In the light of this situation, it is not surprising that Christina’s contemporaries were impressed by her educational accomplishments. The regents, apprehensive of her mother’s legacy, were relieved to find her a clever and studious child. As she grew to womanhood, foreign diplomats and other visitors were quick to praise, though the scholars who later came to Stockholm were generally disappointed, finding her brilliant reputation undeserved. But if her fame eventually promised more than she merited, it was not for want of good schooling. The late King had prescribed for his daughter a broad humanist education, progressive in some details, but on the whole a legacy of the great Renaissance tradition in which he himself had been brought up. Gustav Adolf’s tutors had been independently minded men, and this in turn did much to shape the education that Christina herself now received. Like her father, she was inquisitive, strong-willed, and eager to learn, but unlike him, she had no particular enthusiasm for the ‘Christian virtues’ which were expected to be the basis of all her learning. By her own admission, the only parts of the scriptures she cared for were the Book of Wisdom and ‘the works of Solomon’ – in short, the most secular parts. She remained unmoved by the Gospels, and her lack of devotion to – indeed, lack of any interest in – the person of Jesus Christ was to remain a curious blank in her dramatic religious development. Nevertheless, for a few years during her girlhood, she was intensely pious, even to the point of bigotry. It was hardly surprising, given the narrow brand of Lutheranism prevailing in Sweden at the time, but it also reflected Christina’s own very determined nature. A touch of self-righteousness, untempered by experience, led very naturally to dogmatism. Not least, for a girl who enjoyed confrontation, a staunch Lutheran conviction was in direct opposition to her tutor’s own evenhanded views; Johan Matthiae’s firm belief was in a future union of all Protestant creeds.
Christina’s piety, whatever its cause, did not help her to endure the many long and dreary sermons of the Swedish Church. She hated them, she said, with ‘a deadly hatred’, though one of them did inspire her, at least temporarily, with a solid Lutheran fear of the Lord. Its subject was the Last Judgement, and it was preached every year just before Advent, and hence just before her birthday. It was a reliably ferocious tirade, full of hellfire and brimstone, and, to a sensitive and imaginative child, really terrifying. Hearing it for the first time, Christina turned in frightened tears to Johan Matthiae, who comforted her with the promise that she would escape damnation and live forever in Heaven – provided she was ‘a good girl’ and applied herself properly to her lessons. Christina took the warning seriously, and did her best to behave, but the following year, on hearing the same sermon, she found it somehow less menacing. Another year later, the menace had retreated further still, so far, in fact, that she ventured to suggest to Matthiae that it was all a lot of nonsense, and not just the threats of damnation, but all the rest of the stories, too – the Resurrection of Jesus, and everything. Matthiae was alarmed, and warned her in serious tones that thinking of that kind would certainly lead her down the road to perdition. Christina respected her ‘Papa’, and loved him, too, and she said no more on the subject. But the seed of doubt had fallen on fertile ground. By the time she was out of her girlhood, Christina believed ‘nothing at all of the religion in which I was brought up’, and she later declared that all of Christianity was ‘no more than a trick played by the powerful to keep the humble people down’.
Matthiae was a theologian and a Lutheran clergyman, but his views were liberal. He admired the great humanist tradition, and made it part of Christina’s daily lessons along with the harangues of Roman senators and the dry texts of the Swedish constitution. Christina was particularly attracted to neostoicism, a revival of ancient Stoic thought in a form compatible with Christianity – the inconvenient materialist beliefs of the Romans, for example, had been modified away. In neostoicism, she found a bridge between the Lutheran world that she was gradually abandoning and the classical deism that she was moving towards. The humanists had not gone so far, but Christina read into them what she needed to see, and for now, and for years to come, a deity unhampered by sect or priest or bible was precisely what she wanted to believe in. Besides, the earnest bravery of the neostoics was a perfect complement to the heroic classical tales that she so loved, and it encouraged her enthusiasm for the bookish, boyish virtues – mens sana in corpore sano – of the disciplined Roman Republic. In her fifteenth year, Matthiae introduced her to Lipsius’ Politica, a collection of pithy classical maxims well suited to her own rather apodictical nature. She was never to lose her taste for maxims; from those of ancient Greece and Rome she progressed to those of modern France, and in later life she wrote some of her own, happily contradicting herself with the courage of each changing conviction.
Christina’s religious studies were conducted in German and Swedish, and also in Latin, which she had begun to study seriously. Matthiae had compiled for her a brief summary of Latin grammar, using as his guide Comenius’ recently published Janua linguarum reserata – The Door to Languages Opened.2 Comenius held the then revolutionary idea that lessons should be adapted to the age and ability of the pupil; he was later to produce the first teaching book which combined text with pictures.3 His innovative Latin grammar was built not around abstract rules but around the familiar objects of childhood, but despite this, Christina declared that she hated it so much she almost stopped learning Latin altogether. This she would not have been permitted to do; Latin was essential, a written and spoken lingua franca used everywhere in Christendom. Her father had learned to speak it perfectly before he could read in any language, and Christina claimed the same facility for herself, though this was probably untrue; her progress in Latin was unremarkable, and as a young girl, at least, she was reluctant to speak it. Matthiae wanted her to speak to him only in Latin, but she would not; a brief memorandum on the subject, written shortly before her tenth birthday, reveals the state of the case. In schoolgirl Latin, and using the royal ‘We’, she wrote: ‘We hereby promise to speak Latin with Our tutor from now on. We will hold Ourselves to this obligation. We know We have promised this before, and not kept Our word. But with God’s help, We will keep it this time, beginning next Monday, God willing. Written and signed by Our own hand…’4
Whether or not she kept her promise ‘this time’ is not known, though she spoke the language well enough in later life. But if she did not like learning Latin, she did enjoy the history accessible through it, and in this she was spurred on by the Royal Librarian, Johann Freinsheim, an authority on Tacitus who taught her most of her Roman history. He seems to have taught her well, for in later years, the French ambassador noted that she seemed to have no trouble with Tacitus, ‘even the difficult passages, which I found hard myself’. But it was not the quality of Tacitus’ writing that attracted Christina. She loved the stories of the ancient world, loved reading of the heroic exploits of Caesar and Alexander, loved the tales of nobility and virtue and the unending quest for glory. They were for her a world