Review: Christina, Queen of Sweden by Veronica Buckley

Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric
by Veronica Buckley
512pp, Fourth Estate, £20

Christina, Queen of the Goths, Vandals and Swedes, liked to dabble. Dabbling, in fact, defined her strange, directionless life. Intellectually curious, she dabbled about in the studies of dance and music, history, astronomy and astrology. Sexually ambiguous, she dabbled - it was endlessly rumoured - in lesbianism. She dabbled in politics, she dabbled in philosophy; she invited a reluctant Descartes to journey to her frozen court, where he swiftly died of influenza. She dabbled in Catholicism, then in monarchy, then in murder, and when there was nothing else in which to dabble she settled down in her Roman villa and began to dabble in her garden.

The only child of Gustav Adolf, "the most romantic figure in Sweden's history", in 1632, aged five, Christina inherited both the crown and her father's debilitating legacy. She spent her life, Veronica Buckley argues, doing battle with both the legendary king and her emotionally frail mother, who together defined the extremes of masculinity and femininity which Christina - who was thought, when she was born, to be a boy - would defy. Christina was in no doubt that she had inherited greatness, but that her greatness would not blossom in the sterile court of Stockholm. By the time she was 27, bored with the black skies and icy wastes of Sweden's coldest century, the business of government, the Lutheran church, and prospect of marriage, she gave up the throne to her cousin, kicked up her heels and headed for the Vatican. "Free at last!" she exclaimed on the day of her abdication (in a voice that had become notably deeper), and she cut off her hair and donned the men's shoes and the sword she would now wear on a regular basis.

Off she then went, this tiny, imperious woman, on a journey through war-torn Europe, ready to embrace the wider world. Her appearance and behaviour never ceased to cause a stir. Astride her horse, with one shoulder lower than the other, her hands filthy and her face, above the face-cream, powdered with dirt from the road, she sported a heavy black wig "piled high in the front", a buffalo-hide collar, a bodice looking like a man's vest and a shirt, an observer noted, "showing all the way round between it and her skirt".

Stopping in Hamburg, she twice returned from her frolics so late that the city gates had to be opened for her; when introduced to the Emperor's envoy she pulled a short skirt up over her male attire. Such freedom, Christina felt, must be introduced to England, and what better way than for Oliver Cromwell to turn Catholic and hand the country over to the Pope? The Pope could then return it to Cromwell and crown him King Oliver I. Clearly on a roll, Christina decided that her own next vocation was to be Queen of Naples, and, having extricated herself from one throne, she spent the next stage of her life fruitlessly plotting how to get another. Her title as Queen of Sweden, she insisted, should remain intact, as should her absolute authority over her subjects. And to this end, while she was a guest of the French king at Fontainebleau, she had a courtier, by whom she believed she had been betrayed, brutally murdered.

After years of wandering and scheming, Christina eventually settled in a villa outside Rome, where she hung her pictures, ate chestnuts, grew fat, did charitable works and compared notes on gout and teeth with Azzolino, the cardinal she had loved for the best part of her adult life. Their relationship, and the belief in her innate majesty, were the only areas in which she revealed any tenacity.

Buckley's skill, in her wonderfully rich and poignant book, lies in exploring how this wild eccentric, armed with an over-riding sense of her own uniqueness and supported by all the privileges of her rank, managed to live, in the end, a life so ordinary. Fired with a desire for adventure, for travel, for thought, for supremacy on the scale of her father, Christina achieved nothing save a reputation for battiness. Even her memoirs were left unfinished, which seems an appropriate image for a self so unfulfilled.

Christina emerges as a woman not big or mature enough to meet the requirements of her own imagination. She gave up her throne less because she wanted more out of life than because, like the best of us, she needed to get away from home. But in not giving up her sense of majesty she ended up taking that home, and all its fantasies and restrictions, with her. The Catholicism for which she had supposedly sacrificed so much remained nothing more than a vague interest; penniless and countryless, she clung to the end to an illusion of power. As a biographical study of the fear of freedom, Queen Christina is peerless.

· Frances Wilson's The Courtesan's Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King is published by Faber.