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1654.]
Departure of the queen
from Sweden. CHRISTINA’S ADMINISTRATION.
Her subsequent
conrluet.
345
wished to attend upon the king to his chamber,
but he refusing, attended upon her. Straightway
at two o’clock afternoon, tlie king was crowned,
witli the usual procession ;
his majesty rode to
cluirch with all the councillors of state; thereupon
w-as held a banquet^." The following day Chris-
tina quitted Upsala, and stayed a few days at
Stockholm, where she went publicly to confession.
Twelve ships of war had been equipped to convey
her to Germany, which were to await her at Cal-
mar. Instead of this she took her way by Halm-
stad and the Sound. Only four Swedes followed
her; the rest she had dismissed. On coming to
a brook which then formed the frontier between
Sweden and Denmark, she dismounted from her
carriage, and leaping across it cried,
" At length
I am free and out of Sweden, whither I hope never
to return *."
Thus sank Christina, like a meteor, below the
horizon of Sweden. Soon after Axel Oxenstierna
descended to the grave ’, with sighs exclaiming
^ The queen had caused the tapestries, furniture, and move-
ables of the castle to be packed up ; and such articles had
to be borrowed for the coronation. Yet a contemporary
account says that all things were well managed.
’>
Arckenholtz, i. 420.
s
August 28, 1654.
that " she was still the daughter of the great Gus-
tavus." Her subsequent conduct, in changing first
secretly, then jiublicly, to the Catholic church^,
estranged from her for ever her former counti’y.
She revisited it, however, in ItJGO and 1607, and
renewed both her claims and her renunciation,
besides announcins herself in 1668 a candidate for
the vacant throne of Poland. It is neither possible
nor necessary to discover the reasons which might
explain these proceedings. The learned men of
Europe contiimed to be her voluntary subjects.
Her treatises, mostly composed of short reflections,
exhibit a soul still ardent and untamed in age,
striving in all things after the extreme and the
supreme, but at length submitting to her lot. The
feminine virtues which she despised avenged them-
selves on her good name; yet was she better than
her reputation ’. She died at Rome, April 19,
1689, sixty-three yeax’S old.
6 The former occurred at Brussels, Dec. 24, 1654; the
latter at Innspruck, Nov. 3, 1655.
’ H. Frederick von Raumer, in the 5th volume of his
History of Europe, from the end of the fifteenth century, in
the few pages he has devoted to Christina, has flavoured his
narrative too highly with scandal, of which he seems,
strangely enough, to be fond in history (In the German
translation this note is altered. T.)
A A
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