Nadine Akkerman - Elizabeth Stuart, queen of hearts

If one is to catch a monkey, the old adage recommends that it be approached softly. If, however, one is intent on capturing a woman as enigmatic and grand as Elizabeth Stuart, one must be relentless, dedicated, and bloody- minded. Not unlike Elizabeth herself, in many ways. The requisite archival research alone has taken me the best part of two decades, during which time I have incurred many debts, which to the best of my ability I have acknowledged in the preliminary materials to the volumes of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart. Whether I shall ever be in a position fully to repay them all is a conundrum Elizabeth would have understood perfectly. The particular task of writing this, her biography, was made possible not only by the generosity of a stellar cast of individuals, but also by that of several institutions. The granting of an Aspasia stipend from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) not only allowed me to pay for reproductions, image rights, and the like, but also to accept a one-year visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. At All Souls I had access not only to time and resources, but also to an atmosphere that both challenged and nurtured my work, and without doubt has greatly enhanced this, the final productmy most sincere thanks are due to all the Fellows, as they helped me in myriad ways, whether they knew it or not. The Ammodo Science Prize for Fundamental Research in the Humanities made it possible to continue ordering images, writing, and fine-tuning drafts (Elizabeth Stuart is not a woman who allows herself to be captured easily) long after my return to the Netherlands. Thanks, too, to my colleagues of Leiden University, who granted me more time away from the lecture theatre than was perhaps permissible. I was also very fortunate to know that, while I was away from the university coalface, my students were in the excellent hands of Lotte Fikkers, whose dedication to her task was justly rewarded with the faculty teaching prize in 2020.

I cannot praise Cathryn Steele and Anna Silva at Oxford University Press highly enough, as they and their team made what was the colossally complicated process of bringing my vision of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts into being as smooth and straightforward as one could hope for. My especial thanks go to Christopher Wheeler, who as acquisitions editor at the press persuaded me that this was a book I really ought to write.

So much of a biography is detective work handed down from scholar to scholar. While working on an exhibition on Elizabeth Stuart with the Markiezenhof palace in Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands roughly ten years ago, curator Jan Peeters showed me a beautiful book by Rosalind Marshall, The Winter Queen, which included a reproduction of a portrait of Elizabeth wearing a crown. Peeters explained how the crown she wore in this portrait was not that of Bohemia but the so-called Tudor Crown worn by the monarchs of England (and eventually lost by her brother Charles I during the Civil Wars). When I later began to understand why someone might choose to depict Elizabeth wearing this crown, I contacted Rosalind to ask her about the paintings whereabouts. She put me in contact with the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, where Imogen Gibbon traced it to a castle in Scotland: the Young Academy of the Netherlands at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) then kindly paid for a photographer to drive into the wilds of the north to photograph it for me. The journey of this painting from a plate in a work written to accompany an exhibition in 1998 to its current position as the cover image of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts serves as an eloquent reminder of the many hands that are truly at work in the writing of a biography such as this.

Finishing a book during a pandemic comes with its own challenges, in the most practical sense the lack of access to libraries and collections. I am indebted to Catherine Angerson, Erin Julian, James Lloyd, and to all of those archivists who have bent the rules slightly to allow me a little extra time or access to vital materials, or, like Leidens subject librarian Tommy van Avermaete, who have gone into the vaults on my behalf when I could not. My thanks are also due to my student assistant Jamie Bick for getting her hands on the most inaccessible of materials and brokering some image rights that seemed impossible to secure, and to private collector Christoph Mathes, who very kindly sent me a letter written to Elizabeth by her first-born, Frederick Henry, following the defeat at White Mountain.

Studying a life so entangled in wars and conflicts that spread out over many countries opens up new worlds and disciplines that I could never have adventured by myself. I thank Peter Elmer and Ismini Pells for searching their yet-unpublished database of medical practitioners, The Medical World of Early Modern England, Wales and Ireland c.15001700, on my behalf, and thus identifying Elizabeths childhood physician Mathias Hulsbos. I thank Lori Anne Ferrell, Jemma Field, Lotte Fikkers, Jonas Hock, Willem Jan Hoogsteder, Ineke Huysman, Vivienne Larminie, Ad Leerintveld, David van der Linden, Maureen Meikle, Anthony Milton, Toby Osborne, Michael Pearce, Sara Read, Sean Ward, and Peter Wilson, for readily sharing their expertise. Without the expertise of Dirk van Miert many Latin sources would have remained indecipherable, and without Thymen van Beusekoms assistance Frederick Vs Latin autopsy would never have been understandable to me; Nina Lamals acquaintance with Surianos Italian made it possible to check passages in the Calendar of State Papers Venice that had clearly been transliterated inaccurately. I can only apologize to anyone else who has assisted me in any way and whom I appear to have forgotten.