On October 20, 1650, Kristina Vasa was crowned Queen of Sweden. By then, she had already been the country’s regent since the age of 6, even though the reign took place with a guardian government until she reached adulthood.

According to her account, she was born with a victory hood, was hairy all over, and for the first time, gave up a tone that she claimed was so rough that the midwives, the midwives of the time, thought she was a boy.
It was also what she was expected to be, the future Queen Kristina when she was born in 1626, according to the Julian calendar, on the 8th or 9th of December. According to our Gregorian calendar, it should have been the 17th or 18th, but we won’t get any closer than that.

Gustav II Adolf and Maria Eleonora considered it essential that a son be born to secure the succession to the throne. The royal couple had previously had three children, all of whom died in infancy. Three years earlier, in 1623, they had a daughter, Princess Kristina Augusta, who never even got to see her first birthday. As recently as the year before Kristina’s arrival, 1625, Maria Eleonora had given birth to a stillborn son.
Now was the time.

We will never know whether it was her rough voice or the tense anticipation that was not improbably like violin strings in the castle that caused the midwives to err. But the cannons had been made ready to fire the princely salute.
Perhaps it was to smooth over the mistake that the king’s half-sister had to carry the newborn to her brother and show that it was a girl. After all, he is not supposed to have been disappointed; on the contrary, he is said to have exclaimed, ”Let us thank God, my sister. I hope this girl will be as good to me as a boy. I pray God to preserve her because he has given me her.” That a father who has previously lost three children he hoped for asks God to preserve the newborn child is perhaps not so surprising.
However, Gustav II Adolf never gets to see his daughter and heir grow up. On November 6 (Julian time), 1632, he died in the battle of Lützen, and from one day to the next, Sweden had a queen. One who was only six years ​​old.

Kristina ruled under a guardian government which de facto ruled the country in the coming years while she studied to become Sweden’s regent.
It has sometimes been said that Kristina was raised as a boy, and based on this, all sorts of conclusions about her sexuality and actual gender have been drawn.
I do not intend to speculate on these. However, it should be said that an upbringing and education for a future monarch in the 1630s and onwards was automatically aimed at boys. At that time, the concept of male and female meant that politics, language, diplomacy and logic were considered male qualities. If Kristina had had a brother, she would have been taught to embroider and converse.

In other words, it says more about that time’s view of men and women than it does about Kristina. Kristina’s mother was Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, daughter of Furst Johan Sigismund and his wife Anna of Prussia. The marriage to Gustav Adolf was arranged for political reasons, but Maria Eleonora is said to have loved him deeply. This meant that his absence during the campaign had a negative effect on her psychologically, and when he died, she is said to have broken down.

This excluded her from the guardian government formed around her daughter, and after her aunt’s death, Kristina’s care beyond the necessary education was alternated between several different noblewomen so that she would not become attached to any of them.
She was educated by, among others, Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, who taught her state affairs, and the court preacher and later bishop Johannes Matthiæ Gothus, who gave her lessons in language, theology and philosophy. About Oxenstierna in particular, she later wrote in her never-finished memoirs, ”I had no other lesson and no game or other distraction that I did not gladly leave to listen to his words. We often spent three, four or more hours together. ”

Oxtenstierna’s work with Kristina paid off. In her communications with foreign rulers and her diplomats, such as during the exchange of letters with her representatives in Germany before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it is not just any 20-year-old woman who writes. It is a mature and authoritative regent confident in her knowledge of international politics.

It would become clear that Kristina preferred learning and educated discussions to the ruling. The learned men who were invited to Sweden to teach and hold interesting conversations with Kristina included the Dutch philologists Vossius and Heinsius, the latter of whom taught Kristina Greek, as well as the French philologist Salmasius and his compatriot, the orientalist Borchardt. The most famous of her learned visits was possibly to the mathematician and philosopher Descartes.  In 1649, he moved to Stockholm as an adviser and teacher to Kristina.

It seems that the stay became something of a shock to him. Not only did Kristina want to start their conversations and lessons early in the morning, but the castle was also drafty and the climate colder than he was used to. Maybe their personalities also clashed, as Kristina doesn’t seem to have found him very entertaining when he needed to be. She allegedly locked him in his room and shouted through the door that he was allowed to come out when he wrote a ballet. René Descartes contracted pneumonia and died in Stockholm on February 11, 1650.

In 1649, the year before she was crowned, Kristina announced that she had no intention of marrying. Instead, her cousin Karl Gustav would become her heir to the throne, someone he perhaps unsurprisingly accepted.

As mentioned at the beginning of the post, Kristina was crowned on October 20, 1650, but not in Uppsala Cathedral, which was tradition, but in the Storkyrkan in Stockholm. When this happened, she had ruled in her power for six years but would only sit another four years on the throne. In 1654, she abdicated from the throne after a period marked by social injustices and left the country to settle in Rome after some time travelling. By then, she had converted to Catholicism. But more about that in a later post.

Sources:

Silvermasken – Peter Englund

Drottningen och filosofen : mötet mellan Christina och Descartes -Svante Nordin

Drottning Kristina – Dick Harrison

Drottning Kristina: ett liv – Cilla Dahlén & Annelie Drewsen

Images: Public Domain