James I's daughter, Elizabeth, married Elector Palatine Frederick V on Valentine's Day 1613. This ‘Palatine match’ was one of the most spectacular events of the Jacobean age, allegedly costing over L93,000 or more than a decade's expenditure on all royal palaces. The expense underscored the wedding's importance in James's ambitions to broker European peace: it was the Protestant counterpart of the attempts to marry Elizabeth's brother Charles to a Catholic Spanish or French princess. The lavish display unfortunately also magnified the subsequent discrepancy between aspirations and achievement. Far from securing peace or advancing Protestantism, Stuart involvement with the Palatinate brought frustration and costly engagement in the Thirty Years’ War, contributing to the monarchy's domestic political difficulties and thus, indirectly, to the Civil Wars.

This is well known, but most contemporaries and many historians have generally failed to appreciate the difficulties faced by the Stuarts in shaping a viable policy. My argument is two-fold. First, only by explaining these difficulties can we understand why Stuart policy failed. Second, this explanation lies largely in continental rather than British politics. Defining the Thirty Years’ War is central to our answer. Failure to understand the war (both at the time, and subsequently) is a prime source for confusion. The second section examines the war's roots in the interrelationship between religious and constitutional issues in the Holy Roman Empire. The third part identifies the Palatinate's role in escalating regional problems into full-scale war in 1619. The final section underscores the Stuarts’ dilemma; there was no obvious way they could intervene effectively in continental affairs.

Defining the Thirty Years’ War

To many Britons, the Thirty Years’ War was a struggle between ‘good’ Protestantism and ‘evil’ Catholicism. Subsequent historians have often agreed, though usually without such partisanship, and the conflict has entered popular consciousness as the culmination of an entire age of religious wars beginning with the Reformation. While recent anglophone scholarship stresses religious causes, especially for Britain's Civil Wars, continental European research increasingly questions the appropriateness of the concept of ‘religious war’. The idea of the Thirty Years’ War as a pan-European free-for-all likewise featured in contemporary popular attitudes and shapes many later historical interpretations, notably those related to concepts of a ‘General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’.