ELIZABETH STUART, QUEEN OF BOHEMIA.

ELIZ

I.

LIZABETH STUART, sometime Queen of Bohemia, and still titular Queen of Hearts; daughter of James I., and Anne of Denmark; grand-daughter of Mary Queen of Scots, fourth in descent from Margaret Tudor; sister of Prince Henry, and of Charles I.; wife of the Winterkönig; mother of the Princes Rupert and Maurice, and of the Electress Sophia; friend of Lord Craven-is the Princess who took the blood royal of England and of Scotland to Germany, where it became blended with that of the Guelphs; the result being that Elizabeth's descendants, Stuarts on the spindle side, succeeded to the throne of England, after the last Stuart King had been deprived of the Crown, and after his two daughters had died without leaving issue.

A direct descendant of this mixed strain of royal blood now wears the Crown of Britain. "The sovereign qualification was restored to the realm (at the accession of the house of Hanover) in its highest purity through the descendants of the Guelphs, passing back through the house of Este to connect themselves with some of the illustrious Roman Gentes. The new dynasty was, indeed, by centuries older in history than the Plantagenets." (Burton.) Elizabeth Stuart was born in Falkland Palace, 19th August, 1596; she died 13th February, 1662, in Leicester House, London.

Between birth and death, this descendant and ancestress

of kings lived through many adventures, saw many men of mark in many foreign lands, experienced bitter sorrows, and passed through a strange life of royal romance. Princess, Electress, Queen, fugitive and refugee, her career knew pomp and pleasure, penury and pain. After stormy alternations of rule and of reverse, the (titular) ex-Queen of Bohemia returned from the continent to England, to die there, generally neglected and half unknown. The years which elapsed between the period at which she quitted England as Electress Palatine, and returned to it a beautywaning and distressed widow, discrowned and forlorn, embraced the terrible epoch of the Thirty Years' War; and Elizabeth's vivid memory was filled with vital images of the long agony of that most cruel civil and religious struggle. She had actually and intimately known the persons, intrigues, interests, of the great war; had seen many of the heroes, adventurers, tyrants, of that woful time; had spoken with Gustavus Adolphus, Maurice of Nassau, Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, and many other of the notabilities of that distinctive epoch of history; had shared the somewhat heavy splendours of the German Courts of the seventeenth century, and had experienced the substantial comfort of the hospitable States-General in the great days of Holland. Around her image stand the figures, behind her glooms the sombre background of that dire convulsion. The years over which her active life extended were of singular importance alike to the politics and to the religion of all Europe. A witness of, and an actress in, that supreme struggle between faiths and dynasties, Elizabeth lived in the very midst of the horror, the romance, the woe of that dæmonic strain and anguish of thirty years' duration. She saw the long process of that exhaustion of war-worn nations which dictated the peace of Westphalia: her own brother, after the civil wars of England, perished on the scaffold at Whitehall: she lived through the time of

the Protectorate, and she witnessed the restoration of the royal line in England. Her life, and the times through which she lived, are surely subjects of surpassing interest for an historical essay. Of the sources of information about the Thirty Years' War it may well be said that their name is legion. The number of German authorities, the plethora of continental records are, in truth, almost bewildering; but the writer about that complex time may well bear in mind Professor Masson's modest and pregnant saying, “I can never pass a sheet of the historical kind for the press without a dread, lest from inadvertance, or from sheer ignorance, some error, some blunder even, may have escaped me."

The girlhood of Elizabeth, after her father's accession to the throne (1603), was passed chiefly at Combe Abbey, under the wise guardianship of Sir John, afterwards Lord Harrington, and of his wife. There she played, and studied, and became a mighty huntress. The influences which surrounded her youth were noble, kindly, natural. The Gunpowder Plot conspirators designed to seize her person, and to proclaim her Queen after the murder of her father. They hoped to mould her tender youth to the religion of the Romish Church, and to obtain from such a Sovereign Catholic supremacy in England. During the danger arising from the plot, the young Princess was removed, temporarily, from Combe Abbey to Coventry; but after the execution of the conspirators she returned to the beloved home of her childhood. The great delight of her years of girlhood consisted in the tender friendship which subsisted between Elizabeth and her noble brother, the young Prince Henry; a Prince of rare promise, "the expectancy and rose of the fair State," who evinced in his early years a true sympathy with all that was noblest in English life and thought. Henry, had he lived, would, probably, have been, like the last great Tudor monarch, an

England-loving King, "more English than the English themselves," and in intimate and instinctive union with the essence of the national life. Both Henry and Elizabeth were convinced and ardent Protestants. Between the royal children and their parents there was not-there could not be-much intimacy or close sympathy. Anne of Denmark was gay, pleasure-loving, cheerful, frivolous. James, fittest, by nature, to squabble with another mind of like calibre with his own about the trivialities of theology, was a monarch besotted with his own fatuous conception of the divine right of Kings; and was unstable, pedantic, undignified, and unvirile. That he had a coward's cruelty, the fates of Arabella Stuart and of Sir Walter Raleigh amply prove. Ungainly in person, he was yet more unlovely in mind. Entering upon the noble inheritance of a reign which succeeded to that of Elizabeth, he alienated the nation from his dynasty, he prepared the great rebellion, he lowered England in the councils of Europe; and, while a most exasperating tyrant to people and to Parliament, he remained long the abject slave of Spain and of unworthy favourites. The best excuse, perhaps, for the pusillanimous King of England, who dared not look upon a drawn sword, consists in the fatal event which occurred while he was yet in his mother's womb. James and his daughter never came very near together; James and his son Henry drifted even farther and farther apart. It was inevitable that it should be so.

As the years rolled on, the question of the marriages of such a hopeful Prince and Princess began to press. "I would rather espouse a Protestant Count than a Catholic Emperor," said Elizabeth. In this, as in other things, she took her tone from her knightly Prince brother, who opposed heartily a scheme for marrying him to the Infants Anna of Spain, sister to that Infanta Maria whom his brother Charles afterwards pursued in Madrid with bootless

courtship. Henry, indeed, proposed to accompany his sister to Germany, in order there to be able to remain purely Protestant, and to select and marry some Protestant Princess.

At the suggestion of Maurice of Nassau, a suitor for the hand of Elizabeth presented himself in the person of Frederick, Pfalzgraf of the Rhine, and son of the Kurfürst, or Elector, of the Palatinate, Frederick IV. Frederick IV., who was born in 1574, and married 1593, Luise Juliane, daughter of William the Silent, a noble daughter of a noble father, was the most considerable Protestant Prince of Germany. His territory did not equal in importance that of Saxony, but the talents, the character, and the zeal of Frederick IV. soon placed him at the head of Protestant Germany. He took a leading part in founding the famous Protestant Union in 1608; and was, indeed, the Chief of the Union, which included among its members the Duke of Würtemberg, the Landgraf of Hessen-Kassel, and the Markgrafs of Anspach and of Baden Durlach. Frederick IV. died 18th September, 1610. The Protestant Union called into being the Catholic Liga, founded 10th of July, 1609. The Union had many heads; the Liga only one, but that one was Maximilian of Bavaria, while its general was Tilly. Maximilian was unscrupulous, eager, crafty, energetic. A pupil of the Jesuits, and a bigoted Catholic, Maximilian knew well what he wanted, and he hesitated at no means that would serve his ends. He had the advantage, to a partizan, of a clear will, a ruthless cruelty, and a cunning audacity.

The youth of Frederick V. was passed chiefly at Sedan, under the guidance of the Duke of Bouillon, though his guardian was the Herzog Johann von Zweibrücken, to whom Frederick IV. left the Government of the Palatinate while Frederick V. should remain a minor.

At Sedan the young Kurfürst was in a court, but never