This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

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In Custrin, a fortified castle in the German countryside, a woman paced nervously.

Pregnant with her fifth child, she was waiting on news about her husband.

Things were bad back in Prague, the city they'd lived in for just over a year.

It was under siege, with Catholic armies closing in on all sides. She hadn't wanted to leave

her husband, but rising tensions paired with her growing physical vulnerability made staying impossible.

And so she fled to this castle, 50 miles outside Berlin. When word finally came, it was exactly

what she had feared. Things had not gone their way. Her husband was no longer the king of

Bohemia, which meant that she was no longer the queen. She had been queen of Bohemia for

just one year, a year of ruling a kingdom that had never quite accepted her and her husband,

watching as he navigated political waters so treacherous that they'd ultimately pulled them both under.

One calendar year and it was already over. How had it come to this? How had a princess born into

one of Europe's most powerful families ended up in exile, waiting for news of a kingdom lost.

I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

In previous episodes, we've discussed King James I of England, James the 6th of Scotland,

the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and he is a fascinating man with a whole host of adult

eccentricities and superstitions. But today we're looking at the life of his daughter Elizabeth.

She was born into royalty, the subject of a botched

kidnapping plot in her childhood. Elizabeth's life was dramatic from the beginning. But perhaps

no period of her life was more chaotic than the 12 months she and her husband spent as king and queen of Bohemia.

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