Princesses Behaving Badly (20 page)

The once-princess Sofka died in February 1994, at age 86. Her granddaughter remembered one of Sofka’s favorite sayings: “If you have enough for two loaves, buy one and buy some flowers.” In other words, live life to the fullest—you never know when it’ll all be taken away.

Christina

D
ECEMBER
18, 1626–A
PRIL
19, 1689
S
WEDEN

C
hristina of Sweden’s gender confusion started early—when she was born, she was immediately declared a boy. The mistake was understandable: court astrologers had predicted that the child would be the male that heir her father, King Gustav Adolph, so desperately needed. The newborn was dark and hirsute and gave a lusty cry when she popped out; she also had a caul covering the crucial bits. Plus the room was dim, lit only by a candle.

Christina would later claim that after everyone realized the
he
was a
she
, the terrified nurse carried her wordlessly to her father. Instead of being angry, the king held the infant in his arms, kissed her, and said, “Let
us thank God. 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.” It’s a sweet thought, but it’s probably not at all true.

The fact was, Christina’s birth complicated matters. King Gustav’s only other child was a boy, but he was illegitimate, so the threat of a dynastic crisis was acute. Making another baby was confounded by the fact that her mother, Maria Eleonora, was on her way to going crazy, and her father was usually on his way to war.

King Gustav tried to make the best of a bad situation. He gave explicit instructions that his little girl should be educated as a prince and get plenty of exercise. Then he went and died in battle when Christina was only 6 years old. Christina was proclaimed queen of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals, great princess of Finland, duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and lady of Ingria, a hefty slew of titles for a little girl who, in a portrait painted at the time, resembled an elderly dwarf.

Christina later claimed that everyone confronted with this grownup child-queen was impressed with her, the same sort of retrospective mythmaking she’d applied to the story of her father’s reaction to her birth. In a letter written to God (because she was like that), Christina declared, “They noticed that You had made me so grave and so serious that I wasn’t at all impatient, as is the usual way with children.” But until age 18, she was queen in name only—Sweden was ruled by five regents handpicked by her late father. The regents hoped that Christina would marry before reaching maturity, so that her husband could rule if not through her, then at least alongside her.

But another wrench was thrown into the works: her mother’s mental state was disintegrating rapidly. When the king died, Maria Eleonora pitched herself headlong into a cult of mourning, becoming a black-draped hysteric who wept constantly. The girl she’d rejected for being female, hairy, and “swarthy as a Moor” was now her most treasured link to her dead husband, and she rarely allowed Christina out of her sight. After suffering through nearly three years of this suffocating mothering,
Christina was removed from her mother’s care, and Maria Eleonora was packed off to a castle some 50 miles away.

Christina was then educated according to her father’s wishes and, it seems, took well to the curriculum. One of her tutors found her sufficiently diligent to warrant a report to Parliament that she was “not like other members of her sex” and was “stout-hearted and of good understanding.” As a child, her toys were lead soldiers, which she used to enact military maneuvers. She was a crack shot with a pistol, a keen horsewoman, and versed in sword fighting. She learned statecraft from biographies of Alexander the Great and Elizabeth I; she studied Latin, German, and French to converse with ambassadors; and she received sufficiently large doses of Lutheranism, the state religion.

In November 1644 Christina turned 18, ending the regency. She seized the throne with vigor but was young and inexperienced; she had so often told herself the fairy tale of her own greatness that it blinded her to her faults. Despite her education, she was no master of governance or politics. She was indecisive when she ought to have been resolute; acted out of spite rather than reason; wanted power without earning it; and opened her court to all kinds of intrigues she mistakenly thought she controlled. She also spent the crown’s money as if it were her own, and when coffers dwindled, she started selling titles, flooding the country with earls and barons and reducing the tax base drastically. Before long, the Swedish piggybank had a tinny ring to it. To her credit, Christina spent Sweden’s money mostly trying to buy culture and elevate the provincial tone of the Stockholm court. She amassed a valuable collection of books, paintings, sculpture, and objets d’art and imported legions of scholars from across Europe. The star of her collection was the great French philosopher René Descartes (of “I think, therefore I am” fame), whom she convinced to grace her court. Christina decided he would tutor her three times a week—at five in the morning in an unheated library in January 1650, “the coldest month of the coldest year in an exceptionally cold century.” Descartes soon caught influenza and died. But Christina’s plans for a big memorial to the great man were soon forgotten, and Catholic Descartes was left to molder under a rotting wooden plank in the unbaptized section of a Lutheran graveyard.

Though exceptionally clever, Christina was just a dilettante. She knew a little about a lot, learning only enough about each topic to impress her courtiers, and rarely stuck with anything for long. She was as prideful about her learning as the prince she was raised to be: “I never could stand being corrected,” she once told the French ambassador.

Everyone knew that Christina disliked being a girl. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I despised everything belonging to my sex, hardly excluding modesty and propriety.” Though she was petite—barely five feet tall—and delicate, Christina walked and talked like a man. She strode around in flat shoes, swore like a sailor in a deep gruff voice, and tended to smack her servants around. She slouched, preferred short skirts and trousers to overstuffed female fashions, and had no time or patience for things like embroidery and etiquette. She was often too busy to comb her hair and none too keen on bathing (in her defense, no one really was back then).

Christina was so determinedly boyish that in her own lifetime, she was dogged by a persistent rumor that she was a hermaphrodite. Her mannish ways gave rise to other, more titillating rumors, which she did nothing to quell. She often slept in the same bed as her favorite lady-in-waiting, whom she called Belle on account of the woman’s beauty. This was normal enough for two unmarried women at the time, but Christina liked to insinuate more than just sleeping was going on. She once embarrassed the English ambassador to the court by whispering in his ear that Belle’s inside was as beautiful as her outside.

When Christina was 22, she declared her intention never to marry and even named the man everyone thought she would wed, her cousin Karl Gustav, as her successor. Perhaps she was inspired by Elizabeth I, Britain’s so-called virgin queen with the “heart and stomach of a king,” whose biographies she’d devoured as a teenager. Of course, these actions only made whispers of her lesbianism/bisexuality grow ever louder. But though she talked a good game, there’s not much evidence that she had a sexual relationship with anyone. Her decision not to marry seems more connected to her distaste for sex in general than an aversion to men. She
once wrote, “Marriage is the best cure for love, and the marriage bed is its tomb.”

While everyone was talking about Christina’s odd habits and ambiguous sexuality, they completely ignored the most dangerous of her interests: a budding Catholicism. Like her compatriots, Christina was raised Lutheran, and, as queen, she was also nominally the head of the Church of Sweden. At this time in Sweden, Catholicism was punishable by banishment, torture, and death—even for the queen. But Christina was undeterred (or perhaps encouraged). Her attraction to Catholicism was multifold—many of the scholars she’d brought to court practiced that faith, she liked the church’s strict hierarchy, and she appreciated its tradition of learning.

At the same time, Christina was growing bored of being queen. But in 1650, the year she declared she would never marry, she was officially crowned at her coronation ceremony, which had been put off for lack of funds. Yet even as she was being feted, she was contemplating abdication. She hated the restraints that her duties placed on her freedom. The crown was bankrupt, owing in part to her poor management, and the country was suffering from widespread famine, the result of a brutally cold winter. Discontent with the new monarch pervaded the royal court, but Christina would brook no criticisms.

It’s no surprise that Christina wanted to abdicate, but given her unwavering belief in her own greatness, it’s surprising that she did. In 1653, she declared her intention to give up the throne but retain the title of queen. (She kept her plans to convert to herself.) Amazingly, the Swedish parliament agreed to her demands, which also included land and income. And so on June 6, 1654, with a ceremony at a castle in Uppsala, Christina gave up her crown.

Christina’s impatience to leave was obvious. She cleared out of Uppsala the same day she abdicated, even before the banquet celebrating her cousin’s coronation had ended. Making for Denmark, she put on the men’s clothes she would prefer to wear for the rest of her life, shaved her head, slapped on
a men’s wig, and strapped on a sword. “Free at last!” she supposedly exclaimed. “Out of Sweden, and I hope I never come back!”

She could have traveled in state by ship wherever she wanted to go, but Christina relished the hard-riding dusty overland approach, especially because such behavior was mildly shocking for a woman at the time (which seems to have become her MO from then on). She eventually made her way to Brussels, where she converted to Catholicism; from there, she went to Rome for her first audience with the pope. Just as she’d wasted no time casting off Lutheranism, Christina quickly engaged in some un-Catholic behavior. The night of her conversion, she was overheard making fun of transubstantiation, which she’d just sworn an oath to respect. She had a habit of talking in church. and her taste for nude paintings and sculptures had little to do with the contemplation of divinity.

Christina was also hemorrhaging money. Ensconced in a borrowed villa in Rome, she was so broke she couldn’t afford to pay her servants, who took to stealing the silver. Even more scandalously, she had fallen in love with Cardinal Decio Azzolino, the pope’s young, clever, not-hard-to-look-at representative. For a short time, she even stopped wearing men’s clothes in favor of dresses, which were cut so low as to earn her a reprimand from the pontiff. Azzolino was seemingly in love with Christina as well, and rumors abounded that she’d borne him a child. In reality, the two probably never slept together, despite all her naughty talk and the claim by her former employee that she was “the greatest whore in the world.”

By now Christina had turned to other worldly matters, including political intrigue. She set her sights on becoming a real queen again by taking the throne of Naples, the southern Italian kingdom, France and Spain were perpetually squabbling over. In early 1656, Christina secretly agreed with French spymaster Cardinal Jules Mazarin to take the Naples throne, with the help of 4,000 French soldiers, and keep it warm for young Philip of Anjou. Excited, she bustled up to the top of Castel Sant’ Angelo and fired off a cannon … only she’d forgotten to aim, and the cannonball lodged itself in the side of a building. Oops.