Welcome to my latest queer history blog post! If you enjoy this post, then you’ll love my Historical Fiction novels. Find out more about my projects here, and sign up for my newsletter here to stay in touch!
In every century, history produces a handful of individuals who somehow become more enigmatic as we draw closer to them. Queen – or rather “King” Christina – is undoubtedly in this special category. For European history enthusiasts, Christina of Sweden is an elusive figure who lived at the heart of a transformative age. She has long been an object of fascination for social and queer historians for these reasons and many more. Was Christina, the infamous “Girl King” who absconded her throne, a lesbian? Was she perhaps a transgender man in an era long before that term existed?
It is with tremendous pleasure that, at long last, I dive into the story of the possibly queer queen who, four years ago, plunged me into the vast depths of queer history. Christina and her astonishing tale have rattled around my brain ever since my first idea for a historical fiction novel possessed me. Although that manuscript is presently tucked away as I await others to become my debut, there is nothing standing in my way of sharing Christina’s story here. Perhaps my readers might fall in love with her, as I did, or simply be encouraged to learn more about this monarch who lived so far ahead of her time.
The Vasa Dynasty
Whether or not one accepts Christina as queer, she was undeniably born into a world wholly unsuited to her character and temperament. Or perhaps, as her biography would suggest, she simply refused to play by the rules of 17th century monarchy.
Christina would be the final ruler of her royal house, the Vasa dynasty, which governed Sweden at that country’s geopolitical apogee. Though the phrase “Swedish Empire” may confuse modern audiences, the might of the Vasas was there for all to see in the early 1600s – and aptly demonstrated by Christina’s illustrious father, King Gustav II Adolf.
The preceding 16th century had seen Europe cleaved in half by the fissures of the Protestant Reformation; as the great nations split among the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist faiths, religious warfare engulfed the continent. The most devastating, and enduring, of these conflicts was the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648). Over its duration, the Thirty Years War resulted in an estimated 8 million casualties – a staggering volume of losses which redefined both the religious and political framework for Europe thereafter.[1]
A key consequence was the emergence of victorious kingdoms and principalities which would become the powerbrokers of the following decades. The prospect of hegemony was one of many reasons why Europe’s ruling families were willing to put so much of their resources – and subjects’ lives – on the line in a seemingly interminable conflict. A war that began on religious grounds quickly devolved into a bloody struggle for power.
King Gustav II Adolf was among the most capable and ambitious monarchs of his age. He clearly saw the opportunity to take advantage of a war that Sweden in no way sparked, but could surely leverage as a fast-rising nation. The so-called “Swedish Phase” of the conflict began in 1630 as the King entered the war on the side of the northern, mostly German Protestants. Gustav II Adolf’s immediate and devastating battlefield successes have led military history scholars to laud him as the founder of modern combined arms warfare.[2] The 1631 Battle of Breitenfeld, which became the King’s most notorious and decisive victory, would cement his place as one of history’s most innovative warrior-rulers.[3]
Heir to the Throne
Gustav II Adolf appeared to ascend from victory to victory throughout his 21 years as Sweden’s ruler; the one crucial attribute he lacked for over a decade, however, was a male heir.
In 17th century Sweden, notably, there was no bar to female succession; indeed, a medieval queen Margaret I had capably served as Queen regnant of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden over a century before the Vasa dynasty had come to rule the latter. But despite marrying the charming Maria Eleanora of Brandenburg in 1620, the King’s marriage had yielded no living children. Instead, Gustav II Adolf and his queen endured multiple heartbreaking losses with still births and children who survived just months only to perish. These tragedies may have played a role in the Queen’s already deteriorating mental health, which would have devastating consequences for her eventual and only surviving child, Christina.[4]
By 1626, the Swedish government was desperate for an heir – any heir at all – to succeed the King who was now in his early 30s. Maria Eleanora was pregnant again that year, and hopes were high when her anticipated December delivery turned into active labor.
On December 8th, the Queen finally delivered a healthy baby in the dark of night; what happened next was the unwitting opening salvo to Christina’s life defined by gender nonconformance. The ecstatic midwives declared the crying newborn to be the longed-for son and heir – the prince of all their collective dreams – as they examined an infant obscured by its own amniotic sac and possibly lanugo (a condition which causes a newborn to carry a layer of fine hair throughout their body). It was only later, after the royal parents had been informed of their wonderful news, that a closer examination revealed the infant was in fact a baby girl. Her illustrious father reportedly took the updated news in stride, predicting that “she will be clever, for she has deceived us all.”[5]
This accidental misidentification was most likely just that: an accident brought on by over-eager midwives who did not quite “look before they leaped” as the proverb goes. But the incident was the beginning of a rumor mill which would follow Christina for the remainder of her life – the suggestion that she was what we might today refer to as “intersex” and in her era would have been perceived as hermaphroditism. To be sure, Christina’s personality, behavior and preferences would buoy the whispers about her anatomical gender and gender identity (especially since those terms were not distinct in the 17th century in the way they are more fully understood today).
For the first few years of her life, however, Christina proved to be an intelligent and boisterous little girl who was adored by her father – if much less so by her deeply unwell mother. Queen Maria Eleanora, for her part, virulently rejected Christina upon learning of the midwives’ mistake, even referring to her as an ugly and undesirable baby. Throughout Christina’s life, her mother would be a thorn in her crown, alternating between cold indifference and smothering excess.[6]
Fortunately for the young princess, her larger-than-life sire was keenly interested in her development and well-being. Though often absent on foreign battlefields, the King appeared to show his daughter a natural love which was far from guaranteed among European royalty at the time. Christina was trained to bear all the attributes of a prince, both physical and intellectual, including riding and hunting – in addition to the finest classical education available.[7] As the heir-presumptive, who would one day be declared “King” per her father’s express wishes, these decisions eminently suited her. Christina herself would later write, “my inclinations were wonderfully in agreement with [the King’s] intentions. I had an aversion and invincible antipathy to all that women are and say.”[8]
Coming of Age
Alas, King Gustav II Adolf would not be a benevolent presence in his daughter’s life for very long. Always courageous, the king found himself in the thick of battle at Lützen in 1632 when his martial luck ran dry at last. Reportedly isolated and then dragged from his mount, the king was killed by the soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire amid the onslaught. In an instant, the government of Sweden fell to the shoulders of a not-yet six-year-old girl, her minority council and her shaken royal relations.
The death of her father would be the first defining moment of Queen Christina’s life. For over a decade thereafter, the little ruler would endure constant direction, oversight and reprimand from those authority figures around her – her grieving mother, her beloved aunt Princess Catherine, her ambitious uncles and cousins, and her father’s chief minister, Count Axel Oxenstierna. We can imagine a suffocating existence for the independent, sparky and free-thinking girl who was nevertheless committed to bear the mantle laid upon her by quirk of fate.
None of this was made easier by her mother, whose increasingly erratic behavior threatened both Christina’s mental well-being and the security of the government itself. Maria Eleanora may have been suffering from acute disorders by the time of her daughter’s minority rule. Whatever the cause, court records suggest that she cruelly abused her surviving child, forcing her to endure long hours of prayer beside her father’s decaying body and requiring that they bed together while the late King’s embalmed heart was strung overhead.[9]
All of this was worrying enough to the little Queen’s councilors, but Maria Eleanora’s forays into arranging an intolerable Danish marriage for her daughter were far worse. Maria Eleanora lost all parental rights to Christina in 1636, and became a flitting, dubious presence in the Queen’s life thereafter.[10] It is probable that her horrifying early experiences with her mother influenced Christina’s views on femininity, motherhood, and women more broadly. But Christina’s views on other women, however, were not uniform. As time would prove, there were some ladies that Christina loved quite tenderly.
The Girl King
Christina attained her majority – her independent rule as monarch – upon reaching eighteen years of age in 1644. By then, she had long regularly attended council and diplomatic meetings, and even established her own distinct view of international and domestic policy.[11] Marguerite Gowen writes, “Christina also had dreams of empire – but it was an empire founded not upon war and destruction. She dreamed that Stockholm should be the first capital of Europe with its voice a deciding factor in the councils of Europe. She set about creating an empire peacefully.”[12]
Sources concur that Christina abhorred warfare and viewed the draining of Sweden’s coffers in the interminable Thirty Years War as a distraction from the public works and investment needed to make her country the envy of the world. As such, one of her first acts as Queen was to demand a final peace treaty – once and for all – to end the religious wars she inherited, reversing the policy of her chief advisor Oxenstierna.[13] Her iron determination to end the conflict proved a key thumb on the scale, overcoming the recalcitrant negotiators of the various European powers to produce the Peace of Westphalia at last.
The young woman that emerged from her painful, tragic childhood in 1644 was a formidable ruler indeed: a skilled horsewoman and a fine shot, she was also an intellectual with several languages at her command and a deep interest in history, literature, religion, philosophy as well as mathematics and the sciences. Deborah Compte notes, “[h]er astounding intellectual gifts and independence of thought made her the talk of Europe.”[14] Christina surrounded herself with the intelligentsia of her day, even bringing the renowned scholar René Descartes to serve at her court in order that he might found a Swedish Academy of scholars to rival those of mainland Europe.[15] Little wonder, then, that the newly empowered queen had little patience for those older, more cautious voices who were determined to hold her back from her cosmopolitan ambitions. Louis Crompton foreshadows Christina’s story thusly: “[s]he knew too much to rule Sweden.”[16]
But her willingness to circumvent her own advisors soon proved to be among the many unconventional aspects of her rule. Christina didn’t simply adopt the ceremonial title of “King”; she seemed intent to bear out its masculine connotation in every aspect of her life. From childhood, Christina was known to attire herself in men’s trousers and doublets, preferring boots and riding gloves to the delicate laces and glossy pearls which adorned the wealthy noblewomen of her entourage.[17] She disdained any notion of femininity in her appearance even when in a lady’s conventional attire. She reportedly spent as little time as possible at her toilette and has been described as “utterly without personal vanity”.[18]
Diplomats who visited the Queen emphasized her ambiguous gender expression. A Spanish priest noted of her that “there is nothing feminine about her except her sex,” while an Englishman reported “it [is] believed that nature was mistaken in her, and that she was intended for a man.”[19] Her close friend, Cardinal Decio Azzolino, would write of her decades later that “everyone regards the queen as a man already, indeed as better than any man.”[20]
But how did the so-called “Girl King”, as her courtiers whispered around her, react to such musings? By all accounts, rumors of her gender androgyny or outright masculinity were music to her ears. After all, Christina had no aspirations for the standards of femininity or the social expectations of the gender to which she had been (belatedly) assigned at birth. Generally, though with key exceptions, Christina seems to have disdained both women and womanhood as a concept and mode of expression. In her later years in Rome, for example, Christina was reputed to keep her retinues of female servants to the minimum acceptable level for a woman of royal status. She preferred those she did employ to remain single and unwedded and was viscerally repulsed by pregnancy and pregnant ladies among her staff.[21]
Her behavior toward her Swedish ladies as a younger woman was in line with this pattern. On closer examination, however, it was perhaps a certain genre of lady that Christina found so uninspiring. Women like her mother who bore the characteristics that Christina (fairly or not) found most contemptable: emotional, frivolous, immature, impetuous and rash. Christina’s later writings imply that she believed the bulk of women susceptible to these traits, and thus largely inferior to the men around her. It would be tempting to chalk up these attitudes to internalized misogyny, and the general tenor of opinion toward “the fairer sex” prevalent in 17th century Europe. While valid perspectives, Christina’s views on femininity are perhaps most intriguing within the context of her own debatable gender identity.
But Christina’s story reveals there were indeed women who she regarded highly as intellectual and intimate partners. One in particular may have been the love of Christina’s life, and would give rise to whispers of lesbianism at her court.
“My Beautiful One”
The constant battle which defined Christina’s early years as an independent monarch was not fought on some overseas field, but rather at her council of state. The unwed Queen faced enormous pressure throughout her teenage and young adult years to take a husband and, God willing, produce new heirs to the Swedish throne. Like Queen Elizabeth of England before her, Christina’s singular rule without a male consort struck her nobility as incomplete and wanting. Also like the Virgin Queen, Christina chafed under this miserable pressure and resisted her advisors demands with all her considerable fortitude.
In her own words, Christina rejected the married state and especially the notion of physical intimacy with men which she derided as being used “like a peasant uses his fields.”[22] Her distaste applied not only to any suitable foreigner, but also to men within her own family she had known for years. The top candidate for her hand was her royal cousin Karl Gustav, to whom she would eventually yield her throne in 1654. Karl Gustav had been among her childhood friends and, by all accounts, genuinely loved the Queen; the pair may have even been engaged before Christina reached her majority, and Christina seems to have returned his affection with a sororal, and strictly platonic, love.
But their union was not to be: when Christina named her cousin as her heir (rather than her fiancé) ahead of her coronation, her fretful advisors remonstrated with her to no avail. She informed them, in devastatingly plain terms:
“It is impossible for me to marry. I am absolutely certain about it. I do not intend to give you reasons. My character is simply not suited to marriage. I have prayed God fervently that my inclination might change, but I simply cannot marry.”[23]
Christina was, by this time, entering her mid-20s and had attained a clear, unwavering understanding of her own mind and character. But self-acceptance was not the only factor at play as Christina swatted her ministers away over this issue. Just a few years earlier, a new star had entered Christina’s orbit: a fair-haired, gentle and beautiful young noblewoman named Ebba Sparre.
Ebba’s relationship to Christina – namely, the extent of the intimacy they enjoyed together – has been a subject of controversy for decades and is unlikely to ever be fully clarified.[24] What is undisputed is that they were unusually close and their bond outlasted Christina’s eventual exile from Sweden until Ebba’s death years later. Christina lauded Ebba as “la belle Comtesse” and introduced her to an English ambassador as her “bedfellow.”[25] Christina would toy with this same ambassador by commenting that Ebba’s mind was “as beautiful as her outside.”[26] None of this is proof of a sexual relationship, but Christina’s letters from Italy in her later years confirm profound intimacy:
“How happy I would be if I could only see you, Belle, but though I will always love you, I can never see you, and so I can never be happy. I am yours as much as I ever was…Can it be that you still remember me? And am I as dear to you as I used to be? Do you still love me more than anyone else in the world…Let me believe it is still so. Leave me the comfort of your love, and do not let time or my absence diminish it. Adieu, Belle, adieu. I kiss you a million times.”
Such missives make categorizing this relationship as simply “close friendship” rather taxing for even the most conservative imagination. Moreover (as the aroace writing this post can attest) queerness cannot and should not be confined only to physical, sexual expressions. There is a compelling argument that Christina and Ebba were indeed in love, and that love can appropriately be characterized as a lesbian relationship, even if the exact expressions of that relationship are lost to time. Despite Ebba’s own (unhappy) marriage in 1653 and the queen’s eventual exile, their emotional affair at least remained undiluted by time or distance.
Importantly, viewing this relationship as a lesbian one is not a modern concoction borne out of feverish revisionism. Rumors of Christina’s inclinations to this effect swirled around her for most of her adult life. A Danish diplomat wrote that the queen had “hidden the beautiful Ebba Sparre in her bed and associated with her in a special way.”[27] Sarah Waters adds that “[t]here was certainly gossip about Christina’s relations with women in her own day, identifying her as the aristocratic ‘tribade’ who…was providing a model for female same-sex desire in satirical representation of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.”[28]
Some of this, Waters acknowledges, may have been intended as political poison to disrepute the queen in foreign courts. But other scholars contend that Christina “did nothing to quelch the little flames” of rumor surrounding her sexuality.[29] As with her androgynous gender expression, Christina cared little for the innuendo and may have even reveled in it – all to the good, perhaps, if it helped her push off any notion of a marital relationship.
Second Act?
By the 1650s, however, it became clear to the Queen that (however much happiness she derived from her relationship with Ebba) the matter of marriage and succession would prove unrelenting so long as she held the throne. The exact reasons for Christina’s abdication are among the many facets of her life which defy clarity: she herself claimed that she could no longer bear the burden of rule, especially as a female, though this explanation may well have been a diversion from a new calling toward Catholicism (a faith officially banned her in Lutheran homeland).
More succinctly, the queen was sick and tired of being a monarch: theoretically clothed in vast power, but endlessly impoverished from her father’s wars and stymied at every turn in her vision for Sweden. Combining all of this with her antipathy toward marriage, and perhaps desperate to live a freer life uncontained by the boundaries set upon royals, she saw a singular pathway out of her situation: abdication.
She finally cut the Gordian knot in the summer of 1654. Donning a masculine costume and with a new haircut to complete the look, she rode post-haste out of her former country and embarked on a vast European tour toward Rome, Italy.[30] Once there, she made a triumphal entry into the Eternal City and began her second act in life as an officially converted Roman Catholic. Christina would live most of the remainder of her life along the Mediterranean, marked by a handful of visits back to her home country and the occasional tour in France and Germany.
Yet the abdicated Queen, as Sarah Waters writes, maintained her infamous “resistance to categorization, her tendency, in fact, to cross category, whether national, religious, sexual or sartorial.”[31] In other words, Christina proved as incorrigible, as ungovernable, to her new Italian papal hosts (who initially welcomed her as a propaganda coup for Catholicism) as she had been to her Swedish ministers. Throughout the second half of her life, Christina continued to build her reputation as an intellectual and sponsor of the arts and sciences. Among her preoccupations, she dabbled in alchemy and would go on to found a theatre in Rome.
She also did her best to maintain the blaze of rumor which perpetually surrounded her – including an apparently close relationship (an affair?) with her favored Cardinal Decio Azzolino. These rumors persisted among other talk of affairs with other ladies in France and Italy.[32] Christina’s demeanor also reportedly changed as she settled further into her retired life – she dressed, spoke and accorded herself with an even less feminine bearing than she had in Sweden. One shocked account of the queen around her sixtieth birthday describes her thus: “Her complexion and voice and face are those of a man…You will hardly believe her clothes: a man’s jacket, in black satin, reaching to her knees and buttoned all the way down; a very short black skirt, and men’s shoes.”[33] It was not an uncommon sight to see the queen, breeches and all, riding horseback with little else but a hat as adornment.
Christina continued to be a strange, surprising character who confounded the rules and norms of her day – perhaps even our day as well. She took it all in stride: among her reputed maxims compiled by her friends and associates after her death, there is a curious inclusion: “Men always eye with disapprobation the things they are unable to do.”[34]
Identity?
Where does all of this leave us as we consider the range of categories that Christina’s arguable queerness might fall into? Is the question important, or do distinct definitions matter at all?
The question of sexual orientation is one starting point, though one where it is nearly impossible to draw definitive conclusions. There is most obviously the view that Christina was a lesbian; more specifically in the parlance of her age, she may have been a “tribade” – a masculine woman who took on masculine roles in romantic intimacy.
Some scholarship suggests that Christina might be better understood as bisexual. Her long relationship with the aforementioned Cardinal Azzolino might be compared to her bond with Ebba – the latter defining the first half of her life, and the former defining the second. During her Roman years, ribald whispers and even satirical drawings outright portrayed her relationship with Azzolino as a sexual one. Given Christina’s stated distaste for sexual intimacy with men, however, another possibility is that her relationship with Azzolino represented bi- or pan-romantic orientations, but not necessary a sexual one.
What about asexuality? It could be argued that Christina viewed sexual consummation of any variety as undesirable, and no proof exists that she ever enjoyed any sexual relationship at all. Asexuality, moreover, would not preclude wide-ranging romantic orientations or queerplatonic affairs. Perhaps, when referring to her unchanging “inclinations” she meant a revulsion toward sexuality in general. This orientation might also explain why she found meaningful connections with most women (whose lives were necessarily defined by marriage and romantic/sexual preoccupation in this period) so difficult.
The matter of gender identity is somehow simpler, but more difficult, at the same time. The evidence that Christina might have been physically intersex is thin. A 1965 exhumation of her remains attempted genetic analysis of the queen, which was inconclusive but provided no evidence to indicate Christina did not have typical female genetic markers. Christina was reported to have even joked about her supposed hermaphroditism during her own lifetime, and those close to her do not seem to have ever suggested that the queen was deliberately hiding any unusual physical traits.[35]
What those sources have suggested, however, is that Christina’s gender identity (a wholly distinct matter from that of being intersex) is more debatable. It bears emphasis here that Christina herself repeatedly referred to herself as a woman – admittedly with distinct bitterness and despair over the fact. For that reason, I have chosen to refer to her with she/her pronouns in deference to how the Queen (as best as the historical record can demonstrate) described herself.
That said, Christina lived three hundred years before the earliest phrases referencing transgender and nonbinary people entered any of the (several) languages she spoke. It is thus a fascinating historical question to ponder, if one where caution and prudence are necessary: had Christina lived today, would she have connected to or even identified with the trans+ or nonbinary communities?
The possibility of transmasculinity – that Christina was assigned female at birth but was perhaps a transgender man – is especially intriguing if far from conclusive. By her own admission, she wrestled with a negative perception of her gender, saw herself as wholly distinct from other women, resented and was repulsed by femininity. Her particular disgust for pregnancy, and refusal to contemplate it, might also be read as an indication of discomfort with her own body and its “gendered” functions which repelled her. Nevertheless, while these experiences may be familiar to some transgender people, they are also entirely possible to experience as a cisgender woman (a category where variance of gender identity and expression is also well-documented within the queer community).
In the end, these questions are probably unanswerable. Though we cannot draw any definitive conclusions about who Christina was and her potential identities from a modern lens, it does seem reasonable to characterize her as “queer” in some capacity. As this discussion hopefully elucidates – Christina confused and confounded the barriers between sexes and genders which were the societal foundation of her era. Pushing her into a neatly labeled box is thus, and will likely be forever, beside the point.
The Queen in the Basilica
Queen Christina ultimately passed away in 1689 at age 63, ending her dynamic life in the very building where she was confirmed in the Catholic faith in 1655: St. Peter’s Basilica. Her tomb remains there for viewing today in the right nave with an honorary monument. The internment of the renegade queen, and arguably a queer icon for the ages, within St. Peter’s Basilica is among history’s wonderful unintended ironies.
However one interprets her legacy or potential identities during her lifetime, Christina in many ways still represents an inspirational figure for the modern queer community. She was a ruler who relinquished power in favor of her freedom, a rebel who defied the norms of her age with alacrity and loved others with abandon. Her confusing and chaotic biography points to an individual who refused to be ruled – a true monarch at heart – by the demands or expectations of those who attempted to define her throughout her long life.
Few might consider Christina a hero – but she is heroic nevertheless.
[1] History.com Editors, “Thirty Years’ War,” updated August 21, 2018, History, https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/thirty-years-war.
[2] Dennis K Redmond, “Gustavus Adolphus: Father of Combined Arms Warfare,” USAWC Strategy Research Project, April 10, 2000, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA378251.pdf.
[3] Issac Blatter, “Gustavus Adolphus: Lion of the North,” Military Heritage (Volume 3, Issue 1), August 2001, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/issue/military-heritage-august-2001-issue/.
[4] Veronica Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric (HarperCollins Publishers; New York), 2004, pg. 16. *Author’s Note: while this book is among the more comprehensive English language biographies of Queen Christina, I strongly recommend those interested to review other resources prior to this one for research purposes. Broadly, this biography offers a strangely harsh and unflattering portrait of the Queen; in particular, its discussion of sexual and gender identity in relation to the central figure are relatively limited. These are of course my own opinions, and other researchers may disagree.
[5] Ibid, pg. 19.
[6] Sophie Strid, “Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg – A Queen on the loose,” History of Royal Women, November 25, 2017, https://www.historyofroyalwomen.com/maria-eleonora-of-brandenburg/maria-eleonora-brandenburg-queen-loose2/
[7] Louis Crompton, “Queen Christina” in Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2003), pg. 355.
[8] Ibid, pg. 355.
[9] Buckley, pg. 34.
[10] Strid, ibid.
[11] Marguerite Horan Gowen, “CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia (Volume 53, Issue 3), 1942, pg. 179 – 181, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44209438.
[12] Ibid, pg. 179.
[13] Crompton, pg. 356.
[14] Deborah Compte, “Two Portraits of a Queen: Calderón and the Enigmatic Christina of Sweden,” Hispanic Journal (Volume 27, no. 1), 2006, pg. 49, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44284801.
[15] Buckley, pg. 114.
[16] Crompton, pg. 355.
[17] Gowen, pg. 57.
[18] Una Birch, “Introduction”, Maxims of a Queen, Christina of Sweden (1626 – 89), (Forgotten Books, 2012).
[19] Crompton, pg. 357.
[20][20][20] Buckley, pg. 287.
[21] Buckley, pg. 261.
[22] Ibid, pg. 130.
[23] Ibid, pg. 119.
[24] Sarah Waters, “‘A Girton Girl on a Throne’: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906-1933,” Feminist Review, no. 46 (1994), pg. 43, https://doi.org/10.2307/1395418.
[25] Compton, pg. 358.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid, pg. 359.
[28] Waters, pg. 43.
[29] Buckley, pg. 72.
[30] Waters, pg. 42.
[31] Ibid, pg. 43.
[32] Ibid. Notably, these rumors are far less substantiated than Christina’s relationship with Ebba, but may indicate a pattern of interest.
[33] Buckley, pg. 309.
[34] Maxims of a Queen, Christina of Sweden (1626 – 89), (Forgotten Books, 2012), pg. 25.
[35] Buckley, pg. 304.