Matthiae records that by the time she was eleven, they had read together ‘the usual beginner’s Latin texts’,5 including some of Curtius’ History of Alexander the Great, which the young Diana loved especially. Christina believed that she ‘surpassed the capacity of my age and sex’, but she was very quick to exaggerate her achievements. She wrote, for example, that by the age of fourteen she had learned, ‘with a marvellous facility’, all the sciences, languages, and other studies in which she had been instructed. In the very next breath, she claimed that for modern languages, at least, she had received no instruction at all, any more than she had done for her mother tongue of Swedish. ‘I never had a teacher,’ she writes, ‘for German, French, Italian, or Spanish.’6 In fact, she had spoken German from her infancy; she had used it with her mother and her father, and it seems to have been the first language she learned to write. In French, she had regular lessons for some years. Matthiae records that he began teaching her French grammar when she was twelve years old, but she had learned to speak the language long before then. Living with her Palatine cousins had provided the occasion; they were the first family in Sweden where French was spoken at home – a decided affectation in the eyes of the other nobles, but it gave Christina an easy familiarity with the language, though, even in an age of unsettled orthography, her spelling was quite unusual. French remained her preferred language, and in later years she used it almost always, even when writing to friends and family in Sweden.
The modern languages, in any case, were not of great interest to her during her girlhood. Her heart was in the ancient world, where all her heroes had fought their battles in field and forum. The classical texts served many purposes; they included literature and philosophy and the history that she loved, but they were also an important part of the young Queen’s political education, tried and tested examples of realpolitik from which a present-day ruler might take counsel. Christina enjoyed this aspect of her training in the ‘art of government’. She likened the ancient political feuds to games of chess in which the shrewdest manipulator took the prize, and liked to think of herself as a master of ‘dissembling’ – it was one of her favourite words – who could always outwit even the cleverest men about her, including Chancellor Oxenstierna himself. He was now spending several hours each day instructing her in practical politics and statecraft. These hours she relished: the Chancellor was a man of vast experience, who knew ‘the strengths and weaknesses of every state in Europe’, and she listened, enchanted, to his first-hand stories of battles planned and bargains struck and enemies undermined. ‘I really loved hearing him speak,’ she writes, ‘and there was no study or game or pleasure that I wouldn’t leave willingly to listen to him. By the same token, he really loved teaching me, and we would spend three or four hours or even longer together, perfectly happy with each other. And if I may say so, without undue pride, the great man was more than once forced to admire the child, so talented, so eager and so quick to learn, without fully understanding what it was that he admired – it was so rare in one so young.’7
It is not very likely that the Chancellor’s understanding failed him now as he contemplated the talents of his young pupil. Axel Oxenstierna was among the most gifted men of his generation, and he had comfortably taken the measure of the likes of Cardinal Richelieu while keeping the upper hand, 500 miles distant, of his every opponent at home. But he was certainly pleased with Christina’s progress, reporting to the Senate with satisfaction that the young Queen was ‘not like other members of her sex. She is stout-hearted and of good understanding,’ he said, ‘to such an extent that, if she does not allow herself to be corrupted, she raises the highest hopes.’8 The Chancellor did not elucidate the nature of Christina’s possible corruption, but his reference to her ‘allowing herself’ to be corrupted suggests that he had observed some weakness or unwelcome tendency in her nature. It was no outward menace that he feared for her, but rather, it seems, the consequences of her own contradictory self. He may have been made anxious, perhaps even saddened, by the small deceits which she had begun to practise on him through her correspondence with her Palatine uncle, Johann Kasimir. The Count had once served her father as Grand Treasurer, but shortly after the King’s death, he had been given a clear hint to resign from his position and betake himself to the country. The regents and senators disliked his German origins and suspected him of harbouring too great ambitions for his elder son, Karl Gustav. Christina’s ‘wise and prudent’ uncle swallowed the insult and retired without demur, but he kept in touch with her, and she seems to have enjoyed the opportunities for petty subterfuge which his ambiguous position provided.
As part of her training in statecraft, Christina had studied Camden’s Latin biography of Elizabeth I of England, the Virgin Queen with the ‘heart and stomach of a King’ who had overseen the defeat of the Spanish Armada fifty years before.9 The Protestant Queen Elizabeth was widely known and admired in Sweden, and during Christina’s girlhood, memories of her were still fresh in many minds. King Erik XIV, Christina’s own great-uncle, had for many years been her suitor, and Christina’s great-aunt Cecilia had made a ‘pilgrimage of admiration’ to her court. Elizabeth’s history was heroic; like Christina, she had inherited an uncertain crown; she had bravely endured five years of imprisonment with the axeman waiting at the door, and in the cold and fearful meantime she had perfected her many accomplishments. ‘Shee was even a miracle for her learning amongst the Princes of her time,’ Camden wrote of Elizabeth. ‘Before she was seventeene yeeres of age, she understood well the Latin, French and Italian tongues.’ She had studied Greek as well, which Christina had not yet done, and she was a good musician, too. Elizabeth’s wide culture, her strength of mind, and, not least, her mastery of statecraft, had framed a golden age for her small country, which, like Christina’s Sweden, had only recently emerged on to the world’s wide stage. It was agreed that a queen like Elizabeth would be a fine successor to the great Gustav Adolf, and her glorious reign seems to have aroused Christina’s envy. In a later rant against all women rulers, she avoided mentioning the legendary English Queen, but Elizabeth’s shadow lingers nonetheless in a series of phrases anticipating the obvious interjection of her name: there have been no good women rulers, or if there have, none ‘in our present century’; women are weak ‘in soul and body and mind’, and if there have been a few strong women, well, that’s not because they were women. For Christina, the capable woman ruler was merely the exception that proved the rule. She took her model of all women from her mother, and declared that, of all human defects, to be a woman was the worst:
As a young girl I had an overwhelming aversion to everything that women do and say. I couldn’t bear their tight-fitting, fussy clothes. I took no care of my complexion or my figure or the rest of my appearance. I never wore a hat or a mask, and scarcely ever wore gloves. I despised everything belonging to my sex, hardly excluding modesty and propriety. I couldn’t stand long dresses and I only wanted to wear short skirts. What’s more, I was so hopeless at all the womanly crafts that no one could ever teach me anything about them.10
Christina’s ungenerous attitude towards her own sex had been long fomenting. The hyperfemininity of her unloving mother cannot have helped, but her distaste for