Nadine Akkerman

Elizabeth Stuart is commonly known as the Winter Queen thanks to her brief time as Queen-Consort of Bohemia, and was very much involved in the politics of northwestern Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century. Historians—almost all men—long dismissed Elizabeth as flighty and ineffectual. Nadine Akkerman argues that a reappraisal of her career is needed, and that Elizabeth was far shrewder than she's been given credit for. Akkerman makes a convincing case, particularly for Elizabeth consciously modelling herself on her cousin and namesake, Elizabeth I, and for her knowing how to wield the visual language of power. While at times this biography is a bit dry, Akkerman makes excellent use of the surviving archival material relating to Elizabeth and this is bound to be the authoritative biography of her for some time.… (más)

I have only dipped into this book, but what I found did not encourage me to read further.

On page 119 is the paragraph "Nestled elegantly on the south bank of the Thames in Richmond, Ham House was once part of the jointure of Henry VIII's fourth wife Anne of Cleves, and its courtly interior remains largely intact. Anne is not the only mistress of the house to occupy a space in the British historical imagination, however, as the stories surrounding Elizabeth Murray, who inherited her father's title to become the suo jure Countess of Dysart in 1655, bear witness."

Anne of Cleves died in 1557. Ham House was built in 1610.

On page 122, in a paragraph setting out the antecedents of Elizabeth Murray she states:-
"In 1603, William Murray obtained a position within the inner sanctum of the new, predominantly Scottish, English court: the brokerage of his uncle, Thomas Murray, ... got him appointed as whipping boy to Prince Charles. Having suffered flagellations to serve his prince, William initially enjoyed a great amount of trust that translated into certain privileges and riches, most pertinently the lease of Ham House in 1626, a year after his prince became king. A decade later William married Catherine [Bruce]." William's official status was groom, and his experience as a whipping boy, though often stated, has been questioned, as the original source of this story is the notoriously unreliable George Burnett, but that aside, Akkerman seems to be stating that William and Catherine married in 1636, the only other interpretation being that they married in 1613, when William would have been about thirteen years old. William and Catherine's eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was born in September 1626, so 1636 cannot be the year of their wedding.

I found the rest of this chapter very confusing, as Akkerman seemed to be alternately relying upon and dismissing Burnett's writings and the were-they-weren't-they style of examining the espionage activities of Elizabeth and her parents became wearing, and ultimately I lost interest, particularly as I was not confident of the accuracy of the information.… (más)

This is a scholarly book that looks at the use of female spies in the central portion of the 17th century, a time period including the civil war, the Commonwealth and the Restoration. The focus is around finding traces of these women, when they were considered inappropriate to be spies and their traces were often hidden in their own tme, making them even harder to find now.
It started very dryly, there are lots of footnotes and attributions, as well as an extensive biography. But it became a lot more interesting, and readable, as she started to examine individual women, their letters, their place in the records and what they themselves wrote at the time and later.
There's a lot of ground covered, some of it repeated, but there are some very interesting quirks of history. The Royalist spies were society ladies (or pretended to be such) the spies for the Commonwealth were most certainly not, they appear in the records, for the most part, as nurses. It is an interesting proposition, as nurse you are in a position to spy quite effectively, is that description co-incidence or cover story?
It wasn't necessarily a rivetting read, it was a bit too scholarly for that, but it certainly had some very engaing characters and was well constructed.… (más)