Revisiting The Story of Queen Christina of Sweden: A spoiled Brat and a dilettante

Christina[1] wanted to be a man, but was born a woman.  She longed to be king but shunned her royal duties.  She brazenly relinquished her Swedish throne, but schemed to become again a monarch.  She scorned female wiles, but she used them with excess during her footloose and nonconformist life.  

Because of the ambiguity of her gender and sexual orientations, as well as the mystery behind her political and religious decisions, Christina’s persona and behavior keep fascinating historians, psychologists and film makers, even more so now in our reality show-crazed and people-watching society.  For most of us, Christina is remembered through Greta Garbo, the Swedish film goddess who played her in the 1933 iconic but fanciful film Queen Christina.  In the recent and more faithful film The Girl King (2015), the young queen looks more like she actually was: an uncouth, sloppy and troublesome tomboy. 

In the captivating biography written by Veronica Buckley[2], the strong willed, intelligent and cultured Christina[3] comes across as a rude, selfish, arrogant and conniving woman with a limited patience for the social mores of the period.  She displayed an unsteady temperament, a short attention span, a lack of common sense and dabbled in everything.  Her disillusions of grandeur were the cause of many of her serious errors of judgement.  With the tarnished reputation of a derisory political intriguer and of a Catholic-convert dilettante, Christina died almost ignored in Rome.  She nonetheless had the privilege of being buried in the St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, probably the only scoundrel among the Catholic glitterati. 

Buckley’s description is therefore very different from the romanticized image projected by the Greta Garbo film.  Not only was the biography very positively received, but its many reviewers enjoyed the opportunity to express their own opinion of the queen’s personality and decisions.  It may be unscientific to shape one’s opinion on a single biography, but it is highly tempting for an amateur historian like this blogger to do so and offer her own analysis.

Why did such a proud, intelligent and cultured woman so eager to rule, relinquish the safety, prestige and financial comfort of her throne?  She was only 27 when she left Sweden for a life of adventure in Europe.  Let’s connect the dots.  She became the royal heir at 6 when her dotting father King Gustave II Adolf was killed on the battlefield.  Her rule started in earnest when she reached 18.  Sweden was not an absolute monarchy like France, and Christina soon resented being watched over by her councilors and not having a free hand on royal business.  She had wrongly believed that she had no one to answer to.  The humdrum of royal business bored her and made her literally sick; she was a free spirit who wanted to be a free person and do as she pleased. 

Her role model was the strong-willed Queen Elizabeth I of England, known as the Virgin Queen.  She regarded the act of sex as a submission of a woman to a man and marriage a servitude.  She made it clear that she would never marry, and to produce an heir was out of the question.  She said that “other things titillate me more keenly than the pale pleasures of marriage.”[4]  Christina’s sexual orientation is still a matter of debate.  Buckley writes that “her sexuality remains ambiguous to other and ambivalent to herself.”  Christina had an androgynous personality and her physical features were at the time described as masculine; she routinely cross-dressed and predominantly wore men’s attire after her abdication.  She may have been a lesbian or a bisexual, but historians are still undecided on this matter.  By 17^th century standards, Christina indeed paraded a very unorthodox and provoking lifestyle.

The majority of historians assert that she abdicated in order to convert to Catholicism and ditch her native Lutheranism (Lutheranism was the state religion).  How presumptuous of this blogger to think that it may have been the other way around: She devised her secret conversion to justify her abdication.  Was her rejection of a royal marriage (and children) and her longing for adventure over a taxing royal job, grounds for abdication?.. Certainly, but she could not tell the truth: she had too much respect and love for her country.  The conversion was then a sensible pretense, a ploy.

What elements led this blogger to make such hypothesis?  First and foremost, Christina does not come across as a very spiritual and pious person.  She was intellectually attracted to Catholicism, and regarded Lutheranism as a simplistic faith.  Her readings were more concerned with Greece and Rome than the scriptures of the Gospels.  Apart from her conversion process, she sought the company of philosophers and Jesuit scholars more than that of priests.  During her short reign, she imported art, culture, science and philosophy to her backwater native land.  She once wrote: “We people in the north are rather wild.”[5]  This blogger felt that her conversion gave her a sense of personal power and achievement.  Her love of art drew her to Rome and the Vatican because both were closely associated with art patrons and art creation.  In Rome, she dabbled in art, but because she retained her wild Viking-like behavior she was more an underground and counter-culture queen than art patron.  Her papal hosts were shocked by her conduct, including her long-term romance with a cardinal.  She was a born schemer and plotter, and Rome was a more fertile terrain for her mischief than staid Uppsala.  

                                                                                Not Greta Garbo

Last but not least, as the proud daughter of an illustrious father, she was not going to publicly admit her incapability to rule.  Her visceral contempt for women made her doubt her own capabilities: because she was a woman, she could not be up to the job.  Sadly, she wrote that women were unsuitable to be rulers! “The worse defect of all was being a woman.” Like many of today’s professional women, she suffered from an impostor syndrome.   Otherwise, she thought herself brilliant, great, powerful and invincible.  Christina was a two-legged paradox.  Buckley argues that “this myth of herself led to her impulsively destructive life.”  Although, she was more legitimate a monarch than her idol Elizabeth I, she lacked the discipline needed to achieve a meaningful legacy.  She had good intentions and novel ideas, but was too much of a dilettante to follow through.  At the end, her main achievement was her orderly abdication. 

                                                                                   Unisex outfit

Finally, Christina led the life she wanted, footloose and fancy free, a nonconventional lifestyle which still fascinates four centuries later.  In spite of her flaws, she attracts empathy because she rose above the social and cultural prejudices of the period.  She could do it because she was born king of Sweden; conversely, as such, she had much to lose.

To quote her one last time: “I was born, have lived, and will die free.”.

---

[1] 1626-1689.  Queen from 1626 until 1654.

[2] Christina of Sweden, the Restless Life of an European Eccentric. 2004. Harper Collins.

[3] She was born Kristina Vasa. 

[4] She is still remembered for her sensible and often provocative quotes.

[5] In a letter to Cardinal Mazarin, the French “chef minister” during the youth of Louis XIV.  The letter was sent after an unpleasant incident in Chateau de Fontainebleau.