In December 1626, the Swedish king learned
of the delivery of a healthy male heir. In
the previous six years, all three of Gustaf
Adolf's children had been buried, deepening
the depression of his German wife who sought
relief from 17th-century Stockholm in
bingeing and overspending. So the birth of a
boy was good news. Except that it wasn't a
boy. Many hours later, the king's sister
laid the naked child before him so he could
see for himself. "She will be clever," he is
said to have commented, with a smile, of his
newborn daughter Christina, "for she has
deceived us all."
This story, which Veronica Buckley
identifies as the first of many myths put
about by Christina (Gustaf's acceptance,
Buckley observes, was probably the lassitude
of sickness), nevertheless sums up the
spirit of this wonderful biography and its
infuriating, irrepressible subject.
Christina prided herself on her ability to
wrongfoot people and, duly, rumours trailed
after her like the magnificent 12ft
coronation cloak she would be obliged to
sell for bread and candles in more
straitened times. To give Christina her due,
her life was a mystifying series of riddles,
of false starts and faux pas, a hash
entirely of her own making.
In this persuasive and lively book,
Christina is defined by the exuberance of
her self-belief, a sense of identity built,
miraculously, on the flimsiest of
foundations. Despite her enthusiasm for
whipping up confusion, everyone seems agreed
on one thing - she wasn't much of a looker.
Lopsided after being dropped as a baby with
few of her mother's physical charms, she had
a mannish air and mannish interests, too:
horses, hunting and, occasionally, women (as
the confusion around her delivery suggests,
it seems probable that Christina was
intersex).
Born to a cultured mother and a father who
was one of the greatest soldier-kings of his
era, Christina, sexually confused and
emotionally isolated, rejected both as role
models. She hid her insecurities behind "a
rich facade of learning... she had read
about everything, and heard about everyone,
and a judicious mixture of boasting and
teasing ensured that her visitors were
quickly apprised of those facts".
As well as fancying herself as an
intellectual, she also played the political
strategist, announcing throughout Europe her
skill at "dissembling" while demonstrating,
time and again, an uncanny ability to
squander the advantage. As a portrait of
delusion, this biography is matchless and
hilarious. Heaven knows, there's enough
material for a hatchet job. But Buckley has
given us something elegant, amused and
sharp, and yet far from pitiless; a
convincing portrait of a lost princess.
Throughout her life, Christina was a
dabbler, tiring of her memoir before
completing it, and forever falling in and
out of love with the smart diversions of the
era: philosophy, alchemy, gardening.
She played the dilettante, too, when it came
to her birthright. Having designed her
spectacular, bankrupting coronation in her
mid-twenties, she abdicated two years later,
bored by dingy old Sweden and the burden of
royal responsibility, and swiftly converted
to Catholicism, an experience, which she
pronounced "the most diverting thing in the
world". Then began a long and disruptive
tour of Europe's staterooms.
At first, Christina, with her masculine
clothes and wonky wigs, was a source of
fascination in Paris and Rome. But before
long, she put one sensibly shod foot a bit
too wrong, jeopardizing her dubious social
cachet and the Pope's pension - though her
thick skin meant her final years in Rome,
with a devoted cardinal consort, were
agreeable enough. Christina lived the most
extraordinary life in the most extraordinary
times and this engaging book does her full
justice. |
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