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

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.

Warring and Peace (#ulink_651b4f33-c894-51e1-beef-727bee001762)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.