Source:
The court of Christina of Sweden and the later adventures of the Queen in exile, pages 1 to 9, by Francis Henry Gribble, 1913
The account:
The Thirty Years War raged from 1618 till 1648. Christina of Sweden was born in the midst of it — in the midst, as it were, of the booming of guns and the rattling of sabres — in 1626, and grew up in a period of tumults, alarms, and triumphs. She was not insensible of the glory which the triumphs reflected on her reign; but womanhood nevertheless found her with a deep and ever-deepening desire for peace.
Her subjects saluted her, in the Coronation ceremony, not as the Queen, but as the King of Sweden; and she was distinguished by many masculine accomplishments and qualities. She learnt to swear as roundly as our armies are said to have sworn in Flanders; and she could not only ride, but also shoot. It was said that she could hit a hare with deadly aim while riding at full gallop, though tears always came to her eyes when she realised that the poor little thing was dead. But war was not her sphere, and could not be; for she was brilliantly clever and alive to intellectual arms, she had acquired a taste, amounting almost to a passion, for the arts; her aspiration was to be the Queen, not of a rough camp, but of a refined and polished Court.
Neither swaggering soldiers nor long-headed politicians, that is to say, were Christina's ideal men. She had, indeed, a natural instinct for politics, — she came to be almost as capable as Louis XIV. of being her own Prime Minister; but her real interests were elsewhere. The society which she preferred was that of philosophers, — or, alternatively, that of fashionable young aristocrats of engaging manners. So she laboured, in the face of the opposition of the leading Swedish statesmen, for the conclusion of that Treaty of Westphalia which, in 1648, not only rearranged the map of Europe, but also gave her the opportunity — or, at least, the semblance of the opportunity — of living her own life in her own way in the company of her own friends.
It is as a Queen to whom the pride of her royal status was nothing if she might not live her own life in her own way that Christina challenges and holds attention as one of the most interesting figures in history. She not only put an end to a war in order to achieve that purpose; she also abandoned her throne and changed her religion as steps towards its accomplishment. The story of her life is, consequently, before all things, the story of a great renunciation and a bold experiment: not the less interesting because the experiment, like most human experiments, failed to give full satisfaction, and the exalted hour of renunciation had its sequel in moments of repentance and regret. Christina, as we shall see, was not without her share of the inconsistency commonly attributed to her sex; but her magnificent gesture was, nevertheless, sincerely made. She was, at the moment when she made it, an artist in life intent upon self-expression, genuinely preferring self-development to pomp.
One admires her the more because self-development is difficult for kings and queens, unless they are content to develop on conventional lines and within close limitations. Kingship is a specialised mode of activity; a king is expected to be — and can hardly help being — the thing for which Alfred de Musset professed such abhorrence when his parents urged him to become a lawyer: "a particular kind of man". His pleasures, as well as his duties, are stereotyped. He is taught, from his childhood upwards, that he must work, and pray, and love, and divert himself in accordance with rigid rules and traditional expectations. He must be, or pretend to be, a soldier, a church-goer, and a sportsman, fond of fine clothes, crowded rooms, and ceremonious banquets. He may pass, indeed, from the society of a wife for whom he does not care to that of mistresses who do not care for him; but the very grandeur of his position excludes him from sincere sentiment and reciprocated passion. He may be a Don Juan, but not a Galahad or a Pilgrim of Love; and his first step towards originality in these or in other matters brings him up against barriers which he cannot overcome unless he pulls them down.
The majority of kings, it may be, do not find the restrictions very irksome; for the majority of kings doubtless resemble the majority of their subjects in having vulgar ambitions and commonplace ideals. Even when such ideals and ambitions are not quite natural to them, early habit makes them second nature. They find it easy to dispense with the bracing exercise of unhandicapped competition with their equals. They find it more comfortable to assume than to prove their superiority to other men; and it is not displeasing to them to adopt towards the experts in statesmanship and the arts, whose services are at their disposal, an attitude akin to that which the ordinary employer of labour takes towards the carpenter and the plumber.
Similarly, in the matter of their amusements, they adapt themselves, as a rule, readily enough to the supposed exigencies of their position. Their governors have no difficulty in persuading them that to shoot at birds is the most rational of all kinds of human recreation, and that to look on while horses race, and stake money on the results of the races, is, in very truth, the sport of kings. They find a magic in the make-believe and a charm in the homage which is laid at their feet without discoverable reference to their merits. So they run in grooves for which they have been prepared, and which have been prepared for them, — grooves in which, if a king has the tastes commonly associated with members of the Bullingdon and subalterns in the Guards, everything which the heart can desire would seem to be provided for convenience and delight.
But one thing has not been provided: liberty to leave the groove, when they get tired of it, and be themselves and live their own lives in their own way.
That does not matter, of course, to the typical monarch who combines a magnificent manner with a sloppy mind and ambitions limited to martial and material things. Such a one asks nothing better than to be a soldier, a sportsman, a Don Juan, and the central figure of the pageants. Provided that his armies do not lose too many battles, he will live and die thanking the goodness and the grace that on his birth have smiled; for the education of princes is chiefly directed to that end — to the comfort of the man who is, in the main, pretty much like other men, and has the ordinary man's disposition to take things easily, and swagger, without undue emotional strain or intellectual exertion.
Yet the barriers are always there, however gorgeously they may be gilded; and now and again a prince or a princess has individuality enough to be painfully sensible of them, and to kick against the pricks, in the spirit of the poet revolting against the destiny which has made him, let us say, a dental surgeon or a bank clerk. In our own days the princes — and even the princesses — of the House of Habsburg are continually kicking against those gilded pricks and insisting upon a lion's share of the common lot: as did John Orth, for instance, and "Herr Wulffling", and Princess Louisa of Tuscany. In the past the most famous cases are those of Charles V., who descended from his throne in order to become a holy man, and Diocletian, who stripped himself of the purple for the sake of cultivating cabbages.
That is the category of monarchs to which Christina belonged. She, too, revolted against her exalted lot in order to pursue her somewhat different line of self-development, quitting the position of the Minerva of the North in order to become a wandering amateur of culture and the arts; and her renunciation made a far more enduring noise in the world than did her reign.
Both her motives and her proceedings have been much and stormily discussed, — chiefly because, when she renounced her title to the Swedish throne, she also renounced the Lutheran religion and submitted herself, as did so many persons of culture at that period, to the authority of the Church of Rome. Hence the conflicting blasts blown upon the brazen trumpets of innumerable theologians. Protestants have written of Christina as, first, a traitor to the true faith, and then a perverted monster of iniquity. Catholics, on the other hand, have applauded her as a devoted daughter of the Church, who made a noble sacrifice for conscience'[s] sake. Conceiving it to be their duty to exaggerate, they have thrown their whole souls into the task, with the result that to trust them is to be led astray.
Christina, as we shall see was neither so admirable a woman as the Catholics nor so despicable a woman as the Protestants have represented. She was, at once, more unique and more human than the controversialists on either side allow. Above all, she was more feminine and, if the word may pass, more modern: a woman, in short, who would, in many ways, have found herself in touch with many of the modern women whom one meets in modern drawing-rooms.
Modernity, in fact, far more than even femininity, was the dominant note of her personality. "E donna — she is a woman and behaves as such", was the phrase in which Pope Innocent XI. summed her up; but that judgment only contained a portion of the truth. Christina was also essentially a modern women, — a woman whom we should still account modern nowadays, and for whose mental and modern characteristics there was, in her own seventeenth century, no known precedent. "Neurotic", "neuropathic", "neurasthenic" — those are the epithets with which her own countryman, Baron de Bildt, has, in recent years, assailed her; and if we accept the adjectives as terms, not of abuse, but of psychological difficulties, we may hope to find in them the clues to a good many of the mysteries.
It is, in short, as the first conspicuous case of the neurosis of the North — that mysterious malady with which Ibsen's dramas have familiarised the modern world — that Christina's career arrests and enchains our interest. The evidence which justifies the statement will present itself, piece by piece, as the story is unfolded; but, when it is given, it will be clear that, if we are to understand Christina, and to sympathise, and to make allowances where we cannot approve, we must think of her as an Ibsen heroine before the letter, placed in a station in which her least gesture was bound to be observed, and therefore astonishing a world which as yet knew nothing of Ibsen heroines, — their fixed ideas, their quick and wayward logic, their desperate impulses, and their famous cry of bitter determination, so incomprehensible to the disciplined and orderly Latin intelligence —
Je veux vivre de ma vie.
With that prelude we may proceed to the telling of the story.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Francis Henry Gribble.
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