Christina

At some point after composing reference 1, I fell for a biography of Queen Christina of Sweden, penned by Veronica Buckley. An entertaining read, falling, in the modern manner, somewhere between an old fashioned biography and a novel in fancy dress, that is to say a historical novel (see reference 2). Which is a rather long winded way of saying that Buckley does not scorn to join up the dots.

And I learn that Christina was a very strange bird indeed, with not all of her strangeness being down to her unfortunate upbringing, an upbringing which included being orphaned at six and being made a queen shortly after that. Enough to turn anyone's head. She was also clever, well-educated, keen on riding, hunting & dogs and keen on dressing as a man.

The Sweden of the time might have produced the strongest army in northern Europe, but was in other ways a poor & backward place, and Christina made it her mission to do something about that, inviting all kinds of savants to Stockholm. With one of them, Descartes, dying there.

She also helped to bring the Thirty Years War to end in 1649, securing as part of her spoils what was left of the fantastic collection built up in former years by Rudolf II of Hapsburg. sometime resident of Prague. The Hradčany loot, including 500 paintings, a substantial library and a solitary lion.

Her flamboyant conversion to Catholicism seems rather odd, given that she was neither pious nor observant. Maybe she just wanted to get away from dour Lutheran (or was it Calvinist) divines of Sweden, into the bright lights, into the sun of Rome. Maybe there was an element of deferred adolescent rebellion.

Her long life after her early abdication in 1654 may have been something of a disappointment, at least until she calmed down into the last lap in a small Roman palace, the Palazzo Riario. Now replaced by the Palazzo Corsini. She missed the power & the glory and she was often short of money,  partly because she was a very bad manager and partly because she liked to surround herself with charlatans and worse. But she seemed, for some reason, perhaps a shared taste for arty patronage & display, to get on well with cardinals, with more of less the whole lot of them turning out for her funeral. There was also a particular cardinal, Azzolino, to whom she was very close for many years, close enough to cause gossip, even in an easy going Rome.

The big blot on the landscape was indeed the palace execution in 1657 mentioned at reference 1. An execution which took place in the (French) royal palace of Fontainebleau and which went on for an hour or so, partly because the victim had thought to wear mail under his doublet for his last interview with the Queen, partly because of two time-outs for confessions. The French authorities got rather cross about this grisly affair, not least because of the Queen's defiance after the event, and it was some time before they calmed down. And even then, the Queen still had to leave the country for Rome - although it took a messy business trip to Germany & Sweden and another ten years or so before she finally calmed, and settled down into the aforementioned last lap of around twenty years, dying in 1689 at the age of 62. Probably the best lap, with lots of quality time spent on theatres and gardens.

Reviewing the Garbo film which started this particular hare off last night, we decided that while it was rather free in its treatment of Christina, it did have some connection with the truth. It also thought it best to stop shortly after the climax of the abdication, much better than trying to make something of what followed. Looking at Garbo's wikipedia entry now, it seems entirely appropriate that she insisted on starring in this film; one odd bod portraying another and both of whom took early retirement. But she got paid $300,000 which must have been a huge sum in 1933 and the film was a huge success. Win-win.

PS 1: there was another connection to a book already owned, in that my monograph about Poussin's 'Dance to the Music of Time' contains a reproduction of an engraving of Pope Clement IX entertaining Christina with a banquet in 1668. See reference 3.

PS 2: further to the previous post, I am pleased to record that this morning saw the first pick of Horton Lane blackberries, far more plentiful and far more ripe than I had thought likely after yesterday's Horton Clockwise. Maybe it was the different view afforded by doing Horton Lane anti-clockwise, something I only rarely do. Maybe some more this afternoon. And for lunch, we finish off the last of last year's, in the form of blackberry and apple stewed with a little sugar.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/resweded.html.

Reference 2: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/poussin-others.html.