Читать книгу Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric - Veronica Buckley - Страница 13

Christina’s kingdom was now her own. On a cold November day in 1644, shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she summoned her ‘five great old men’ to give a formal account of the twelve years of their regency. They spoke of the past, and also of the future. From now on, Christina would be Queen in fact as well as in name. Once the war had been concluded, there would be a spectacular ceremony of coronation to confirm the beginning of a glorious new reign, and in the meantime she was to take into her own hands the governance of the realm.

It was a curious young woman who stood before the regents now. She was fairly small, not quite five feet tall, and her habit of wearing flat shoes made her seem even smaller to her high-heeled contemporaries. Her delicate upper body was marred by a pronounced unevenness of the shoulders, the result of her fall in infancy, but her arms were round and womanly, tapering to fine, small hands. Her face was finely made and oval-shaped, framed by straight fair hair, and her forehead was high. Her long, hooked nose led to a small mouth, from which most of the back teeth, it seems, were already missing, narrowing the delicate jaw, and emphasizing the small, pointed chin. All accounts agree that her large, blue, close-set eyes were beautiful, lit with intelligence and humour; they revealed pride, too, and often anger, and at times a kind of penetrating stare which seems to have alarmed every recipient into quick submission, but their expression does not seem to have ever been cold. Despite her small stature and fairly delicate build, the young Queen’s movements and gestures were far from feminine. She walked like a man, sat and rode like a man, and could eat and swear like the roughest soldier. Her voice was deep and gruff, and her temper warm – her servants were no strangers to blows or bruises. She was clever and well read, but she liked best to talk of manly things, and whenever she spoke of military action, she adopted a sort of martial pose, planting one foot in front of the other. Her many unusual traits notwithstanding, she formed an impressive figure, and she left her old counsellors broadly reassured for the future of their country.

Not the least anxious observer of the young Queen’s development had been the remarkable Baron Axel Oxenstierna, whose own premier position of many years’ standing was about to encounter its first challenge. Since his first appointment as Chancellor in 1612, at the age of only 29, he had served Sweden with great distinction in every field from military logistics to city planning. A lawyer by training, an outstanding administrator and diplomat, he was also an able politician, and for more than thirty years he had steered a well-judged course between Sweden’s longstanding adversaries of crown and nobility. It was Oxenstierna who had curtailed the power of the crown after the death of Christina’s ferocious grandfather, ‘the rabble King’ Karl IX, wresting agreement for a balance of power from the new King, Gustav Adolf; it is a measure of his abilities, and of the sixteen-year-old King’s perspicacity, that Oxenstierna was nonetheless appointed Chancellor only a few months afterwards. His years as Chancellor to Christina’s father had been a turning-point in the life of his country; the two had worked together to transform their homeland from a backward outpost on the cold periphery of Europe to a major power on the continent’s centre stage. Oxenstierna’s considered temperament had provided a perfect complement to the exuberant genius of Gustav Adolf, epitomized in a famous exchange between them: ‘If we were all as cold as you are,’ the King had once exclaimed, ‘we should freeze.’ ‘If we were all as hot as Your Majesty is,’ replied the Chancellor, ‘we should burn.’ After Gustav Adolf’s early death, it was Oxenstierna who had supported the vulnerable Vasa dynasty, defending the child Queen against the importuning nobles who had sought greater power for themselves. He had assumed the leadership of the civil government, introducing major administrative reforms and initiating a second phase of tremendous development within the country. Sweden’s wideranging military effort had also fallen to his charge, and not least, he had become guardian to Christina and to her illegitimate half-brother. Over decades of service, he had revealed not only his abilities and his strength of mind but also his profound patriotism, a golden thread running through the many antagonisms of his public life, in Sweden and abroad.

Oxenstierna’s achievement had been phenomenal. By the end of the regency in 1644, there was no stone of state that he had left unturned, and his rare combination of vision and pragmatism had earned him admiration and respect and, in the areas of Swedish military action, no small fear. To the senators and the men of the Riksdag, his remarkable partnership with the late King remained a vibrant memory, and in the years after Gustav Adolf’s death, Oxenstierna’s own powerful aura had only shone the more brightly.

Now, in the small firmament of the Swedish court, there was no longer room for two stars of equal brilliance. In the eagerness and arrogance of her eighteen years, Christina felt it was her turn to shine. She was intimidated by the Chancellor’s achievements, and mistrustful of his reforms, seeing in them a threat to her own power. Despite his long years of service and his championing of the Vasa dynasty, she convinced herself that he was taking advantage of her inexperience to weaken the crown and advance his own authority instead. Her tutelage, she decided, was at an end. During the years of his guardianship, she had listened to him attentively, but now she would speak, and he would listen. She did not seek the fruitful equipoise of monarch and chancellor which had served her father so well. In her mind, this was only history, after all; for the twelve years of her girlhood the Chancellor had ruled alone, seconded and supported by his ubiquitous family. But the right to rule was not his at all; he had used it while he could, but he would not usurp it now that she was of age. It was her own right, and she would exercise it.

The Chancellor thus appeared less a complement than a foil to Christina’s own designs, and his prominent position merely a conspicuous target for her keen and jealous eye. Her concern became to oppose him, and from a wilful principle it grew into a habit. His great abilities, his vast experience, and, not least, his own majestic presence, so often remarked upon by contemporaries, all struck deeply at the defensive heart of an uncertain girl, not even five feet tall. She responded by perversely attacking the great oak which might have sheltered her own tender growth, developing at the same time an attitude of terrific outward pride, insistent to the point of comedy and even pathos.

Though the Chancellor had now formally ceded his place as first power in the land, his position remained immensely strong. He stood supported by his own men, with wealth and patronage at his disposal, and about him a wall of skill and influence three decades thick. He was not without enemies, old rivals for office and riches, and those envious of his family’s great standing, but they were not as yet a solid flank to be used in opposition to him, and Christina in any case lacked the experience to manipulate them to that end. She began instead on her own, cautiously, and her plan of attack was simple: the mighty old oak was, above all, a northern oak; it flourished best under its own wintry skies, mistrusting the dazzling sun and the rich soil of the south – most particularly, the soft, sticky soil of France. This soil, in gleeful handfuls, Christina now determined to spread.

In 1635, under the Chancellor’s leadership, the Swedes had entered into a cautious alliance with France against the Habsburg Empire. It had not been a happy partnership. Both sides were wary of each other, the Chancellor looking down his noble nose at the French with their devious and frivolous ways, and Richelieu raising his eyebrows at the majestic Swede – ‘very astute,’ he thought, ‘but a bit Gothic’. The replacement of Richelieu by his protégé, the never ordained but nevertheless Cardinal Mazarin, had not improved relations between the two countries. For almost a decade their awkward alliance had remained in place, with the French offering but not always paying subsidies for Sweden’s armies, expecting in return a biddable northern ally, and the Swedes accepting the offers, and the money when it was forthcoming, but continuing to make their own decisions, watching their backs the while. The Chancellor’s personal experience negotiating in Paris had confirmed his prejudices, and he had not modified them in the ensuing years. The French were unreliable, he believed, and too concerned with fashion, and they ate too much, and none of their fancy food could bear comparison anyway with a good stew of sundried salmon with plenty of pepper. Though he knew French well, in recent years he had not been heard to speak that capricious tongue; with more courtesy than candour, he insisted that he could not favour any one country over another.

No such scruples had restrained him from unleashing new conflict with a nearer neighbour. At the end of 1643, in supposed outrage at the Danes’ involvement in Maria Eleonora’s flight from Gripsholm, Swedish forces had invaded and quickly overrun vital coastal areas of Denmark. The Queen Mother’s escape had proved a useful pretext for attacking a hostile power whose control of the Baltic trade routes was altogether too strong for Sweden’s liking. By the spring, the Swedes had secured access to the routes for themselves, taking an eye in the process from the bold but ageing Danish King. An ancient balance had once again been tipped, this time in Sweden’s favour.

The Danish war was the Chancellor’s war. For him, Sweden’s deadliest enemy would always be the Danes, once ferocious overlords, still dangerous neighbours, inevitably competing for domination of the great thoroughfare of the Baltic Sea. The Habsburg Empire, by comparison, was a distant threat, drawing precious men and money away from the northern lands. The French, naturally enough, took the opposite view. For them, the Danish conflict was a peripheral matter, requiring a swift conclusion so that Sweden’s men could return to the field against the Emperor. To this end, Cardinal Mazarin had dispatched a peacemaker in the guise of a new ambassador to Sweden, a Monsieur de la Thuillerie, who quickly brought the eighteen-year-old Queen around to the French way of thinking.

For Christina, it was a golden opportunity to take a stand against the Chancellor. The Danes were suing for peace, but Oxenstierna hoped to continue the war until they had acceded to Sweden’s territorial demands for the southern peninsula; it was still in Danish hands, preventing Swedish access to the crucial Sound. Christina allowed herself to be persuaded that if the Danish terms were not accepted at once, she would be ‘blamed by posterity’ for her ‘unbounded ambition’. To this effect she wrote several times to the Chancellor, defensively couching her argument as the wish of the Senate – evidently she had not yet the courage of France’s convictions. ‘Most of them feel quite differently than you and I do,’ she wrote. ‘Some of them would give their hands to end the war.’

In the late summer of 1645, a treaty was finally signed between the two old enemies.¹ Though advantageous to Sweden, it did not cede all that the Chancellor had wanted. To add insult to injury, Christina suggested that a double celebration be held to mark not only the signing of the treaty but also a recent victory of the French army over imperial forces. As the French had just been discovered in secret negotiation with Sweden’s Bavarian enemies, the idea progressed no further. Christina suggested a slighter alternative: she arranged for a group of her ladies-in-waiting to entertain Monsieur de la Thuillerie with some songs in his own language, apparently having trained the ladies herself. The unsuspecting choir performed a series of bawdy soldiers’ ditties in appropriately colourful French, the Ambassador maintaining a diplomatic poker-face throughout. He could afford to laugh – or not to laugh; he had gained his point, Cardinal Mazarin was satisfied, and the young Swedish Queen, whether she realized it or no, had begun her steady transformation into France’s creature.

None of it was lost on the Chancellor. His regard for Christina was now being severely tested, and exchanges between them became markedly cool. Despite her formidable adversary, Christina did not retreat, but as the stubborn days wore into tired months, the strain of her opposition to Oxenstierna began to undermine her health. Within a year of the regency’s end, she had fallen seriously ill and was, or so she believed, in danger of her life. She attributed her illness to ‘the great exhaustion’ of managing the affairs of state, though in fact she had assumed little responsibility beyond continuing to attend the sessions of the Senate. The Chancellor was still very able and very willing to continue at the helm, had Christina been content for him to do so. Her recuperation once begun, she relapsed into illness again, and then succumbed to a serious case of the measles, but it was emotional distress, then as later, which seems to have caused the greater part of her illness. ‘I loved him like my own father,’ she said of Axel Oxenstierna, but like her father, too, the gifted Chancellor cast a long shadow over Christina’s sense of her own greatness. Inexperienced as she was, delighting in any intrigue, attracted by the sophisticated ways of a foreign people whom Oxenstierna disliked and mistrusted, she burrowed ever more deeply into a self-deluding syllogism, harmful to herself as to her country: the Chancellor opposed the French; Christina must oppose the Chancellor, therefore Christina must support the French.

It was a simplistic hostility, but it did not relent, and it left her exposed to easy manipulation by the less scrupulous figures about her. Soon after her recovery, she allowed it to govern a second clumsy foray into the country’s foreign affairs, at the same time revealing her susceptibility to a particular type of artful and persuasive opportunist who was to feature prominently in her public and private life.

The first adventurer appeared to take his advantage just as the regency was ending, a Monsieur Marc-Duncan de Cérisantes, brawler and seducer extraordinaire, former gentleman of Constantinople, future Catholic aristocrat, current Huguenot diplomat-conveniently-at-large. In earlier incarnations he had been known by the prosaic appellation of Mark Duncan, but Christina accepted him at his own aggrandized word, and before long she had dispatched him to Paris, to ‘assist’ Sweden’s permanent minister there, the celebrated jurist, Hugo Grotius. Grotius had occupied this post since his appointment by Axel Oxenstierna almost a decade before, and had overseen a long period of cautious alliance between the two states. Needless to say, he did not appreciate the encroachment, and was soon penning outraged letters, complaining that he was being spied on. If so, no good report of him was making its way back to Stockholm. The French disliked Grotius as heartily as he disliked them. A staunch Protestant Dutchman, Grotius could not conceal his disdain for the frippery and popery of Mazarin’s court, and he refused to extend the usual diplomatic courtesies to France’s ‘Prince of the Church’, claiming that the rank of Cardinal was unrecognized by those who were not Catholic. His dour comportment became quickly comical in the company of his wife, whose advancing years had enveloped her sturdy frame with an excessive rondeur. In her youth a heroine of political resistance, Madame Grotius had since declined into all but physical obscurity, so that one refined newcomer to the court was obliged to ask her identity. ‘Who is that bear?’ he asked of the young lady standing beside him. Unhappily, his unknown companion was Mademoiselle Grotius. ‘It is my mother, sir,’ she replied.

Inelegance was as good an excuse as any. At the end of December, only weeks after the regency had ended, Christina recalled the minister, awarded him his pension, and shortly afterwards appointed Cérisantes chargé d’affaires in his stead. Grotius was among the most learned men of his day, theologian, historian, the ‘father of international law’, and one of Gustav Adolf’s own heroes. His replacement by the conniving Cérisantes was a fall from the sublime to the ridiculous, which left Cardinal Mazarin and his government puzzled and amused. As might have been expected, Cérisantes rendered the Swedes no service; eventually he actually deserted his post. Christina rewarded this by offering him a position in the Swedish army, but, being then on the way to Rome, he declined, and was soon collecting a handsome sum for his noisy public conversion to Catholicism.

Cérisantes had duped Christina, and he provided an archetype for later artful characters who would dupe her in their turn. Always men, always plausibly capable, always of doubtful origin, they were to form an infamous row of lovable and not so lovable rogues in the gallery of her life. She would be repeatedly defrauded by them, repeatedly forgive them, repeatedly refuse to hear a word spoken against them. Their crimes would run the gamut from petty theft to abduction and murder – she would tolerate, indeed defend, it all.

It is hard to see how Christina could have been so readily ensnared by Cérisantes and his ilk. They were none of them subtle characters, and few other people were taken in by them for long. At the start, perhaps, Christina enjoyed the subterfuge, sharing the thrill of deceiving, or supposedly deceiving, her sturdy, straightforward compatriots. Perhaps, too, she recognized in each opportunist the genuine dissembler that she believed herself to be. For decades they would take advantage of her, stealing, lying, blackening her reputation; her response would be to reward them with her own defrauded hands. Christina’s pride was enormous, and it would never have been easy for her to admit that she had made an error of judgement, but her intelligence was considerable, too, and it should not have been easy to deceive her. It would have been hardest of all for her, perhaps, to accept that she herself was not party to the joke, but instead the butt of it, that the deceiver’s ground had been whisked out from under her, and that she, too, could find herself, bereft and foolish, among the barefoot deceived.

Cérisantes’ place as Christina’s representative in Paris was taken by a nobler but otherwise no more likely contender, Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie. Scion of a prominent Franco-Swedish family, he was in fact a cousin of sorts to the Queen – his great-uncle was her own uncle, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, illegitimate half-brother to Gustav Adolf. Magnus’ father was the Grand Marshal General Jakob De la Gardie, who had served as military instructor to the boy Gustav Adolf, and his mother was none other than Ebba Brahe, the beauty who had once captured the young King’s heart; Magnus, her ‘dear and noble son’, was the eldest of her fourteen children. In 1645, just 22 years of age, he returned to Stockholm after almost ten years of study and travel in Sweden and abroad, including a lengthy and expensive sojourn in Paris. He had rounded it all off with a tour of duty in the Danish war, adding a soldier’s dash to his courtly accomplishments.

Christina was delighted with him. He was tall and muscular, handsome, charming, extravagant, the son of her father’s old favourite, and, above all, very fluent in the elegant ways of France – in short, perfectly calculated to annoy the Chancellor. They became intimate friends, and she soon made him Colonel of her Guard. It was a swift advance for so young and inexperienced a man, and few doubted that Christina had fallen in love with him – some even whispered that they were lovers. It is not likely to have been true, not least because Magnus was himself in love with Christina’s schoolfellow and favourite cousin, Maria Euphrosyne. He soon made a proposal of marriage to her; she soon accepted.

Christina responded by separating them. In the spring of 1646, she announced that Count Magnus had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to France – ‘extraordinary’ thanks were owing to the French, she felt, for their involvement in the Danish treaty. There was in fact no political need for any such appointment to be made, and the Chancellor opposed it strongly, adding to Christina’s determination with his every objection. Magnus was to go, and he was to go in splendour such as no Swedish envoy had ever before enjoyed, splendour which was to impress even the extravagant French. A carriage of gold and silver was prepared for him; some three hundred persons were to form his personal retinue; his allowance would be enormous. For three months she delayed his departure with fond excuses, so that those about her, ‘not wishing to cast aspersions on Her Majesty’s conduct’, assumed that, despite his engagement to her cousin, Magnus would soon be married to the Queen. The infuriated Chancellor could only look on, kept company by a sad Karl Gustav, whose promising romance had evaporated into the perfumed air surrounding his rival. Towards the end of July, Magnus finally set out for Paris. Christina took to her room, and wept.

She might have wept more bitterly if she had learned what Magnus had to say of her once he arrived at Mazarin’s court. At first, he spoke of her ‘in passionate terms’, and ‘so respectfully’ that the French, too, suspected that his feeling exceeded that of a normally dutiful subject for his Queen. But the matter was soon made clear: Christina was an extraordinary monarch, wonderfully learned, but not very feminine – in fact, not like a woman at all, not in her appearance, not in her behaviour, not even in her face – a surprisingly ungallant remark from so suave a tongue. Magnus made full use nonetheless of her continuing indulgence of him, exceeding his huge allowance three times over, referring his debts to the Queen without her leave, and perversely raising Sweden’s reputation as a land of some financial resource, while her soldiers remained unpaid in their garrisons and camps. Little wonder that Christina’s former man in Paris, the incorrigible Cérisantes, thought it worth his while to protest that he himself had not been reappointed.

The French appointment served a multiple purpose. It gave Christina time to recover from her love for Magnus. Alternatively, it gave Magnus time to recover from his love for Maria Euphrosyne, and to reconsider what the love of a queen might bring in its train; the costly embassy in Paris was an obvious indication. In either case, it made the point that it was Christina’s voice, and not Axel Oxenstierna’s, that was now to be decisive. The link between Sweden and France would, at least formally, be strengthened, though in fact Magnus’ inexperience only weakened Sweden’s standing in the eyes of the French.

Magnus remained in Paris just seven months, capably discussing French poetry with the court précieuses, while political matters passed beyond his ken. In Stockholm, Christina exchanged daily visits with his mother, and together they sang the praises of their absent idol. Magnus’ fiancée herself does not seem to have been included in these laudatory soirées, but she was there readily enough when he returned, ‘preceded by the sound of his expenses’, to celebrate an unrepentantly lavish wedding. Christina managed to upstage bride, bridegroom, and priest: placing the couple’s hands together, she declared to Magnus, ‘I hereby give you the most precious thing I have.’ Precious things continued to flow in the same direction, so that within a year, while Christina’s Treasury limped along, Magnus, at the happy age of 24, was believed to be the richest man in Sweden.

Magnus was married, and Karl Gustav rejected, but Christina’s affections were not long idle. This time they took a different turn, which kept the gossips as busy as they had ever been with Magnus or Marc-Duncan de Cérisantes. The Queen’s attention was now fixed on one of her own ladies-in-waiting, a quiet young beauty who had been left in her care on the death of her courtier father some years before. Her name was Ebba Sparre, but in compliment to her loveliness, Christina called her Belle.

Apart from their age, the two had little in common. Belle was timid, feminine, and sedentary, with no particular interest in learning or high culture, but she accepted Christina’s attentions, and seems to have returned her affection. They commonly shared a bed, no unusual matter at the time for two young unmarried women, but Christina enjoyed the provocative possibilities of the situation. She drew deliberate attention to it before the prudish English Ambassador, Bulstrode Whitelocke, whispering into his reddening ears that Belle’s ‘inside’ was ‘as beautiful as her outside’. Her insinuations quickly ossified into supposed fact, and before long it was widely believed that the Queen was a lesbian, or possibly, in mitigating afterthought, a hermaphrodite. Her reluctance to marry added weight to the charge – had not the Count Palatine been trailing on his leash, unfed, for years behind her? – 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 a roomful of courtiers eager for scandal and impatient for an heir, all betokened clear sexual aberration.

Christina did nothing to quench the little flames, declaring in round terms her aversion to the idea of sex with a man. ‘I could not bear to be used by a man the way a peasant uses his fields,’ she said. At the same time, it was clear that neither modesty nor timidity had prompted her attitude. Her coarse language, though she herself regarded it as a natural Swedish defect, was the cause of frequent comment. She was fond of bawdy jokes, too, and was not above teasing the maidenly Belle. She led her one day to the chamber of Claude Saumaise, a Frenchman and a favourite of the Queen who had absented himself from some scholarly rendezvous on the pretext of illness. They found him sitting up in bed with a risqué book in his hand. Recognizing its title, Christina disingenuously asked Belle to read a passage aloud from it. Belle began confidently, but was soon blushing and stammering, to a loud roar of laughter from the Queen, and a quiet smirk from Saumaise.

Christina was clearly fond of Belle, and may even have loved her, but she did not refrain from making use of this most innocent friend in her ongoing battle with Chancellor Oxenstierna. For some time Belle had been engaged to his son, Bengt, but Christina persuaded her to break off the engagement, and to marry instead Jakob Casimir De la Gardie, Magnus’ younger brother. A story went the rounds that, during the wedding celebrations, the Queen ordered all the guests to take off their clothes and dance – at least – in the nude. The story is mere gossip, but that it could even be suggested reveals something of the reputation that Christina had by now acquired.

Belle’s own epitaph was not happy. There was no real affection between Jakob and herself, and even after the wedding, she continued to live with the Queen. She had three children, but all died in infancy, and within a very few years she became a widow. Thereafter, despite Christina’s continuing affection for her, Belle’s young life declined into illness and sadness.

Talk of Christina’s lesbian tendencies, meanwhile, did not recede. It was grounded in at least partial truth, which was recognized, if reluctantly, by some of those closest to her. Her two uncles, Count Johann Kasimir and the Grand Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, had long hoped that she would marry Karl Gustav. But by the time Christina was twenty, Gyllenhjelm at least had acknowledged that the marriage was unlikely. He urged Christina instead to seize her chance to choose an heir if she would not choose a husband. ‘If Your Majesty does not marry,’ he wrote, ‘you must act in good time to secure the succession for a certain family.’ His reference was to the Queen’s Palatine cousins: the bridegroom manqué, Gyllenhjelm hoped, might yet wear a Swedish crown. In either place, he would be a powerful counterweight to the great noble families, and in particular the Oxenstiernas, who might otherwise mould the monarchy to their own liking, or even dispense with it altogether. Moreover, it was they who had ousted Karl Gustav’s German father from his position as Grand Treasurer. The father’s revenge would be rich indeed if the son after all should ascend the Swedish throne, not as the Queen’s consort, but as King in his own right. Christina did not disagree. She was very willing to assume her uncle’s attitude, which put a rational face on her own antagonism towards the Chancellor, and she wrote to her uncle that there were some, she believed, who would be only too happy to feed Karl Gustav ‘a dose of Italian soup’ to get rid of him once and for all. She made no formal statement about the marriage, but allowed it to be generally understood, by all but the would-be bridegroom himself, that in due course it would take place.

In due course the anxious Chancellor challenged her on the subject. The talk had been going on for long enough, he declared. Was there really any substance to it? The Queen’s marriage was a matter of the greatest importance to the state. The Senate should have a say in it. They should at least be kept properly informed, and not have to wait to hear the latest story from the fishwives and gossipmongers about the town.

The Queen began with a denial, or rather with a confirmation. It was true that she had intended to marry Karl Gustav, but she had changed her mind. She was not going to marry him. She had in fact no wish to marry at all. However, she did intend to make him Commander-in-Chief in Germany. The Chancellor called her bluff. The Count was German himself, he objected, or at least his father was, which amounted to the same thing. Command of the Swedish armies could not be entrusted to a foreign hand. The only way his loyalty could be assured was for the Queen to marry him. Christina stumbled: she was not going to marry the Count, she declared, indeed she was not going to marry anyone. However, if she did marry anyone, it would be the Count. In fact, yes, since the Chancellor was asking, yes, she was going to marry him, in fact, yes, they were already engaged.

The news was soon out, leaving no one more surprised than the fiancé himself. He had time to take a few elated steps before being interrupted by a private communication from the Queen, informing him that the supposed engagement was no more than a ruse to increase his own public standing. If he were generally believed to be her future husband, his appointment as Commander-in-Chief would be the more readily approved.

He quickly sought a clarifying interview with her, to which she slowly agreed. It took six months to bring it about, and it was not, in the end, the private discussion that Karl Gustav had requested. Instead, Christina insisted that Magnus De la Gardie and Johan Matthiae, her former tutor, should be present throughout. With two other men in the room, it seems, the Count was less likely to become passionate or desperate. Here, as on the battlefield, there was a precarious safety in numbers.

She managed one decisive statement. She was not going to be bound by promises she had made as a young girl. At the same time she didn’t want to take away the Count’s last hope, but she was not going to marry him unless reasons of state made it absolutely necessary. If she didn’t marry him, she would see that he became her successor, though if she couldn’t persuade the Estates to agree to this, she would marry him after all. In any case she would give him a final answer within the next five years.

Karl Gustav’s response was manly. He protested his love for the Queen, and declared that the succession proposal was of no interest to him. He would accept no consolation prizes. If she would not marry him, he would leave Sweden and never return.

The Queen told him not to be ridiculous. He was indulging in romantic fantasies, she said. He should count himself honoured that she had even considered him as a possible husband. Even if he died before she made up her mind, it would still have been a great honour for him, as everyone would acknowledge. But she accepted that he was fond of her, and agreed in the end that he could continue to plead his cause – though not in person. He was to declare his love in letters to his father and to Johan Matthiae. They could pass the messages on to her. And he must leave immediately to assume command in Germany. And above all, he must pretend that she had agreed to marry him. This would make it easier for him to succeed her, if she should die.

Karl Gustav’s response was human. He became ill, plagued with constant headaches and fainting fits. Christina did not relent, and so, defying the Chancellor’s anti-German insinuations, he sought consolation in the time-honoured Swedish way: he took to drinking heavily, then turned his mind to soldiering.

But from his post in Germany, the young Commander-in-Chief sent pleading and desperate letters, not to Christina but, as she had instructed, to his father and to Johan Matthiae. If the Queen would not marry him, he wrote, he would exile himself from Sweden, seeking a sad alternative fortune at the hands of kinder princes. Some, at least, believed that his suit was not yet lost. He received encouraging letters from Magnus De la Gardie, the friend of his youth and now his brother-in-law, who had much to gain if the marriage could be achieved. ‘You must risk everything to win her,’ wrote Magnus. ‘Remember, fortune favours the brave!’ It was easy advice from a man who had never himself risked very much, and Karl Gustav had no need of it in any case. By threatening to leave Sweden forever, he had already risked everything. Apart from his country, his family, the castle at Stegeborg, the promise of wealth, the crown itself, he had nothing else to risk, save his own life, and this he had already risked many times in battle in Christina’s name.

Christina’s hesitancy was not the result of callousness. It was not a cat-and-mouse game that she was playing for her own perverse pleasure. There were gains to be made in championing the Palatine family in the teeth of opposition from Axel Oxenstierna and his supporters. Karl Gustav’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief was a slap in the Chancellor’s face, just as Magnus’ appointment to Paris had been. But the hardest slap that Christina could give would have been to marry Karl Gustav. Unlike her, he had brothers and sisters. His own rise would be followed by a train of honours and riches for them all, advancing them at once from dependency to dynasty and demoting the Oxenstiernas to a permanent second place.

Christina hesitated to marry Karl Gustav not because she did not love him, but because she did. It was not the love of a woman for a man, and so it could not be the love of a wife for her husband. Rather, it was the sturdy old love of a childhood friend, of a comrade-in-youthful-arms, of a brother in all but name. It was a love that continued despite things, not because of things. Christina saw, as clearly as anyone, how advantageous the match would be to the family that had been in effect her own family, to the uncle who had welcomed her as one of his own, to the girls and boys who had played with her and fought with her and grown to adulthood with her, to the people who had given her her only sense of belonging. Marriage to Karl Gustav would have been a perfect ending to her childhood’s only idyll, and it would have made him happy, too. This she saw as she told him to wait, to keep his hope alive, to do this or that beforehand, to prepare the way. But she could not marry, and this she saw at the same time, saw it as she told him that she had changed, that she could not keep her girlish promises, that she would console him with an army, with a fortune, with a crown.

Karl Gustav loved Christina in the same unassailable way. Because of it, he endured more than ten years of her ebbing and flowing, endured the prodding of his friends and the sniggering of his enemies. He may have loved her, too, in the simpler way that a man loves a woman. He may have wanted her for his wife, to found a family, to be with him through his days and his nights. Whatever its nature, Karl Gustav’s love for Christina was a very great love. In the years that followed, its urgent flame would fade to the quieter glow of loyalty, of kindness, protectiveness, and patience, but despite myriad gusts of provocation, it was never to be extinguished.