Source:
The court of Christina of Sweden and the later adventures of the Queen in exile, pages 18 to 28, by Francis Henry Gribble, 1913
The account:
The wealth of the Rhenish vineyards and the pride of the Rhenish prelates were not the only things which attracted the attention of Gustavus Adolphus during his journey through Germany. He was also charmed by the fair face of Marie-Eléonore, the eldest daughter of the Elector of Brandenburg, and he married her in 1620, — two years after the beginning of the Thirty Years War, but some time before he himself decided to take part in it. He chose her, according to Christina, because she was "the most eligible of the Protestant Princesses of the period, to whom his religion limited his choice"; and Christina added, with the detachment of a critic rather than the affection of a daughter —
"This Princess, who was not without beauty, and possessed the good qualities looked for in her sex, lived with the King on sufficiently pleasant terms in a union which nothing marred except the lack of an heir to secure the succession."
It is faint praise; and one can read a good deal between the lines of it. A lack of sympathy is indicated: something more than the lack of sympathy which is almost normal between the younger and the older generations; an echo, evidently, of a lack of sympathy which had subsisted between the husband and the wife.
Gustavus Adolphus was a great man and a strong man: a man of ideals as well as a man of action. Marie-Eléonore had no endowment but her beauty and her family connections. Personally, she was colourless and insignificant: a silly woman who got sillier as she grew older; the sort of woman who would have been quite innocently happy in a doll's house. Gustavus Adolphus was fond enough of her in his way, but had no illusions about her. She counted for no more in his life — and had no larger vision of the events of her time — than if he had been a Sultan and she the favourite beauty of his harem; and she loved her husband pretty much as such a beauty might have loved her master. She suffered, as we shall see, from nerves, and became morbid to the point of eccentricity; a point on which it is necessary to insist when we are looking for the hereditary influences which helped to make Christina what she became.
Christina flattered herself that she was, in a special sense, her father's child; and the flattery of others confirmed her in that opinion. In sheer cleverness, as students understand the word, she probably surpassed her father: beyond question she was more variously accomplished. She inherited many masculine traits from him — some of them already indicated; and she had much of his energy, though she expended it otherwise. But her nature had also a nervous strain, bequeathed by a neurasthenic mother, though she did not know it, and emphasised by incidents of her up-bringing of which we shall have to speak, — the blending of the influences producing that brilliant example of the neurosis of the North of which we have spoken.
Her mother had borne two daughters before her; but they had died in infancy. The third child, said the astrologers — for those were the days when people always inquired what the astrologers had to say — would be a boy; and it seemed, for a moment, that they had guessed correctly. The women in attendance were deceived by the infant's vigour and lusty cries. They spread the false report, and feared that the King would be furiously angry with them when they came back to correct it, — his sister Catherine handing the child to him, so that he might satisfy himself, by ocular evidence, of the error and the grounds for it. But he made no trouble, and even seemed quite gratified —
"Let us thank God, my sister" (Christina reports him as saying). "I hope my daughter will be as good as a son to me. Since God has given her, may God preserve her!"
He added that "she ought to be clever since she has taken us all in"; and Christina, relating the story in her fragmentary Memoirs, goes on to render her own thanks to God for having made her of the weaker sex, — albeit a virile member of it. "My sex", she writes, addressing herself to God, "has been Your means of preserving me from the vices and debaucheries of the country in which I was born"; and she continues, going into details —
"If it had been Your will that I should be born a man, perhaps the habits of the country and the example of my companions would have corrupted me. I might perhaps have drowned in drink, as so many others do, all the virtues and talents which You have given me. Very likely, too, my ardent and impetuous temperament would have led me into embarrassing relations with women from which it would have been difficult for me to extricate myself. ... At any rate, there would have been a danger that the society of women would have taken up the time which, having been devoted to study and the search for Truth, has brought me nearer to You."
A curiously exaggerated manifesto of the pride of sex, and one to which the test of evidence shall be applied as we proceed. Meanwhile —
"The Queen, my mother, who had the weaknesses as well as the virtues of her sex, was inconsolable. She could not endure me, she said, because I was a girl and was ugly, — wherein she told the truth, for I was as dusky as a little Moor. My father, on the contrary, was very fond of me; and I responded to his affection in many precocious ways. It seemed to me that I understood the differences between their qualities and their feelings, and was able to do justice to both of them, even in the cradle."
Christina further relates that she was dropped on the floor as a baby; and she was fully persuaded that she was dropped on purpose, in the belief that her mother would be glad to hear of her death as the result of what could be called an accident. One has no means of judging whether the suspicion was well founded; one only knows that the consequences of the fall was a permanent, though not a very conspicuous, deformity. Throughout Christina's life her dresses had to be cut so as to conceal the fact that one of her shoulders was a little higher than the other.
Meanwhile the King delighted in every precocious trait and, more particularly, in every indication that his little girl had the spirit of a boy. She tells us what happened when, as a child of two, she was saluted by the guns of the fortress of Calmar —
"There was some hesitation because of the fear of frightening a baby as important as I was; and the Governor, not wishing to fail in his duty, asked what were the King's orders. The King, after hesitating for a moment, said: 'Fire! She is a soldier's daughter, and must get used to the sound of guns.' So the order was obeyed, and the salute was duly fired. I was with the Queen in her carriage; and instead of being frightened, as children of that tender age generally are, I laughed and clapped my hands, and, not yet being able to speak, expressed my delight as best I could by signs, and indicated that I wanted them to fire again. My father's affection for me was greater than ever after that. He hoped that I was destined to be as brave as he was himself."
He was never to know anything about that, however; for Christina was only four [sic] when Gustavus Adolphus set out on the campaign from which he was not to return. He caused the country and the army to swear allegiance to her before he went; and she plucked at his beard to make him listen to a farewell speech which her nurses had taught her —
"When he noticed that, he took me in his arms and kissed me, unable to restrain his tears. Or so I have been told by persons who were present, who also assure me that I cried so bitterly for three whole days that I hurt my eyes and very nearly ruined my sight which, like his, was extremely weak. My tears were regarded as of evil omen, as I was a child who hardly ever cried."
Another evil omen was the cessation of the flow of a river, believed always to cease to flow of the eve of the death of a King of Sweden; and Gustavus Adolphus himself predicted his own death in his farewell harangue —
"The pitcher which goes often to the well is broken at last. So it will be with me. I have faced many dangers for my country's good, and have never shrunk from imperilling my life. By God's grace my life has so far been spared; but I shall lose it in the end."
And so to Lützen, where, as we have seen, he fell, praying, as well as fighting, hard. He fought and prayed, from Christina's ultimate point of view, on the wrong side; but she was too proud of him to despair, for that reason, of the salvation of his soul, though she felt that she must express her hopes in the guarded phraseology of Rome. "It may be, Lord", we find her writing, "that a ray of Thy triumphant grace may have descended to crown him at the last moment of his life." And she adds, with the same sort of piety: "Whether that was so or not, we must bow to Thy just and eternal decrees, and admire and worship them."
That was when Christina was six. There had, of course, to be a Regency; an office which was placed in commission under the direction of the Grand Chancellor Oxenstiern. Gustavus Adolphus had made every provision for the event; and his instructions to Oxenstiern, drawn up in the midst of campaigns, were now produced, and showed that he had taken the measure of Marie-Eléonore's capacity —
"He bade him serve, honour, and assist the Queen, his wife, and try to comfort her in her trouble, but never, on any account, to permit that Princess to have anything to say in political affairs, or in the matter of my education. Those had always been his orders, and he now confirmed them and expected them to be carried out."
It was a wise stipulation, Christina thought; and historians have not ventured to contradict her. Marie-Eléonore was affectionate, but foolish; people liked her, but did not respect her; and there was a Republican party in Sweden. It was easy to persuade the Republicans to be loyal to a helpless child; it might have been difficult to persuade them to be loyal to a silly woman, reputed, rightly or wrongly, to be as vain as she was empty-headed. So the debate on the propriety of proclaiming a Republic was practically closed when Christina was taken by the hand and led into the presence of the Assembly. Her personal likeness to her father settled the matter —
"She is his very image", they cried. "She has the nose, the eyes, the brow of Gustavus Adolphus. She shall be our Queen."
And with that they proclaimed her Queen, with a unanimous voice, and set her on the throne; and one of her first ceremonial appearances on the throne warmed their hearts to enthusiasm.
She had to receive a Mission from Russia, sent to negotiate for the renewal of an old treaty; and there were doubts whether she would receive it with a sufficiently dignified demeanour. The Russians of those days were, in appearance at all events, barbarians, horribly hirsute, and strangely and wonderfully apparelled. A little child might very well be frightened by them, as by Bogey Men or Wild Men from Borneo. So the Regents implored Christina not to be afraid —
"Their want of confidence in me hurt me; and I asked them indignantly: 'What is there to be afraid of?' They told me that the Russians were dressed quite differently from us, that they had long beards, that they were terrible persons, and that there were a great many of the, but that I must not be frightened. It so happened that the Ministers with me on that occasion were the Grand Constable and the Grand Admiral, who, themselves, wore long beards. So I laughed, and said: 'Suppose they have beards — what of that? You have beards, and I am not afraid of you. Why should I be afraid of them? Tell me what I have to do, and leave the rest to me.' And I kept my word. I received my visitors, seated on the throne, in the customary manner, with a demeanour so self-possessed and majestic that, instead of being frightened, as other children are, on similar occasions I made the Ambassadors feel what all men feel when they are brought in contact with the great; and my subjects were delighted, and admired my manner, as people admire every trifling trait on the part of children whom they love."
That was in 1633, when Christina was seven. We may allow for a little exaggeration; but the story at least shows us that Christina, like her mother, was vain, though she was not vain of the same things. She was no less proud of having been a great queen than of having forsaken grandeur for the sake of independence and self-development. But that is to anticipate. Our immediate business is with Christina's meeting with her mother.
Marie-Eléonore had accompanied Gustavus Adolphus on his campaigns; and now, in 1633, she returned to Sweden, bringing his coffin with her. "I kissed her", Christina writes. "She shed floods of tears, and nearly stifled me in her embrace." And then there were memorial services and sermons; which sermons were "harder to bear than the King's death", for which, as nearly two years had passed since it occurred, Christina was already consoled.
And then began that education which was to be one of the influences helping to make Christina a neurasthenic.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora.
Above: Francis Henry Gribble.
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