Although God, the most high prince of war, often lets dark clouds cover his own, he still tends to them

finally, gladdening them once again with the loving rays of his son, and releasing the weather of wrath

over the enemies of his church and common liberty.

Frederick V of the Palatine in a letter to Christian of Denmark, autumn 1626. The Lord, He said

The 1624 greeted

With a bitter enemy, Frederick V of the Platinate, had been utterly defeated, and was now asking for peace.

It had been a shaky start for the Emperor, and his success had been wrestled from the jaws of defeat by his trusty allies and Habsburg Cousins the Spanish.

While he had paid off

his most other important ally, Maximilian Duke of Bavaria.

His allies had enabled him to first put down the Bohemian Rebellion, and then his allies struck

again as they overran the Palatine lands Frederick called home by the end of 1623. In short, his victory was total. The only source of opposition

could be found in the exile Frederick and is apparently hopeless schemes to orchestrate an

international alliance against him, while the Dutch continued to suffer successive defeats against

his Spanish ally on the continent. It is all too easy to present this narrative as the moment of Habsburg triumph,

and to simplify this period of the Thirty Years' War accordingly.

Geoffrey Parker warns against this approach, though, in his book The Thirty Years' War, he writes,

quote,

Although it has become the convention in histories of the 30 years war to examine the events of

the 1620s mainly through the eyes of the defeated Protestants, such a view is both distorted and

deceptive. It fails to take into account the patient labours of the victors to turn their temporary

triumph into a permanent achievement, first in the conquered lands of the rebels, and later in the

empire at large.

...