Source:
Encyclopædia Brittanica, volume 5, pages 702 to 703, edited by Thomas S. Baynes and William Robertson Smith, 1890; original at Harvard University
Above: Kristina.
The article:
CHRISTINA (1626-1689), queen of Sweden, was the second daughter of Gustavus Adolphus and Mary Eleanor of Brandenburg. Disappointed in his hopes of male offspring, her great father reared her in virile fashion, and left her, on his departure for Germany (1630), in the hands of Axel Oxenstiern, the famous chancellor, and of Johannes Matthiæ, his own almoner, who was to ground her in sciences and in Latin and Greek.
The battle of Lützen placed Christina on the throne in her sixth year. She was proclaimed queen without delay, but the government was vested in a council of regency, composed of the five chief dignitaries of the kingdom, with Oxenstiern at their head. Placed under the care of her aunt Catharine, the countess-palatine, the little queen made rapid progress in the direction indicated by Gustavus. At ten years old she dressed usually in boy's clothes, and was wont to hunt and to go long journeys on foot and on horseback; and she found means, in the midst of these occupations, to acquire several sciences and modern languages, in addition to the classical tongues. In 1636 Oxenstiern returned from Germany, and again assumed the direction of affairs; and from him, her father's friend and minister, Christina received the ablest lessons in state-craft and the art of government that the age could furnish. At sixteen, the confidence reposed in her was such, that she was generally solicited to enter on the exercise of her functions as queen regnant. This proposal she declined, however, nor would she listen to any renewal of it till two years later (1644), when the conduct of the state was placed in her hands. For a time all went well. The members of the council of regency were confirmed in their places; the kingdom was flourishing within and without; the war[s] with Denmark and Germany promised to bear good fruits. Christina, however, had determined on peace, in this she was opposed by Oxenstiern; but during the following year a treaty was signed with Denmark exceedingly advantageous to Sweden. Germany was not so easily dealt with; Christina was compelled to form a secret conspiracy against her own ministers; and by her efforts, ably seconded by those of Adler Salvius, a young diplomatist to whom she had entrusted this affair, the peace of Westphalia was concluded (1648), and the Thirty Years' War was brought to an end.
The eyes of Europe were now fixed on the young queen. Offers of alliance came to her from all quarters — from Holland and Spain, from England and France. She continued for some time to deserve the esteem with which she was regarded, reforming abuses, filling the treasury, and encouraging arts and commerce to the utmost in her power. It was the general wish that she should marry, and many suitors were proposed. Christina excused herself in an epigram; and to rid herself of further importunities[,] she named her cousin Charles Gustavus her successor, presenting him in that capacity to the assembled estates in 1649, and in 1650 she solemnly took to herself the title of king.
At this time the change would seem to have come upon Christina's conduct that was to determine so much of her subsequent career, induced apparently by the maxims of a certain Bourdelot, a French physician in her employ. The practice of a cynical epicureanism became her only occupation. The reign of favourites began; and with it the welfare of the kingdom commenced to decline. Honours, dignities, and treasure were lavished on the most worthless of men; and discontent grew rife everywhere beyond the palace. Christina was alarmed, and had thoughts of abdication (1651); but her designs were vigorously opposed by Oxenstiern, and for a while she yielded to the pressure brought to bear on her by the chancellor and his party. The favourites (among whom were Whitelock, Cromwell's envoy, Pimentelli, the Spanish ambassador, and Chanut, the representative of France) were kept in the background, and Bourdelot, the master cynic, was sent out of Sweden. Christina encouraged the presence of artists and men of science; Descartes, an exile from his native land, was received by her with great consideration; she made large purchases for the Swedish museums; she corresponded with Vossius and Salmasius, with Puffendorf and Grotius, with Naudé and Bochard; she did her best to rule and to be respectable. But she was weary of the roughness and coarseness of the land of her birth; she longed for freedom and change; she was conscious, moreover, of her own gradual degradation in the eyes of the subjects she despised. The conspiracy of Messenius, the chiefs of which perished on the scaffold, gave her an excuse and the opportunity she had long desired. In 1654 the estates were convoked at Upsala, and she resigned the crown to her cousin Charles Gustavus.
She had reserved to herself her own independence, an absolute authority over such of her subjects as should accompany her, and the revenues of Pomerania and Mecklenburg, with those of several Swedish provinces. Quitting the habit of her sex, and taking the words Fata viam invenient as a device, she left her kingdom, traversed Denmark and Germany, and established herself at Brussels. Here she remained for nearly a year [sic], signalizing her sojourn by the private renunciation of Lutheranism, which she afterwards solemnly and publicly abjured at Innsbruck. From Innsbruck she went to Italy. She entered Rome on horseback, was received, confirmed, and baptized Alexandra by Alexander VII., and was lodged in the Palazzo Farnese, where she surrounded herself with artists and amorists, with philosophers and scientific mountebanks. In 1656, having quarreled with some of the College of Cardinals, she made her first trip to France, where she had much success as a spectacle, called on the king at Compiègne, was lodged at Fontainebleau, and stayed for some time in Paris. She was most gracious with the men of letters and science, but she outraged all the women by her expressions of contempt for their sex and themselves (which called forth many illiberal remarks concerning her spare figure and humped shoulder), and declared that Ninon de l'Enclos was the only one of them worth her regard. She also attempted to instil a few of her own political theories into the bosom of Mazarin; but that subtle diplomatist resisted, and when in the following year, after a journey to Italy, she attempted to renew her visit, he found means to have her detained at Fontainebleau. It was here that, after writing to Cromwell, who would none of her, she caused her favourite Monaldeschi, in revenge for the betrayal of her secrets, to be put to death by the captain of her guard. The public indignation was great, and she was ordered to leave France. Leibnitz, however, apologized for the crime, and she took no notice of her expulsion till 1658, consoling herself meanwhile, with the society of a kindred spirit, Madame de la Suze. In that year she returned to Rome; and the Swedish revenues coming slowly in, Alexander allowed her a pension. In 1660 Charles Gustavus died, and Christina returned to Sweden, to claim the throne she had quitted so lightly and regretted so bitterly. But the Swedes had lost their old reverence for the daughter of Gustavus; her new religion and her treatment of Monaldeschi had made them wary of her; and she was compelled to sign another and more binding deed of abdication, and once more to retreat to Rome. She reappeared in Sweden some six years afterwards; but the exercise of her faith was denied her, and she withdrew to Hamburg, where she begged in vain the empty crown of Poland, and whence she made for Rome once more. In that city she lived for some twenty years, quarrelling, intriguing, and collecting, corresponding with men of letters and founding academies, active in the Molinist controversy and in the cause of the Venetians besieged by the Turks, consumed by the desire of that political power which she had thrown away, and endeavouring to assert her vanished influence to the last. She died, with great composure, in 1689, and was buried, under a sonorous epitaph, in St Peter's. Her magnificent library was purchased by Alexander VIII., her collection of antiques and part of her paintings by Odescalchi, a nephew of the Pope, and the remainder of her pictures by the regent Orléans.
Christina left many MSS., which were collected and published by Archenholtz [sic], librarian to the landgrave of Hesse Cassel, in his memoirs of her life, 4 vols, 4to, 1751. Her life was also written by Jacques Lacombe, a translation of whose work, said to be superior to the original, appeared in London in 1776. See also D'Alembert, Mémoires et Réflexions sur Christine, Reine de Suède.
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