Queen Christina 1993

Queen Christina Vasa of Sweden is a person who simply deserves a good biopic. It is true that she fails to meet the criteria that usually earn the "great people" of history a film treatment. Politically speaking she was almost a non-entity even though she was born a monarch, her reign one dull gap between Sweden's time as one of the leading Protestant nations in the Thirty Years' War and the era of Swedish dominance that overshadowed northern European history in the late 1600s. Even though she was an accomplished polyglot academic, Christina also has no scientific discoveries or philosophical breakthroughs or groundbreaking writings or translations to offer up, just her correspondences with the scholarly superstars of her time like Rene Descartes, Anne Le Fevre Dacier, and Pierre Gassendi.

All that aside, Christina's life still holds all the raw materials for an engaging book. She swore, savored dirty jokes, routinely wore a mix of women's and men's clothing, traveled extensively, and once mortified Paris' blue bloods by flinging her legs over the armrests of her chair at a theatrical performance. Then there are her somewhat mysterious reasons for abdicating her throne and converting from Lutheranism, the religion her father died to uphold, to Catholicism, which have given fuel for romantic speculations in this film and The Abdication from 1972. Even after her abdication, she had other adventures, such as a disastrous but thrilling bid to become the Queen of Naples at Spain's expense. Finally there's Christina's modern reputation as one of very few prominent lesbians in European history which, even if one does not agree, at least makes for interesting arguments and speculations one way or another. So how does the film stand up?

Well, Margaret Goldsmith's biography, which came out the same year as the film, may have felt free even in 1933 with discussing Queen Christina's possible homosexuality, but the film can take no such liberties. It does dance around the subject; not by even hinting that Christina might have certain...inclinations, but by having a servant react with horror when he sees Christina in drag and Antonio in the same bed. Certainly a film made even just before the Hayes Code reached its apex of strictness could not go having Greta Garbo overtly play a lesbian who doesn't end the film dead or institutionalized (for one thing, where would that leave the requisite male lead?). Nonetheless people unfamiliar with films from the era, and carrying the unfair assumption that any film made before the advent of Betty Friedan must automatically be suspected as misogynist or at least "problematic", will be surprised at how much screen time is given to Christina's escapades in drag and in how independent and aggressive her character is (she even has non-marital intercourse, although the mostly implied kind).

So it's one of those historical films that's worth watching, simply because it actually is a very good film. I'd go so far as to say that its reputation as one of Greta Garbo's best is far from undeserved. As far as the history goes...well, it does make an effort to hit the "big points" and for the most part it tries to catch something of Christina's personality, but honestly attributing her decision to abdicate to a man is fairly insulting, even if it does set up one of the most memorable and tragic endings in American cinematic history. On that note...

History vs. Queen Christina

What was the Thirty Years' War?

To cut to the heart of it, the Thirty Years' War was the most devastating continent-wide war Europe had known until the World Wars. Arguably it was brought about by all the pressure building up since the Reformation finally coming to a full boil. Without getting into the daunting and operatic series of causes and circumstances, the spark was the largely Protestant country of Bohemia showing their dislike for the staunchly Catholic dynasty that ruled over them, the Hapsburgs, by throwing their agents out of a window and onto a pile of horse manure. Matters escalated even more when the Bohemians tried to prop up a Protestant king and when their Austrian Hapsburg overlords reacted by calling in the help of their cousin, King Felipe IV of Spain.

When all was said and done - and some historians estimate that up to 30 percent of Germany's population was wiped out - the Thirty Years' War completely rearranged the game for all the European nations. Why is this so important for Christina's story? Well, by the time she came to the throne her father, Gustav II, had brought Sweden out of the War as the leading power in northern Europe, a position it kept up into the eighteenth century.

Did Christina go about dressed in male clothing?

Well, the movie naturally exaggerates this part - as far as we know Christina never tried to actually pass herself off as a man - but it is true that Christina expressed strikingly masculine mannerisms and characteristics. This reflected in her costume choices. While using today's lingo she didn't really go out in drag, there are eyewitness accounts that state that she wore clothes that mixed in traditional women's clothes with fashion choices that were associated with men.

Who is this Prince Charles?

Charles Gustav was Christina's cousin and the next in line to the throne. Showing the sort of incestual practicality European royal dynasties were so engaged in, it was hoped - even planned that Charles wound marry Christina. However, even though she did have a childish kind of romance with him when they were both very young, Christina had an aversion to marriage, which may have been caused by her attraction to women, although she was, like so many women who are powerful and unattached, suspected of having affairs with men. At least, when Christina abdicated, she made sure Charles would succeed her without any hitch.

Was she really indifferent to the idea of religious war? And did she really push to get Sweden out of the Thirty Years War?

Christina was probably not an agnostic, a deist, or an atheist (although, of course, at the time for a public figure like her it would have been practically impossible to express such viewpoints outside highly intimate conversations), but she was known for her skepticism and irreverence. Sermons bored her, she openly bashed both Catholic and Protestant religious institutions, and did not believe in Hell. Perhaps the best indication of her attitudes, though, is the fact that she went from being the daughter of the hero of the Protestant cause to a Catholic convert, possibly just because she wanted to live in Rome, which is where she spent the latter years of her life.

As for the Thirty Years' War, she was strongly against continuing Sweden's involvement from the moment she reached her majority, going against even the ideas of her minister and political mentor, Johan Oxenstierna. As is often the case with Hollywood historical movies, the script puts lofty ideological sentiments in Christina's mouth. The fact was that Sweden had been in the war for over two decades and the toll on the economy and the general populace was showing. Of course, there might very well have been a personal motive - after all, it was the war the father she barely knew died fighting in, leaving her with a mentally ill mother who resented her - but it's not quite true that Christina opposed the war just on principle.

So she liked to get up early just to read?

Oh yes. According to court accounts, Christina apparently only slept four to five hours every night, since she wanted to spend so much time on state work and her scholarly pursuits.

There's actually a funny, if slightly depressing, anecdote involving Christina's Spartan habits and the death of one of the most influential intellectuals in the history of Western thought. Throughout her life Christina enjoyed having lengthy correspondences with all the top thinkers of Western and Central Europe, and while she was still queen she struck one up with Descartes. By 1649, Christina invited Descartes to work as her tutor in Stockholm. Unfortunately, Descartes, who had health problems, was less than prepared for Scandinavian weather or for the fact that Christina wanted Descartes to meet with her almost daily at five AM. Apparently he died from pneumonia. Worse still, since he died a Catholic in a Protestant country, he was buried in a graveyard intended for unbaptized infants. Some years later, French agents secretly dug up his remains in the middle of the night and transported them to France, where he was given a proper Catholic burial at a Parisian church. His memorial marker still stands in Sweden, at the Church of Adolf Frederick in Stockholm.

So I take it in real life Ebba Sparre was possibly more than Christina's handmaiden and confidant?

Oh yes. Putting aside the whole pervasive (and, in my opinion, absurd, pointless, and historically inaccurate) argument that you can't even talk about people being homosexual or queer or some equivalent before 1870 or thereabouts, Christina was almost certainly exclusively interested sexually in her own sex - and some of the people who were in a position to know were not ignorant of the fact. The evidence from her contemporaries are various, but perhaps the most blunt description comes from a Danish envoy who once wrote that Christina had "hidden the beautiful Ebba Sparre in her bed and associated with her in a special way."

Was the Lord Chancellor aiming to marry Queen Christina?

Not at all, he's a stock villain shoved into the film. Unless I overlooked something, he's not based on an actual historical actor. Besides, by this point in history it wasn't that easy for someone who didn't carry royal credentials to marry the only daughter of a king, especially one who happened to be queen regnant.

Did Christina's abdication really come as a surprise? And was there a great opposition to it?

It wasn't a surprise, exactly; a political leader can't make a decision of this magnitude without something leaking out, especially in seventeenth-century European courts. But from eyewitness accounts her formal abdication was a dramatic scene. People who were present loudly wept and she had to remove her crown herself because no one would do it.

I guess Christina didn't abdicate her throne just for a man...?

Nope. Of course Christina's motives were known only to herself, much less to the historical record, and knowing human nature they probably weren't known entirely even to her. Based on Christina's extensive traveling, though, her reasons mostly boiled down to the desire for freedom and to see the world, motives that are wholly understandable.