* In fact, it was not traditional for daughters to be taken from their mothers. Mary Stuart had lived with her mother, Mary of Guise, until she was engaged to the dauphin and sent to France to learn the customs of the kingdom it was expected she would rule.

† Queen Anne would give birth to another son and two daughters over the course of her marriage but none of these children survived longer than two years.

* In later life, he developed a great dread of witches and pursued them obsessively. From this aversion sprang the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

* Morton was one of the two high noblemen at James’s inaugural who had taken the oath of office in the king’s stead when he was too young to form the words himself.

* He would later commission and personally oversee the production of the King James Bible, a signal achievement.

* Henry was initially expected to stay in Scotland, but no sooner had James left for England than Anne defied her husband and went to take possession of her eldest son from his guardian, the earl of Mar, whom she detested for depriving her of her child. James chastised her by letter, observing that it was primarily due to the earl’s negotiations on his behalf that they owed their new positions as king and queen of England, to which his wife retorted “that she could rather have wished never to see England, than to be obliged for it to the Earl.” She chose her moment well. Reluctant to engage in a controversy that might delay his coronation, James relented and allowed Henry to accompany Anne and Elizabeth to England.

* Elizabeth Stuart’s experience replicated that of her grandmother Mary Stuart to a startling degree: born in Scotland, Mary also lived frugally until her engagement at the age of five to Francis, eldest son of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, whereupon she was sent to France and grew up in splendor at the royal court.

* The informer was concerned that the more moderate Catholic lords (one of whom was his brother-in-law), who were not in on the conspiracy, would be blown to bits along with their Protestant counterparts. The letter urged the Catholic peers to come up with a pretext for avoiding the session.

* There is also the evidence that Elizabeth’s daughters were educated along these lines, and in my experience, parents tend to replicate their own schooling in their children; witness James’s insistence that his sons learn Latin.

† “This is only my desire/This doth set my heart on fire/That I might receive my lyre/With the saints’ and angels’ quire [choir],” Elizabeth rhapsodized. Let’s hope she did better with botany.

* Although publicly James blustered that he would never allow his daughter to become a Catholic, evidence indicates that he was in fact considering marrying her to Philip III and probably would have accepted this condition provided the conversion ceremony occurred in Spain and not England. But Elizabeth remained ignorant of this, as the Spanish ambassador never made a formal offer of marriage, thus relieving the king of the responsibility for broadcasting his views, and allowing all the blame to fall on the queen.

* In cases where the office for emperor fell vacant or was in dispute, the matter was settled by election. Out of all the barons in Germany, only seven were allowed to cast votes; hence the term elector. Frederick was one of the seven.

* Charles was actually twelve years old when Henry died, but he was so slight and physically immature that the Venetian ambassador may perhaps be excused for thinking him younger than he was.

* This was an important ceremony. James sat in state; Elizabeth’s remaining brother, Charles, escorted Frederick to his place in front of the king’s great throne, where a large Turkish carpet had been specially spread for the occasion. All the government ministers, royal courtiers, and the princess’s ladies-in-waiting were in attendance. Frederick wore “a black velvet cloake caped with gold lace”; Elizabeth was also in black velvet, her gown richly embroidered in silver. Gout or no gout, it is difficult to believe that Anne would have missed such a critical day in her only daughter’s life if the queen were not intent on publicly signaling her opposition to the marriage.

* Certainly Frederick had a conduit to the French government in the person of his uncle, the duke of Bouillon, one of the highest-ranking Huguenots in France.

* Lord and Lady Harrington were ensnared in one of these clashes of etiquette and departed in July 1613, a mere six weeks after their arrival in Heidelberg. To Elizabeth’s great grief, Lord Harrington died of fever on the journey back to England. Her maid of honor stayed and married the count of Shomberg.

* The three Crowns were the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

* In English, Charles Louis, but Charles was such a popular name in the Stuart family that rather than always have to identify which Charles I am talking about, I have decided to use the German spelling.

* Philip III, king of Spain, the dominant relation within the Habsburg dynasty, pressured Matthias to name one of his sons (the oldest was eleven) as king of Bohemia. Ferdinand, who was thirty-eight and had at least traveled in Germany and visited Prague, was considered the lesser evil by Matthias and his counselors. No one wanted the Spanish to have an excuse to invade the empire.

* The three Catholics were the electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves; the Protestants were Frederick (Elector Palatine) and the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg.

* This would not be the only time that the loss of Henry due to premature death would have a significant impact on English and European history.

† When Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne, had died six months previously, on March 2, 1619, without leaving a written will, James had taken the opportunity to bestow many of her finest jewels, as well as her primary residence and other holdings, on Buckingham. The father did not set aside a single gem or other property of his wife’s, even as a token of remembrance, for his daughter, although Elizabeth grieved deeply at the loss of her mother. The rest of Anne’s estate went to Charles, who was present at her deathbed and was her vocal heir.

* James’s excuse for this behavior was “that his subjects were as dear to him as his children, and therefore he would not embroil them in an unjust or needless quarrel.” But surely the time to have expressed this sentiment would have been before he signed the German defensive treaty. James had been happy enough to take on the role of the dominant Protestant power and leader of the Princes of the Union during peacetime.

* Woodrow Wilson’s similarly studious insistence on neutrality and naive handling of the Germans in World War I comes to mind.

* In other words, the Spanish were not invading for their own conquest but only so they would have the pleasure of giving it all back to James.

* There is no reliable data on the size of Buquoi’s force, as it had been skirmishing in the field during the summer and its numbers were probably diminished and then refilled with recruits over that time. However, Buquoi was upset that he had not been named supreme commander and had wanted the duke of Bavaria’s army to go in a different direction in order to split the Bohemian forces, believing that he could then easily defeat his half. If true, this means he must have had at least 20,000 soldiers under his command, which in turn meant that, once Buquoi and the duke of Bavaria met up, Frederick’s army was looking at a combined imperial opposition force of over 40,000 men. And this was without the regiments advancing under the leadership of the elector of Saxony.

* The duke of Württemberg also levied a small force from within his duchy and conducted it personally to Bohemia to aid Frederick. He would later pay dearly for this demonstration of loyalty.

* This turned out to be a prudent move. Of Frederick’s supporters who remained behind, more than forty of the leading aristocrats were rounded up, and a mass execution was held in the public square by direct order of the emperor, to discourage future rebellions.

* Maurice of Nassau was Frederick’s mother’s half brother. Frederick’s extended family was impressively confusing even by the standards of the day owing to his maternal grandfather, William the Silent, having had fifteen children by four wives. This was the same Maurice, prince of Orange—middle-aged and balding—who had once been a suitor for Elizabeth’s hand.

* Approximately seven thousand of these soldiers were Englishmen who had volunteered for this assignment under the command of Sir Horace Vere. The force was a far cry from the 30,000 promised.

* “Ye shall present her with two fair long diamonds… and a fair pendent diamond hanging at them; ye shall give her a goodly rope of pearls, ye shall give her… thirteen great ballas rubies, and thirteen knots or conques of pearls, and ye shall give her a head-dressing of two and twenty great pear pearls… and three goodly pear pendent diamonds, whereof the biggest to be worn at a needle in the midst of her forehead, and one in every ear,” read a partial list of the rare gems dispatched to Spain in pursuit of the Infanta, as elucidated by James to Charles in a letter of March 17, 1623.

* Louis was sickly from birth and would die the following year. He “was the prettiest child I had, and the first I ever lost,” Elizabeth would later write sadly.

* It was during this trip that the duke of Buckingham took it into his head to try to seduce Louis XIII’s wife, Anne of Austria, queen of France, a diplomatic initiative of questionable value. This is the source of the liaison depicted in The Three Musketeers. Unlike the character of the French queen portrayed in the Dumas novel, however, Anne of Austria definitely rejected the duke’s overtures.

* He had already signed a peace treaty with France the previous May.

* That the cardinal and Louis XIII feared Ferdinand’s ambitions would eventually lead to an invasion of France if not checked was well documented. “They say the French king—though not yet in print, yet in words to those ambassadors and agents that are about him, and in deeds to all the world—hath now professed enmity more than ever against the house of Austria [the Habsburgs]: the main reason whereof is because he knows well enough that if he had not called that… king [of Sweden] into Germany, the Austrians had poured some four armies into France at one clap,” reported a member of the English government.

* And this was the prince Elizabeth’s parents wouldn’t let her marry! What a couple these two would have made.

* Frederick had an unfortunate habit of referring to himself in the third person, as “the King of Bohemia,” even in his personal letters to Elizabeth.

* I know it is difficult to keep the different Elizabeths straight but I will try very hard to make it clear when I am talking about the mother and when the daughter. This Elizabeth is Frederick’s widow. As a rule, I will endeavor to always refer to her eldest daughter as Princess Elizabeth to avoid confusion.

* In light of future events, staying out of England would prove to be a very wise decision.

* It is interesting that the queen of Bohemia, whose children’s names read like a litany of whoever happened to be helping her at the moment, never named any of her sons James.

* The prince of Orange’s wife, Amelia de Solms, one of the queen of Bohemia’s former ladies-in-waiting, branched out a little and had her portrait painted in 1631 by the popular new young artist Rembrandt van Rijn. But Rembrandt, with his keen observation and emphasis on detailing every wrinkle, painted her in profile, giving special attention to her double chin, so after that she stayed with Honthorst.

† If you want to see what Leyden looked like while Louise Hollandine and her siblings were growing up, you have only to glance at Rembrandt’s work before 1630. He took all of his subjects (except for his many self-portraits) from the streets of the town. After that he moved to Amsterdam, where the demand for his portraits was so great that “he had not only to be paid but to be prayed” to take on a subject, a local wag quipped.

* It’s hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it was recently restored. Go see it.

* There’s no hard data on what caused this behavior but somehow I suspect that excessive alcohol consumption was involved.

* Clearly, not much had changed in Scotland since the days when James had had to contend with his equally intractable subjects.

* Fifty Quatrains, Containing Useful Precepts for the Guidance of Man by Gui de Faur Pibrac, a sixteenth-century author, was considered a standard educational text for the period.

* In Charles’s defense, he genuinely believed that all of his problems were the work of a few troublemakers and that overall his subjects supported him. Richard Nixon, another leader inclined toward expedience, famously labeled this helpful population as “the great silent majority” and also used it to justify his actions.

* He seems really to have fallen in love with her. Rupert “never named her after in life, without demonstration of the highest admiration and expressing a devotion to serve her,” a chronicler of the period observed.

* It has been suggested that Descartes was in fact a spy, not a soldier, and this theory has merit in my view.

† An approach that later became known as the Cartesian method.

* Please don’t be concerned if you don’t understand this question, or the material in any of the other letters that follow. Personally, I’ve no idea what the two of them were talking about either; what seems to be important here is that they understood each other.

* To the great amusement of the royal forces, Rupert taught Boye to lift his leg whenever the name Pym (head of the House of Commons) was mentioned.

* Rupert apparently inspired as much admiration for his good looks as he did for his derring-do. A memoir by a gentlewoman who lived through the civil war affirmed that “when the Prince broke up his quarters, the neighboring ladies not only went to see him march out of the town, but some of them were actually gone along with him!”

* Marie de Gonzaga would fulfill her father’s wishes by becoming the second wife of Wladyslaw IV, king of Poland, Princess Elizabeth’s old beau, after the death of his first spouse, the emperor’s daughter.

† Grandson of Henri, duke of Guise, with whom Marguerite de Valois, youngest daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, fell in love before being forced instead to marry her cousin Henry, king of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France). It would appear that virile good looks and outstanding physiques were part of the genetic makeup of the family.

* To give a sense of what Edward was up against, the most powerful man in the kingdom, Cardinal Mazarin, would later take on Anna de Gonzaga—and lose.

* Interestingly, she seems to have turned to metaphysics as a way for her mind to control her body and emotions and lead to inner peace, something like the seventeenth-century version of yoga.

* Charles called the child Henrietta Maria after his wife, who in the urgency and danger of her departure had been forced to leave the baby behind in the care of a trusted lady-in-waiting.

† “Wherefore I command and conjure you, by the duty and affection which I know you bear me, that… you immediately march… with all your force to the relief of York… You may believe that nothing but an extreme necessity could make me write thus,” implored Charles in a letter of June 14. “Had not [the king]… this year given a fatal direction to that excellent Prince Rupert to have fought the Scotch army, surely that great Prince and soldier had never so precipitately fought them,” a Royalist officer who knew Rupert well concluded.

* Rupert was apprised of his brother’s marriage by a letter from an English correspondent in Paris dated May 5, 1645. “Your Highness is to know a romance story that concerns you here, in the person of Prince Edward. He is last week married privately to the Princess Anne… [His new wife] is very rich; six or seven thousand pounds a year sterling is the least that can fall to her, maybe more: and is a very beautiful young lady.”

* Karl Ludwig has been treated rather unfairly by historians who uniformly accuse him of abandoning his uncle in order to obtain money from Parliament. But it is clear that Karl Ludwig, who was the only member of his family actually present in England during the run-up to the civil war, consistently gave the king solid advice to moderate his approach and was frustrated at every turn by the outlandish schemes of the queen, whose counsel Charles took instead. Karl Ludwig, whose father had precipitated the Thirty Years’ War, viewed his uncle’s behavior as similarly self-destructive and refused to encourage him. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for the family to lose one kingdom (Bohemia) may be characterized as misfortune; to lose two (England) seemed to Karl Ludwig like carelessness.

* This ceding of Alsace-Lorraine would contribute to hostilities between France and Germany for the next two and a half centuries, up to and including the two World Wars.

* In fact, it was 569 miles to the southeast, and this in a time when the roads were poor or nonexistent.

* “Lord Craven was a very valuable friend, for he possessed a purse better furnished than my own from which to provide presents for my partisans. He always had refreshments standing ready, and used to give away quantities of little ornaments, such as would delight young people. He needed all these attractions to make him agreeable, and to enable us to tease him a little in private,” Sophia observed.

* Descartes, famously following his precept to always seek out the positive when dealing with adversity, had written to her in the aftermath of Charles’s beheading: “Although the death we speak of, being so violent, may seem at first far worse… it is undeniable that without his last trial the gentleness and other virtues of the dead king would never have been so remarked and so esteemed as they will be in future by whoever shall read his history.” How much consolation this view of Charles’s sufferings, not to mention his minimal achievements, afforded Elizabeth is unclear.

* To please Descartes, Elizabeth dutifully wrote a letter to Christina as a way of initiating a correspondence, but Christina, who was interested in Descartes, not a rival female disciple, chose not to answer her.

* Although the “ONE” to whom Montrose referred was his archenemy Archibald Campbell, marquis of Argyll, who led the Scottish Presbyterians during the years of the English civil war and joined with the Puritans in the rebellion against Charles I, he thus also correctly predicted the dictatorial rise of Oliver Cromwell.

* It was during this period, while he was at Breda, that Montrose had his portrait painted and sent to the queen of Bohemia. “I give you many thanks for your picture,” she added in a postscript to her letter of June 24. “I have hung it in my cabinet to fright away ‘the Brethern.’” (The Brethern was the Winter Queen’s scornful nickname for Argyll’s Covenanters.) Her receipt of this portrait, combined with her many affectionate letters to Montrose, have led some historians to speculate that these two were having an affair. But there is no evidence of this; rather, the queen of Bohemia had portraits of all of her family around her, like a modern-day photograph album. That Montrose sent her this likeness could instead be interpreted as further evidence of his future role as the queen of Bohemia’s son-in-law.

* Rupert, who survived the storm, was so broken by his brother’s death that for years he refused to believe it, and continued to hold out hope that Maurice had somehow escaped.

* This would not be the only time that Mary sat for Louisa. On August 6, 1654, Charles II wrote to his aunt that “I have now received my sister’s picture that my dear cousin the Princess Louisa was pleased to draw, and do desire your Majesty thank her for me, for tis a most excellent picture.”

* Edward was clearly invested in his sister’s conversion. “Madam, I received yours of November 29 so late that I can give you but a word in way of return,” he wrote to Louisa from Paris on December 31, 1657. “I am transported with joy concerning that which you write, and doubt not but God will bless your design… The Queen [of France] had already propounded Challiot, a nunnery of the order of St. Marie, whither the Queen of England doth continually resort, and there you may be instructed in the manner how to live in this condition without engaging yourself at all… there are many persons in convents to whom pensions are given, and they are respected as queens.”

* “His Majesty [Ferdinand] received him at the Weissen Berg [White Mountain], where our father had been defeated by the late Emperor,” Sophia noted. “This caused the courtiers to say that my brother gained there more than my father had lost.”

* Years later Karl Ludwig had real need of Rupert and begged him for help but was turned down in a way that indicated that the wound had still not healed. “Your Belovedness has caused me to take a solemn oath to God that I will never more set foot in the Palatinate; and my sworn, if regrettable, oath I will keep,” Rupert responded with bitterness.

* Karl, Liselotte’s brother, would later say of his upbringing, “I carry with me the stigma of oppression. My young days were poisoned and I have known but little happiness in this life.”

* His mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, was not among those who advised him to capitulate and was in fact horrified at her son’s acceptance of these terms. Although she had initially favored a treaty with Scotland and had helped set up Montrose, she had never counseled him to take the Covenant or betray his Catholic subjects.

* Her creditors, too, clamored for her jewels, but luckily the chairman of the special committee established by the States General charged with adjudicating her affairs was a man of sound principles and discernment. “Must not a queen have some jewels for her entertainment?” he scolded the hapless vendors, and ruled in her favor.

* Elizabeth was referring to the arrears on her royal allowance, stopped at the time of the civil war in England, and the 10,000-thaler dowry promised under the Peace of Westphalia. Neither payment materialized. Parliament had more pressing expenses and the emperor ruled that dowries were due only to those of the Winter Queen’s daughters who married.

* He had a son, Dudley, by this marriage to whom he left his property but whom he never formally recognized. He also had an illegitimate daughter, Ruperta, by an actress with whom he had a brief affair.

* Sadly, Edward did not live long enough to witness his daughter’s marriage. He died of an unspecified illness in Paris on March 10, 1663, at the age of thirty-eight, nine months before the wedding. He was attended on his deathbed by a Capuchin friar, a local priest, and his German manservant. According to the servant, his last words were “Voilà un Huguenot,” although whether he was referring to himself or his German steward is unclear.

* Henrietta was the daughter that Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, had given birth to in England during the civil war and been forced to abandon when she fled to France. The child was kept safe by a loyal lady-in-waiting who managed to smuggle her out of England to her mother’s court in St. Germain when she was two years old. Henrietta grew up in France and was married to Philippe in 1661. The marriage was unhappy and it certainly didn’t help that Louis XIV took a romantic interest in her. Henrietta died at the age of twenty-five, just ten days after returning from a clandestine embassy to England and only a few hours after drinking a glass of iced chicory water. She went to her grave screaming that she had been poisoned. An autopsy by her physicians revealed that she had succumbed to natural causes, most likely peritonitis, but most of the French court continued to believe that she had been murdered. For more on Henrietta’s death and the evidence against her having been poisoned, see Notes.

* The Edict of Nantes had been proclaimed law by Henry IV, Louis XIV’s grandfather, in April 1598. Henry IV had been the leader of the Huguenot faction for over two decades and had converted to Catholicism only when it became clear that France would not accept a Protestant king. His Edict of Nantes grew out of the old Edicts of Toleration that Catherine de’ Medici had passed legalizing Protestantism in an effort to wrest political power from the Guise family, leaders of the Catholic faction in France. Catherine would turn on her former Huguenot allies in 1572 by orchestrating the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

* The bishop of Meaux’s career was made when he gave the funeral orations for both Liselotte’s predecessor, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, and Louis XIV’s first wife, the queen of France. So celebrated was he that when Anna de Gonzaga died in August 1685, her daughter the princess de Condé demanded that Bossuet eulogize her mother as well.

* Since she was the aunt of Madame and therefore a member of the extended royal family, the great Bossuet himself delivered her eulogy.

* Osnabrück had been the town chosen to house the Swedish delegation during the Treaty of Westphalia negotiations.

* Ironically, Sophia’s advancement to bishopess meant that all three sisters held positions of authority in a religious community at exactly the same time—but what a difference in their experience of church life!

* If Sophia, the youngest, had been brought up not to flirt, much less engage in love affairs, it is highly likely that this was the way all of the queen of Bohemia’s daughters were raised—another strong argument against Louisa’s having delivered fourteen illegitimate children while living at her mother’s court at The Hague.

* He was so young that the University of Leipsic refused to grant him his degree even though he had sailed through all of the requirements. He went to the University of Altdorf in Nuremberg instead, and upon examining him, the masters immediately granted him a doctorate and offered him a teaching position.

* To anticipate those critics who will inevitably claim that I have overstated Sophia’s role as a philosopher in her own right, I point to the recent scholarship of Dr. Lloyd Strickland of the University of Wales. After collecting and translating all of the correspondence among Leibniz and Sophia and Figuelotte, Dr. Strickland concluded, “It does both [Sophia and Figuelotte] a disservice to suppose that their place in the history of philosophy can be secured only through the services they rendered to Leibniz. Likewise, it does both a disservice to depict… their interest in philosophy as a passive one, since there is clear evidence that both actively engaged in philosophical discussion proper, and had contributions to make to the philosophical debates of their day.”

* This perhaps gives a sense of why Rupert decided to keep his marriage to a Catholic woman secret.

* Catholics had to apply for a special dispensation from the pope in order to marry a first cousin, as the union fell within proscribed boundaries. There was, however, no similar restriction for Protestants.

* “‘This is a fair and beautiful princess, worthy of the highest destiny. May I ask what religion she has been brought up in?’ a courtier who saw Figuelotte in 1679 when she was eleven years old asked. ‘She has none at present,’ Sophia answered coolly. ‘When we know what prince will be her husband, she will be instructed in his religion.’” Although this is likely an example of the duchess of Hanover’s making fun with a straight face—her daughter was brought up Protestant—there is an element of truth in it, as (again, before Louis XIV’s persecution of the Huguenots) she would almost certainly have instructed Figuelotte to convert to Catholicism in order to marry Louis XIV after the death of his first wife.

* Also named Sophia Dorothea; no wonder no one understands this period.

* Also named James, for maximum confusion.

* He was close; she would have her seventy-first birthday in October. But you get the idea.

* Except, of course, for one son, the duke of Gloucester, who died just before his eleventh birthday.