ABSTRACT
While there are many ways to explain why the war apparently so convincingly ended at the battle of White Mountain did not end and instead grew wider and more intrusive into the politics of Germany and of Europe, one may begin with the simple fact that the parties to the Bohemian war themselves would not let it end. After a period of enforced travel, the young Friedrich V – now already in some quarters styled ‘the Winter King’ because of the brevity of his majesty in Bohemia – was received into a comfortable exile in The Hague by his Dutch friends in April 1621. Encouraged by them and others, he disregarded the advice he had received earlier in that year from his father-in-law, James I, to renounce the Bohemian crown as a possible means of restoration to the Palatine lands and titles declared forfeit in the imperial ban pronounced on him by Ferdinand II in January. Emboldened by the knowledge that some of his military forces had escaped the disaster in Bohemia, as well as by the belated acquisition of some new allies and the expectation of still more, Friedrich clung stubbornly to his royal pretensions.
