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

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

Pallas of the North (#ulink_2ed7fe14-170a-5a63-83ee-e46374953134)

In the spring of 1649, the fabulous collection of the Emperor Rudolf, pushed and pulled all the way from Prague, was brought ashore at Stockholm, and Christina found herself mistress of one of the finest cultural treasures in Europe. It was a splendid crowning of many smaller efforts of plunder and purchase, the work of more than a century, as successive rulers had brought home piece after piece of beautiful tinder to stoke the Swedes’ reluctant aesthetic fires. Christina’s father had been the most determined of them, to the extent of leaving two of his best generals hostage in Bavaria for the sake of his newly looted Holbein canvases.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Holbeins, along with works by Lucas Cranach and many other German and Dutch masters, were sufficient in number and in quality to form the basis of a first Swedish national collection, installed during Christina’s childhood in the Tre Kronor Castle. Though she was quick to appreciate her father’s methods of acquisition, she was slower to appreciate the works themselves; the restrained northern painters held little appeal for her, and she was able to give many fine canvases away without so much as a backward glance.

But whether she liked the paintings or not, they were important to her. A certain level of cultural life was necessary if Sweden’s national prestige were to be maintained, or indeed even acquired – there was a vast distance to be covered before the Swedes could compare with most of their northern neighbours, let alone with the richly cultured southern lands of Spain or France or, above all, Italy. Plundering was a quick, but not necessarily cheap, way of building up collections; armies were as costly as marble and canvas, and victory was not always assured. Besides, no one would fight for a sculpture or a painting; booty of this kind was unpredictable, to be seized opportunistically like windfall apples from the highest branches. No monarch could afford to presume upon it, and neither did Christina. Even as a young girl, tantalized by ambassadors’ tales of beautiful and brilliant things, she had sent emissaries abroad to seek out books and works of art. One envoy went as far as Egypt, lending his hand in excavations for the remnants of the ancient world. Others scoured the studios and libraries of Europe, unearthing sculptures and drawings and a great many books and manuscripts for the avid young Queen, whose plundering streak was strong enough for her to leave many bills unpaid.

It prevented her, too, from building up her collections in any systematic way. Though she did request specific books, to match her developing intellectual interests, her agents scouting for antiquities and works of art bought more or less at their own discretion, often sending back things that were not to Christina’s taste; ten paintings by Gerrit Dou, for instance, bought at considerable cost by her agent Silfvercrona in Holland, were soon passed on to Silfvercrona’s family. The Prague cornucopia did not change her approach to the northern schools of painting, though it contained many eloquent examples of it, but it did provide a concrete elaboration of the Renaissance ideas which had framed the minds of her own teachers. It was largely within that tradition that Christina was now forming her own view of the world.

The Emperor Rudolf had collected not only paintings and sculptures, but also objets d’art and all sorts of curiosities, sublime and ridiculous, inanimate and live – the lion now brought ashore for Christina was the lonely representative of a once great menagerie. Caravaggio canvases and Dürer woodcuts had overlooked displays of tools and shells and bits and pieces, including nails said to be from Noah’s Ark and a jawbone supposedly belonging to one of the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey. Rudolf had acquired many spectacular pieces, but not primarily so that they might be admired. Instead, the thousands of individual items were all intended to be understood together as a single entity, a complete representation of all the things and ideas in the material world. Together, they were to reveal the harmony of the created universe itself. The myriad items were almost like the words of a lost language; if enough of them could be collected, the links between them might be discerned, and the language of the universe might be finally understood.

This ‘pansophist’ idea underlying the Emperor’s great collection had been part of the received wisdom of his day, and it had not yet given way to the ideas of the empirical scientists, who instead were learning to think of the natural world as a vast series of discrete phenomena. At a time when it still seemed possible to find and categorize every single thing, whether natural or artificial, a collection served as a kind of ‘encyclopedia of the visible world’. It was important to complete it, for without every piece, the overall meaning of the universe itself could not be deciphered. Collecting was a kind of ‘practical alchemy’ which, in its highest form, could reveal the hidden essence of things.

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Though she was well versed in pansophist ideas, and she was to look to other aspects of pansophism to guide her own spiritual path, Christina had no wish to build a collection in this grand Renaissance way. In her grandfather’s day, when the Emperor was acquiring his host of objects, any Swedish noble wishing to follow suit would simply have been too poor to do so, and the haphazard selection of items looted or bought en masse