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'Christina, Queen of Sweden': A Royal Mess

CHRISTINA, QUEEN OF SWEDEN The Restless Life of a European Eccentric. By Veronica Buckley. Illustrated. 370 pp. Fourth Estate/ HarperCollins Publishers. $26.95.

IT'S not exactly the image Greta Garbo tried to convey in the 1933 movie, but in Veronica Buckley's vividly persuasive new biography, Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-89) comes across as the Pippi Longstocking of her time -- a footloose, strong-willed, mischief-making, utterly idiosyncratic Swedish imp. Identifying with the heroic legend of her father, the warrior king Gustavus Adolphus (whose death elevated her to the throne at the age of 6), and appalled by her feckless, neurotic mother (who, after being widowed, hung her husband's heart above the bed in which she and her daughter slept), Christina established, at an early age, a reputation as a monarch with a mind of her own -- and the posture, vocabulary and table manners of a viking marauder.

Yes, she knew her classics, developed a connoisseur's eye for art and at 19 impressed Louis XIV's ambassador with her fluent French. Yet Christina was, for the most part, a woman of action, not contemplation -- a lover of adventure stories whose choice of Alexandra as a confirmation name is often attributed, in part, to her idolization of Alexander the Great. Unfortunately, her actions tended to be monumentally ill considered: as a girl, she sparked palace intrigues and diplomatic incidents, simply, it seems, because she could; in adulthood, she all but wrecked the Swedish economy with her extravagance while frivolously manipulating just about everyone who crossed her path. Supposedly keen to bring culture to the backwater of Stockholm, she summoned world-class scholars and belletrists from Europe's four corners, only to ignore them once they arrived. She was even responsible for the death of René Descartes, who, dreading the Nordic cold, nonetheless finally agreed to visit Sweden and, after wasting several months hanging around at court, succumbed to the flu. If, decades earlier, Elizabeth I of England (against whom she was inevitably measured) had united a fractious nation, Christina, blessed with a relatively harmonious council and kingdom, appears to have been driven to tear the whole thing apart. To top it all off, she openly scorned Sweden's established Lutheran Church, at first professing a deism that would have landed any of her subjects in prison and ultimately opting to join the Roman Catholic Church -- an act that obliged her, sensationally, to relinquish her throne and leave her country at the age of 27.

Given Christina's flippant attitude toward her conversion -- attending her first Mass after her reception into the church, she joked about the doctrine of transubstantiation -- it's hard not to conclude that, far from being motivated by some profound experience of the sacred, her decision was rooted largely in her love of plotting (she gleefully conspired with a raft of Catholic ambassadors and undercover Jesuits), an eagerness to shock (which she did, and then some) and a yearning for sunnier climes and more passionate spirits (phlegmatic northerners were not her favored companions). As Buckley succinctly observes: "It suited her to choose the Roman Church. It was, after all, in Rome."

Departing Sweden, Christina paused at the Danish border only to have her hair cut short, strap on a sword and change into the men's clothing that would henceforth be her attire of choice. Yet her abdication was typically shortsighted: somehow she didn't grasp the notion that giving up the throne would involve a loss of power; in later years, she would unsuccessfully seek the crowns of no fewer than three other kingdoms, in addition to trying to regain her own.

All, to be sure, was not lost: Christina, as Rome's big catch, was welcomed lavishly by the pontiff and his cardinals -- one of whom, a reform-minded, polyglot man of culture (and the Vatican's future secretary of state) named Decio Azzolino, would be her lover and confidant for more than a quarter-century. Yet the Eternal City's haut monde soon lost patience with its Swedish guest, whose combination of royal arrogance and unroyal conduct -- propping her legs up on theater chairs, chatting with shopkeepers and street urchins -- was found to be scandalous.

Disdain trailed her across the Continent: visiting France, she was mocked as "an ill-bred savage"; in Hamburg, she triggered outrage by staying at the home of a Jew -- an offense that, for a modern reader, can go a long way toward atoning for her faults. Yet if Christina's lack of religious bigotry is estimable, her lack of national loyalty is not: upon discovering that "without the crown she had little real importance," she urged other European powers to attack Sweden. While a guest at Fontainebleau, moreover, she revealed her darkest side, commanding the summary execution (actually a hastily enacted, gruesomely drawn-out butchering) of a supposedly disloyal underling -- an act that tarnished her name even, as Buckley puts it, "among the cynical courtiers of a violent age." Unfazed, Christina dismissed all the fuss in a letter to Cardinal Mazarin, observing that "we people of the north are rather wild." And even after this debacle, she failed to learn the value of keeping a low profile: years later, in Protestant Hamburg, her staggeringly ill-advised public celebration of the coronation of Pope Clement IX (including free wine for the rabble) ended in a riot and eight deaths.

As Buckley suggests, Christina might have exploited her unique position to noble ends -- to promote, for example, religious tolerance. But though she took steps in this direction ("at one point," Buckley tells us, "she made plans to become the formal protector of Rome's Jewish population"), in the end she accomplished very little. This, lamentably, was the story of Christina's life: though her first-act curtain was arguably the most dramatic of any in 17th-century Europe, she had no second act. (Her patronage of the arts, however, was hardly inconsiderable: both Scarlatti and Corelli conducted her private orchestra, and Bernini, who did a bronze bust of her, testified with apparent sincerity that she knew "more about sculpture than I do.") Buckley returns time and again to the subject of Christina's deficient self-knowledge, but serves up at least one quotation that implies the ex-queen knew herself, if not her sex, better than one might think: "Women who rule," she mused in an unfinished autobiography, "only make themselves ridiculous one way or the other. I myself am no exception."

For all Christina's follies and foibles, it's hard not to feel a certain fondness for her. She rises from the pages of this richly evocative book (Buckley's first) as a complex, thoroughly believable human being, by turns maddening and endearing, admirable and absurd -- a bizarre cross between Francis of Assisi, Peggy Guggenheim, Eric the Red and Wile E. Coyote. Shifting capably between the hilarious and the deeply touching, "Christina, Queen of Sweden" makes it easy to understand how this offbeat, frequently unkempt cross-dresser could win the respect of eminent artists and the lifelong adoration of a prince of the church and still be so irritating a schemer that the pope briefly considered excommunicating her. (He ended up simply laughing the incident off.)

In the end, you find yourself thinking of Christina (who, by the way, looked more like Danny DeVito than Greta Garbo) as a prematurely modern spirit who couldn't manage to fit into a not-yet-modern world -- one of those historical figures who make the past feel less distant and, in the hands of a sensitive writer like Veronica Buckley, fully alive.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 7, Page 34 of the National edition with the headline: A Royal Mess. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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