SYMHC Classics: Christina of Sweden

This 2014 episode covers the life of a woman who was smart and learned, but not a particularly good ruler. Her entire life was marked by being kind of a contradictory, restless character - starting basically from the moment she was born.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. It is Christina of Sweden's birthday. She
was born on December eighteen six. That is the New
style calendar date, which was December eight in the old style.
Christina is sometimes called King Christina, both because she was
raised as the heir to her father's throne and also

(00:23):
because when she was born, the midwives who attended her
birth initially reported that she was a boy. There are
lots of different ways that her story is interpreted today,
but she is a clear example of somebody who lived
outside of society's expectations regarding sex, gender, and sexuality. In
This episode originally came out on October Enjoy Welcome to

(00:48):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the cast. I'm Tracy
Vie Wilson. Today we're going back to the world of
Swedish royalty. This time it is to Queen Christina. She

(01:09):
lived about a hundred years after previous podcast subject Eric
the fourteen, and she, like him, was also part of
the House of Vassa and her story has a lot
of our favorite running podcast themes. Most of them really
started with previous hosts, but they've carried on until today.

(01:29):
We have a sad royal childhood, we have an abdication,
and we even had an exhumation. All in all, Queen
Christina was not known for being a particularly great ruler
of Sweden, and she abdicated her throne only about a
decade into her reign. But she was extremely learned. She
spoke a lot of languages. Apart from her native Swedish,

(01:52):
there was also Greek, Latin, German, French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish
and Finnish, along with a little Hebrew and Arabic. And
she helped start the first Swedish newspaper in sixteen forty five,
as well as Sweden's first public opera house and its
first universal public school program. She amassed a huge collection

(02:14):
of arts and literature, and her collection of books and
manuscripts later went on to become part of the Vatican
Library uh And a sort of a side note, her
life became a movie starring Greta Garbo in nineteen thirty three.
So her whole life was marked by being this kind
of contradictory, restless character, and that started basically from the

(02:34):
moment that she was born. So Christina was born to
King Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. Before she
was born, her parents had had two stillborn babies, and
they also had a daughter who had died before she
reached the age of one, so people were really starting
to be concerned about the kingdom having an air. Gustav

(02:57):
had an illegitimate son who was aimed Gustav Gustafsson, and
he was not eligible for a lot of reasons, including
his illegitimacy to be on the throne. King. Gustav's Catholic cousin,
uh Seismund, was king of Poland and he had two
sons of his own, and people were quite worried that
if something had happened to Gustav before he produced a

(03:20):
legitimate air, uh Sismund was going to take over and
make Sweden, which at that point was a staunchly Lutheran country,
into a Catholic country, and since since Sigismund had two sons,
it seemed like that had the potential to turn into
a lasting Catholic dynasty, so it would really have upended Sweden.

(03:41):
Maria Eleonora, so Christina's mother, also seemed to to have
developed some kind of mental or emotional disorder over the
course of her previous pregnancies and the children she had lost.
She had always been really affectionate with her husband, but
she became just desperately attached to him. She would get
really agitated and distressed whenever he was away, which he

(04:04):
had to be away quite a lot because he was king.
Her language skills and her handwriting started to deteriorate, and
her behavior became really erratic. People started to worry about
her ability to conceive and to carry a healthy child
to term. However, despite all of those potential issues UH.
Five years into Gustave and Maria Eleanora's marriage, Maria became

(04:28):
pregnant with Christina, who was born on December eighth of
sixty six, that's in the Julian calendar uh, which would
be December eighteenth under the modern Gregorian calendar. And she
was a little early and born in Call, so that
means her amniotic membrane was still intact and covering her
once she was born, and so the midwives removed the

(04:50):
membrane and they declared her initially to be a boy
uh and words spread around the castle to a great
deal of celebration. However, once the excitement was over and
they took a longer and more careful look at her,
they almost immediately realized she was actually a girl, and
everybody was sort of afraid how the King would react.

(05:11):
I mean, they had had all of these previous strategy
tragedies and all this build up, and they had just
told him joyfully that he had a son. Now. Um,
so nobody told him about the mistake until the next day.
That kind of cracks me up. Uh. There's been a
great deal of speculation about what may have caused this
misidentification on the part of the midwives to believe that

(05:32):
Christina was a boy rather than a girl. There have
been theories bandied about that she had an intersex condition
and some kind of chromosomal disorder, and that her external
genitalia may have exhibited both male and female traits. Another
theory is that her body was simply ambiguous and that
the lighting was poor, and that there could have been

(05:53):
a little wishful thinking in the mix, and that the
midwives saw initially what they wanted to see, which would
have been a male heir. There are a lot of
family memoirs from this time who portray the King is
being just enormously and immediately welcoming and accepting of the
fact that he actually had a daughter. Uh, And some
of that is kind of glossing over the initial shock

(06:15):
and upset that he did have. Um having a daughter
instead of a son was a big upset. They had
been trying for a long time to have a male
heir and now they didn't. But he did quickly warm
to the idea of having a daughter and of raising
his daughter like a prince. Christina's mother, on the other hand,
was devastated that after so many attempts, now she had

(06:36):
a daughter and not the son that she had been,
you know, basically tasked with providing for the kingdom. So
she basically shunned her daughter for a lot of her
early life. Uh. And Gustav decided that Christina, in spite
of being female, would indeed be his heir, and he
wanted her, as Tracy said just a moment ago, to
have a princely upbringing. And this was not just in

(06:59):
terms of her agication and her intended role as as
the leader of the country, but also in terms of
her sort of day to day exercise and the pastimes
that that they would kind of nurture her into as
she grew up. This suited her just fine. She was
not at all fond of the duties and pastimes that

(07:19):
genuine that generally fell to women at the time. Her
father wanted her to learn to ride and to fight
and to handle a bow, and she did all that,
and she did it well, and her demeanor was not
at all typically feminine. I think today people would have
called her a tomboy. And just for clarity, it really
was not unheard of for girls to have the same

(07:39):
education as boys, especially when they were in line for
the throne, and so Christina's schoolmates were part of her
childhood were actually two female cousins. The fighting and the
hunting and the bow work, however, we're not really typical
pursuits for girls or women. So the idea of Christina
as his air was not just an idle fancy on

(08:02):
Gustav's part. He started making real plans to confirm her
as his successor while she was still a baby. The
Thirty Years War had been going on for about eight
years by the time Christina was born, and Adolf knew
that it was very possible that he would be killed
in battle. So in addition to officially naming her as

(08:22):
his successor. He started looking for suitable candidates for her
to marry when she got older to cement the hereditary
line to the throne. The primary candidate was a cousin
of hers named Carl Gustav. He also had his chancellor
named Axel Oxenstierna, along with five regents to rule in

(08:42):
his and his daughter's stead. However, he didn't really have
an active part in raising his young heir. He was
needed in the war and Christina's mother wanted nothing to
do with her. So Christina spent most of her early
childhood living with cousins, except for being dropped once she
was a baby, and that was possibly on purpose by

(09:03):
someone with Catholic leanings. It was mostly a happy few years.
She was surrounded by other children close to her own age.
She had playmates and friends, and other girls who were
studying with her, so this part of her earlier life,
in spite of being separated from her parents, was not
all that bad. But when she was just five, so

(09:25):
still very young, her father was killed in the Battle
of Lutzen, and Christina's mother, of course completely distraught. Uh
We talked about how clingy and sort of almost obsessive
she had become with king, so her mother had the
king's heart removed and placed in a golden casket so
that she could keep it with her. Her behavior continued

(09:47):
to become increasingly bizarre, and she spent a lot of
money on a really elaborate funeral. She also did not
bury the king's body right away. Now this was not
entirely a heard of at the time, especially when it
was wintertime and the ground was frozen and it was
difficult for people to travel for that sort of thing.

(10:08):
But Gustav's body wound up being buried nineteen months after
his death, and this was over the fierce objections of
his wife, who had kept it lying in state and
spent hours and hours at a time viewing it. At
some point she even kept the coffin in her own
bedroom so she could have it close by. So, as
we said, not a typical for there to be a

(10:30):
long delay at this point between when king was when
the king died, and when the king was buried. But
this was a really long time, and Maria Eleanora's displays
of grief were not at all typical for the time.
So the king was finally buried, and once that happened,
Maria Eleanora took custody of Christina, and she took her
out of the home where she had been and had

(10:52):
friends and playmates, and she moved her into a much
more lonely and erratic and just sort of cold existence
that was largely just the two of them together. And
this is where Christina's royal childhood became kind of sad.
She started having these really sudden illnesses, and the general
agreement is that these were brought on by the stress

(11:14):
of the situation. She generally got better pretty quickly, but
she got sick over and over again. It was a
frequent occurrence. In part to get some distance from her mother,
she really threw herself into her education and into training
and into exercise. She sort of dove even farther into
the more masculine parts of her upbringing. And before we

(11:39):
move into when she actually ascended to the throne, Holly,
would you like to take a minute for a brief
word from a sponsor. It sounds like a capital idea.
And now let's get back to Christina of Sweden and
now when she's going to actually become queen, and becoming

(12:02):
queen and her ascension to the throne really was not
as simple as just being the king's daughter and surviving
to adulthood to be crowned. Sweden was an elective monarchy,
so even if someone had inherited the throne, they still
had to be accepted by the Reek's Dog, which was
Sweden's parliament, as well as the Swedish senators. This meant

(12:23):
that the four estates of the reeks Dog, which were
the clergy, the nobles, the burghers and the peasants, all
had to be in favor of Christina's presence on the
throne in order for her to actually become the queen.
And the end they were and Christina became the Queen
of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland,
Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, and

(12:47):
she basically carried herself as a ruler right from the beginning.
The Chancellor began to allow her to attend council meetings
and participate as early as the age of fourteen. She
was officially crowned at the age of eighteen, so she
was kind of doing the work of this job for
several years before it was made official. She was at
that point simultaneously. A diminutive young woman, she had very

(13:09):
fine hands and beautiful blue eyes, but she was also
a very masculine, for she walked the walk, she talked
to talk, and she swore like a soldier. Christina and
Chancellor Axel Oxensternia did not see eye to eye. The
Chancellor had done a really good job of ruling between
the death of her father and her age of majority,

(13:31):
and even when the king was still alive, the two
men had really worked together to run the kingdom and
to plan and make decisions. Axel had been an efficient
and pragmatic diplomat, and he was well respected among the Reeks,
dog and among Sweden's military leaders. But Christina was a
proud and arrogant eighteen year old, and she really felt

(13:52):
like it was her time to shine, and so she
and Axel butted heads. They did so repeatedly and often.
If this were a modern day film, you would maybe
expect them to end up falling in love somehow, but
things that would work out that way in real life. Yes,
that would definitely be the romantic comedy version version of

(14:14):
Christina of Sweden. They also started to have financial problems
in the kingdom Pretty early in her reign, she tried
to continue her father's generosity with the royal coffers, but
she wasn't nearly as careful about it as he had been.
She got into this cycle of giving away too much
and then selling noble titles to try to earn some

(14:34):
more money, and then raising taxes on the people she
had just promoted. It did not work out well. It
was it was not an efficient way of ridging the gap,
kind of like a cascading circle of bad decisions. Um Naturally,
in the midst of all of this, everyone wanted her
to marry Uh. In addition to Carl Gustav, another suitor

(14:55):
was Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, who ended up marrying someone else,
and Christina had a not all that clandestine affair with
one of the ladies of her court, which led to
some speculation about her sexual orientation, her sex, and her gender,
which of course tied back into that initial Uh mistake

(15:16):
in identifying her sex. In the midst of all of this,
popular opinions started to turn against her, and when she
was twenty a man armed with daggers tried to kill
her while she was at prayer. Her life being apparently
legitimately at risk put a lot more pressure on her
to get married, which was an idea that she continued

(15:36):
to resist. And about this same time, the Thirty Years
War was drawing to a close, which was something she
herself was greatly in favor of, but not everyone felt
the same. Many Protestant clergy wanted the war to continue
until there could be a decisive Protestant victory over Catholicism.
Others wanted it to continue just so that Sweden could

(15:59):
continue to act additional war booty to potentially supplement their
their money situation. Yeah, the Thirty Years War was this
massive and obviously very lengthy conflict, and different nations had
different motivations for being involved in it. We haven't really
talked about that part of it because it's kind of
ancillary to this podcast. But yeah, for Sweden in particular,

(16:19):
there were people who felt like ending the war at
that point was too soon. But to Christina, as long
as the war went on, she could never really be
in charge. While she had been accepted as Sweden's queen
and she was making lots of decisions for herself as
the ruler, she really had no authority over military matters.
War was pretty much exclusively a man's game, especially when

(16:43):
it came to running the show. So as long as
the war went on, the Chancellor and the regents continued
to have a major hand in making decisions that Christina
could have no control over. Ending the war would and
did put an end to one of their sources of
power and gave Chrisdna more direct control over pretty much
everything that was going on in the kingdom. So the

(17:05):
Thirty Years War did indeed end with the Peace of
Westphalia in sixty eight, and once the war had concluded,
Christina turned her attention to her own court, and she
began inviting artists, writers and thinkers to the Swedish court.
The most famous among all of these was mathematician and
philosopher reneed A Cart, who she invited to stay in

(17:28):
the palace at Stockholm. He did not really want to go.
Sweden was too cold and it was too far away,
and he really doubted that the Lutheran court was going
to welcome him with open arms since he was Catholic.
But in the end he was convinced to come, and he,
in a translator, went to Sweden in September of sixteen
forty nine. His misgivings about going and about staying once

(17:51):
he got there were unfortunately prescient. He got the flu
the following January and died. Uh Some people blamed Christina
both for bringing him there and for putting huge demands
on his time and effort while he was visiting courts.
Yet another source of pressure for Christina to marry came
in sixteen forty nine, when her cousin Jan kazim Years

(18:13):
ascended to the throne in Poland. This was the second
of Sigismund's two sons who had so worried people before
Christina was born. Jan succeeded his late brother and married
his late brother's widow, who was still young enough to
have children. So once again people were threatened by the
idea that the monarchy in Poland was going to come

(18:33):
to power over Sweden. Instead of marrying, though, Christina did
something completely different. She went to the Reek's Dog and
said that she wanted her cousin, Count Palatine Karl Gustav,
the one that she had been intended to marry, to
be named as her successor. The Reek's Dog pretty much
scoffed at that entire idea. They were like you're gonna

(18:56):
marry him anyway, So what's the point. Like, that's the
guy you're gonna get married to and have babies with,
so naming him as your successor now seems silly. They
thought this even though she was still having sudden illnesses.
Even even though she was sick pretty often, people still
thought she was young and healthy enough to have a baby. Uh.

(19:19):
Christina not delighted by this reaction, she went back to
them and she said it was going to be impossible
for her to marry. In her words, quote, I am
absolutely certain about it. I do not intend to give
you reasons. My character is simply not suited to marriage.
I have prayed God fervently that my inclination might change,

(19:39):
but I simply cannot marry. This once again, was a
completely foreign and kind of silly idea to the Reeks,
dog and they refused her suggestion. Again. They basically thought,
she's just gonna agree to marry him eventually. They've been
friends since their childhood, they get along fine. Of course
they should be married. It seems so clear to them.

(20:00):
They were. They were really like, well, obviously, you're just
going to marry him, so why is why is this
a big thing, are you being fussy? So the thing
that ended up changing the Reeks Dommas minds on this
issue was the execution of Charles the First of England.
When that happened, leaders began to fear rebellion on multiple fronts,

(20:20):
so they wanted to ensure that the line of succession
was not going to be interrupted. So in March of
sixty nine, they finally agreed to officially named Carl Gustav
as Christina's successor, although at that point they really still
thought she would end up marrying him and make it
all a sort of a moot gesture. Yeah, they thought
they were humoring her. She, on the other hand, thought

(20:41):
she was getting exactly what she wanted. She was still
going to get to rule, but she was not going
to have to get married and produce an air Carl
was going to have to do that. She was off
the hook. And before we talk about getting further off
the hook, let's take another brief moment for a word
from a sponsor that sounds grand. And now let's return

(21:09):
to the story of how Queen Christina, having fought so
long and so hard to get total control over the throne, abdicated.
So although She had started to rule officially at eighteen,
and that was after she had already been kind of
involved in some government duties. She still wasn't actually crowned
until she was twenty three, so it really took quite

(21:30):
a long time for her to kind of get all
of the dust settled on her official ascension. By the
time she was actually planning her coronation, which was scheduled
for October of sixteen fifty, she was already thinking abdicating
might sound like a good plan. Before she had told
anyone about this plan, she started trying to convince the

(21:51):
reeks dog not just to make Carl Gustav her successor
if she died, but to make him the actual next
hereditary king of sweet not just someone to sort of
run things in the event of her untimely death until
another real king could be found and elected. And they
said no, um, so she pulled a series of political

(22:13):
strings until they finally agreed. She basically pitted all of
the different classes against one another, and like played up
the you know, the noble sphere of the common people
taking over and the common people's fear of the nobles,
until they all agreed that if if she would just
give them a break, that they would do what she asked. Uh.

(22:35):
In August of sixteen fifty one, so less than a
year after her very extravagant coronation, she informed the Senate
that she planned to abdicate, and she spent the next
several months trying to convince the Reefs dog to allow it.
I feel like she spent her entire time trying to
convince the Reefs dog of things. That is pretty accurate.
There was a lot of her trying to get the

(22:57):
Reeks dog to do what she wanted. Um, they not
buying this at all. And so after this couple of
months of really trying to convince them, she dropped the
matter for a couple of years. But during the interim
she started meeting with Jesuits and talking about converting to Catholicism.
So we have talked about up to this point, you know,

(23:19):
some pretty deep seated um discord between the religions, and
so for her to want to convert, that's big stuff. Uh.
Catholicism was a religion that had really appealed to her
since she was quite young. When she was nine, a
tutor had told her that Catholicism did not allow lay
people to read the Bible, it encouraged celibacy, and believed

(23:42):
in purgatory, and her reaction to all of that was, oh,
what a lovely religion. In early sixteen fifty four, when
everyone thought this whole matter of abdicating had just been dropped,
Christina announced once again that she was going to abdicate.
She negotiated a settlement that I did her some lands
and some money, and it kept her as the sovereign

(24:04):
of Sweden, so she didn't have to handle any of
her royal responsibilities. But she was still a queen regardless
of how you feel about her her various ways of
running the kingdom that we're not all that great. This
was kind of a masterful string pulling to get exactly
the best possible situation for her to be in. Yeah,

(24:24):
like all of the benefits, none of the responsibilities. So
she abdicated that may, leaving the palace before midnight on
the night of Karl Gustav's coronation. She was like the
person that leaves the wedding reception early in this case,
she was like, yeah, I have fun, I'm out of here.
So there are a lot of theories about exactly why

(24:48):
she was so set on abdicating. Her explanation was that
she thought that they really needed a man to rule
the country, in particular to lead the army. So if
you know, there were another future war that the country
was going to participate in, they would be better off
with a male king than with a female queen. She
also said that the pressures of ruling had been too

(25:09):
much for her and that she needed to rest. And
as we've made pretty clear, she was really deeply opposed
to the idea of marrying and she was under immense
pressure to do so as queen, And as soon as
she was out of Sweden, she adopted a more masculine dress,
more masculine mannerisms, and a more masculine demeanor, and she

(25:31):
converted to Catholicism. She took the names Maria and Alexandra
after Alexander the Great. And I want to make clear
here she was not living as a man. She tended
to wear trousers instead of dresses and to just behave
in a more coarse way than women were expected to,
but she did not present herself as a man. She
was still apart from a couple of times as she

(25:52):
was traveling in disguise, she was still Christina. Her conversion
to Catholicism was an enormous deal. Sweden was a Lutheran
nation and as Queen Christina was the head of the church,
and even though she had abdicated her rule, this was
still pretty monumental on and she was still sovereign, so
they still had a lot of stock in her religion.

(26:15):
So Christina traveled to Rome, where she was a guest
at the Vatican, something women were not generally allowed to do,
and she later moved into a palace in Rome, which
was her permanent home until her death, although at various
times she was away from that palace in Sweden, in Hamburg,
and elsewhere. While in Rome, she fell in love with

(26:35):
Cardinal Ducchio at Alino, who was the Pope's representative and
a priest, and this seems to have been more like
a romantic friendship than a physical relationship, but he did
basically break up with her in a letter later in
their relationship when he quote freed her. In sixteen fifty seven,

(26:56):
while traveling, she became embroiled in an anti Habsburg plot
to seize control of Naples. This plot had to be
abandoned when she learned that one of her officers had
revealed her plans, so she had last rites administered to
him and then had him executed in her presence. This
was a long and gory execution, and the Pope did

(27:17):
not approve of it, and so when she returned to Rome,
she was no longer allowed in the Pope's presence. Yeah,
her conversion had basically been viewed as this giant coup
among the Catholic Church. They she was sort of their
golden example of of awesomeness for a while, but not
anymore after this. Uh. Later in her life, she also

(27:41):
sort of wanted to rule again. She had hoped to
take the throne of Poland Lithuania, another elective monarchy, after
Yan Kazimir's abdicated Um. She really did not have any
tie to that throne apart from being a cousin of
the previous king. Um she was, you know, a vassa
and now she was Catholic and that was really all

(28:03):
that she had to show for herself on the matter,
and so that attempt failed. She also hoped, for a while, uh,
in her sort of mere curial desires, that she would
become Queen of Sweden again after Karl Gustav's sudden death
at the age of thirty eight. His own successor at
the time was only five, But she did not get

(28:24):
her wish in this case and did not become Queen
the ruler of Sweden again. She spent her last year's
mostly keeping to herself, and she was basically broke When
she died in sixteen eighty nine at the age of
sixty two. All of her possessions passed to Ducchio Atzelino,
although there wasn't enough money to pay off her debts

(28:46):
or to set up legacies for some people who had
worked with her and deserved them, which normally would have
been part of what a ruler's estate would have done.
Her tomb is in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Her
body was exhumed in nine to try to determine whether
she had an intersex condition or whether there was some

(29:08):
other explanation for the midwives early confusion about what her
sex was, and then whether that might explain her more
masculine behavior later on. The results of that were totally inconclusive.
In Christina's description of herself, she said she had quote
an ineradicable prejudice against everything that women like to talk

(29:31):
about or do in women's words and occupations. I showed
myself to be quite incapable, and I saw no possibility
of improvement in this respect. And that is Christina. She's
quite a fascinating character. She has kind of fascinating character.
One of the papers that I read about her, that
which not a lot from it, made its way into

(29:53):
this outline because this outline became very long, Uh, was
about the erotic art in her artwork and how her
artwork collection, um, and how a lot of the people
who had previously been owners of this artwork had kind
of kept that off in the corner, um and not
really wanted to be associated with the fact that this

(30:15):
more erotic art was part of their collection. UM. She
on the other hand, hung it all in her grand salon,
which was right outside her bedroom, and she would greet
visitors with these erotic nudes hanging all around her. Um. Yeah.
She just was a whole pile of contradictions her whole
her whole life, because she, on the one hand, did

(30:36):
not seem super interested in, uh, having relationships of a
romantic sort with people. She You know, she had a few,
but they didn't really last. But you know, then she's
greeting visitors in a room with hung with these erotic
nude paintings. There there are some fascinating juxtapositions there her

(30:56):
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