Christina’s kingdom was now her own. On a cold November day in 1644, shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she summoned her ‘five great old men’ to give a formal account of the twelve years of their regency. They spoke of the past, and also of the future. From now on, Christina would be Queen in fact as well as in name. Once the war had been concluded, there would be a spectacular ceremony of coronation to confirm the beginning of a glorious new reign, and in the meantime she was to take into her own hands the governance of the realm.
It was a curious young woman who stood before the regents now. She was fairly small, not quite five feet tall, and her habit of wearing flat shoes made her seem even smaller to her high-heeled contemporaries. Her delicate upper body was marred by a pronounced unevenness of the shoulders, the result of her fall in infancy, but her arms were round and womanly, tapering to fine, small hands. Her face was finely made and oval-shaped, framed by straight fair hair, and her forehead was high. Her long, hooked nose led to a small mouth, from which most of the back teeth, it seems, were already missing, narrowing the delicate jaw, and emphasizing the small, pointed chin. All accounts agree that her large, blue, close-set eyes were beautiful, lit with intelligence and humour; they revealed pride, too, and often anger, and at times a kind of penetrating stare which seems to have alarmed every recipient into quick submission, but their expression does not seem to have ever been cold. Despite her small stature and fairly delicate build, the young Queen’s movements and gestures were far from feminine. She walked like a man, sat and rode like a man, and could eat and swear like the roughest soldier. Her voice was deep and gruff, and her temper warm – her servants were no strangers to blows or bruises. She was clever and well read, but she liked best to talk of manly things, and whenever she spoke of military action, she adopted a sort of martial pose, planting one foot in front of the other. Her many unusual traits notwithstanding, she formed an impressive figure, and she left her old counsellors broadly reassured for the future of their country.
Not the least anxious observer of the young Queen’s development had been the remarkable Baron Axel Oxenstierna, whose own premier position of many years’ standing was about to encounter its first challenge. Since his first appointment as Chancellor in 1612, at the age of only 29, he had served Sweden with great distinction in every field from military logistics to city planning. A lawyer by training, an outstanding administrator and diplomat, he was also an able politician, and for more than thirty years he had steered a well-judged course between Sweden’s longstanding adversaries of crown and nobility. It was Oxenstierna who had curtailed the power of the crown after the death of Christina’s ferocious grandfather, ‘the rabble King’ Karl IX, wresting agreement for a balance of power from the new King, Gustav Adolf; it is a measure of his abilities, and of the sixteen-year-old King’s perspicacity, that Oxenstierna was nonetheless appointed Chancellor only a few months afterwards. His years as Chancellor to Christina’s father had been a turning-point in the life of his country; the two had worked together to transform their homeland from a backward outpost on the cold periphery of Europe to a major power on the continent’s centre stage. Oxenstierna’s considered temperament had provided a perfect complement to the exuberant genius of Gustav Adolf, epitomized in a famous exchange between them: ‘If we were all as cold as you are,’ the King had once exclaimed, ‘we should freeze.’ ‘If we were all as hot as Your Majesty is,’ replied the Chancellor, ‘we should burn.’ After Gustav Adolf’s early death, it was Oxenstierna who had supported the vulnerable Vasa dynasty, defending the child Queen against the importuning nobles who had sought greater power for themselves. He had assumed the leadership of the civil government, introducing major administrative reforms and initiating a second phase of tremendous development within the country. Sweden’s wideranging military effort had also fallen to his charge, and not least, he had become guardian to Christina and to her illegitimate half-brother. Over decades of service, he had revealed not only his abilities and his strength of mind but also his profound patriotism, a golden thread running through the many antagonisms of his public life, in Sweden and abroad.
Oxenstierna’s achievement had been phenomenal. By the end of the regency in 1644, there was no stone of state that he had left unturned, and his rare combination of vision and pragmatism had earned him admiration and respect and, in the areas of Swedish military action, no small fear. To the senators and the men of the Riksdag, his remarkable partnership with the late King remained a vibrant memory, and in the years after Gustav Adolf’s death, Oxenstierna’s own powerful aura had only shone the more brightly.
Now, in the small firmament of the Swedish court, there was no longer room for two stars of equal brilliance. In the eagerness and arrogance of her eighteen years, Christina felt it was her turn to shine. She was intimidated by the Chancellor’s achievements, and mistrustful of his reforms, seeing in them a threat to her own power. Despite his long years of service and his championing of the Vasa dynasty, she convinced herself that he was taking advantage of her inexperience to weaken the crown and advance his own authority instead. Her tutelage, she decided, was at an end. During the years of his guardianship, she had listened to him attentively, but now she would speak, and he would listen. She did not seek the fruitful equipoise of monarch and chancellor which had served her father so well. In her mind, this was only history, after all; for the twelve years of her girlhood the Chancellor had ruled alone, seconded and supported by his ubiquitous family. But the right to rule was not his at all; he had used it while he could, but he would not usurp it now that she was of age. It was her own right, and she would exercise it.
The Chancellor thus appeared less a complement than a foil to Christina’s own designs, and his prominent position merely a conspicuous target for her keen and jealous eye. Her concern became to oppose him, and from a wilful principle it grew into a habit. His great abilities, his vast experience, and, not least, his own majestic presence, so often remarked upon by contemporaries, all struck deeply at the defensive heart of an uncertain girl, not even five feet tall. She responded by perversely attacking the great oak which might have sheltered her own tender growth, developing at the same time an attitude of terrific outward pride, insistent to the point of comedy and even pathos.
Though the Chancellor had now formally ceded his place as first power in the land, his position remained immensely strong. He stood supported by his own men, with wealth and patronage at his disposal, and about him a wall of skill and influence three decades thick. He was not without enemies, old rivals for office and riches, and those envious of his family’s great standing, but they were not as yet a solid flank to be used in opposition to him, and Christina in any case lacked the experience to manipulate them to that end. She began instead on her own, cautiously, and her plan of attack was simple: the mighty old oak was, above all, a northern oak; it flourished best under its own wintry skies, mistrusting the dazzling sun and the rich soil of the south – most particularly, the soft, sticky soil of France. This soil, in gleeful handfuls, Christina now determined to spread.
In 1635, under the Chancellor’s leadership, the Swedes had entered into a cautious alliance with France against the Habsburg Empire. It had not been a happy partnership. Both sides were wary of each other, the Chancellor looking down his noble nose at the French with their devious and frivolous ways, and Richelieu raising his eyebrows at the majestic Swede – ‘very astute,’ he thought, ‘but a bit Gothic’. The replacement of Richelieu by his protégé, the never ordained but nevertheless Cardinal Mazarin, had not improved relations between the two countries. For almost a decade their awkward alliance had remained in place, with the French offering but not always paying subsidies for Sweden’s armies, expecting in return a biddable northern ally, and the Swedes accepting the offers, and the money when it was forthcoming, but continuing to make their own decisions, watching their backs the while. The Chancellor’s