Source:
Eccentric Personages: Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of Remarkable Characters, volume 2, pages 58 to 59, by William Russell, 1864; original at the Wellcome Library
The biography:
Queen Christina's determination, in opposition to her Chancellor's counsel, to finish with the thirty years' war, is creditable to her judgment. She boasted to have been born "in the palms and laurels thereof", but the cypresses so thickly intertwined with those bloody palms and laurels seem to have at last made an impression even upon her, by no means sensitive, conscience. The year following the Peace of Westphalia, Christina indulged herself in the caprice of being solemnly crowned King with great splendour. On the afternoon of that day of high festival the Queen or King issued an order commanding that the illuminations in Stockholm should be continued in unabated splendour till the dawn of day.
By this time the Swedish people, with whom the Queen was universally popular, spite[,] or possibly because of her eccentric vagaries, were extremely anxious that Christina should marry, lest peradventure they should, some disastrous day, find themselves queenless — a doomed nation, with not even a child six years of age to save them from perdition. The crown being, as her majesty smilingly observed, "a very pretty girl", there were abundance of suitors for the sacrificial honour of dividing the glittering burden with her. The kings of Spain, of Poland, of Naples, with no end of electors, dukes, margraves, were willing to undertake the onerous duty; but Christina begged to decline the assistance so generously proffered. Neither heaven nor earth, she vowed, should compel her to marry, "an act which required far more courage than to fight a battle." Taking pity, however, upon her loyal people, who were daily becoming more and more demented by the dreadful risks they were daily running of sinking into insignificance by being reduced to the condition of lost fatherless and motherless sheep, — an unhappy flock, destitute of shepherd or shepherdess, — Christina suddenly nominated her cousin, Charles Augustus [sic], Crown Prince of Sweden, whereupon the alarm of the people subsided.
Above: Kristina.
Note: Kristina's coronation took place in 1650, not 1649 (the Peace of Westphalia was signed in October 1648), but she actually was crowned and proclaimed king of Sweden that day, and it did indeed take place in Stockholm (the traditional and favoured coronation city for kings of Sweden was Uppsala). Although she was queen in name and was usually referred to as such, according to Swedish law at the time, queens were only recognised as the wives of kings, and Kristina, who was queen regnant (ruling in her own right) and never queen consort, took this distinction very seriously and likely also very literally.
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