Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric

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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.’

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

Acorn Beneath an Oak (#ulink_44766457-e563-5013-be7a-616009cc1477)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.