Source:
Christina, Queen of Sweden, pages 78 to 82, by Francis William Bain, 1890; original at the University of Connecticut Library
The account:
Christina was extravagantly delighted when at length the Peace was actually signed; she gave the courier who brought the news to Sweden a gold chain, worth 600 ducats, and raised the secretary who brought the instrument to the nobility. Te Deums were sung in the churches, cannons fired, and public rejoicings held by her order. But the Chancellor and his war party were by no means so much pleased; they had no such exact perception of the needs and exigencies of the time as the wise young Queen, and looked only to the fact that less gain had accrued to Sweden than in view of all her efforts they thought might and ought to have been the case. Most of the nobles even regretted the war for its own sake. Themselves first, Sweden next, and Germany to take care of itself was their policy: whereas Christina exactly reversed that order, and placed the wants of Germany and the Swedish people above everything else. When some expressed in her presence their opinion that the Peace would not be of long duration, she replied, "I know well that there can be no eternal peace in this world; but that same Providence which has brought freedom to Germany will watch over it to preserve it."
By the clergy, again, it was not so well received; it stank in their nostrils that Calvinism should be recognized, or any disposition shown to half measures with Catholicism. In the pulpits they preached against it; one bigoted preacher exclaimed that the cause of Lutheranism had been deserted, and delivered an invective against the Catholics. Christina had him summoned before her, and rebuked him so sharply that the poor man lost his wits, and denied that he had ever uttered what had been heard by four thousand people.
We must carefully remember these things when we listen to abuse of Christina; it was just by such actions as these that her large mind and catholic toleration gained her the rancorous abuse and hatred of pitiful religious and political sectarians who could not comprehend her. Nobles and Swedish Lutheran patriots bore her a grudge for the Peace of Westphalia. It is exactly in this reference that Christina showed a keener political insight than the Chancellor. "It was", says Geijer, "the beginning of a new order of things, which in its operation set him aside; in this, more than in the weakness of age, lay the secret of his powerlessness; his political life terminated with the Peace." From this moment he stands aside, and the Queen does everything by herself. "She did without him on several occasions", says Chanut, "consulting him only like the other ministers, without marking the wide distinction there was between his experience and that of her other advisers."
And this is the moment at which she reaches her greatest elevation. To understand the benefits conferred on the world by the peace[,] it is necessary to be familiar with the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. Fortunately this is not the place to dwell upon them; yet something must be said to help us to realize the situation. It was no longer a war of man against man, but brute against brute. Human nature was disappearing, in every sense of the word. Military license, famine and cannibalism, plague and pestilence ruled over Germany; the initial stages of rage and despair had long passed away, and only apathy remained to the miserable remnant of the population. A few more years, and this too would have vanished, and Germany have become a desert. "Almost all the country below Leipsic", wrote the Chancellor in 1643, "is a waste." "In the two armies", wrote Gronsfeld in 1648, "there were certainly more than 180,000 men, women, and children, who must all live as well as the soldiers; provisions are distributed every twenty-four hours for 40,000; how the remaining 140,000 are to live passes my comprehension, if they are not to pick up a bit of bread for themselves; there is not a single place where the soldiers[,] if they have money[,] can buy anything: I say this, not as approving exorbitancies, but to show that all was not done out of insolence, but much out of mere hunger."
The imagination, brooding however deeply over that picture, will notwithstanding never be able to reach the appalling misery of the actual facts. What wonder that Germany took long to recover, and that her civilization was thrown back for a century. That a period was put to this desolation, she has to thank Christina more than any statesman of that age; we shall not err in asserting that but for Christina the Peace might have been retarded indefinitely. But for her, the policy of the past, the policy of religious uncompromising antagonism and national antipathy, the policy of the war party and Oxenstiern, would have carried the day; Sweden and France would never have united, and the rest would have been chaos. The Peace of Westphalia, with all its consequences, even the existence of Germany as a nation, is entirely due to the unflagging energy and unwearied labour of Christina. And when we consider what was the strength of the opposition through which she carried it by the force of her genius and tenacity of her purpose, working, amidst a multitude of other business, from eighteen to twenty-two, harder than any under-secretary, to master all its minutest details, which she knew better than any paid official — never allowing herself to be absent from the Senate, even though frequently "suffering from fever, and obliged to be bled", till she had attained her end — we shall recognize that her claims to the admiration and gratitude of posterity are of quite another kind than those of many of its painted idols.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Axel Oxenstierna.
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