Ada Harrison's biography of Kristina, part 3

Source:

Christina of Sweden, pages 18 to 20, 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:

Once Christina had become queen in fact, the question of the succession engrossed her ministers. Whom would she marry? The field was wide. The daughter of Gustavus Adolphus was a rich morsel, and the country was still gaining prestige in the Thirty Years' War. According to Christina herself, the field was illimitable. 'There was no man in the world', she says simply, 'but would have thought himself happy if I had deigned to give him my hand.' But every aspirant was to be disappointed. Still in her teens, Christina established on this point a determinedly feminist attitude, to which she was faithful all her life. She would marry no one. She saw the thing in one light only; she did not want a master.

Though Christina refused marriage, she was far from disliking the male sex. For society she depended almost entirely upon men. Anything womanly she could not endure. Women were to her like needlework; she took a childish pleasure in being above them. 'She speaks little with the ladies of her court', remarked Chanut, 'and mixes with them not at all, except on the occasion of a visit, when, having saluted them, she leaves them on one side of the room and entertains herself with the men.' It is evident that Christina saw in every woman herself, but she was the exception, brilliantly untainted by any affinity with the rule. She was a man in education, in intelligence, in endurance and in courage. She was in fact a man in everything but sex. And this itself was a strength, because, being a woman, she had no temptations to obscure her shining talents by incontinence and wine. Fortune had made a special sexual dispensation for her. She was put upon the throne, she saw it clearly, to demonstrate the best of every conceivable world.

Christina's celibacy had been in one small danger in her youth. She had plighted herself as a girl to her cousin, Charles Gustavus, and now when the time came for her to take a consort, he pressed his claim, backing it with the most earnest protestations of affection. Christina refused it on the ground that the childish vow was no bond, and although subsequently she had many suitors and infinite encouragement from those who surrounded her to take a husband, she never wavered again.

Christina's refusal to marry was the determining factor in her life. It left her free to enjoy (or, if we like it better, at the mercy of) her own wits and energy. She would attack a thing, spend herself on it, fight her way through it, and then plunge down upon the next. Marriage would have been impervious to this method. She would have plunged into it and there stuck, unable to shake it off when she was done. As it was, she was free to begin her long succession of pursuits. It was not that she was superficial or inconstant. It was simply that, to her restless and energetic nature, life had always to be moving on; the scene must be perpetually shifting. Some subject would attract her; she would become furiously involved in it; but somehow or other the end of it would come, and a new attraction, equally absorbing, would fill the horizon. She was temperamentally the exact antithesis of her mother, to whom life was a single state — wifehood in colours or widowhood in black — to which there was no horizon whatsoever.

The first state through which Christina fought her way was nothing less than Sweden. It was no small affair, but it was not proof against twenty-three years of her attention. She concentrated on her country during her energetic childhood, girlhood and young womanhood. But her gaze was always large, and always straining across present boundaries. Gradually she looked more and more often beyond them, until in the end the home country became intolerable, and putting off her crown with steady hands, she turned to new pastures.

Above: Kristina.