Ada Harrison's biography of Kristina, part 1

Source:

Christina of Sweden, pages 7 to 16, by Ada Harrison, 1929

https://books.google.com/books?id=xJvrtq4DCv0C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=memoires+concernant+christine+1760&source=gbs_navlinks_s

The biography:

CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN

(1626-1689)

I

CHRISTINA IN SWEDEN

SINCE HER DEATH Christina of Sweden has earned various epithets which would have displeased her. She has been called an enigma, she has been called a murderess, she has been called, in modern times, an egocentric neuropath. But she has never met with a description which would have enraged her so perfectly as that of representative woman.

Christina, throughout her life, had two profound convictions: that she was not as other women are, and that she was great. By these two lights she lived. The suggestion that she was typical and not unique, and that she was a woman and not a prodigy, would have been the most absolute insult that could be offered her.

A rapid glance at her history justifies her estimate of herself. She was crowned while still a tiny child, acted the queen almost from the moment she could speak, showed prodigies of intelligence, was proficient at every pastime, refused marriage, was converted to the Roman faith, threw up her kingdom, and rode into Rome in triumph on a white horse. Subsequently she lived there a life at once brilliant and squalid, patronised the arts, founded an academy, was credited with innumerable love affairs, committed one outrageous murder, fought with a succession of Popes, and insulted almost every person of importance with whom she came in contact.

Christina's contemporaries, dazzled by her virtuosity, heartily concurred with her. She was to them a great personage, a great wonder, and, according to religious views, either a great convert or a great scandal; certainly there was no woman like her. Posterity takes a longer and a cooler view. To us Christina's waywardly feminist make-up is typical of a number of her sex and her antics are thoroughly feminine. None the less, to us too she is great. For, apart from the accidents of her position and circumstances, we find her dowered with that peculiar intensity of nature which will not allow itself to be ignored. Though she accomplished nothing and was directed nowhere in particular, she was a force. She breathed a powerful spirit over her surroundings. She was a great character; and in those moments when she was too frivolous or too perverse to merit such a designation, she was a great and impressive oddity.

Christina of Sweden, the daughter of the great Gustavus Adolphus, who had thrust his country forward in the eyes of Europe by his magnificent leadership in the Thirty Years' War, was an unalloyed chip of her father's block. She inherited from him courage, intelligence, the royal spirit and a passion for military affairs. One of the few women in history who might actually have made a soldier, she was touched fitfully, throughout her life, by her father's splendour, but it never settled on her fairly; perhaps because she could not win it directly on the field of battle, or because splendour visits the second generation with difficulty, or because, being a woman, she was almost bound to dissipate her energy in many channels. Her shortlived bond with Gustavus was strong, and sympathy between father and daughter was instinctive.

Christina's mother, Marie Eleanore of Brandenburg, was a soft and foolish German Princess. Her nature was complementary to the Vasa male, but unendurable to the Vasa female. Christina was a child of one parent, and when that one died she might have been better left with none at all than with a mother who was more of a burden than a guardian.

She was born in 1626, a royal child, long prayed for. Sweden was at that time without an heir, so that she was prayed for in the opposite sex, and her first outrage was committed with her first appearance. Eleanore, who could bear no more children, could not forgive her daughter. Medicine and astrology and her own hopeful heart had all promised a son, and the disappointment was great. She was a woman who, deprived of a son, might have found consolation in a doll; but never was a girl less doll-like than Christina. She is said to have been ugly at birth, and hairy, and to have uttered her first cry in a strident voice that was the very note of a boy. Misled by the sound, attendants at the birth actually announced an heir to the King, and later they had tremblingly to undeceive him. He, however, forgave the baby easily. He may have seen that she was the image of himself, and reflected that in all likelihood a son would have taken after his mother.

Christina, who in middle life began to write her Memoirs, records that throughout her babyhood her mother remained implacable. She goes so far as to say that her lameness was the result of a fall in babyhood, which had been planned by the Queen. But her father delighted to make a little soldier of her. All the histories tell how, when the commander of the fortress Calmar hesitated to salute the King with guns for fear of frightening the two-year-old princess, Gustavus commanded, 'Fire! She is a soldier's daughter!' and was rewarded by having the baby clap her hands at the racket. This was almost the sum of Christina's relations with her splendid father. He was at home only in the truces of the Thirty Years' War. When she was four [sic] he went off again to lead the Protestant cause up and down Germany. Before his departure he appeared before the Estates, holding Christina in his arms. 'Since it generally happens that the pitcher goes so often to the well that at last it breaks', he said, 'thus also will it fall out with me, who in many dangers have shed my blood for the welfare of Sweden; though hitherto God has spared my life, yet at last I must lose it.'

Now he became a shadowy figure to whom the child wrote stiff little copy-book letters, sending her duty and prayers for his health. During the next year he won the battle of Breitenfeld, a victory in which good Catholics could scarcely believe, because 'it seemed as if God had suddenly turned Lutheran.' A year later, in 1632, the pitcher went its appointed last time to the well, and the King's glories ended at the battle of Lutzen.

Eleanore, once widowed, swooped down upon her child. She had not come at a blow to love her, but Christina was the most important relic of Gustavus, and relics in future were to be the staple of her life. She began now to exert her rights upon the dead King and the living Queen. She travelled to Germany, where her husband's body lay, had the body opened and embalmed against the King's expressed wishes, and entered upon a widowhood to match the glories of the deceased. Nearly two years [sic] after the King's death, she brought him home to Sweden for the royal burial.

Christina, at this point, must have come near hating the memory of her beloved father. The jovial King, already half forgotten by her baby mind, was raised as a grim idol, requiring incessant offerings of tears. One dark December day she was put into a carriage and dragged at a footpace the twelve miles from Stockholm to Nykoping in the train of his interminable funeral. She was prey not to terror, but to a very agony of boredom. Nor was it over at the graveside. With grisly zest the Queen-Mother settled down to a state of perpetual bereavement. She hung her rooms in black from floor to ceiling, admitted none but candlelight, and only alternated tears with prayers. The dead King's heart, enclosed in a golden casket, hung at her bed-post; the other relic, Christina, scarcely more free, was to be constantly at hand to share with it her mother's hysterical embraces. At night she was still to sleep within reach of the stricken Queen's arm. Christina was at this time eight years old [sic], a passionate, strong-willed child, full of inquisitive energy. Her sufferings can be imagined. They were augmented by the fact that she did not love her mother, and all her life had had little desire and less inducement to please her.

Her one escape from the ludicrous torture of her surroundings was to her lessons, and she took it eagerly. Never had a child greater encouragement to learn. Christina, however, was in little need of encouragement, and the long hours she spent with her tutors were the happiest of her day. These tutors had been provided for her in the late King's will. Gustavus, realising his own precarious hold upon life, had left thoughtful provision for the education of his daughter. He had appointed a council of five regents to govern for the queen during her minority, and these were her teachers. Except, as the King naïvely provided, that Christina was to be taught modesty, she was to have an education in every way boyish and princely. That is, she was to be taught the exercises of the brain and the body, but not those of the fingers. The ingredients of this education, as it happened, suited her extremely well. She was a bookish and enquiring child. Not even the interminable lessons of royalty were too much for her fierce young energy. Much historical sympathy has been expended over the little Christina closed for eight hours a day with her books. It has been thought that what she needed was a little handwork to soothe her nervous system. Christina's nervous system, from its earliest days, was in constant need of solace, but handwork was not the prescription for it. She was the clever pupil to whom a piece of needlework is the same torture as Latin grammar is to a dunce. A modern infant's education would have driven her frantic. She was childishly proud all her life of not being able to sew. When she was old enough to choose her own relaxations, she soothed herself in the laboratory, hunting for the philosopher's stone.

The queen took no less eagerly to the physical side of her boyish education. With the same energy she flung herself into outdoor exercises, and was as easily proficient at them. The quality of this education was admirable, but there was far too much of it. The tutors, oppressed by the multitude of things a royal person should know, could not persuade themselves to lay down the book, and the precocious child herself was only too anxious to become cleverer and cleverer. It was the same out-of-doors. Christina rode and ran and set herself trials like a self-conscious little Spartan. She early formed and boasted of the habit of going without sleep. And she was without doubt irritated more and more into her strenuous habits by the desire to escape from her mother's clutches.

The queen-mother, as it happened, had no real rights over the queen. Gustavus is said to have been fond of his wife, but he had no illusions about her, and in his will had carefully excluded her from any share in the government of his daughter. Eleanore's claim over Christina was one of sentiment, and not of right. But, like many claims of sentiment, it was suffocatingly strong. It was linked also to an obstinate folly common to persons of her nature. Christina, with her child's sensitive palate, naturally hated all forms of alcohol and liked to drink only water. This her mother would not have. The child must drink wine or beer. Christina therefore, to the best of her ability, drank nothing at all. At last, in desperation, she was obliged to steal and drink the rose-water from her mother's closet. She was caught at this, whipped by her mother's orders, and in future made to drink nothing but small-beer as a punishment.

The council of five were by this time watching the widow's behaviour with more and more concern. The tears, the mourning régime, the extravagant affection on one side and the harsh stupidity on the other, seemed to them no fit environment for the queen. Finally they decided to detach her from it. A battle ensued for the possession of Christina, in which the queen-mother marshalled all her army of tears. Rights, however, were with the council, and in the end Christina was withdrawn entirely from her mother, and placed in the care of her aunt, the Princess Catherine, who remained her guardian until she died in 1639. This disposition, necessary though it was, left the mother in an intolerable position, and provoked her later into remarkable and unexpected behaviour.

Christina was not, doubtless, immoderately influenced by her surroundings. It is untrue to say that with another upbringing she would have become a different person. But her failings were aggravated by the bleak circumstances of her early years. Her immense and often unwarranted confidence in herself was the result of her having been an imperious only child, never matching herself against equal or superior strength in her own class. The lovelessness from which she suffered all her days was the result of the lack of common affection in her early relationships. It was a loss which she was slow to perceive, but which in reality afflicted her greatly. Her antipathy to women was nourished by the fact that her mother was the epitome of female follies. Finally, the condition of her later years, in which she was the victim of her own energy, and could never cease from piling fresh chimerical irons on the fire, was the result of the fact that she was never in childhood given to be happy doing nothing, nor to play without profit, nor to wander aimlessly about a pleasant home.

Christina's truncated autobiography is the source of anecdotes and information about her early years. Voluntarily and involuntarily it throws a clear light upon her. She records what incidents she can remember, confesses as much of her character as she was aware of, and abundantly reveals the rest. Looking back from middle-life upon the grown-up figures of her childhood, she describes them fairly. First is the soldier-king, reconstructed from hearsay but still with love; next her mother, temperamentally inconsolable, showing a 'love and grief that one could pardon rather than justify"; next comes Axel Oxenstiern, the chief of the council of five, to whom she pays a long, sincere tribute. Throughout Gustavus' reign Oxenstiern had been the King's right hand. He was the head of one of the greatest families in Sweden, and if he had thrown in his lot with the republican nobles, who were strong at the time of the King's accession, Gustavus might never have ruled at all. As it was he put himself at the King's side, and at every turn aided his brilliance with his own strength and deliberation. He was foreign minister, minister of war and chancellor under the King, and after his death he virtually ruled Sweden for twelve years. Christina's other governors were Axel Baner, a fine soldier and a general of the Thirty Years' War; Horn, a general also but a scholar as well, and Matthiae, the gentle tutor and man of learning.

In the midst of all these moved the little Christina, cradled, as she says, on the throne. Looking back, she lovingly describes her childish queenliness. She was, she professes, born for the part. In fact, she was born with a strong sense of her own importance, which every detail of her environment contrived to enhance, and which remained the dominant characteristic of her life. She records with satisfaction, and her biographers record with amazement, the aptitude with which she played her part. She lent her childish ear unweariedly to matters of State. She endured formalities, received ambassadors, gave audiences to suitors with a patience far beyond her years. When Eleanore arrived back from Germany with the body of Gustavus, envoys from Russia came to pay tribute to the dead King. The queen who was then eight [sic], was to receive them, and her Governors anxiously bade her not to fear the uncouth figures with their flowing garments and black beards. Christina impatiently repudiated fear. Why should she be afraid? Let them tell her what to do and she would do it. In fact she would hardly have been afraid of a den of lions. She had perfectly the courage of one endowed with the divine right. So long as she was the central figure, she was equal to any situation. She allows in her Memoirs that she was impatient, angry and proud. In fact, from her accession at four years old [sic] to her death uncrowned fifty-nine years later, Christina was a regular royal queen.

Although the queen was doubtless a precocious and unlovable child, her cleverness deserved admiration. She writes: 'Je savais a l'age de quatorze ans toutes les langues, toutes les sciences and tous les exercises dont on voulut m'instruire.' Nor was it an idle boast. In all her chosen directions she was remarkably apt. She taught herself most languages, and all her life was a keen and vigorous student. In the same way she was proficient in physical exercises with no more instruction than a few lessons in dancing and in mounting a horse.

Above: Kristina.