Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 23 to 26, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
The tale of Christina's favourites is a long one, half-comical, half-tragic. Her life, like any other, can be read in her personal relationships. In these her good luck was something below the average. She did not marry, she loved late and was unevenly requited; there was scarcely an ounce of female influence in her life; and a woman who lives entirely by the other sex is apt to triumph somewhat forlornly.
She was, by character, a difficult creature to love. Her wit was too sharp; she was too clear-cut, too utterly lacking in the womanly power to lean. She was always strong; she was always right; she did not care if her hand was against every man. She was restless, and pitched in a higher key than the people round her. She compelled men almost without exception to admire her, but there were few whom she could coerce into anything like love. Her career is a long succession of enthusiasms, of which the intellectual ones are sound, and the personal ones very often unsound to a startling degree. It seems that with the exception of her great friend or lover, Azzolino, Christina did not expect to look upwards in her personal relationships, and being resigned to looking down, she looked immoderately low. As long as she was in Sweden, however, she was saved from the disastrous snares into which she fell later.
Her first ideal, Charles Gustavus, did not occupy his pedestal for long. Christina had probably liked him at first for the simple but sufficient reason that he was a boy. He grew up an unpretentious young man, physically and mentally thick-set, very Swedish in his make-up, the last person in the world to hold the attention of the more mature Christina. She continued, however, to bear something like a family affection for him. She was more careful of his feelings than was usual with her, and she made him heir to Sweden. Charles Gustavus protested that he wanted no glory, but only Christina. He may have been sincere. She must have seemed to him a dazzling creature, and might well have captured his slow imagination. He continued so to protest while he suffered Christina to broach to him the subject of his succession, to nominate him her heir and to abdicate in his favour. 'After all, Krona is a pretty girl too', the queen protested at last, when his martyred attitude seemed to have lasted a little too long.
Magnus de la Gardie, Christina's first true court favourite, was a horse of another colour. He was the heir of a French family settled in Sweden and there risen high. He was young and charming, a handsome and brilliant courtier, best of all he was French, and bore with him the stamp of that swift, enlightened world of which Christina, tied to the cold and heavy north, so eagerly gathered the gleams. The queen was never niggardly. On de la Gardie she showered titles, offices, rich presents. 'The count de la Gardie was a genteel figure', wrote Madame de Motteville in her memoirs, 'had a lofty mein [sic] and all the appearance of a distinguished favourite. He talked of his queen in language so passionately respectful as plainly indicated there was no injustice in suspecting that the tenderness of his affection exceeded what the duty of a subject requires.'
It was thought, and by some in Sweden feared, that she would marry him. But instead he fell from grace with a devastating suddenness. It is not known certainly what undid him. Perhaps he boasted abroad of his power over Christina, which would account for her subsequent implacability towards him. Another version is that Magnus charged certain gentlemen with accusing him of unfaithfulness and treachery towards the queen. These gentlemen were two of Christina's first courtiers, Tott and Steinbergh. Before the queen and their accuser they denied the charge on their lives. The charge was then laid upon another courtier, who denied it in the same way. There was nothing left for de la Gardie but to ask the queen's permission to withdraw from court. Whatever the truth was, he disappeared abruptly and the episode ended with a letter from Christina in which in the most unrelenting fashion she refused his pleas and declared her certainty of never repenting his dismissal. As it happened, this was an act which she had fair inducement to repent, for many years later the tables were turned, and de la Gardie in power showed himself a keen rememberer of old scores.
Rumour called de la Gardie the queen's lover, as it had called Charles Gustavus, and later was to call Tott and every man with whom she came into association. On this point rumour was almost certainly wrong. Christina respected no conventions in relationships with men. She saw the favourite or companion just when and how she pleased. But she was not amorous, though, like many untried people, she protested the warmth of her nature; and with the possible exception of de la Gardie, love entered into none of her relationships in Sweden.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.
No comments:
Post a Comment