Among the seventeenth-century princes who managed to ruin their principalities and their families by their lack of political judgment, Frederick V of the Palatinate (1596–1632) deserves a special place of fame. Next to the prince elector of Saxony, the most powerful Protestant ruler in the Holy Roman Empire before 1618, he was foolhardy enough to accept the offer of the Bohemian crown in 1619, thereby making a full-scale conflict with the Habsburg dynasty and the Bavarian-led Catholic League inevitable. Within two years, he and his family found themselves in exile in the Netherlands, where they concentrated all their efforts on regaining their lost titles and territorial possessions. In his study, Pert focuses primarily on the period 1632 to 1648, that is, the years after Frederick’s death, when his widow Elizabeth Stuart desperately tried to make sure that the Causa Palatina was not totally forgotten by the major European powers. Pert looks both at the economic and the cultural resources that the Palatines could fall back on to uphold their status and their legal claims. He rightly points out that although lacking sufficient financial resources and unlike other exiled princes such as Charles IV of Lorraine—a well-known military entrepreneur in his own right—unable to field an army, the Palatines nevertheless enjoyed some advantages. Their kinship with the royal house of Stuart lent them considerable prestige and may have been one of the reasons that the Stadtholder of the Netherlands from the house of Orange-Nassau was prepared to grant them refuge in his country, thereby bolstering his claims to a king-like status.

Of course, Elizabeth of Bohemia was after 1632 more dependent than ever on the support her brother, King Charles I of England, granted her. After the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, this source of revenue increasingly dried up, although parliament continued to give Elizabeth some financial support, which, however, was never really sufficient to maintain a court of the splendor compatible with the dignity of a queen in exile. Pert underlines the well-known reluctance of Charles I to risk a war with Spain after 1630 to reclaim the Palatine inheritance for his nephew Charles Lewis, Frederick V’s eldest surviving son. One condition for declaring war on the Habsburgs would have been an alliance with a continental power prepared to fight for the restitution of the electoral dignity and the Upper and Lower Palatinate to Charles Lewis, preferably France. However, Elizabeth of Bohemia deeply distrusted France, as she, perhaps rightly, suspected Louis XIII and Richelieu of trying to extend French borders to the Rhine and beyond, thus permanently occupying the Lower Palatinate. In any case, Richelieu was not prepared to give the restitution of the Palatine dynasty any priority in his policy. Nevertheless, Charles’s reluctance to go to war for his sister’s family provoked resentment at the Palatine court in exile. Charles Lewis, in particular, decided rather to court parliament’s favor in London than to support his uncle in the civil war. Pert is particularly good at illustrating the political choices facing Charles Lewis after the outbreak of hostilities in England in 1642, most of them bad options. Supporting the king as his brothers Rupert and Maurice, both strong royalists, did would have cut him off from financial support and would have made it difficult to appeal to Protestant solidarity in Europe as Charles was seen by many observers as unreliable in his religious allegiance. However, being complicit in Charles’s downfall and eventual execution—and Charles Lewis came quite near to such a stance—would have ruined his relations with the Stuart dynasty and ultimately also with his own mother. Given the English parliamentarians’ and republicans’ outsider status on the European stage, it would also have weakened his negotiating position during the last years of the Thirty Years’ War. As Pert can show, Charles Lewis did send envoys to the Westphalian peace conference. They were not allowed to participate in the official discussions in Münster and Osnabrück but frequently held private meetings with the representatives of France and Sweden and other major players at the conference. This aspect of Palatine diplomacy has so far been largely neglected, and Pert’s study is particularly valuable in correcting the prevailing impression that the Palatine Wittelsbachs had become completely irrelevant in politics in the 1640s. In the end, they owed their partial restitution to their erstwhile possessions and titles—Charles Lewis had to be content with the new electoral dignity the emperor bestowed on him, as Maximilian of Bavaria continued to hold the original title—mostly to Sweden. As Pert demonstrates, Charles Lewis’s position after 1648 remained a difficult one. By many, he was seen as a kind of second-rate prince elector as he failed to reclaim many of the prerequisites of the former electoral title, such as the office of Erztruchsess (Lord High Steward of the Empire). Moreover, because the Palatinate was totally depopulated and in ruins, he felt unable to satisfy the demands of his mother and his brother Rupert for generous financial support or some kind of apanage and fell out with them. The dynasty paid a high price for this conflict as Rupert, embittered and resentful, spent his life after 1660 in England and remained unmarried, which was one of the reasons that the House Pfalz-Simmern became extinct in 1685. Pert has written an exhaustive and well-researched study of the Palatine dynasty in exile, and his book will be valuable both for students of the Thirty Years’ War and for those interested in the English Civil War.