Christina, meanwhile, did what she could herself to escape. The means at her disposal were slender, but she exploited them, or so she claims, to the full. Her hours of exercise and especially of schooling became her refuge. The mother’s weakness was turned to the daughter’s profit. ‘What I endured with her,’ she writes, ‘made me turn all the more keenly to my books, and that is why I made such surprisingly good progress – I used them as a pretext to escape the Queen my mother.’21 The indecisive senators had at least been able to agree on the kind of education the child should receive; in fact, prompted by their absent Chancellor, the entire Riksdag had discussed it, and in March 1635, with Christina already eight years old, they made their conclusions known. Their priorities are revealing. The little Queen must learn, states their preamble, ‘to speak well of her subjects and of the present state of the country and of the regency’. Though she must learn something of foreign manners and customs ‘as becomes her station’, she must also ‘practise and observe Swedish ones and be taught them carefully’. She must learn table manners, too, they declared, without, however, specifying whether these were to be homegrown or of some foreign variety.
The men of the Riksdag were clearly anxious that Maria Eleonora’s widely known disdain for all things Swedish should not be inculcated in her daughter. Other foreign errors were also to be strenuously avoided, notably those of popery and Calvinism. The ‘art of government’ was acknowledged to be important for her to learn, but ‘as this sort of knowledge is learnt rather with age and experience than by the studies of childhood, and as the knowledge of God and his worship is the true foundation of all else, it is most salutary that she should first and foremost study the word of God, the articles of faith and all the Christian virtues’.22 She must also learn ‘to write well and to calculate quickly’, and she must read only those books which had been approved by learned men of suitably moral temper. The programme for her education was to be reviewed as the little Queen progressed.
Gustav Adolf had also been concerned to prevent Maria Eleonora from influencing their daughter adversely. From his campaigns abroad, he had sent back detailed instructions about her upbringing in the event of his own death. The Queen was to be excluded from any regency, and three named men were to be appointed to oversee the child’s education. Her two governors were to be Axel Banér and Gustav Horn, both senators. As tutor she was to have Johan Matthiae, a theologian and former schoolmaster, and the late King’s own chaplain. The two governors were both expert in the use of arms, and both were hard drinkers, but otherwise they were very different men, Banér apparently something of a rough diamond with a penchant for pretty women, Horn more of a courtier, fluent in foreign languages and an experienced diplomat. The tutor, Johan Matthiae, well born and well educated, had studied not only in Sweden’s own university at Uppsala, but also in the German lands as well as in Holland, France, and England. He was a man of calm and kindly temperament, liberal in his thinking, especially in religious matters; in this he reflected, as he had no doubt helped to form, the views of his late King.
Unlike the ‘five great old men’ who comprised her regency, Christina’s governors and tutor were young, all in their thirties at the time of their appointment, Gustav Horn indeed barely so. Two at least had been Gustav Adolf’s beloved friends, Banér even sharing the King’s bedchamber before his marriage and afterwards, whenever the Queen was absent. Johan Matthiae, too, had accompanied the King on campaign. Christina later described them all as ‘capable, good men’. She appreciated the straightforward honesty of Banér, and admired Horn’s foreign polish, but for her tutor she reserved a special fondness. She called him ‘Papa’, and he quickly became the confidant of all her little secrets, a steady and reassuring presence in her difficult young life.
The late King’s choice of guardians, according to their little charge herself, writing many years later, was ‘as happy as it could be, given that none of them were Catholic’. Together, they formed a vital counterweight to the extremities of Maria Eleonora’s court, and provided an outlet for the frustrated energies of a bright and active child. But the Queen Mother’s continuing obsessive behaviour during these years destroyed any chance for a real affection to develop between herself and her daughter. Though Christina claims to have loved her mother ‘tenderly enough’, her respect for her began to fade, she says, when she ‘seized me, in spite of my tutors, and tried to lock me up with her in her apartment’.23 Three years were to pass before her eventual release, in the summer of 1636, on the return of Axel Oxenstierna to Sweden. More determined and less manipulable than his brother senators, the Chancellor removed Christina at once from her mother’s suffocating embrace, and placed her again in the care of the Princess Katarina, with whose two younger daughters she now continued her schooling. The Queen Mother herself was also promptly removed, and placed under comfortable but tedious guard in the island castle of Gripsholm at Mariefred, some fifty miles from Stockholm. Like her own once imprisoned daughter, Maria Eleonora would do her best to escape.
Christina was once more in the safe and steady care of her Aunt Katarina. With her tenth birthday approaching, she was now taking her lessons in the company of her two cousins, Maria Euphrosyne, aged eleven, and Eleonora Katarina, aged nine. The three girls seem to have shared an easy friendship, though Christina did complain – to their father – that her elder cousin was falling behind in her schoolwork; it would be a good idea, she suggested, if he made her work a bit harder.
The late King had left instructions that his daughter was to receive ‘the education of a prince’, and to take plenty of exercise, an uncommon emphasis for a girl of the time. He had no doubt seen that, even as a little child, she was physically very active, and perhaps, too, he had wished to distance her from the precious femininity which her mother had evinced. Christina was to be trained to only two conventionally feminine habits: modesty and virtue, though in the former, at least, she was to fail spectacularly. But her schooling with the two little countesses suggests that her academic training was not exceptional for a girl of her position. Though she may have been more capable than either of her cousins, they all read the same texts and wrote the same inkblotted exercises.
In later years, Christina’s accomplishments were to be the subject of a good deal of extravagant praise, not least from her own pen. It is certain that she was a clever and inquisitive child who enjoyed learning. She welcomed this ‘pretext to escape the Queen my mother’, and claimed that by the age of eight she was already studying twelve hours every day ‘with an inconceivable joy’, though she does