Daughters of history
SARAH GRISTWOOD finds that an engaging narrative about the daughters of Elizabeth Stuart fills some gaps in the succession story
Daughters of the Winter Queen by Nancy Goldstone Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 496 pages, £20
For many of us, there is a bit of a gap in British history. The sexy Stuarts produced – through an obscure route – the horrid Hanoverians, whose line continues to the present monarchy. But how did we get from James I to George I? Nancy Goldstone’s vivid and convincing new book is in some ways a succession story, rewritten to give the distaff line its due.
Wisely, perhaps, her pitch passes over the well-worn glamour of the ‘Winter Queen’ herself, Elizabeth Stuart. Nonetheless, almost a third of this text is taken up by recounting that queen’s youth and married life. Daughter of James VI and I – and proposed puppet queen of the Gunpowder Plotters – she married a princeling who became king of Bohemia but held the throne for just one year. When he died 12 years later, their eldest daughter, also named Elizabeth, was only 13, and the youngest, Sophia, was just a toddler. From the ambitious but impecunious court the couple had set up in The Hague, the ‘Winter Queen’ continued to mount a decades-long rearguard action, vindicated only after her own death. She would never regain Bohemia, but her grandson would become king of Great Britain.
But this is primarily the story of the ‘Winter Queen’s’ four surviving daughters. Elizabeth, the eldest, a scholar and correspondent of philosopher René Descartes, became a Protestant abbess. Louisa, a talented painter, broke her family’s hearts by turning Catholic for her choice of convent refuge. Beautiful Henrietta Maria died just months after marrying the prince of distant Transylvania. And it is unfair that Sophia is
remembered less for her wit and intellect, or for her friendship with philosopher and mathematician Leibniz, than for her place in the English succession. Had she lived two months longer, she would have succeeded Anne in 1714. As it is, the plum went to her son George.
Goldstone’s sweeping narrative encompasses a lot of extended family history, not least the ramifications of the Civil War. But as the author of Four Queens, The Rival Queens and The Maid and the Queen, Goldstone is used to managing the reins of a multi-faceted royal narrative – and, once again, she does it with consummate skill.