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The princess and her teacher
After less than a year of his reign, Elisabeth’s father was exiled from his kingdom and this is what gave him the nickname “The Winter King”: a king for one winter, that is. The rest of their lives, the family spent travelling around Europe: first to Heidelberg, where Elisabeth was born, then to the Hague, in the Netherlands, where they set up an exile government of Bohemia.
Despite her father’s continuing attempts to return as a ruler to his country, this dream never came true, and they had to live in relatively limited material circumstances in their exile. What money they had to spend came to them from donations and support from their relations all over Europe, particularly from the British throne – Elisabeth was sister of Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Despite living their lives in exile, Elisabeth managed to attract many of the great minds of her time to her court. She corresponded with churchmen like Edward Reynolds, thinkers and artists like Anna Maria van Schurman, Nicholas Malebranche and Leibniz, and Quakers like Robert Barclay and William Penn, whom she helped escape persecution.
We know nothing of her work as a thinker but what she writes in her letters to Rene Descartes, perhaps the most influential philosopher of modern times. All her thought is contained in the twenty-six letters she sent him, and it is telling that the famous man wrote her thirty-two in return. They always went out of their way to be polite to each other, she seeing herself as the famous man’s student, but Descartes, at the same time, recognising her as royalty, even if her kingdom had ceased to exist by the time they first met.
In her letters, despite her admiring words for the famous man, she is a clear-sighted critic of Descartes’ work. Her criticism predated and foreshadowed what many generations of philosophers would since have to say about the weakest points of Cartesian dualism.
It has often been asked what exactly the relationship between the two might have been. Elisabeth never married, although once she was lined up to. But it turned out that her prospective husband, Władysław IV Vasa, King of Poland, was a Catholic. The protestant Elisabeth, always the philosopher and true to her principles, refused to …
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