Farthing - Elizabeth Stuart - Queen of Bohemia Dover, Kent

Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, became Queen of Bohemia for a single winter — 1619 to 1620 — before Frederick V's defeat at the Battle of White Mountain sent her into decades of Flemish exile. She became a romantic fixture in English popular memory precisely because she never came back. Tradesmen's tokens of this period were an emergency response to the near-total absence of official small change under the Commonwealth and early Restoration, and tavern and inn keepers issued their own copper pieces to make transactions possible at all.

A Dover innkeeper trading under her name issued this farthing token — her enduring celebrity doing commercial work long after her death in February 1662.