Whatever his private feelings, and despite his fever, the King soon rallied. A Te Deum was commanded in thanksgiving for the birth, and the baptism was quickly arranged. The child was christened Kristina Augusta,17 the same names that had been given to the elder sister who had died three years before. ‘Christine’ had been the King’s mother’s name, and his grandmother’s, too, and it was also the name of a Finnish noblewoman with whom he had once been in love – the memory of that young beauty may now have brought a smile to his lips as he announced the name he had chosen for his little daughter.18 The baby’s second name, Augusta, perhaps a loose rendering of ‘Gustav’, may have been the Queen’s choice. She is not likely at any rate to have liked the baby’s first name; there had been no love lost between herself and the King’s late mother.
Many years later, needing to emphasize her Catholic credentials, Christina was to claim that, during her baptismal ceremony, the pastor had inadvertently blessed her baby forehead with a sign of the cross, so enrolling her unwittingly in the ‘happy militia’ of Rome. But in fact, this kind of blessing had remained fairly common in Sweden through the early decades of Lutheranism. The pastor’s sign, far from a presaging, was a gesture made instinctive from the force of long habit. And Christina’s claim, as so much of her life was to be, was no more than a ruse to persuade her audience, and perhaps even more, to persuade herself.
Why had it been so difficult for Maria Eleonora’s attendants to determine the sex of her newborn child? The large caul would surely have been removed at once to establish the answer to this most important of dynastic questions. The baby’s loud voice, the ‘extraordinary, imperious roar’, may have been a sign of strength, but not more. It is more likely that the experienced midwives were for once confronted with something unfamiliar in the squalling little person of a baby of ambiguous sex. Though the child had been born before midnight, they waited until the morning to make their final, altered decision.
Was the little girl really a boy? Was she a hermaphrodite, or a pseudo-hermaphrodite? Diagnoses of this kind, at a distance of centuries, must always be conjectural. It is possible that Christina was born with some kind of genital malformation, and she may even have been what would now be called intersexual or transgendered. Our own statistically-minded age records that about one in every hundred babies is born with malformed genitals of varying degrees of ambiguity, making it often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to determine the baby’s sex. There are various disorders which can cause such malformations;19 in the case of a baby girl, the most common of them would produce a perfectly healthy infant with normal internal sex organs, but often with an enlarged clitoris and partially fused labia, easily confused at first glance with the small infant penis of a longed-for male child.20
Whatever the case, Christina’s sex, like her sexuality, was to remain ambiguous to others and ambivalent to herself throughout her tempestuous life. It would distort her relations with her mother and her father, poisoning the one and tainting the other. And in the first years of her life, it would precipitate a dynastic crisis from which she would emerge an acclaimed crown prince.
In his diary, looking back to the years of his childhood, John Evelyn records:
I do perfectly remember…the effects of that comet, 1618…whose sad commotions sprang from the Bohemians’ defection from the Emperor Matthias: upon which quarrel the Swedes broke in, giving umbrage to the rest of the princes, and the whole Christian world cause to deplore it, as never since enjoying perfect tranquillity.’
The English diarist’s ‘comet’ of 1618 was no less than the beginning of the Thirty Years War, set in slow motion by the infamous ‘defenestration of Prague’, when the city’s two unhappy Habsburg governors were thrown from a window of the Hradčany Castle.2 The governors, ignobly landing on a dungheap, survived unhurt, disappointing many of the Emperor’s supporters of two early martyrs to the cause. But in the following years, there had been no lack of martyrs on either side, indeed, on all sides, for the war was proving less a struggle for or against imperial power than a muddled conflict of shifting alliances, religious, territorial, political, and personal. No one, it seems, had wanted war; fear had motivated most. But defensively, pre-emptively, unwittingly, dozens and then scores of combatant armies were gradually dragged or preached or bribed into the lists of the perverse, ancient battle for peace.
For generations, the Holy Roman Emperors of the German Nation had been successively elected from the Catholic Austrian House of Habsburg.3 The Empire, a loosely linked archipelago of hundreds of principalities and estates, cities and bishoprics, both Catholic and Protestant, was by no means exclusively German; territories as far afield as Lombardy had allowed it to claim its ‘Roman’ title, and it had once encompassed even the Papal States. But since the beginning of the Reformation, a hundred years before, its tenuous cohesion had been threatened by growing Protestant objections to the rule of a Catholic Emperor.
Of the Empire’s seven Electors, three were Catholic bishops, three Protestant princes, and the seventh was the elected King of Bohemia, in recent decades always Catholic and always a member of the Habsburg family. But as the aged and childless Emperor Matthias began to fail in health, the restive Protestants of Bohemia saw their chance. On the Emperor’s death, a new King of Bohemia would be elected, a new voice for the choosing of the next Holy Roman Emperor. They determined that the voice would not be Catholic, nor would it be the voice of a Habsburg, and they set their sights on Friedrich, the Calvinist Elector of the Palatine.
On Matthias’ death in March 1619, his titles of Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia were assumed by his Habsburg cousin, Ferdinand of Styria, in the full expectation that the title of Holy Roman Emperor would also soon be his. But the Protestant Bohemians countered by deposing Ferdinand, and elected Friedrich as their King in his place. Ferdinand’s response was ferocious. In the autumn of 1620, at the great Battle of the White Mountain at Bíláhora near Prague, the Bohemian army was destroyed. Ferdinand exacted a terrible revenge: the gates of Prague were closed, and for a week his troops were licensed to take whatever they could. The city was sacked, and the gates of the Hradčany Castle itself were more than once blocked with wagonloads of plunder. For the rebels themselves, there was no mercy; the native nobility was simply wiped out, most by execution, the rest by confiscation of their lands and subsequent exile – many found their way to Sweden. Bohemia was forcibly re-Catholicized, while Friedrich’s expected allies, the union of German Protestant princes,4 stood anxiously by, shaking their heads.
Friedrich appealed to Gustav Adolf to adopt his cause and take up arms against the Habsburg forces, but the Danes had already answered the call, and the Swedes could not be persuaded to fight alongside their old enemies and former overlords. The hapless ‘Winter King’ continued a disheartened and desultory search for help, while his own Palatinate lands were occupied by Spanish Habsburg troops, cousins to Ferdinand’s Austrians. Thenceforth the greater part of Europe was gradually sucked into the vortex. The Dutch, seizing their chance to strike at the distracted Spaniards, fanned the flames with their plentiful banknotes. Catholic France, no friend to Catholic Austria or to Catholic Spain, joined the fray on the Protestant side, while every German field and town paid its pound of flesh.
In the months before Christina’s birth, the Spanish Habsburgs had been making a last attempt to reassert their own imperial strength, forging closer links with their Austrian relatives and trying to construct a united bloc of powers friendly to both Habsburg dynasties. The jewel now loosening from the Spanish imperial crown was the Dutch United Provinces – broadly, the