Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

Author:Linda Rodriguez McRobbie [ McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-59474-665-9
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2013-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

POSTABDICATION VACATION

Christina’s impatience to leave was obvious. She cleared out of Uppsala the same day she abdicated, even before the banquet celebrating her cousin’s coronation had ended. Making for Denmark, she put on the men’s clothes she would prefer to wear for the rest of her life, shaved her head, slapped on a men’s wig, and strapped on a sword. “Free at last!” she supposedly exclaimed. “Out of Sweden, and I hope I never come back!”

She could have traveled in state by ship wherever she wanted to go, but Christina relished the hard-riding dusty overland approach, especially because such behavior was mildly shocking for a woman at the time (which seems to have become her MO from then on). She eventually made her way to Brussels, where she converted to Catholicism; from there, she went to Rome for her first audience with the pope. Just as she’d wasted no time casting off Lutheranism, Christina quickly engaged in some un-Catholic behavior. The night of her conversion, she was overheard making fun of transubstantiation, which she’d just sworn an oath to respect. She had a habit of talking in church. and her taste for nude paintings and sculptures had little to do with the contemplation of divinity.

Christina was also hemorrhaging money. Ensconced in a borrowed villa in Rome, she was so broke she couldn’t afford to pay her servants, who took to stealing the silver. Even more scandalously, she had fallen in love with Cardinal Decio Azzolino, the pope’s young, clever, not-hard-to-look-at representative. For a short time, she even stopped wearing men’s clothes in favor of dresses, which were cut so low as to earn her a reprimand from the pontiff. Azzolino was seemingly in love with Christina as well, and rumors abounded that she’d borne him a child. In reality, the two probably never slept together, despite all her naughty talk and the claim by her former employee that she was “the greatest whore in the world.”

By now Christina had turned to other worldly matters, including political intrigue. She set her sights on becoming a real queen again by taking the throne of Naples, the southern Italian kingdom, France and Spain were perpetually squabbling over. In early 1656, Christina secretly agreed with French spymaster Cardinal Jules Mazarin to take the Naples throne, with the help of 4,000 French soldiers, and keep it warm for young Philip of Anjou. Excited, she bustled up to the top of Castel Sant’ Angelo and fired off a cannon … only she’d forgotten to aim, and the cannonball lodged itself in the side of a building. Oops.

But political winds shift, and within a year and a half, the plan to make Christina the queen of Naples was shelved. She took out her anger and frustration on one of her own: Gian-Rinaldo Monaldeschi, her master of the horse (an accurate appellation because she really did have just the one horse). While in France awaiting word from Mazarin about the Naples plan, Christina discovered that Monaldeschi was writing letters containing all kinds of evil gossip about her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.