I have been dying to get this chapter out, so you're getting it a day or two early. Enjoy!
Queen Christina has gone down in English history as one of the greatest patrons of the arts this country has ever known. Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a town that doesn’t have a ‘Queen Christina’ theatre, school, library or gallery within its boundaries. It might surprise some then, to realise that Christina was never meant to be England’s Queen at all. When the possibility of her coming to England was first raised, in the winter of 1530, it was assumed that she would marry Lord Richard, Duke of York and Normandy, for Prince Lionel was promised to the Infanta Beatrice of Portugal.
Indeed, this is where we get the expression ‘storm-sent lovers’, for had it not been for the stormy autumn of 1531, Lionel and Christina would never have met, and the course of English history would have taken a very different turn.
For it was the storms that kept Christina’s father King Christian in port long enough for him to have to abandon his attempt to regain his throne that year. He might have gone the following year, but her brother John died that spring, and without a male heir, her father King Christian considered his cause lost, abandoned by God. It wasn’t until the summer of 1534 that King Henry and the Emperor managed to persuade King Christian that it was his holy duty to try to reclaim Denmark from his heretical uncle King Frederick. He agreed, but only under the condition that he didn’t fight alone.
King Henry didn’t need asking twice. Fired with zeal for the ‘crusade of Denmark’, as he called it, King Henry gathered together a force of 4000 men and sailed to meet King Christian off the Norwegian coast, leaving the thirteen-year-old Lionel as nominal Regent in his absence.
What King Henry didn’t expect was for King Christian to send his daughters, Dorothea and Christina, the other way, to act as living reminders of their host’s pledge to fight at their father’s side. Dorothea and Christina landed at Great Yarmouth in September 1534, a month after King Henry had set sail to join their father.
The girls would spend the next thirteen months in England as Lionel’s guests, while their fathers fought (successfully) to reinstate the senior line of the House of Oldenburg on the Danish throne. At some point during that time, Lionel and Christina must have become infatuated with one another.
The details of how and where they married are sketchy, although it is most likely to have been in the summer of 1535, for Lionel turned 14 that May, and was therefore of age to marry. What we do know is that, when King Henry returned to England in the October of 1535, having paused in Paris and Rouen to visit Princess Maria and Lord Richard on his way home, Lionel met his father at Dover with Christina on his arm as Princess of Wales.
There was uproar. King Henry castigated Lionel for breaking his betrothal to the Infanta Beatrice without permission and threatened to have the marriage to Christina annulled on the grounds that Lionel hadn’t been free to marry. Lionel, meanwhile, declared he’d give up his right to the throne before he’d give up Christina, famously saying ‘Do your worst, Father! I’d rather beg my bread in the streets with Christina as my wife than be monarch of all of Christendom with the Lady Beatrice!”
While King Henry spluttered, the newly-weds fled to the County Palatine of Chester, which Lionel held largely independently of his father, but not before swearing an oath to the Archbishop of Canterbury himself that they had made their marriage in good faith and before witnesses – Christina’s older sister Dorothea among them.
The matter, however, was far from over, and had Christina’s belly not swollen with child that winter, King Henry might have succeeded in forcing the two apart, especially with the King of Portugal furious that his sister had been jilted and willing to back any attempt to untie Lionel’s union with Christina. The possibility of a Duke of Monmouth, however, sealed the matter. Henry VIII could hardly allow his eldest grandchild to be born a bastard, particularly not when Lionel and Christina had both been of age and of sound mind when they took their vows. The Portuguese were pacified with the promise of twenty years free trade with England and Normandy and a queenly jointure for Infanta Beatrice if they allowed Lord Richard to take his brother’s place as her groom, and Lionel and Christina were welcomed back to Court for Easter, four months before their first son, named John for Lionel’s godfather and Christina’s deceased brother, was born.
The young Duke of Monmouth was soon followed by two brothers and a sister: Lord William (b.1538), Lady Mary (b.1541), and Lord Henry (b.1545).
Many say that Queen Christina’s passion for education stemmed from her days as Princess of Wales, when she seems to have been largely focused on her children. But I cannot do justice to Christina’s role as a mother and teacher here, for it is so wide a topic it deserves a chapter of its own….
________ Sarah Rose, ‘Christina: The Queen England Was Never Meant to Have’