Karl Gustav’s dogged love was not the only recurrent theme of Christina’s early reign. Problems of state recurred, too, on a larger scale and at a faster pace than the young Queen could hope to manage them. Pride in her own capacities and resentment of older and wiser heads made the problems worse than they might have been, and hindered their solution.
The first problem was money, or rather, a serious lack of it. It was not all Christina’s fault. It had begun nobly enough, years before, with the drive to improve public services. Her own great father had set it in train, building schools and hospitals, endowing universities, developing the post office, laying new streets, boosting local industries. In every enterprise he had been assisted by his eminently capable Chancellor, who had carried on the work through the years of the regency, creating in the process a proud and beautiful city worthy of its standing as a European capital. To raise the money for such vast reform, Gustav Adolf had sold what belonged to the crown: land, industries, the right to raise revenue. He fully expected to regain what he had sold by way of indirect taxation – the land and the industries and everything else would be more productive, it was presumed, in any hands other than the crown’s. His Chancellor approved the sales, calling them ‘pleasing to God and hurtful to no man – and not provocative of rebellion’. They seemed to be a way of modernizing the state’s finances, replacing the old herring-and-rawhide payments with efficient cash in hand.
For more than thirty years, all the years of Gustav Adolf’s reign, and all the years of the regency, it worked. But it provided a dangerous precedent for Christina’s extravagant temperament, and in time she came to view the crown’s assets like the loaves and fishes on the Mount of Olives – miraculously renewable, no matter how many hands dipped into the basket. Moreover, she could not distinguish, or would not distinguish, between the crown’s property and what belonged to her personally. It was all endlessly available for public works or for presents to favourites or for libraries or paintings or armies or orchestras. She used it all, sometimes justly, rewarding a soldier’s bravery or a civil servant’s hard work, but more often at random, and always more lavishly than was needed. She had little understanding of finance, and she made no attempt to learn.
Reserves soon dwindled. The quickest way of raising more money, Christina saw, was to sell noble titles, and she began to sell them by the dozen. When all the old ones were gone, she created new ones, handing them out impartially to the high-born and the low, until steady citizens were heard to complain that a man could now ‘leap into the highest posts straight from his pepper-bags or his dung-cart’.1 Within a few years, she had increased sevenfold the number of Sweden’s earls, swamped the nine old barons with forty-one new ones, and almost trebled the number of noble families. ‘We now have arms and escutcheons by the hundred,’ wrote one disgusted courtier. ‘The court is overrun by the mob they call counts.’2 Worst of all, most of the country’s new aristocrats were not even Swedish: artists and merchants and mercenary soldiers arrived to claim their laurels from the Baltic states, from England and Scotland, from Germany and the Netherlands and, especially, from France. Townsfolk and peasants alike muttered that there were altogether ‘too many nobles and too many foreigners’ in the country. Some at least had paid for their new positions, but just as many received them simply as tokens of the young Queen’s regard. Extravagance, it seemed, was her credo. ‘Magnificence and liberality are the virtues of the great,’ she wrote. ‘They delight everyone.’
But there were many who were far from delighted. For with the noble titles went, too often, noble land, or rather, crown land sold to provide an instant family estate for the new-made aristocrats. It seemed that the number of nobles would keep on growing, that the Queen would continue to sell off land or give it away until there was nothing left. At the crown’s land registers, where titles had once changed more slowly than the pace of generations, the clerks could not cope with the sudden flow of transfers. Serious mistakes were made; some land was sold twice over, and one man, with an entrepreneurial spirit lacking elsewhere in the country, made a tidy profit selling land that did not even exist.
As the nobility grew, so the crown’s assets shrank. Christina attempted to redress the balance by raising taxes, a measure that was bound to be of limited effect when there were so few people to be taxed in the first place. Worse, the many ennoblements had been continually reducing the numbers liable to taxation at all; nobles paid no tax, and their peasants paid taxes to them, rather than to the crown. It was a simple equation – more nobles, less tax revenue – but Christina did not master it.
The great families themselves, nobles ancient and modern, did nothing to halt the downward spiral. Official rewards and simple plunder during the long years of war had expanded their understanding of the good life, and they now began to emulate their extravagant young Queen in a hedonistic parade of new wealth. Once modest to the point of discomfort, their homes and their habits were now thoroughly up to date. They lived as fashionably, and owed as much money, as any of their compeers in France or Italy. Over the years of the regency, palaces and manors had been built in town and country to house their new art collections and their new aspirations to cultured living. Most magnificent of them all was the home of Jakob and Ebba De la Gardie, Magnus’ father and mother, which stood proudly in the middle of Stockholm. Adorned in the Italian style with sculptures and fountains, it was named, appropriately, Makalös – matchless. Other magnates tried nonetheless to compete, among them the Chancellor himself, whose own impressive red palace stood boldly facing the city’s cathedral. Inside the great new houses, tapestries warmed the walls, lovely objects drew eye and hand, and many a looted German grandee looked sternly out from his portrait, while the candlelight danced on the new silk gown of his captor’s wife or daughter.
The real problem was that Sweden – isolated, sparsely populated, half-frozen – simply did not produce very much. Although Gustav Adolf and Oxenstierna and Christina, too, had encouraged the potentially valuable mining industry and promoted foreign trade, including the slave trade,3 it was not enough to meet much more than the people’s daily needs. All was consumed in the prosaic traffic of hand to mouth. Except in the leanest years, most simple folk lived better than their counterparts in other lands, but there was no general surplus for the kind of luxuries now demanded in the towns and in the manor houses. Moreover, most Swedes were too used to thinking in terms of farming or soldiering to turn their minds to commerce, and the country owed what modest industrial success it had so far achieved mainly to foreign entrepreneurs, almost all of them Dutchmen.4 Their influence encouraged some of Sweden’s governors to view the innovative and prosperous Netherlands as a possible model for their own economic advancement. A South Sea Company was set up, and an Africa Company, and favourable conditions ensured for adventurous investors at home, but those who might have taken advantage of them failed to do so, and for the huge deficit in Christina’s crown revenues, it was in any case too little, and too late.
The Queen, whether really at fault or no, was an easy target for criticism. Voices were raised against her, and pamphlets slyly printed, and one summer Sunday, as she knelt at prayer in the castle chapel, a man armed with two naked daggers slipped through the congregation and ran towards her. The two guards standing in front of the Queen, despite their spears and battleaxes, were unable to stop him; he knocked them both to the ground, snapping the spear of one before jumping over the other. Their captain, standing beside the Queen apparently in pious reverie, had completely failed to notice the commotion. Christina gave him a shove, and he leapt into belated action, seizing the assailant