Elizabeth

For more information on Elizabeth, visit Britannica.com.

Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596-1662). The eldest daughter of James VI and I and sister of Charles I, she married in 1613 Frederick of the Palatinate. Five years later, the Bohemians elected Frederick as king in defiance of the Habsburgs. In the wars that followed, they were driven out of their new kingdom and the Palatinate overrun. She spent only October 1619-November 1620 at Prague and hence was known as the ‘Winter Queen’. She was the mother of Prince Rupert and through her daughter Sophia the Hanoverians came to the throne of Britain in 1714.

(1618-80) The daughter of Frederick, the Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, and Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I of England. Elizabeth is known in philosophy through her extensive correspondence with Descartes. After an early conversion to Catholicism she refused the throne of Bohemia, and her philosophical interests led her to avoid marriage; in 1667 she retired to the protestant convent of Herford in Westphalia, where she eventually became abbess, running a tolerant and liberal regime. Her questions to Descartes reveal an acute philosophical intelligence, particularly in probing the inadequacy of the Cartesian explanation of how immaterial substance (the mind) can generate motion in material substance (the body), and in questioning elements of Descartes's ethics.