No such scruples had restrained him from unleashing new conflict with a nearer neighbour. At the end of 1643, in supposed outrage at the Danes’ involvement in Maria Eleonora’s flight from Gripsholm, Swedish forces had invaded and quickly overrun vital coastal areas of Denmark. The Queen Mother’s escape had proved a useful pretext for attacking a hostile power whose control of the Baltic trade routes was altogether too strong for Sweden’s liking. By the spring, the Swedes had secured access to the routes for themselves, taking an eye in the process from the bold but ageing Danish King. An ancient balance had once again been tipped, this time in Sweden’s favour.
The Danish war was the Chancellor’s war. For him, Sweden’s deadliest enemy would always be the Danes, once ferocious overlords, still dangerous neighbours, inevitably competing for domination of the great thoroughfare of the Baltic Sea. The Habsburg Empire, by comparison, was a distant threat, drawing precious men and money away from the northern lands. The French, naturally enough, took the opposite view. For them, the Danish conflict was a peripheral matter, requiring a swift conclusion so that Sweden’s men could return to the field against the Emperor. To this end, Cardinal Mazarin had dispatched a peacemaker in the guise of a new ambassador to Sweden, a Monsieur de la Thuillerie, who quickly brought the eighteen-year-old Queen around to the French way of thinking.
For Christina, it was a golden opportunity to take a stand against the Chancellor. The Danes were suing for peace, but Oxenstierna hoped to continue the war until they had acceded to Sweden’s territorial demands for the southern peninsula; it was still in Danish hands, preventing Swedish access to the crucial Sound. Christina allowed herself to be persuaded that if the Danish terms were not accepted at once, she would be ‘blamed by posterity’ for her ‘unbounded ambition’. To this effect she wrote several times to the Chancellor, defensively couching her argument as the wish of the Senate – evidently she had not yet the courage of France’s convictions. ‘Most of them feel quite differently than you and I do,’ she wrote. ‘Some of them would give their hands to end the war.’
In the late summer of 1645, a treaty was finally signed between the two old enemies.1 Though advantageous to Sweden, it did not cede all that the Chancellor had wanted. To add insult to injury, Christina suggested that a double celebration be held to mark not only the signing of the treaty but also a recent victory of the French army over imperial forces. As the French had just been discovered in secret negotiation with Sweden’s Bavarian enemies, the idea progressed no further. Christina suggested a slighter alternative: she arranged for a group of her ladies-in-waiting to entertain Monsieur de la Thuillerie with some songs in his own language, apparently having trained the ladies herself. The unsuspecting choir performed a series of bawdy soldiers’ ditties in appropriately colourful French, the Ambassador maintaining a diplomatic poker-face throughout. He could afford to laugh – or not to laugh; he had gained his point, Cardinal Mazarin was satisfied, and the young Swedish Queen, whether she realized it or no, had begun her steady transformation into France’s creature.
None of it was lost on the Chancellor. His regard for Christina was now being severely tested, and exchanges between them became markedly cool. Despite her formidable adversary, Christina did not retreat, but as the stubborn days wore into tired months, the strain of her opposition to Oxenstierna began to undermine her health. Within a year of the regency’s end, she had fallen seriously ill and was, or so she believed, in danger of her life. She attributed her illness to ‘the great exhaustion’ of managing the affairs of state, though in fact she had assumed little responsibility beyond continuing to attend the sessions of the Senate. The Chancellor was still very able and very willing to continue at the helm, had Christina been content for him to do so. Her recuperation once begun, she relapsed into illness again, and then succumbed to a serious case of the measles, but it was emotional distress, then as later, which seems to have caused the greater part of her illness. ‘I loved him like my own father,’ she said of Axel Oxenstierna, but like her father, too, the gifted Chancellor cast a long shadow over Christina’s sense of her own greatness. Inexperienced as she was, delighting in any intrigue, attracted by the sophisticated ways of a foreign people whom Oxenstierna disliked and mistrusted, she burrowed ever more deeply into a self-deluding syllogism, harmful to herself as to her country: the Chancellor opposed the French; Christina must oppose the Chancellor, therefore Christina must support the French.
It was a simplistic hostility, but it did not relent, and it left her exposed to easy manipulation by the less scrupulous figures about her. Soon after her recovery, she allowed it to govern a second clumsy foray into the country’s foreign affairs, at the same time revealing her susceptibility to a particular type of artful and persuasive opportunist who was to feature prominently in her public and private life.
The first adventurer appeared to take his advantage just as the regency was ending, a Monsieur Marc-Duncan de Cérisantes, brawler and seducer extraordinaire, former gentleman of Constantinople, future Catholic aristocrat, current Huguenot diplomat-conveniently-at-large. In earlier incarnations he had been known by the prosaic appellation of Mark Duncan, but Christina accepted him at his own aggrandized word, and before long she had dispatched him to Paris, to ‘assist’ Sweden’s permanent minister there, the celebrated jurist, Hugo Grotius. Grotius had occupied this post since his appointment by Axel Oxenstierna almost a decade before, and had overseen a long period of cautious alliance between the two states. Needless to say, he did not appreciate the encroachment, and was soon penning outraged letters, complaining that he was being spied on. If so, no good report of him was making its way back to Stockholm. The French disliked Grotius as heartily as he disliked them. A staunch Protestant Dutchman, Grotius could not conceal his disdain for the frippery and popery of Mazarin’s court, and he refused to extend the usual diplomatic courtesies to France’s ‘Prince of the Church’, claiming that the rank of Cardinal was unrecognized by those who were not Catholic. His dour comportment became quickly comical in the company of his wife, whose advancing years had enveloped her sturdy frame with an excessive rondeur. In her youth a heroine of political resistance, Madame Grotius had since declined into all but physical obscurity, so that one refined newcomer to the court was obliged to ask her identity. ‘Who is that bear?’ he asked of the young lady standing beside him. Unhappily, his unknown companion was Mademoiselle Grotius. ‘It is my mother, sir,’ she replied.
Inelegance was as good an excuse as any. At the end of December, only weeks after the regency had ended, Christina recalled the minister, awarded him his pension, and shortly afterwards appointed Cérisantes chargé d’affaires in his stead. Grotius was among the most learned men of his day, theologian, historian, the ‘father of international law’, and one of Gustav Adolf’s own heroes. His replacement by the conniving Cérisantes was a fall from the sublime to the ridiculous, which left Cardinal Mazarin and his government puzzled and amused. As might have been expected, Cérisantes rendered the Swedes no service; eventually he actually deserted his post. Christina rewarded this by offering him a position in the Swedish army, but, being then on the way to Rome, he declined, and was soon collecting a handsome sum for his noisy public conversion to Catholicism.
Cérisantes had duped Christina, and he provided an archetype for later artful characters who would dupe her in their turn. Always men, always plausibly capable, always of doubtful origin, they were to form an infamous row of lovable and not so lovable rogues in the gallery of her life. She would be repeatedly defrauded by them, repeatedly forgive them, repeatedly refuse to hear a word spoken against them. Their crimes would run the gamut from petty theft to abduction and murder – she would tolerate, indeed defend, it all.
It is hard to see how Christina could have been so readily ensnared by Cérisantes and his ilk. They were none of them subtle characters, and few other people were taken in by them for long. At the start, perhaps, Christina enjoyed the subterfuge, sharing the thrill of deceiving, or supposedly deceiving, her sturdy, straightforward compatriots. Perhaps, too,