Elizabeth Stuart, the only daughter of James VI of Scotland (he became James I of England seven years after her birth), was married at sixteen to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, also sixteen, in 1613. His principality, the Palatinate (its capitol, Heidelberg), made him the first elector of the Roman Empire. The arranged match turned out to be a love match: they were devoted to each other.
Elizabeth was Queen of Bohemia for only twelve months. Frederick, offered the crown by its Protestant nobles, accepted it, unwisely. He and Elizabeth were crowned in Prague in November 1619 and ruled until November 1620, when his troops were defeated in the Battle of White Mountain. Nevertheless, Elizabeth insisted throughout her life on the title. Frederick’s acceptance of the crown initiated the Thirty Years’ War, the pan-European conflict that lasted from 1618 to 1648.
More devastating for Frederick and Elizabeth than losing Bohemia was the Spanish occupation of the Palatinate, which left them stateless. They took refuge in The Hague, where Elizabeth lived until after the restoration of the Stuarts, when she returned to England, briefly, before she died. Frederick joined the army of Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, after he entered the conflict in 1630; Frederick hoped to regain the Palatinate by advancing the Protestant cause. But he died of plague in 1632, leaving Elizabeth a widow with eleven surviving children.
This volume contains Elizabeth’s correspondence during her most politically active years, 1632–42, when she was left to manage the affairs of her family and their quest to regain the Palatinate. By 1642 her eldest son, Charles Louis, had attained his majority and assumed control. Oxford University Press published this volume first because it was ready: it was Akkerman’s dissertation. Volume 1 of the correspondence is scheduled for 2014, volume 3 for 2016.
Elizabeth’s correspondence figures prominently in the first serious biography of her, by Mary Anne Everett Green (1818–95); a revised edition appeared posthumously in 1909. Green was an accomplished historian employed by the Public Record Office to calendar state papers. The only published edition of Elizabeth’s letters prior to Akkerman’s appeared in 1953, the work of L. M. Baker. It is an amateurish affair: Baker takes most of the letters from printed sources and her annotations are minimal. Her edition contains some sixty-five letters Elizabeth wrote between 1632 and 1642; Akkerman’s contains some 300 letters from Elizabeth and over 300 letters to Elizabeth written during the same period.
Akkerman consulted at least fifty archives, libraries, and private collections; she used both manuscript and printed sources. Each letter is prefaced by headnotes specifying its type, its location (for manuscripts), its recipient, its endorsements, its previous appearances in print, its relation to other letters in the volume, and the identity of its bearer and its secretary, when known. Letters are translated from French (which Elizabeth wrote fluently) and also from Latin. Akkerman has reconstructed the ciphers Elizabeth and some of her correspondents used and glossed the letters in which they appear. In addition, the letters are copiously annotated: Akkerman has mastered the complex diplomatic and military developments of the period. One could scarcely ask for more.
This volume will not alter our understanding of the larger configurations of the Thirty Years’ War: it focuses on the ways both sides used the Palatinate as a bargaining chip. The Protestants wanted Elizabeth’s father and then her brother, Charles I, to commit substantial resources to their side; the Catholics wanted them to remain neutral. James was committed to negotiation. Charles, as crown prince, deplored his father’s unwillingness to act, but, as king, lacked resources to intervene in significant ways. Moreover, in 1634 he committed to the Tower for four months Elizabeth’s secretary, Sir Francis Nethersole, for too vigorously advocating her cause. In her letters Elizabeth gallantly proclaims her trust in her brother as well as her despair as she watches yet another round of negotiations and frets that Charles’s emissaries are likely to bargain away some of her son’s rights.
Elizabeth’s correspondents in this volume include the Swede Axel Oxiensterna, Christian IV of Denmark, Wilhelm V of Hesse-Kassel, even Emperor Ferdinand II and the King of Hungary, soon to be Emperor Ferdinand III. Most of her correspondents, however, are English, influential men she hoped would keep the Palatine cause alive: Sir John Coke; James Hamilton, Marquess of Hamilton; James Hay, Earl of Carlisle; Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel; and Henry Rich, Earl of Holland. Her most frequent correspondent is Sir Thomas Roe, who held ambassadorial posts under both James and Charles; he became Elizabeth’s friend, confidant, and advisor. She also cultivated as a correspondent William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, who became active in secular affairs in 1635. Her eldest son, Charles Louis, who encouraged ties with Charles’s parliamentary opposition, wrote frequently to her; her letters to him from this period have disappeared.
This volume shows Elizabeth as a committed and shrewd tactician and a remarkable woman — articulate, thoughtful, responsible, emotionally sturdy, loving, and fond of amusement. Volume 1 will show the maturing princess and the young wife and reveal her role in the social and cultural life of The Hague; perhaps it will also reveal more about her role in her husband’s decision to accept the crown of Bohemia. Volume 3 will reveal more about her relations with English Royalists in exile, in particular her nephew, the young Charles II. Together they will show a more resolute and less romantic figure than previous biographies have shown. Most biographies since Green’s (there have been many) have tended to subtract from Green’s rather gritty account rather than add to it. A new biography of Elizabeth awaits the publication of the remaining volumes of her correspondence. Perhaps Akkerman will write it.
