Source:
Queen Christina of Sweden: Lothian Prize Essay for 1880, pages 16 to 31, by Sir Arthur Henry Hardinge, 1880; original at the University of Michigan
The essay:
CHAPTER II.
CHRISTINA'S GOVERNMENT.
JUST a year before the Peace of Bromsebro, Christina came of age. On the 8th of December, 1644, the Estates were convoked at Stockholm, and she was solemnly proclaimed queen, on her promise to observe the laws and constitutions of the realm. Her first duty was to give her sanction to the acts performed by the regents during her minority. She approved all that they had done, and thanked them in terms of high praise for the faithful discharge of their duties; but deferred all consideration of the "Form of Government", until after her coronation, when it was to be revised and sanctioned by the Diet. The coronation, however, was put off till 1650, so that the question of the constitution had to remain in abeyance for several years more. Foreign affairs, in fact, were the subject which called for most of the attention of the Government, and the young queen began at once to take them in hand herself. She corresponded regularly with Oxenstyerna, who was treating with Denmark at Bromsebro; and her letters to him are of some interest, for they shew that this girl of eighteen had a clear insight both into the advantages to be gained by delaying the peace, and into the difficulties of continuing a war against which strong feelings existed in Sweden and abroad. "Most of the council", she says, in one of these letters to Oxenstyerna, "are of different opinions from you and me, and any disaster would be put down to my youth, want of wisdom, and lust for dominion: the cares and labours may be mine, but the honours go to others; but if anything happens through their neglect, the blame has to be borne by me."
The confidential style of these letters, and the way in which the council is spoken of, prove them to have been Christina's unaided composition; it is of course possible that the reasons she alleges against prolonging the war, as for instance, the attitude of the Dutch and Poles, may have been suggested by her advisers; but there is throughout them a tone of self-confidence and independence, which is utterly unlike the mere repetition of a lesson learnt in the Senate.
As the war with Denmark was merely a side incident in the great European war which was raging in Germany, so the peace of Bromsebro was but a prelude to the great final settlement of Westphalia. The negotiations for peace had in fact begun in 1643, under the mediation of Venice, the Pope, and Denmark; and it was the unfriendly position taken up by the latter power, under the pretence of mediation, which had induced Oxenstyerna to forestal[l] its attack.
He could now once more turn his attention to the question of a general peace. It was, indeed, high time to think of putting an end to a war, the original causes of which had long been forgotten, and which had turned the most fruitful and prosperous regions of Germany into a hideous wilderness. The powers engaged were thoroughly exhausted; the armies of foreign mercenaries, who marched up and down Germany, leaving famine, plague, and cannibalism behind them, were often unpaid, and obliged to satisfy themselves by such plunder as they could get. Bernard of Weimar had died lamenting the complete loss of discipline or humanity amongst the brutalised soldiery, and sick of the horrors around him; and Torstenson was now commander of the Swedish forces in Germany. After ravaging Saxony and Bohemia, he defeated the Austrians at Jankow, pushed on to meet Turenne (who had just conquered Maximilian of Bavaria, at the old battle-field on the Lech,) so as to unite his troops with the French, and end the war by marching upon Vienna, and forcing the Emperor to make peace. Unfortunately, his own infirmities, and the plague which spread through his army on his junction with Ragotski's half-savage Transylvanian hordes, compelled him to retreat northwards, and he soon afterwards yielded his command to Marshal Wrangel. The respite, however, was felt by the Emperor to be but temporary. Spain, exhausted by revolts in its own provinces, and by a series of defeats in Flanders, was powerless to assist him, and he was obliged to consent to the opening of conferences for peace.
The great European congress which produced the treaty of Westphalia began. The Empire treated with France through the mediation of the Pope, at Münster, with Sweden and the Protestant states, through that of Venice, at Osnabrück. The French were represented by Servien and Count d'Avaux, the latter a diplomatist of great talent, and thoroughly acquainted with the affairs of Germany and of the North. The Swedish ambassadors were John Oxenstyerna, son of the chancellor, who inherited his father's political ideas without his abilities, and Adler Salvius, a man of humble birth, but possessed of considerable skill and experience. The negotiations were extremely difficult; France and Sweden, though allies, were jealous of one another, and seemed to be pursuing different objects: the latter insisted upon Pomerania, which the Elector of Brandenburg was unwilling to give up, unless he was compensated out of some of the Church-lands, a step which France was averse to taking, as it would offend the Elector of Bavaria and the princes of the Catholic League, which it was anxious to gain over to its own side, or at least to separate from the Emperor.
Nor was this all: the Swedish counsels were themselves divided. Oxenstyerna, who, from the league of Heilbronn downwards, had always distrusted France, assumed a haughty tone, and demanded the secularization of the Catholic Church-lands and the absolute ascendancy of Lutheranism. Both he and his son seemed indifferent as to whether the negotiations succeeded or not, and treated not only the French ambassadors, but even the German princes, with intentional arrogance and contempt.
The queen, on the other hand, was eager for peace, and ready to make concessions to France, with which she was anxious to continue friendly; and she found in Adler Salvius a minister who agreed with her views upon this question, and whom she could trust to carry out all her directions. She corresponded with him, unknown to Oxenstyerna, during the whole course of the negotiations, and her letters are full of expressions of anger at the slowness with which the conferences for peace dragged on. "Before all things", she angrily writes in April, 1647, "I desire a safe and honourable peace; the well-being of the State and the satisfaction of the Crown should be cared for as much as possible, but without breaking the peace or making it drag on; if this is not done, I would have you know that not all the authority or support of a class shall hinder me from letting the whole world know the dislike I bear to such senseless proceedings."
This letter, though nominally addressed to both ambassadors, was meant for John Oxenstyerna alone; in her next she repeats her expressions of confidence in Salvius, and shews her readiness to offend the nobility by raising him to the post of senator. "Never mind their jealousy", she tells him, "but answer with Marius, 'contemnunt novitatem meam, ego illorum ignaviam, mihi fortuna, illis probra objectantur.'" Against the whole of the aristocratical party she appears at this time to have been very bitter, and especially against the old chancellor; his cunning and hypocrisy reminded her, she wrote, of Tiberius; and one of her reasons for pushing on the peace, was to let men know that Oxenstyerna could not, as was commonly supposed, turn the whole world round his little finger.
The jealousies of France, the difficulties raised by Brandenburg about Pomerania, and all the other obstacles to peace, were at last got over, and the treaty of Westphalia was signed on the 24th of October, 1648. Sweden had come triumphant out of the war. It was now in possession of Pomerania, of the isle of Rügen, of Wismar in Mecklenburg, and of the two bishoprics of Bremen and Verden; it had acquired, moreover, by these possessions a voice in the internal affairs of the Empire, of which it had become a member, to say nothing of its immense influence as head of the Lutheran interest. It is true that the dream of Gustavus, of a "Corpus Evangelicorum", or solid confederation of the Protestant States of the North under the protection of Sweden, as a bulwark against the encroachments of the Catholic Empire, had not been realised; but for such a confederation there was now no longer any need. Protestantism had been firmly secured, the Catholic reaction had been beaten back; the battle which had been going on ever since the time of Luther, between the doctrine of the Reformation and the independence of the princes on the one hand, and the centralised despotism of the Catholic house of Austria on the other, had been decided against that imperial principle, which was at once effete and premature. The attempt to bring back, or give new life, to the institutions of the Middle Ages, or to a political organization resting upon the Church, had failed; and a new Europe had arisen, in which the principle of nationalities was henceforth to play a part of increasing importance, in which religious liberty was to grow more and more every day, and in which differences of creed were no longer to form the avowed grounds for the friendships or enmities of states. Christina herself, in her views on the peace, is typical of the new period; she desires a treaty which will secure the honour and interest of the country, without regard for the special welfare of her Lutheran co-religionists; whilst in Oxenstyerna, statesman as he is, the traditions of the Reformation wars still linger; his object is still the welfare of the German Protestants, and the ultimate possession by them of the Catholic ecclesiastical lands. He does not seem thoroughly yet to realise that the days when community of religious opinion could form a basis for political combinations have passed away for ever from the world.
Just after the peace of Westphalia King Ladislaus of Poland died. His two sons, Charles Ferdinand and John Casimir, were neither of them popular, but Christina was anxious to maintain on the throne of Poland a dynasty closely connected with her own, and from which designs against the existing order in Sweden were now no longer to be feared. Herself inclined to Charles Ferdinand, she yielded to the wishes of France, which feared the Austrian sympathies of that prince; and the two great powers which had just dictated terms at Münster to the fallen Empire, united once more to procure the election of John Casimir to the vacant crown of Poland.
Christina was now twenty years of age; and it was natural that, with the return of peace, and the direction of public interest towards home affairs, the question of her marriage should come forward. Several princes had already been suggested: amongst them Prince Ulric of Denmark, the younger son of Christian IV., and the electoral Prince Frederick of Brandenburg. It is always futile to speculate on what might have been the results of an event which did not take place; but it is difficult to resist the thought of the difference which such a marriage as this last would have made in the whole of the future history of the North, and even of Europe. The union of Sweden and Prussia would have established in the north-east of Europe an immense Teutonic and Protestant empire, completely enclosing the Baltic within its shores: and the existence of such an empire, whilst diverting Brandenburg from schemes of German aggrandisement at the expense of Austria, would have opposed an almost insuperable barrier to the advance of Russia towards the coast. As it was, the occupation of Pomerania made Sweden and Brandenburg natural rivals instead of natural allies; and the latter, which was to a certain extent the great progressive power of the north-eastern system, became, from mere jealousy of Swedish ascendancy in the Baltic, the ally of Peter the Great, and the accomplice of the designs of Russia for forcing an entrance into Europe.
It was generally supposed (after the rejection of the offers mentioned above) that if any one obtained Christina in marriage, it would be the Prince Palatine, Charles Gustavus. He had been the playmate of her childhood, and before leaving Sweden in 1647 for the German war, had ventured to talk to her about marriage. The queen, though she told him that she could not think of such a step till she was twenty-five years old at least, yet promised that if she did not become his wife, she would marry no other man; and further, that in case of her continuing unmarried, she would set to work to have him recognised by the Diet as her successor to the throne. It was therefore thought that, now that peace was made, she would gladly fulfil her promise; and the three lower estates drew up repeated petitions to her to marry the prince, in which even the nobility, though not particularly eager to perpetuate the dynasty, felt themselves obliged reluctantly to join.
Christina, however[,] still continued averse to the notion of marriage. Her proud spirit, as she tells us herself, rebelled against the ideas of subjection which are connected with the position of a wife, but which, apart from her view of her dignity and duty as a queen, would have been utterly repugnant to a woman of her tastes and training. Besides this, she always appears to have felt a strange half-romantic sort of admiration for a life of celibacy. It was one of the institutions in the Roman Catholic Church which attracted her most: even when quite a little girl she had been told that the Papists held it meritorious to lead a single life, and had exclaimed with enthusiasm, "O what an admirable doctrine: that's the religion which I shall belong to." In her own case, it would seem that she persuaded herself that her persistent rejection of all offers of marriage was a kind of noble self-sacrifice to the dignity of her position as a queen, and to the duty imposed upon her by that position, of giving her whole undivided care to the welfare of the country over which she ruled.
Under the influence of these feelings, Christina rejected all the petitions which the Diet presented on the subject of her marriage; but, as the necessity of securing the succession was the chief argument on which these petitions insisted, she resolved to make use of it, for the purpose of carrying out a scheme which she had long premeditated. Entering the council-chamber in which the Senate was sitting, she proposed, to the astonishment of all present, that the Prince Palatine should be declared the next in succession to the crown. The sudden and unexpected nature of the proposal at first took all the senators aback; but as soon as they had recovered from their surprise, they one and all began most vehemently to oppose it. But the queen was not to be put down. Long accustomed to speak with authority in the Senate, she overruled all objections with blunt, and almost cynical straightforwardness, and even ventured to accuse them of opposing an useful measure from selfish motives of class ambition. "I know", she said, "that some consider my the last of my race, and think that after my death they may hope themselves to be candidates for the crown; to those I would say, that no one of their family is so fit to reign as the prince. Others, again, desire an aristocratic republic, and put their own class interests above the welfare of the state, in which such a government would be impossible." Some senator objected that she might marry after all; and that, if she had children, a civil war might take place between them and the prince, who, having once been declared successor, would certainly not be willing to let the crown slip from his grasp. "I solemnly swear", replied the queen, "that if I do not marry Prince Charles, I will never take any other man for my husband; and as to your fears about a civil war, groundless as they are, it would be better that such a war should break out between my children (if I should have any) and the Prince, than between the families of Brahé and Oxenstyerna." The Senate was still undecided. "I know", said Christina, "that you want an elective monarchy or an aristocracy. The schemes of the Chancellor and of Gabriel Oxenstyerna are not unknown to me." In vain the nobles protested that they did not desire a change of government. They might sympathise with the Parliamentary cause in England, or with the resistance of the nobility of France to the tyranny of a low-born Italian upstart; but they had no wish, they assured her, to set up a republic in Sweden. The queen was still firm. "I will wager my two ears", she said, "that if this proposal of mine is not carried now, you will never take the prince for your king." The Senate broke up without coming to any conclusion; and on the discussion being resumed on the 27th of February, it was resolved to submit the matter to a "committee of the Diet." The committee shewed itself more ready to agree to the queen's proposal than the Senate had been. It offered a few feeble remonstrances, which Christina roughly crushed, and promised to bring the matter as soon as possible before the Diet. By the Diet the plan was not ill received; the three lower estates agreed to it at once. The unwilling consent of the nobility was forced from it by the outspoken threats of the queen, and drew with it that of the Senate. Oxenstyerna alone, though he signed the act regulating the succession, entered a solemn protest against it, and declared that the younger generation would live to regret the consequences of this election. At the queen's coronation, which took place in the following autumn, the Prince Palatine was officially recognised as heir-apparent to the crown.
Christina had obtained a signal victory over the aristocracy. Their plans for leaving the succession open, and thus paving the way for the fulfilment of their private ambitions, had been baffled by the energy and firmness of their queen. The hopes they may have founded on the weak reign of a woman, or on the increase of power acquired by them during the Regency, had fallen to the ground. They had seen Christina, single-handed, and by the sheer force of her will, carry through, against the wishes of the whole of their order, and of the Senate, but lately all-powerful, a measure which seemed, at least for a time, to cut off from them all hopes of regaining their lost supremacy in the state.
The opposition of the nobility was, however, not the only difficulty against which the queen had to struggle; at the Diet of 1650, a new class of troubles arose, which at one time seemed likely to bring upon the country the miseries of civil war. To explain these events clearly, it is necessary to go back a little, and to touch slightly upon causes which had been at work before the accession of Christina to the throne.
Previously to the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, the close alliance between the Crown and the mass of the people against aristocratical privilege, had prevented the existence in Sweden of anything like a democratical party unconnected with, and even opposed to, kingly authority. Under Charles IX. the lower orders had found their strongest support against the nobles in the strong government of the "Peasants'-king;" but towards the beginning of the seventeenth century various indirect influences, such as that of the Reformation, of the revival of national life, of the intercourse with the Hanse towns, and through them with the rest of Europe, had combined to give birth to a strong democratic and anti-feudal feeling among the people. On the other hand, it had been the policy of Gustavus Adolphus to conciliate the nobility, and to abstain from encouraging an anti-aristocratical spirit, which, though fostered at first under the shadow of the throne, might in the end become anti-monarchical as well. The result of this divergence between the interests of the king and of the lower classes, had been to give a fresh impulse to the growth of the rising democratical faction as a party, independent of the Crown; and this party, though it found a powerful opponent in the Chancellor Oxenstyerna, acquired a scarcely less able leader in the person of Johan Skytte, son of the burgomaster of Stockholm, and a member of the royal council. The German war for a time drew away public attention from these internal disputes, but they came once more prominently forward after the conclusion of the Westphalian treaty. As soon as the enthusiasm of victory had cooled down, the exhaustion of the finances and burdens which the war involved, produced their natural effect upon the common people, and made them all the more ready to listen to the tales told by popular leaders of the great revolution which had just taken place in England, and which was believed in Sweden to have been, at least in its latter stages, a triumph of democratical classes and principles over king and nobility alike. They were therefore quite prepared to give full vent to their discontent with the aristocracy; and at the Diet of 1650 the quarrel broke out, on the question of the "alienation of Crown domains."
This practice had begun under Gustavus Adolphus, who, anxious to secure his dynasty against the plots of Poland and of the nobles, had alienated to different noblemen an immense amount of Crown property, in order, as he said, "that those who obtained the estates might be all the more true to his family, for they might suppose that if another dynasty came to the throne, they might disapprove and revoke his concessions." It was natural that the Regency, unwilling to lay on fresh taxes, should have been only too ready to fill the exchequer by a system so favourable to the increase of aristocratic power. The alienations during their rule were in fact enormous, but were all confirmed by Christina when she took the government in hand herself. The result of all this was the transfer of the Crown rents, which represented the taxes paid by the peasants living on the Crown lands, to the noblemen to whom the domains had been alienated, a step which seemed to reduce the free yeomanry of Sweden (udallers) to the position of mere tenant-farmers, and to make them from immediate, only mediate subjects of the Crown, through the nobility. This latter view the nobles themselves lost no opportunity of encouraging. "We are all 'subditi Regni'", said Count Peter Brahé, "the peasants mediately, we gentlemen immediately." Others went even further, and declared that as the rents or land-tax originally paid to the Crown had passed to the nobility, the absolute possession of the soil, and bodies of the peasants, had passed with it, and that to themselves (the nobles) had now been transferred every right which the Crown had once enjoyed over them.
This state of things caused serious alarm to the unnoble orders, who were inclined from other causes to be discontented; and at the Diet of 1650, just before the coronation, they drew up a "Protestation for the restitution of Crown estates", which they presented to the queen, in the hope, perhaps, that her recent quarrels with the aristocratic party would ensure their claims against it a favourable hearing. In this Protestation they complain, that Crown estates have been alienated to several persons in permanent possession; that in consequence the peasants have suffered in many ways, being oppressed by the gentry, who force them to give up their cattle, keep grain at a high price, &c. Their demands for redress, which included nothing less than the restitution of the alienated domains, were presented in an insolent and threatening manner, and caused great excitement in Stockholm; the clergy were divided, the bishops met and debated for several weeks in a separate hall from the great body of priests; and Oxenstyerna, as representative of the nobles, advised the queen to reply to the Protestation by a stern reprimand, as an insolent invasion of the prerogative of the Crown in matters which concerned itself alone. The burghers and peasants on their side were equally resolute; men began to fear that things would end in a civil war; several wealthy nobles prepared to leave the country, and Oxenstyerna himself felt his life in danger. The storm was for the time prevented by the firm and conciliatory attitude of the queen, and by the mediation of the clergy. Christina acted with wisdom and prudence; she could not promise the restoration of the Crown lands, but at the same time she was not disposed to allow any unjust oppression of the peasantry by the nobility; and she declared that the epithet "ill-born", used of the unnoble orders by the nobles, applied only to those who disgraced a noble origin by degeneracy or baseness. All men, she said, born in lawful wedlock, should be held to be well-born, whatever their rank, and should be equally eligible for all offices in their country's service. This principle was quite opposed to the ideas embodied in the Form of Government; and that famous instrument, which ought to have been revised that year, was allowed to fall entirely into abeyance.
The troubles of the Diet in 1650, the opposition of the magnates to the nomination of the queen's successor, and their evident inclination for an elective kinship; the growth of a democratic spirit among the lower orders, the exhausted state of the revenue, the feeling that she stood alone between factions, neither of which was heartily loyal to her — all these difficulties combined to suggest to the queen the project of giving up the Crown, and leaving to her successor the task of settling the rivalries and curbing the ambitions of contending classes and interests. The first person to whom she announced her plan was the French ambassador, Pierre Chanut. Chanut, an agreeable man of considerable culture, and not without some political ability, had for some time past enjoyed a large share of her favour, and had used his position to inspire her with sentiments of friendship towards France. She often took him with her on expeditions into the country, and spent a great deal of her time in discussing all kinds of topics with him; it is said that it was through his means that Descartes was induced to visit Stockholm. On this occasion, however, he failed to shake her resolution, and in Oct., 1651, she imparted her scheme to the Senate. Her grounds, she said, were reasons of state. "Resolved herself never to marry, she was sure that prince would do so as soon as he succeeded to the throne; so long, however, as he continued without heirs, the future of the royal house could not be really secure." The Senate implored her to think better of her scheme, and, in spite of their political opinions, there is reason to believe that they were sincere. The hopes which some of them had nourished of reducing their sovereign to the position of a Polish King or Venetian Doge were but scanty; the rule of Christina, a frivolous woman, whose literary tastes were beginning to draw her more and more away from the cares of state, was far less formidable to them than the ambition of the crafty and politic Prince Charles, whom they distrusted and hated both as a foreigner, and because he well knew, and might be expected to remember, the persistent jealousy which they had displayed towards his house. They now gave a signal proof of their sincerity, by offering themselves to pay the debts with which the Crown was burdened, rather than that the queen should resign the throne.
With a show of reluctance Christina yielded, nor is it probable that her determination was ever very deep. It would be doing her an injustice to regard it as a mere affectation of intellectual contempt for human dignities, though at the same time the society of men of letters, and the eagerness with which for some time past she had studied philosophical writers, may have filled her for a time with a romantic, but none the less really-felt enthusiasm, for what she pictured to herself as the repose of a studious life. The assurances of fidelity she received from her own nobles, and the dislike shewn by foreign courts, especially that of France, to the change proposed, easily induced her to give up her design, at any rate for the present.
She was soon, however, to feel that a temporary burst of loyalty on the part of the Senate, could not repress discontents which grew deeper and deeper every year. As in England after Waterloo, so in Sweden, as soon as the enthusiasm kept up by the continuance of the war had died away, men began to realize the wretched state in which it had left the country, and their discontent found vent in sullen murmurings against the Government. The Crown was heavily burdened, the alienation of Crown lands was no longer possible, nor could any increase of taxes be attempted: the lower classes, once the strongest support of monarchy, were now the most deeply dissatisfied. They complained bitterly of the extravagance of the Court, which was certainly, considering the state of the country, excessive, and at the gifts lavished upon favourites and foreign savants; and these feelings were rather fostered than checked by the clergy, which viewed with suspicion and dislike the literary men from abroad who surrounded the queen, some of them Papists, others Calvinist heretics from Holland, and others suspected or even avowed unbelievers. Just at this juncture a certain Arnold Messenius, son of the historian, John Messenius, — who had been imprisoned with his father during the regency for intriguing with Poland, and who felt a bitter personal hatred towards Oxenstyerna, — endeavoured to make use of the popular discontent to serve his own half-private, half-political ends. His plan was to re-organize that democratical party of which John Skytte had been the leader in the late king's reign, and which had displayed its sentiments with such threatening violence at the Diet of 1650. By means of this party he hoped to effect a popular revolution. The Palatine, at the head of the troops, was to march upon Stockholm, depose the queen, and rise to the throne like a second Charles IX, by the ruin of the nobility, and especially of the Oxenstyernas. Such was the tenour of an anonymous letter sent to Prince Charles, and traced to Messenius' son, a young man of twenty, who was mixed up in his father's schemes, and afterwards to Messenius himself. He no doubt supposed that Charles, whose enmity to the great families was well known, would readily have fallen in with his plots; but the prince — who for some time past had lived a retired life, apparently indifferent to the cares of state, but really biding his time — was not to be hurried into an act of folly, which, apart from its being repugnant to his honourable character, was certain to end in his ruin. He sent the pamphlet to the queen; the Messenius', father and son, avowed their guilt, and perished on the scaffold. Their confessions added importance to a conspiracy at first sight trifling and personal, for they implicated a number of leading men, all of whom, it appeared, had been in the habit of holding language, and advocating views, similar to those expressed in the letter to Prince Charles. Amongst them were Nilson, the burgomaster of Stockholm; the senator, Benedict Skytte; Terserus, Dean of Westeras (who had been spokesman for the clergy at the Diet of 1650), all of them men who had taken a leading part in the threatening democratic agitation of that year, and who were, from their influence with the lower orders, all the more formidable to the state. Their connexion with Messenius proved the discontent of the classes in whose interest they professed always to act, and the readiness with which the popular party might lend itself to the most dangerous revolutionary designs.
Christina thus occupied a solitary position. She felt that the aristocracy — which had so long really ruled the country under the Form of Government, and which had only recently been curbed by a sudden and determined stroke of policy on her part — could not be trusted to support her heartily, except with the view of gaining advantages for themselves incompatible with the authority of the Crown; whilst the burgher and peasant class were thoroughly discontented with her government, and were being formed into an organized opposition by factious leaders. The country, triumphant in its foreign policy, was utterly ruined internally; abroad, the establishment of the Commonwealth in England, and the troubles of the Fronde in France, seemed like the prelude of a general anti-monarchical movement throughout Europe, and reacted dangerously on both the discontented parties in Sweden. It is necessary to form a proper estimate of all these difficulties, before hastily reproaching Christina with the abandonment of her duties as a queen, for the mere selfish gratification of her literary tastes; in fact, had she remained upon the throne, she would have found it no easy task to maintain her position unimpaired. She now once more began to think of abdication as the only means of solving the problems before her, and her inclination for it was strengthened by the ever-increasing desire of giving herself wholly up to literature. This desire had been growing on her for the last few years, and was the result of the society of the learned men whom she had invited to her court from all parts of Christendom. A short account of the residence of some of the most remarkable of these "savants" at Stockholm, and of the influence exercised by them upon the queen, will form the subject of the earlier part of the ensuing chapter.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Sir Arthur Henry Hardinge.
Note: Jankovich, Jankowitz or Jankau is the German name for what is now the town of Jankov in what is now the Central Bohemian region of the Czech Republic.
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