Christina II of Sweden

Christina (Christina Ingrid Désirée, in formal Swedish regnal use Christina II) is the Queen of Sweden, a sovereign in her own right since the death of her father in 2010, and the consort of Ernest V, who was King of the fourteen Crowns of the personal union until his abdication on 31 October 2028 and is now the Duke of Cumberland. Her own Crown is held wholly apart from his. She is the mother of George V, who succeeded his father in the fourteen on 31 October 2028 and is her heir in Sweden. In ordinary use she is Queen Christina, and since the loss of the King’s aircraft on 25 September 2028 she has been Queen Christina, Regent. From then until 31 October she exercised on her husband’s behalf the royal functions of thirteen other Crowns while he lay in a hospital in New Westminster; he woke there on 20 October and knew her, did not recover enough to resume them, and gave them up. Since the evening of 31 October she has been Regent in the same thirteen realms for their son, who is fifteen, until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029.

The Register’s other articles about her are partial because she appears in them for other reasons. Kingdom of Sweden treats her as the head of state of a Nordic country, Kittyhawk as the Queen of the first weeks, and Ernest V and George V as the wife of one King and the mother of the next. This article treats her as a person: the only child of a king, a naval officer, a student of the Realm’s constitution who first met her husband at nineteen, a mother who moved her household to another continent for her son’s schooling, and the one adult in the right city on the night the King was lost.

Name and styles

Her names

She was born Christina Ingrid Désirée at Stockholm Palace in 1974 and was a Princess of Sweden from birth. No exact birth day is fixed, but the Swedish name-day calendar puts her name on 24 July and the Court marks that day. In the family she is called Tina, a name her father used in private until he died and which the Court has never used in public.

Styles

She is Her Majesty the Queen of Sweden. In ordinary use, in the Swedish press and in the Register, she is Queen Christina; the numeral in Christina II is reserved for formal regnal use, and distinguishes her from the seventeenth-century queen of the same name. Under the Crowns of the union she has no style by marriage, since she holds none of their offices by right. As Regent she is Queen Christina, Regent, a form chosen to name her own person and her own Crown first and the regency second. In the Realm’s press she is simply “the Queen”, and in the Realm’s schools “the Swedish one”, a name she has said she does not mind.

Her motto is För Sverige, i god tid, “For Sweden, in good time”, a joke about her naval training and a promise about the succession. Her father’s was “For Sweden, with the times”. Her cypher is a plain crowned C II, not a monogram. She signs “Christina R” in Sweden and “Christina” in the Realm, and has said that the R is for the Riksdag to put there.

Early life

Birth and family

Christina was born in 1974 at Stockholm Palace, the only child of Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. Her father was a shy, practical king who loved the sea, scouting and the outdoors, and who died in the spring of 2010. Her mother, Silvia, was born in Heidelberg and raised partly in the Empire of Brazil, and met the king in 1972; they married in 1973. Christina has no brother or sister.

She is an only child because Queen Silvia could have no more children after the birth. The Queen said so in a newspaper interview in 1979, in the middle of the Riksdag’s debate on equal succession, and it is the reason the Riksdag voted for absolute primogeniture almost without argument: there was no brother whom the reform would displace.

Crown Princess at five

The equal succession act of 1979 entered into force on 1 January 1980, when she was five, and she became Crown Princess on that day. She was told at six, by her father, on a boat, that she would be queen.

She was born in the twenty-fifth anniversary year of the Treaty of Kalmar, and the five heads of the Scandinavian Union attended her christening in 1974. It was the only occasion on which all five sat in one church, and the Union keeps her cradle at Kalmar Castle.

Childhood

She grew up at Drottningholm Palace and in the royal apartments at Stockholm Palace, with summers at Solliden, the family’s house on the island of Öland. She went to day school in Stockholm, at the Enskilda school, and was never sent abroad to school, because her father wanted the Swedes to see her grow up. Her closest childhood friend is Ebba Lindqvist, a schoolmate at the Enskilda, who is now her Private Secretary: they have known each other for forty years, and Lindqvist is the one person at Court who says “no” to her in front of others.

At home she spoke Swedish with her father and German with her mother. Her languages are Swedish, English and German, with good French and serviceable Spanish. She reads Danish and Norwegian without trouble, as every child of the Union does, and is learning Finnish badly and in public.

Faith

She was baptised in the Church of Sweden and confirmed in it at fourteen, in 1988, at the Royal Chapel. She is a practising Lutheran. The Church of Sweden was separated from the state in 2000, and her faith has been a private matter until the regencies, when the Crowns she administers began to include two that have established churches.

The Court and the Council

Her father took her to the Riksdag at twelve and told her to sit and be quiet, which she did. At eighteen, in 1992, she took her seat at Councils of State as the heir, and she has said that the first lesson of the Council is that nobody there needs to hear from the monarch.

Education and training

The navy

After the Enskilda she did her national service in the Swedish Navy, a term of officer training at Karlskrona in the spring of 1993. She holds the honorary rank of Admiral, and has said that the navy taught her that the way to be obeyed is to be early.

The Realm

From the autumn of 1993 to the summer of 1994 she spent a year in the Realm, as a student of constitutional government at the University of Columbia in New Westminster, a fact the Swedish press treated as eccentric at the time. It is where she first met the American Crown.

Uppsala

From 1994 to 1998 she studied political science and history at Uppsala. She lived for the first year in a student room like any other, with a Court officer in the next room, and she took no degree title in public use. She holds one honorary degree, from Uppsala, for her work with the Kalmar Youth Council, and has declined every other.

Pastimes

Her sports are sailing, which she learned from her father, and cross-country skiing. She has skied the Vasaloppet nine times, never in under seven hours, and finishes under a plain bib number with no escort. She still sails her father’s wooden sloop, the Ingrid, off Öland each summer, a boat thirty feet long and older than she is, in which Frederick learned to sail; she has been offered a new one by three yacht clubs and has declined all three. She sings alto in the Court’s amateur choir, which she joined at nineteen, and reads crime fiction in four languages.

The Crown Princess

The Kalmar Youth Council

After Uppsala she worked as Crown Princess for the Union, and chaired the Kalmar Youth Council, which sends a hundred students a year across the five countries of the Scandinavian Union. It is still the work of which she is proudest. She held no Swedish political office, as the law requires.

The border posts

Finland is the Union’s frontline republic. She has visited it more often than any Swedish royal, every year on 30 November, the anniversary of the Winter War, at a different border post, where she stands with the guard for an hour in whatever the weather is. She has never visited the Russian Republic and has not been invited, and the Court has never said which of those facts it prefers. Her Finnish visits are generally read as the other half of the sentence.

Rumour

She had no public romance as Crown Princess. The Swedish tabloids invented about a dozen and the Court denied none of them, on the ground that denying one confirms the rest, and the lack of gossip about her became a standing national joke.

Patronages

Her mother’s work is children and the disabled, and Queen Silvia kept the foundation that bears her name. Christina took over as its patron in 2000 and has never missed its annual dinner, even when she was in New Westminster.

The marriage

First meeting

She first met Ernest V in November 1993, at the reception that Columbia Palace gives for foreign students each autumn. He was forty-six and reigning, and she was nineteen. He spoke to her for ten minutes about the text of the Treaty of Kalmar, and neither remembers it the same way: he says she corrected a clause, and she says he did. Nothing came of it for thirteen years.

The letters

The courtship began with a letter. After the May Day Bombings of 2006 she wrote to the King, in her own hand, to express her sympathy. He answered in his own hand: four lines about the weather in London and one about grief. It began a correspondence that lasted two years, and both kept every letter.

They met again on 1 May 2007, at the first anniversary memorial for the bombings in New York, where she represented Sweden and he attended as King. They talked for forty minutes on the steps afterwards, which the press photographed and did not understand.

The courtship

The courtship was eighteen months of letters and four meetings: at Kalmar, in London, at the King’s lodge at Lac du Roi in the Laurentian hills, and at Stockholm. Neither told their household, and the Swedish Court’s own Private Secretary learned of it from the King’s. He proposed at Lac du Roi in August 2008, in a rowing boat, and she said that she would answer in a letter. She did, the next week, in one line. The letter is held in the Royal Archives, and neither has said what it says.

The engagement and the wedding

The marriage of a Swedish heir needs the consent of the Government, which was given in a single sitting of the Council of State, and the engagement was announced in the autumn of 2008. The wedding was in the summer of 2009; the exact date is not fixed. It took place in Stockholm Cathedral, Storkyrkan, in the Lutheran rite conducted by the Archbishop of Uppsala, with Swedish civil forms observed first. The King wore a Swedish naval uniform lent for the day, and said afterwards that it was the first time he had been dressed by someone else’s household.

The Stockholm Instrument

The marriage is governed by a short instrument, the Stockholm Instrument of 2009, signed by both sovereigns and witnessed by the Swedish and British Prime Ministers: separate crowns, separate households, separate papers, and no cross-direction by either side’s officers. It says nothing about children, which was deliberate, and it has never been published in full.

The Queen’s Consort

A Consort Act passed in the spring of 2009 gave her husband a Swedish style, His Majesty King Ernest, the Queen’s Consort (drottningens gemål). It gave him precedence in Sweden immediately after the Queen and before the Crown Prince, and no seat, no vote, no papers and no office. The Swedish Court has not said what his style in Sweden is now that he has given up his own Crowns. He did not become King of Sweden, as the Kingdom of Sweden article states.

At the opening of the Riksdag he sits at her side in the royal box and walks one step behind her in processions, as a courtesy. He does not speak at Swedish state occasions, and wears the Order of the Seraphim, which she gave him on the wedding day. The Swedes call him, affectionately, “the Queen’s Englishman”, although he was King of Great Britain and not of England; he is liked as a courteous guest who reads. The nickname is used in Sweden and nowhere else, and he has never been told it.

The marriage in practice

He lives in London. She lives in New Westminster in the school year, and in Stockholm for the opening of the Riksdag, for Midsummer and for the summer. They speak by telephone every night at nine, London time. She flies to London one weekend a month, and he crosses to New Westminster six times a year. On the telephone he reads her the previous day’s debates in Parliament, and she corrects his Swedish. They have never had a public quarrel, and the Court says they have never had a private one that lasted a night.

They argue, courteously and in writing, about the box room. The King kept Frederick’s school reports with the realm boxes and the May Day files. She won the argument in 2024: the reports are in a drawer in her sitting room, and the King is sent a copy of each. On the marriage, in words reported by her mother and not printed until now, she has said: “I married a man who is exact. I knew what I was getting, and I got more.”

Queen of Sweden

Accession

Her father died in the spring of 2010, at the end of a long illness, at Drottningholm, and Christina was at his bed. Her accession was the next morning, in a Council of State, and she took the oath before the Riksdag four days after the funeral. Carl XVI Gustaf’s funeral was in Stockholm Cathedral. The four other heads of the Union walked behind the coffin, and Ernest V walked behind the new Queen, the first time that a reigning king had walked behind a queen in Stockholm. The Swedish press said that he did it without looking as though he minded, which they took as the highest praise.

The first acts

Her first act as Queen, in 2010, was to ask the Riksdag to cut the civil list by eight per cent. The Riksdag did, for five years, and restored it at her own request when the Court’s accounts showed that it could spare nothing more. At her first opening of the Riksdag, in October 2010, she spoke for three minutes with one joke, about the Riksdag’s long habit of finishing the previous year’s business in the first week. The Riksdag laughed and then, a little late, applauded.

The office

The Swedish Crown is national, ceremonial and legally separate from every other monarchy, and the Kingdom of Sweden article describes it. She opens the Riksdag, chairs formal Councils of State, receives information and cannot veto, dismiss or withhold. Prime Minister Karin Lindholm sees her on Tuesdays for an hour in the weekly information audience; Lindholm is a Social Democrat and not a monarchist, and has said that the Queen is the one person who has ever listened to a whole budget. She sees the Leader of the Opposition twice a year, for an hour, at Stockholm Palace, and has said that she likes both leaders more than their parties like each other. Under Swedish custom the monarch does not vote, and she has never said how she would.

The Court

The Royal Court has about 160 staff, under the Marshal of the Court, Admiral (retired) Per-Olof Strand, and the Private Secretary Ebba Lindqvist. The Court’s budget is published in full each spring. The part of the Court that travels to New Westminster is twelve, and the part that stays at Stockholm Palace is the rest. Her income is Sweden’s civil list, audited as the Sweden article describes, and her private means are modest, from her father’s estate; she owns none of her residences privately except a cottage at Solliden.

The Union

Once a year, at Midsummer, the five heads of state of the Scandinavian Union meet in Stockholm in the Union’s Joint Session, and she hosts it. She has no vote, sits where the protocol puts the host, and says almost nothing, and the Union’s ministers have said that this is why it works. King Haakon of Norway and King Frederik of Denmark are her friends. The three sovereigns race together in the Kalmar regatta each July, in boats of the same class; she wins on handicap, which is scored by a Dane, and the Norwegians dispute every result. In 2014 she made a state visit to Iceland, the smallest member of the Union, with no army, and walked the length of the Þingvellir plain with the President, speaking Icelandic phrases she had learned for the visit. The Icelandic press said that her pronunciation was correct and her tenses were a catastrophe.

She was one of the sovereigns who attended the founding of the European Concert at Straßburg in 2027, as a guest of its first Presidency, and said nothing, which the Concert’s own record notes as the most useful contribution of the day.

The Navy

As Admiral she reviews the fleet each June at Karlskrona and presents the Queen’s Cup to the crew of the best-kept ship, judged by a petty officer and not by a flag officer. The ship that wins has the Cup for a year and, by custom, is not told in advance.

Sápmi

She has visited Sápmi every year since 2000, speaks a few words of North Sámi, and opened a session of the Sámi Parliament in North Sámi in 2016. The Sámi press called it clumsy and kind, and has been consistent since.

Disasters and temper

In the summer of 2018, when the forests burned in the north of Sweden, she spent three days at the fire line in Jämtland, in boots and a borrowed helmet, carrying water to the crews. The Court published nothing. The firefighters’ union did, and the Court did not object. Her one famous temper was at Luleå in 2012: she waited forty minutes on the apron for an unready airfield crew, said so once, quietly, and the airport manager resigned. She asked him by letter not to, and he withdrew the resignation. It is the one time the Swedish press has used the word “furious” about her.

Readers

In 2015 she founded the Children’s Libraries Trust in the Realm and, the same year, the Queen’s Library Fund in Sweden, which pays for a book to be placed in the hand of every child at the age of seven. She chose seven because it was the age at which she first read something she was not asked to. She has published one book, a picture book called Det lilla skeppet, “The Little Ship”, under the pseudonym C. Ingrid, for the Library Fund. It has sold about nine hundred thousand copies, and nobody at the publisher was officially told who C. Ingrid is; the Court has never denied it. Her Swedish counterpart to the Realm’s patronage is the Library Fund, and in New Albion she is patron of northern and Inuit causes as a guest of that Crown.

The republicans

Sweden has a Republican Association with about forty thousand members, chaired by Maja Sundin, a former teacher. Sundin has said that the Queen is the best argument for the monarchy and the strongest for abolishing it, because she makes it impossible to say that a republic would be better run. In 2021 the Riksdag’s Constitution Committee considered a residence clause for the Court Act, requiring the monarch to live in Sweden for a set number of days. The Queen was asked whether she would accept it. She said that she would accept any law Parliament passed, and the Committee, which had expected an argument, dropped the clause.

In the Court’s polling about two thirds of Swedes favour the monarchy and about a quarter would prefer a republic, with the rest unmoved. The republicans’ complaint is her residence and Frederick’s future, not the family. The Swedish press calls her Drottningen i god tid, “the Queen in good time”, for her punctuality: her staff are told to be there twenty minutes ahead and have learned to be thirty.

Honours, portrait and coin

She wears two decorations in public, the Order of the Seraphim and her father’s own Order of the Sword, and says that a monarch with more is dressing for somebody else. Her portrait has been on the Swedish twenty-krona coin since 2012, with the motto “För Sverige, i god tid”, which the Mint chose over an older, longer proposal; the Court has never said who suggested it. In the Realm she has not allowed her image on coin or stamp, on the ground that the Realm’s money belongs to the Realm’s Crown and she is not that. The Realm has not asked again. Her official portrait in the Royal Palace was painted in 2012 by a Swedish painter, Karin Ekdahl, in eleven sittings, during which the Queen read crime novels aloud to the painter, who has said that it is the only portrait for which the sitter’s voice was better than her own.

Press and the interview

She gives one interview a year, in January, to a newspaper chosen by lot, on a subject of her own choosing that nobody expects: libraries one year, sea ice the next. In the interview of 2019, on sea ice, she said of the monarchy: “A monarch is a long contract with people who never signed it. The least I can do is be on time.” She has given none since Kittyhawk.

Midsummer

At Midsummer at Solliden she dances once round the maypole, badly, with Frederick, and then leaves the floor. The Court has never released a photograph of it and the Swedish press has never been able to buy one. In 2016 a man climbed the fence at Drottningholm and asked to see the Queen about a pension. She was in the garden, gave him tea on the terrace, and told the guards to let him go. The guards were not told what to do about the fence, and the Court has since added a gate with a bell.

Motherhood and residence

The pregnancy

She was thirty-eight when Frederick was conceived. The pregnancy was announced in October 2012, was difficult, and she took five months’ leave from public duty, which no Swedish monarch had done. The Riksdag treated it as a parental-leave precedent, and one deputy asked whether it should be paid.

The birth

Frederick was born on 2 May 2013 at the Karolinska hospital in Stockholm, so that he was registered as Crown Prince at birth under Swedish law. The King was present: he flew from London the same morning and arrived late. The Realm’s Governor-General sent a telegram that was read to the delivery room. He was christened Frederick Alexander in the Royal Chapel at Stockholm Palace. His godparents are Olav, Grand Duke of Minnesota, his mother’s cousin of the Bernadotte cadet branch, and Queen Caroline of Hanover, his father’s sister.

Olav

Olav was born in the same year as Christina, 1974, and they are the only two Bernadottes of their age. They have met at every family gathering since the age of ten: dutiful, fond and slightly wary of each other. His line is outside the Swedish succession, and she has never asked him for anything.

Where he would live

The decision where Frederick would live was made in 2018, when he was five, and took a year. She wanted Stockholm. The King’s household argued that the American Crown needed its own formation and could not be learned from a distance, as the King had learned it. She agreed on one condition: “I will not be a visitor in my son’s life.” She moved with him.

Frederick’s schooling

Frederick went to nursery at Columbia Palace, then to a day school in the city, then to Ellicott High School, where he is enrolled as Frederick Hanover. He has a Swedish tutor, Marianne Hellström, three hours a week, and a summer at Solliden every year. He speaks Swedish with his mother, English with his father, and both badly when angry. He spoke Swedish before English until he was three, since she was the one at home with him, and his first word was “nej”, no; Ebba Lindqvist claims to have witnessed it. He calls her “Mamma” in Swedish and “Mum” in English, and “Queen” only in jokes, and in public “my mother”.

In October 2027 Frederick, then fourteen, attended the Riksdag’s opening in Stockholm for the first time, standing at his mother’s left in a blue suit. He was the tallest in the royal box, and the Swedish press said that he looked like a boy who had been told not to fidget and had decided to obey. The Swedish Court published in 2026 the plan for the Crown Prince’s formation, the Crown Prince’s Course: two years at Uppsala, a naval term at Karlskrona, a year with a Swedish municipality, and the Riksdag’s committees. It is to begin after he finishes school.

Mother and son

She collects him from school herself two days a week, and Tuesday evenings are kept clear of every engagement. She read to him in Swedish at bedtime until he asked her to stop at eleven. Theo Hartigan, his friend since September 2025, has been to Solliden twice, in the summers of 2026 and 2027; she treats him as a friend of the house and has never asked him what he thinks of the Court. When the Royal Household’s statement of 2027 cost Theo’s mother her place on a public-facing ward, the Queen wrote to her by hand within the week, apologising for the Household’s error and asking for nothing. The two have since had tea twice. The Household’s apology remains private, and the Queen’s has never been mentioned by either.

There is a rule, kept for ten years by the Swedish and the Realm’s press alike, that Frederick is not photographed at school, at church or on a Tuesday. It was suspended in effect in the week of Kittyhawk, on four occasions: at Columbia Cathedral on 26 September, on the apron on 29 September, at the Privy Council on 30 September and at the school gate on 2 October. The press has observed it again since 3 October.

The household

Her household in New Westminster is twelve people in the north wing of Columbia Palace, Swedish Court staff paid from the Swedish civil list. Frederick’s household is the Realm’s and is paid from the Crown estate, and the two have separate kitchens and a shared door. Her security in New Westminster is the Realm’s Royal Protection Service with a Swedish detail of four. In Stockholm she has never accepted an armoured car, and rides to the Riksdag in the Court’s ordinary black saloon.

Her year

Her year is about five months in Stockholm, five in New Westminster and two in transit and on visits. The Swedish Court publishes the count of her days in Sweden every year, and the figure for 2027 was 143, which the republicans quote and the Court has never disputed. A motion in the Riksdag in 2020 asked that the Queen reside in Sweden. It was lost by a large majority, with three deputies in favour. The Court’s response was the published count, and the motion has not been moved again.

Her Swedish work is done from New Westminster when she is there. The Council of State meets by video from Columbia Palace at 3 p.m., which is 9 p.m. in Stockholm. The papers come by diplomatic bag, and she signs on the day they arrive. The Instrument of Government asks for her signature, and the Court says that it does not ask where she signs.

The household’s rule

Because the succession rests on one life, the household has a flight rule: Ernest V, the Queen and Frederick are never aboard the same aircraft. They may fly separately, on the same day or the same ocean, and the rule is only that they do not fly together. It is the reason that she was not aboard Kittyhawk.

In the Realm and Britain

The state visit of 2009

Her first visit to the Realm as the King’s wife was a state visit in the autumn of 2009, four months after the wedding. A foreign sovereign cannot address Parliament, so she did not, but the Speaker received her in the Great Hall of Parliament House and she was shown the Charter in its case. The Realm’s newspapers wrote that she asked for the page on which the King’s title is defined.

New Westminster

At Columbia Palace she walks in the garden at seven each morning, under the capital’s unbarricaded convention, which keeps the gardens partly visible from the public gate. A few regulars stand at it. She nods, they nod, and in six years nobody has addressed her. In the Realm’s precedence she is a sovereign visitor with no place in the order, and as Regent she takes the monarch’s place, which in the Realm’s practice means the seat on the right of the Governor-General at state occasions and no seat at all when the Governor-General is absent.

The Governor-General, Michelle Lujan Grisham, commissioned in 2022, is the Crown’s resident representative in New Westminster, and the Queen defers to her on every American matter. They lunch on the first Monday of each month. In public the Queen says “Governor-General” and in private “Michelle”; the Governor-General calls her “Ma’am”. Prime Minister Caleb Whitlock was commissioned on 11 September 2028, two weeks before the loss. She had met him once, for fifteen minutes, at the reception after his commission, and found him the only person in the room who asked how Frederick’s reading was going.

In Great Britain the Prime Minister, Alistair Rennie, advises her. They spoke by telephone in the small hours of 26 September, when she accepted the delegation, for four minutes. She has called him “Prime Minister” throughout and he has called her “Ma’am” throughout, and neither has used a name.

New Albion and Lac du Roi

They spend a fortnight every August at Ernest’s lodge at Lac du Roi in the Laurentian hills, which is in New Albion. She skis there in winter when she can. In July 2022 she was beside the King when he apologised for the residential schools, and she asked to sit at the back of the platform, behind the survivors’ chairs and not beside his. New Albion is a separate realm of the same King, not part of the Realm, and her patronage of northern and Inuit causes there is held as a guest of that Crown and, since 6 October 2028, as its Regent.

The Hanover circle

Queen Caroline of Hanover, Ernest’s sister and since 31 October heir presumptive to her son, is her closest friend in the house of Hanover; they speak on Sunday evenings. When Heinrich I died on 12 February 2028 Christina and Ernest both went to the funeral at Berlin Cathedral, on separate aircraft under the household’s rule, and Christina sat with Caroline through the service. Princess Charlotte writes to Frederick, the only member of the family who does. Christina has told the household that she will not read the letters, and has been seen not reading them. Frederick and Alexander I, first cousins eight months apart, are close, and he has offered Alexander a private companionship through the year. She has also said that she is the one of the family who most wants Charlotte to be left alone to be a doctor.

On 11 October 2028, the evening Princess Charlotte took the regency of Prussia and the Empire, Christina wrote her a single page in German. It was delivered by hand by the Swedish ambassador. She did not give advice. She said only that the first month is the worst and that Caroline would answer any telephone call at any hour. The letter is not public. On the Prussian crisis she has said nothing, and the Court has instructed the Swedish ambassador in Berlin to say that the Queen takes no position on the law of another state, which is the sentence that governs her own regencies.

Peter II

They met in the autumn of 2026 when Peter II made his state visit to the Realm and was received jointly at New Westminster. A Lutheran queen and a Pope born in the Realm talked for twelve minutes, mostly about libraries and Detroit. After Kittyhawk he wrote her a private letter, which the Vatican has confirmed and not described, and she answered in two lines.

In public

She speaks little in public and in short sentences, with a dry joke at the end. Her longest speech in office was nine minutes, to the Kalmar Youth Council in 2019, and the line people quote from it is “Being early is a form of listening.” The Realm’s press calls her “the Queen” and the Swedes call her “Christina”.

Kittyhawk and the regencies

The night of 25 September

The King’s aircraft was lost east of Newfoundland at about 5:47 p.m. Eastern on Monday 25 September 2028, which was 11:47 p.m. in Stockholm. She was asleep at Stockholm Palace. Ebba Lindqvist woke her at ten past midnight, after the King’s Deputy Private Secretary in London had telephoned the Swedish Court. She spoke to Prime Minister Rennie at about three in the morning Stockholm time, two in London, and accepted the British delegation in four minutes. She then asked Lindqvist for one hour on her own, and spent it writing to Frederick by hand, a letter that she did not send because she would be there before it.

The crossing

The Court’s Private Secretary asked her to wait a day, until the search was clearer. She said that her son was alone with a household and a Governor-General, and that she would not wait. She left Stockholm at about 6:40 a.m. on 26 September on a Swedish government aircraft, and landed at New Westminster at about 2 p.m., where the Governor-General received her at the airfield. She went straight to Columbia Palace. He said, “You were quick.” She said, “I was early.” He said, “You are always early.” Her next words were “Have you eaten?” She sat with him in the kitchen until after midnight. He asked her whether his father was dead, and she said that she did not know, and promised that she would tell him the moment she did.

26 to 28 September

On 27 September she signed her first British instrument at Columbia Palace, forty-one papers in all, most of them Army promotions and the continuation of a naval commission. She read every one. The household noted that nobody in Britain had expected her to read them, and that she has asked for the same every day since.

On 28 September, when the wreckage was found, the household asked that the announcement be held for an hour. She spent it going to Ellicott High School and telling Frederick herself, in the principal’s office. She did not say that the King was dead, because she did not know it. She said that wreckage had been found and that no one had been found with it. He asked to finish the period, and she waited in the corridor. The statement issued in his name that evening, “I want to thank everyone who is searching for my father and for the people with him”, was his own. She read it, changed nothing, and asked only that it be shorter; he had cut it by half before she asked.

29 September

She told Frederick at the palace that his father had been found alive, within the hour of the Governor-General’s telephone call, and that he had a head injury and was unconscious. He wrote the second statement, about the crew of the Kathleen Marie, that afternoon. She went ahead to New Westminster General at about nine in the evening, to be there before the aircraft landed. She was in the admissions corridor when the King was brought in shortly before midnight. He was unconscious. She said nothing, followed the trolley to the room, and sat by the bed without speaking for about twenty minutes before she asked a nurse for a chair.

The bedside

She is at the hospital most nights until two, and has asked for a camp bed in the room next to the King’s, which she uses on average three nights a week; the nurses have been told not to mention it. The King’s physicians report to her each morning at seven, in person, and she has asked that every bulletin be shown to Frederick before it is issued. She has never asked for one to be softened. In the evenings she reads to the King, in English, from the previous day’s debates in the Parliaments of Westminster and New Westminster, which is what he used to read to her on the telephone. The physicians have said that it can do no harm and may do good, and she has not asked which. She prays at the bedside, in Swedish, and has asked the hospital chaplain of the Church of America only to say the evening office; she once asked for a Swedish hymn, “Härlig är jorden”, which the chaplain learned by ear. Archbishop Naomi Achebe, the Primate of America, visited the King on 1 October and prayed at the bedside with the Queen for ten minutes; the Primate has said that the Queen asked her, before they began, whether she would mind if the prayers were said in two languages, and that she did not mind.

30 September: the Realm

On 30 September she took the Regent’s oath before the Privy Council in the Council Chamber at Parliament House, in a plain dark dress, in English, in an accent that the Council noted was clearer than most of theirs. She came from the hospital and returned to it. She said nothing afterwards. Frederick sat at the table as an observer, as the Regency Act 1811 allows, and said nothing either. Prime Minister Whitlock, who is twenty-six and was in his third week, said afterwards that she was the calmest person in the room and the only one who had looked at him as though he were also a person. She thanked him in writing.

2 October: Britain

On 2 October she signed the commission of royal assent at Columbia Palace at about one in the afternoon, for the Act that made her Regent. At six in the evening she was sworn at the British High Commission before the Lord President of the Council and two Cabinet ministers. She asked that there be no photographer and that the High Commission’s flag be flown at its usual height. She was in the hospital again by eight. She had asked Frederick to stay at school and not to come, as Britain’s law gives him no part. He asked once why and accepted the answer, then asked her to tell him afterwards what the oath said, and she did, from memory, in the car.

The thirteen regencies

The first three regencies were the Realm’s, Britain’s and New Albion’s. The Realm’s rests on the Regency Act 1811, which names no person: it makes the adult heir Regent and otherwise the sovereign’s consort, so that the Queen is Regent in the Realm by law and not by anyone’s choice. Britain’s and New Albion’s name her in new Acts. New Albion’s Regency Act passed at Ottawa on Friday 6 October, and she was sworn the next day, Saturday 7 October, at New Albion’s High Commission in New Westminster, before its High Commissioner and two members of its Privy Council who had flown down that morning. It was the third oath in eight days, and the third office.

The other ten followed in the next week, each realm acting under its own law and none copying another; nine by Act of its legislature and Normandy by a resolution of its Estates:

Malaya needs no regency, since its elected king is its head of state, as the Federation of Malaya article already records. She took the oaths in two sittings at Columbia Palace: six on Saturday 7 October, before the High Commissioners of Ireland, New Wessex, South Africa, the Philippines, the West Indies Federation and the River Plate, and four on Thursday 12 October, for Raj, Hanover, Brunswick and Normandy. Each oath was in the realm’s own language, with an interpreter, and the second sitting ran forty minutes.

The press has a headline for it: “One Queen, fourteen Crowns”, counting her own. She has asked the Swedish Court to say that the count is wrong, because she holds her own and administers the others, and the Court has said so once and been ignored.

The Regency Office

She acts in each realm only on that realm’s ministers’ advice, and keeps thirteen separate boxes. A Regency Office of eleven people was set up at Columbia Palace on 4 October under the King’s Deputy Private Secretary, with one officer for each group of realms, and a rule that no paper from one realm is read in a room where another’s lies open. In the first twelve days she signed about eleven hundred instruments across the thirteen realms and refused none. She has used no discretion. She has asked each Prime Minister’s office for its advice in writing, even where it is a formality, and the offices have complied. She is paid nothing as Regent in any realm: she declined every stipend that the Acts allow, and the thirteen governments each noted it.

The limits of the regencies are as the Acts say. Britain’s Act forbids her assent to any Bill changing the order of succession and binds her to British ministers’ advice; the other twelve instruments contain similar clauses and differ in wording. She has said, privately, that the clause she values most is the one that stops her from deciding anything she cannot undo.

The churches

She is a Lutheran. The King is Supreme Governor of the Church of England and of the Church of America, an office that confirms senior appointments. As Regent in Britain and in the Realm she exercises the constitutional functions of that office and none that is liturgical; appointments are confirmed on ministers’ advice, and both Archbishops have said that they are content. The Church of America article records that no religious test attaches to any office. Her own Church has no view. The Archbishop of Uppsala said on 3 October that the Queen would not be asked to act against her conscience and would not be asked what it was. She has made no statement about the churches, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primate of America have each written to say that her faith is not in question.

The minority bill

Britain’s leaked draft bill would have let the heir act as Regent from sixteen, on 2 May 2029. She opposed it, privately, on one ground: he was to be a boy until he was eighteen. She said to the household that she would take any decision about it that the King’s ministers put to her, and would not take the argument beyond that room. The common terms of 30 October fixed sixteen in every realm, and she took them as they were put to her.

Frederick at the table

Frederick asked to sit with her at every Privy Council she attended in the Realm, as the Act allows, as an observer. She said yes on the condition that he did his homework first, and he did. He said nothing at the table, as the Act requires, and took notes in a school exercise book. On 31 October he sat at the Council as King for the first time, at the sitting at which his accession was proclaimed in the Realm.

Sweden

In Sweden the Court announced on 26 September that the Queen had gone to New Westminster “to be with her family”. Prime Minister Lindholm made a short statement the same day, saying only that the Queen’s duties would be carried out from wherever she was. The Riksdag sat on 27 September and did not debate it. She has chaired three Councils of State by video from Columbia Palace since 26 September, each at 9 p.m. Stockholm time; the Swedish ministers say that the video makes them shorter, and that the Queen has not asked whether she may keep it.

The Riksdag’s Constitution Committee opened an inquiry on 10 October into whether a Queen of Sweden may lawfully act for other Crowns. Prime Minister Lindholm said that it would report after the regencies end and not before, and that nobody in Stockholm wishes the Queen to be in the position of defending her conduct while she is doing it. A Swedish poll in the second week of October found that about three quarters of Swedes think the Queen is right to be in New Westminster, and that fewer than one in ten think she should return; the Republican Association did not dispute the figures.

The Nordic and family reaction

King Haakon of Norway and King Frederik of Denmark telephoned her on the morning of 26 September, within the same hour, and the Presidents of Finland and Iceland sent messages that evening. All four have since asked to be told if they can help, and she has asked them for nothing. The Union’s next Midsummer Joint Session is unaffected: the four other heads of state have written to say that it will be held at Stockholm whether or not she is present, with her place kept, and that no one will sit in it. Queen Silvia has stayed at Drottningholm and writes her a letter each day, which the Swedish diplomatic bag takes to New Westminster; Christina has told the Court that she reads them last, in bed, because they are the only post she wants.

The Realm’s reaction

At the gates of Columbia Palace someone tied a small Swedish flag to the railing on 26 September, then fifty more, and they have stayed. At Stockholm Palace people leave candles, and the Court asked them on 4 October to leave them on the Slottsbacken and not at the gates because of the traffic. On 5 October the Realm’s Parliament passed an address of thanks to the Queen, unanimously and without debate, moved by the Speaker, Mark Kelly. She replied with one line, that she would pass it on to the King when he could read it, and the Speaker read the reply to the House without comment. A poll in the Realm found that more than eight in ten approved of her serving as Regent, and that about a third of them could not have said where she was born; the ABC’s commentator said that this is the highest compliment a regent can be paid.

The Kathleen Marie and the dead

On Sunday 8 October she and Frederick received the five crew of the Kathleen Marie and their families at Columbia Palace, privately, after the Royal American Air Force flew them down. There was no press. She thanked each by name, Frederick shook each hand, and the skipper is reported to have said “We were only coming home.” She wrote by hand to the families of the three who died, Squadron Leader Holloway, Flight Lieutenant Price and Graham Pearce, the King’s valet, in the first week. Each letter took an evening. She received Pearce’s widow in the hospital chapel and sat with her for half an hour, and did not mention the King. She has asked for nothing about the inquiry into the loss; she told the Governor-General that the report should be published whole, and that she should not see it before the King’s ministers do.

Silence

She made no public statement from the loss until the evening of 31 October. The Swedish Court’s note each Friday has run unchanged since 29 September and is signed by the Marshal of the Court.

Asked in the Swedish press why she has not spoken, the Court said that she would speak when she had something to say. Her days since 30 September are a schedule: up at six; the hospital from eight to eleven; papers from eleven to two (British, the Realm’s, New Albion’s and the rest, and Swedish by video at 3 p.m., which is 9 p.m. in Stockholm); Frederick at four on the days she collects him; the hospital again after supper; Hansard to her husband at ten; bed after two. She has told Lindqvist that it is not a hardship, only a schedule.

20 October

The King woke in New Westminster General at about twenty to four in the morning of Friday 20 October. She was at Columbia Palace that night, not on the camp bed, and she was the first to be sent for, at about ten to four. She was at the bedside by about twenty past four, and he knew her. The Household has said only that he spoke a few words, and has not said what they were. Frederick was brought from the palace after her, at about a quarter past five, and the Governor-General came at about six. The Regency Office sent word to the other realms from about seven, after the Prime Minister and Britain’s Prime Minister had been told. The physicians’ bulletin at eight said that it was too early to say how complete his recovery would be, and that he was not to receive Ministers or perform any function of the Crown.

The five officers of the Regency Act met the same morning and resolved that the declaration of 30 September stands until the physicians certify that he is capable, so that she remains Regent in the Realm. Each of the other twelve realms in which she was Regent left its regency in place that day, each under its own law and by its own statement in the course of the day: twelve decisions, not one. Great Britain said that its own physicians must certify before its declaration under the Regency Act 2028 can end, and that a certificate given in the Realm would not do for Britain. She remained Regent in all thirteen, and made no public statement.

31 October

The Realm was the last of the realms to give effect to the abdication. His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Bill passed all its remaining stages in both Houses before midday, and at 11:42 in the morning she assented to it at Columbia Palace as Regent, the Governor-General having no power to perform an instrument that touches the succession. Her husband had signed his declaration at New Westminster General on 30 October and she had accepted it; on 31 October she gave it effect in the last of his realms.

At two in the afternoon, which was six in the evening in London, the abdication took effect in every realm at once and her son, who was in a geometry class at Ellicott High School, became King George V. She ceased to be Regent for her husband and became, under the common terms, Regent for her son in the same thirteen realms until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029. She took the Regent’s oaths for him in each realm that day, in the Realm at the Privy Council at Columbia Palace at six, at which his accession was proclaimed. Malaya, which follows Britain, needed no Regent.

She then spoke in public for the first time since the loss. Her words were issued from Columbia Palace.

That evening, on the advice of Alistair Rennie, she signed the warrant in New Westminster for the letters patent creating her husband Duke of Cumberland, and the Great Seal was affixed in London, the first British instrument of the new reign. He remains in New Westminster General. The Household announced from London the same evening, with the British government’s agreement, that her son will be crowned at Westminster Abbey after his sixteenth birthday, on a date to be fixed, and that the oaths a sovereign takes on his accession will wait for that birthday.

Character

Appearance and voice

She is tall, about 1.78 metres, with a straight naval carriage. Her hair, fair, went grey at forty and she has never dyed it. She wears reading glasses on a chain and takes them off when she is listening. She wears Swedish designers, plain colours, and at every state occasion one brooch, a sapphire that was her mother’s and had been a gift from her father. In public she has never been photographed in a hat she did not have to wear. Her voice is low and unhurried; her English has a Swedish spine and an American tail, picked up in fifteen years of New Westminster. She laughs rarely, and when she does the room hears it.

Temperament

Where her husband is formal she is conversational, and where he is archival she is pastoral, as his own article says. She is punctual to a fault, stubborn about small things (the garden walk, Tuesday evenings, being early) and flexible about large ones, and her staff say that she has never raised her voice and has never needed to. The Realm’s household staff call her “Early” behind her back, and she knows. She replied once, in the hearing of the footmen, that she hoped it was an accurate description of the staff too. She writes about twelve letters a day, all by hand, in Swedish, English or German, and has done so since she was eighteen; the Court keeps copies. When the household asked whether she would stop during the regencies, she said that the letters were the part of the day she could do well.

Habits

She drinks four cups of black filtered coffee a day, from one cup she brought from Stockholm and has never allowed to be washed by anybody else. She eats herring at breakfast. She knits, in private and never in meetings, and the scarf in Frederick’s school colours is hers. Her handwriting is small and upright.

Health

It is good. The Court’s only bulletin in years was a knee, from skiing, in 2019. Since the loss she has slept about four hours a night, and the Court’s doctor has been told to report nothing that she has not agreed to. The household’s worry is not hers.

Homes and money

In Sweden she has her apartments at Stockholm Palace, a house at Drottningholm shared with Queen Silvia, and Solliden on Öland for the summers. In the Realm she has the north wing of Columbia Palace and, with her husband, a fortnight each August at the lodge at Lac du Roi. Queen Silvia, who lives mostly at Drottningholm, has not left Sweden since Kittyhawk, and has told the Court that she will not be asked to take the regency of anything.

Symbols

Her Swedish standard and cypher are as the Sweden article gives them (the swallow-tailed banner of the national arms; a crowned C II), and she uses them only in Sweden. As Regent she uses no standard of her own in any realm: the Royal Standard of each realm is flown only when the King is present, and not over a hospital.

Failings

The Register states the failings plainly.

Her residence. Sweden pays a civil list for a Queen who spent 143 days in the country in 2027. The Court’s answer is the published count, which is honest and is not an answer to the objection.

The Court’s silence. The Court’s habit of saying little left Sweden and the Realm to learn the facts of Kittyhawk from the press, and the Friday note, the only regular communication, says one sentence.

The press rule. Frederick’s protection from photographers rested on ten years of the press’s own agreement and nothing in law. It held until the first night, and was suspended in effect four times in a week.

The heir’s distance. Frederick is being raised a continent from his Swedish inheritance. The Crown Prince’s Course is a plan and not a residence, and the republicans’ objection to it is the one the Court has least answered.

Sweden’s open question. Whether a Queen of Sweden may lawfully act for other Crowns was answered in London by an Act that named her. It has been put to the Riksdag’s Constitution Committee, which will not report until the regencies end.

The single point of failure. All thirteen regencies rest on her alone, and none names a deputy if she falls ill.

Assessment

She is the person the system needed and did not design. A queen with a country of her own has taken on the offices of thirteen others by being the one adult in the right city, and since 31 October has held them for her son, with a date, 2 May 2029, on which she gives them up. Her strength is the habit of being early, the refusal to explain herself and the refusal of discretion; her risk is that all of it rests on one person, who sleeps four hours a night and is the mother of the only heir. The Register’s account is of a woman who has done each thing that was asked of her, on time, and has asked for nothing in return.

Unresolved questions

As at 31 October 2028:

• Her husband’s recovery. He woke on 20 October and knew her. On 24 October his physicians said that his speech and parts of his memory may not recover fully. He gave up the Crown on 31 October and remains in New Westminster General as the Duke of Cumberland.
• The end of the regencies. Under the common terms her regencies for her son end on his sixteenth birthday, 2 May 2029, in every realm at once. The terms do not say what would follow if she could not act before then.
• The Constitution Committee’s inquiry in Stockholm. It will report after the regencies end.
• Sweden and the fourteen. Her son is King in fourteen capacities and her heir in Sweden, and the Interrealm Succession Compact says nothing about the two inheritances meeting in one person.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Ernest V, her husband, King of the fourteen Crowns from 1972 to 2028, now the Duke of Cumberland
• George V, her son, King of the fourteen Crowns since 31 October 2028 and Crown Prince of Sweden
• Kingdom of Sweden, the Crown she holds in her own right
• Scandinavian Union, whose Joint Session she hosts at Midsummer
• Kittyhawk, the loss of the King’s aircraft on 25 September 2028, his waking on 20 October and his abdication
• Princess Charlotte, Regent of Prussia and the Empire
• Olav, Grand Duke of Minnesota, her cousin of the Bernadotte cadet branch
• Theo Hartigan, Frederick’s friend
• Church of America, whose Supreme Governor’s functions she exercises as Regent
• Privy Council, before which she was sworn on 30 September
• The Regency, the ABC’s record of 2 October
• Peter II, who wrote to her after Kittyhawk
• Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Governor-General
• Caleb Whitlock, the Prime Minister
• Styles and titles of the Crown, the fourteen capacities

Categories

World people · Royalty · Sweden · The Bernadotte family · Regents