Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/206

 by the Dauphin of France; but no solicitatious could induce her to forfeit her honour; and it is said that the prince at last married her privately, and, by her influence, was reformed, and regained the affections of the king. After his death, in 1711, she retired to obscurity, and died in 1744, universally respected.

CHRISTINA, QUEEN OF SWEDEN, of the great Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and of Maria Eleonora of Brandenburgh, was born December 18th., 1626. Her father was very fond of her, and carried her about with him in all his journeys. When she was about two years old she was taken to Calmar, the governor of which hesitated, on her account, whether to give the king the usual salute, but Gustavus exclaimed, "Fire! the girl is a soldier's daughter, and should be accustomed to it betimes." The noise delighted the princess, who clapped her hands, and, in her infantile language, cried, "More, more!" showing thus early her peculiarly bold and masculine turn of mind.

Her father died in 1633, and Christina, a girl of seven years old, was placed upon the throne, and even at that early age she appeared to be conscious of her high destiny, and in all trying circumstances conducted herself with great firmness and dignity.

The queen-mother was a woman of weak judgment and capricious temper, and her injudicious management of the young Christina was doubtless the first cause of her dislike for her own sex, which was farther increased by the manner of her education. She early displayed an "antipathy," to use her own words, "to all that women do and say;" but she was an excellent classical scholar, admired the Greeks and Romans, and all the heroes of antiquity, particularly Homer and Alexander the Great. At the age of fourteen, she read Thucydides in the original; she rode and hunted, and harangued the senate, and dictated to her ministers. But in the gentler graces and virtues of her own sex she was deficient. She grew up self-willed, arrogant, and impatient; and yet was flattered because she was a queen. She understood this, and observed that "Princesses are flattered even in their cradles; men fear their memory as well as their power; they handle them timidly, as they do young lions, who can only scratch now, but may hereafter bite and devour."

When Christina had assumed the reins of government, in 1644, many of the most distinguished kings and princes of Europe aspired to her hand; but she uniformly rejected all their proposals, and caused one of her suitors, her cousin Charles Gustavus, to be appointed her successor. Her love of independence and impatience of control had exhibited themselves from childhood in a distaste to marriage. "Do not," said she to the states, "compel me to make a choice: should I bear a son, it is equally probable that he might prove a Nero as an Augustus."

Christina had an opportunity to display her magnanimity in the early part of her reign. While she was engaged in her devotions in the chapel of the castle at Stockholm, a lunatic rushed through the crowd, and attempted to stab her with a knife. He was seized, and Christina calmly continued her devotions. Learning that the man was insane, she merely had him put under restraint.

One of the most important events of Christina's reign was the peace of Westphalia, to which her influence greatly contributed.