Ebba Brahe - Biography

Biography

Ebba Brahe was born as the daughter of Magnus Brahe and Britta Stensdotter Leijonhuvud and cousin of Margareta Brahe and Per Brahe the Younger. She was sent to court in 1611 at the age of fifteen to spend some time as a lady-in-waiting to the queen dowager, Christina of Holstein-Gottorp, to become accustomed to the ways of the fashionable world before marriage.

In 1613, by the age of 16, she became the mistress to the king, Gustavus Adolphus. This was by no means an official position, but it was well known within the royal court. By the letters exchanged between them, it seems that they were both equally in love with each other. There were serious plans for a marriage, and Gustavus Adolphus would not have found this impossible, as three previous queens, Margareta Leijonhufvud (his grandmother), Katarina Stenbock (his step-grandmother) and Gunilla Bielke (his aunt by marriage) had also been nobles. The plans of marriage was, however, opposed and prevented by the queen dowager, who was the ruler de facto during her son's first years and who wished for him to have an arranged marriage of political convenience. The dispute between the dowager queen, the king and Ebba Brahe about the marriage continued until 1615, and has been the subject of romantic plays, stories and poems for centuries.

The most famous trivia about this dispute is as follows: the queen dowager passed a window, followed by Ebba Brahe. On the windowpane, the queen dowager wrote with a diamond ring, as a hint of the plans which they did not discuss openly: One thing you want, one thing you shall; that is the way in cases such as this, and left. Ebba Brahe stepped forward and wrote in reply: I am happy with what I have, and thank my God for the grace of that. By this, Ebba Brahe accepted that the relationship with the king could never be official. On 24 June 1618 she married Count Jacob De la Gardie, although her relationship with Adolphus continued (in secret) until his death in 1632.

Widowed in 1652, she became one of the many powerful female land holder, who occupy a significant place in the local legends of Sweden during the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Barbro Påle, Sophia Drake, Margareta Huitfeldt and Margareta von Ascheberg. She became a successful land holder, managed her estates and expanded them. She acquired new estates from the formerly Danish province Skåne, which became a Swedish province in 1658 and had many large estates which were left behind by the Danish nobility. She also played an influential part at the royal court, and was believed to have had an influence on queen Christina of Sweden. In 1651, the historian Messenius and his son accused her of having persuaded queen Christina not to marry by using witchcraft. Such an accusation could not be accepted about a noble, and the acccusors were instead decapitated for treason.

After her husband's death in 1652 she successfully petitioned Queen Christina I of Sweden to found the city of Jakobstad in Finland, named in honour of her late husband. A street in Jakobstad, Ebba Brahe Esplanaden, has been named after her.