Introduction

Abstract This introductory chapter discusses how Elizabeth Stuart is misrepresented in historiography, with biographers often taking her words or the words of those who knew her out of context, or simply parroting Catholic propaganda. It also reflects on what it entails to write a woman’s biography. In the early modern period, royal women wielded a lot of power, yet still had to operate within tight constraints. The queen may have set events in motion, but their ultimate agency would have to be asserted through men, usually kin. This means that writing the biography of a woman such as Elizabeth, one ends up writing shadow biographies of several men: that of her father James VI/I, her brother Charles I, her husband Frederick V, her kin and mercenaries, Christian of Brunswick and Ernest, Count of Mansfeld. Mary Anne Everett Green’s biography has been invaluable as a source and as a template, but Nadine Akkerman has, through the years spent in editing The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, assembled a far more substantial body of letters and documents than either she or any of Elizabeth’s other biographers had to draw from: for instance, over 1,000 letters were previously untranscribed, while 125 letters written in code had never before been deciphered. This has allowed Akkerman to paint an entirely new picture of Elizabeth Stuart as the politically active, savvy, and witty individual she was. Rather than repeating the malign cliché of calling her the Winter Queen, Akkerman shows how she was, in truth, the Queen of Hearts.