To the senators’ invitation to nominate Karl Gustav, Christina replied that she could not do so, for the improbable reason that his own father would not approve of the appointment. More sensibly, she added that it was not suitable for her to choose one of her own regents; the matter, she wrote, should be referred to the Chancellor. Her cousin was astonished, her uncle dismayed. How could she have declined so valuable a position on their behalf? More than once she was obliged to point out herself how clever she had been. ‘If I had nominated Karl Gustav,’ she wrote to her uncle, ‘the other regents would have thought I was only wanting to plant a spy among them.’14 It seems she had not stopped to consider how useful such a spy might have been to her, almost as useful indeed as the powerful and well-paid post itself would have been to her impoverished cousin. Instead, the noise of her self-congratulation quickly drowned out the sound of his own puzzled disappointment. Years later she would describe the episode as evidence of her capacity for ‘profound dissimulation, which even in my early youth deceived the most astute people’.15
The ‘most astute people’ were, of course, the Chancellor, but it is not very likely that her ruse persuaded him of any sudden lack of fondness on her part for the Palatine family. Christina’s ‘dissimulation’, whether profound or no, was of no benefit to Karl Gustav, and indeed cost him a great deal. It cost the Chancellor nothing, and left Christina herself, in the eyes of her nearest relatives, with an aura of immaturity, or unreliability, or untrustworthiness.
It is a measure of Christina’s naivety at this stage that she believed she had somehow outwitted the Chancellor. It is revealing, too, of her great confidence in her own powers that she regarded the little ploy as an exercise in ‘profound dissimulation’, a capacity to which she would always lay extravagant claim. But above all it is significant that Christina’s first attempt at political influence was an attempt to deceive. Just fifteen years old, in a position of extraordinary privilege, with a hundred hardened greybeards awaiting her response, she might have revealed a precocious wisdom or even simple humility. She might have made a bold stand to assist the family to whom she owed so much. Instead, she responded deviously, leaving Karl Gustav to bear the risk.
Christina’s ploy did not help her cousin, but quite by chance, it may have helped her country. The new High Steward, chosen by lottery, was the senator Count Per Brahe, a cousin of her father’s former love, and a man of immense experience and talent in military and civil affairs. Per Brahe was no doubt better suited to the position than any nineteen-year-old, no matter how handsome, could ever have proved to be. The adverse effects of Christina’s clumsy subterfuge had been prevented, quite literally, by the luck of the draw.
Johan Matthiae’s reports on Christina’s education ended in her seventeenth year, when Matthiae left Stockholm for Strängnäs, some fifty miles away. Here, despite his lukewarm Lutheranism, he had been given a bishopric. Christina had been a good pupil, talented and studious, but Matthiae’s efforts to educate her ‘as a Christian prince’ in the way of Erasmus must be said, on the whole, to have failed. In her adult life there would be little trace of the humanist virtues which her tutor had so exalted. Christina was not without admiration for them, and apt quotations were never to be far from her fluent tongue. But, although in her earnest girlhood she embraced some of their values, it was not in her nature to pursue them beyond these years. She would be seldom stoical, often unprincipled, and generally, at least where her personal affairs were concerned, rational only ex post facto. On the rock of her own ebullient temperament, the fine-wrought vessel of her education was doomed to break apart, nature triumphant over nurture.
During these years of her girlhood, Christina saw her mother hardly at all. Confined at Gripsholm Castle, Maria Eleonora made only one brief appearance in Stockholm, and it seems that the visit was never reciprocated. Christina approved of her mother’s exclusion from the regency, regarding it as ‘a most sensitive mark of my father’s love’ to have insisted upon it. If her mother had had a hand in ruling the country, she wrote, ‘she would no doubt have ruined everything, like all the other women who have tried it’. ‘But,’ she added, ‘though I praise the regents for keeping her away from the business of governing, I must admit it was rather harsh of them to separate her from me completely.’16
It is hard to say whether Maria Eleonora really missed her daughter; her maternal interest had been erratic, after all. It is certain, in any case, that she was miserably unhappy at Gripsholm Castle. Perched on an island in the sparkling lake, to the Queen Mother’s mind it was the bleakest fortress imaginable. For four bored and angry years, she had stewed inside its red brick walls, her coterie of German ladies-in-waiting simmering about her. Unmoved by the loveliness of her surroundings or by her daughter’s occasional pleas for calm, she had taken consolation in a secret correspondence with King Kristian of Denmark, himself no friend to Sweden’s governors. In this she gave full vent to her resentment of the Chancellor and his men – adding insult to injury, Oxenstierna had dismissed her to Gripsholm with the suggestion that she ‘learn to grow old gracefully’. Gradually, with cunning and charm, she laid her plans for a vengeful escape.
She was now aged 40, and still, it seems, despite the Chancellor’s injunction, in full possession of all her womanly assets. Only a few years before, her widow’s weeds notwithstanding, she had been described by two French visitors as ‘the most beautiful, radiant woman we had ever seen. We were,’ writes one, ‘quite dazzled by her beauty.’17 The Frenchmen, apparently, were not the only ones to admire Maria Eleonora’s ‘charming features’ and her ‘truly royal figure’. Her official captor was now captivated in his turn. Marshal Nilsson, whose army days had no doubt accustomed him to less insinuating prisoners, had been readily acceding to Her Majesty’s wishes: she had such a passion for Homer, it seemed, that she wished to spend her days on the shores of the island, reading the majestic lines of the Iliad, listening to the majestic sound of the waves. Maria Eleonora must indeed have been a woman of many charms; after four years of confinement, during which she had evinced no interest whatsoever in classical literature, her improbable ploy worked perfectly. She was soon aboard a Danish sailing ship en route to Helsingør, a latter-day Chryseis returned to friendlier shores.18
In France, delighted tongues whispered that Maria Eleonora and the Danish King were lovers; to join him, she had braved the seas, defying the wrath of mighty Sweden. Kristian does not seem to have appreciated the irony of the rumours; his wife, after bearing him twelve children, had braved his own wrath for the embraces of a German count. The cuckolded King, though as yet still in possession of both his eyes – he was soon to lose one in battle against the Swedes – was now aged 63; his gallantry towards the lady had been prompted more by politics than by love. He duly received a protest from the outraged Swedes, and sent them a cool apology, but he soon turned his energies to ridding himself of his turbulent guest. Her brother, the ailing Elector Georg Wilhelm, flatly refused to permit her return to Brandenburg, and by Christmas, an exasperated Kristian was applying to the new Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, to take her off his hands.
The young Elector was not pleased. Brandenburg had recently been at war in the Emperor’s service, and Friedrich Wilhelm was now suing for peace with the hard-pressing Swedes. He had no wish to embrace a major diplomatic embarrassment in the person of his volatile aunt. The refugee herself was apparently happy enough to go; indeed, she had little choice, since the Swedes had rescinded all her rights