Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Read online

  But if the journey was a romantic comedy, it was not without its dramatic aspects. His search for a wife in the German lands had allowed Gustav Adolf to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various princes who served as a Protestant bulwark against the Catholic Habsburgs. He was not impressed, and he returned contemptuous of their ‘feebleness, cross-purposes, selfishness, and military incompetence’, an ill omen for the Protestant alliance that he would later attempt to forge.5

  In the autumn Maria Eleonora and Chancellor Oxenstierna set out upon the northward road, accompanied by the Electress Dowager and her youngest daughter, Katharina, together with the bride’s personal secretary and many ladies-in-waiting. They travelled in some comfort, their journey assisted – and the bride’s dowry increased – by the pawning of valuables which the Electress Dowager had raided from the Brandenburg state treasury. At Kalmar, not far from the Danish border, they stopped, for here the King himself had come to meet them, pausing en route to purify the land for his bride by torching a number of plague-stricken houses in the surrounding countryside.

  At Kalmar, the party passed several days of alternate rest and celebration in the beautiful castle beside its placid harbour. It was an historic place, for here, more than two hundred years before, the triple-Queen Margareta had united Sweden with the neighbouring lands of Norway and a dominant Denmark, a union against which Gustav Adolf’s own grandfather had led his people to rebel.6 Kalmar was Sweden’s architectural jewel, a castle of fairytale beauty and among the finest in Europe, built with a sure artistic sense by the King’s Renaissance forebears. Many of its rooms were beautifully decorated, with painted mouldings and inlaid wood, and finely made furniture from the lands to the south. No doubt it was all displayed with pride to the newcomers, and perhaps, too, the young bride was teased with horror stories of the murders which the same rooms had witnessed, not so very long before.7 If so, they did not deter her. The bridegroom set out for the Tre Kronor Castle, thoughtfully going ahead to give his personal attention to the heating of Maria Eleonora’s rooms, and soon she set out after him with her own entourage on the long, hard journey to Stockholm, 300 miles northward, with the winter closing in around them.

  If the sophisticated ambience of Kalmar had reassured the young bride, her composure was soon to be tested as she made her way through her new-found country, for as yet Sweden had little to impress a German countess. Its climate harsh and its people few, it was overwhelmingly rural, with small clusters of farmsteads thinly spread over the less inhospitable southern areas. Lakes and forests dwarfed and isolated all but the largest settlements. Befitting their rural homeland, almost all the Swedes, about a million souls in all, were peasants. A few tens of thousands lived in small and undeveloped towns, and even the nobles mostly chose to live in the countryside, putting their modest incomes back into the land. The very crown revenues, including taxes, were still paid in kind; grain and fish and butter, hides and furs, and iron and copper from Dutch-owned mines, all poured into the royal warehouses, and out of them, too, for the crown’s own servants and even foreign creditors were paid in kind as well. In the early days of Gustav Adolf’s reign, meetings of parliament had taken place in the open air, while at the Tre Kronor Castle, the monarch’s own residence, the doors remained open to all comers.

  As the weary train arrived in Stockholm, the young bride’s deepening disappointment turned to dismay. Not yet the country’s formal capital, the grand northern city where she had thought to make her home was in fact scarcely more than a backward country town, its muddy streets lined with basic wooden houses, unwarmed as yet by the ubiquitous red paint that would one day turn their roughness to charm. Goats wandered on the brown turf rooves, nibbling at the roots and grass, sending a plaintive bleating into the chilly air. Inside, the dwellings of rich and poor alike were largely bare, with little covering on the floors and less upon the walls, and now, in the gathering winter, reliably cold. Though the King himself, like his forefathers, was genuinely interested in architecture and the fine arts, there had been little excess wealth for great public buildings or lavish artistic patronage; native literature and music remained rudimentary, theatre almost unknown, paintings and sculpture rare, and Sweden’s nobles, in their bare-walled, bare-floored houses, largely unconvinced. To the citizens of the superbly cultured towns of Italy, or to those of Holland with its advanced financial system and its plethora of cheap goods, Sweden seemed a desperate outpost at the ends of the earth. To Maria Eleonora, accustomed to the rich heritage of Brandenburg and with cultural pretensions of her own, disdain was now added to disappointment. She conceived a contempt for the land and its people, her husband only excepted, and garnered much ill will from her offended new compatriots.

  In the December of 1620, the marriage took place, and three days later, before the silver altar of Stockholm’s Storkyrka, Sweden’s new Queen was crowned. Though her title was ancient, her accoutrements were new, for the former Queen, Gustav Adolf’s mother, Christine, had refused to hand over her regal insignia. In some haste, a new crown had been beaten out of gold, a new sceptre and orb provided, studded with rubies and diamonds, the red and white of the Queen’s native Brandenburg. The King was dressed in the colours of his own land, in a blue robe embroidered with gold. Liveried pages and knights in pearled helmets paid homage, as the resentful Queen Mother looked on.

  Late in the summer of the following year, Maria Eleonora gave birth to a stillborn daughter. The King was away, campaigning in Livonia,8 taking advantage of a Turkish attack on southeast Poland to harangue his old enemy from the north, when the news arrived that his wife had been ‘too soon and untimely’ delivered of the child. From his camp outside Riga, he sent a grieving letter to his brother-in-law, lamenting the ‘misery’ which had befallen the Queen and stricken his royal house. ‘May God be kind to her,’ he wrote, ‘and help her quickly back to health.’9

  Health of a kind did return to the Queen, but not quickly, and it was more than two years before she was brought to bed again, of a second daughter, who was named Kristina Augusta. ‘The little girl is doing well,’ she wrote, and in the summer of 1624, after almost four years in Sweden, Maria Eleonora’s mother decided that she and her youngest daughter could safely return to Brandenburg. But this hopeful time was not to last. In the autumn, the child fell suddenly ill, and before she had reached her first birthday, she died, an unhappy reminder of Maria Eleonora’s own three youngest siblings, all of whom she had seen die within their first year of life.

  Maria Eleonora passed a sad winter, bereft of her mother and sister, her little daughter dead, and her husband, to whom she had begun to cling with a desperate fondness, too often preoccupied and too often away. In February came a further blow, the death of her younger brother, at the age of just 21. As the spring approached, happier times seemed promised; the days lengthened and a mild sun shone down, and another baby quickened in her womb. But in April, news arrived from Berlin of the Electress Dowager’s death. The Queen was deeply affected, and for some weeks she lay sorrowing and ill, mourning her mother, wearied by her pregnancy. Towards the end of May, she rallied. The King was again in Stockholm, and in the fine spring weather an inspection of the Swedish fleet was to take place in the surrounding harbour. The royal couple would attend together, reviewing the ships from aboard their own small yacht. The fleet lay at anchor off the little island of Skeppsholmen, and as the King and Queen sailed past, a sudden squall blew up around them, rocking their yacht from side to side until it almost capsized. Though the mooring was soon reached, the Queen was carried back, frightened and ailing, to her rooms in the castle, and there she endured the bitter conclusion of the day. For within a few hours, her labour had begun, too early; the morning light would break upon her weeping women, and her little stillborn son.

  The King recorded the tragedy with pious resignation. ‘Disaster has befallen me,’ he wrote. ‘My wife has brought a dead child into the world. It is because of our sins that it has pleased God to do this
.’10

  For his Vasa dynasty, at least, it was indeed a disaster. In this fifth year of his marriage, and despite the Queen’s three confinements, Gustav Adolf had as yet no living heir. Three years before, his younger brother had been killed in battle in Poland, and the King of that same country, Gustav Adolf’s cousin, Sigismund III, now stood to inherit the Swedish throne. Moreover, Sweden’s enemy heir had two adult sons of his own, through whom a Catholic dynasty might be foisted upon the unwilling Swedes, raising once again the spectre of civil war.

  But the lack of an heir was not the only disaster to have befallen the King. His wife’s behaviour was becoming increasingly eccentric. During his many absences on campaign, she would be ill and depressed, then would bound out of her dismal moods with cravings for sweet foods and lavish spending on gifts for her favourites which the Treasury could not afford. She had always been passionately fond of her husband, but now her attachment became obsessive, and she pleaded repeatedly with Axel Oxenstierna to persuade him to return. ‘Please help me, if you can help me,’ she wrote to the exasperated Chancellor. One courtier, describing her as ‘unimaginably’ hysterical, attributed her behaviour, sympathetically, to simple loneliness. Maria Eleonora herself felt sure of the source of her malaise. ‘When I know that my most beloved lord is coming,’ she wrote, ‘then all my sickness and panic fall away.’11

  The Queen’s extreme behaviour was not the only sign that she was now far from well. Her very odd use of language was becoming the subject of comment by many at court. Far from having mastered the language of her adopted country, since coming to live in Sweden she had become incapable of using even her native German correctly. Whether speaking or writing, she muddled syllables and made up strange concoctions of words which resembled but did not match those of any language she had learned. Although no one regarded the Queen as intelligent, and many spoke of her extravagant flights of hysteria, her unusual difficulty with language suggests a possible neurological problem. It may be that, during one of her confinements, she had suffered some kind of stroke; certainly there was no mention of any language problem before her marriage, and her own father had suffered several strokes which had left him increasingly debilitated. Whatever the reason for the Queen’s abnormal use of language, it no doubt added to her increasing sense of desperation – even her handwriting, once straight in lines of even spacing, now showed a pronounced downward slope, the graphologist’s tell-tale sign of depression.12

  The Queen’s unhappiness can only have been increased by the knowledge that, only a few hours’ journey from Stockholm, her husband’s nine-year-old illegitimate son was living with his Dutch mother and stepfather, Margareta and Jakob Trello, at Benhammar, an estate in the King’s gift.13 The King was evidently proud of the boy; he had named him, after all, Gustav Gustavsson. His existence was no secret, and indeed, rumours abounded that the affair between the King and Margareta was still ongoing; Margareta herself had written to Gustav Adolf to reassure him that she was not the source of them. There does not seem to have been any truth in the rumours, but the boy’s bright and sturdy presence in itself must have been a constant reminder to the Queen of the son she herself still lacked.

  The King, though courteous and considerate, had by now abandoned any hope of a genuine companionship with his wife. In public, he spoke of her affectionately, but in private he referred to her as his malum domesticum, a ‘domestic cross’ which he was obliged to bear. To his friends, it seemed, he regarded her as ‘more or less a child’, to be attended to and watched over, but from whom no mature, reciprocal feeling could ever be expected. Still in her twenties, Maria Eleonora had already begun to assume the sad mantle of old age, confused in her speech, prey to every illness, trying to those about her.

  Further troubles now beset Gustav Adolf, for this was 1625, a plague year, and his own troops in the east had not been spared. In December came news of his mother’s death. It was late in the spring before he could return to bury her; through the long months of winter her body lay in state in Nyköping. But on his arrival, the King brought joyful news; the Queen was expecting another child. Pitying her pleading, and no doubt only too aware that an heir had yet to be produced, the King had agreed to her joining him after a Swedish victory had provided a pause in the fighting. As the year progressed, every precaution was taken to ensure Maria Eleonora’s safety, and in November, a few weeks before the expected birth of the new baby, Gustav Adolf’s illegitimate son was tactfully dispatched to the university at Uppsala, in the care of the King’s own boyhood tutor. It was not in any sense a dismissal; the young Gustav would retain his place in his father’s affections, but for now, it seems, he was best out of the way.

  December in Stockholm, the cold, dark winter of the north, and a new moon glimmered on the frozen river. Around the castle, the plain wooden dwellings stood huddled and low, as if to shelter themselves from the bitter weather. Above, in a black sky, the stars were aligned just as they had been more than thirty years before at the birth of Gustav Adolf; now, once again, the Lion ascendant cast its faint reflection on the old stone tower’s three golden crowns. Within the castle, torches flamed and fires blazed, striving against the darkness and the damp. Courtiers paced and servants dozed, while the Queen consulted her astrologers, and the King dreamed of a son.

  It had been an anxious time. Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora had been six years married, and they had as yet no living child. The birth of a boy was now predicted, but as the Queen drew near her confinement, the astrologers foresaw death as well. The child would die, or if he lived, he would cost the life of his mother, or even his father, who lay ill, feverish and troubled as the hour of the birth approached. If the boy lived, he would be great, they said, and the Queen took comfort, remembering the signs of her pregnancy, the omens in the stars, and her husband’s dreams.

  It was the eighth of December,14 a Sunday, and as night fell, a night of bitter cold, the Queen began her labour. She was not strong, and the birth proved difficult, but as the clocks neared eleven, the baby emerged, alive, into the eager hands of the midwives. That the child was strong and likely to survive was clear – a lusty roar announced a determined entry into the world – but it was covered from head to knee in a birth caul, concealing the crucial evidence of its sex. The caul was removed at once, and the Queen’s attendants, delighted to meet the expectations of the court, declared the child a boy; its siblings were dead, and it was, after all, sole heir to a valiant warrior king. The mother and father were duly informed, and through the cold midnight air the castle rang ‘with mistaken shouts of joy’.

  The nurse came confidently forward, the exhausted Queen lay back, but for the disconcerted midwives it would be no night of rest or sweet, familiar work. A closer look at the baby had revealed their error; it was in fact a girl. Through the dark night hours they waited, for no one dared tell the King. As the morning light dawned weakly over the castle, the baby’s aunt decided to take the matter in hand. She took the child up in her arms, went to her brother’s sickroom, and lay the child directly on the King’s bed, sans swaddling clothes or, as the baby herself was to describe the event, ‘in such a state that he could see for himself what she dared not tell him’.15

  Legend has it that the King expressed no disappointment, indeed, not even surprise, at this extraordinary turn of events. He calmly took up the child and kissed it, then spoke to his sister in accents of tender stoicism. ‘Let us thank God,’ he said. ‘This girl will be worth as much to me as a boy. I pray God to keep her, since He has given her to me. I wish for nothing else. I am content.’ The Princess reminded him that he was still young, as was the Queen, that there would surely be other children, surely a son, but the King merely replied, ‘I am content. I pray God to keep her for me’, and he blessed the baby and kissed her again, as if to emphasize his contentment. ‘She will be clever,’ he added, smiling, ‘for she has deceived us all.’16

  The legend has its source in the pen of Christina herself, though she claimed
to have heard the story ‘a hundred times’ from her aunt and also from her mother, who, at the time of this exchange, lay perilously weak in her own room. It is not likely to be true, though the Princess may well have softened the tale for the lonely little girl whom she later took into her care. In fact, the birth of a daughter was a desperate disappointment for Gustav Adolf and his followers, and it threw into question the very survival of the shaky Vasa dynasty. The King’s calm acceptance, if calm it really was, is more likely to have been the result of his fever, the lassitude or lethargy of a draining illness, or even of quiet relief to have at least a living child. As for the Queen, it was some time before she was considered strong enough to withstand the sorry news. After four pregnancies and the deaths of three infants, and this latest, most difficult birth, she was ‘inconsolable’ to find that she had not borne a son after all. She rejected the child out of hand, and began her own descent into a profound mental disarray.