ABSTRACT
The population of Castile and Andalusia was reduced by a series of plagues: these meant a scarcity of labour, a rise in the price of food and a decrease in the output of wool, the basis of the Castilian economy. The Emperor Ferdinand II, who had no army of his own, invited the aid of his kinsman in Spain and of the Duke of Bavaria, the most powerful and ambitious of the German Roman Catholic princes, in order to reassert his claim to rule over Bohemia. Charles’s father, who had always prided himself on being a peace-maker, did not want to be pushed into war in his old age, but was frequently ill and seldom in London. Charles’s purpose now became one of regaining the Palatinate for his nephew by diplomacy or, as Archbishop Laud wrote to the Queen of Bohemia, ‘recognized it was better to recover it by treaty than by arms’.
