Kitabı oku: «Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric», sayfa 3
The time had come to offer peace terms, and accordingly, Swedish envoys were sent out to Wallenstein, in their hands the plan for the Corpus Evangelicorum, with plenty to placate the besieger. The Generalissimo chose not to accept it, as he could well afford to do, with Gustav Adolf and his once invincible men penned in beneath the ridge. Without fresh supplies, the Swedes could not survive the cold weather that would soon be upon them, and in mid-September the desperate King decided to attempt a retreat from the camp. If he succeeded, he would march towards Austria, where new rebellions were rumoured to have started against the Habsburg powers.
The retreat began, the Swedes fearing every moment the onslaught of the imperial troops. But Wallenstein did not attack. Instead, he turned his army towards Saxony, to the lands of Gustav Adolf’s half-hearted ally, the Elector Johann Georg. The Swedes themselves turned back to help the Elector, and by mid-October they were once again in Nuremberg, the scene of their own grim defeat only weeks before. Now, passing through the abandoned imperial camp, they found, to their horror, the remnants of Wallenstein’s army, the unburied dead and, worse, the starving wounded, still lying there. The King gave instructions for the occupation of the area before the winter should set in, and moved his army on towards Saxony. They marched via Leipzig, then west some fifteen miles to the little town of Lützen, where, so they had heard, Wallenstein was encamped with a reduced army. There the revitalized Swedes would engage them, sure of victory with their novel fighting tactics and their superior numbers.
But Gustav Adolf’s information was only partially correct. Wallenstein had only just dismissed his 12,000 allied forces. Learning of the Swedish King’s advance, he had sent for them to be recalled. His remaining army alone numbered some 14,000, and they spent the night setting up their cannon and their barricades. In the early hours of the next morning they were still to be seen, making their way by torchlight, digging their trenches and hoisting their defences, while, outside the town, in the fields nearby, the 16,000 Swedish troops lay sleeping.
It was the sixth of November. By eight in the morning, in clear light, the first shots had been fired, while the King still stood before his army, offering prayers for a Protestant victory. Wallenstein had drawn up his army in traditional formation, with infantry in the centre, protected by artillery, and cavalry on the wings, while the Swedes stood ready in the flexible squares which had served them so well at Breitenfeld. It was not until ten that the two armies engaged, and by then the battleground was covered in a thick mist, alternately providing cover and hampering visibility. The Swedes charged first, and the desperate struggle began.13
Later, those who had fought that day could not agree when the imperial reinforcements had arrived; some thought midday, others thought not until the evening. In fact, the cavalry arrived first, led by the legendary Count Gottfried Pappenheim, hero of the imperial army and idol of his own soldiers. They attacked immediately, beating the Swedes back over the territory they had won. Pappenheim was shot through the lung and retreated from the battle to die, choked with blood, in his coach behind the lines. It was rumoured that Gustav Adolf had also been hit. His horse had been seen, wounded in the neck, plunging wildly across the battlefield. The imperial general Piccolomini, himself grazed seven times by bullets, swore that he had seen him lying on the ground. Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar took command of the Swedish force, and by nightfall, the imperial troops had been driven back. Wallenstein retreated to the nearby town of Halle, leaving his men in disarray behind him. The battle had been inconclusive, but the Swedes now occupied the field, and the victory was held to be theirs.
In the darkness, the Swedish soldiers began the terrible search for the body of their King. Beneath a heap of the dead, naked but for his shirt, they found him. He had been killed by a shot through the temple, but his body showed other wounds: a dagger thrust and another shot in his side, two shots in the arm, and a shot in the back.
Rumours spread that the King had been betrayed, killed by his own men under cover of battle. Some recalled the Bloodbath of Linköping, saying that the sons of those beheaded by his father had succeeded in claiming a tardy revenge.14 Others held that his murder had been ordered by Cardinal Richelieu, determined to be rid of the ‘impetuous Visigoth’ who had bettered him at his own political games. It seemed impossible that the great Gustav Adolf could have died like any ordinary soldier, shot and stabbed as he fought his way through enemy lines. Bernard of Saxe-Weimar gave out that the King was not dead, but only wounded, and for days afterwards merchants in London were placing bets that he was still alive. Waiting in Erfurt, Maria Eleonora learned the truth on the tenth of November; she collapsed with grief. The following day, in Frankfurt, Chancellor Oxenstierna heard the news, and passed the first sleepless night of his life.
Gradually it emerged that, leading a cavalry charge early in the battle, the King had been shot in the arm, and had lost control of his horse. In the thick mist covering the battlefield, he had been separated from his escort of cavalrymen. Wounded again, he had fallen from his saddle, but his boot had caught in a stirrup, and he had been dragged along the ground. Falling free, he had been unable to rise, and had been shot in the head where he lay.
His body was carried, on a powder wagon, to the little village of Meuchen near the battlefield, and there it was washed clean of dirt and blood. The King’s reverent soldiers stored the blood itself in the village church, marking the place with his coat of arms. Overnight, the body lay before the altar, and when morning broke, the village schoolmaster, who served as the local joiner as well, set to work to build a wooden coffin. In this the King’s body was carried to the town of Weissenfels, some ten miles distant. There, in the bay-windowed room of a local guesthouse, it was laid out and embalmed by the King’s own apothecary. Among those who saw the body there in its simple coffin was Gustav Gustavsson, the King’s illegitimate son, now sixteen years old, and serving in the Swedish army.
Back in Meuchen, one Swedish soldier, recovering from his own wounds, arranged a primitive memorial to his lost commander-in-chief. With the help of local peasants, he rolled a large stone – the ‘Swede’s Stone’ – to the place where his King had fallen.15
It is said that the Emperor himself wept, and ordinary people who had never set eyes on the great King wailed in the streets at the news of his death. ‘He alone was worth more,’ said Richelieu, ‘than both the armies together.’
The King’s body had now to be transported back to Sweden, escorted, in death as in life, between footsoldiers and cavalrymen. From Weissenfels it was carried a hundred miles north towards Berlin, and in the middle of December, the cortège was met by the newly widowed Queen. She was almost hysterical. For several weeks, fearing to aggravate her state, her attendants had kept her in Erfurt, preventing her from travelling to where her husband’s body lay. Now, seeing his lifeless form, she gave way to an extravagant grief. The King’s heart had been taken from his body, to be separately preserved; this Maria Eleonora now took to herself, wrapping it first in a linen kerchief and later placing it in a golden casket. She kept it with her constantly. At night, it hung above her bed, glowing in the light of vigil candles, while the Queen wept desperate tears.
Northward the Swedes continued their sorrowful journey. At Wolgast, they paused; the Baltic Sea was frozen, and for many months there would be no passage across to Sweden. Maria Eleonora’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre; the eccentric traits which she had shown for some years had been intensified, it seemed, by the shock of the King’s death. Now, disregarding the entreaties of those around her, she began to make plans for an elaborate funeral, spending wildly on one scheme after the next. Her stranded little court began to disintegrate into chaos, while, day and night, Maria Eleonora clung, often literally, to her husband’s mortal remains, until her attendants feared she had lost her reason. In February 1633, three months after the King’s death, she wrote from Wolgast: ‘Since We, God pity Us, were so rarely granted the pleasure of enjoying the living presence of His Majesty, Our adored, dearest master and spouse, of blessed memory, it should at least be granted to Us to stay near his royal corpse and so draw comfort in Our miserable existence.’16
From Stockholm, the alarmed senators dispatched the Chancellor’s cousin, Gabriel Oxenstierna, to investigate the Queen’s entourage and to oversee the return of the King’s body home to Sweden. Delayed by illness and the winter weather, Oxenstierna reached Wolgast only in the middle of May, and there he found the grieving Queen ‘swimming in tears’, and her little court in wretched disorder.
It was not until July that the royal flagship set off at last, and in early August the entourage arrived at the industrial town of Nyköping, on the eastern coast of Sweden. Here, furnaces blasted and foundries thundered, shipwrights and millworkers toiled and travailed. Once the country’s capital, Nyköping now centred on a magnificent Renaissance castle, the Queen’s private residence. It was here, twenty years before, that Gustav Adolf had been proclaimed King, and it was here that his body now came to a temporary rest.17
It was in Nyköping, too, that Maria Eleonora at last saw again her six-year-old daughter. It had been some fifteen months since their last meeting; since the spring of the previous year, the Queen had been in Germany, visiting her family, following her husband’s campaigns. Christina had been left in Sweden in the care of her paternal aunt, the Princess Katarina, and she had now travelled to Nyköping ‘in person, with all the senators and all the noblemen and women’, to meet the sad cortège. Dutifully, the little girl approached the unfamiliar, grieving woman who was her mother. ‘I kissed her,’ she was later to write, ‘and she drowned me with tears, and nearly suffocated me in her arms.’18
The King’s body was laid at first in the castle’s Green Hall, but Maria Eleonora, now refusing any talk of burial, soon had it removed to her own bedroom. The coffin was covered by an elaborate set of oval pearls after her own design, but it remained unsealed, and it seems that it was not seldom opened. More than a year after the King’s death, the men of the Swedish parliament, shocked, embarrassed, and indignant, petitioned the Estate of the Clergy, asking ‘whether a Christian could in good conscience apply for and be granted the right to open the graves and the coffins of their dead and gaze at and fondle their bodies in the belief that through these acts they would receive some comfort and solace in their state of great heart-rending sorrow and distress’.19 But slow planning for the state funeral, and perhaps, too, some pity for their great King’s widow, stayed any firm response.
After many delays, and constant opposition by Maria Eleonora, the King’s body was at last interred on 15 June 1634, nineteen months after his death. Towards the Riddarholm Church in Stockholm, final resting-place of Sweden’s kings, the body was borne on a silver bier, encircled by military standards and captured enemy cannon and other symbols of the warrior King’s victories, including his bloodstained sword, just as it had been taken from the battlefield at Lützen. A vast crowd of people accompanied the procession, weeping, mourning, straining to see. And among the nobles and soldiers and court officials, some of them spied one very small figure – their new, seven-year-old Queen.
Within a day of the King’s interment, Maria Eleonora pleaded for the coffin to be opened again, asking that the King should not be buried while she lived.
Fourteen years before, when the handsome young ‘Adolf Karlsson’ had come to court her, the body of Maria Eleonora’s father had lain in state, months after his death, in the gloom of the castle chapel, while the drab accompaniments of a formal mourning oppressed his court. The King’s own mother, too, had lain unburied through the long northern winter, awaiting her son’s return from the conquests that would make his name feared and famous. But, even in an age of delayed burial and long months of mourning, Maria Eleonora’s grief at her husband’s death was felt to be excessive. Throughout the royal apartments, darkness reigned. Black fabrics draped the walls from ceiling to floor, and the windows were blocked with sable hangings; no daylight filtered through. Sermons and pious orations droned endlessly. The Queen mourned day and night, relieved only by her troupe of dwarves and hunchbacks, dancing in the candlelight. Bereft of her husband, she now turned her attention for the first time to her little daughter, smothering her with new-found affection, and forcing her to live alongside her in the macabre atmosphere. She dismissed Christina’s Aunt Katarina, who had looked after the child for the previous two years, and announced that from now on she herself would take care of her. The once rejected girl-child, ugly and ‘swarthy as a little Moor’, was now found to be ‘the living image of the late King’, and the Queen scarcely let her out of her sight. By day the little girl struggled to escape to her books and her horses; by night she was obliged to share her mother’s bed in the gloomy chamber, lying fearful and lonely beneath her father’s encased heart. The King’s death had set in train a melodrama of mourning in which Christina was to remain a virtual prisoner, until her rescue by the ‘five great old men’ who were now to serve as Sweden’s regents.
The Little Queen
It was Victory which announced my name on the fateful field of battle – Victory, a herald at arms proclaiming me King.1
So, at least, Christina was to write, many years later, at a time when she needed to call upon her every credential of greatness. She was, she continues, ‘the link, weak as it was, which united so many good men, so many diverse and opposing interests, all dedicated to sustaining the rights of the girl who began to reign at that fatal moment’. All the generals, she says, all the men of the army, and ‘the great Chancellor’, too, submitted to the name of Christina.
In rhetorical terms, there is some truth in this tale, but in reality the crown did not pass to the little girl quite so smoothly. Gustav Adolf’s generals stood firm, and announced their loyalty to his fragile Vasa dynasty from their battlefields in Germany, giving the Chancellor, who now assumed power in the King’s stead, the means to continue the war. But in fact there was no guarantee that Christina would inherit her father’s throne at all. Only five years before, when she was just a year old and no male heirs seemed likely, Gustav Adolf had had to confirm her right, as a female, to succeed him.2 His own royal line was not so ancient that he could be sure of its continuance against all odds; his cousin Sigismund, the Catholic King of Poland, had his own, arguably greater claim to the Swedish throne. Moreover, heredity was not enough; for many centuries the Swedish monarchy had been elective, and the principle, established by Christina’s great-grandfather, applied to males only. It was by no means certain that the Estates would accept a woman – indeed, a little girl – as their ‘King’, as the Swedes always formally referred to their sovereign. There were even some who might have preferred to oust the monarchy entirely and install a republic in its place.
In the Senate, or so Christina was later to write, it was a different story. All the senators declared themselves in her favour. They all felt that her right to the throne was ‘incontestable’. They were ‘only too happy’ to have this child, who was ‘their only strength and Sweden’s only hope of salvation at such a dangerous time’.3 Histrionic as the words may seem, they were probably true – indeed, the ‘strength and salvation’ phrase was the Swedes’ very definition of their monarchy. And it was certainly a dangerous time, with Swedish armies exposed in Germany and elsewhere, and the constant threat of the Catholic Poles taking power at home. It was no doubt this double peril which persuaded the senators’ now to support Christina’s succession, for they had much to gain by opposing it. For the noble families from which every senator was drawn, the three generations of the Vasa dynasty had meant, above all, a steady waning of power. Their own grandfathers had only grudgingly accepted the first Vasa King, Gustav I Eriksson. Though he had driven out the Danes by his energy and bravery, they had regarded him as an upstart with no very ancient lineage. Resentment had rankled into the next generation; Gustav’s son Karl IX had been determinedly opposed by the noble families. He had sought support instead from the common people, earning the nobles’ disdainful epithet of ‘the rabble King’. But the people’s support had allowed Karl to govern on his own terms. Power had drained from the noble families and collected around the crown. In 1600, the King had finally secured his position in the infamous ‘Bloodbath of Linköping’, where his five leading opponents, including four members of Sweden’s highest nobility, were beheaded in the town’s market square. It had required the extraordinary gifts and the no less extraordinary personality of Karl’s son, Gustav Adolf, to quiet the outrage of the noble families and persuade them to support their malefactor’s heir. But now the golden-haired King was gone, leaving no son to succeed him. His sole heir was female; the principle of heredity could at last be abandoned, and the nobles could reclaim their ancient right of electing their own grateful and manageable sovereign.
It says much for the senators’ patriotic spirit, or perhaps for their fear of Poles and popery, that they decided to forgo this right and give their support to a continuing Vasa dynasty. But, although the Senate stood unanimously behind the little ‘King’, she was not so quickly accepted by the men of the Riksdag, a socially more diverse group with differing views of the perils facing their homeland. The Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, comprised four Estates: the clergy, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants. It was among these last, as Gustav Adolf had feared, that opposition to a female ruler now proved strongest. The story is told that, in March 1633, when the Riksdag was assembled to affirm Christina’s succession to the throne, the marshal was interrupted in the middle of his address by a member of the peasants’ Estate, a man bearing the almost symbolically Swedish name of Lars Larsson. The peasants, it seemed, were not convinced by the senators’ arguments. ‘Who is this girl?’ Larsson demanded. ‘We don’t know her. We’ve never even seen her.’ Larsson was seconded by a growing number of the men, and the child was sent for. Happily for her, and for the senators, Christina’s resemblance to her father was clear. Larsson recognized at once the great King’s forehead, his blue eyes, and, starting out from the solemn little face, his long, distinctive nose. The succession was assured. Christina was unanimously acclaimed Elected Queen and Hereditary Princess of Sweden – ‘elected’ as a warning to the Polish Vasas that their hereditary rights would not be enough to claim a Swedish throne.
The little blonde-headed girl, just six years old, now bore the titles of Queen of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland, Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, the last owing to the Peace of Stolbova concluded with the Russians a few years before. If Christina’s own story is to be believed, she bore them all, even at this early age, with appropriate aplomb. She did not really understand what was happening, she writes, but nonetheless she was delighted to see all the great men of the land – among them the Count Palatine, Johann Kasimir – on their knees at her feet, kissing her hand. Her delight is understandable, for Johann Kasimir was her uncle, and she had already spent a good deal of time in his castle at Stegeborg, in his care, no doubt kindly, but also under his no doubt authoritative eye. Here was a reversal indeed.
Christina has left a description, addressed to God, of the first convening of the Riksdag in 1633, following her acclamation. Before all the men of the four Estates, she ascended the throne of her great father:
The people were amazed by my grand manner, playing the role of a Queen already. I was only little, but on the throne I had such an air, such a grand appearance, that it inspired respect and fear in everyone…You had planted on my forehead this mark of greatness…Everyone said, ‘How can it be that a child inspires such feelings in us after we have seen Gustav Adolf on the throne?’ They noticed that You had made me so grave and so serious that I wasn’t at all impatient, as is the usual way with children. I never went to sleep during all the long ceremonies and all the speeches I had to sit through. Other children have been seen going to sleep or crying on occasions like this, but I received all the different signs of homage like a grown-up person, who knows they are his due…I remember very well being told all this, and being very pleased with myself about it.4
Writing in her later years, Christina admitted that ‘it doesn’t take much to admire a child, and even less a child of the great Gustav, and perhaps flattery has exaggerated all this’. But in fact ‘all this’ reflects an idea that was to remain absolutely consistent throughout her life, the idea that sovereignty was something which she carried within herself. For Christina, kingship was a personal attribute which had nothing to do with the rights and regalia of monarchy. Her right to rule, she believed, was innate; she could not be divested of it. God Himself had planted ‘this mark of greatness’ on her forehead, and even in her childhood, it had inspired ‘respect and fear’ in all who saw it.
A large delegation of diplomats from Muscovy supposedly observed this inborn sovereignty at about the same time, and, we are told, it left them quaking in their fur-lined boots. The Russians had arrived to offer their condolences on the King’s death and to extend a formal greeting to the new monarch; they had also to ensure that the peace which Gustav Adolf had made with them at Stolbova, after eight years of fighting, would now be ratified.5 According to Christina’s ‘little story’, the regents were anxious that their six-year-old Queen would not be able to endure the rigours of the formal reception with the necessary gravitas:
I was such a child that they thought the Russians would frighten me with their strange clothes and their wild manners. They told me not to be frightened, and I was quite stung by this, in fact quite annoyed. Why should I be frightened, I said. Oh, they said, the Russians were dressed very differently from us. They had great big beards, and they were terrible-looking, and there were lots of them. As it happened, two of the regents themselves had big beards, and I laughed and said to them, Why should I be frightened by their beards? Haven’t you got big beards, too? ‘I’m not afraid of you, so why should I be afraid of them? Just give me the proper instructions, and leave it all to me.6
And when the Russians finally approached the little Queen, seated on her throne, looking ‘so assured and so majestic’, they felt ‘what all men feel when they approach something that is greater than they are’.
Closer to the truth, no doubt, is Christina’s subsequent remark that all her people were ‘overjoyed’ with her behaviour, admiring her delightedly ‘as one admires the little games of a beloved child’. Perhaps, despite her later, inverted interpretation of the event, she was herself awed into good behaviour by the strange-looking visitors and the solemnity of the occasion. Or perhaps she was induced to behave herself by the ‘magnificent presents’ which the Russians had brought for her, ‘according to their custom’. They were rewarded in any case with the ratification they sought, and were ‘sent off with the usual tokens’.
The ratification itself had been agreed by Christina’s regents, the ‘five great old men’ who had accepted the charge of government until their little Queen should reach her eighteenth birthday. Though it had been a mighty blow, Gustav Adolf’s death entailed no difficult transition for those who governed the country. During the King’s frequent absences on campaign, the regular business of government had been left in the hands of ten nominated men of the Senate, and now, despite their loss, they adapted easily to the new situation. The King himself had chosen five of them to form a regency in the event of his death, five noblemen who were also to hold the five great offices of state: Grand Chancellor, Grand Treasurer, Grand Marshal, Grand Admiral, and High Steward. The government was now dominated by what amounted to Sweden’s second royal family, the Oxenstiernas. The premier office of Grand Chancellor was held by Baron Axel Oxenstierna, the late King’s close friend and undoubtedly one of the ablest administrators of the age. The Grand Treasurer was the Chancellor’s cousin, Baron Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstierna, and the High Steward his younger brother, Baron Gabriel Gustavsson Oxenstierna.7 The office of Grand Marshal was held by one of Sweden’s finest generals, Count Jakob De la Gardie; to him Gustav Adolf had lost his former love, Ebba Brahe; their son Magnus was to prove a contentious figure during Christina’s own reign. The Grand Admiral was Christina’s uncle, Baron Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, illegitimate half-brother of the late King. On his broad soldier’s shoulders, and on those of his four fellow senators, the burden of government now lay.
Christina herself has left us a picture of her regents. Of Axel Oxenstierna, primus inter pares, she writes with respect and affection, indeed almost with awe: he was, she says, a man ‘of great capacity, who knew the strengths and weaknesses of every state in Europe, a wise and prudent man, immensely capable, and greathearted’.8 Tireless in the affairs of state, he nevertheless always found time to read, so continuing the studious habits of his youth. She notes that he was ‘as sober as a man can be, in a country and at a time when that virtue was unknown’, and adds that the Grand Chancellor was a great sleeper, by his own admission having spent the first sleepless night in his life after the death of his beloved friend and King. Christina describes him as an ambitious but loyal man, and incorruptible, if a little too ‘slow and phlegmatic’ for her taste, but she loved him, she says, ‘like a second father’.
The Chancellor’s cousin, Gabriel Bengtsson, Sweden’s Grand Treasurer, Christina regarded as ‘upstanding’, and ‘capable enough’ of his high office. Of the younger Oxenstierna brother, Gabriel Gustavsson, now High Steward, she writes that he was well liked and well spoken, but in the natural way of the Swedes, without the burden of much erudition, since he had ‘only a smattering of Latin’. But he was, she adds consolatorily, ‘a very good man’. The Grand Marshal, Jakob De la Gardie, is described as able and personally courageous; this pre-eminent soldier had distinguished himself in the Swedish campaigns against Poland and Russia. Christina notes that his personality was direct, even brusque, but that he liked to chat. He had been a favourite with her father, she says, and was always competing with Axel Oxenstierna for the King’s favour. In Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm, the Grand Admiral, ‘bastard brother of the late King and my uncle’, Christina recognized ‘a good, brave, old-fashioned man, a good Swede, bright enough’, but worn down by the twelve years he had spent in irons in a Polish prison, refusing to abjure his Lutheran faith for the despised Catholicism of his captors.9 He was ‘absolutely devoted to the house of Vasa,’ she writes, ‘and he loved me like his own child’.
For the next twelve years, the ‘five great old men’ were to rule in their little Queen’s name, though in fact Christina may not have been intended to rule at all, or at least not to rule alone. The steps which her father had taken to ensure her succession to the throne had been, as it were, an emergency precaution, anxiously put in place as he himself prepared to go back to the war from which he felt he would not return. The pious King, almost fearful of his extravagant successes in the sight of ‘a jealous God’, had had premonitions of his own death. The succession must be assured if civil war, or worse, were not to overtake his homeland. A long period of regency was certain, but in time the girl would marry; her husband would rule alongside her, or even in her place. Besides, Sweden’s name was now great in Europe; Gustav Adolf himself had made it so. A king’s daughter was an opportunity incarnate to forge new alliances, and shift the balance of power.
Negotiations for the little girl’s betrothal had consequently been in place for some time. The chosen prince was her own first cousin, Friedrich Wilhelm, her senior by seven years, the eldest son of the Elector of Brandenburg, and now, in the summer of 1633, thirteen years of age.10 The boy was Protestant, and seemed promising, and, crucially, he stood to inherit the duchy of Pomerania, whose long coasts were strategically important for both trade and warfare. Pomerania was now, insecurely, in Swedish hands – Gustav Adolf had concluded a treaty with its Archduke Boguslav XIV – but Boguslav’s heir was the Elector Georg Wilhelm, and in time the vital Pomeranian coasts would pass to his son, Friedrich Wilhelm. A marriage between Friedrich Wilhelm and Christina would thus ensure Sweden’s continuing access to them. It would make Brandenburg a safe neighbour and, moreover, would serve as a mighty cornerstone for the new bloc of Protestant powers once envisaged by Gustav Adolf, and now promoted by Christina’s regents. Above all, the marriage would give Sweden at last the almost mythical dominium maris baltici, the mastery of the Baltic Sea which had lain at the heart of Swedish policy for generations.
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