Sidney Dark's biography of Kristina, year 1929, part 3

Source:

Twelve Royal Ladies, pages 166 to 168, by Sidney Dark, illustrations by Mabel Pugh, 1929; original at the University of California

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3477474&seq=178

The account:

Christina was crowned in 1650, and four years afterwards this remarkable young woman abdicated. Europe was astounded. The abdication, which was as unexpected as Elizabeth's would have been after the destruction of the Spanish Armada, or Queen Victoria's in the year of the Great Exhibition, was due to a combination of circumstances reacting on an original and, in some respects, an abnormal character.

The internal affairs of Sweden were in a peculiarly difficult position. Christina understood the sufferings of the poor caused by the war, and she unquestionably resented the arrogance of the nobles. But she did nothing either to alleviate or to check, and her own personal extravagance stimulated discontent. She was confronted by a problem that she could not solve, and she ran away from it. Rather than confess to failure, she preferred to surrender what was becoming an untenable position, made the more tiresome by the folly and incapacity with which she was surrounded.

Moreover, she was determined never to marry. Like Elizabeth, she had a morbid horror of the action of s*x. Elizabeth hated it, but, as Mr. Lytton Strachey says, "she would play with it nevertheless." The English Queen never at any time had any real intention of marrying, but she delighted in coarse philanderings, and negotiations for marriage were the trump card in her crooked diplomacy until she was an old woman. Christina was more honest and more direct. She disliked women. All her friends were men, but from her girlhood she scorned the idea of marriage, because, perhaps, it meant reckoning herself with the sex which she despised. She would have no master. She was determined to die a free woman. But Christina realised that a childless monarch is a national nuisance. The succession remains doubtful. Dangerous ambitions are stimulated. A party among the Swedish nobles was perfectly content with a maiden Queen, and there was a suggestion that after her death an elected monarchy should be established in Sweden. But Poland was the object lesson of the futility of such a system. In abdicating, therefore, and in making way for her cousin, Prince Charles, Christina certainly acted as a patriotic Swede. It had long been supposed that she would marry her cousin, and, when she first broached the subject of abdication to the Senate, it was urged that, if she would not marry Charles, he would never marry anyone else. "But he will", said the Queen. "Love burns not for one alone. The crown is a pretty girl."

Above: Kristina.

Above: Sidney Dark.