A rather ferocious person

Christina became queen of Sweden because her heroic father Gustavus Adolphus had been killed in battle, winning glory in Germany but having sired no legitimate sons. She was not quite six at the time, and they were not sure whether to call her king or queen; an ambiguity of roles, not of sex, which lasted a long time. Her armies went on fighting all comers in Germany for another 16 years, until everyone else was sick of war, and unable to prevent the Swedes from pulling off one last gigantic heist: the removal of the great imperial collection of books, art and curiosities from Prague. It was the biggest art-theft in Europe before Napoleon, and Christina got most of it.

By then (1648) she was a full sovereign with an alarming personality, an active brain and variety of poses running from rough tomboy in trousers to Pallas of the North, the philosopher-queen leading the Swedes to ‘grace and beauty, gaiety and freedom’ as Greta Garbo put it. That great haul of cultural swag from Prague was followed by an influx of learned refugees, of whom Descartes is and was the best known, his final illnesses precipitated by lecturing bare-headed in her cold library, but made worse by his own medicine. For a few years it seemed as if art, poetry and wit had entered what they liked to call the Arctic at the invitation of this odd but alluring young woman. In those years she was a star: see the dust-cover of this biography for Bourdon’s enchanting portrait of her out hawking on her horse, the big nose and eyes presented with a quick sideways glance reducing the observer to the status of the spaniel in the right foreground. Professors, diplomats, musicians and poets came rolling in from sunnier shores, eager to be charmed, understood, toyed with and paid, while Sweden went through hard times under the firm guidance of the chancellor, Oxenstierna.