Scholar Looks at a Queen

By Elbridge F. Stoneham

European royalty has produced some highly controversial and colorful characters, and writers of historical biography have reaped bountifully in this field. Now Georgina Masson, European scholar and Italian correspondent of a London architectural magazine, has selected a subject who ranks among the most alluring and bewildering of them all. Her Queen Christina (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $7.95) is a carefully researched and highly entertaining portrait of an enigmatic woman whose conversion to Catholi-

cism, abdication as queen of Sweden and scandalous be havior had popes and kings on tenterhooks.

DAUGHTER of the great Gustavus Adolphus, a man of personal charm, bravery and furious temper, and of a fluttery neurotic mother, Christina fell victim to her father's desire that she be brought up like a boy and do everything a young prince should. Add to this the evidence of mental in stability in her ancestry; and one is not too surprised at Christina's paradoxical character, lesbian tendencies and masculine dress

and language. She could swear like one of her own troopers.

In other respects she was a child of her age, the 17th Century. Deeply conscious of her royal position, she was ruthless in her practice of intrigue and in imposing her will.

HER TURNING to Catholicism in a country where Lutheran Protestantism was the state religion and her abdication to the throne obviously had to be accomplished with great delicacy. But eventually eventually Christina

pulled it off.

changing into men's clothes, Cropping her hair and she had herself smuggled out of Sweden on her journey, by way of Hamburg, to Italy. And Miss Masson is at her best in describing Christina's triumphal progress through the Papal States to Rome. The exqueen, traveling in one of the Pope's carriages, kept to mannish dress even amidst the splendor of her reception. She liked to shock people and time after time succeeded in doing so.

DESPITE her self-imposed exile, Europe had by no means heard the the last of her. By her abortive attempts to become Queen of Naples and subsequently to succeed the King of Poland, she continued to upset the applecart of European diplomacy and to embarrass the papacy. Her close friendship with Cardinal Azsolino got her out of many a jam, but she lived a hectic life almost to the end.

Miss Masson calls Christina "a strange, complex and in many ways a pathetic woman" but gives her full credit for her generosity, her quick-wittedness, her recognition of religious and spiritual values and her interest in the arts.

This is not a book to go to sleep over.