Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable History Breaching Space and Time.

First of all, as the header said, I’ve got a little guest comic over at Skepchick featuring Christina and one of the other great minds of the seventeenth century, Anna Maria van Schurman, along with a little essay about the strange meeting the two of them had in 1654, just after Christina’s abdication. So, read that, many times, and bombard them with pleasant notes about your enjoyment of it so that they’ll ask me back again!
As to this one, Christina burnt a large part of her post-abdication years chasing the dream of ruling Naples. She was to be basically the pawn of France in the endeavor, which was to work against the interests of Spain, but her steady bombarding of Mazarin with letters to make good on the scheme only made him doubt the wisdom of the idea more, and eventually, with peace between Spain and France, the need evaporated, and after that she turned her attention back for a while to Sweden, offering it some salient and entirely unsought advice before conceding that a private life might be best and settling down in Rome at last.
– Count Dolby von Luckner

Christina’s abhorrence of the idea of giving birth was profound and life-long, contributing heavily to her decision to abdicate. More interesting than that, though, is the scandalous tale of Fontainebleau. Monaldeschi, one of Christina’s manifestly untrustworthy servants, had tried to discredit another of her hangers-on through forgery and been found out. Mixed with that was the possibility that he had betrayed Christina’s plans of becoming Queen of Naples with French backing to Spain. We’ll never know. What we do know is that Christina, outraged at this betrayal of trust, ordered him summarily executed. Keep in mind, she’s on French soil at the time, but since part of her abdication conditions was the proviso that she kept the title of Queen, she reasoned that she had the power of life and death over her household, and so the poor fellow was stabbed to death, taking an agonizingly long time to die in one of the most gut-wrenching tales of botched execution on the books. It was the absolute low point of Christina’s international reputation, and put the last nail in the coffin of her Naples ambitions.
– Count Dolby von Luckner

“Christina and Cromwell?!” you say, “Too wildly improbable, good sirs. It won’t do.”
Well, in fact, Cromwell did figure in a number of Christina’s schemes, and, oddly enough, the idea of a marriage was floated by none other than Mrs. Cromwell. I’ll let Veronica Buckley tell the story in her own entirely wonderful way:
“Cromwell’s own good lady wife had not been feeling at her best, it seems, and as she sat palely in bed, glancing without apparent irony through her cherished portrait collection of the many crowned heads of Europe, she came across a picture of Christina. “If I were to die,’ Mrs. Cromwell mused, ‘here would be the one to replace.’ The thought of the match, centuries on, still beggars the imagination.”
– Count Dolby von Luckner