Cérisantes’ place as Christina’s representative in Paris was taken by a nobler but otherwise no more likely contender, Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie. Scion of a prominent Franco-Swedish family, he was in fact a cousin of sorts to the Queen – his great-uncle was her own uncle, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, illegitimate half-brother to Gustav Adolf. Magnus’ father was the Grand Marshal General Jakob De la Gardie, who had served as military instructor to the boy Gustav Adolf, and his mother was none other than Ebba Brahe, the beauty who had once captured the young King’s heart; Magnus, her ‘dear and noble son’, was the eldest of her fourteen children. In 1645, just 22 years of age, he returned to Stockholm after almost ten years of study and travel in Sweden and abroad, including a lengthy and expensive sojourn in Paris. He had rounded it all off with a tour of duty in the Danish war, adding a soldier’s dash to his courtly accomplishments.
Christina was delighted with him. He was tall and muscular, handsome, charming, extravagant, the son of her father’s old favourite, and, above all, very fluent in the elegant ways of France – in short, perfectly calculated to annoy the Chancellor. They became intimate friends, and she soon made him Colonel of her Guard. It was a swift advance for so young and inexperienced a man, and few doubted that Christina had fallen in love with him – some even whispered that they were lovers. It is not likely to have been true, not least because Magnus was himself in love with Christina’s schoolfellow and favourite cousin, Maria Euphrosyne. He soon made a proposal of marriage to her; she soon accepted.
Christina responded by separating them. In the spring of 1646, she announced that Count Magnus had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to France – ‘extraordinary’ thanks were owing to the French, she felt, for their involvement in the Danish treaty. There was in fact no political need for any such appointment to be made, and the Chancellor opposed it strongly, adding to Christina’s determination with his every objection. Magnus was to go, and he was to go in splendour such as no Swedish envoy had ever before enjoyed, splendour which was to impress even the extravagant French. A carriage of gold and silver was prepared for him; some three hundred persons were to form his personal retinue; his allowance would be enormous. For three months she delayed his departure with fond excuses, so that those about her, ‘not wishing to cast aspersions on Her Majesty’s conduct’, assumed that, despite his engagement to her cousin, Magnus would soon be married to the Queen. The infuriated Chancellor could only look on, kept company by a sad Karl Gustav, whose promising romance had evaporated into the perfumed air surrounding his rival. Towards the end of July, Magnus finally set out for Paris. Christina took to her room, and wept.
She might have wept more bitterly if she had learned what Magnus had to say of her once he arrived at Mazarin’s court. At first, he spoke of her ‘in passionate terms’, and ‘so respectfully’ that the French, too, suspected that his feeling exceeded that of a normally dutiful subject for his Queen. But the matter was soon made clear: Christina was an extraordinary monarch, wonderfully learned, but not very feminine – in fact, not like a woman at all, not in her appearance, not in her behaviour, not even in her face – a surprisingly ungallant remark from so suave a tongue. Magnus made full use nonetheless of her continuing indulgence of him, exceeding his huge allowance three times over, referring his debts to the Queen without her leave, and perversely raising Sweden’s reputation as a land of some financial resource, while her soldiers remained unpaid in their garrisons and camps. Little wonder that Christina’s former man in Paris, the incorrigible Cérisantes, thought it worth his while to protest that he himself had not been reappointed.
The French appointment served a multiple purpose. It gave Christina time to recover from her love for Magnus. Alternatively, it gave Magnus time to recover from his love for Maria Euphrosyne, and to reconsider what the love of a queen might bring in its train; the costly embassy in Paris was an obvious indication. In either case, it made the point that it was Christina’s voice, and not Axel Oxenstierna’s, that was now to be decisive. The link between Sweden and France would, at least formally, be strengthened, though in fact Magnus’ inexperience only weakened Sweden’s standing in the eyes of the French.
Magnus remained in Paris just seven months, capably discussing French poetry with the court précieuses, while political matters passed beyond his ken. In Stockholm, Christina exchanged daily visits with his mother, and together they sang the praises of their absent idol. Magnus’ fiancée herself does not seem to have been included in these laudatory soirées, but she was there readily enough when he returned, ‘preceded by the sound of his expenses’, to celebrate an unrepentantly lavish wedding. Christina managed to upstage bride, bridegroom, and priest: placing the couple’s hands together, she declared to Magnus, ‘I hereby give you the most precious thing I have.’ Precious things continued to flow in the same direction, so that within a year, while Christina’s Treasury limped along, Magnus, at the happy age of 24, was believed to be the richest man in Sweden.
Magnus was married, and Karl Gustav rejected, but Christina’s affections were not long idle. This time they took a different turn, which kept the gossips as busy as they had ever been with Magnus or Marc-Duncan de Cérisantes. The Queen’s attention was now fixed on one of her own ladies-in-waiting, a quiet young beauty who had been left in her care on the death of her courtier father some years before. Her name was Ebba Sparre, but in compliment to her loveliness, Christina called her Belle.
Apart from their age, the two had little in common. Belle was timid, feminine, and sedentary, with no particular interest in learning or high culture, but she accepted Christina’s attentions, and seems to have returned her affection. They commonly shared a bed, no unusual matter at the time for two young unmarried women, but Christina enjoyed the provocative possibilities of the situation. She drew deliberate attention to it before the prudish English Ambassador, Bulstrode Whitelocke, whispering into his reddening ears that Belle’s ‘inside’ was ‘as beautiful as her outside’. Her insinuations quickly ossified into supposed fact, and before long it was widely believed that the Queen was a lesbian, or possibly, in mitigating afterthought, a hermaphrodite. Her reluctance to marry added weight to the charge – had not the Count Palatine been trailing on his leash, unfed, for years behind her? – and there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to be brought to bear: her mannish way of walking, her love of hunting, her gruff voice, her flat shoes – to a roomful of courtiers eager for scandal and impatient for an heir, all betokened clear sexual aberration.
Christina did nothing to quench the little flames, declaring in round terms her aversion to the idea of sex with a man. ‘I could not bear to be used by a man the way a peasant uses his fields,’ she said. At the same time, it was clear that neither modesty nor timidity had prompted her attitude. Her coarse language, though she herself regarded it as a natural Swedish defect, was the cause of frequent comment. She was fond of bawdy jokes, too, and was not above teasing the maidenly Belle. She led her one day to the chamber of Claude Saumaise, a Frenchman and a favourite of the Queen who had absented himself from some scholarly rendezvous on the pretext of illness. They found him sitting up in bed with a risqué book in his hand. Recognizing its title, Christina disingenuously asked Belle to read a passage aloud from it. Belle began confidently, but was soon blushing and stammering, to a loud roar of laughter from the Queen, and a quiet smirk from Saumaise.
Christina was clearly fond of Belle, and may even have loved her, but she did not refrain from making use of this most innocent friend in her ongoing battle with Chancellor Oxenstierna. For some time Belle had been engaged to his son, Bengt, but Christina persuaded her to break off the engagement, and to marry instead Jakob Casimir De la Gardie, Magnus’ younger brother. A story went the rounds that, during the wedding celebrations, the Queen ordered all the guests to take off their clothes and dance – at least – in the nude. The story is