ELIZABETH (1596-1662), consort of Frederick V., elector palatine and titular king of Bohemia, was the eldest daughter of James I. of Great Britain and of Anne of Denmark, and was born at Falkland Castle in Fifeshire in August 1596. She was entrusted to the care of the earl of Linlithgow, and after the departure of the royal family to England, to the countess of Kildare, subsequently residing with Lord and Lady Harington at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire. In November 1605 the Gunpowder Plot conspirators formed a plan to seize her person and proclaim her queen after the explosion, in consequence of which she was removed by Lord Harington to Coventry. In 1608 she appeared at court, where her beauty soon attracted admiration and became the theme of the poets, her suitors including the dauphin, Maurice, prince of Orange, Gustavus Adolphus, Philip III. of Spain, and Frederick V., the elector palatine. A union with the last-named was finally arranged, in spite of the queen’s opposition, in order to strengthen the alliance with the Protestant powers in Germany, and the marriage took place on the 14th of February 1613 midst great rejoicing and festivities. The prince and princess entered Heidelberg on the 17th of June, and Elizabeth, by means of her English annuity, enjoyed five years of pleasure and of extravagant gaiety to which the small German court was totally unaccustomed. On the 26th of August 1618, Frederick, as a leading Protestant prince, was chosen king by the Bohemians, who deposed the emperor Ferdinand, then archduke of Styria. There is no evidence to show that his acceptance was instigated by the princess or that she had any influence in her husband’s political career. She accompanied Frederick to Prague in October 1619, and was crowned on the 7th of November. Here her unrestrainable high spirits and levity gave great offence to the citizens. On the approach of misfortune, however, she showed great courage and fortitude. She left Prague on the 8th of November 1620, after the fatal battle of the White Hill, for Küstrin, travelling thence to Berlin and Wolfenbüttel, finally with Frederick taking refuge at the Hague with Prince Maurice of Orange. The help sought from James came only in the shape of useless embassies and negotiations; the two Palatinates were soon occupied by the Spaniards and the duke of Bavaria; and the romantic attachment and services of Duke Christian of Brunswick, of the 1st earl of Craven, and of other chivalrous young champions who were inspired by the beauty and grace of the “Queen of Hearts,” as Elizabeth was now called, availed nothing. Her residence was at Rhenen near Arnheim, where she received many English visitors and endeavoured to maintain her spirits and fortitude, with straitened means and in spite of frequent disappointments. The victories of Gustavus Adolphus secured no permanent advantage, and his death at Lützen was followed by that of the elector at Mainz on the 29th of November 1632. Subsequent attempts of the princess to reinstate her son in his dominions were unsuccessful, and it was not till the peace of Westphalia in 1648 that he regained a portion of them, the Rhenish Palatinate. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s position in Holland grew more and more unsatisfactory. The payment of her English annuity of £12,000 ceased after the outbreak of the troubles with the parliament; the death of Charles I. in 1649 put an end to all hopes from that quarter; and the pension allowed her by the house of Orange ceased in 1650. Her children, in consequence of disputes, abandoned her, and her eldest son Charles Louis refused her a home in his restored electorate. Nor did Charles II. at his restoration show any desire to receive her in England. Parliament voted her £20,000 in 1660 for the payment of her debts, but Elizabeth did not receive the money, and on the 19th of May 1661 she left the Hague for England, in spite of the king’s attempts to hinder her journey, receiving no official welcome on her arrival in London and being lodged at Lord Craven’s house in Drury Lane. Charles, however, subsequently granted her a pension and treated her with kindness. On the 8th of February 1662 she removed to Leicester House in Leicester Fields, and died shortly afterwards on the 13th of the same month, being buried in Westminster Abbey. Her beauty, grace and vivacity exercised a great charm over her contemporaries, the enthusiasm for her, however, being probably not merely personal but one inspired also by her misfortunes and by the fact that these misfortunes were incurred in defence of the Protestant cause; later, as the ancestress of the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, she obtained a conspicuous place in English history. She had thirteen children—Frederick Henry, drowned at sea in 1629; Charles Louis, elector palatine, whose daughter married Philip, duke of Orleans, and became the ancestress of the elder and Roman Catholic branch of the royal family of England; Elizabeth, abbess and friend of Descartes; Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, who died unmarried; Louisa, abbess; Edward, who married Anne de Gonzaga, “princesse palatine,” and had children; Henrietta Maria, who married Count Sigismund Ragotzki but died childless; Philip and Charlotte, who died childless; Sophia, who married Ernest Augustus, elector of Hanover, and was mother of George I. of England; and two others who died young.
Bibliography.—See the article in Dict. of Nat. Biography and authorities there collected; Five Stuart Princesses, ed. by R.S. Rait (1902); Briefe der Elizabeth Stuart ... an ... den Kurfürsten Carl Ludwig von der Pfalz, by A. Wendland (Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins, 228, Stuttgart, 1902); “Elizabeth Stuart,” by J.O. Opel, in Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, xxiii. 289; Thomason Tracts (Brit. Mus.), E., 138 (14), 122 (12), 118 (40), 119 (18). Important material regarding the princess exists in the MSS. of the earl of Craven, at Combe Abbey.
ELIZABETH [PAULINE ELIZABETH OTTILIE LOUISE] (1843- ), consort of King Charles I. (q.v.) of Rumania, widely known by her literary name of “Carmen Sylva,” was born on the 29th of December 1843. She was the daughter of Prince Hermann of Neuwied. She first met the future king of Rumania at Berlin in 1861, and was married to him on the 15th of November 1869. Her only child, a daughter, died in 1874. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 she devoted herself to the care of the wounded, and founded the Order of Elizabeth (a gold cross on a blue ribbon) to reward distinguished service in such work. She fostered the higher education of women in Rumania, and established societies for various charitable objects. Early distinguished by her excellence as a pianist, organist and singer, she also showed considerable ability in painting and illuminating; but a lively poetic imagination led her to the path of literature, and more especially to poetry, folk-lore and ballads. In addition to numerous original works she put into literary form many of the legends current among the Rumanian peasantry.
“Carmen Sylva” wrote with facility in German, Rumanian, French and English. A few of her voluminous writings, which include poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays, collections of aphorisms, &c., may be singled out for special mention. Her earliest publications were Sappho and Hammerstein, two poems which appeared at Leipzig in 1880. In 1888 she received the Prix Botta, a prize awarded triennially by the French Academy, for her volume of prose aphorisms Les Pensées d’une reine (Paris, 1882), a German version of which is entitled Vom Amboss (Bonn, 1890). Cuvinte Sufletesci, religious meditations in Rumanian (Bucharest, 1888), was also translated into German (Bonn, 1890), under the name of Seelen-Gespräche. Several of the works of “Carmen Sylva” were written in collaboration with Mite Kremnitz, one of her maids of honour, who was born at Greifswald in 1857, and married Dr Kremnitz of Bucharest; these were published between 1881 and 1888, in some cases under the pseudonyms Dito et Idem, and includes the novel Aus zwei Welten (Leipzig, 1884), Anna Boleyn (Bonn, 1886), a tragedy, In der Irre (Bonn, 1888), a collection of short stories, &c. Edleen Vaughan, or Paths of Peril, a novel (London, 1894), and Sweet Hours, poems (London, 1904), were written in English. Among the translations made by “Carmen Sylva” are German versions of Pierre Loti’s romance Pêcheur d’Islande, and of Paul de St Victor’s dramatic criticisms Les Deux Masques (Paris, 1881-1884); and in particular The Bard of the Dimbovitza, a fine English version by “Carmen Sylva” and Alma Strettell of Helène Vacarescu’s collection of Rumanian folk-songs, &c., entitled Lieder aus dem Dimbovitzathal (Bonn, 1889). The Bard of the Dimbovitza was first published in 1891, and was soon reissued and expanded. Translations from the original works of “Carmen Sylva” have appeared in all the principal languages of Europe and in Armenian.
See [Rumania]: History; also M. Kremnitz, Carmen Sylva—eine Biographie (Leipzig, 1903); and, for a full bibliography, G. Bengescu, Carmen Sylva—bibliographie et extraits de ses œuvres (Paris, 1904).
ELIZABETH (1635-1650), English princess, second daughter of Charles I., was born on the 28th of December 1635 at St James’s Palace. On the outbreak of the Civil War and the departure of the king from London, while the two elder princes accompanied their father, the princess and the infant duke of Gloucester were left under the care of the parliament. In October 1642 Elizabeth sent a letter to the House of Lords begging that her old attendants might not be removed. In July 1644 the royal children were sent to Sir John Danvers at Chelsea, and in 1645 to the earl and countess of Northumberland. After the final defeat of the king they were joined in 1646 by James, and during 1647 paid several visits to the king at Caversham, near Reading, and Hampton Court, but were again separated by Charles’s imprisonment at Carisbrooke Castle. On the 21st of April 1648 James was persuaded to escape by Elizabeth, who declared that were she a boy she would not long remain in confinement. The last sad meeting between Charles and his two children, at which the princess was overcome with grief, and of which she wrote a short and touching account, took place on the 29th of January 1649, the day before his execution. In June she was entrusted to the care of the earl and countess of Leicester at Penshurst, but in 1650, upon the landing of Charles II. in Scotland, the parliament ordered the royal children to be taken for security to Carisbrooke Castle. The princess fell ill from a wetting almost immediately upon her arrival, and died of fever on the 8th of September. She was buried in St Thomas’s church at Newport, Isle of Wight, where the initials “E.S.” alone marked her grave till 1856, when a monument was erected to her memory by Queen Victoria. The princess’s sorrowful career and early death have attracted general interest and sympathy. She was said to have acquired considerable proficiency in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, as well as in Italian and French, and several books were dedicated to her, including the translation of the Electra of Sophocles by Christopher Wase in 1649. Her mild nature and gentleness towards her father’s enemies gained her the name of “Temperance.”
See Lives of the Princesses of England, by M.A.E. Green (1855), vol. vi.; Notes and Queries, 7th ser., ix. 444, x. 15.