page_title: Briget Paget
section_title: Editor and guardian
hierarchical_section_title: Briget Paget / Editor and guardian
caption_attribution_description: Elizabeth Stuart (1596 - 1662), known as the 'Winter Queen', was the eldest daughter of James I of England. She married Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate, in 1613. He accepted the Bohemian crown in 1619, and was expelled from Bohemia in the following year. They lived in exile in Holland from 1621 onwards. She returned to England in 1661, and stayed in the London house of the 1st Earl Craven. In the following year she moved into Leicester House in Leicester Square where she died a few weeks later on 13 February. The picture was painted during the Queen's exile in Holland, ten years after she had been widowed, and may have been commissioned to mark this anniversary. She is shown as a grieving widow, wearing black with very few pieces of jewellery, notably the pearl earrings which had been given to her by her husband. She holds a stem in her hand on which there are two roses, one healthy and one wilted, a symbol of her widowed state along with the black ribbon on her arm. The dog can be interpreted as a symbol of fidelity.
context_page_description: Bridget Paget née Masterson was an English Puritan who acted as her husband John Paget's literary executor and editor.
context_section_description: After John Paget's death, Briget became the guardian of his literary heritage. In 1639, from Dordrecht, she issued Meditations of death, wherein a Christian is taught how to remember and prepare for his latter end, a previously-unpublished collection of sermons. She wrote the dedication, making clear she was the editor, to Elizabeth of Bohemia, since Frederick's death the figurehead for the Protestant cause. Drawing on the experience of her own loss, she hinted at a close relationship, referring to "the gentle and propitious respects your Majesty hath at sundry times manifested" to John and herself. She assured Elizabeth that divine help might yet restore her to her throne, along with her "princely progeny." The preface to the book was signed by Robert Paget.
  In 1641 Briget and Robert Paget brought out A defence of church-government, exercised in presbyteriall, classical, & synodall assemblies. Once again there was a preface by Robert, explaining the context of the work, which lay in John Paget's controversies with the English separatists in Amsterdam. However, publication came just as the conflict between Charles I, Elizabeth's brother, and Parliament reached a critical stage. Thomas Paget therefore contributed by way of dedication an Humble Advertisment [sic] to the high Court of Parliament, presenting the book to the House of Commons. This rehearsed the history of nonconformity in the Diocese of Chester, especially those aspects in which Thomas had personal involvement. It also sought to distinguish the Presbyterian cause from that of more radical Calvinists, with which the royalist agitator Sir Thomas Aston, 1st Baronet had sought to conflate it.
  In Cheshire Briget's own family were soon caught up in the English Civil War, most apparently taking the royalist side. In 1642 no Mastersons signed the Remonstrance of the Cheshire commons in support for Parliament Brereton held Nantwich for Parliament after fierce fighting early in 1643. Thomas Masterson, Briget's nephew and the head of the family, suffered sequestration of his estates in 1644 and was forced to compound with a fine of £630. Briget's brother-in-law, Thomas, took the opposite side, returning to England around 1646 to take up the incumbency of Chad's Church in Shrewsbury – a town that had fallen to the Parliamentarians the previous year. Briget never returned to England.
caption: Elizabeth of Bohemia, as portrayed in 1642 by Gerard van Honthorst
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