‘I can handle any sort of arms passably well,’ she wrote, ‘though I was barely taught to use them at all.’ From this it seems that she must have learned to fence, but if she did not receive much instruction, this is not surprising. Fencing was an aspect of military training, and consequently not something that any girl, even an honorary prince, would be expected to need. Perhaps Christina persuaded one of her governors, both expert swordsmen, to give her a few lessons, or perhaps her two cousins, happy to display their boyhood skills, passed on to her some of their own instruction. Christina did not keep up her fencing, though from time to time in her adult life she liked to wear a sword.
Hunting, by contrast, was a noble sport of long standing for both men and women, and fast and furious riding was an integral part of it. Christina loved it all. Whether or not she was ‘barely taught’, she was a very good shot; the French Ambassador remarked that she could ‘hit a running hare faster than any man’, though as she herself insisted, ‘I wasn’t cruel and I have never killed an animal without feeling real sympathy for it.’12 She was a very fine horsewoman, too, though she used a lady’s side-saddle, and was probably taught by her governor Axel Banér, himself a superbly skilled rider. Christina admitted that she had been taught to ride ‘a bit’, but in fact she received a good deal of instruction, and she spent many exhilarating hours on horseback in the royal hunting grounds of Djurgården, across the lake from her castle home. In short, she was perfectly suited to the vigorous princely upbringing which her father had commanded for her. In the young girl racing on horseback through the forest, the Swedes saw their great King’s own active spirit embodied once again:
Between what I was taught and what I wanted to learn myself, I was able to learn everything that a prince should know, and everything a girl can learn in all modesty…I loved my books with a passion, but I loved hunting and horse-racing and games just as much. I loved horses and dogs – but I never lost a moment of my study or my duty to any of that…The people who had to look after me were at their wits’ end, because I absolutely wore them out, and I gave them no rest, day or night, and when my women wanted to slow me down, I just made fun of them, and I said to them: If you’re tired, go and lie down; I don’t need you. Every hour of my days was occupied with affairs of state, or study, or exercise.13
It is a rather boastful account, and a touch defiant, but Christina’s description of her girlhood self is more or less true. She was clever, and generally hardy, though given to sudden illnesses, most apparently emotional in origin, and she did spend her days more or less charging at the world, infuriating and exhausting those about her.
The Princess Katarina died a few days after Christina’s twelfth birthday, in the December of 1638. Christina had been fond of her kindly aunt, and she missed the company of her cousins, most of whom now returned to their own castle at Stegeborg. Only the youngest girl remained with her in Stockholm, and she stayed for four years, a companion ‘suitable for my age’ in schooling and at play. Both Christina’s governors died within these years, and they were not replaced. Johan Matthiae was to remain until Christina was sixteen, and from then on, for all but her political education, she was to be left to her own devices.
While Christina had been poring over Caesar and Alexander, a latter-day hero had been making his way, in less martial mode, through other lands. In 1641, Karl Gustav returned to Stockholm, aged just nineteen, with the happy weight of student life and foreign travel on his broad young shoulders. If his portrait is to be believed, he had grown into an exceedingly handsome young man, with dark eyes and dark hair, and fine but manly features. He was well liked among his peers and well regarded by those above him, liberal but not extravagant, courageous, and very capable, a young man full of promise, but with no settled future as yet before him.
It had been more than three years since Christina had last seen her cousin. She was now fifteen, and she found at once that her former easy, boyish talk of fencing and hunting no longer felt appropriate when she was with him. Awkward chatter soon gave way to whispers and sighs and secret glances, as the friend of her childhood metamorphosed into her first love. It became a conspiracy. With chaperones in the way, the two resorted to impassioned notes, delivered by an excited Maria Euphrosyne, cousin and sister to the lovers, or a surprising alternative go-between, Christina’s learned old tutor, Johan Matthiae. There need not have been much intriguing. For a girl of her rank, Christina was now of marriageable age, and the match would have been welcomed by Karl Gustav’s family – it had in fact been a long-held wish of his mother, Christina’s Aunt Katarina. Chancellor Oxenstierna would have been less pleased. He disliked the Palatine family and suspected them of manipulating Christina’s affections for their own advancement. But as head of the regency council, he could in any case have forbidden any marriage until Christina had formally attained her majority at the age of eighteen. This was almost three years away; by then the youthful romance would surely have run its course.
The Chancellor had miscalculated the strength of Karl Gustav’s affections, but where Christina herself was concerned, he need not really have worried. She seems to have enjoyed the subterfuge as much as the romance itself. She wanted to write in code, and though she often enough swore ‘eternal love’ and ‘faithfulness unto death’, she spent as many lines trying to keep the young man calm, and urging him to think of his professional future. ‘I will wait for you,’ she wrote, ‘but for now you need to think about the army. All good things come to those who wait. We can marry once I have become Queen in fact as well as in name’ – an event still several years distant. The eager young lover could be packed off to the wars, and the game of love continue to be played without danger of any real involvement.
In a roundabout way, Christina ensured this herself, probably by accident, but possibly in order to keep Karl Gustav at bay. An important position had fallen vacant at the court. The Chancellor’s brother had recently died, and the Senate was debating who might succeed him as High Steward and member of the regency council. Christina had proved a keen and able student of politics, and it was thought that, as she was now aged fifteen, she might add her voice to those of the senators – her father, after all, had begun to attend Riksdag sessions at the age of only twelve. The senators suggested she might like to nominate her cousin, Karl Gustav, for the newly vacant position. It was welcome news to the young man himself; he had no other employment, and his family had no wealth beyond what they could earn through the grace of the court. Johann Kasimir was delighted. He had himself once been a member of Sweden’s highest Council. Now, despite his German blood, his son would take his own place there. They could count on Christina, he knew – but he had reckoned without her paradoxical support.
Excited by this first foray into real politics, she devised a small subterfuge, apparently to persuade the Senate that she was not especially predisposed towards her cousin and his family. In fact, Chancellor Oxenstierna seems to have been her real target. Though she hung on his every word and ‘never tired of listening to him’, she had begun to resent the great man’s power; he was her regent, after all, and not the King. The Chancellor disliked her uncle Johann Kasimir, regarding him as an untrustworthy foreigner who had come to the country with nothing and who intended to