Book Review: Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts, by Nadine Akkerman

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

The dazzling biography of one of history's most misunderstood queens

Elizabeth Stuart is one the most underestimated - figures of the seventeenth century. Labelled a spendthrift more interested in the theatre and her pet monkeys than politics or her children, and long pitied as 'The Winter Queen', the direct ancestor of Elizabeth II was widely misunderstood. Nadine Akkerman's biography reveals an altogether different woman, painting a vivid picture of a queen forged in the white heat of European conflict.

Nadine Akkerman’s Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts restores to full view a woman who has too often been pigeonholed as a political footnote or a romantic curiosity, and it invites readers to consider how a single life—ambitious, precarious, relentlessly social—illuminates the politics, culture, and material worlds of early-modern Europe. 

Elizabeth Stuart is more than the “Winter Queen” of legend—she emerges as  woman whose emotional intelligence, household management, and diplomatic activity shaped her fragmentary career: daughter of James VI & I, bride of the Protestant elector Frederick V, queen of a short-lived Bohemian experiment, and a long-suffering, politically active exile. 

The narrative moves beyond the headline events (marriage, defeat at White Mountain, exile) to linger on domestic and cultural practices—patronage, letter-writing, household politics, material culture—that made Elizabeth influential even while she lacked a stable throne.

Scholars of early-modern Europe and students of gender and political culture will find a substantive, methodologically rich treatment. General readers attracted to intelligent biography will enjoy Nadine Akkerman’s storytelling. Finally, those who care about the practice of history will appreciate the book’s demonstration of how much can be regained from careful archival work.

Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts is a model of what historical biography can achieve when archival rigour and narrative skill are joined. Nadine Akkerman rescues Elizabeth from the shadow of failure and exile without overstating her successes; she recasts the Winter Queen as an energetic networker, a shrewd self-fashioner, and a politically consequential figure whose life offers a window on the entangled realms of affection, image, and power in seventeenth-century Europe. For readers interested in how the small things—letters, inventories, portraits, gifts—make large history, this book is essential reading.

Tony Riches

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About the Author

Professor Nadine Akkerman is an archival detective, biographer, cryptographer, editor and spymistress. An acclaimed literary historian, she is the award-winning author of Invisible Agents. Her latest book is Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration, which she co-wrote with Dr Pete Langman.  Nadine is also the author of the authoritative biography of the sometime Queen of Bohemia Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI/I, and editor of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart (3 vols) - it has been said that the only person who has read more of Elizabeth’s letters than Nadine is Elizabeth herself. If historians take one thing from these works, it is that Elizabeth Stuart should never be called 'The Winter Queen' again.  A popular public speaker in the UK, Nadine has been a guest on Woman’s Hour, Histories of the Unexpected podcast and on the SkyArts series Treasures of the British Library (with Julia Donaldson) to name but a few. Nadine is Professor in Early Modern Literature and Culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where she lives in a seventeenth-century canal house with her partner, novelist Pete Langman (when they’re not in the UK), and hopes to have a cat soon. Follow her on Twitter: @misswalsingham and Bluesky ‪@misswalsingham.bsky.social‬