Between 1553 and 1556, he made a Grand Tour, visiting Padua, Malta, Savoy, France and England.

In 1568, he travelled to Zurich, where he met numerous leading Reformed, with whom he also started an intense correspondence.

Between 1574 and 1577, he served as Lord High Stewart at the Reformed court of Elector Palatine Frederick III in Heidelberg.

After the Palatinate reverted to Lutheranism under Elector Louis VI, his service in Heidelberg ended.

Louise and his first wife Anna moved their residence from the ancestral Wittgenstein Castle on a hilltop overlooking Bad Laasphe to a former hunting lodge near Berleburg.

His diaries are an important source of information about the intellectual and political history of his time.

Children of his first marriage were: In 1567, Louis remarried, to Countess Elisabeth of Solms-Laubach (6 March 1549 – 1599), daughter of Frederick Magnus I, Count of Solms-Laubach and his wife, Countess Agnes von Wied (d. 1588), widow of Count Kaspar von Mansfeld-Hinterort (d. 1542).