Frederick V of the Palatinate

Frederick V was Elector Palatine, king of Bohemia for a single winter, and the man whose acceptance of a crown started the Thirty Years' War. He was a Calvinist prince, head of the Protestant Union, and married to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, in a celebrated match that gave him expectations of English support he never actually had. In 1618 the Protestant nobles of Bohemia threw the emperor's regents out of a window in Prague and deposed Ferdinand of Habsburg as their king. They offered the crown to Frederick. His advisers were divided, his father-in-law was against it, and he took it anyway, arriving in Prague in October 1619. Just over a year later a Catholic League army under Tilly destroyed the Bohemian forces at the White Mountain outside the city in about two hours, and Frederick fled with his family so hurriedly that the royal regalia were left behind. He was mocked across Europe as the Winter King. He lost the Palatinate as well as Bohemia, was placed under imperial ban, and lived the rest of his life in exile at The Hague, dying of plague in 1632. His daughter Sophia was the mother of George I, so the British royal line descends from him. Elizabeth Stuart was known afterwards as the Winter Queen and kept a court in exile at The Hague that became a centre of Protestant Europe. Their thirteen children included Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who commanded Charles I's cavalry in the English Civil War. The Palatinate was fought over for the next thirty years and lost perhaps half its population.

• Lived: 1596 CE – 1632 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: ruler