EVEN after she was widowed in 1632, Elizabeth rarely visited England. Her embattled brother Charles I feared that Parliament, which doubted his commitment to the Protestant cause, might prefer Elizabeth, and on the eve of his execution in 1649, Charles refused an interview to Elizabeth’s son Charles Louis, recently restored as Elector Palatine by his mother’s tireless campaigning.
For the next eleven years, England was a hostile republic. Elizabeth returned to London only after the Restoration, and died there in 1662, aged sixty-five. However, she continued to influence Britain’s destiny.
In 1688, Parliament deposed Elizabeth’s nephew King James II, in fear of his Catholic loyalties.* His Protestant daughters Mary and Anne duly succeeded him, but they had no children; so in 1701, Parliament disqualified their Catholic half-brother James Stuart,* and settled the crown on their reliably Protestant second cousin George, Elector of Hanover, son of Elizabeth’s daughter Sophia. When Anne died in 1714, the Winter Queen’s grandson was crowned King George I of Great Britain.
See our post The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. As the Pope still claimed the right to overrule national Parliaments, and as James believed that the ‘divine right of kings’ made him unaccountable to any Parliament or authority except God, Westminster understandably felt that James would not govern exclusively in the interests of his own subjects.
The danger of James was that, just like little Elizabeth Stuart, he might have been used as a puppet for powerful Catholic monarchs such as Louis XIV of France. See our post The War of the Spanish Succession.