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Elizabeth Stuart, the ‘Winter Queen’
Mr I Bannerman
Elizabeth Stuart was born a Scottish princess, raised in a now demolished English palace in Surrey, lionised as a protestant ‘phoenix’ by John Donne and married in a wedding so lavish that it nearly bankrupted England.
She reigned as Electress consort of the Palatinate for ten years and Queen of Bohemia for a single winter. After her husband’s defeat at the Battle of White Mountain (1620), she and her family were cast out of their lands and condemned to roam Europe as vagabonds, while central Europe was doomed to the almost unparalleled horrors of the Thirty Years War. During her remarkably eventful youth Elizabeth also found the time to have thirteen children, seven of whom predeceased her, as did her husband, Frederick of the Rhine, her father, King James I of England and her brother Charles I, who was decapitated in front of the Banqueting House in London on the 30th of January 1549.
Unlike her uncouth father and inflexible brother, Elizabeth always maintained a place of affection in the English imagination.
Image: Princess Elizabeth 'Elizabeth of Bohemia, The Winter Queen' by Robert Peake 1603
She had been named to flatter her third cousin, Elizabeth I, and was always consciously depicted in her image in portraiture. While her family were often viewed as parasitic Scottish interlopers, Elizabeth was associated with the halo of good queen Bess. Elizabeth Stuart was highly educated, literate, a superlative horsewoman and fluent in several European languages, she was an accomplished dancer and musician as well as a witty conversationalist. The only gap in her education was Latin, which she had not been taught, as her father believed that knowledge of Latin was dangerous and unseemly in women given that it lent it itself to increasing their ‘cunning’. Elizabeth’s hand in marriage was eagerly sort across Europe but eventually went to Frederick of the Rhine. Unusually for arranged marriages they seem to have been utterly devoted to each other and Elizabeth nearly starved herself to death in grief at her husband’s eventual demise. After a fabulously expensive wedding and celebrations which lasted two months Elizabeth and Frederick decamped to the gothic splendour of Heidelberg in modern Germany. To please his wife Frederick built for her, in his castle, a monkey-house, a zoo, and a set of gardens so lavish that they were described as the eighth wonder of the world.
This peace was shattered by the decision of the nobles of protestant Bohemia to depose their Habsburg King and elect Frederick in his place. Frederick saw it as his duty to defend protestant Bohemia and wished to be a King rather than a mere Elector. Whatever his reasoning the decision was a disaster. Frederick and Elizabeth ruled Bohemia for twelve months before being expelled by the Hapsburgs. While this was a personal disaster for the couple, it was a catastrophe for the Bohemian protestants who were forcibly catholicized or exterminated and for Central Europe as a whole.
A greater percentage of the population of Germany was killed during the Thirty Years War than during either the First or Second World Wars and the religious violence and persecution of the conflict inspired the horror of absolutism and Catholicism which led to the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. While Elizabeth’s own family were not unscathed by the conflict they had unwittingly unleashed, they did prosper. Her son Rupert became the most famous of the Cavalier generals in the Civil War (his dog was believed by parliamentarians to have demonic powers) but it was her daughter, Sophie, who had the most lasting impact on history. Sophie married the Elector of Hannover, was a great patron of science and her son became King of Great Britain as George I.
