Nor shall less joy your regal hopes pursue

In that most princely maid, whose form might call

The world to war, and make it hazard all

Its valor for her beauty; she shall be

Mother of nations, and her princes see

Rivals almost to these.

—A prescient description of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Stuart, the future Winter Queen, in a poem by Ben Jonson, June 1610

She has bin long admir’d by all the Learned World as a Woman of incomparable Knowledge in Divinity, Philosophy, History, and the Subjects of all sorts of Books, of which she has read a prodigious quantity. She speaks five Languages so well, that by her Accent it might be a Dispute which of ’em was her first.

—John Toland, secretary to the English embassy to Hanover, reporting on the character of Sophia, youngest daughter of the Winter Queen, September 1701