Sidney Dark's biography of Kristina, year 1929, part 4

Source:

Twelve Royal Ladies, pages 168 to 170, by Sidney Dark, illustrations by Mabel Pugh, 1929; original at the University of California

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3477474&seq=180

The account:

She was bewildered and disappointed. She was overworked and ill, trusting none of her counsellors and without any real power to delegate, and she, a laughter-loving blue-stocking, had grown weary of the dull Puritan Swedes.

But, with all these motives influencing her, there was a stronger motive still which finally caused her to surrender her throne. She had always been attracted by Rome, partly, it is suggested, because of its high regard for celibacy, and at the same time she knew that a Roman Catholic sovereign was impossible in the Sweden of the middle seventeenth century. She disliked Lutheranism. As a girl she had invented a queer [strange] mystical religion of her own, and she had an ever-growing regard for the Catholic Church, with its saints and martyrs and its "admirable virgins." During a dangerous illness two years before her coronation, she had finally determined to become a Catholic, and it was this determination which caused her abdication in 1654. She would not marry. She would not remain a Protestant. She had grown tired of the cold north and yearned for the sun of the south. And so Christina ceased to be a queen.

At a stately ceremony in her capital [sic] she signed an act of abdication, and then she herself took the crown from her head, laid down the sceptre, and, standing in a simple white dress, bade her people farewell. "I thank Almighty God", she said, "who caused me to be born of a royal stock and raised me to be Queen over so large and mighty a kingdom: and for that He has granted me so uncommon a measure of success and blessing." Then she bade her cousin and successor remember his ancestors and prove worthy of their traditions. The abdication was almost immediately followed by conversion, and from that moment Christina became the hero of the Catholics and the bugbear of the Protestants.

Above: Kristina.

Above: Sidney Dark.

Notes: Kristina's abdication took place in Uppsala, not in Stockholm.

Although the legend is famous and widespread, in reality no one refused to take the crown off of Kristina's head, and Kristina did not take the crown off herself.