No Way Back 173queen were separately crowned during the following week. The events
were celebrated with all the traditional pomp and display, and the royal
couple were escorted by guards in splendid uniforms, quite unlike those
of their unpaid and hungry fellow soldiers suffering in the war to the
south. The estates too turned out in force, decked in their finery like
aristocrats with a rosy future in their grasp, rather than yesterday’s men
enjoying their last hurrah. For now their triumph and their self-esteem
were encapsulated in a commemorative medal struck for the coronation
and inscribed ‘Friedrich, King by the Grace of God and the Estates’.^40
The best that can be said of Friedrich is that he looked the part, as
did his wife, who was considered to have inherited the beauty of her
grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots. A recent biographer calls for ‘a revi-
sion of the prevailing view of Frederick as an Early Modern prototype of
princely incompetence’ and ‘an insipid character totally lacking in abil-
ities’, but he himself calls him a ‘narrow-minded obstinate man’, and
there seems little reason to change the long-standing historical assess-
ment of his character.^41 Had he been the duke of a minor German
territory in peaceful times Friedrich would probably have got by well
enough, occupying himself with the pleasures of court life, hunting, and
fathering large numbers of children, while leaving the government in
the hands of his officials. As elector Palatine, at the head of the leading
principality on one side of the great political and religious divide in the
Empire, and even more as the new king of a country fighting for its exis-
tence, he was completely out of his depth. Far from finding a William of
Orange – although Friedrich was his grandson – the Bohemians elected
a nonentity.
Drawn into the centre of the action, he demonstrated an unfortunate
combination of limited perception and reckless aspiration, aggravated
by an unshakeable belief in his own rectitude and an obstinate refusal to
contemplate concessions or compromises, in which he was sustained by
an equally unshakeable conviction that he was doing God’s will.^42 Thus
he responded to the Bohemian Estates, as he had to Maximilian, that as
his election had taken place ‘through God’s unquestionable providence
and divine ordinance’ he must accept, ‘in order not to oppose the will of
the Almighty’.^43 Despite his assertion that he had not sought the crown,
however, he had been contemplating the possibility for at least nine
months, as he told one of his councillors in December 1618 that the
main problem for him was that the Bohemians would not guarantee
that it would be passed on to his posterity.^44 After his election he made
this a priority, and despite the firm stipulation in the new constitution
that a successor could not be named during the lifetime of an incumbent