Thenceforth Elizabeth dwelt at the Hague, while the Thirty Years' War, of which her husband's action had lit the spark, raged over Germany. Slowly and reluctantly a few of the Protestant Princes took up arms against the Emperor. James I sent armies of Ambassadors both to Spain and Austria, and offered settlements to which Frederick would not, or could not agree, but he lent little further aid to his distressed daughter. He regarded his son-in-law's action as a political crime, which had produced the religious war that he had striven all his life to avoid, therefore, though he tacitly permitted English volunteers to enlist under Frederick's mercenary, Count Mansfeld, he would not countenance the war openly. Indeed he deprecated it as the chief obstacle to the marriage of Prince Charles with the Spanish Infanta, on which he had set his heart. The English Parliament, on the contrary, detested the idea of a Spanish alliance, and eagerly advocated a war on behalf of the Protestant exiles. But if her father would not fight on her behalf Elizabeth had friends who asked nothing better. For her sake Duke Christian of Brunswick, the lay-Bishop of Halberstadt, threw himself passionately into the war. He and Mansfeld having completed between them the alienation of the other Princes, {8} by their lawless plunderings, were defeated by the Imperialist General, Tilly. The Emperor settled the Upper Palatinate on his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bavaria, and, though the Lower Palatinate clung tenaciously to its Elector, Frederick was never able to return thither, until, many years later, the intervention of the quixotic King of Sweden won him a brief and evanescent success. Thus in trouble, anxiety and poverty passed the early youth of the Palatine children. In the first years of the exile only Henry and Rupert shared their parents' home at the Hague; Charles and Elizabeth had been left in the care of their grandmother Juliana, who, when Heidelberg became no longer a safe place of residence, carried them off to Berlin, where Maurice had been left with his aunt.