to have no trouble with Tacitus, ‘even the difficult passages, which I found hard myself’. But it was not the quality of Tacitus’ writing that attracted Christina. She loved the stories of the ancient world, loved reading of the heroic exploits of Caesar and Alexander, loved the tales of nobility and virtue and the unending quest for glory. They were for her a world of adventure, where bravery and fortitude triumphed, a world of danger and daring where the strong took all and the wisest man was the unflinching stoic. To her they outshone even her own great father, and in her extravagant expectations of what she herself would accomplish, she identified herself with them. Not content with reading about them, she took to writing about them, too: a brief ten pages on Caesar, and a more substantial essay on Alexander, which ran to seven drafts – very little changed from one to the next, however, and all but the first copied out in the weary hand of a court scribe. Alexander remained her greatest hero, and she lived surrounded by his exploits: even the walls of her own room in the castle were hung with tapestries depicting them. Matthiae taught her no Greek, but Christina later persuaded Freinsheim to help her study it, and found a new hero in the Persian Emperor Cyrus, brought to life in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a popular mélange of fact and fiction then widely read by schoolboys. Christina admired the faultless Cyrus, but did not seek to emulate him. Caesar and Alexander, though rougher diamonds, produced, she thought, a greater light.

Matthiae records that by the time she was eleven, they had read together ‘the usual beginner’s Latin texts’,⁵ including some of Curtius’ History of Alexander the Great, which the young Diana loved especially. Christina believed that she ‘surpassed the capacity of my age and sex’, but she was very quick to exaggerate her achievements. She wrote, for example, that by the age of fourteen she had learned, ‘with a marvellous facility’, all the sciences, languages, and other studies in which she had been instructed. In the very next breath, she claimed that for modern languages, at least, she had received no instruction at all, any more than she had done for her mother tongue of Swedish. ‘I never had a teacher,’ she writes, ‘for German, French, Italian, or Spanish.’⁶ In fact, she had spoken German from her infancy; she had used it with her mother and her father, and it seems to have been the first language she learned to write. In French, she had regular lessons for some years. Matthiae records that he began teaching her French grammar when she was twelve years old, but she had learned to speak the language long before then. Living with her Palatine cousins had provided the occasion; they were the first family in Sweden where French was spoken at home – a decided affectation in the eyes of the other nobles, but it gave Christina an easy familiarity with the language, though, even in an age of unsettled orthography, her spelling was quite unusual. French remained her preferred language, and in later years she used it almost always, even when writing to friends and family in Sweden.

The modern languages, in any case, were not of great interest to her during her girlhood. Her heart was in the ancient world, where all her heroes had fought their battles in field and forum. The classical texts served many purposes; they included literature and philosophy and the history that she loved, but they were also an important part of the young Queen’s political education, tried and tested examples of realpolitik from which a present-day ruler might take counsel. Christina enjoyed this aspect of her training in the ‘art of government’. She likened the ancient political feuds to games of chess in which the shrewdest manipulator took the prize, and liked to think of herself as a master of ‘dissembling’ – it was one of her favourite words – who could always outwit even the cleverest men about her, including Chancellor Oxenstierna himself. He was now spending several hours each day instructing her in practical politics and statecraft. These hours she relished: the Chancellor was a man of vast experience, who knew ‘the strengths and weaknesses of every state in Europe’, and she listened, enchanted, to his first-hand stories of battles planned and bargains struck and enemies undermined. ‘I really loved hearing him speak,’ she writes, ‘and there was no study or game or pleasure that I wouldn’t leave willingly to listen to him. By the same token, he really loved teaching me, and we would spend three or four hours or even longer together, perfectly happy with each other. And if I may say so, without undue pride, the great man was more than once forced to admire the child, so talented, so eager and so quick to learn, without fully understanding what it was that he admired – it was so rare in one so young.’⁷

It is not very likely that the Chancellor’s understanding failed him now as he contemplated the talents of his young pupil. Axel Oxenstierna was among the most gifted men of his generation, and he had comfortably taken the measure of the likes of Cardinal Richelieu while keeping the upper hand, 500 miles distant, of his every opponent at home. But he was certainly pleased with Christina’s progress, reporting to the Senate with satisfaction that the young Queen was ‘not like other members of her sex. She is stout-hearted and of good understanding,’ he said, ‘to such an extent that, if she does not allow herself to be corrupted, she raises the highest hopes.’⁸ The Chancellor did not elucidate the nature of Christina’s possible corruption, but his reference to her ‘allowing herself’ to be corrupted suggests that he had observed some weakness or unwelcome tendency in her nature. It was no outward menace that he feared for her, but rather, it seems, the consequences of her own contradictory self. He may have been made anxious, perhaps even saddened, by the small deceits which she had begun to practise on him through her correspondence with her Palatine uncle, Johann Kasimir. The Count had once served her father as Grand Treasurer, but shortly after the King’s death, he had been given a clear hint to resign from his position and betake himself to the country. The regents and senators disliked his German origins and suspected him of harbouring too great ambitions for his elder son, Karl Gustav. Christina’s ‘wise and prudent’ uncle swallowed the insult and retired without demur, but he kept in touch with her, and she seems to have enjoyed the opportunities for petty subterfuge which his ambiguous position provided.

As part of her training in statecraft, Christina had studied Camden’s Latin biography of Elizabeth I of England, the Virgin Queen with the ‘heart and stomach of a King’ who had overseen the defeat of the Spanish Armada fifty years before.⁹ The Protestant Queen Elizabeth was widely known and admired in Sweden, and during Christina’s girlhood, memories of her were still fresh in many minds. King Erik XIV, Christina’s own great-uncle, had for many years been her suitor, and Christina’s great-aunt Cecilia had made a ‘pilgrimage of admiration’ to her court. Elizabeth’s history was heroic; like Christina, she had inherited an uncertain crown; she had bravely endured five years of imprisonment with the axeman waiting at the door, and in the cold and fearful meantime she had perfected her many accomplishments. ‘Shee was even a miracle for her learning amongst the Princes of her time,’ Camden wrote of Elizabeth. ‘Before she was seventeene yeeres of age, she understood well the Latin, French and Italian tongues.’ She had studied Greek as well, which Christina had not yet done, and she was a good musician, too. Elizabeth’s wide culture, her strength of mind, and, not least, her mastery of statecraft, had framed a golden age for her small country, which, like Christina’s Sweden, had only recently emerged on to the world’s wide stage. It was agreed that a queen like Elizabeth would be a fine successor to the great Gustav Adolf, and her glorious reign seems to have aroused Christina’s envy. In a later rant against all women rulers, she avoided mentioning the legendary English Queen, but Elizabeth’s shadow lingers nonetheless in a series of phrases anticipating the obvious interjection of her name: there have been no good women rulers, or if there have, none ‘in our present century’; women are weak ‘in soul and body and mind’, and if there have been a few strong women, well, that’s not because they were women. For Christina, the capable woman ruler was merely the exception that proved the rule. She took her model of all women from her mother, and declared that, of all human defects, to be a woman was the worst:

As a young girl I had an overwhelming aversion to everything that women do and say. I couldn’t bear their tight-fitting, fussy clothes. I took no care of my complexion or my figure or the rest of my appearance. I never wore a hat or a mask, and scarcely ever wore gloves. I despised everything belonging to my sex, hardly excluding modesty and propriety. I couldn’t stand long dresses and I only wanted to wear short skirts. What’s more, I was so hopeless at all the womanly crafts that no one could ever teach me anything about them.¹⁰

Christina’s ungenerous attitude towards her own sex had been long fomenting. The hyperfemininity of her unloving mother cannot have helped, but her distaste for all things feminine was mostly, it seems, the result of her own very masculine nature. The late King’s instructions that she should have a ‘princely’ education consequently accorded very well with what she herself most enjoyed. Even her dolls, it seems, were the classic toys of little boys. They were ‘pieces of lead which I used to learn military manoeuvres. They formed a little army that I set out on my table in battle formation. I had little ships all decked out for war, little forts, and maps.’¹¹ Whether they were really her own toys, or whether they were inherited from her cousins, Karl Gustav and Adolf, Christina does not say, but her enthusiasm for them was genuine enough; she loved cannon and swords and all things military. She loved being outdoors, too, and loved animals, especially horses and dogs; when Karl Gustav went off to university, he left his gun-dogs in her particular care. She believed that every animal possessed its own individual soul, and was prepared to contradict the opinion of the great Descartes on the subject. For Descartes, a quintessentially indoor philosopher, animals were no more than living machines, but Christina’s experience of the different temperaments of her own horses and dogs convinced her otherwise.

‘I can handle any sort of arms passably well,’ she wrote, ‘though I was barely taught to use them at all.’ From this it seems that she must have learned to fence, but if she did not receive much instruction, this is not surprising. Fencing was an aspect of military training, and consequently not something that any girl, even an honorary prince, would be expected to need. Perhaps Christina persuaded one of her governors, both expert swordsmen, to give her a few lessons, or perhaps her two cousins, happy to display their boyhood skills, passed on to her some of their own instruction. Christina did not keep up her fencing, though from time to time in her adult life she liked to wear a sword.

Hunting, by contrast, was a noble sport of long standing for both men and women, and fast and furious riding was an integral part of it. Christina loved it all. Whether or not she was ‘barely taught’, she was a very good shot; the French Ambassador remarked that she could ‘hit a running hare faster than any man’, though as she herself insisted, ‘I wasn’t cruel and I have never killed an animal without feeling real sympathy for it.’¹² She was a very fine horsewoman, too, though she used a lady’s side-saddle, and was probably taught by her governor Axel Banér, himself a superbly skilled rider. Christina admitted that she had been taught to ride ‘a bit’, but in fact she received a good deal of instruction, and she spent many exhilarating hours on horseback in the royal hunting grounds of Djurgården, across the lake from her castle home. In short, she was perfectly suited to the vigorous princely upbringing which her father had commanded for her. In the young girl racing on horseback through the forest, the Swedes saw their great King’s own active spirit embodied once again:

Between what I was taught and what I wanted to learn myself, I was able to learn everything that a prince should know, and everything a girl can learn in all modesty…I loved my books with a passion, but I loved hunting and horse-racing and games just as much. I loved horses and dogs – but I never lost a moment of my study or my duty to any of that…The people who had to look after me were at their wits’ end, because I absolutely wore them out, and I gave them no rest, day or night, and when my women wanted to slow me down, I just made fun of them, and I said to them: If you’re tired, go and lie down; I don’t need you. Every hour of my days was occupied with affairs of state, or study, or exercise.¹³

It is a rather boastful account, and a touch defiant, but Christina’s description of her girlhood self is more or less true. She was clever, and generally hardy, though given to sudden illnesses, most apparently emotional in origin, and she did spend her days more or less charging at the world, infuriating and exhausting those about her.

The Princess Katarina died a few days after Christina’s twelfth birthday, in the December of 1638. Christina had been fond of her kindly aunt, and she missed the company of her cousins, most of whom now returned to their own castle at Stegeborg. Only the youngest girl remained with her in Stockholm, and she stayed for four years, a companion ‘suitable for my age’ in schooling and at play. Both Christina’s governors died within these years, and they were not replaced. Johan Matthiae was to remain until Christina was sixteen, and from then on, for all but her political education, she was to be left to her own devices.

While Christina had been poring over Caesar and Alexander, a latter-day hero had been making his way, in less martial mode, through other lands. In 1641, Karl Gustav returned to Stockholm, aged just nineteen, with the happy weight of student life and foreign travel on his broad young shoulders. If his portrait is to be believed, he had grown into an exceedingly handsome young man, with dark eyes and dark hair, and fine but manly features. He was well liked among his peers and well regarded by those above him, liberal but not extravagant, courageous, and very capable, a young man full of promise, but with no settled future as yet before him.

It had been more than three years since Christina had last seen her cousin. She was now fifteen, and she found at once that her former easy, boyish talk of fencing and hunting no longer felt appropriate when she was with him. Awkward chatter soon gave way to whispers and sighs and secret glances, as the friend of her childhood metamorphosed into her first love. It became a conspiracy. With chaperones in the way, the two resorted to impassioned notes, delivered by an excited Maria Euphrosyne, cousin and sister to the lovers, or a surprising alternative go-between, Christina’s learned old tutor, Johan Matthiae. There need not have been much intriguing. For a girl of her rank, Christina was now of marriageable age, and the match would have been welcomed by Karl Gustav’s family – it had in fact been a long-held wish of his mother, Christina’s Aunt Katarina. Chancellor Oxenstierna would have been less pleased. He disliked the Palatine family and suspected them of manipulating Christina’s affections for their own advancement. But as head of the regency council, he could in any case have forbidden any marriage until Christina had formally attained her majority at the age of eighteen. This was almost three years away; by then the youthful romance would surely have run its course.

The Chancellor had miscalculated the strength of Karl Gustav’s affections, but where Christina herself was concerned, he need not really have worried. She seems to have enjoyed the subterfuge as much as the romance itself. She wanted to write in code, and though she often enough swore ‘eternal love’ and ‘faithfulness unto death’, she spent as many lines trying to keep the young man calm, and urging him to think of his professional future. ‘I will wait for you,’ she wrote, ‘but for now you need to think about the army. All good things come to those who wait. We can marry once I have become Queen in fact as well as in name’ – an event still several years distant. The eager young lover could be packed off to the wars, and the game of love continue to be played without danger of any real involvement.

In a roundabout way, Christina ensured this herself, probably by accident, but possibly in order to keep Karl Gustav at bay. An important position had fallen vacant at the court. The Chancellor’s brother had recently died, and the Senate was debating who might succeed him as High Steward and member of the regency council. Christina had proved a keen and able student of politics, and it was thought that, as she was now aged fifteen, she might add her voice to those of the senators – her father, after all, had begun to attend Riksdag sessions at the age of only twelve. The senators suggested she might like to nominate her cousin, Karl Gustav, for the newly vacant position. It was welcome news to the young man himself; he had no other employment, and his family had no wealth beyond what they could earn through the grace of the court. Johann Kasimir was delighted. He had himself once been a member of Sweden’s highest Council. Now, despite his German blood, his son would take his own place there. They could count on Christina, he knew – but he had reckoned without her paradoxical support.

Excited by this first foray into real politics, she devised a small subterfuge, apparently to persuade the Senate that she was not especially predisposed towards her cousin and his family. In fact, Chancellor Oxenstierna seems to have been her real target. Though she hung on his every word and ‘never tired of listening to him’, she had begun to resent the great man’s power; he was her regent, after all, and not the King. The Chancellor disliked her uncle Johann Kasimir, regarding him as an untrustworthy foreigner who had come to the country with nothing and who intended to take from it whatever he could. He disliked the fact that Karl Gustav had his own claim to the Swedish throne – like Christina, he was a grandchild of Karl IX – and he disliked the evident fondness that existed between the young Queen and her Palatine family. Christina’s own growing jealousy of the Chancellor was reason enough for her to strike against him, but the vacant position of High Steward provided the opportunity which until then had been wanting. She would win the Chancellor’s confidence by pretending to stand on his side against the Palatines, and in future would use this trust to further her cousin’s interests, and her own – the senators might even appoint Karl Gustav anyway. She set her mind to scoring this first political point, and in so doing managed to harm the very person whom she most wished to help.

To the senators’ invitation to nominate Karl Gustav, Christina replied that she could not do so, for the improbable reason that his own father would not approve of the appointment. More sensibly, she added that it was not suitable for her to choose one of her own regents; the matter, she wrote, should be referred to the Chancellor. Her cousin was astonished, her uncle dismayed. How could she have declined so valuable a position on their behalf? More than once she was obliged to point out herself how clever she had been. ‘If I had nominated Karl Gustav,’ she wrote to her uncle, ‘the other regents would have thought I was only wanting to plant a spy among them.’¹⁴ It seems she had not stopped to consider how useful such a spy might have been to her, almost as useful indeed as the powerful and well-paid post itself would have been to her impoverished cousin. Instead, the noise of her self-congratulation quickly drowned out the sound of his own puzzled disappointment. Years later she would describe the episode as evidence of her capacity for ‘profound dissimulation, which even in my early youth deceived the most astute people’.¹⁵

The ‘most astute people’ were, of course, the Chancellor, but it is not very likely that her ruse persuaded him of any sudden lack of fondness on her part for the Palatine family. Christina’s ‘dissimulation’, whether profound or no, was of no benefit to Karl Gustav, and indeed cost him a great deal. It cost the Chancellor nothing, and left Christina herself, in the eyes of her nearest relatives, with an aura of immaturity, or unreliability, or untrustworthiness.

It is a measure of Christina’s naivety at this stage that she believed she had somehow outwitted the Chancellor. It is revealing, too, of her great confidence in her own powers that she regarded the little ploy as an exercise in ‘profound dissimulation’, a capacity to which she would always lay extravagant claim. But above all it is significant that Christina’s first attempt at political influence was an attempt to deceive. Just fifteen years old, in a position of extraordinary privilege, with a hundred hardened greybeards awaiting her response, she might have revealed a precocious wisdom or even simple humility. She might have made a bold stand to assist the family to whom she owed so much. Instead, she responded deviously, leaving Karl Gustav to bear the risk.

Christina’s ploy did not help her cousin, but quite by chance, it may have helped her country. The new High Steward, chosen by lottery, was the senator Count Per Brahe, a cousin of her father’s former love, and a man of immense experience and talent in military and civil affairs. Per Brahe was no doubt better suited to the position than any nineteen-year-old, no matter how handsome, could ever have proved to be. The adverse effects of Christina’s clumsy subterfuge had been prevented, quite literally, by the luck of the draw.

Johan Matthiae’s reports on Christina’s education ended in her seventeenth year, when Matthiae left Stockholm for Strängnäs, some fifty miles away. Here, despite his lukewarm Lutheranism, he had been given a bishopric. Christina had been a good pupil, talented and studious, but Matthiae’s efforts to educate her ‘as a Christian prince’ in the way of Erasmus must be said, on the whole, to have failed. In her adult life there would be little trace of the humanist virtues which her tutor had so exalted. Christina was not without admiration for them, and apt quotations were never to be far from her fluent tongue. But, although in her earnest girlhood she embraced some of their values, it was not in her nature to pursue them beyond these years. She would be seldom stoical, often unprincipled, and generally, at least where her personal affairs were concerned, rational only ex post facto. On the rock of her own ebullient temperament, the fine-wrought vessel of her education was doomed to break apart, nature triumphant over nurture.

During these years of her girlhood, Christina saw her mother hardly at all. Confined at Gripsholm Castle, Maria Eleonora made only one brief appearance in Stockholm, and it seems that the visit was never reciprocated. Christina approved of her mother’s exclusion from the regency, regarding it as ‘a most sensitive mark of my father’s love’ to have insisted upon it. If her mother had had a hand in ruling the country, she wrote, ‘she would no doubt have ruined everything, like all the other women who have tried it’. ‘But,’ she added, ‘though I praise the regents for keeping her away from the business of governing, I must admit it was rather harsh of them to separate her from me completely.’¹⁶

It is hard to say whether Maria Eleonora really missed her daughter; her maternal interest had been erratic, after all. It is certain, in any case, that she was miserably unhappy at Gripsholm Castle. Perched on an island in the sparkling lake, to the Queen Mother’s mind it was the bleakest fortress imaginable. For four bored and angry years, she had stewed inside its red brick walls, her coterie of German ladies-in-waiting simmering about her. Unmoved by the loveliness of her surroundings or by her daughter’s occasional pleas for calm, she had taken consolation in a secret correspondence with King Kristian of Denmark, himself no friend to Sweden’s governors. In this she gave full vent to her resentment of the Chancellor and his men – adding insult to injury, Oxenstierna had dismissed her to Gripsholm with the suggestion that she ‘learn to grow old gracefully’. Gradually, with cunning and charm, she laid her plans for a vengeful escape.

She was now aged 40, and still, it seems, despite the Chancellor’s injunction, in full possession of all her womanly assets. Only a few years before, her widow’s weeds notwithstanding, she had been described by two French visitors as ‘the most beautiful, radiant woman we had ever seen. We were,’ writes one, ‘quite dazzled by her beauty.’¹⁷ The Frenchmen, apparently, were not the only ones to admire Maria Eleonora’s ‘charming features’ and her ‘truly royal figure’. Her official captor was now captivated in his turn. Marshal Nilsson, whose army days had no doubt accustomed him to less insinuating prisoners, had been readily acceding to Her Majesty’s wishes: she had such a passion for Homer, it seemed, that she wished to spend her days on the shores of the island, reading the majestic lines of the Iliad, listening to the majestic sound of the waves. Maria Eleonora must indeed have been a woman of many charms; after four years of confinement, during which she had evinced no interest whatsoever in classical literature, her improbable ploy worked perfectly. She was soon aboard a Danish sailing ship en route to Helsingør, a latter-day Chryseis returned to friendlier shores.¹⁸

In France, delighted tongues whispered that Maria Eleonora and the Danish King were lovers; to join him, she had braved the seas, defying the wrath of mighty Sweden. Kristian does not seem to have appreciated the irony of the rumours; his wife, after bearing him twelve children, had braved his own wrath for the embraces of a German count. The cuckolded King, though as yet still in possession of both his eyes – he was soon to lose one in battle against the Swedes – was now aged 63; his gallantry towards the lady had been prompted more by politics than by love. He duly received a protest from the outraged Swedes, and sent them a cool apology, but he soon turned his energies to ridding himself of his turbulent guest. Her brother, the ailing Elector Georg Wilhelm, flatly refused to permit her return to Brandenburg, and by Christmas, an exasperated Kristian was applying to the new Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, to take her off his hands.

The young Elector was not pleased. Brandenburg had recently been at war in the Emperor’s service, and Friedrich Wilhelm was now suing for peace with the hard-pressing Swedes. He had no wish to embrace a major diplomatic embarrassment in the person of his volatile aunt. The refugee herself was apparently happy enough to go; indeed, she had little choice, since the Swedes had rescinded all her rights to income and had confiscated the many personal belongings she had left behind her. Perhaps her nephew had also heard of her objections to him as a suitor to her daughter – though now an Elector, he could still never be the son of a king. Whatever his reasons, he kept her waiting for almost two years, while the Swedes were gradually persuaded to restore her income, and the Danish King descended into desperation. Maria Eleonora would remain four years at her nephew’s court in Brandenburg, returning to Stockholm at last to find her daughter fully grown, and a reigning monarch.