6 Queen of Hearts

ELIZABETH WAS TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD, the mother of a large and still growing brood—her sixth son and eighth child, Edward, had been born the previous October—when she received the news of her father’s death. She would not have been human if her grief was not tinged with a hint of relief. She and Frederick were by this time living under such straitened conditions that Charles, as one of his first acts, had to send his sister’s family the black clothing necessary to outfit them during the official period of mourning. “You may easily judge what an affliction it was to me to understand the evil news of the loss of so loving a father as his late majesty was to me,” Elizabeth wrote to an English diplomat of long acquaintance on April 11, 1625. “It would be much more but that God hath left me so dear and loving a brother as the king is to me, in whom, next God, I have now all my confidence,” she added candidly.

Even better, this time Charles would not be laboring alone in his effort to restore the Palatinate to his sister and her husband. In the ever-shifting minuet that represented seventeenth-century European politics, a new and completely unexpected partner had suddenly emerged from the wings to help lead the next promenade around the dance floor. A prominent Catholic at the court of Louis XIII of France, this new ally’s name was Armand Jean du Plessis, although he is much better known by his title Cardinal Richelieu.

Richelieu’s great insight was that, although a staunch Catholic himself, he did not perceive the world in terms of religious dogma but instead focused on power. He could not help but notice, for example, that the Habsburgs were becoming something of a problem for France. It was perhaps not the best idea, the cardinal reasoned, to let the armies of Spain and the empire, Catholic though they might be, win quite so convincingly over their Protestant opponents. They were getting a little too ambitious. Already, Spanish forces were beginning to encroach on key mountain passes through the Alps that had traditionally been allied to France. To lose this territory made the kingdom much more vulnerable to attack. What Richelieu needed was something to divert Spain’s and the emperor’s attention and military away from Italy so that France could reclaim that property.

Charles’s repudiation of the Spanish marriage and his subsequent ascension to the throne of England was coincident with the cardinal’s rise to power. So when Charles, still looking for a suitable bride, inquired through intermediaries about the possibility of his marrying Louis XIII’s youngest sister, fifteen-year-old Henrietta Maria, and tying this alliance to a French promise of help in retrieving the Palatinate for Frederick and Elizabeth, his proposal was met with approval, pending favorable resolution of a few niggling details. It was twenty-four-year-old Charles I and his favorite, the duke of Buckingham, negotiating against twenty-three-year-old Louis XIII and his favorite, Cardinal Richelieu. This cannot really be called a fair fight.

Cardinal Richelieu

Louis XIII and the cardinal proved to be every bit as intractable and indefatigable in negotiation as the Spanish. In exchange for a league dedicated to the recovery of the Palatinate, they insisted that all the discriminatory laws currently enforced against English Catholics be rescinded; that Henrietta Maria be allowed to worship publicly in a chapel; that she be allowed to raise her children as Catholics; and that her household be made up of French Catholic attendants. (Luckily, the princess was not interested in going into a convent, so Charles was saved from that condition.) And, since the marriage was tied to a military alliance, the French also demanded the loan of English ships. For this, Louis XIII was willing to give his sister a dowry of £120,000, to help defray the expenses of a war for the Palatinate and to supply Frederick’s commander, General Mansfield, with funds for six months.

Charles accepted all of these conditions, although he kept the terms a secret, knowing they would be unpopular in Protestant England, and sent the duke of Buckingham to France in May with instructions to bring his bride to him as quickly as possible.^* Henrietta Maria and her escort arrived in Dover on June 12 and the marriage was consummated the next day (they had been wedded by proxy in Paris). By June 17, 1625, they were in London, where Charles’s new French Catholic wife was greeted by a traditional English downpour.

And with this marriage and the league with France, for the first time in years, Elizabeth allowed herself to feel hope. “The comforte of my deare brother’s love doth revive me,” she wrote excitedly in a letter to an English friend. “He hath sent to me Sir Henry Vane, his coferer [treasurer], to assure me, that he will be both father and brother to the King of Bohemia and me. Now, you may be sure, all will goe well in Englande; for your new master will leave nothing undone for our good. The great fleet is almost readie to goe out. [Charles had promised to bring the English navy into the war to help retrieve the Palatinate.]… My uncle, the King of Dennemark, doth beginne to declare himself for us, and so doth Sweden… I have the best brother in the worlde.”

That the return of the Palatine to Frederick would even be considered to be an important international issue after so many years was due almost entirely to his wife’s efforts. It was spirited, engaging Elizabeth who, by the sheer force of her personality, drew supporters to their small court in The Hague and made it a center of influence in Holland; Elizabeth who charmed and cajoled, both by personal appeal and letter, all who might be of service to their cause, frequently bestowing drolly affectionate nicknames on her correspondents; Elizabeth (unlike her husband, who often gave in to depression, although who could blame him) who recognized that allies come to those who remain positive and refuse to surrender to despair. “Though I have cause enough to be sad, yet I am still of my wild humor, to be as merry as I can, in spite of fortune,” she wrote. The English ambassador in Holland agreed. “I know not so great a lady in the world, nor ever did—though I have seen many courts—of such natural affection,” he observed. Even the prince of Orange, though related to the husband, took the wife’s part. “The Queen of Bohemia is accounted the most charming princess of Europe, and called by some the queen of hearts; but she is far more than that,—she is a true and faithful wife, and that, too, of a husband who is in every respect her inferior,” he concluded frankly before his death in the spring of 1625. Unlike her father, he persuasively demonstrated his high opinion of her by leaving her valuable shares in the Dutch East India Company in his will. Her brother Charles, upon his ascension to the throne, made it clear that he too believed Elizabeth’s political acumen to be more acute than her husband’s. “I send you herewith letters of my sister and brother. I place them so because I think the gray mare [Elizabeth] is the best horse,” read the new king’s instructions to the duke of Buckingham when he sent him off to The Hague for an official state visit.

But it was not for her admirers alone that Elizabeth was known as the queen of hearts. No woman in Europe could boast a more tangibly affectionate husband than Frederick. No year passed without Elizabeth’s either becoming pregnant, preparing for labor, or just getting over a delivery. On July 7, 1626, she gave birth to her ninth child and third daughter, whom she and Frederick christened Henrietta Maria as a gesture of respect to her new sister-in-law. On September 27 of the next year came Philip, number ten. Philip was followed in December 1628 by another daughter (who sadly did not survive childhood) but who was in any event almost immediately replaced by Sophia, number twelve, born on October 14, 1630. The arrival of Gustavus Adolphus on January 14, 1632, made for a whopping baker’s dozen.

All of these children lived away from their parents under the care of a variety of tutors and governesses at the house in Leyden. In 1624, Karl Ludwig, the king and queen of Bohemia’s second son, had been sent from Berlin to live with his brothers and sisters, but it wasn’t until 1628 that the remaining two children, Princess Elizabeth and Maurice, who had been left in the care of Frederick’s mother and sister in Germany, joined the rest of the family in Holland.

Of all of their many offspring, Elizabeth’s and Frederick’s highest hopes for the future naturally settled on their eldest, Frederick Henry. Frederick Henry was not only heir to the Palatinate and crown prince of Bohemia, he was third in line (after Charles I and Elizabeth, so long as Charles remained childless) to inherit the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Moreover, he was a bright, attractive boy, affectionate to his siblings, and showed great promise of developing into a strong and noble statesman. He was very attached to his sister Princess Elizabeth, who was only a baby when he left Heidelberg but whom he associated with his happy childhood days in Germany before the war. He sent letters to his grandmother in Berlin asking after her welfare and sometimes enclosed little gifts. “I wish for nothing so much that I may see her again, with all happy things around her, at dear Heidelberg,” ran one of these compositions. “I beg your Highness to accept with this a pair of gloves and a silver pen… I beseech you to present… to my sister Elizabeth a true-hearted brotherly kiss, to whom I send also the enclosed trinket—a little heart—in token of my fond, faithful, fraternal love.” With his brothers Karl Ludwig and Rupert (the others were too young), he attended the University of Leyden, where he mastered several languages, including French, English, German, and the inevitable Latin. His military training was not neglected and he took a keen interest in sports and particularly in the navy. His father was extremely proud of him, and took Frederick Henry with him on excursions and brought him to The Hague whenever he could to expose him to state business and diplomacy.

In her insistence that all of her children become fluent in English as well as French and German and that they be trained in English composition so that they would become accustomed to writing letters, Elizabeth ensured that, should all else fail, her progeny would at least have a future in her native land. Judging by the disastrous results of the efforts ostensibly waged on her behalf by her brother in the first few years of his rule, this would turn out to be a worthwhile endeavor.

IN HIS EXUBERANCE AT being crowned king, Charles—egged on by his most influential adviser and best friend, the duke of Buckingham, a man of large vision if somewhat questionable abilities—had made a great many promises. Among the more significant were his pledge to provide Mansfield, Frederick’s general, with £240,000 (of which £120,000 was supposed to come from his wife’s dowry) to support enough soldiers to take back the Palatine; another £300,000 to help his uncle Christian, king of Denmark, field an army against the Spanish troops who had remained in northern Germany in order to protect Holland and the Netherlands from imperial encroachment; and a further £300,000 to refurbish the mighty English fleet, which had been sadly neglected during James’s reign, and which Charles and Buckingham, still nurturing hurt feelings over the humiliating Infanta episode, intended to use to attack Spain outright. These expenses were over and above the amounts Charles would also need to pay for his father’s funeral, his own coronation, and his and his wife’s household living allowances. A quick examination of the royal treasury confirmed a substantial deficit between the new king’s expectations and the funds available at the time of his ascension, so Charles called a parliament in order to petition the kingdom’s legislators to supply the difference.

Beginning one’s reign by presenting one’s subjects with a bill several times larger than any in recorded history was perhaps not the optimal way to establish a long and fruitful relationship. Not unreasonably given future events, Parliament balked and instead chastised Charles for agreeing to all the tolerant Catholic clauses in his marriage contract, forcing him to renege. They then went on the offensive and tried to impeach Buckingham for, among other transgressions, agreeing to lend Protestant English ships to the Catholic king of France, who, it turned out, intended to use them to help subdue their coreligionists, the Huguenots, who were rebelling at La Rochelle. To save his favorite from disgrace, Charles was forced to dismiss Parliament without obtaining anywhere near the amount of money needed to accomplish his objectives.

A lack of sufficient funds did not, however, dissuade Charles and the duke of Buckingham from going ahead and putting their ambitious war program into action anyway. Buckingham, after spending years first as James’s favorite and then his son’s, was by far the richest man in England. He bought himself the title of lord admiral, made a cut-rate attempt to spruce up the navy, pronounced the fleet seaworthy, and in October 1625 sent it off to attack the Spanish coast and hopefully bring back some pirated treasure. It was only after the fleet set sail that the commanding officer noticed that there wasn’t nearly enough food or weaponry to support a military operation of any length and that in any event the ammunition supplied didn’t fit the gun barrels. By November they were already on their way back to England, having achieved nothing beyond the loss of four ships and the sacrifice of a significant proportion of English sailors, many of them forced recruits, to storms, disease, and privation.

The outcry over this disastrous expedition served only to amplify the demands for Buckingham’s censure and removal from office. To counteract this unfortunate trend, Charles, again on the advice of his favorite, decided to embark on an innovative new war strategy. Despite Elizabeth’s and Frederick’s pleas that the promised money and soldiers be sent to help retake the Palatine, the duke of Buckingham instead insisted that the best way to proceed (and, coincidentally, appease his parliamentary critics) was to come to the aid of the rebelling French Protestants at La Rochelle, who were under siege by Louis XIII’s Catholic troops. The fact that this meant attacking his own ally, with whom he had just signed an extensive military treaty whose sole purpose was to return his sister and her husband to their property in Germany, seems not to have occurred to Charles.

So what remained of the fleet was once again patched up as best it could be, this time on monies raised through forced loans. (Those of Charles’s subjects who refused to contribute were imprisoned, a novel if not particularly effective financing strategy.) By June 1627, the ships were pronounced sound, and the squadron set sail for France with Buckingham personally in command.

Despite the invigorating presence of the lord admiral, the mighty British fleet had much the same experience fighting the French as it had had with the Spanish. Determined to seize an enemy fort located on the Isle of Rhé, a small landmass just off the coast of La Rochelle, Buckingham launched an assault, only to discover that the scaling ladders he had brought along to scramble over the walls were too short to reach the top. He sent back messengers to England begging for money and reinforcements, but Charles, an art connoisseur, instead used what funds he could scrounge to purchase a collection of paintings by Old Masters (a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, his Italian dealer assured him), so Buckingham was forced to retreat through a narrow strait that allowed the French to decimate the English soldiers with impunity. The entire operation was such a debacle that Louis XIII was able to joke about it. “Alack,” he told the ambassador from Savoy, “if I had known my brother of England had longed so much for the Isle of Rhé, I would have sold it him for half the money it hath cost him.”

By the time he and his ships limped back to England, Charles’s lord admiral and chief adviser was the most detested man in the realm. (“Who rules the kingdom?—The king. Who rules the king?—The duke. Who rules the duke?—The devil” ran a popular London ditty.) Nonetheless Buckingham refused to admit defeat and convinced Charles to make yet another attempt to relieve the siege of La Rochelle. However, the lord admiral’s luck ran out on August 23, 1628, when he was stabbed to death in Portsmouth, where he had gone to inspect the inevitable repairs on the fleet. The assassin, one of Buckingham’s own seamen, a veteran of the catastrophic Isle of Rhé operation, was regarded as a hero by the general populace, who lit bonfires and proclaimed public prayers in his name when a shattered Charles had him executed for the crime.

Charles sent the naval force to France anyway, where it sat in the harbor of La Rochelle and watched as the Huguenot inhabitants slowly succumbed to the French Catholic troops under the generalship of Cardinal Richelieu—“in the sight of the English fleet which did effect nothing for them,” as a French Protestant observed bitterly to a member of Charles’s government. The English commander was moved by the suffering of the citizens, but Richelieu’s army and defenses were so daunting that he dared not intervene. On October 18, 1628, the Protestants of La Rochelle surrendered. “There died in this siege, of famine, 16,000 persons. The rest endured a wonderful misery, most of their food being hides, leather, and old gloves,” read the official report from the fleet.

Such were the results of the confident promises and resolutions, the carefully arranged alliances and military operations undertaken by Charles I on behalf of his sister. And while the king of England busied himself with a futile war against his French ally, the imperial army racked up victory after victory, dealing out death and destruction indiscriminately to all who stood in its path, burning, looting, and savaging the terrified civilian population, as Ferdinand tightened his hold on Germany.

ONCE AGAIN, ELIZABETH AND FREDERICK could only stand by and watch in dismay as their hopes and prospects were blighted by a lack of support from England. Elizabeth’s uncle the king of Denmark bravely took to the field in a three-pronged, coordinated attack with General Mansfield and Christian of Brunswick (who had already lost an arm in service to the queen of Bohemia), but without English soldiers or money, the effort was doomed. Mansfield flung twelve thousand men over a bridge in Dessau, in northern Germany, about eighty miles southwest of Berlin, only to see nearly half of them brutally cut down by the far superior imperial artillery under the direction of General Wallenstein, Ferdinand’s new, highly competent commander. Christian of Brunswick, who had so bankrupted himself in his lady’s cause that his soldiers were reduced to fighting with iron rods, died despondent and forlorn at the age of twenty-eight of wounds received in battle at Wolfenbüttel, also in northern Germany. The king of Denmark was defeated in a pitched battle with General Tilly’s Catholic forces at nearby Lutter, where six thousand Danish corpses littered the field and all of his artillery was lost before he sounded the retreat.

It wasn’t until November 1628, just after the French Protestants at La Rochelle surrendered to Cardinal Richelieu’s army, that a stroke of good luck actually fell Elizabeth’s way. Ships from the Dutch East India Company suddenly appeared off the coast of England on their way to Amsterdam, and it was immediately apparent that Holland had been the beneficiary of an unprecedented (if pirated) windfall. “The great prize taken in the West Indies by the Hollanders amounts… to £870,000 or thereabout,” a correspondent from London enthused. “They have also taken the Brazilian fleet, laden with sugars. In that West India Company of Holland, the Queen of Bohemia hath one-eighth part left her by the late Maurice, Prince of Orange, in his last will and testament.”

One-eighth of nearly £900,000, a small fortune! Enough to try again, to raise a new troop of soldiers with which to pry Heidelberg from Ferdinand’s grasp at last, with maybe even some left over to pay down their household debts! Elizabeth had (of course) just given birth again and couldn’t make the trip, but she sent Frederick to Amsterdam, where the ships were harbored, to inspect the bounty. The treasure had excited the interest of the general population; many people took time to visit and marvel at the haul, and Frederick knew that his eldest son especially would enjoy the spectacle, so on January 7, 1629, he took Frederick Henry, who five days earlier had just turned fifteen, with him.

Father and son boarded a small sloop with about twenty other people to sail from The Hague to Amsterdam. It was a bitterly cold day, with a strong wind. The sea was crowded with shipping vessels in a hurry to make port, which made it difficult to maneuver. The afternoon light was failing—night comes early in January in Holland—when suddenly out of the gloom came a much larger craft carrying a full cargo of beer. There was no time to get out of the way. The beer-laden galleon struck the boat carrying Frederick and his son with such force that it split it in two. In minutes, it had filled with water and sunk, its passengers pitched into the sea, screaming for help and clinging to the debris as best they could. According to a letter of January 21 reporting these events, “The murthering boat, having a fair wind, would have left them all there; but a skipper of the King’s boat being gotten into it, did with his dagger threaten death to the master thereof, if he would not presently save the King of Bohemia, to whom a cable being cast, he was by that means saved, together with a woman and a lackey that took hold thereof with him.”

But the other passengers were not so lucky. Frederick could hear his son’s cries—“Save me, father, save me!”—but could not find him in the darkness, though with their last energies, the members of the drowning crew had hoisted the boy to the ship’s mast, which yet stood above the water. The galleon on which the rescued king of Bohemia stood was forced, despite his entreaties, to give up the search. Nineteen people died that night in the frigid sea. The next morning, when Frederick came back to search for bodies, he found his eldest son’s corpse bobbing in the water, the boy’s cloak still wrapped around the mast of the ship and “his cheek fastened by the frost to the said pole.”

This tragedy, the correspondent continued, “hath been such a wind to the poor father’s and mother’s hearts, as it is much feared that… (she being newly brought to bed, and he much bruised and distempered with that miserable accident) it may endanger their lives.”

THE COUPLE SURVIVED, but Frederick, who had stood wet and shivering on the deck of the rescue ship in the bitter wind listening to his child’s desperate pleas for help and whose grief must consequently also have carried with it the heavy burden of guilt for having exposed the boy, however unconsciously, to danger, never fully recovered his health and spirits. And the next two years were as dark and discouraging as any Elizabeth had known. Frederick was frequently ill with a nagging cough that the doctors feared was consumption. In the spring of 1630, Charles, whose military ambitions had died with the duke of Buckingham, sent a messenger to his sister and her husband at The Hague to break the news that he had agreed to a peace with Spain that did not include a return of the Palatinate.^* The ambassador reported back that thirty-three-year-old Frederick broke down in tears at this interview and threatened to send Elizabeth on the next boat to England to beg alms from her brother “for that he [Frederick] was not able to put bread into her mouth.” In January 1631 they buried their second-to-youngest daughter, the child who had been born just before the terrible episode with the treasure ships, in the tomb next to their eldest son.

So when later that year the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, onetime suitor of Elizabeth, decided to enter the war in Germany on the side of the Protestants, nobody gave it much thought.

Improbably, it was again Cardinal Richelieu who acted as catalyst. Although he had briefly reclaimed the vital passages through the Swiss Alps for France, these had reverted to Spain when the cardinal had been forced to redeploy his army to subdue the rebellion at La Rochelle. Now he needed another means by which to divert imperial attention and troops (as, clearly, based on recent experience, Charles I was neither competent nor reliable in this regard). After some contemplation, Richelieu looked around and settled on Gustavus as the man for the job. On January 23, 1631, France and Sweden signed the Treaty of Bärwalde, which, in addition to the usual smoke screen of trade and defensive language, specified that Gustavus, a Lutheran, was to lead an extensive army of some thirty thousand men, to be funded by Richelieu, into Germany against the Catholic emperor.^*

This turned out to be an inspired move. Gustavus Adolphus, without question the finest commander of his age, known admiringly as “the Golden King” or “the Lion of the North” for his Nordic coloring and general ferocity in battle, was definitely a man worth backing. Unlike his opponent General Tilly, who was older and not particularly innovative when it came to tactics, the king of Sweden, who had begun fighting as a ten-year-old child in his father’s army, had propelled himself enthusiastically into the study of combat and made it his life’s work. Gustavus saw the various military units—cavalry, infantry, artillery—not as separate battalions but as interlocking gears in a precisely driven machine that he orchestrated and drilled incessantly, like a master conductor rehearsing a particularly complex and strenuous symphony. Before landing in northern Germany, he had the foresight to raise an army of over 40,000 men—not the usual motley conglomerate of enthusiastic but inexperienced knights supplemented by forced recruits, but skilled soldiers, trained in small groups to shoot and reload lightweight muskets so quickly and continuously that the effect was not unlike modern automatic weaponry. Nor did Gustavus bring this vast force over all at once, where there was the chance its ranks would be diminished by lack of food or illness. Instead, he had them shipped over in stages when he knew supplies were adequate, so they arrived fresh and strong.

The king of Sweden was also shrewd enough to recognize that his prospects for a successful invasion would increase substantially if he could pry allies away from Ferdinand by convincing the Protestant members of the German ruling class to support his efforts. Luckily for Gustavus, he held clout with one such baron who was perfectly situated to assist him in his endeavors: his brother-in-law, the elector of Brandenburg.

Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North

The elector of Brandenburg, a man who seemingly could be cowed by a strong breeze, whose one ambition had been to pass through life in the comfort and safety of out-of-the-way, provincial Berlin, had had the misfortune first to marry Frederick’s sister and then to have his own sister marry the fearsome Gustavus. Try as he might to wiggle out of it, this put him squarely in the middle of the conflict. With Frederick he had been firm—he would allow the deposed king of Bohemia’s children to remain in Berlin until provision could be made for them in Holland, but he would not take his part against the emperor, and Frederick, having no choice, had acquiesced in this decision. But Gustavus was a different story. The Swedish king had an army, and on June 19, 1631, when the elector of Brandenburg peeked out the window of his safe, comfortable manor house, he saw himself and his family surrounded by some 27,000 shockingly well-armed and obviously able-bodied Swedish soldiers. Of course, he did the only thing he felt he could do under the circumstances—he sent his mother and wife out to negotiate with Gustavus while he hid inside. The result of this parlay was that the elector of Brandenburg abruptly switched sides and agreed to give the king of Sweden everything he wanted.

Gustavus’s recruiting efforts were also given a strong boost at this critical juncture by the unfortunate actions of the imperial army. While the king of Sweden and his men were marching on Berlin, about 100 miles to the west, Ferdinand’s commander, General Tilly, and his forces were busy attacking the Protestant city of Magdeburg. After a short siege, Tilly’s army of nearly 30,000 men overcame the Magdeburg defenses and stormed the wall, swarming into the city. The slaughter was horrific. Even members of the Catholic minority (who had been living in the city in peace with their Protestant neighbors) were exterminated where they stood. So dire was the situation—so many terrified women, children, and innocent civilians were abused and butchered in the first hours of the attack—that the local burghers decided it was better to die by flames and so set fire to the town rather than allow the imperial soldiers to loot and find shelter among them. “A conflagration arose during the storming, which the enemy, according to the universal testimony of the prisoners, intentionally and wickedly kindled, ‘in order that the city might not bring us any good,’” General Tilly complained to the imperial government in his official report.

The resulting inferno and destruction shocked even a country already inured to the carnage of over a decade of war. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the elector of Saxony, who had heretofore been bribed by Ferdinand to stay loyal to the empire, and who, with the duke of Bavaria, had been one of the Protestant barons who had originally turned against Frederick, suddenly offered to help the king of Sweden fight against Tilly, giving as his reason the brutalities committed at Magdeburg.

In August, Gustavus marched his 27,000 Swedes south from Berlin, and by September had met up with the elector of Saxony, who had marshaled a force of nearly 20,000 German soldiers and who had even thought to supply his own artillery. Tilly, aware of the threat, had spent the summer adding to his ranks, so he had somewhere around 42,000 experienced troops under his command. On September 17, 1631, the opposing armies met on a dry, dusty hillock called Breitenfeld, close to Leipzig, and fell on each other with “great fury.” Such was the zeal exhibited by the imperial troops that the elector of Saxony and his men, whose previous military experience had been against the hapless Silesians, bolted almost immediately. It was reported that the elector of Saxony, who had a flashy new uniform for the occasion and whose movements were consequently easily discernible, did not stop galloping for fifteen miles, until he was safely back in his home territory. Although he could not prevent a portion of his army from chasing after the fleeing soldiers and so lost some men that he could have used on the field, General Tilly did manage to capture and turn the elector of Saxony’s artillery around so he could use it, as well as his own, to fire on Gustavus and his Swedish troops.

In any battle that had come before, this dispiriting opening would have been enough to destroy the morale of the remaining combatants and with it their chance for victory. But Gustavus Adolphus was unlike any opponent Tilly had faced. He did not give up and he did not allow his soldiers to give up, even under the pressure of the heavy guns. His muskets kept firing, regularly, ceaselessly, over the course of hours; his cavalry, used to working in small groups, could turn in an instant to protect the infantry; and Gustavus was always in the lead where the fighting was thickest, driving his stallion from one hot spot to the next. The imperial army fought bravely but charge after charge was beaten back until by the end of the day it was the Swedes who were charging, recapturing the artillery that had been used against them. It was a battle for the history books; Napoleon would later cite it with admiration. When it was over, 15,000 imperial soldiers lay dead on the field, with another 7,000 taken prisoner, and Tilly was so severely wounded that he was forced to retreat. As night fell, the king of Sweden, who had lost only 1,200 men that day, held the field.

The news spread rapidly through Europe and a messenger was dispatched from Gustavus to Charles I in London. The envoy brought with him “a letter from him [Gustavus] to his Majesty [Charles]… of the great and complete victory which God had given him against his enemies,” reported a member of Charles’s government in amazement, “and withal to represent unto him the fair opportunity which now was offered of restoring the King of Bohemia to his estate.”

AFTER SO MANY YEARS of raised hopes followed by crushing disappointment, Elizabeth could hardly credit the news. “They talk much of a letter from that king [of Sweden] to my brother, where all is promised; yet since we cannot have a sight of that letter I fear there is nothing in it,” she wrote guardedly to a friend. But this time, unbelievably, it was true. Gustavus followed up his mighty victory by marching farther south into Germany, taking first Erfurt, and then Würzburg, which was only a little more than fifty miles from Heidelberg itself. Even better, to redeem himself and his men after their somewhat less than stalwart behavior on the battlefield at Breitenfeld, the elector of Saxony agreed to send some of his soldiers into Bohemia to capture the capital, an assault made significantly easier by the fact that the imperial troops charged with defending the city decamped before they got there. “I am this week to present you with the joyful news of the winning of Prague, by Count Thorne, who, upon his arrival in Bohemia with some of the Duke of Saxony’s and of the King of Sweden’s forces, the country people flocked unto him; and he no sooner appeared before the city but it yielded without any blows,” an English envoy reported to Charles’s secretary of state in a letter of November 29, 1631.

All through that glorious autumn and winter, the Protestant cause, crushed for over a decade under Habsburg rule and thought irretrievably lost, rebounded under the king of Sweden’s potent dynamism. (So much for Lutherans preferring Catholics to Calvinists. What Lutherans preferred was what everyone prefers—to win.) And Gustavus seemed absolutely committed to returning Frederick’s property to him. When Charles, pleading poverty (but actually worried about breaking his peace with Spain and hoping, like his father, to rely solely upon negotiations to settle the matter), refused to help his sister and her husband outfit a force that would allow Frederick to aid the effort to retrieve the Palatinate, Gustavus insisted that the king of Bohemia join him in Germany anyway, even if he could not contribute a single soldier. “When the King of Sweden first sent for him [Frederick] thither, he made answer… he had neither men or money,” a legislator reported from London. “‘No!’ said the King. ‘What, a brother of the King of Great Britain, and protected by the States, and must he come to me in his doublet and hose! Let him come, howsoever, and I will do my best to restore him to his patrimony.’ To which end, I hear, that incomparable King hath sworn all the towns he hath taken in the Palatinate to the service of their original master, the Palsgrave [Frederick]. And I am told also that he hath given order to the Duke of Saxony once more to proclaim him King of Bohemia,” the English correspondent added with awe.^*

Elizabeth couldn’t go—she had just (what else) given birth, on January 12, 1632, to her thirteenth child, a son whom the couple gratefully named Gustavus Adolphus—but she sent Frederick into Germany to meet with his benefactor. He left The Hague on January 26, but before setting off in earnest, made sure to visit the family house in Leyden to say good-bye to his children. On February 10 he was in Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the king of Sweden had set up his winter camp. By the time he got there, Gustavus was supreme commander of some seven armies incorporating approximately 80,000 men. A dozen Protestant German barons had joined him and were serving in his various armies. Ambassadors from every power in Europe thronged his court.

Finding the king of Sweden out with his troops, Frederick went after him into the countryside. “My Lord of Canterbury told me, yesterday, from Sir Francis Nethersole’s mouth, that the Kings of Sweden and Bohemia… met… in a great field between Frankfort and Mentz,” reported a member of Charles’s government. “When they approached, the armies making a stand, the kings met on horseback, and, having saluted each other, dismounted and embraced; but he of Sweden the other with such joy and affection as he lifted him upon high, which was apprehended for a good omen to the King of Bohemia by all that saw it.” Although Heidelberg was still held by Spanish troops, much of the rest of the Lower Palatinate was already under the king of Sweden’s control and the inhabitants turned out in large numbers at the news of Frederick’s arrival. “Wonderful welcome, was this prince to his own subjects of the Palatinate,” exclaimed an English envoy, “who everywhere ran out to see his majesty, with infinite expressions of joy and contentment, with many a hearty prayer, and tear, and high-sounding acclamation.” Such a reception could not help but lift Elizabeth’s and her husband’s spirits. “I think that the King [Charles I] will one day recognize the mistake he made in not giving military assistance to the King of Bohemia,” Frederick wrote tellingly to his wife from Frankfurt.^* Back in The Hague, Elizabeth, giving herself over to joy and hope, had a commemorative medallion struck and engraved with the motto “The setting sun rises again.”

But where Frederick’s priority was to expel the remaining Spanish soldiers from Heidelberg and reestablish himself and his family in his ancestral territory, this was in no way Gustavus’s primary concern. The king of Sweden had a major war to run, which was spread out across the Habsburg empire, and which obliged him to move swiftly from place to place. Nor could the king of Bohemia convince Gustavus (who was nonetheless unfailingly warm and polite to his guest) to let Frederick break away from the rest of the army and raise his own troops to take on the Spanish himself. “My dearest heart,” Frederick was soon complaining by letter to Elizabeth, “I know not what I am about; I see clearly that the King of Sweden does not desire me to have troops; he said that if I raised any, it would ruin his army—I know not therefore what I shall be good for… If there be nothing more to do than what I see as yet, I had better have stayed at the Hague.”

What really seemed to have happened was that Gustavus’s head had been turned by all the attention, and whereas before he might have been content with just the territory he had already conquered in northern Germany, by the time Frederick joined him he had enlarged his vision significantly, to the point where he felt himself deserving of an empire, in which all the Protestant barons, including the king of Bohemia, would comprise so many vassals. “The appetite has been so sharpened in Gustavus Adolphus by the conquests which he has achieved that it already has no bounds,” the French ambassador warned bluntly in a report to Paris, “and his confidence in his fortune has risen to such a height that he no longer doubts in regard to any supposable success, and regards assault and victory as of one meaning to him… He desires to rule the whole course of the Rhine, occupy Coblentz and Mannheim, extend aid to the Hollanders, and to cut off our access to Germany.”

Frederick, not truly understanding this and believing that Gustavus would eventually get around to retaking Heidelberg, felt more or less obliged to stick around and sort of trail after Gustavus in his martial wanderings. They went from Frankfurt to Aschaffenburg, from Aschaffenburg to Nuremberg. Their destination was Augsburg, where Tilly, although clearly still damaged both physically and spiritually from the earlier battle at Breitenfeld, had been pressured by Ferdinand to regroup and mount an offensive. (During a military strategy meeting the veteran general shocked the duke of Bavaria by suddenly breaking down into uncontrollable sobs.) On April 15, Gustavus’s soldiers surprised Tilly’s in a morning skirmish. Tilly was shot in the leg in the first wave and had to be hurriedly evacuated by litter from the field; the rest of his army retreated with him. The aged and broken general died two weeks later, on April 30, 1632, of his wounds. Gustavus, with Frederick still part of his entourage, went on to take Munich.

By the end of the summer it was clear that the king of Sweden did not intend to reinstate his good friend and ally the king of Bohemia in the Palatinate except at a very great price, the terms of which were drawn up in Latin. Frederick would have to pay an exorbitant sum to Gustavus (whose soldiers, in fairness, would be doing all the work) and he would have to ensure that those of his subjects who were Lutherans could practice their religion without prejudice (Frederick was a very devout Calvinist). Even then, Gustavus did not agree to give back that part of the Palatinate that he had already conquered, although he gave lip service to the condition that Frederick’s sons would inherit in full after his death. “I never did think that the King of Sweden would proceed honorably,” Frederick fumed in a letter of September 29 to Elizabeth. “I saw clearly that he had designs on freedom.” Thoroughly depressed, and suffering from an ear infection, he left Gustavus’s army and headed back on his own toward the Lower Palatinate, intending to stop at the small village of Alsheim, near Mainz, to recover. “I will be miserable at Alsheim, where I shall be entirely alone,” he confessed despondently to his wife. “I will not fail to write to you from there every week. Believe me that my thoughts are continually with you, whom I love with all my heart.”

Back in Holland, Elizabeth did everything she could to raise her husband’s spirits and forward his cause. No secretary of state or cabinet minister displayed more energy or ability than she. She secured audiences, drew important emissaries to her house at The Hague, and once again directed reams of letters to every member of her wide acquaintance, alternately coaxing, humoring, entreating, or bargaining. She was in direct correspondence with the English ambassador assigned to Gustavus’s court, and he frequently replied to her before reporting to London. Charles’s envoy to Brussels was also a regular correspondent, as was one of her brother’s closest advisers in London. She lobbied endlessly for funds and sent a personal messenger to her uncle the king of Denmark, and thereby succeeded in soliciting a promise that Elizabeth would receive a share in the inheritance of her maternal grandmother to be used to help reclaim the Palatinate. To Frederick she wrote loving, encouraging missives two and sometimes three times a week: bright, chatty notes filled with news about his sons and daughters or entertaining gossip (any important information relating to the war or the Palatinate was communicated by cipher). Along with her letters, she often attached portraits of the children, for which in his forlornness he thanked her profusely.

And while Frederick made his weary, despondent way west toward Mainz, and Elizabeth strove to manage their affairs and infuse their prospects with new buoyancy, Gustavus Adolphus moved forward relentlessly.

A METEORIC SUCCESS of the kind achieved by the king of Sweden inevitably provokes pushback. In this case, Ferdinand, watching first in disbelief and then in desperation as town after town fell to the enemy, understood that this was a challenge that must be met immediately. Consequently, after Tilly’s death, the emperor appointed his former commander General Wallenstein as well as Tilly’s second-in-command, Count Pappenheim, to recruit a new army. It took all summer, but by the fall they had assembled a new imperial fighting force of approximately 26,000 soldiers.

Aware of Gustavus’s superior numbers, Wallenstein wisely chose not to engage his opponent in open battle but instead to go wherever the king of Sweden was not. With so much territory to cover, Gustavus obviously could not be everywhere at once and so Wallenstein began to retake the towns and cities, beginning with Prague, which had been captured by the Swedes but then left sparsely defended. This strategy resulted in Gustavus’s having to chase after the imperial army all over Germany. It wasn’t until the second week in November that he caught up with them in Lützen, not very far from Breitenfeld, site of his original triumph.

Wallenstein knew himself to be in trouble. Not expecting to meet the enemy, he had sent Pappenheim’s divisions north and so found himself left with only about half his soldiers. He sent an urgent message ordering Pappenheim’s return and did what he could to prepare for the onslaught. He dug a ditch to protect his musket men and supplemented his meager 14,000 troops by pressing into service his cooks and baggage handlers. Gustavus had only 16,000 soldiers with him—he had been waiting for reinforcements—but when he was apprised of the thinness of the imperial numbers, he knew he could take them. On the morning of November 16, 1632, the king of Sweden called his troops together, bent his head in prayer, and attacked.

An early morning fog hung over the battlefield, which initially helped obscure the imperial position, but by late morning the Swedish cavalry had overrun the ditch and had only the small store of imperial artillery with which to contend. Alarmed, Wallenstein set fire to the town to have the cover of smoke in the event of a retreat when suddenly hurtling out of the north came Pappenheim and his troops. And sometime after that, as the smoke began to clear, Gustavus’s stallion was observed to be running loose with no sign of the king in the saddle. The rumor ran frantically through the Swedish army that the Lion of the North had fallen.

By nightfall Wallenstein was forced to concede the field and retreated with the remains of his army, leaving the artillery and camp stores to the victor. But he also left behind the corpse of Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest warrior of his time or perhaps of any time. The body was found on the enemy’s side of the ditch, and it was clear that the king of Sweden had not succumbed easily. He had been shot four times: once in the head, twice in the arm, and the last, ominously, in the back.

NEWS OF GUSTAVUS’S DEATH reverberated through Europe. No one was more shocked or disappointed than Elizabeth, who had clearly held out hope that after some negotiation, the king of Sweden and Frederick would come to terms and that they would soon be able to return to their home in Heidelberg. “The loss… doth not a little trouble me, considering in what estate the King [Frederick] is now left,” she confessed to an English cousin. Her husband was still in Mainz, where he had been waiting for a messenger from Gustavus in response to his latest overture. He had recovered from his ear infection but still felt unwell; in addition, he was depressed and lonely. There was plague at Mainz but he couldn’t sit still, and against his doctor’s orders he went to a crowded church to pray for guidance. That evening, he went to bed with a headache.

During the night, he had a fever and a little swelling in the neck, but his secretary wrote reassuringly to Elizabeth that he had seen “his majesty of Bohemia, in his bed in the morning; and he told me that his fever had quite left him, but that the swelling in his neck troubled him a little, and he hoped when that had burst, he should be cured. For the rest, he spoke of business, and smiled at the physicians who wanted to charge him with the plague.” But that evening the fever returned in force, and he was delirious. The telltale marks of the fearful disease began to appear on his body.

On November 17, Frederick rallied sufficiently to be able to write Elizabeth a short note. Not wanting to worry her, he did not mention his illness. But he knew he was failing. “I will not make this any longer except to assure you that I shall be until my grave my dear and only heart, your most faithful friend and most affectionate servant,” he scribbled.

It was to be his last letter to her. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1632, just two weeks after the slaying of Gustavus in battle, thirty-six-year-old Frederick, onetime king of Bohemia and Elector Palatine, summoned witnesses to his bedside. His final thoughts were with his wife and children. He pleaded for their care and protection by the prince of Orange, the king of England, and the States General of Holland.

He died at daybreak.