Fortunately, or unfortunately, the Swedes were not alone in their division of efforts: the French, too, had dual lines of counsel, each with its own spokesman. Both detested both the Swedes, who in their turn detested both the Frenchmen. The Comte d’Avaux relayed a loud disgust of the proud young Oxenstierna, ‘sitting there on his throne as if he’s about to pass judgement on the twelve tribes of Israel’. The Chancellor riposted on his son’s behalf: ‘If he writes to you in French,’ he told him, ‘write back in Swedish.’ Mistrust flourished. Christina wrote to Salvius: ‘The Chancellor is being very obliging, but I am wary of Greeks bearing gifts’, and added a postscript that he should tell her what kind of faces Johan pulled when he saw the letter. They were apparently quite remarkable, but no more so than the faces Christina herself pulled when she heard the news Salvius was spreading in Osnabrück: the Queen was about to marry, it seemed, and her husband was to be the Chancellor’s second son, Erik. A violent scene ensued in Stockholm, and a harried message was soon on its way from the innocent Chancellor to his son, urging him to make haste and deflect the rumours by finding a suitable bride. He did.
Though she took their part against the Oxenstiernas, Christina did not always feel sure of the French delegates, either: ‘I am very well acquainted with their ways,’ she wrote. ‘For the most part, it’s all just compliments. But civility won’t cost us anything – we can pay them in their own coin.’ Her own often impulsive intervention, however, ensured that France earned much more than compliments, and it even cost Christina something in a personal sense. She had wanted to have the town of Benfeld as a grand bestowal for Magnus, but the French took it along with the other Alsatian territories. Magnus had to be content with the Benfeld cannon instead – he quickly sold them to the town’s new owners.
Despite their internal rivalries, the Swedes and the French between them took the lion’s share of the treaty’s benefits, and in the end they were happy enough to sit down together at the great celebratory banquet hosted by Karl Gustav in Nuremberg. Among those present was the new-made Count of Vasaborg, Christina’s illegitimate half-brother, Gustav Gustavsson, only half-rejoicing. His blood ties to the Queen had not been enough to overcome the stain of his long service to the Chancellor, and Christina had placed no trust in him, nor had she, or the French, supported his personal claims – he had had his eye on a couple of German dioceses. Johan Oxenstierna attended the banquet, too. After sobering up, he travelled on to Pomerania, its new post-treaty governor.
The Russians, though they had not been among the combatants, enjoyed nonetheless the best of the peace celebrations. After 30 long years, they did not at first believe that the war had ended at all, and it was decided that an extravagant spectacle would be the quickest way to convince them. Consequently, in the border town of Narva, between Swedish and Russian territory, a ‘joyous day of thanksgiving’ was prepared, with religious services and feasting and cannon firing off, and particularly elaborate fireworks which could comfortably be viewed from both sides of the border.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1648, as negotiators wrangled in Münster and Osnabrück, the Swedes themselves had instigated the last important military episode of the war. Fittingly, and sadly, it took place in the beautiful city of Prague, where the conflict had started three decades earlier. Led by General Königsmarck, with Magnus alongside him, a large Swedish contingent marched unbidden into Bohemia, and by the end of July they had captured the western part of Prague on the left bank of the Vltava river, by the great Hradčany Castle. Prague was the last, symbolic bastion. For years the Swedes had been urged to retake the city by exiled Czech reformists.15 The great blaze was dying down; its last flare should illumine the poetic recapture of the ancient town where the first match had been struck.
In the newly taken area of Prague’s Minor Town stood the magnificent palace of Gustav Adolf’s nemesis, the Generalissimo Count Wallenstein, towering up from ground previously occupied by three gardens, a brick factory, and no fewer than 26 houses. Wallenstein was by now long dead, and his palace was spared devastation, but the soldiers did their best anyway to rob the nearby tomb of the Czechs’ legendary King Otakar II, who had lain undisturbed, beneath many a bitter Bohemian struggle, since his entombment centuries before. Otakar’s tomb was believed to be laden with treasure, but the Swedes found none, and vented their frustration on the King’s statue by breaking off its undistinguished pre-Habsburgian nose.
From the Minor Town they began an artillery bombardment of the Old Town across the river, and for a time it seemed they would take the whole city, but quite suddenly they stopped the attack, and, without pressing their advantage, took to plundering instead. Their orders had been countermanded, and a new, secret instruction received, from the Queen herself, that they should occupy the castle and seize all that remained of the famous collections of the Emperor Rudolf II. They did so, resisted only by the castle’s unhappy keeper, the too aptly named Miseroni. Evidently the Swedes felt they had fought enough for one day; they simply tortured him until he gave them all the keys. On the last day of August, an itemized inventory of the collections was drawn up and sent back to Stockholm, where Christina received it eagerly.
The Swedes’ decision to cease their attack and turn to plundering was a fortunate one for the invaded Bohemians. It gave them time to gather their own forces and organize some defence before the greater part of the Swedish army, under Karl Gustav’s command, could reach Prague. There was little to be gained from surrendering the city to the Swedes. It had already been agreed at the peace conference that Bohemia would remain under Habsburg rule, a Catholic territory with an hereditary, not elected, monarchy. A Swedish victory now would be too late to make any difference. Besides, many of the citizens were too young to remember what life before the revolt had been like, and after 30 years of war most were ready in any case to oppose almost any soldier apart from their own. Ironically, the Swedish army included many soldiers who were just that – Czech and other Bohemian exiles from the enforced Catholicism of Habsburg rule. The valiant Bohemian defence effort continued for three months, and in November was rewarded by an armistice, but by then the loot was gone.
For more than half a century, the vast collections of Rudolf II of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia and Hungary, had been legendary throughout Europe and beyond. By 1648, however, most of the best pieces, in fact most of all the pieces, had been dispersed. Victims of their own success, over the decades they had attracted a long succession of admirers, most happy simply to stand and gaze, but some determined to enjoy them comfortably at home. The despoliation had begun only a few years after Rudolf’s death in 1612, when some of his jewels were sold by Bohemian rebels needing to finance their war against the Habsburgs. After the famous Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, a victorious Maximilian of Bavaria had returned to Munich with 1,500 wagonloads of items from the collections. Following their own visit in 1631, the Protestant Saxons carried a further 50 wagonloads home to Dresden. Rudolf’s collections must have been phenomenal, for the items which Christina received, even after all this plunder, included almost 500 paintings, 70 bronzes, 370 scientific instruments, and 400 ‘Indian curiosities’, as well as hundreds of corals, ivories, precious stones, pieces of amber, vases and other objets d’art, thousands of medals, two ebony cabinets, and a solitary, live lion. Even so, it was not enough for Christina, who penned a hasty letter to Karl Gustav telling him not to forget Rudolf’s library. ‘It is absolutely imperative,’ she wrote, ‘that you get everything on to the water as quickly as possible and send it on here.’16
It was indeed, for everything had to be on Swedish territory before the last signatures were added to the peace treaties. If not, according to the treaties themselves, it would all have to be returned ‘to its original owner’. Karl Gustav got it all on to the Moldau river with 24 hours to spare, amid vast rejoicing. For the Swedes, the Hradčany loot represented the apogee of their takings from all the years of the war. There was enough and more to reward all the