Alison Plowden is one of the “A” Team of historical biography authors, with Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser. I was inspired to pick up this book after reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy (currently being broken down into a nonagy to facilitate paperback sales). Elizabeth of Bohemia (“The Winter Queen”), her daughter Sophie of Hanover, and various other sisters and cousins and aunts all figure prominently in those novels so I thought to research further.

Elizabeth, who spent almost all her life in exile after her husband was unceremoniously deposed as King of Bohemia, figures prominently in this book, too. So prominently - almost half the book is devoted to her - that I suspect she was the original subject and the author later decided to pad things a little with accounts of the later Stuarts. Not that Elizabeth didn’t have an interesting enough life - reduced to transient lodging with various Protestant governments while trying to scrape up money and troops - not to retake Bohemia, but just to recover her husband’s ancestral home in the Rhineland. While finding time to have 14 children, many of whom went on to complicate European politics for years. (I suppose those were the Good Old Days, when what moved Europe was dynastic squabbling rather than having a good percentage of the population trying to burn out the remainder. Although that could describe the 30 Years War, too. I wonder when Gustavus Adolphus is going to show up.)

At any rate, after Elizabeth the rest of the Stuart princesses are a little anticlimactic. Even though two of them, Mary and Anne, were Queens of England, they get relatively brief treatment here. Some of Mary’s early (teenage) letters are quite spicy; she formed an attachment with an older woman and writes of being her “obedient wife” and of wanting to be her “dog on a leash”, “fish in a net” and “bird in a cage”. Mary was matched up with William of Orange, who appears to have had a thing for little Dutch boys. Perhaps that’s why they got along together so well. I always like a little kink with my history. Other than that, though, I don’t get as much of a feel for Mary as a person, and even less for her sister and eventual successor Anne. Anne’s major claim to fame (other than giving the name Queen Anne’s War to one of the French and Indian conflicts in North America - we colonials gather something was going on in the Old Country, too) was to get in a contest with Henry VIII over who could be the Fattest English Monarch. Anne, despite being handicapped by gender and body frame size, gave it a good run, eventually became unable to walk, and had to be carried everywhere in a litter. Oddly, she also gave her name to a lighter and less complicated furniture style that would have collapsed if she ever used it.

Although this is a well-written and readable book, I would have like a little more description of what life was like in the period. Some background on other things going on in the world, and a better background for the various conflicts - if you don’t know how the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire functioned or what was involved in keeping even a moderate army in supply in those days it’s hard to figure out what’s going on sometimes. ( )