When Frederic had sued for and won the hand of the fair Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Great Britain, it was understood that the alliance would be more brilliant for her than it seemed.

James with his usual vanity spoke of his son-in-law as a future king.
It was a golden dream for the Elector and for the general cause of the Reformed religion.

Heidelberg enthroned in the ancient capital of the Wenzels, Maximilians, and Rudolphs, the Catechism and Confession enrolled among the great statutes of the land, this was progress far beyond flimsy Majesty-Letters and Compromises, made only to be torn to pieces.
Through the dim vista of futurity and in ecstatic vision no doubt even the Imperial crown might seem suspended over the Palatine's head.

But this would be merely a midsummer's dream.

Events did not whirl so rapidly as they might learn to do centuries later, and--the time for a Protestant to grasp at the crown of Germany could then hardly be imagined as ripening.
But what the Calvinist branch of the House of Wittelsbach had indeed long been pursuing was to interrupt the succession of the House of Austria to the German throne.