SYMHC Classics: Christina of Sweden

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. It is Christina of Sweden's birthday. She was born on December eighteen six. That is the New style calendar date, which was December eight in the old style. Christina is sometimes called King Christina, both because she was raised as the heir to her father's throne and also because when she was born, the midwives who attended her birth initially reported that she was a boy. There are lots of different ways that her story is interpreted today, but she is a clear example of somebody who lived outside of society's expectations regarding sex, gender, and sexuality. In This episode originally came out on October Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the cast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Today we're going back to the world of Swedish royalty. This time it is to Queen Christina. She lived about a hundred years after previous podcast subject Eric the fourteen, and she, like him, was also part of the House of Vassa and her story has a lot of our favorite running podcast themes. Most of them really started with previous hosts, but they've carried on until today. We have a sad royal childhood, we have an abdication, and we even had an exhumation. All in all, Queen Christina was not known for being a particularly great ruler of Sweden, and she abdicated her throne only about a decade into her reign. But she was extremely learned. She spoke a lot of languages. Apart from her native Swedish, there was also Greek, Latin, German, French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish and Finnish, along with a little Hebrew and Arabic. And she helped start the first Swedish newspaper in sixteen forty five, as well as Sweden's first public opera house and its first universal public school program. She amassed a huge collection of arts and literature, and her collection of books and manuscripts later went on to become part of the Vatican Library uh And a sort of a side note, her life became a movie starring Greta Garbo in nineteen thirty three. So her whole life was marked by being this kind of contradictory, restless character, and that started basically from the moment that she was born. So Christina was born to King Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. Before she was born, her parents had had two stillborn babies, and they also had a daughter who had died before she reached the age of one, so people were really starting to be concerned about the kingdom having an air. Gustav had an illegitimate son who was aimed Gustav Gustafsson, and he was not eligible for a lot of reasons, including his illegitimacy to be on the throne. King. Gustav's Catholic cousin, uh Seismund, was king of Poland and he had two sons of his own, and people were quite worried that if something had happened to Gustav before he produced a legitimate air, uh Sismund was going to take over and make Sweden, which at that point was a staunchly Lutheran country, into a Catholic country, and since since Sigismund had two sons, it seemed like that had the potential to turn into a lasting Catholic dynasty, so it would really have upended Sweden. Maria Eleonora, so Christina's mother, also seemed to to have developed some kind of mental or emotional disorder over the course of her previous pregnancies and the children she had lost. She had always been really affectionate with her husband, but she became just desperately attached to him. She would get really agitated and distressed whenever he was away, which he had to be away quite a lot because he was king. Her language skills and her handwriting started to deteriorate, and her behavior became really erratic. People started to worry about her ability to conceive and to carry a healthy child to term. However, despite all of those potential issues UH. Five years into Gustave and Maria Eleanora's marriage, Maria became pregnant with Christina, who was born on December eighth of sixty six, that's in the Julian calendar uh, which would be December eighteenth under the modern Gregorian calendar. And she was a little early and born in Call, so that means her amniotic membrane was still intact and covering her once she was born, and so the midwives removed the membrane and they declared her initially to be a boy uh and words spread around the castle to a great deal of celebration. However, once the excitement was over and they took a longer and more careful look at her, they almost immediately realized she was actually a girl, and everybody was sort of afraid how the King would react. I mean, they had had all of these previous strategy tragedies and all this build up, and they had just told him joyfully that he had a son. Now. Um, so nobody told him about the mistake until the next day. That kind of cracks me up. Uh. There's been a great deal of speculation about what may have caused this misidentification on the part of the midwives to believe that Christina was a boy rather than a girl. There have been theories bandied about that she had an intersex condition and some kind of chromosomal disorder, and that her external genitalia may have exhibited both male and female traits. Another theory is that her body was simply ambiguous and that the lighting was poor, and that there could have been a little wishful thinking in the mix, and that the midwives saw initially what they wanted to see, which would have been a male heir. There are a lot of family memoirs from this time who portray the King is being just enormously and immediately welcoming and accepting of the fact that he actually had a daughter. Uh, And some of that is kind of glossing over the initial shock and upset that he did have. Um having a daughter instead of a son was a big upset. They had been trying for a long time to have a male heir and now they didn't. But he did quickly warm to the idea of having a daughter and of raising his daughter like a prince. Christina's mother, on the other hand, was devastated that after so many attempts, now she had a daughter and not the son that she had been, you know, basically tasked with providing for the kingdom. So she basically shunned her daughter for a lot of her early life. Uh. And Gustav decided that Christina, in spite of being female, would indeed be his heir, and he wanted her, as Tracy said just a moment ago, to have a princely upbringing. And this was not just in terms of her agication and her intended role as as the leader of the country, but also in terms of her sort of day to day exercise and the pastimes that that they would kind of nurture her into as she grew up. This suited her just fine. She was not at all fond of the duties and pastimes that genuine that generally fell to women at the time. Her father wanted her to learn to ride and to fight and to handle a bow, and she did all that, and she did it well, and her demeanor was not at all typically feminine. I think today people would have called her a tomboy. And just for clarity, it really was not unheard of for girls to have the same education as boys, especially when they were in line for the throne, and so Christina's schoolmates were part of her childhood were actually two female cousins. The fighting and the hunting and the bow work, however, we're not really typical pursuits for girls or women. So the idea of Christina as his air was not just an idle fancy on Gustav's part. He started making real plans to confirm her as his successor while she was still a baby. The Thirty Years War had been going on for about eight years by the time Christina was born, and Adolf knew that it was very possible that he would be killed in battle. So in addition to officially naming her as his successor. He started looking for suitable candidates for her to marry when she got older to cement the hereditary line to the throne. The primary candidate was a cousin of hers named Carl Gustav. He also had his chancellor named Axel Oxenstierna, along with five regents to rule in his and his daughter's stead. However, he didn't really have an active part in raising his young heir. He was needed in the war and Christina's mother wanted nothing to do with her. So Christina spent most of her early childhood living with cousins, except for being dropped once she was a baby, and that was possibly on purpose by someone with Catholic leanings. It was mostly a happy few years. She was surrounded by other children close to her own age. She had playmates and friends, and other girls who were studying with her, so this part of her earlier life, in spite of being separated from her parents, was not all that bad. But when she was just five, so still very young, her father was killed in the Battle of Lutzen, and Christina's mother, of course completely distraught. Uh We talked about how clingy and sort of almost obsessive she had become with king, so her mother had the king's heart removed and placed in a golden casket so that she could keep it with her. Her behavior continued to become increasingly bizarre, and she spent a lot of money on a really elaborate funeral. She also did not bury the king's body right away. Now this was not entirely a heard of at the time, especially when it was wintertime and the ground was frozen and it was difficult for people to travel for that sort of thing. But Gustav's body wound up being buried nineteen months after his death, and this was over the fierce objections of his wife, who had kept it lying in state and spent hours and hours at a time viewing it. At some point she even kept the coffin in her own bedroom so she could have it close by. So, as we said, not a typical for there to be a long delay at this point between when king was when the king died, and when the king was buried. But this was a really long time, and Maria Eleanora's displays of grief were not at all typical for the time. So the king was finally buried, and once that happened, Maria Eleanora took custody of Christina, and she took her out of the home where she had been and had friends and playmates, and she moved her into a much more lonely and erratic and just sort of cold existence that was largely just the two of them together. And this is where Christina's royal childhood became kind of sad. She started having these really sudden illnesses, and the general agreement is that these were brought on by the stress of the situation. She generally got better pretty quickly, but she got sick over and over again. It was a frequent occurrence. In part to get some distance from her mother, she really threw herself into her education and into training and into exercise. She sort of dove even farther into the more masculine parts of her upbringing. And before we move into when she actually ascended to the throne, Holly, would you like to take a minute for a brief word from a sponsor. It sounds like a capital idea. And now let's get back to Christina of Sweden and now when she's going to actually become queen, and becoming queen and her ascension to the throne really was not as simple as just being the king's daughter and surviving to adulthood to be crowned. Sweden was an elective monarchy, so even if someone had inherited the throne, they still had to be accepted by the Reek's Dog, which was Sweden's parliament, as well as the Swedish senators. This meant that the four estates of the reeks Dog, which were the clergy, the nobles, the burghers and the peasants, all had to be in favor of Christina's presence on the throne in order for her to actually become the queen. And the end they were and Christina became the Queen of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland, Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, and she basically carried herself as a ruler right from the beginning. The Chancellor began to allow her to attend council meetings and participate as early as the age of fourteen. She was officially crowned at the age of eighteen, so she was kind of doing the work of this job for several years before it was made official. She was at that point simultaneously. A diminutive young woman, she had very fine hands and beautiful blue eyes, but she was also a very masculine, for she walked the walk, she talked to talk, and she swore like a soldier. Christina and Chancellor Axel Oxensternia did not see eye to eye. The Chancellor had done a really good job of ruling between the death of her father and her age of majority, and even when the king was still alive, the two men had really worked together to run the kingdom and to plan and make decisions. Axel had been an efficient and pragmatic diplomat, and he was well respected among the Reeks, dog and among Sweden's military leaders. But Christina was a proud and arrogant eighteen year old, and she really felt like it was her time to shine, and so she and Axel butted heads. They did so repeatedly and often. If this were a modern day film, you would maybe expect them to end up falling in love somehow, but things that would work out that way in real life. Yes, that would definitely be the romantic comedy version version of Christina of Sweden. They also started to have financial problems in the kingdom Pretty early in her reign, she tried to continue her father's generosity with the royal coffers, but she wasn't nearly as careful about it as he had been. She got into this cycle of giving away too much and then selling noble titles to try to earn some more money, and then raising taxes on the people she had just promoted. It did not work out well. It was it was not an efficient way of ridging the gap, kind of like a cascading circle of bad decisions. Um Naturally, in the midst of all of this, everyone wanted her to marry Uh. In addition to Carl Gustav, another suitor was Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, who ended up marrying someone else, and Christina had a not all that clandestine affair with one of the ladies of her court, which led to some speculation about her sexual orientation, her sex, and her gender, which of course tied back into that initial Uh mistake in identifying her sex. In the midst of all of this, popular opinions started to turn against her, and when she was twenty a man armed with daggers tried to kill her while she was at prayer. Her life being apparently legitimately at risk put a lot more pressure on her to get married, which was an idea that she continued to resist. And about this same time, the Thirty Years War was drawing to a close, which was something she herself was greatly in favor of, but not everyone felt the same. Many Protestant clergy wanted the war to continue until there could be a decisive Protestant victory over Catholicism. Others wanted it to continue just so that Sweden could continue to act additional war booty to potentially supplement their their money situation. Yeah, the Thirty Years War was this massive and obviously very lengthy conflict, and different nations had different motivations for being involved in it. We haven't really talked about that part of it because it's kind of ancillary to this podcast. But yeah, for Sweden in particular, there were people who felt like ending the war at that point was too soon. But to Christina, as long as the war went on, she could never really be in charge. While she had been accepted as Sweden's queen and she was making lots of decisions for herself as the ruler, she really had no authority over military matters. War was pretty much exclusively a man's game, especially when it came to running the show. So as long as the war went on, the Chancellor and the regents continued to have a major hand in making decisions that Christina could have no control over. Ending the war would and did put an end to one of their sources of power and gave Chrisdna more direct control over pretty much everything that was going on in the kingdom. So the Thirty Years War did indeed end with the Peace of Westphalia in sixty eight, and once the war had concluded, Christina turned her attention to her own court, and she began inviting artists, writers and thinkers to the Swedish court. The most famous among all of these was mathematician and philosopher reneed A Cart, who she invited to stay in the palace at Stockholm. He did not really want to go. Sweden was too cold and it was too far away, and he really doubted that the Lutheran court was going to welcome him with open arms since he was Catholic. But in the end he was convinced to come, and he, in a translator, went to Sweden in September of sixteen forty nine. His misgivings about going and about staying once he got there were unfortunately prescient. He got the flu the following January and died. Uh Some people blamed Christina both for bringing him there and for putting huge demands on his time and effort while he was visiting courts. Yet another source of pressure for Christina to marry came in sixteen forty nine, when her cousin Jan kazim Years ascended to the throne in Poland. This was the second of Sigismund's two sons who had so worried people before Christina was born. Jan succeeded his late brother and married his late brother's widow, who was still young enough to have children. So once again people were threatened by the idea that the monarchy in Poland was going to come to power over Sweden. Instead of marrying, though, Christina did something completely different. She went to the Reek's Dog and said that she wanted her cousin, Count Palatine Karl Gustav, the one that she had been intended to marry, to be named as her successor. The Reek's Dog pretty much scoffed at that entire idea. They were like you're gonna marry him anyway, So what's the point. Like, that's the guy you're gonna get married to and have babies with, so naming him as your successor now seems silly. They thought this even though she was still having sudden illnesses. Even even though she was sick pretty often, people still thought she was young and healthy enough to have a baby. Uh. Christina not delighted by this reaction, she went back to them and she said it was going to be impossible for her to marry. In her words, quote, I am absolutely certain about it. I do not intend to give you reasons. My character is simply not suited to marriage. I have prayed God fervently that my inclination might change, but I simply cannot marry. This once again, was a completely foreign and kind of silly idea to the Reeks, dog and they refused her suggestion. Again. They basically thought, she's just gonna agree to marry him eventually. They've been friends since their childhood, they get along fine. Of course they should be married. It seems so clear to them. They were. They were really like, well, obviously, you're just going to marry him, so why is why is this a big thing, are you being fussy? So the thing that ended up changing the Reeks Dommas minds on this issue was the execution of Charles the First of England. When that happened, leaders began to fear rebellion on multiple fronts, so they wanted to ensure that the line of succession was not going to be interrupted. So in March of sixty nine, they finally agreed to officially named Carl Gustav as Christina's successor, although at that point they really still thought she would end up marrying him and make it all a sort of a moot gesture. Yeah, they thought they were humoring her. She, on the other hand, thought she was getting exactly what she wanted. She was still going to get to rule, but she was not going to have to get married and produce an air Carl was going to have to do that. She was off the hook. And before we talk about getting further off the hook, let's take another brief moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand. And now let's return to the story of how Queen Christina, having fought so long and so hard to get total control over the throne, abdicated. So although She had started to rule officially at eighteen, and that was after she had already been kind of involved in some government duties. She still wasn't actually crowned until she was twenty three, so it really took quite a long time for her to kind of get all of the dust settled on her official ascension. By the time she was actually planning her coronation, which was scheduled for October of sixteen fifty, she was already thinking abdicating might sound like a good plan. Before she had told anyone about this plan, she started trying to convince the reeks dog not just to make Carl Gustav her successor if she died, but to make him the actual next hereditary king of sweet not just someone to sort of run things in the event of her untimely death until another real king could be found and elected. And they said no, um, so she pulled a series of political strings until they finally agreed. She basically pitted all of the different classes against one another, and like played up the you know, the noble sphere of the common people taking over and the common people's fear of the nobles, until they all agreed that if if she would just give them a break, that they would do what she asked. Uh. In August of sixteen fifty one, so less than a year after her very extravagant coronation, she informed the Senate that she planned to abdicate, and she spent the next several months trying to convince the Reefs dog to allow it. I feel like she spent her entire time trying to convince the Reefs dog of things. That is pretty accurate. There was a lot of her trying to get the Reeks dog to do what she wanted. Um, they not buying this at all. And so after this couple of months of really trying to convince them, she dropped the matter for a couple of years. But during the interim she started meeting with Jesuits and talking about converting to Catholicism. So we have talked about up to this point, you know, some pretty deep seated um discord between the religions, and so for her to want to convert, that's big stuff. Uh. Catholicism was a religion that had really appealed to her since she was quite young. When she was nine, a tutor had told her that Catholicism did not allow lay people to read the Bible, it encouraged celibacy, and believed in purgatory, and her reaction to all of that was, oh, what a lovely religion. In early sixteen fifty four, when everyone thought this whole matter of abdicating had just been dropped, Christina announced once again that she was going to abdicate. She negotiated a settlement that I did her some lands and some money, and it kept her as the sovereign of Sweden, so she didn't have to handle any of her royal responsibilities. But she was still a queen regardless of how you feel about her her various ways of running the kingdom that we're not all that great. This was kind of a masterful string pulling to get exactly the best possible situation for her to be in. Yeah, like all of the benefits, none of the responsibilities. So she abdicated that may, leaving the palace before midnight on the night of Karl Gustav's coronation. She was like the person that leaves the wedding reception early in this case, she was like, yeah, I have fun, I'm out of here. So there are a lot of theories about exactly why she was so set on abdicating. Her explanation was that she thought that they really needed a man to rule the country, in particular to lead the army. So if you know, there were another future war that the country was going to participate in, they would be better off with a male king than with a female queen. She also said that the pressures of ruling had been too much for her and that she needed to rest. And as we've made pretty clear, she was really deeply opposed to the idea of marrying and she was under immense pressure to do so as queen, And as soon as she was out of Sweden, she adopted a more masculine dress, more masculine mannerisms, and a more masculine demeanor, and she converted to Catholicism. She took the names Maria and Alexandra after Alexander the Great. And I want to make clear here she was not living as a man. She tended to wear trousers instead of dresses and to just behave in a more coarse way than women were expected to, but she did not present herself as a man. She was still apart from a couple of times as she was traveling in disguise, she was still Christina. Her conversion to Catholicism was an enormous deal. Sweden was a Lutheran nation and as Queen Christina was the head of the church, and even though she had abdicated her rule, this was still pretty monumental on and she was still sovereign, so they still had a lot of stock in her religion. So Christina traveled to Rome, where she was a guest at the Vatican, something women were not generally allowed to do, and she later moved into a palace in Rome, which was her permanent home until her death, although at various times she was away from that palace in Sweden, in Hamburg, and elsewhere. While in Rome, she fell in love with Cardinal Ducchio at Alino, who was the Pope's representative and a priest, and this seems to have been more like a romantic friendship than a physical relationship, but he did basically break up with her in a letter later in their relationship when he quote freed her. In sixteen fifty seven, while traveling, she became embroiled in an anti Habsburg plot to seize control of Naples. This plot had to be abandoned when she learned that one of her officers had revealed her plans, so she had last rites administered to him and then had him executed in her presence. This was a long and gory execution, and the Pope did not approve of it, and so when she returned to Rome, she was no longer allowed in the Pope's presence. Yeah, her conversion had basically been viewed as this giant coup among the Catholic Church. They she was sort of their golden example of of awesomeness for a while, but not anymore after this. Uh. Later in her life, she also sort of wanted to rule again. She had hoped to take the throne of Poland Lithuania, another elective monarchy, after Yan Kazimir's abdicated Um. She really did not have any tie to that throne apart from being a cousin of the previous king. Um she was, you know, a vassa and now she was Catholic and that was really all that she had to show for herself on the matter, and so that attempt failed. She also hoped, for a while, uh, in her sort of mere curial desires, that she would become Queen of Sweden again after Karl Gustav's sudden death at the age of thirty eight. His own successor at the time was only five, But she did not get her wish in this case and did not become Queen the ruler of Sweden again. She spent her last year's mostly keeping to herself, and she was basically broke When she died in sixteen eighty nine at the age of sixty two. All of her possessions passed to Ducchio Atzelino, although there wasn't enough money to pay off her debts or to set up legacies for some people who had worked with her and deserved them, which normally would have been part of what a ruler's estate would have done. Her tomb is in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Her body was exhumed in nine to try to determine whether she had an intersex condition or whether there was some other explanation for the midwives early confusion about what her sex was, and then whether that might explain her more masculine behavior later on. The results of that were totally inconclusive. In Christina's description of herself, she said she had quote an ineradicable prejudice against everything that women like to talk about or do in women's words and occupations. I showed myself to be quite incapable, and I saw no possibility of improvement in this respect. And that is Christina. She's quite a fascinating character. She has kind of fascinating character. One of the papers that I read about her, that which not a lot from it, made its way into this outline because this outline became very long, Uh, was about the erotic art in her artwork and how her artwork collection, um, and how a lot of the people who had previously been owners of this artwork had kind of kept that off in the corner, um and not really wanted to be associated with the fact that this more erotic art was part of their collection. UM. She on the other hand, hung it all in her grand salon, which was right outside her bedroom, and she would greet visitors with these erotic nudes hanging all around her. Um. Yeah. She just was a whole pile of contradictions her whole her whole life, because she, on the one hand, did not seem super interested in, uh, having relationships of a romantic sort with people. She You know, she had a few, but they didn't really last. But you know, then she's greeting visitors in a room with hung with these erotic nude paintings. There there are some fascinating juxtapositions there her many fay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.