This altercation, with its thinly veiled threats, does not seem to have made the slightest difference to Maria Eleonora. She had little to lose, in any case. The ‘warm affection’ in which her subjects supposedly held her was a myth, as both she and the Baron well knew. She was in fact exceedingly unpopular among the Swedes. From her earliest days as a young bride, she had made perfectly clear her disdain for her new home, frozen solid in winter, culturally primitive whatever the weather. Surrounding herself with exclusively German attendants, she had aroused the envy and resentment of the Swedish courtiers. Her new kinsmen, defensive and offended, had quickly reciprocated her dislike.
Now, however, she was at least cautious enough to lie to them. She wrote to Axel Oxenstierna declaring that she would not commit Christina to marrying anyone before she had reached the age of twelve and could give her own consent. She did not want her daughter to reproach her, she said, with having forced her into a marriage during her minority, adding disingenuously that she would welcome the Chancellor’s guidance in the matter. Once back in Stockholm, she informed the Elector’s envoy that she favoured the Brandenburg marriage after all. There was no one, she said, to whom she would rather give her daughter than her nephew Friedrich Wilhelm, but the problem was that ‘some people’ were against it. The Chancellor, she claimed, had plans to marry Christina to his own son, Erik, but, in a neat arabesque on her objection to Friedrich Wilhelm himself, she declared that she would never allow her daughter to marry a man of lower social position than she was herself.
By the beginning of 1634, six months after her regal reception of the Russian ambassadors, the betrothal of the now seven-year-old Christina to her Brandenburg cousin was understood throughout Europe to be a fait accompli. Resigned shoulders shrugged in Copenhagen, and an anxious Emperor paced the floors of his palace in Vienna. Only in Stockholm and Berlin did doubt remain, for the two protagonists had in fact reached no agreement at all.
Christina herself was never to mention her father’s plan for the Brandenburg marriage, for it clearly indicated that he had seen no particular ‘mark of greatness’ planted on her childish forehead. He had not intended her to rule alone, nor indeed perhaps even to rule at all. She chose to dwell instead on the instructions that he had left for her upbringing, exaggerating them to accommodate her own profound need to be accepted, not as the little Queen of Sweden, but as its divinely appointed King.
In the two years preceding the King’s death, Christina had seen equally little of her father and her mother. Whether following her husband on campaign or visiting her family in Brandenburg, Maria Eleonora appears to have given little thought to the child left behind. ‘My mother could not bear the sight of me,’ Christina was to write, ‘because I was a girl, and she said I was ugly.’16 Portraits of Christina in her early childhood depict nonetheless a charming little girl, though most are conventional, and all are no doubt flattering. It is true, however, that she was slightly deformed. As a baby, she had apparently been dropped, and her injuries had left her noticeably lopsided in the upper body, with one shoulder higher than the other; the portraits show her in tactful semi-profile. She herself was later to claim that this ‘dropping’ was no less than an attempt on her life commanded by Catholic sympathizers among her cousins, and at times even suggested that it had been her mother’s own idea. Whatever the truth, the resulting deformity cannot have endeared her to her beauty-loving mother. Had she wished to, however, Maria Eleonora might have seen herself reflected in the appearance of her only child; many extant portraits suggest that Christina owed not only her high forehead and her large, bright eyes to her mother as much as to her father, but also her distinctive, large nose. Like her mother, too, she was of delicate build. The difference between the two, it seemed, was not so much in feature as in nature.
For in those talents most evident in childhood, Christina was her father’s child. In her little person she carried a keen reminder of Gustav Adolf’s own physical hardiness, together with his able and enquiring mind. In both respects she seemed to those about her the very opposite of her frivolous, fluffily pretty mother, whose extravagant behaviour, untempered by any worthy achievement, had earned only disdain. The King had left a trace of his hot blood, too, pulsing in his daughter’s veins; her tendency to emotional outbursts, complete with tearfulness and violence, was a legacy of his own volatile temperament.
In the absence of both mother and father, Christina had spent most of her time with her family of Palatine cousins, who lived in unpretentious comfort at Stegeborg Castle, to the south of Stockholm. Her aunt was the Princess Katarina, the King’s elder half-sister, and her uncle Count Johann Kasimir of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, who had once accompanied Gustav Adolf to Berlin to meet the young Maria Eleonora. The Princess Katarina, aged then in her later forties, was the mother of five surviving children, the youngest still in his infancy; Christina describes her aunt as a woman of ‘consummate virtue and wisdom’. She had settled in easily with the other children; among this lively half dozen, she was fourth in age, with two little countesses, Maria Euphrosyne and Eleonora Katarina, a year or so either side of her. Her eldest cousin, some ten years older, was the Countess Kristina Magdalena, and there was a young boy, too, Karl Gustav, Christina’s senior by four years, and the baby, Adolf.
Her father’s untimely death had wrenched Christina from this comfortable environment and installed her against her will in her mother’s bizarre and gloomy apartments at Nyköping Castle; here she had been closeted for a year or more. ‘It would have been a lovely court if it hadn’t been spoiled by the Queen Mother’s mourning,’ Christina was to complain. ‘There is no country in the world where they mourn the dead as long as they do in Sweden. They take three or four years to bury them, and then when they do, all the relatives, especially the women, weep all over again as if the person had only just died.’17 Maria Eleonora ‘played the role of grieving widow marvellously well,’ she writes, insisting at the same time that her mother’s grief was sincere. ‘But I was even more desperate than she was, because of those long dreary ceremonies and all the sad and sorry people about me. I could hardly stand it. It was far worse for me than the King’s death itself. I had been quite consoled about that for a long time, because I didn’t realize what a misfortune it was. Children who expect to inherit a throne are easily consoled for the loss of their father.’18
Consoled or not, in the midst of her mother’s melodrama, Christina fell ill with the first of many maladies attributed by contemporaries, as by later scholars, to her distressed state of mind. She developed ‘a malignant abscess in my left breast, which brought on a fever with unbearable pain. At last it burst, releasing a great flow of matter. That did me good, and in a few days I was perfectly well again.’19
After