Source:
The Sibyl of the North: The Tale of Christina, Queen of Sweden, pages 19 to 29, by Faith Compton Mackenzie, 1931
The account:
Gustavus Adolphus was killed in the battle of Lützen on November 6, 1632, in the fourteenth year of the Thirty Years' War. Wallenstein had consulted the astrologers, and finding that the stars were hostile to Gustavus, he decided to give battle. There was a dense fog through which Gustavus rode at lightning speed at the head of his cavalry. His arm was shattered by a musket-ball, and as he was being led away by an attendant he was shot in the back. There are many theories as to the hand which dealt this death-blow. Arckenholtz is convinced it was the hand of a traitor. Partly because of the fog, and partly because of his great speed, there were few witnesses of his death. The Duc de Saxe Lauenbourg was with him, and is one of those inculpated. A curious story came from Saxony fifty-three years afterwards. An old man confessed that he had been with Gustavus when he was wounded, that he had shot him with his pistol and stolen the spectacles that Gustavus always used for short sight. When he confessed, he delivered up the spectacles to his confessor, from whom they were bought by a Swedish gentleman, M. André Groedging, and deposited in the Swedish archives. This tale is legendary, but is less revolting than the notion of a trusted officer being the murderer.
The appearance of the King's charger, galloping with blood-stained saddle through their ranks, announced to the Swedes that their beloved leader was dead. When the battle was over and search was made for his body it was found buried beneath a heap of dead, stripped, robbed, and covered with blood, trampled almost out of all recognition by horses' hoofs.
Christina was six when her father died, and, though her grief at the time was passionate, when, two years later, his body was brought in state to Sweden, the remembrance of him had faded, and as she remarks herself, "children who expect to inherit a throne are easily consoled for the loss of a father". Besides, two years is as long as eternity to a child of eight. Not only were the tedious ceremonies in which she had to take part exceedingly irksome, but a new development in her relations with her foolish mother threatened to cast a blight over the rest of her childhood.
After persistently neglecting the child whose sex she so deeply resented, Marie Eleanore suddenly assumed, after the death of her husband, an exaggerated maternal attitude which demanded the continuous presence of Christina at her side. This would have been tiresome under any circumstances, but the extravagant mourning which became simply an unpleasant form of self-indulgence and the excessive affection lavished upon herself were more than Christina could bear. She writhed under her mother's caresses. Her early childhood had been spent in the company of men — big men, too, the pick of Sweden. The Princess Palatine, the only woman with whom she had been on intimate terms, was strong-minded, not given to vapours and sentimentality. Marie Eleanore's display of feminine weakness was something new and revolting. Christina could not endure this kind of thing, and as she grew older she had less and less toleration for women. She once said she liked men not so much because they were men as because they were not women. Marie Eleanore was no doubt partly responsible for her daughter's impatience with the average of her sex. Christina had very much the point of view of the homosexual male in regard to women. There were certain ladies distinguished for their beauty or wit whom she admired almost beyond the bounds of what is compatible with admiration. The average female — la donna che pensa con l'utero — bored and disgusted her, but she readily admitted her usefulness, and the ladies-in-waiting she dragged about Europe with her were poor, homely creatures whom she treated with the generosity of a slave-owner.
She even denied woman the capacity of governing a kingdom, and does not exempt herself from the indictment, though she does not mention Queen Elizabeth. All women, she says, who have reigned, or pretended to reign, have made themselves ridiculous in one way or another. At sixty-three, looking back at her ten years' reign over Sweden, what particularly was in her mind when she wrote that paragraph in the biography which, though it extended no farther than her eighth year, showed signs of being nothing more than a justification of herself before a censorious world? If she had not been intimidated by the clamour of the pornographists what a biography she could have written — if their calumnies had not driven her to the other extreme in self-defence! It would have ranked with Casanova or Benvenuto, if she could have written as she talked, and told her tale freely with her keen and fiery wit.
.......
Marie Eleanore imprisoned herself and her daughter in candle-lit rooms hung with black. In these rooms hideous dwarfs and buffoons crept and capered; the heart of Gustavus Adolphus reposed in a coffer in the very room where Christina lay through long, uneasy nights beside her mother. The velvety walls were full of dark shadows. It was not surprising that Christina welcomed the hours of her lessons, when she could take refuge in her tower and bury herself in study, spurred on by the tutors who helped her to forget that dismal room below where dwarfs bobbed and wambled, tapers flared, and a mournful woman in sable draperies hung about her neck and bathed her resisting head with tears.
This could not go on, and it was obvious that Christina's nerves were affected by such an unnatural existence. Though Gustavus Adolphus had expressly ordered that she should not be under her mother's influence, it was hardly possible, immediately after his death, to deny his widow access to the child, who, she now declared, was all that was left to her in life. Once the child was yielded, to release her was difficult. Any attempt at a change brought on a storm of tears and entreaties from the Queen-Mother which it was hard to resist, especially as the Grand Chancellor was still in Germany and his authority lacking.
So for two years Christina shared her mother's life, ensured her caresses, her moods and her persistent mourning, until Axel Oxenstierna returned from Germany, and Marie Eleanore herself provided an excellent loop-hole by criticizing the education of her daughter. Here was an opportunity which the Regents were not slow in taking. They could not, they said, allow any interference with the education of the Queen. The minute instructions left by her father were sacred, and were being carried out faithfully. (All, it must be admitted, but the clause relating to the Queen-Mother.) Christina was restored to the guardianship of her uncle, Prince Palatine, and his wife, and Marie Eleanore retired in a rage to her castle at Gripsholm, in Sudermania. Christina was glad to be back among her cousins. Her favourite was Charles Gustavus who, she decided, should eventually be her husband.
And now the education began in good earnest. Matthaie found his religious instruction no easy matter. Christina, from babyhood, accepted nothing without question; she was born a sceptic, and such problems as the following must have presented themselves often to the devoted teacher. In her eighth year she was taken to hear the annual sermon on the Day of Judgment. Horrified, she demanded of Matthaie why she had not been warned of this. Would it happen to-night, and what would become of her? Matthaie soothed her with some conventional hope that if she were good she would go to Paradise. The second year she was sarcastic about it, and the third year she laughed and asked if all the rest of religion was as much of a fable as this Day of Judgment which never came. Her teacher rebuked her sternly for this, and even threatened her with the whip, at which, she says, she quelled him with a glance; but that day, whatever belief she may have had in her father's religion died. She says she invented one of her own, and though for form's sake she attended the dreary Lutheran church, her example was not of much use to her subjects, for she played with her dogs or read books throughout the interminable sermons.
If she was difficult on the religious question, she made amends to her tutor in her enthusiasm for the Classics. She soon mastered enough Greek and Latin to enjoy reading them in the original, and by the time she was fourteen she was enjoying Cicero, Livy, Tacitus and the rest, as well as speaking and writing French, German, Italian, Spanish and, of course, Latin and Greek. Science, which was also Matthaie's province, she regarded as a recreation rather than a study, and she showed as early as this the passion for rare books and manuscripts that ultimately made her library one of the most famous in Europe. She studied twelve hours a day when possible, because she liked it. There was no forcing by her tutors — it was not necessary. "I had an insatiable desire to know everything", she says. "Tout savoir!"
In spite of this bookishness she was not a prig. If Minerva occupied one side of the medal, on the other was Diana. She was one of the finest riders in Sweden. There was no horse she could not master. Hours were spent in the saddle in man's habit — sometimes ten at a stretch. She would throw herself on the bare ground for rest, regardless of heat or cold or lack of food, drinking nothing but spring water. Wine or beer were odious to her, and she was once chastised for stealing the dew water intended for her mother's toilet, because she was given nothing but wine to drink when under her care. Chanut says in his Memoirs that she only slept five hours, and Christina alters this in the margin to "three hours". No one could persuade her to spare herself, and when her ladies- (and gentlemen-) in-waiting began to yawn she would send them all to bed. She slept little, not because she needed little sleep, but because all her hours were precious. So many were occupied with State business that there was not time for her books, her horses, her dogs, her hunting.
The eye of all Sweden, and soon of all Europe, was upon her, and she was duly conscious of it, and enjoyed it obviously. Conceited, vain, arrogant, egocentric — all these she was, but she never had a smug moment.
Equally important and as much enjoyed as her studies with Matthaie were the hours spent daily with the Grand Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, when he instructed her in her duties as ruler of her people, in statecraft and the conduct of war. She astounded him by her precocious insight. She discussed the most complicated problems of the war situation with a breadth of vision and understanding seldom found in a woman, much less in a child of ten. She had never known anything but a state of war, and while she was sitting at the feet of her great preceptor, her country, whose main army had been almost annihilated at Nördlingen in 1634, was re-establishing itself as an invincible Great Power, partly by the genius of Oxenstierna himself, who bought off Poland with a twenty-six years' truce, arranged a large subsidy from France, and appointed John Banér Commander-in-Chief. The victory of Wittstock followed, and under Banér the army regained what it had lost since the death of Gustavus Adolphus. In 1640 the health of the leader began to fail. Christina wrote to her uncle:
"Banér is dangerously ill and in all human probability will not recover. Nobody troubles about this here. They think they can find someone to take his place, but men such as he are not shaken out of one's sleeve. Things will go ill if Banér dies. ..."
She was partially right. When Banér died, in 1641, the Swedish army went to pieces again, much as it did at the death of Gustavus Adolphus. Mutiny and corruption spread like a plague. But Sweden's stock of great leaders was not yet exhausted. Lennart Torstensson, "the equal of Banér in genius, his superior in energy, mastering by the greatness of his soul a body wasted by captivity and disease", was called from his retirement to save Sweden and her army. This brilliant soldier, what was known as Blixten, from his swift and incalculable movements in action, had been page to Gustavus Adolphus in early days, and at twenty-seven was in command of the Swedish artillery in the battle of Breitenfeld, when the King himself had commanded the right wing. A whole day's battle it had been, and had marked the turning-point of the Thirty Years' War, and had raised Sweden to the rank of a Great Power. In a later action Torstensson was taken prisoner for nearly a year, which helped to shatter his health. But he was back doing great things with Banér until 1641, when he was compelled to retire from ill-health — he was a martyr to gout — and was made a Senator, and no doubt expected to end his days peacefully in the Riksdag. But scarcely two months had passed when Banér died, and Torstensson was recalled to be Generalissimo of the armies. His arrival with fresh forces and money put life into the army, and the period of his command was a series of brilliant engagements (during most of which he was carried about in a litter) culminating in the decisive victory of Leipzig, in 1642. No sooner was the situation improving in Germany than trouble with Denmark, which had long been threatening, was brought to a head indirectly by no less a person than Marie Eleanore, the Queen-Mother, who had been sulking and plotting in her castle at Gripsholm since she had been deprived of all power over Christina.
It is not really surprising that she sulked. From her point of view it was monstrous that she should be ignored so completely by the guardians of the young Queen. After all, she was her mother, and she had been the adored wife of Sweden's greatest ruler and a figure of some importance. The situation was humiliating indeed. She had never loved Sweden; now she hated it, and certainly hit upon an effective revenge. There was one person who appreciated her situation, and that was the elderly but still vital King Christian IV of Denmark. Her flight from Gripsholm was melodramatic and absurd. She spent several days in elaborate preparation for it, and then shut herself up with one lady-in-waiting in a room opening on to the castle grounds, on the pretext that she wished to meditate and fast. At dead of night she and her companion crept to where a carriage was awaiting them, posted to Nyköping, where a sloop took them on board a Danish man-of-war sent by Christian, who was fondly awaiting her on the island of Gotland. At least gossip said it was fondly. Whatever the motive for this "tender pilgrimage", it might as well have been made quite openly, as no one in Sweden had the least objection to her departure on whatsoever pretext. But the fact that she had been aided secretly in her flight by Denmark was just what was necessary to unloose the flood of hatred and jealousy which had so long been on the point of overflowing. The story of this jealousy is too long to tell here; it goes back to Knut, and Harald Blue Tooth, and a contributary cause had always been the control of the Baltic.
Oxenstierna sent secret instructions to Torstensson who was in Moravia, and rushed his armies in an incredibly short time across Prussia and the Danish frontier. In a lightning flash Jutland was occupied by the Swedish army. King Christian straightway set about himself the equipping of his navy, and in June, 1644, met the Swedish fleet that was to take Torstensson to the islands, and the great sea battle of Kolberger Heide, which lasted ten hours, was fought, with the heroic old King standing on the quarter-deck throughout it, though an exploding gun wounded him in thirteen places and he lost an eye. This battle of Jutland was as indecisive as a later famous one. Both sides claimed the victory. A few months afterwards, another tremendous fight gave the victory to Sweden, and Denmark was obliged to give in. Oxenstierna was for pressing hard terms, but here Christina's individual judgment is clearly shown. She could not but be moved by the tragedy of the fine old King who, in spite of his sixty-eight years, braved the fury of desperate engagements only to be vanquished. She was inclined to be a generous victor. And not for sentimental motives only. Her political foresight prompted her to make a peace reasonable enough not to be broken. No one was to be trusted in those days when war hung like a miasma over Europe. And in any further trouble who would not be glad to side against Sweden with her dangerous Baltic supremacy? Oxenstierna was obliged to recognize the justice of Christina's point of view, and when he returned from the peace conference at which France had been a mediator, Christina made him a Count, a high dignity in Sweden, endowed him with a large estate, and made a remarkable speech in his praise in the Senate.
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Above: Kristina.
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Above: Maria Eleonora.
Above: Faith Compton Mackenzie.
Notes: Compton Mackenzie's comment about Kristina's view of women being similar to the view "the homosexual male" might have of women has caught me off guard, but I'm not surprised because she was writing this in the 1930s, a time when homosexuality was more marginalised and even seen as a psychological or psychiatric disorder or disturbance, which it is not. Although they naturally do not feel any romantic or sexual attraction to them, it is not at all unusual for gay men to have great admiration for women or to have close and strong platonic bonds with the women in their lives.
Kristina did not live to be 63; she only lived for four months after turning 62 (she started writing her autobiography in June 1681, when she was 54½). Although she was born in 1626 and died in 1689, it is sometimes forgotten that she was born in December, the very last month of the year.
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