Belle’s own epitaph was not happy. There was no real affection between Jakob and herself, and even after the wedding, she continued to live with the Queen. She had three children, but all died in infancy, and within a very few years she became a widow. Thereafter, despite Christina’s continuing affection for her, Belle’s young life declined into illness and sadness.
Talk of Christina’s lesbian tendencies, meanwhile, did not recede. It was grounded in at least partial truth, which was recognized, if reluctantly, by some of those closest to her. Her two uncles, Count Johann Kasimir and the Grand Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, had long hoped that she would marry Karl Gustav. But by the time Christina was twenty, Gyllenhjelm at least had acknowledged that the marriage was unlikely. He urged Christina instead to seize her chance to choose an heir if she would not choose a husband. ‘If Your Majesty does not marry,’ he wrote, ‘you must act in good time to secure the succession for a certain family.’ His reference was to the Queen’s Palatine cousins: the bridegroom manqué, Gyllenhjelm hoped, might yet wear a Swedish crown. In either place, he would be a powerful counterweight to the great noble families, and in particular the Oxenstiernas, who might otherwise mould the monarchy to their own liking, or even dispense with it altogether. Moreover, it was they who had ousted Karl Gustav’s German father from his position as Grand Treasurer. The father’s revenge would be rich indeed if the son after all should ascend the Swedish throne, not as the Queen’s consort, but as King in his own right. Christina did not disagree. She was very willing to assume her uncle’s attitude, which put a rational face on her own antagonism towards the Chancellor, and she wrote to her uncle that there were some, she believed, who would be only too happy to feed Karl Gustav ‘a dose of Italian soup’ to get rid of him once and for all. She made no formal statement about the marriage, but allowed it to be generally understood, by all but the would-be bridegroom himself, that in due course it would take place.
In due course the anxious Chancellor challenged her on the subject. The talk had been going on for long enough, he declared. Was there really any substance to it? The Queen’s marriage was a matter of the greatest importance to the state. The Senate should have a say in it. They should at least be kept properly informed, and not have to wait to hear the latest story from the fishwives and gossipmongers about the town.
The Queen began with a denial, or rather with a confirmation. It was true that she had intended to marry Karl Gustav, but she had changed her mind. She was not going to marry him. She had in fact no wish to marry at all. However, she did intend to make him Commander-in-Chief in Germany. The Chancellor called her bluff. The Count was German himself, he objected, or at least his father was, which amounted to the same thing. Command of the Swedish armies could not be entrusted to a foreign hand. The only way his loyalty could be assured was for the Queen to marry him. Christina stumbled: she was not going to marry the Count, she declared, indeed she was not going to marry anyone. However, if she did marry anyone, it would be the Count. In fact, yes, since the Chancellor was asking, yes, she was going to marry him, in fact, yes, they were already engaged.
The news was soon out, leaving no one more surprised than the fiancé himself. He had time to take a few elated steps before being interrupted by a private communication from the Queen, informing him that the supposed engagement was no more than a ruse to increase his own public standing. If he were generally believed to be her future husband, his appointment as Commander-in-Chief would be the more readily approved.
He quickly sought a clarifying interview with her, to which she slowly agreed. It took six months to bring it about, and it was not, in the end, the private discussion that Karl Gustav had requested. Instead, Christina insisted that Magnus De la Gardie and Johan Matthiae, her former tutor, should be present throughout. With two other men in the room, it seems, the Count was less likely to become passionate or desperate. Here, as on the battlefield, there was a precarious safety in numbers.
She managed one decisive statement. She was not going to be bound by promises she had made as a young girl. At the same time she didn’t want to take away the Count’s last hope, but she was not going to marry him unless reasons of state made it absolutely necessary. If she didn’t marry him, she would see that he became her successor, though if she couldn’t persuade the Estates to agree to this, she would marry him after all. In any case she would give him a final answer within the next five years.
Karl Gustav’s response was manly. He protested his love for the Queen, and declared that the succession proposal was of no interest to him. He would accept no consolation prizes. If she would not marry him, he would leave Sweden and never return.
The Queen told him not to be ridiculous. He was indulging in romantic fantasies, she said. He should count himself honoured that she had even considered him as a possible husband. Even if he died before she made up her mind, it would still have been a great honour for him, as everyone would acknowledge. But she accepted that he was fond of her, and agreed in the end that he could continue to plead his cause – though not in person. He was to declare his love in letters to his father and to Johan Matthiae. They could pass the messages on to her. And he must leave immediately to assume command in Germany. And above all, he must pretend that she had agreed to marry him. This would make it easier for him to succeed her, if she should die.
Karl Gustav’s response was human. He became ill, plagued with constant headaches and fainting fits. Christina did not relent, and so, defying the Chancellor’s anti-German insinuations, he sought consolation in the time-honoured Swedish way: he took to drinking heavily, then turned his mind to soldiering.
But from his post in Germany, the young Commander-in-Chief sent pleading and desperate letters, not to Christina but, as she had instructed, to his father and to Johan Matthiae. If the Queen would not marry him, he wrote, he would exile himself from Sweden, seeking a sad alternative fortune at the hands of kinder princes. Some, at least, believed that his suit was not yet lost. He received encouraging letters from Magnus De la Gardie, the friend of his youth and now his brother-in-law, who had much to gain if the marriage could be achieved. ‘You must risk everything to win her,’ wrote Magnus. ‘Remember, fortune favours the brave!’ It was easy advice from a man who had never himself risked very much, and Karl Gustav had no need of it in any case. By threatening to leave Sweden forever, he had already risked everything. Apart from his country, his family, the castle at Stegeborg, the promise of wealth, the crown itself, he had nothing else to risk, save his own life, and this he had already risked many times in battle in Christina’s name.
Christina’s hesitancy was not the result of callousness. It was not a cat-and-mouse game that she was playing for her own perverse pleasure. There were gains to be made in championing the Palatine family in the teeth of opposition from Axel Oxenstierna and his supporters. Karl Gustav’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief was a slap in the Chancellor’s face, just as Magnus’ appointment to Paris had been. But the hardest slap that Christina could give would have been to marry Karl Gustav. Unlike her, he had brothers and sisters. His own rise would be followed by a train of honours and riches for them all, advancing them at once from dependency to dynasty and demoting the Oxenstiernas to a permanent second place.
Christina hesitated to marry Karl Gustav not because she did not love him, but because she did. It was not the love of a woman for a man, and so it could not be the love of a wife for her husband. Rather, it was the sturdy old love of a childhood friend, of a comrade-in-youthful-arms, of a brother in all but name. It was a love that continued despite things, not because of things. Christina saw, as clearly as anyone, how advantageous the match would be to the family that had been in effect her own family, to the uncle who had welcomed her as one of his own, to the girls and boys who had played with her and fought with her and grown to adulthood with her, to the people who had given her her only sense of belonging. Marriage to Karl Gustav would have been a perfect ending to her childhood’s only idyll, and it would have made him happy, too. This she saw as she told him to wait, to keep his hope alive, to do this or that beforehand, to prepare the way. But she could not marry, and this she saw at the same time, saw it as she told him that she had changed, that she could not keep her girlish promises, that she would console him with an army, with a fortune, with a crown.
Karl Gustav loved Christina in the same unassailable way. Because of