Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 34 to 37, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
If the Senate showed concern at the proposal to abdicate, Christina's behaviour was calculated to soften the blow when it did fall. Now that she regarded her position in Sweden as something which she might one day abandon, she became scornful and weary of it. She could not rid herself of the habit of dealing assiduously with affairs, but they sickened her. She began to feel herself intolerably bound.
She wrote to Chanut: 'In vain I rise early, go to bed late, sleep little; I get no further. I have not a moment free. State affairs take up all my time and weary me to death. When, Great Heavens! shall I disembarrass myself of these tiresome persons? [her secretaries]. An hour of their company is longer than eternity. They batter my ears and my spirit, and always reduce me to a black mood .... Boast as you will the brilliant and inestimable prerogatives of royalty, if one cannot do as one wants without being exposed to the censure of mankind, I would sooner be Ninon than Christina.'
As was natural at such a moment, she emphasized every one of her activities which seemed born of her own free will and not of her circumstances. She became more high-handed and extravagant than ever; more eccentric and more frivolous. So surprising was her behaviour that her mother made a brief appearance on the scene to remonstrate, and, as might have been expected, disappeared from it in tears, having accomplished nothing.
But though no word of religious matters was breathed in public, in private Christina had taken a momentous step. She had provided herself with a confidant. This was Antonio Macedo, confessor of the Portuguese Ambassador. In conjunction with him the deeply solemn matter took on a hint of subterfuge and intrigue which delighted the woman in Christina. Macedo's master spoke no language but his own. Therefore at all interviews with the queen[,] the priest was present as interpreter. Under cover of State discussions, long religious investigations were held, the ambassador being aware of nothing but that 'the words between them were more than the things proposed to him by the interpreter, and repeated by the interpreter to him.' At last, after all the thought and the debating, the stirring of action came. Ranke, who digresses from his Popes for a chapter on Christina, tells the story:
'Suddenly, Macedo disappeared from Stockholm. The queen pretended to have him sought for, pursued, while she had, in fact, herself despatched him to Rome, for the purpose of explaining her wishes to the General of the Jesuits, and entreating him to send her some most trusted members of his Order.
In February 1652 the Jesuits demanded arrived in Stockholm accordingly: they were two young men, who represented themselves to be Italian noblemen engaged in travel, and in this character were admitted to her table. The Queen at once suspected their true errand, and while they walked immediately before her to the dining-hall, she observed to one of them, in a low voice, that perchance he had letters for her. He replied, without turning his head, that he had; with one rapid word she then warned him to keep silence. After dinner, she sent her most trusted servant, Johann Holm, for the letters, and the following morning the same servant conducted the Jesuits in the most profound secrecy to the palace.'
It was a dramatic moment for the queen, heightened and sweetened by the fact that not a soul guessed what was toward. The secret messengers stood before her, carrying, most likely, her new life in their hands.
The long searchings and examinations began. The Jesuits, like every other person who came into contact with it, were astonished at the quality of the queen's mind. Christina did not wish to be comforted with dogma. She wished, like Socrates, to consider the nature of good and evil and the chances of immortality for a man's soul.
'The Jesuits', continues Ranke, 'do not tell us what replies they gave to these questions; they believed that, during their conferences, thoughts were suggested to them such as had never entered their minds before and which they had immediately afterwards lost and forgotten. The queen, they think, was under the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit; the truth being that she was under the influence of a decided predisposition which supplied what might be wanting in every argument and even added force to conviction itself. They most frequently recurred to that primary assumption, that the world cannot be left without the true religion, and to this they added the assertion that of all existing religions, the Catholic is the most reasonable. "Our chief endeavour", say the Jesuits, "was to prove that the points of our holy religion which are raised above reason, are in nowise opposed to reason" .... She conversed with them also on the difficulties that must arise in the event of her determining to become a Catholic; these sometimes appeared likely to prove insurmountable, and one day, when she again saw the Jesuits, she declared to them that they would do well to return home, that the attempt they were making was impracticable, and that besides, she thought she could never become wholly Catholic at heart. The good fathers were amazed, they used every argument that seemed likely to keep her to her previous purpose, placed God and eternity before her, and affirmed her doubts to be but suggestions and assaults of Satan. It is entirely characteristic of Christina that she was at this moment more fully resolved on her conversion that at any previous moment of the conference. "What would you say", she asked suddenly, "if I were nearer to becoming a Catholic than you suppose?" "I cannot describe the feelings", says the Jesuit narrator, "that we experienced. We seemed like men raised from the dead! The queen asked whether the Pope could not grant permission to receive the Lord's Supper once a year according to the Lutheran rites. We replied that he could not. "Then", said she, "there is no help, I must resign the crown."'
The die was cast. The messengers were despatched to arrange for Christina's reception into the church, so that even if in their long period of absence the queen had time to repent, everything would be put irrevocably in train. Meanwhile her new favourite was Don Antonio Pimentelli, Ambassador of Spain, who shared her pleasures and enjoyed her confidence, and in his master's name offered the hospitality of Spain to the queen after her conversion. A pause ensued while negotiations went forward, and in the interminable period that preceded release[,] she chafed against her bonds. 'I think I see the devil when I see these men', she wrote to Chanut, of her secretaries filing in to get her signature to documents. Yet, as might be expected of her, she continued to the end to play perfectly the queen of Sweden. She never shirked an obligation. While she hugged the prospect of the chosen future, she yet lived fully in the present; nor could she withhold her interest from any affair. An illuminating glimpse of Christina is afforded by this moment. She was abdicating ostensibly for spiritual reasons, yet spiritually she was limited by her practical and active nature. It is clear that the Church of Rome alone would hardly have drawn her out of Sweden, and that the new life, which was to be a change of religion, was to be by no means a change of her other interests, but rather an intensification of them.
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