Queen Christina and the Crown Nobody Would Touch

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On a June morning in 1654, in a hall at Uppsala Castle, a young woman stood before the leading men of Sweden wearing purple velvet and a crown. She was the Queen, she was twenty-seven years old, and she had called them there to watch her stop being Queen. When the moment came, she asked someone to lift the crown from her head. Nobody moved. Today: Christina of Sweden, who gave her kingdom away on purpose, and the people who could hardly bear to let her.

Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into seventeenth-century Sweden, a cold northern kingdom that had suddenly become one of the great powers of Europe.

Christina was born in Stockholm in December 1626, the only surviving child of King Gustavus Adolphus. Her father was one of the most famous soldiers in Europe, and he had no son, so he left instructions that his daughter be brought up as a prince. She learned to ride and shoot, and studied languages, history and politics like someone expected to run a government. When she was five, her father was killed at the Battle of Lützen, and the little girl became Queen of a country at war. For twelve years the realm was governed by a regency led by her father's chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, a patient, formidable man who had sworn to the dead king to keep the crown on his daughter's head.

She came of age in 1644 and turned out to be remarkable. She collected scholars, manuscripts and paintings the way other monarchs collected horses. She brought the philosopher René Descartes to Stockholm and received him in her library at five in the morning; he lasted one Swedish winter and died there in February 1650. She was clever, impatient, generous to the point of recklessness, and entirely uninterested in the one thing her council most wanted from her, which was a husband.

So she persuaded the estates to accept her cousin, Charles Gustavus, as her heir. The succession no longer depended on her marrying anyone. In October 1650 she was crowned in Stockholm with great ceremony, and almost no one understood that she was clearing a path out.

She had another secret, a more dangerous one. Her father had died a hero of the Protestant cause, and Sweden was firmly Lutheran. Christina had grown curious about Catholicism. She wrote privately to the head of the Jesuit order, and in early 1652 two Jesuit scholars arrived in Stockholm without announcing what they were. In long private conversations they helped settle her mind. A Catholic could not go on ruling Sweden. To change her faith, she would have to give up the crown.

She first told her council she meant to abdicate in 1651. The old chancellor led a delegation begging her to stay, and she gave in, for the moment. In February 1654 she told them again and said the decision could not be undone. Oxenstierna, after the usual protests, said only, "If it is to be, then the sooner the better."

The estates gathered at Uppsala that spring, and an English ambassador, Bulstrode Whitelocke, was in the hall for the opening. It was normally the chancellor's job to tell the assembly why it had been called. Oxenstierna refused. He had sworn to her father to keep the crown on her head, he said, and he would not stand up and propose taking it off. So Christina stood up and told them herself.

Each of the four estates answered in turn. The archbishop spoke for the clergy, then came the nobles and the townsmen, all asking her to reconsider. Last came the speaker for the peasants, a farmer in patched shoes, who skipped the bowing entirely. As it was translated for the ambassador, he said, "O Lord God, Madam, what do you mean to do?" Where would she ever find another kingdom like this one? He begged her to stay in harness like a good lead horse, and promised that he and his fellows would help her carry the load. Then he walked up, shook her hand, kissed it two or three times, turned his back, pulled out a dirty handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Christina told Whitelocke afterward that the farmer had shown his love for her more than greater men had.

None of it changed her mind. On the morning of June 6th, 1654, she came in wearing her coronation robes over white silk, with the crown on her head. On a table lay five cushions. On four of them lay the sword of state, the sceptre, the orb and the keys. The fifth was empty.

She made a short speech wishing her cousin happiness in his reign. Then she asked that someone take the crown from her head. No one would. According to the account carried to the English ambassador, she called on two courtiers, Count Tott and Baron Steinberg, and ordered them to do it. They refused. She ordered them again, more firmly, and at last they lifted it off and set it on the fifth cushion. The high steward, Per Brahe, wrote in his journal that sobs broke her voice as she spoke to her successor, and that many in the room wept with her. Then she curtsied to her cousin and walked out to her own rooms, no longer a queen.

That afternoon her cousin was crowned Charles the Tenth in Uppsala Cathedral. As his procession returned to the castle, Christina leaned from a window and called down her congratulations.

She had already packed, so thoroughly that tapestries and furniture had to be borrowed for the coronation. The next day she left Uppsala. Twelve warships had been readied to carry her to Germany in state. She ignored them and went overland, with only four Swedes in her company. Near the Danish frontier she cut her hair short, put on men's clothes and travelled as a Count Dohna. At a small stream that then marked the border, she climbed down from her carriage and jumped across. "At last I am free," she is supposed to have said, "and out of Sweden, where I hope never to return."

She was received into the Catholic Church privately in Brussels that Christmas Eve, and publicly in Innsbruck the next November. In December 1655 she entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo, whose inner face the Pope had Bernini decorate for her arrival.

Freedom did not make her peaceful. She schemed after other thrones, ran short of money, and in 1657, as a guest at the French palace of Fontainebleau, had a member of her own household, the Marquis Monaldeschi, killed for betraying her. But in Rome she founded an academy, kept musicians and scholars around her, and built one of the great art collections of the age. She died there in 1689 and was buried in Saint Peter's Basilica, one of very few women laid to rest there.

Old Oxenstierna had died only a few months after the abdication. He had disapproved of nearly everything she did at the end, yet he is said to have sighed that she was still the daughter of the great Gustavus. And of all the speeches made that spring, the plainest came from the farmer with the dirty handkerchief, who knew she was going and asked her to stay anyway.

That's our story for today. Thanks for listening to Hidden History.