Daughters of the Winter Queen by Nancy Goldstone Minoo Dinshaw
MINOO DINSHAW
Daughters of the Winter Queen: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots ‘By virtue first, then choice, a Queen.’ Thus, in 1619, did a suave English diplomat, Sir Henry Wotton, hail the coronation of his master King James’s
beautiful, charming and popular daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, as Queen of Bohemia.
Elizabeth and her pleasantly ineffectual husband, the Elector Palatine Frederick V, endured exactly a year on their Shakespearean throne, winning the mocking sobriquet of the Winter King and Queen. Nancy Goldstone’s chatty, ambitious book on Elizabeth and her family reveals how these relatively little-known German Stuarts lived and, with a couple of important exceptions, died in exile.
Personal inclination, commercial antennae and the temper of the times all induce Goldstone to bill her story both as a saga of female empowerment, and as an extended posthumous revenge by Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s infamous grandmother. In reality, for the Calvinist Elizabeth, Mary, a twice-convicted murderess martyred in the wrong religious cause, was an ancestor best forgotten.
Elizabeth, as Goldstone presents her, is vaguely reminiscent of her grandmother, not so much for her ‘intelligence and strength of mind’ (arguable qualities in either queen) as for beauty, manipulativeness, patchy judgement and optimism bordering on the deranged.
Despite the book’s title and mission statement, the boys, including Elizabeth’s third son, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, get plenty of attention too, even if Goldstone is palpably more interested in court intrigues than military campaigns.
The eldest and the youngest of the four daughters – the Winter Queen’s namesake, Elizabeth of the Palatinate, and Sophia, eventually to become Bishopess of Osnabrück, Electress of Hanover and heiress presumptive to England – both merit full biographies, and have been curiously ignored, given their respective intellectual and political significance. The middle daughters – Louise Hollandine, a talented painter who became a Catholic abbess, and Henrietta Maria, the confusingly named and short-lived Princess of Transylvania – are more shadowy figures. But they contribute to a canvas whose teeming gorgeousness at times overpowers even its author.
‘No wonder no one understands this period,’ Goldstone quips in a characteristic footnote. This tone of arch, tolerant and understated New York amusement is sustained throughout. Goldstone’s favourite pejorative adjective is ‘questionable’. But once the reader has acclimatised, it becomes more companionable than trying.
Goldstone’s passing reference to ‘Westminster Castle’ (which does exist, but in Colorado) and her sadly overconfident conviction that ‘Americans have never heard of [the Marquess of] Montrose, but in Britain his name is still synonymous with a romantic ideal of true nobility’ will tickle all but the most stonily countenanced of pedants.
More subtle, but equally endearing, is her misconstruction of a French phrase, so that a rakish Duke of Guise becomes not a ‘hero in a novel’ but a sober ‘Roman hero’.
This hulking treasure ship of a book, sailing under the false colours of histchick-lit, disguises a gallant stab at a general history of seventeenth-century Europe for the lay reader.
Goldstone puts it well in an epilogue that quietly and truthfully qualifies the book’s proleptic-feminist-heroine marketing: ‘These women were not ahead of their time; they were their time.’
Of all the family, the eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, a friend and disciple of Descartes whom many present-day philosophers now consider to have outdistanced her teacher, feels closest to modernity. Yet there are revealing moments – when she arranges her unfortunate little sister’s disastrous Transylvanian marriage or schemes to be made abbess of an ancient Lutheran community – when we are reminded that here is a true seventeenth-century princess, proud of her exalted rank and, in lieu of other resources, willing to trade on it.
Goldstone’s comparison of the youngest sister, Sophia, to a Jane Austen heroine appears to be an example of her propensity towards meretricious anachronism, but it is soon revealed as apt. The Electress’s memoirs, written in French when Sophia was at a low ebb in the 1680s, include such gleaming throwaway lines as, of her unattractive governesses, ‘I believe that they prayed to God and never disturbed man’; of the Heidelberg Catechism, ‘I knew it by heart without understanding a word of it’; or, of her cousin, the young Charles II in exile at The Hague, ‘a prince richly endowed by nature, but not sufficiently so by fortune’.
It is all tantamount to a dossier for a Jane Austen Authorship Controversy. Recounting a manoeuvre where she escaped one undesirable suitor by attracting another in record time, Sophia admits, ‘My answer was not that of a heroine of romance… an unhesitating Yes.’ She does, though, definitely emerge as the heroine of this extremely entertaining and immersive book.