Coming out of lurkdom...
It is far easier for her often sympathetic biographers to describe Elizabeth as spunky, funny and charming (which she was) than to admit she was also treacherous, less than politically astute, extravagant, and a dreadful mother.
In Elizabeth's early biographies, her behavior was largely whitewashed. It was not until the discovery of Sophia's Memoirs, and the publication of biographies of Sophia, Rupert, and the younger Elizabeth, that her behavior was questioned or re-appraised. Unfortunately, despite the new evidence, even Elizabeth's best modern biographer, Carola Oman, continued the Victorian tradition of making excuses for the so-called Queen of Hearts, minimizing or ignoring her failures and mistakes, and usually deriding Elizabeth's children, particularly those who did not marry.
For what it's worth, I think Elizabeth should be admired for her impressive lobbying skills, and for the fact that she understood the value of good public relations, a concept her brother could never grasp. She refused to take no for an answer when her brother King Charles refused to raise an army on her behalf, and kept herself and her children's plight before the eyes of the world by welcoming visitors to her Court at The Hague and by building up a vast network of correspondents. "I am on show here like any Fat Lady or Dancing Bear," she once wrote to a supporter. Unfortunately, as a mother, her best-known nickname, the Winter Queen, sums her up perfectly.
Incidentally, her sons Rupert and Maurice were not smugglers, but were in charge of a small fleet of ships that defected to the Stuart cause in 1648. After the execution of their uncle Charles I, their cousin Charles II made Rupert his Lord High Admiral. Rupert and Maurice led a mission to blockade an Irish port from being used as a point of entry by Cromwell, and when that proved impossible, moved on to their secondary goals of disrupting English shipping and capturing prizes to finance the exiled Stuart court, operating without a base for three years, an amazing achievement.