Читать книгу Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric - Veronica Buckley - Страница 14

Karl Gustav’s dogged love was not the only recurrent theme of Christina’s early reign. Problems of state recurred, too, on a larger scale and at a faster pace than the young Queen could hope to manage them. Pride in her own capacities and resentment of older and wiser heads made the problems worse than they might have been, and hindered their solution.

The first problem was money, or rather, a serious lack of it. It was not all Christina’s fault. It had begun nobly enough, years before, with the drive to improve public services. Her own great father had set it in train, building schools and hospitals, endowing universities, developing the post office, laying new streets, boosting local industries. In every enterprise he had been assisted by his eminently capable Chancellor, who had carried on the work through the years of the regency, creating in the process a proud and beautiful city worthy of its standing as a European capital. To raise the money for such vast reform, Gustav Adolf had sold what belonged to the crown: land, industries, the right to raise revenue. He fully expected to regain what he had sold by way of indirect taxation – the land and the industries and everything else would be more productive, it was presumed, in any hands other than the crown’s. His Chancellor approved the sales, calling them ‘pleasing to God and hurtful to no man – and not provocative of rebellion’. They seemed to be a way of modernizing the state’s finances, replacing the old herring-and-rawhide payments with efficient cash in hand.

For more than thirty years, all the years of Gustav Adolf’s reign, and all the years of the regency, it worked. But it provided a dangerous precedent for Christina’s extravagant temperament, and in time she came to view the crown’s assets like the loaves and fishes on the Mount of Olives – miraculously renewable, no matter how many hands dipped into the basket. Moreover, she could not distinguish, or would not distinguish, between the crown’s property and what belonged to her personally. It was all endlessly available for public works or for presents to favourites or for libraries or paintings or armies or orchestras. She used it all, sometimes justly, rewarding a soldier’s bravery or a civil servant’s hard work, but more often at random, and always more lavishly than was needed. She had little understanding of finance, and she made no attempt to learn.

Reserves soon dwindled. The quickest way of raising more money, Christina saw, was to sell noble titles, and she began to sell them by the dozen. When all the old ones were gone, she created new ones, handing them out impartially to the high-born and the low, until steady citizens were heard to complain that a man could now ‘leap into the highest posts straight from his pepper-bags or his dung-cart’.¹ Within a few years, she had increased sevenfold the number of Sweden’s earls, swamped the nine old barons with forty-one new ones, and almost trebled the number of noble families. ‘We now have arms and escutcheons by the hundred,’ wrote one disgusted courtier. ‘The court is overrun by the mob they call counts.’² Worst of all, most of the country’s new aristocrats were not even Swedish: artists and merchants and mercenary soldiers arrived to claim their laurels from the Baltic states, from England and Scotland, from Germany and the Netherlands and, especially, from France. Townsfolk and peasants alike muttered that there were altogether ‘too many nobles and too many foreigners’ in the country. Some at least had paid for their new positions, but just as many received them simply as tokens of the young Queen’s regard. Extravagance, it seemed, was her credo. ‘Magnificence and liberality are the virtues of the great,’ she wrote. ‘They delight everyone.’

But there were many who were far from delighted. For with the noble titles went, too often, noble land, or rather, crown land sold to provide an instant family estate for the new-made aristocrats. It seemed that the number of nobles would keep on growing, that the Queen would continue to sell off land or give it away until there was nothing left. At the crown’s land registers, where titles had once changed more slowly than the pace of generations, the clerks could not cope with the sudden flow of transfers. Serious mistakes were made; some land was sold twice over, and one man, with an entrepreneurial spirit lacking elsewhere in the country, made a tidy profit selling land that did not even exist.

As the nobility grew, so the crown’s assets shrank. Christina attempted to redress the balance by raising taxes, a measure that was bound to be of limited effect when there were so few people to be taxed in the first place. Worse, the many ennoblements had been continually reducing the numbers liable to taxation at all; nobles paid no tax, and their peasants paid taxes to them, rather than to the crown. It was a simple equation – more nobles, less tax revenue – but Christina did not master it.

The great families themselves, nobles ancient and modern, did nothing to halt the downward spiral. Official rewards and simple plunder during the long years of war had expanded their understanding of the good life, and they now began to emulate their extravagant young Queen in a hedonistic parade of new wealth. Once modest to the point of discomfort, their homes and their habits were now thoroughly up to date. They lived as fashionably, and owed as much money, as any of their compeers in France or Italy. Over the years of the regency, palaces and manors had been built in town and country to house their new art collections and their new aspirations to cultured living. Most magnificent of them all was the home of Jakob and Ebba De la Gardie, Magnus’ father and mother, which stood proudly in the middle of Stockholm. Adorned in the Italian style with sculptures and fountains, it was named, appropriately, Makalös – matchless. Other magnates tried nonetheless to compete, among them the Chancellor himself, whose own impressive red palace stood boldly facing the city’s cathedral. Inside the great new houses, tapestries warmed the walls, lovely objects drew eye and hand, and many a looted German grandee looked sternly out from his portrait, while the candlelight danced on the new silk gown of his captor’s wife or daughter.

The real problem was that Sweden – isolated, sparsely populated, half-frozen – simply did not produce very much. Although Gustav Adolf and Oxenstierna and Christina, too, had encouraged the potentially valuable mining industry and promoted foreign trade, including the slave trade,³ it was not enough to meet much more than the people’s daily needs. All was consumed in the prosaic traffic of hand to mouth. Except in the leanest years, most simple folk lived better than their counterparts in other lands, but there was no general surplus for the kind of luxuries now demanded in the towns and in the manor houses. Moreover, most Swedes were too used to thinking in terms of farming or soldiering to turn their minds to commerce, and the country owed what modest industrial success it had so far achieved mainly to foreign entrepreneurs, almost all of them Dutchmen.⁴ Their influence encouraged some of Sweden’s governors to view the innovative and prosperous Netherlands as a possible model for their own economic advancement. A South Sea Company was set up, and an Africa Company, and favourable conditions ensured for adventurous investors at home, but those who might have taken advantage of them failed to do so, and for the huge deficit in Christina’s crown revenues, it was in any case too little, and too late.

The Queen, whether really at fault or no, was an easy target for criticism. Voices were raised against her, and pamphlets slyly printed, and one summer Sunday, as she knelt at prayer in the castle chapel, a man armed with two naked daggers slipped through the congregation and ran towards her. The two guards standing in front of the Queen, despite their spears and battleaxes, were unable to stop him; he knocked them both to the ground, snapping the spear of one before jumping over the other. Their captain, standing beside the Queen apparently in pious reverie, had completely failed to notice the commotion. Christina gave him a shove, and he leapt into belated action, seizing the assailant by the hair. On questioning, he was found to be insane; he was spared punishment, but was carried off to a madhouse.

The attack lent an urgency to the government’s demands that Christina should marry as soon as possible. She was already aged twenty; she had not been free of illness; now there had been an attempt on her life. If she should die without heirs, how would the succession be assured? How could they avoid dissension, civil war, foreign interference, a Catholic king? Christina responded wryly, equivocally, angrily, but always without committing herself. From Brandenburg, her frustrated cousin, the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, continued his suit via envoys and agents, who never in fact managed to see the Queen. She was too often strategically absent on hunting trips, and the men she had designated to deal with the envoys, her uncle, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, and Magnus’ father, Jakob De la Gardie, both appeared to be ‘tending their estates in the country’ with annoying frequency. In Copenhagen, the King’s second son, encouraged by Maria Eleonora, began to hope for success where his brother had failed; in due course, he failed too.

Though she ignored – and worsened – the country’s financial problems, and delayed the question of her marriage, there were other matters which pressed on Christina daily, and which she could not dismiss. Privately and publicly, in court and in government, she encountered the same antagonisms between the crown and the nobles, and between the nobles and the commoners’ Estates, that her father had known, and that he had never fully overcome. During his long absences on campaign, almost every year of his twenty-year reign, Gustav Adolf had left the government in the hands of the great noble families, ensuring their loyalty by allowing them to monopolize the best offices almost as if they were their own personal property. This had maintained a long internal stability, but it had worked against able men of humbler background, who would have preferred instead some form of meritocracy such as earlier Swedish kings had had, a ‘rule of secretaries’ – essentially, men like themselves who had made their way up through talent and effort, who could govern the kingdom with the monarch’s support, or indeed, without it. During the years of the regency, without the King’s charisma to bind them together, the two sides had diverged more sharply. Many who were themselves of noble birth had become openly hostile to the powerful old families, the Brahes and De la Gardies and the Banérs and the Bielkes and the Sparres and, above all, the Oxenstiernas, who dominated the government and the court. Christina’s own uncles, Johann Kasimir and Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, resented and feared them, and she quickly learned to do the same – not without some reason: when an appeal case between the Oxenstiernas and the Bielkes was brought before the Senate, it quickly became apparent that every single senator was related to one or other of them, or to both.

Christina could not dispense with them, and as yet she lacked the skill to undermine them, but she struck out at them nonetheless, muddling her dislike of their influence with her own continuing rivalry with the Chancellor. In the first months of 1647, soon after her twentieth birthday, her old tutor, Johan Matthiae, now Bishop of Strängnäs and recently ennobled, unwittingly provided an opportunity for the young Queen to test her power.

As the late King had done, and as he had wished his daughter to do, Matthiae supported the idea of a single Protestant Church, uniting both Lutheran and Calvinist creeds. This kind of syncretic thinking was anathema to the adherents of Sweden’s rather narrow form of Lutheranism, among whom the Chancellor himself was counted. From his diocese in Strängnäs, Matthiae had written a book promoting Protestant unity.⁵ It had infuriated the Chancellor, and at a session of the Senate, he denounced it roundly, calling for the book to be banned and for Matthiae himself to make a formal apology before the 500 men of the Riksdag. Matthiae did so, and the Senate and the Riksdag together then demanded the outlawing of any movement prejudicial to the accepted rites; an old document of 1580, the Liber concordiae, was to set the terms thenceforth for religious observance in Sweden.

Christina seized her chance. Just as her father had done almost forty years before, she rejected their decision and refused to accept the Liber concordiae. There was nothing wrong with the Bishop’s views, she declared; indeed, her own views were the same. The Chancellor remonstrated, the Queen stood her ground, the Chancellor insisted, and the Queen burst into tears. The match was a draw, more or less: the book was not banned, but nor was it reprinted, and the Chancellor went off to his country house, muttering that the Queen was absolutely impossible, that the late King would never have behaved so imperiously, and that the Bishop was not to be trusted.

At the Tre Kronor Castle, Christina’s angry tears were dried by the kindly old Count Per Brahe, who had taken Karl Gustav’s proffered place as High Steward. Her Majesty was young, he said, and with the greatest of respect, had much to learn; she would be wise not to place all her trust in a priest – any priest, even a beloved former tutor. And if he might be so bold, Her Majesty could perhaps exercise a little more discretion in her choice of companions. That Magnus De la Gardie was altogether overstepping the bounds; he needed to learn his place. The Chancellor and the senators were experienced men; they would serve Her Majesty very well, if she could only put aside the pride of youth, and trust their judgement.

In the name of the most holy and individual Trinity: Be it known to all, and every one whom it may concern, or to whom in any manner it may belong, That for many Years past, Discords and Civil Divisions being stir’d up in the Roman Empire, which increas’d to such a degree, that not only all Germany, but also the neighbouring Kingdoms, and France particularly, have been involv’d in the Disorders of a long and cruel War…from whence ensu’d great Effusion of Christian Blood, and the Desolation of several Provinces. It has at last happen’d, by the effect of Divine Goodness, seconded by the Endeavours of the most Serene Republick of Venice…that there shall be a Christian and Universal Peace…between his Sacred Imperial Majesty, and his most Christian Majesty of France…the most Serene Queen and Kingdom of Swedeland, the Electors respectively, and the Princes and States of the Empire…and that there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles, in what place, or what manner soever the Hostilitys have been practis’d…Done, pass’d and concluded at Munster in Westphalia, the 24th Day of October, 1648.⁶

The peace, like the war, had been years in the making. Since the early 1630s, there had been sporadic attempts to secure it; many smaller truces had been made and broken. A few individuals had laid down arms of their own accord, then taken them up again as their personal interests had shifted. Wallenstein had been the most important of them, but one of Christina’s generals, too, had for a time undermined Swedish strategy by pursuing an independent peace until his attention was distracted by a pretty young German princess – hard drinking had then drained what was left of his private ambition.⁷ By the 1640s, Bohemia and the German lands had become, as it were, a vast chessboard where the powers played out their alliances and antagonisms, religious or political. Apart from the occasional Scandinavian skirmish, all Europe’s wars had become more or less ‘fused’, in Gustav Adolf’s phrase, ‘into a single war’. But in 1645, a Turkish attack on the island of Crete, then in the hands of the Venetian Republic, had finally concentrated the collective mind of Christendom, forcing the European powers to realize the external peril threatening their territories and their ideals. ‘While the Christians squabble among themselves,’ wrote an anxious Dutch poet, ‘the Turk is sharpening his sword.’⁸

The Venetians at least had perceived the threat, and had set themselves to broker a general European peace. Now, foreseeing that assistance from their coreligionists might be needed in their own struggle, they redoubled their efforts. And so it was that ‘by the Mediation and Interposition of the most illustrious and most excellent Ambassador and Senator of Venice, Aloysius Contarini Knight, who for the space of five Years, or thereabouts, with great Diligence, and a Spirit intirely impartial, has been inclin’d to be a Mediator in these Affairs’, representatives of the various powers came together at last in the German province of Westphalia. Christina, as Queen of the all-conquering Swedish armies, was a guarantor of peace along with France’s boy King, the ten-year-old Louis XIV.

Even at the negotiating table, it was not considered safe to seat Catholic and Protestant together. In consequence, the treaties were to be discussed and finally signed in two separate cities, 30 miles apart – Münster for the Emperor and his Catholic allies, Osnabrück for the Protestant powers. An exception was made for the representatives of Catholic France: evidently unable to stomach Austrian company, or perhaps Austrian food, they assembled with the Swedes and their Protestant allies in Osnabrück. By early August the main proposals had been agreed, and on the twenty-fourth of October, the treaties were finally signed.

Sweden emerged as a determined victor, with major territorial gains including control of the trade-rich Oder river and the whole of Western Pomerania, as well as huge indemnity payments and permanent representation at the German parliament.⁹ Many in Sweden felt cheated nonetheless, maintaining that the war should have been continued until the Protestant cause was victorious, or at least until more money could be exacted. Some of the clergy condemned the treaty from their pulpits, stirring up opposition to it until they were formally forbidden to do so. French gains were particularly resented, the more so as they had been largely brought about by Christina’s personal intervention. The whole of the central Rhine area and a dozen Alsatian cities passed into French hands, making a bitter mockery of Gustav Adolf’s last warning, only days before his death, that France must not be allowed to gain control of any German territory.¹⁰

France’s star had begun to rise, and its neighbour’s long bright day was drawing to a close. In a clear signal of the continuing decline of Spain’s Habsburg Empire, the United Provinces of the Netherlands finally gained their independence, and the city of Amsterdam won an important smaller victory by forcing the end of free navigation on the Scheldt river, so diverting trade away from Spanish Antwerp northward to its own burgeoning wharves. With revolts on their hands to east and west,¹¹ and continuing war with France, the Spaniards could hardly afford to press for better terms.

For the land of the first brave rebellion, it had all been in vain. There was to be no confessional liberty in Bohemia or Moravia, and no restitution of the lands confiscated from the rebels. To Prague’s many exiles there remained two simple choices: embrace Catholicism, or stay away. ‘We are abandoned,’ a despairing Comenius wrote to the Swedish Chancellor. ‘You hold our liberty in your hands, and you are handing it over to our oppressors.’¹² In France, too, the boy King Louis was ‘oblig’d to preserve in all and every one of his Countrys the Catholick Religion…and to abolish all Innovations crept in during the War’. Only in the German lands did a partial confessional tolerance prevail, a tolerance for rulers, if not for those ruled. By the principle of cuius regio eius religio, German princes might choose their religion, and their subjects might follow suit. After all the years of fighting, there would be no single faith across the continent. People stopped talking of Christendom, and began instead to speak of Europe.

It was all too much for the Pope, who saw in the treaty a certain end to the Catholic hope of a reunified Church, cherished since Luther’s first revolt more than a hundred years before. In a furious outburst, he denounced it as ‘null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and devoid of meaning for all time’.¹³ As in Stockholm, so in Rome: France’s gains were a source of particular outrage; it had been Cardinal Mazarin who, four years before, had attempted to block the Pope’s election, and the two had nursed a mutual enmity ever since. Unable to strike at France’s heart, the Pope fixed on the francophile Queen of Sweden as the object of his personal vengeance. Proclamations were pasted up in the imperial capital of Vienna, inveighing against the impostor Christina, who had stolen the crown from its rightful Polish owner. The Emperor, though in private no doubt agreeing, was readier to recognize that the time for conflict was past. He saw a different writing on the wall, and quietly had the proclamations taken down. In Münster, Cardinal Chigi, the Pope’s unhappy representative, turned at last from the negotiating table with a resigned ‘O tempora, o mores!’

But if the Pope had lost his dream of a reunited Church and Spain had lost its prosperous Dutch provinces, the greatest loss had been sustained by the people of Germany, whose homes and farms and cities had been the main theatre of the war. The ‘great Effusion of Christian Blood’ had mostly been their blood; a third of the population, possibly half, had been killed. Weapons had not been the only threat, nor often even the main one. Hunger and disease, including periodic outbreaks of plague, had claimed the lives of soldier and peasant and townsman indiscriminately. Always on the move to the next battle or the next supply area, the armies had carried their disasters with them across the increasingly ravaged land, spreading dysentery, typhus, and worse as they passed.

The treaty brought the Germans peace, but they made no other gains. By the end of 1648, much of their territory was in ruins. The western regions and the three great rivers lay in foreign hands.¹⁴ The deep disruption of war had broken the many vital bonds of ordinary daily life. In some areas, there was no trade at all. Though property could be given back and titles reconferred, the ‘general Restitution’ occasioned by the treaty had no power to recreate ‘those things which cannot be restor’d’. In the bitter aftermath, a once advancing German political culture was dashed into the parochial pieces of smaller rival states. Thenceforth they would all defer to the bold young giant, France.

And in the end, the savage tragedy of 30 years turned to dispiriting farce. When a team of weary riders arrived at last with the Emperor’s letter accepting the terms of the treaty, it was found to be in code, and their dusty saddlebags contained no key. At length the letter was deciphered, but further delay ensued: in a near parody of baroque formality, it took the next three weeks to agree the order in which the different sections of the treaty should be signed.

It was not out of pity for soldier or peasant, or concern for trade and treasuries, that Christina wanted to end the war. In later years she would be quick to suggest the use of arms when it was in her own interest to do so. But warfare was quintessentially a man’s game, and no amount of little lead soldiers on her schoolroom table could turn it into a game that she could play. Like Elizabeth I of England, she might have ‘the heart and stomach of a King’, but unlike Elizabeth, she also had Axel Oxenstierna, who had been capably directing the war for almost fifteen years. While it continued, he was bound to retain his premier position in Sweden, and bound to detract from Christina’s own authority in other matters of government. Her stratagem for the peace conference was thus a perfect complement to her tactics at home. Her aim in both was to undermine the Chancellor.

The Chancellor did not attend the conference himself. Instead, he sent his eldest son, Johan, now in his middle thirties, through whom he intended to direct the Swedish negotiations. Johan was tall and majestic, but apart from this he could not boast – although he did boast – any of his brilliant father’s qualities. He was a headstrong man, inordinately proud, hot-tempered, red-faced, fond of wine, and very fond of women. He arrived in Osnabrück at the beginning of the negotiations to a guard of honour 500 strong, with a retinue of almost 150 servants. Through the three long years of talks, every day was punctuated by trumpet fanfares announcing the rising and the setting of the Chancellor’s son, and every meal in between. They were seldom blared at the usual times; Johan gave many elaborate banquets and generally slept late into the morning. Exasperated locals rumoured that he and his men kept supplies of bitter almonds to chew during the discussions – it was supposedly the only thing that could keep them sober.

Johan was the official leader of the Swedish legation, or so he repeatedly insisted, but there was an unofficial leader as well. Not daring to override the Chancellor formally, Christina had sent a second, smaller legation headed by her late father’s representative, Johan Adler Salvius. Of modest birth, Salvius was among the very few men in Sweden who had managed to rise through the ranks to a position of national influence. Trained in law, medicine, finance, and the science of war, he had also made a fortune by the shrewd courting of a rich widow. He was now almost sixty years of age, with an impressive record of diplomacy behind him, and he was certainly better suited than Johan Oxenstierna to lead the Swedish legation in Osnabrück. But Christina had lacked the courage – and perhaps, too, the necessary support – to propose him instead of the Chancellor’s son, and so the two proceeded in parallel, or rather at cross-purposes, alternately amusing and frustrating the representatives of the other powers. Johan was directed to draw out the negotiations until certain conditions had been met; if necessary, he was to threaten a resumption of the war. Salvius was to settle for peace at any price, regardless of the Chancellor’s instructions.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the Swedes were not alone in their division of efforts: the French, too, had dual lines of counsel, each with its own spokesman. Both detested both the Swedes, who in their turn detested both the Frenchmen. The Comte d’Avaux relayed a loud disgust of the proud young Oxenstierna, ‘sitting there on his throne as if he’s about to pass judgement on the twelve tribes of Israel’. The Chancellor riposted on his son’s behalf: ‘If he writes to you in French,’ he told him, ‘write back in Swedish.’ Mistrust flourished. Christina wrote to Salvius: ‘The Chancellor is being very obliging, but I am wary of Greeks bearing gifts’, and added a postscript that he should tell her what kind of faces Johan pulled when he saw the letter. They were apparently quite remarkable, but no more so than the faces Christina herself pulled when she heard the news Salvius was spreading in Osnabrück: the Queen was about to marry, it seemed, and her husband was to be the Chancellor’s second son, Erik. A violent scene ensued in Stockholm, and a harried message was soon on its way from the innocent Chancellor to his son, urging him to make haste and deflect the rumours by finding a suitable bride. He did.

Though she took their part against the Oxenstiernas, Christina did not always feel sure of the French delegates, either: ‘I am very well acquainted with their ways,’ she wrote. ‘For the most part, it’s all just compliments. But civility won’t cost us anything – we can pay them in their own coin.’ Her own often impulsive intervention, however, ensured that France earned much more than compliments, and it even cost Christina something in a personal sense. She had wanted to have the town of Benfeld as a grand bestowal for Magnus, but the French took it along with the other Alsatian territories. Magnus had to be content with the Benfeld cannon instead – he quickly sold them to the town’s new owners.

Despite their internal rivalries, the Swedes and the French between them took the lion’s share of the treaty’s benefits, and in the end they were happy enough to sit down together at the great celebratory banquet hosted by Karl Gustav in Nuremberg. Among those present was the new-made Count of Vasaborg, Christina’s illegitimate half-brother, Gustav Gustavsson, only half-rejoicing. His blood ties to the Queen had not been enough to overcome the stain of his long service to the Chancellor, and Christina had placed no trust in him, nor had she, or the French, supported his personal claims – he had had his eye on a couple of German dioceses. Johan Oxenstierna attended the banquet, too. After sobering up, he travelled on to Pomerania, its new post-treaty governor.

The Russians, though they had not been among the combatants, enjoyed nonetheless the best of the peace celebrations. After 30 long years, they did not at first believe that the war had ended at all, and it was decided that an extravagant spectacle would be the quickest way to convince them. Consequently, in the border town of Narva, between Swedish and Russian territory, a ‘joyous day of thanksgiving’ was prepared, with religious services and feasting and cannon firing off, and particularly elaborate fireworks which could comfortably be viewed from both sides of the border.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1648, as negotiators wrangled in Münster and Osnabrück, the Swedes themselves had instigated the last important military episode of the war. Fittingly, and sadly, it took place in the beautiful city of Prague, where the conflict had started three decades earlier. Led by General Königsmarck, with Magnus alongside him, a large Swedish contingent marched unbidden into Bohemia, and by the end of July they had captured the western part of Prague on the left bank of the Vltava river, by the great Hradčany Castle. Prague was the last, symbolic bastion. For years the Swedes had been urged to retake the city by exiled Czech reformists.¹⁵ The great blaze was dying down; its last flare should illumine the poetic recapture of the ancient town where the first match had been struck.

In the newly taken area of Prague’s Minor Town stood the magnificent palace of Gustav Adolf’s nemesis, the Generalissimo Count Wallenstein, towering up from ground previously occupied by three gardens, a brick factory, and no fewer than 26 houses. Wallenstein was by now long dead, and his palace was spared devastation, but the soldiers did their best anyway to rob the nearby tomb of the Czechs’ legendary King Otakar II, who had lain undisturbed, beneath many a bitter Bohemian struggle, since his entombment centuries before. Otakar’s tomb was believed to be laden with treasure, but the Swedes found none, and vented their frustration on the King’s statue by breaking off its undistinguished pre-Habsburgian nose.

From the Minor Town they began an artillery bombardment of the Old Town across the river, and for a time it seemed they would take the whole city, but quite suddenly they stopped the attack, and, without pressing their advantage, took to plundering instead. Their orders had been countermanded, and a new, secret instruction received, from the Queen herself, that they should occupy the castle and seize all that remained of the famous collections of the Emperor Rudolf II. They did so, resisted only by the castle’s unhappy keeper, the too aptly named Miseroni. Evidently the Swedes felt they had fought enough for one day; they simply tortured him until he gave them all the keys. On the last day of August, an itemized inventory of the collections was drawn up and sent back to Stockholm, where Christina received it eagerly.

The Swedes’ decision to cease their attack and turn to plundering was a fortunate one for the invaded Bohemians. It gave them time to gather their own forces and organize some defence before the greater part of the Swedish army, under Karl Gustav’s command, could reach Prague. There was little to be gained from surrendering the city to the Swedes. It had already been agreed at the peace conference that Bohemia would remain under Habsburg rule, a Catholic territory with an hereditary, not elected, monarchy. A Swedish victory now would be too late to make any difference. Besides, many of the citizens were too young to remember what life before the revolt had been like, and after 30 years of war most were ready in any case to oppose almost any soldier apart from their own. Ironically, the Swedish army included many soldiers who were just that – Czech and other Bohemian exiles from the enforced Catholicism of Habsburg rule. The valiant Bohemian defence effort continued for three months, and in November was rewarded by an armistice, but by then the loot was gone.

For more than half a century, the vast collections of Rudolf II of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia and Hungary, had been legendary throughout Europe and beyond. By 1648, however, most of the best pieces, in fact most of all the pieces, had been dispersed. Victims of their own success, over the decades they had attracted a long succession of admirers, most happy simply to stand and gaze, but some determined to enjoy them comfortably at home. The despoliation had begun only a few years after Rudolf’s death in 1612, when some of his jewels were sold by Bohemian rebels needing to finance their war against the Habsburgs. After the famous Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, a victorious Maximilian of Bavaria had returned to Munich with 1,500 wagonloads of items from the collections. Following their own visit in 1631, the Protestant Saxons carried a further 50 wagonloads home to Dresden. Rudolf’s collections must have been phenomenal, for the items which Christina received, even after all this plunder, included almost 500 paintings, 70 bronzes, 370 scientific instruments, and 400 ‘Indian curiosities’, as well as hundreds of corals, ivories, precious stones, pieces of amber, vases and other objets d’art, thousands of medals, two ebony cabinets, and a solitary, live lion. Even so, it was not enough for Christina, who penned a hasty letter to Karl Gustav telling him not to forget Rudolf’s library. ‘It is absolutely imperative,’ she wrote, ‘that you get everything on to the water as quickly as possible and send it on here.’¹⁶

It was indeed, for everything had to be on Swedish territory before the last signatures were added to the peace treaties. If not, according to the treaties themselves, it would all have to be returned ‘to its original owner’. Karl Gustav got it all on to the Moldau river with 24 hours to spare, amid vast rejoicing. For the Swedes, the Hradčany loot represented the apogee of their takings from all the years of the war. There was enough and more to reward all the Queen’s soldiers, but the lion’s share, and the lion, found their way into Christina’s own delighted possession.

The fortunate Russians had played no part in the long-drawn-out war or the long-drawn-out peace. They had watched from the periphery as Sweden’s armies advanced across the continent, and as they had watched, so their anxiety had grown. The Swedes were old enemies of the Russians; the two had been at war for years during Gustav Adolf’s reign, and shortly before Christina’s birth her Vasa cousins had still been pursuing their own claim to the Russian throne. Russia was still a minor power, but Gustav Adolf had feared Sweden’s fate ‘if Russia should ever learn her strength’. The fear was mutual, and in the early summer of 1649, the Grand Duke Alexei of Muscovy decided that, since the Swedes had stopped fighting in the south, it would be wise to pre-empt a resumption of their interest in the east. Accordingly, a delegation of 112 diplomats was dispatched to Sweden, bearing greetings from their noble Romanov lord. Their visit was observed, and reported in some detail, by the correspondent of a Swedish-controlled news-sheet in Leipzig.¹⁷

It seems that, from their ships moored on the lovely waters of Stockholm, the Russians disembarked to be met by an assembly of the usual councillors and secretaries, as well as ‘three substantial-looking old persons’, otherwise unidentified. The following day, in an echo of her very first ambassadorial reception at the tender age of six years, the young Queen herself received them at a public audience.

The Russians appeared to have lost none of their magnificence in the sixteen intervening summers. They were dressed very richly in gold-embroidered robes interwoven with pearls, and they processed towards the Queen in stately fashion, still bearded, it seems, but without any show of the ‘wild manners’ of which she had once been forewarned. Christina remained ‘on her royal seat’, with a cushion beside her bearing her crown and orb and one of her dozen-odd sceptres, lengthened since the last Russian visit to suit her now full-grown height.

This time, too, the ambassadors had come laden with presents for her, including, as the correspondent reported, nine pieces of gold cloth, each one ‘twelve ells’ in length,¹⁸ tapestries worked in gold thread, three suits of Turkish clothes ‘and similar things’, twenty mink furs ‘for wearing indoors’, a beautiful vessel studded with rubies and turquoises, and – in a wintry echo of the lion looted from Prague for her only months before – three live mink. They brought so many presents, in fact, that it took 40 soldiers to carry them all. With them, too, came the more prosaic gifts of letters from the Grand Duke Alexei exhorting ‘eternal peace’ between their two lands, and a rather tardy apology for the several hundred soldiers who had deserted the Swedish army to join the Russians more than thirty years before.

Following the reception, the ambassadors repaired to the excellent lodgings which had been provided for them, and there, one evening shortly afterwards, they were visited by the Baron Güldenstern and a gentleman of the prominent Sparre family, whom Christina had sent along to keep them company. It seems that, by the time the two Swedes arrived, the Russians had already raised one or two glasses to drink the health of one or two people, and they were not averse now to drinking the health of Her Royal Majesty, the Queen of Sweden. This toast drunk, however, the health of the Grand Duke of Muscovy was immediately proposed by one of the Russians. The Swedes objected; this would imply an equivalent status between the Grand Duke – technically a mere prince – and their own Queen; the Grand Duke should wait until a few nobler toasts had been drunk.¹⁹ The indignant Russians stood up, or staggered up, from the table, and left the room without adieu.

The next day, a delegation from the delegation appeared ‘very solemnly’ before Christina to make a formal protest. Whether amused or annoyed by all the fuss, the Queen advised them directly to let the matter drop, and added that, if they did not, there would be no further visits from Swedish noblemen to Russian ambassadors – in future, it would be the commonfolk who would be sent to keep them company in their lodgings. Moreover, she warned, if they persisted in their protest, she would lodge her own complaint against them with the Grand Duke himself. This last threat proved to be more than enough. Their indignation evaporated with their courage, and the cowed ambassadors began to plead with the Queen; their master must absolutely not hear of the affair. She promised to say nothing, but the Grand Duke had other sources of information: in the middle of June, the whole story appeared in the Leipzig weekly news-sheet, where the Swedish correspondent noted ominously, ‘What will happen now, no one can tell.’

Christina should not in fact even have been in Stockholm to hear the Russians’ complaint. She had been expected to leave the city directly after their formal reception, to travel to Fi’holm, a day’s journey away in the bright summer weather, for the funeral of Madame Oxenstierna, the Chancellor’s wife. But the opportunity to spite the Chancellor had proved irresistible to her, more so than any Russian gold or rubies or mink, dead or alive. The night before she was due to leave for Fi’holm, she became suddenly ‘indisposed’; though a large retinue had been sent on ahead to prepare for her arrival, she announced that she would not be able to attend the funeral after all. Her transparent stratagem must have saddened Oxenstierna, or perhaps made him angry; certainly it did not convince anyone else. In Leipzig, it was noted sardonically that, once the day of the funeral had passed, Her Majesty ‘suddenly became quite well again’.

It was a petty act, unworthy of any Queen, or indeed of any adult. Determined to dim the Chancellor’s prestige, she had succeeded only in offending him, and in making herself look foolish. In so doing, Christina revealed how much she had still to learn about strength and self-indulgence, and the difference between the two.