On the 13th of March 1799 the Opera House of Berlin was the scene of a masquerade which contemporary reports describe as well worthy of the days of Louis XIV., or of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. It represented the marriage of the English Queen Mary with Philip of Spain, the character of the bride being supported by Queen Louisa, and that of the bridegroom by the Duke of Sussex. A minuet of these two royal personages was followed by a quadrille between Queen Elizabeth, Don John of Austria, Margaret of Parma, and the Duke of Savoy.
On the evening of March 16, 1792, Gustavus III. was mortally wounded at a masked ball at the Opera House at Stockholm, and died, after great suffering, on the 29th. The pistol-shot was fired by a man of noble family, Ankarström, formerly a captain in the Guards, who, having retired from active service, and still holding a half-civil command in the island of Gothland, had been--rightly or wrongly--accused of a traitorous understanding with the Finland mutineers in 1788. He had, therefore, been sentenced by the King to a term of imprisonment. This sentence, it has been suggested, and the wrongs his order had sustained in the constitutional changes of 1789, may have wrought a mind naturally gloomy into madness; in addition to which he is said to have lost heavily by a sudden depreciation of paper money to an extent of 30 per cent. Hence the King, in his eyes, was a tyrant and a robber, and he vowed vengeance. With him were joined several other discontented and angry nobles, who had suffered arrest in 1789, and had real or fancied wrongs to avenge; and it may be added that the King’s secretary, Bjelke, who enjoyed much of his Majesty’s confidence, persuaded him to go to the ball, taking care to give timely notice to the conspirators.
At night, after Christina had taken the most solemn step of abandoning the community of Luther for the Church of Rome, at Innsbruck, in Tyrol, the Archduke entertained her with a masque and dancing. Nor was this all, for there was a play represented before her that evening, the moral of which, it is said, was not of the cleanest, and upon which the illustrious convert made this comment: “Well, gentlemen, it is but proper that you should entertain me with a comedy to-night, since I amused you with a farce this morning”--a profane remark, concerning which the great Leibnitz remarks that, if it was really uttered, it proved that “Christina was not mindful of--decorum!”