Nancy Goldstone: Daughters of the Winter Queen
Subtitle: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Still catching up with reviewing books I read weeks ago, because RL keeps being insanely busy:
kathyh mentioned this one to me, and as it overlaps with several areas of interest to me, I read and enjoyed it. It's entertaining, and accomplishes the feat of covering some of the most insanely complicated eras of European history (=> Thirty Years War, I'm just saying) in a way that should makes it comprehensible to a readership who doesn't know their Tilly from their Wallenstein while at the same time doesn't bore or annoy an audience (yours truly being a case in point) who does. This mighty deed is achieved by telling its story as a family soap opera saga with power games, love affairs, schemes and various gruesome defeats and victories against the odds.
Mind you, the very title smacks of a misdirecting marketing ploy, with nothing but the prologue and two sentences at the end justifying the "Mary, Queen of Scots" bit. I can just hear the publishing person saying "no one knows or cares about these Germans, you need to connect this to the one Stuart everyone has at least heard of!" And so we get a prologue describing the execution of Mary Stuart, assuring us that while people back then might have thought the execution spelled her defeat and ending, she'd have the final triumph because her progeny, not Elizabeth's, would rule England forever and ever and this book tells you how this was accomplished through a series of remarkable women. Which honestly made me roll my eyes, because
a) When Mary was executed, everyone knew Elizabeth was past menopause and childless, therefore, no descendant of hers would rule, and Mary's son James was the most likely successor. Short of James getting killed before Elizabeth and Elizabeth having to change her mind about her locked up Grey relations, there was in effect no way this would have been avoided. (Well, okay, if the Spanish Armada had won, I guess.) Therefore, Mary's descendants being on the throne would have been something everyone watching her execution would have expected.
b) Allow me to doubt Mary would have regarded her Protestant descendants ousting her Catholic descendants from the throne as her ultimate triumph. If you want to believe that, fine, but I do take her claim to be a faithful Catholic a bit more seriously than that. (Not least because if Mary had been equal minded about Protestant and Catholic claims, she'd hardly have had a case against Elizabeth.)
c) Also, that prologue comparing Mary to Jeanne d'Arc (basis of comparison: their trials' outcomes were clear from the get go, their judges didn't expect these brave women to talk back! Which, well....) doesn't do the book any favors, since it's otherwise better history than that.
Prologue and final sentence aside, though, the book is fun. The other mismoniker bit of the tile is that it should be more properly called "The Winter Queen and her children" , since the first third to the first half is completely focused on Elizabeth Stuart (the Winter Queen in question), and at least two of her sons (Rupert of the Palatinate and Karl Ludwig) get as much narrative space in the second part as the majority of their sisters. This is narratively justifiable because Rupert gets involved with the English Civil War, big time, which means a lot of drama, while one of the sisters, Maria Henrietta, doesn't do much more than be pretty and die young (there aren't even any letter quotes bringing her to life), and it doesn't mean the other daughters don't get a lot of (entertaining) page time, but I'm stating it for accuracy's sake.
So, with this out of the way, what is the book about and what does it tell, more specifically than "a family soap opera saga on a Game of Thrones level"? First, meet Elizabeth, sole daughter of James the VI and I (of Scotland and England respectively, son of Mary Queen of Scots; played by Alan Cummings on Doctor Who, which I just have to mention). She spends her childhood and teenage years being a princess praised for beauty and cleverness, a golden girl like her brother Henry is a golden boy, and little brother Charles the sickly afterthought. However, James rather surprisingly sells her under marriage market value by accepting a marriage proposal not from European royalty (and definitely not from a British noble - James was justifiably paranoid, and the Gunpowder Plotters apparently had a scheme of making little Elizabeth Queen after offing her male relations), but from one Friedrich, Prince Elector of the Palatine. This made him one of the more powerful princes within the HRE, but still, in no way was he Elizabeth's social equal. Otoh he was her age (they were born just ten days apart), handsome, and had, drumroll, a rather intriguing prospect on the horizon if a whole chain of events would happen, relating to the Crown of Bohemia. Whether James when marrying his daughter to Friedrich was actively encouraging German Protestants to consider his new son-in-law as a candidate for the Bohemian Crown (what the Bohemians thoughts, what many a German Protestant thought, and definitely what Elizabeth thought) or whether he had no such thing in mind (what James said he thought and how he acted subsequently) became a matter of hot debate. Not least because just before the marriage could happen, James' older son Henry died, which make Charles (whose health had been poor all through his youth) the sole surviving male heir, which in turn meant Elizabeth suddenly was next in line for the English and Scottish heritage as well.
Elizabeth marries Friedrich, has a few early good years with him at Heidelberg producing babies, and then the Defenestration of Prague happens, Bohemians vote the Catholic Habsburg Emperor out and Friedrich in re: the Bohemian Crown (with the expectation that hey, father-in-law James, who also accepted the title of head of the German Protestant Defense League surely would have never done that and made the guy his son -in-law if he wasn't willing to spend some money and troops there) - and Thirty Years of the bloodiest, most devastating conflict on European soil until the 20th century have just started. BTW, Goldstone is unabashedly partisan and harsh on James, who at time wanted to marry Charles to a Spanish Infanta (as in, a Habsburg, Catholic one), not only didn't do anything to help Elizabeth and her husband but explicitly forbade her and any of her children to return to England once the war turned against them (which it quickly did), but you can of course make the case that this way, he kept Britain out of the hell that was this particular war. (Otoh whether or not this war would have happened when it did and the way it did if he'd made it clear earlier that he would act this way is also up to debate.)
The reason why Elizabeth and her husband are called "The Winter Queen and the Winter King" is that they didn't last much longer before a crushing defeat happened that ousted them from Prague. Worse was to come, because Friedrich's own principality, the Palatinate, was next. Which meant Elizabeth was on the run with no money, no backup, one toddler (Rupert, btw), her highly pregnant again, and her three older children with her mother-in-law. At which point she becomes interesting as she shows she's one of the Stuarts who are best in adversity. Courtesy of the Prince Elector of Brandenburg having married Friedrich's sister, they end up at first in, drumroll, Küstrin, which is mostly famous because that's where Elizabeth's great-grandson would lock up his son, her great great grandson, future Frederick the Great, and force him to watch his friend's and probable lover's execution, so naturally I paid attention at the naming of this particular location. However, their brother-in-law of Brandenburg doesn't want any trouble with the Emperor, so this was only temporary, and they ended up in the Netherlands, sponsored by the Prince of Orange. Elizabeth's ever increasing number of children reads like a list of the people she hoped would help her in her stubborn lobbying campain for allies and to get at least the Palatinate back. (Notably, there's not a single "James" among them, but a Gustavus Adolphus, after the most famous Protestant ruler of the 30 Years War.)
Of the daughters who grew up in the Netherlands while Elizabeth (who was widowed with fourteen children when Friedrich died of the plague, because the guy truly has a claim to the "Most unfortunate prince of the era" ttitle) struggled on, the one who gets the most page is the youngest, child No.12, Sophia. This is both because Sophia left us the most first person material - delightfully snarky memoirs, from which Goldstone quotes amply, and a just as entertaining correspondances -, and because Sophia, like the youngest fairy tale princesses are prone to, would turn out to be the success story of the saga, the one to win the Game of Thrones, so to speak. Also important and having left some primary source material to describe them in a three dimensional way are:
Elisabeth the younger: first class maths talent, becoming bff with Descartes and able to not just correspond but exchange maths problem with him. Has a rivalry about him with the famous Queen Christina of Sweden. (Neither woman wanted Descartes romantically, I hasten to add.) This includes the part where Descartes crushes Elisabeth by asking her whether he can show Christina her letters along with his to her and the part where he signals Elisabeth she's still his favourite royal soulmate by confessing Christina, as it turned out, wasn't into maths but languages. Elisabeth mostly for lack of cash does not get married, has a spectacular argument with her mother over one particular scandal, see below, and after moving in with the Brandenburg cousins for a while ends up as a (Protestant) Abbess of Herford.
Louisa Hollandine (named thus by a grateful Elizabeth to honor her Dutch hosts), who became a painter apprenticed to Gerard van Honthorst and after various almost marriages didn't happen due to either lack of money or scandal (not her fault, I get to it), shocked her mother to the core by converting to Catholicism and ending up as the (Catholic) Abbess of Maubisson.
Sophia, by contrast, does get married (though late for the era - she was in her later 20s already) due to her involvement with the Hannover brothers (the older first proposed to her, then the younger) and ends up changing the fate of Europe in more than one way; you can read about her in the entries re: her memoirs and her letters I linked above. Sister Henrietta (named after Charles' wife, in the hope that Charles, once he got on the throne, would fork over some money and troops, the former of which he did until he himself started to get embroiled in a civil war and lost his throne), like I said, remains a cypher due to her early death. Of the brothers, we get cautious Karl Ludwig, who was in Britain at the same time Rupert was but did not side with Uncle Charles due to wanting the English Parliament continue to pay his mother's and sibliings living expenses, which, well ,they didn't, unsurprisingly) , who ends up trying to do a miniature Henry VIII by divorcing his wife on his own authority only for her to refuse to move out, with the result being that he had to support two wives and two families, Rupert who between fighting for Uncle Charles in the English Civil War, becoming a pirate post Civil War, and then an Admiral when nephew Charles II became King bascially covers the action hero angle in this tale (also the pet angle: he had a poodle named Boy(e) whom he he had acquired while being imprisoned in Austria (pre English Civil war - Rupert got around a lot) and who was so constantly at his side that some Parliamentarian killed the poor beast and boasted about it after the Battle of Naseby), Edward who solved the family's eternal cash problem by converting to Catholicism and marrying a hot and determined lady a decade older than him, Anna de Gonzaga, and Philip who also is a cypher like Henrietta, famous only for one thing, and that gets me to the big scandal in a family which had these a lot: after fourteen years of utterly respectable widowhood, Elizabeth the Winter Queen comes across a dashing Frenchman named either Epinay or the Marquis d'Epinay, depending on whether you believe he made the noble title up or not, and flirts with him. A lot. Epinay when coming across her son Philip boasts he's had Philip's mother and is having a go at his sister Louisa as well. (Most likely not true, but the story would finish Louisa's marriage chances for good.) Phiip loses it, and kills Epinay (whether or not Epinay drew too is also debated, but what's not debated is that Philip knifed him. A duel, this was not.) Elizabeth by grieving for Epinay and taking against Philip ended up quarrelling with almost all her other children, all of whom took Philip's side. That's when her daughter Elisabeth the Younger moved to Berlin. Sophia, who had been the most distant of the daughters when growing up (due to being the youngest and the snarkiest), ironically was the only daughter still on good terms with her mother after that one, but usually from a Hannover distance. Of the sons, only her fave Rupert didn't care. (He'd be by her side when Elizabeth finally went back to England, after the Restoration, to live the last year of her life there.)
Like I said: Nancy Goldstone does a good job presenting this story and its twists and turns in an accessible manner. The Stuart partisanship certainly made my eyebrows rise more than once - presenting the dethroning of James II/Glorious Revolution as a Goneril and Regan vs Lear thing is certainly... a choice, and she's a bit economical with the truth when claiming both Sophia and her niece Liselotte (most famous and outspoken letter writer at Versailles of the era, wife to Philippe d'Orleans, aka Monsieur) had no doubt James was in the right; having read both their letters, I can tell you Sophia saw the dethroning of James the ÜberCatholic coming ("The King of England supposedly said at supper that my brother the Prince Elector and I didn't have any religion, and another time when he thought a letter I had written to him amusing, he added: "My cousin has wit, but not much religion." One could only wish this worthy prince that he wouldn't have such a loose tongue which will probably end costing him his throne") and Liselotte thought exiled James was certainly to be pitied, but William of Orange (whom she'd met as a girl and for a time had wanted to marry) had way more sense and definitely made a better King). But otoh, there isn't a dull page in the book. In conclusion: I can reccomend it, and not just if you want to know why Britain got ruled by German monarchs from 1714 onwards. This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1453740.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Still catching up with reviewing books I read weeks ago, because RL keeps being insanely busy:
kathyh mentioned this one to me, and as it overlaps with several areas of interest to me, I read and enjoyed it. It's entertaining, and accomplishes the feat of covering some of the most insanely complicated eras of European history (=> Thirty Years War, I'm just saying) in a way that should makes it comprehensible to a readership who doesn't know their Tilly from their Wallenstein while at the same time doesn't bore or annoy an audience (yours truly being a case in point) who does. This mighty deed is achieved by telling its story as a family soap opera saga with power games, love affairs, schemes and various gruesome defeats and victories against the odds.
Mind you, the very title smacks of a misdirecting marketing ploy, with nothing but the prologue and two sentences at the end justifying the "Mary, Queen of Scots" bit. I can just hear the publishing person saying "no one knows or cares about these Germans, you need to connect this to the one Stuart everyone has at least heard of!" And so we get a prologue describing the execution of Mary Stuart, assuring us that while people back then might have thought the execution spelled her defeat and ending, she'd have the final triumph because her progeny, not Elizabeth's, would rule England forever and ever and this book tells you how this was accomplished through a series of remarkable women. Which honestly made me roll my eyes, because
a) When Mary was executed, everyone knew Elizabeth was past menopause and childless, therefore, no descendant of hers would rule, and Mary's son James was the most likely successor. Short of James getting killed before Elizabeth and Elizabeth having to change her mind about her locked up Grey relations, there was in effect no way this would have been avoided. (Well, okay, if the Spanish Armada had won, I guess.) Therefore, Mary's descendants being on the throne would have been something everyone watching her execution would have expected.
b) Allow me to doubt Mary would have regarded her Protestant descendants ousting her Catholic descendants from the throne as her ultimate triumph. If you want to believe that, fine, but I do take her claim to be a faithful Catholic a bit more seriously than that. (Not least because if Mary had been equal minded about Protestant and Catholic claims, she'd hardly have had a case against Elizabeth.)
c) Also, that prologue comparing Mary to Jeanne d'Arc (basis of comparison: their trials' outcomes were clear from the get go, their judges didn't expect these brave women to talk back! Which, well....) doesn't do the book any favors, since it's otherwise better history than that.
Prologue and final sentence aside, though, the book is fun. The other mismoniker bit of the tile is that it should be more properly called "The Winter Queen and her children" , since the first third to the first half is completely focused on Elizabeth Stuart (the Winter Queen in question), and at least two of her sons (Rupert of the Palatinate and Karl Ludwig) get as much narrative space in the second part as the majority of their sisters. This is narratively justifiable because Rupert gets involved with the English Civil War, big time, which means a lot of drama, while one of the sisters, Maria Henrietta, doesn't do much more than be pretty and die young (there aren't even any letter quotes bringing her to life), and it doesn't mean the other daughters don't get a lot of (entertaining) page time, but I'm stating it for accuracy's sake.
So, with this out of the way, what is the book about and what does it tell, more specifically than "a family soap opera saga on a Game of Thrones level"? First, meet Elizabeth, sole daughter of James the VI and I (of Scotland and England respectively, son of Mary Queen of Scots; played by Alan Cummings on Doctor Who, which I just have to mention). She spends her childhood and teenage years being a princess praised for beauty and cleverness, a golden girl like her brother Henry is a golden boy, and little brother Charles the sickly afterthought. However, James rather surprisingly sells her under marriage market value by accepting a marriage proposal not from European royalty (and definitely not from a British noble - James was justifiably paranoid, and the Gunpowder Plotters apparently had a scheme of making little Elizabeth Queen after offing her male relations), but from one Friedrich, Prince Elector of the Palatine. This made him one of the more powerful princes within the HRE, but still, in no way was he Elizabeth's social equal. Otoh he was her age (they were born just ten days apart), handsome, and had, drumroll, a rather intriguing prospect on the horizon if a whole chain of events would happen, relating to the Crown of Bohemia. Whether James when marrying his daughter to Friedrich was actively encouraging German Protestants to consider his new son-in-law as a candidate for the Bohemian Crown (what the Bohemians thoughts, what many a German Protestant thought, and definitely what Elizabeth thought) or whether he had no such thing in mind (what James said he thought and how he acted subsequently) became a matter of hot debate. Not least because just before the marriage could happen, James' older son Henry died, which make Charles (whose health had been poor all through his youth) the sole surviving male heir, which in turn meant Elizabeth suddenly was next in line for the English and Scottish heritage as well.
Elizabeth marries Friedrich, has a few early good years with him at Heidelberg producing babies, and then the Defenestration of Prague happens, Bohemians vote the Catholic Habsburg Emperor out and Friedrich in re: the Bohemian Crown (with the expectation that hey, father-in-law James, who also accepted the title of head of the German Protestant Defense League surely would have never done that and made the guy his son -in-law if he wasn't willing to spend some money and troops there) - and Thirty Years of the bloodiest, most devastating conflict on European soil until the 20th century have just started. BTW, Goldstone is unabashedly partisan and harsh on James, who at time wanted to marry Charles to a Spanish Infanta (as in, a Habsburg, Catholic one), not only didn't do anything to help Elizabeth and her husband but explicitly forbade her and any of her children to return to England once the war turned against them (which it quickly did), but you can of course make the case that this way, he kept Britain out of the hell that was this particular war. (Otoh whether or not this war would have happened when it did and the way it did if he'd made it clear earlier that he would act this way is also up to debate.)
The reason why Elizabeth and her husband are called "The Winter Queen and the Winter King" is that they didn't last much longer before a crushing defeat happened that ousted them from Prague. Worse was to come, because Friedrich's own principality, the Palatinate, was next. Which meant Elizabeth was on the run with no money, no backup, one toddler (Rupert, btw), her highly pregnant again, and her three older children with her mother-in-law. At which point she becomes interesting as she shows she's one of the Stuarts who are best in adversity. Courtesy of the Prince Elector of Brandenburg having married Friedrich's sister, they end up at first in, drumroll, Küstrin, which is mostly famous because that's where Elizabeth's great-grandson would lock up his son, her great great grandson, future Frederick the Great, and force him to watch his friend's and probable lover's execution, so naturally I paid attention at the naming of this particular location. However, their brother-in-law of Brandenburg doesn't want any trouble with the Emperor, so this was only temporary, and they ended up in the Netherlands, sponsored by the Prince of Orange. Elizabeth's ever increasing number of children reads like a list of the people she hoped would help her in her stubborn lobbying campain for allies and to get at least the Palatinate back. (Notably, there's not a single "James" among them, but a Gustavus Adolphus, after the most famous Protestant ruler of the 30 Years War.)
Of the daughters who grew up in the Netherlands while Elizabeth (who was widowed with fourteen children when Friedrich died of the plague, because the guy truly has a claim to the "Most unfortunate prince of the era" ttitle) struggled on, the one who gets the most page is the youngest, child No.12, Sophia. This is both because Sophia left us the most first person material - delightfully snarky memoirs, from which Goldstone quotes amply, and a just as entertaining correspondances -, and because Sophia, like the youngest fairy tale princesses are prone to, would turn out to be the success story of the saga, the one to win the Game of Thrones, so to speak. Also important and having left some primary source material to describe them in a three dimensional way are:
Elisabeth the younger: first class maths talent, becoming bff with Descartes and able to not just correspond but exchange maths problem with him. Has a rivalry about him with the famous Queen Christina of Sweden. (Neither woman wanted Descartes romantically, I hasten to add.) This includes the part where Descartes crushes Elisabeth by asking her whether he can show Christina her letters along with his to her and the part where he signals Elisabeth she's still his favourite royal soulmate by confessing Christina, as it turned out, wasn't into maths but languages. Elisabeth mostly for lack of cash does not get married, has a spectacular argument with her mother over one particular scandal, see below, and after moving in with the Brandenburg cousins for a while ends up as a (Protestant) Abbess of Herford.
Louisa Hollandine (named thus by a grateful Elizabeth to honor her Dutch hosts), who became a painter apprenticed to Gerard van Honthorst and after various almost marriages didn't happen due to either lack of money or scandal (not her fault, I get to it), shocked her mother to the core by converting to Catholicism and ending up as the (Catholic) Abbess of Maubisson.
Sophia, by contrast, does get married (though late for the era - she was in her later 20s already) due to her involvement with the Hannover brothers (the older first proposed to her, then the younger) and ends up changing the fate of Europe in more than one way; you can read about her in the entries re: her memoirs and her letters I linked above. Sister Henrietta (named after Charles' wife, in the hope that Charles, once he got on the throne, would fork over some money and troops, the former of which he did until he himself started to get embroiled in a civil war and lost his throne), like I said, remains a cypher due to her early death. Of the brothers, we get cautious Karl Ludwig, who was in Britain at the same time Rupert was but did not side with Uncle Charles due to wanting the English Parliament continue to pay his mother's and sibliings living expenses, which, well ,they didn't, unsurprisingly) , who ends up trying to do a miniature Henry VIII by divorcing his wife on his own authority only for her to refuse to move out, with the result being that he had to support two wives and two families, Rupert who between fighting for Uncle Charles in the English Civil War, becoming a pirate post Civil War, and then an Admiral when nephew Charles II became King bascially covers the action hero angle in this tale (also the pet angle: he had a poodle named Boy(e) whom he he had acquired while being imprisoned in Austria (pre English Civil war - Rupert got around a lot) and who was so constantly at his side that some Parliamentarian killed the poor beast and boasted about it after the Battle of Naseby), Edward who solved the family's eternal cash problem by converting to Catholicism and marrying a hot and determined lady a decade older than him, Anna de Gonzaga, and Philip who also is a cypher like Henrietta, famous only for one thing, and that gets me to the big scandal in a family which had these a lot: after fourteen years of utterly respectable widowhood, Elizabeth the Winter Queen comes across a dashing Frenchman named either Epinay or the Marquis d'Epinay, depending on whether you believe he made the noble title up or not, and flirts with him. A lot. Epinay when coming across her son Philip boasts he's had Philip's mother and is having a go at his sister Louisa as well. (Most likely not true, but the story would finish Louisa's marriage chances for good.) Phiip loses it, and kills Epinay (whether or not Epinay drew too is also debated, but what's not debated is that Philip knifed him. A duel, this was not.) Elizabeth by grieving for Epinay and taking against Philip ended up quarrelling with almost all her other children, all of whom took Philip's side. That's when her daughter Elisabeth the Younger moved to Berlin. Sophia, who had been the most distant of the daughters when growing up (due to being the youngest and the snarkiest), ironically was the only daughter still on good terms with her mother after that one, but usually from a Hannover distance. Of the sons, only her fave Rupert didn't care. (He'd be by her side when Elizabeth finally went back to England, after the Restoration, to live the last year of her life there.)
Like I said: Nancy Goldstone does a good job presenting this story and its twists and turns in an accessible manner. The Stuart partisanship certainly made my eyebrows rise more than once - presenting the dethroning of James II/Glorious Revolution as a Goneril and Regan vs Lear thing is certainly... a choice, and she's a bit economical with the truth when claiming both Sophia and her niece Liselotte (most famous and outspoken letter writer at Versailles of the era, wife to Philippe d'Orleans, aka Monsieur) had no doubt James was in the right; having read both their letters, I can tell you Sophia saw the dethroning of James the ÜberCatholic coming ("The King of England supposedly said at supper that my brother the Prince Elector and I didn't have any religion, and another time when he thought a letter I had written to him amusing, he added: "My cousin has wit, but not much religion." One could only wish this worthy prince that he wouldn't have such a loose tongue which will probably end costing him his throne") and Liselotte thought exiled James was certainly to be pitied, but William of Orange (whom she'd met as a girl and for a time had wanted to marry) had way more sense and definitely made a better King). But otoh, there isn't a dull page in the book. In conclusion: I can reccomend it, and not just if you want to know why Britain got ruled by German monarchs from 1714 onwards. This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1453740.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.