Veronica Buckley - Christina Queen of Sweden - The Restless Life of a European Eccentric

December in Stockholm, the cold, dark winter of the north, and a new moon glimmered on the frozen river. Around the castle, the plain wooden dwellings stood huddled and low, as if to shelter themselves from the bitter weather. Above, in a black sky, the stars were aligned just as they had been more than thirty years before at the birth of Gustav Adolf; now, once again, the Lion ascendant cast its faint reflection on the old stone tower’s three golden crowns. Within the castle, torches flamed and fires blazed, striving against the darkness and the damp. Courtiers paced and servants dozed, while the Queen consulted her astrologers, and the King dreamed of a son.

It had been an anxious time. Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora had been six years married, and they had as yet no living child. The birth of a boy was now predicted, but as the Queen drew near her confinement, the astrologers foresaw death as well. The child would die, or if he lived, he would cost the life of his mother, or even his father, who lay ill, feverish and troubled as the hour of the birth approached. If the boy lived, he would be great, they said, and the Queen took comfort, remembering the signs of her pregnancy, the omens in the stars, and her husband’s dreams.

It was the eighth of December, 14a Sunday, and as night fell, a night of bitter cold, the Queen began her labour. She was not strong, and the birth proved difficult, but as the clocks neared eleven, the baby emerged, alive, into the eager hands of the midwives. That the child was strong and likely to survive was clear – a lusty roar announced a determined entry into the world – but it was covered from head to knee in a birth caul, concealing the crucial evidence of its sex. The caul was removed at once, and the Queen’s attendants, delighted to meet the expectations of the court, declared the child a boy; its siblings were dead, and it was, after all, sole heir to a valiant warrior king. The mother and father were duly informed, and through the cold midnight air the castle rang ‘with mistaken shouts of joy’.

The nurse came confidently forward, the exhausted Queen lay back, but for the disconcerted midwives it would be no night of rest or sweet, familiar work. A closer look at the baby had revealed their error; it was in fact a girl. Through the dark night hours they waited, for no one dared tell the King. As the morning light dawned weakly over the castle, the baby’s aunt decided to take the matter in hand. She took the child up in her arms, went to her brother’s sickroom, and lay the child directly on the King’s bed, sans swaddling clothes or, as the baby herself was to describe the event, ‘in such a state that he could see for himself what she dared not tell him’. 15

Legend has it that the King expressed no disappointment, indeed, not even surprise, at this extraordinary turn of events. He calmly took up the child and kissed it, then spoke to his sister in accents of tender stoicism. ‘Let us thank God,’ he said. ‘This girl will be worth as much to me as a boy. I pray God to keep her, since He has given her to me. I wish for nothing else. I am content.’ The Princess reminded him that he was still young, as was the Queen, that there would surely be other children, surely a son, but the King merely replied, ‘I am content. I pray God to keep her for me’, and he blessed the baby and kissed her again, as if to emphasize his contentment. ‘She will be clever,’ he added, smiling, ‘for she has deceived us all.’ 16

The legend has its source in the pen of Christina herself, though she claimed to have heard the story ‘a hundred times’ from her aunt and also from her mother, who, at the time of this exchange, lay perilously weak in her own room. It is not likely to be true, though the Princess may well have softened the tale for the lonely little girl whom she later took into her care. In fact, the birth of a daughter was a desperate disappointment for Gustav Adolf and his followers, and it threw into question the very survival of the shaky Vasa dynasty. The King’s calm acceptance, if calm it really was, is more likely to have been the result of his fever, the lassitude or lethargy of a draining illness, or even of quiet relief to have at least a living child. As for the Queen, it was some time before she was considered strong enough to withstand the sorry news. After four pregnancies and the deaths of three infants, and this latest, most difficult birth, she was ‘inconsolable’ to find that she had not borne a son after all. She rejected the child out of hand, and began her own descent into a profound mental disarray.

Whatever his private feelings, and despite his fever, the King soon rallied. A Te Deum was commanded in thanksgiving for the birth, and the baptism was quickly arranged. The child was christened Kristina Augusta, 17the same names that had been given to the elder sister who had died three years before. ‘Christine’ had been the King’s mother’s name, and his grandmother’s, too, and it was also the name of a Finnish noblewoman with whom he had once been in love – the memory of that young beauty may now have brought a smile to his lips as he announced the name he had chosen for his little daughter. 18The baby’s second name, Augusta, perhaps a loose rendering of ‘Gustav’, may have been the Queen’s choice. She is not likely at any rate to have liked the baby’s first name; there had been no love lost between herself and the King’s late mother.

Many years later, needing to emphasize her Catholic credentials, Christina was to claim that, during her baptismal ceremony, the pastor had inadvertently blessed her baby forehead with a sign of the cross, so enrolling her unwittingly in the ‘happy militia’ of Rome. But in fact, this kind of blessing had remained fairly common in Sweden through the early decades of Lutheranism. The pastor’s sign, far from a presaging, was a gesture made instinctive from the force of long habit. And Christina’s claim, as so much of her life was to be, was no more than a ruse to persuade her audience, and perhaps even more, to persuade herself.

Why had it been so difficult for Maria Eleonora’s attendants to determine the sex of her newborn child? The large caul would surely have been removed at once to establish the answer to this most important of dynastic questions. The baby’s loud voice, the ‘extraordinary, imperious roar’, may have been a sign of strength, but not more. It is more likely that the experienced midwives were for once confronted with something unfamiliar in the squalling little person of a baby of ambiguous sex. Though the child had been born before midnight, they waited until the morning to make their final, altered decision.

Was the little girl really a boy? Was she a hermaphrodite, or a pseudo-hermaphrodite? Diagnoses of this kind, at a distance of centuries, must always be conjectural. It is possible that Christina was born with some kind of genital malformation, and she may even have been what would now be called intersexual or transgendered. Our own statistically-minded age records that about one in every hundred babies is born with malformed genitals of varying degrees of ambiguity, making it often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to determine the baby’s sex. There are various disorders which can cause such malformations; 19in the case of a baby girl, the most common of them would produce a perfectly healthy infant with normal internal sex organs, but often with an enlarged clitoris and partially fused labia, easily confused at first glance with the small infant penis of a longed-for male child. 20

Whatever the case, Christina’s sex, like her sexuality, was to remain ambiguous to others and ambivalent to herself throughout her tempestuous life. It would distort her relations with her mother and her father, poisoning the one and tainting the other. And in the first years of her life, it would precipitate a dynastic crisis from which she would emerge an acclaimed crown prince.