A marriage between Maria Eleonora, now aged twenty, and Gustav Adolf, five years her senior, had been under consideration for some years already. Offers for the hand of the young Countess were not wanting: among her suitors she could boast Gustav Adolf’s cousin, the Crown Prince Wladislaw Vasa of Poland, and Prince Charles Stuart, heir to the English throne. Her father had been ambivalent towards a possible Swedish match, but his son, the new Elector, had taken a clear stand against it. He had no wish to antagonize the Catholic Emperor, or the King of neighbouring Catholic Poland, whose vast country lay only two days’ march from Berlin. The Swedes were already at war there, and Georg Wilhelm thought little of their chance of victory. Though a Calvinist himself, and ruler of a Lutheran state, he felt his sister would do better to marry the Crown Prince of Poland. In the Habsburg lands, not so far to the south, the Emperor had recently reasserted his power over the luckless Protestants of Bohemia, whose ill-starred ‘Winter King’ was the brother of Georg Wilhelm’s own wife. Religious neutrality seemed the wisest course as the match set in Prague began to kindle. But, by family custom, it was the privilege of the Electress to decide her daughter’s marriage, and on this the Swedes had pinned their hopes. An alliance with Brandenburg could strengthen their hand against Poland, and might hasten the formation of a new bloc of Protestant states against the Catholic Habsburgs. The Elector’s fear was Gustav Adolf’s hope.
For his journey now, however, the young King had paid a great personal price. A spirited and warmhearted man, he had been passionately in love with the daughter of one of Sweden’s noblest families, the beautiful Ebba Brahe. Ebba had returned his love, but the King’s strongminded mother had felt that a match between them would not serve Sweden’s dynastic interests. Intriguing and determined, she had set to with a will to break off the romance, at one point even laying her own violent hand on the lovers’ go-between. In due course, she had succeeded. Ebba was married off to the scion of another noble family. The sad and disappointed King dispatched a beautiful letter of farewell, wishing his love ‘a thousand nights of gladness’ in her husband’s arms, and at length he turned his thoughts towards Brandenburg, where his mother’s gaze had long been fixed.
Happily, the object of his present attentions was well formed to incite new passion in the young man’s heart. Maria Eleonora was a genuine beauty, her figure rounded, her face soft and full, with a sweet bow mouth, a strong nose, and large, beautiful eyes. She was blonde, and her manner was lively, giving an impression of girlish gaiety to all those who saw her.
At first, though, it seemed that her young suitor might not succeed in seeing her at all. Her father had died in the previous December, and the court was still in mourning. Dark hangings draped the rooms, and the few permitted candles flickered on his doleful, black-garbed retainers. Five months after his death, the old Elector’s body lay still unburied in the castle chapel. The usual bustling life of the court was suspended, and visitors received only the simplest civilities. But the pulse of youth was strong in the burgeoning spring, and besides, Gustav Adolf could not afford to wait; there was too much to do at home. For a bribe of 300 ducats, he acquired a portrait of the young Countess, and, duly encouraged, arranged a secret rendezvous. It was a Sunday, and all the court was at church, all except Maria Eleonora, who had found some pretext for absenting herself. The Swedes, being Lutheran rather than Calvinist, could not, of course, attend, and soon the meeting was effected in the shade of the trees in the castle park. The Countess, at least, was not disappointed, as the King’s friend would later remind him. ‘Where the girl’s thoughts were, I couldn’t say,’ he wrote, ‘but she didn’t take her eyes off Your Majesty.’1
There was not much else, it seems, in Maria Eleonora’s head. She had chafed at her school lessons, and she had no interest now in learning or literature. But she was lighthearted, prettier than most girls, and at least with a genuine love of music and art. No doubt these things were spoken of in the further meetings which were soon arranged between the two, for the King himself enjoyed them both; he was interested in painting, and he played the lute well. Johan Hand records that the couple met privately several times, that they dined together and conversed at length, and that Gustav Adolf did not depart unkissed. On the whole, he was pleased to have made the journey. The girl’s grandfather and great-uncle had been insane, it was true, but this could hardly count against her, for had not his own uncle and aunt been the same?2
For her part, Maria Eleonora was delighted. She soon discovered the true identity of the handsome ‘Adolf Karlsson’, and, turning her heart where duty lay, promptly fell in love with him. In this, at least, she showed good judgement, for the young King was among the very finest men of his age, able and cultivated, brave, strong, and generous, courteous, farsighted, conscientious, and just, an inspired military leader and a man of profound religious humility, amply deserving the epithet that his dazzled contemporaries would one day accord him – Gustav Adolf the Great. Had he lived in a time of peace, his many gifts might have borne yet finer fruits, but in 1611, when he had come to the throne at the age of only sixteen, his tiny country was already at war with Denmark, and by 1618, at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, Sweden had embarked on warfare to last a generation, in which the greathearted King, the ‘lion of the north’, was to lose his own life.
But for now, Gustav Adolf’s fine soldier’s reputation can only have added to his attraction. For Maria Eleonora, he seemed the fulfilment of a dream, indeed, the fulfilment of a prophecy, for her father’s own astrologer had once predicted that she would grow up to marry a king. The King himself was not so sure. Though he wanted to marry quickly, a Brandenburg connection was not the only possibility. In the ripening spring, he made his way southward, pausing in the vibrant town of Frankfurt am Main, where books and silks and jewellery were traded in the busy streets beneath the great cathedral. While there, he took the time to purchase a magnificent diamond necklace at a value of almost 9,000 riksdaler – the price of 3,000 cows, no less – borrowing the money from his brother-in-law to do so. As yet, however, he had not decided whose neck the lovely item would adorn.
From Frankfurt, he made his way to Heidelberg, there to cast his eye upon an alternative marriage candidate, the Princess Katharina, sister of Friedrich V, Elector and Prince Palatine of the Rhine, the unhappy ‘Winter King’ of Bohemia. The Swedish King had maintained his incognito, but he was now dressed as an army captain, and disguised by the simple acronym of Gars – Gustavus Adolphus Rex Sueciae – Gustav Adolf, King of Sweden. The Princess, a young lady of generous circumference but, it seems, no great perspicacity, failed to recognize her prospective suitor. She mistook his interested approach for impertinence, declaring to her sister, in imperious French, ‘What intrusive people these Swedes are!’ Alas, among the eleven languages understood by the clever King, French was not the least.3 The portly princess had cooked her goose. Gustav Adolf decided that the pretty little Countess of Brandenburg would suit him better, and in due course he made his way back to Stockholm, dispatching his friend and Chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, to complete the arrangements in Berlin, while the Countess herself sat down to pen an excited letter to her grudgingly accepting brother. ‘The whole journey was like a play,’ wrote Johan Hand in his diary.4
But if the journey was a romantic comedy, it was not without its dramatic aspects. His search for a wife in the German lands had allowed Gustav Adolf to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various princes who served as a Protestant bulwark against the Catholic Habsburgs. He was not impressed, and he returned contemptuous of their ‘feebleness, cross-purposes, selfishness, and military incompetence’, an ill omen for the Protestant alliance that he would later attempt