Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 92 to 95, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
The last years of Christina's life, in spite of her courage, appear melancholy. She lived on in her great palace, wayward, eccentric, pugnacious, still defiantly giving rise, in her person and her household, to every kind of scandal; but brilliant though the talk still was, and desperately keen the antagonisms and enthusiasms, much of the zest must have departed. Age and infirmity were weaknesses which, whatever front she showed them, she could not wholly defy. She lost heart to struggle against her squalid insolvency, and was reduced at last to beg.
'Pomponne will tell you', she wrote at her lowest ebb to Louis XIV, 'of the deplorable state into which Sweden, my thankless country, has thrust me. I appeal to your Majesty, who is the arbitrator of sovereigns. Your friendship alone can soothe my woes. It would be an offence to make you a long and humble prayer to bring you to embrace my cause. I am a queen and wretched. You are just and generous. My grief, my plaints and my misfortune will cease at your bidding.'
Her vulnerable points grew weaker as she grew older. She had always lacked kin and comfortable friends; her natural need of them was now increased. She had always, since she took up residence in Rome, been the typical expatriated woman, living by art and culture, instead of by human relationships. The pathos of this way of life now became stronger as she still clung desperately to outside things, still persisted in the delusion that she was the centre of the world and must keep up. She had never been able to lean; she remained to the end painfully independent and upright. She finally confessed her unhappiness in Rome by opening negotiations to end her days with some distant relations in Germany, although she lacked the strength to uproot herself, and she realised too that even if she could not be contented in Rome[,] she could never be anything but unbearably wretched away from it.
Happily Christina did not grow really old in years. She did at sixty-three [sic], in nearly full possession of her powers. She had suffered intermittently from erysipelas. In February 1689, she was seized by so violent an attack that it was thought impossible for her to recover. She had patched up a peace with the Pope, and Innocent wished to be at her bedside, but he was at this time himself too ill to go abroad, and she received his blessing and the last unction from Cardinal Ottoboni. Then, amidst rejoicing, her fire reasserted itself and she surprisingly rallied, but she suffered another attack in April, from which she could not recover. She faced death very peacefully and with great courage on the morning of April 19th, making an end in every way worthy of herself.
She left a will naming Azzolino her sole heir. Though she had not much money, her art treasures were very valuable. She had always collected superbly, irrespective of what she could afford. Azzolino did not enjoy her inheritance for long, for he died a few months after Christina. He in his turn left the collections to a nephew, and to all it seemed a strange dispensation of Providence that an inconspicuous gentleman of Ancona should inherit the magnificent art treasures of a queen.
It is evident that Azzolino was working his way systematically through the queen's correspondence, destroying it as she had directed him, when he was interrupted by death. Thus Christina's Hamburg letters, the outcome of their last long separation, survived.
The queen had desired to be buried very simply in the Pantheon, under the inscription: 'Christina lived sixty-three years.' Her wishes, like her father's, were not regarded, and she was buried in St Peter's with a grandiloquent tomb and text. For her last as for her first journey through Rome[,] her route was lined with gazers, and once again St Peter's, draped in black instead of crimson, seemed too small for the thronging crowd.
The spectacle was not out of place. All her life, by deeds and by circumstances, Christina had been spectacular, and it was fitting that the end should harmonise. She was infallible at catching the public eye and the public imagination, and she was scarcely dead before she inspired a number of panegyric, abusive, and highly and falsely coloured Lives and Descriptions of herself. The tongue of scandal, having murmured all her life, broke into a triumphant shout the moment she was dead. She was accused of everything. She was a monster of immorality, the leader of a vile and debauched court. Yet everyone agreed with the writer of the 'Intrigues and Gallantries', the most scurrilous pamphlet of all, that 'she always maintained the majesty of a queen, both in person and in character, to the highest degree, and her wit and parts were so very extraordinary that they raised the admiration of all.' For in spite of its flamboyance, Christina's nature was founded upon rock. She had a fine brain, a fine strength and a fine energy. She was unfruitful, but she was undeniably great. She had glaring faults, the products, most of them, of the ill-assimilated divine right of kings, but she had certain virtues that were golden. Her honest and laborious attachment to letters, in an age full as any of the jargon and shallowness of dilettantism, was golden; her generosity and her sincerity were golden; her courage, that was impetuous, that was wrong-headed, that warred continually against her own comfort and interest, was, in a world that is destined always to know too little of it, purest gold.
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Above: Kristina.
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