Christina, Queen of Sweden
Later life

Christina's fourth and last entry in Rome took place on 22 November 1668. Clement IX often visited her; they had a shared interest in plays. Christina organized meetings of the Accademia in the Great Hall which had ‘a platform for singers and players’. When the pope suffered a stroke, she was among the few he wanted to see at his deathbed. In 1671, Christina established Rome's first public theatre in a former jail, Tor di Nona.

The new pope, Clement X, worried about the influence of theatre on public morals. When Innocent XI became pope, things turned even worse; within a few years he turned Christina's theatre into a storeroom for grain, although he had been a frequent guest in her royal box with the other cardinals. He forbade women to perform with song or acting, and the wearing of decolleté dresses. Christina considered this sheer nonsense, and let women perform in her palace. In 1675, she invited António Vieira to become her confessor. Itinerant doctor Nicolaas Heinsius the Younger, the legitimized son of a former literatus at Christina's court in Stockholm, arrived in Rome in 1679, converted and was appointed the Queen's personal physician until about 1687, providing autobiographical material for his picaresque novel, The Delightful Adventures and Wonderful Life of Mirandor (1695). Christina wrote an unfinished autobiography, of which there are several drafts extant, essays on her heroes Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great and Julius Cæsar, on art and music (“Pensées, L’Ouvrage du Loisir” and “Les Sentiments Héroïques”) and acted as patron to musicians and poets as Vincenzo da Filicaja. Carlo Ambrogio Lonati and Giacomo Carissimi were Kapellmeister; Lelio Colista luteplayer; Loreto Vittori and Marco Marazzoli singers and Sebastiano Baldini librettist. She had Alessandro Stradella and Bernardo Pasquini to compose for her; Arcangelo Corelli dedicated his first work, Sonata da chiesa opus 1, to her. On 2 February 1687 Corelli or Alessandro Scarlatti directed a tremendous orchestra performing a Pasquini cantata in praise for James II, England's first Catholic monarch since Mary I to welcome Roger Palmer, 1st Earl of Castlemaine as the new ambassador to the Vatican, accompanied by the painter John Michael Wright, who knew Rome and spoke Italian.

In 1656, Christina had appointed Carissimi as her maestro di cappella del concerto di camera. Lars Englund of Uppsala University ' Department of Musicology has hypothesized that Christina's early involvement with Italian music, and in particular church music from Rome, "was part of a deliberate self-transformation, from a ruling Lutheran regent to a Catholic Queen without a land."

Christina's politics and rebellious spirit persisted long after her abdication of power. When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, abolishing the rights of French Protestants (Huguenots), Christina wrote an indignant letter, dated 2 February 1686, directed at the French ambassador Cesar d'Estrees. Louis did not appreciate her views, but Christina was not to be silenced. In Rome, she made Pope Clement X prohibit the custom of chasing Jews through the streets during the carnival. On 15 August 1686, she issued a declaration that Roman Jews were under her protection, signed la Regina – the queen.

Christina remained very tolerant towards the beliefs of others all her life. She on her part felt more attracted to the views of the Spanish priest Miguel Molinos, whom she employed as a private theologian. He had been investigated by the Holy Inquisition for proclaiming that sin belonged to the lower sensual part of man and was not subject to man's free will. Christina sent him food and hundreds of letters when he was locked up in Castel Sant'Angelo.
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