Christina, Queen of Sweden

Biography

In May 1649 a shipment arrived in Stockholm from Prague: about seven hundred and sixty paintings, hundreds of statues, tens of thousands of coins and medals, manuscripts and books. Swedish troops had taken Prague Castle a year earlier, and the former collection of Emperor Rudolf II passed to a queen of twenty-two. Until then the royal collection in Sweden had been modest: good tapestries and some hundred paintings by minor German, Flemish and Swedish artists.

Christina remained a collector for the rest of her life.

She was born on 18 December 1626 (8 December, Old Style) in the Tre Kronor castle in Stockholm, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus and Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. By her own account, the midwives at first took the newborn for a boy: she was covered in hair and cried loudly. Her father, according to the same stories, was delighted with a daughter. In 1632 he was killed at the Battle of Lützen, and Christina, aged six, inherited the throne. Her mother, whose behaviour contemporaries thought unstable, lost the right to raise her in 1636. The girl was brought up by her aunt, Catherine, Countess Palatine, and the chancellor Axel Oxenstierna taught her affairs of state. She was educated as a prince would have been: the theologian Johannes Matthiae taught her religion, philosophy, Greek and Latin, and she is said to have studied up to ten hours a day. Besides Swedish and German she learned several more languages. She was declared of age in 1644, at eighteen; her coronation, postponed because of the war with Denmark, took place in Stockholm in October 1650.

The Thirty Years’ War ended during her reign. Under the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 Sweden received an indemnity and territories in northern Germany, and under the Treaty of Brömsebro Gotland and Ösel passed to it from Denmark. She and Oxenstierna differed: he wanted to press the negotiations harder, she insisted on peace and sent her own representative, Johan Adler Salvius, to the congress. In 1649 she refused to marry and secured recognition of her cousin Charles Gustav of the Palatinate as heir. Contemporaries recalled that as a child she had read a life of Elizabeth I of England. In ten years of rule Christina and Oxenstierna granted many noble titles and gave away much crown land; the court’s expenses grew, and discontent among the estates increased.

Under her the court became a gathering place for scholars and performers. In 1645 she founded the newspaper Ordinari Post Tijdender, which is still published. Johann Freinsheim and Isaac Vossius served as her librarians, she corresponded with Pierre Gassendi, and Blaise Pascal offered her a copy of his calculating machine. In October 1649 Descartes came to Stockholm at her invitation. She scheduled his lessons for five in the morning in a cold castle, and they did not get on; in February 1650 he died. She did not stay off the stage herself: she acted in amateur productions, invited foreign companies, and in 1648 commissioned thirty-five paintings from Jacob Jordaens for a ceiling in Uppsala Castle.

The decision to abdicate matured in the early 1650s. By 1651 she was already corresponding secretly with the Jesuits in Rome, and in 1652 two Jesuits, Paolo Casati and Francesco Malines, came to Sweden. In 1653 she sent books, tapestries and paintings ahead to Antwerp. In February 1654 she told the council of her intention, and on 6 June at Uppsala she laid down the crown and handed it to Charles X Gustav. She kept the revenues of several territories, about two hundred thousand riksdalers a year. She left Sweden in men’s clothing. She was received into the Catholic Church in Brussels at Christmas 1654 and publicly renounced Lutheranism in Innsbruck on 3 November 1655. She entered Rome on 20 December 1655; Pope Alexander VII gave her a second name, Alexandra.

In 1656 she travelled to France for the first time, where she discussed with Mazarin and Louis XIV a plan for her to take the throne of the Kingdom of Naples. Nothing came of it. In the autumn of 1657 at Fontainebleau, on her orders, her servants killed her master of the horse, the marquis Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, whom she suspected of betrayal. What the letters behind the affair contained is not known: a priest kept them, and the letters themselves are lost. Her reputation in Rome suffered badly. Later she came to Sweden twice more, in 1660 and 1666, but nobody gave her back the throne, and in 1668 her candidacy for the Polish throne failed.

From 1659 she lived in the Palazzo Riario in Trastevere. In the Sala dei Quadri hung thirteen Titians, eleven Veroneses, five Raphaels and several Correggios. She bought five small panels from the predella of Raphael’s Colonna Altarpiece, and Titian’s “Death of Actaeon” she apparently received as a gift from Archduke Leopold William. She gave Dürer’s “Adam and Eve” to Philip IV of Spain, and they are now in the Prado. She had befriended Bernini within days of arriving in Rome. In 1656 she made Giacomo Carissimi maestro di cappella of her chamber concerts. Alessandro Stradella and Bernardo Pasquini wrote for her, and Arcangelo Corelli dedicated his first collection of sonatas to her. In 1671 she opened Rome’s first public theatre in a former prison, Tor di Nona, but Innocent XI later turned it into a grain store. Her own writings, maxims and an unfinished autobiography were written in Rome. In 1686 she publicly declared that the Jews of Rome were under her protection.

Christina died on 19 April 1689 in Rome (according to other sources, 9 April). Her body lay in state for three days in the Palazzo Riario and was then buried in the Vatican Grottoes, one of three women given such a place in St Peter’s Basilica. She named Cardinal Decio Azzolino her universal heir, but he died the same year, and his nephew quickly sold off the collection. Some of the paintings passed to the Odescalchi family, and in 1721 a hundred and twenty-three of them went into the Orléans collection; the Swedish royal collections had been destroyed in 1697 in the fire at the Stockholm castle.