The couple's selection for the crown by the nobles of Bohemia was part of the political and religious turmoil that set off the Thirty Years' War.

[1][2][3] Princess Elizabeth was the only surviving daughter of James VI and I, King of Scotland, England, and Ireland, and his queen, Anne of Denmark; she was the elder sister of Charles I.

During Elizabeth Stuart's childhood, unbeknownst to her, part of the failed Gunpowder Plot was a scheme to replace her father with her on the throne, and forcibly raise her as a Catholic.

In her widowhood, she eventually returned to England at the end of her own life during the Stuart Restoration of her nephew and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

[5][10] During her early life in Scotland, Elizabeth was brought up at Linlithgow Palace, where she was placed in the care of Lord Livingstone and his wife, Eleanor Hay.

Along with her elder brother, Henry,[13] Elizabeth made the journey southward to England with her mother "in a triumphal progress of perpetual entertainment".

[18] On 19 October 1603 "an order was issued under the privy seal announcing that the King had thought fit to commit the keeping and education of the Lady Elizabeth to the Lord Harrington [sic] and his wife".

[19] Under the care of Lord and Lady Harington at Coombe Abbey, Elizabeth met Anne Dudley, with whom she was to strike up a lifelong friendship.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, had already attended formal functions, and the conspirators knew that "she could fulfil a ceremonial role despite her comparative youth".

[21] The conspirators aimed to cause an uprising in the Midlands to coincide with the explosion in London and at this point secure Elizabeth's accession as a puppet queen.

Some simply were not of high enough birth, had no real prospects to offer, or in the case of Gustavus Adolphus, who on all other grounds seemed like a perfect match, because "his country was at war with Queen Anne's native Denmark".

His ancestors included the kings of Aragon and Sicily, the landgraves of Hesse, the dukes of Brabant and Saxony, and the counts of Nassau and Leuven.

[33] Frederick also struck up a friendship with Elizabeth's elder brother, Prince Henry, which delighted his prospective bride immensely.

King James did not take into consideration the couple's happiness, but saw the match as "one step in a larger process of achieving domestic and European concord".

[36] The wedding took place on 14 February 1613 at the royal chapel at the Palace of Whitehall and was a grand occasion that saw more royalty than ever visit the court of England.

Among many celebratory writings of the events was John Donne's "Epithalamion, Or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth, and Count Palatine being married on St Valentine's Day".

A contemporary author viewed the whole marriage as a prestigious event that saw England "lend her rarest gem, to enrich the Rhine".

[40] Her arrival in Heidelberg was seen as "the crowning achievement of a policy which tried to give the Palatinate a central place in international politics" and was long anticipated and welcomed.

[45] Before the couple had left England, King James had made Frederick promise that Elizabeth "would take precedence over his mother ... and always be treated as if she were a Queen".

[46] This at times made life in the Palatinate uncomfortable for Elizabeth, for Frederick's mother Louise Juliana had "not expected to be demoted in favour of her young daughter-in-law" and, as such, their relationship was never more than civil.

The Habsburg heir, Archduke Ferdinand, crowned King of Bohemia in 1617, was a fervent Catholic who brutally persecuted Protestants in his Duchy of Styria.

[49] They decided on deposition, and, when others declined because of the risks involved, the Bohemians "pandered to the elector's royalist pretensions" and extended the invitation to Elizabeth's husband.

Fearing the worst, by the time of the defeat at the Battle of White Mountain, Elizabeth already had left Prague and was awaiting the birth of her fifth child at the Castle of Custrin, about 80 km (50 mi) from Berlin.

The last, Gustavus, was born on 2 January 1632 and baptised in the Cloister Church where two of his siblings who had died young, Louis and Charlotte, were buried.

She became a patron of the arts, and commissioned a larger family portrait to honour herself and her husband, to complement the impressive large seascape of her 1613 joyous entry to the Netherlands.

Her memorial family portrait of 1636 was outdone by Amalia van Solms, who commissioned the Oranjezaal after the death of her husband Frederick Henry in 1648–1651.

Her death caused little public stir as by then her "chief, if not only, claim to fame [in London] was as the mother of Rupert of the Rhine, the legendary Cavalier general".

[60] On the evening of 17 February, when her coffin (into which her remains had been placed the previous day) left Somerset House, Rupert was the only one of her sons to follow the funeral procession to Westminster Abbey.

When Smith presented his map to Charles I, he suggested that the king should feel free to change the "barbarous names" for "English" ones.