Note 314 — MAY. (continued 3)

[It would be idle to speculate on the political motives which may have combined with other reasons to induce Christina of Sweden to conceive and execute this extraordinary design. Other sovereigns have abdicated from the lassitude of age or the burden of unpopularity, or the desire of ensuring the succession to their offspring; but the resignation of a Queen in her twenty-ninth year, surrounded by able ministers and a loyal people, and who had reigned with splendour and success, is an event without a parallel in history. The explanation of it is to be found in the eccentricity, the levity, the feverish curiosity, and the indomitable love of independence and singularity which are to be traced in every part of the Queen’s character. She was a woman of powerful but ill-regulated mind, capable at one time of sharing in the speculations of Descartes or of applauding the exhortations of Whitelocke,—at another, of bowing to the spiritual bondage of Rome, and even of committing the brutal murder of Monaldeschi. The character of Cromwell pleased her by its adventurous exploits and its arbitrary tendency, and her reception of the English Embassy was as much the result of personal predilection as of policy. Whitelocke amused her by his somewhat pedantic erudition, and flattered her vanity, but he seems scarcely to have divined the extraordinary variations of her character.]