The attack lent an urgency to the government’s demands that Christina should marry as soon as possible. She was already aged twenty; she had not been free of illness; now there had been an attempt on her life. If she should die without heirs, how would the succession be assured? How could they avoid dissension, civil war, foreign interference, a Catholic king? Christina responded wryly, equivocally, angrily, but always without committing herself. From Brandenburg, her frustrated cousin, the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, continued his suit via envoys and agents, who never in fact managed to see the Queen. She was too often strategically absent on hunting trips, and the men she had designated to deal with the envoys, her uncle, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, and Magnus’ father, Jakob De la Gardie, both appeared to be ‘tending their estates in the country’ with annoying frequency. In Copenhagen, the King’s second son, encouraged by Maria Eleonora, began to hope for success where his brother had failed; in due course, he failed too.
Though she ignored – and worsened – the country’s financial problems, and delayed the question of her marriage, there were other matters which pressed on Christina daily, and which she could not dismiss. Privately and publicly, in court and in government, she encountered the same antagonisms between the crown and the nobles, and between the nobles and the commoners’ Estates, that her father had known, and that he had never fully overcome. During his long absences on campaign, almost every year of his twenty-year reign, Gustav Adolf had left the government in the hands of the great noble families, ensuring their loyalty by allowing them to monopolize the best offices almost as if they were their own personal property. This had maintained a long internal stability, but it had worked against able men of humbler background, who would have preferred instead some form of meritocracy such as earlier Swedish kings had had, a ‘rule of secretaries’ – essentially, men like themselves who had made their way up through talent and effort, who could govern the kingdom with the monarch’s support, or indeed, without it. During the years of the regency, without the King’s charisma to bind them together, the two sides had diverged more sharply. Many who were themselves of noble birth had become openly hostile to the powerful old families, the Brahes and De la Gardies and the Banérs and the Bielkes and the Sparres and, above all, the Oxenstiernas, who dominated the government and the court. Christina’s own uncles, Johann Kasimir and Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, resented and feared them, and she quickly learned to do the same – not without some reason: when an appeal case between the Oxenstiernas and the Bielkes was brought before the Senate, it quickly became apparent that every single senator was related to one or other of them, or to both.
Christina could not dispense with them, and as yet she lacked the skill to undermine them, but she struck out at them nonetheless, muddling her dislike of their influence with her own continuing rivalry with the Chancellor. In the first months of 1647, soon after her twentieth birthday, her old tutor, Johan Matthiae, now Bishop of Strängnäs and recently ennobled, unwittingly provided an opportunity for the young Queen to test her power.
As the late King had done, and as he had wished his daughter to do, Matthiae supported the idea of a single Protestant Church, uniting both Lutheran and Calvinist creeds. This kind of syncretic thinking was anathema to the adherents of Sweden’s rather narrow form of Lutheranism, among whom the Chancellor himself was counted. From his diocese in Strängnäs, Matthiae had written a book promoting Protestant unity.5 It had infuriated the Chancellor, and at a session of the Senate, he denounced it roundly, calling for the book to be banned and for Matthiae himself to make a formal apology before the 500 men of the Riksdag. Matthiae did so, and the Senate and the Riksdag together then demanded the outlawing of any movement prejudicial to the accepted rites; an old document of 1580, the Liber concordiae, was to set the terms thenceforth for religious observance in Sweden.
Christina seized her chance. Just as her father had done almost forty years before, she rejected their decision and refused to accept the Liber concordiae. There was nothing wrong with the Bishop’s views, she declared; indeed, her own views were the same. The Chancellor remonstrated, the Queen stood her ground, the Chancellor insisted, and the Queen burst into tears. The match was a draw, more or less: the book was not banned, but nor was it reprinted, and the Chancellor went off to his country house, muttering that the Queen was absolutely impossible, that the late King would never have behaved so imperiously, and that the Bishop was not to be trusted.
At the Tre Kronor Castle, Christina’s angry tears were dried by the kindly old Count Per Brahe, who had taken Karl Gustav’s proffered place as High Steward. Her Majesty was young, he said, and with the greatest of respect, had much to learn; she would be wise not to place all her trust in a priest – any priest, even a beloved former tutor. And if he might be so bold, Her Majesty could perhaps exercise a little more discretion in her choice of companions. That Magnus De la Gardie was altogether overstepping the bounds; he needed to learn his place. The Chancellor and the senators were experienced men; they would serve Her Majesty very well, if she could only put aside the pride of youth, and trust their judgement.
In the name of the most holy and individual Trinity: Be it known to all, and every one whom it may concern, or to whom in any manner it may belong, That for many Years past, Discords and Civil Divisions being stir’d up in the Roman Empire, which increas’d to such a degree, that not only all Germany, but also the neighbouring Kingdoms, and France particularly, have been involv’d in the Disorders of a long and cruel War…from whence ensu’d great Effusion of Christian Blood, and the Desolation of several Provinces. It has at last happen’d, by the effect of Divine Goodness, seconded by the Endeavours of the most Serene Republick of Venice…that there shall be a Christian and Universal Peace…between his Sacred Imperial Majesty, and his most Christian Majesty of France…the most Serene Queen and Kingdom of Swedeland, the Electors respectively, and the Princes and States of the Empire…and that there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles, in what place, or what manner soever the Hostilitys have been practis’d…Done, pass’d and concluded at Munster in Westphalia, the 24th Day of October, 1648.6
The peace, like the war, had been years in the making. Since the early 1630s, there had been sporadic attempts to secure it; many smaller truces had been made and broken. A few individuals had laid down arms of their own accord, then taken them up again as their personal interests had shifted. Wallenstein had been the most important of them, but one of Christina’s generals, too, had for a time undermined Swedish strategy by pursuing an independent peace until his attention was distracted by a pretty young German princess – hard drinking had then drained what was left of his private ambition.7 By the 1640s, Bohemia and the German lands had become, as it were, a vast chessboard where the powers played out their alliances and antagonisms, religious or political. Apart from the occasional Scandinavian skirmish, all Europe’s wars had become more or less ‘fused’, in Gustav Adolf’s phrase, ‘into a single war’. But in 1645, a Turkish attack on the island of Crete, then in the hands of the Venetian Republic, had finally concentrated the collective mind of Christendom, forcing the European powers to realize the external peril threatening their territories and their ideals. ‘While the Christians squabble among themselves,’ wrote an anxious Dutch poet, ‘the Turk is sharpening his sword.’8
The Venetians at least had perceived the threat, and had set themselves to broker a general European peace. Now, foreseeing that assistance from their coreligionists might be needed in their own struggle, they redoubled their efforts. And so it was that ‘by the Mediation and Interposition of the most illustrious and most excellent Ambassador and Senator of Venice, Aloysius Contarini Knight, who for the space of five Years, or thereabouts, with great Diligence, and a Spirit intirely impartial, has been inclin’d to be a Mediator in these Affairs’, representatives of the various powers came together at last in the German province of Westphalia. Christina, as Queen of the all-conquering Swedish armies, was a guarantor of peace along with France’s boy King, the ten-year-old Louis XIV.
Even at the negotiating table, it was not considered safe to seat Catholic and Protestant