Bellicose days: news, memory and the culture of the Stuart intervention into the Thirty Years War 1624-1630

Abstract

This thesis examines the rich culture of wartime during the beginning of Charles I’s reign.

Between 1625 and 1630, the Stuart kingdoms entered the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) purportedly to reclaim the hereditary Palatinate of Charles’s brother-in-law Frederick V and sister Elizabeth Stuart, seized by Spanish troops in 1622. The Thirty Years War therefore influenced every facet of early Stuart culture: from the approximately 50,000 Stuart subjects who fought across Europe at Breda, Cadiz, Lutter and La Rochelle, to the vast corpus of words and images, news-books, maps, sermons, engravings, poems, plays, ballads which reported and shaped perceptions of a conflict on a global scale. This cultural history therefore assesses the literal alongside the visual. Particular attention is given to the profound interplay between the huge volume of cheaply printed news arriving in the Stuart kingdoms from the Continent, and cultural memory, a vital medium for comprehending the momentous present through what I define as a landscape of European memory.

My work endeavours to re-situate this neglected period of Stuart wartime, defined as the Bellicose Days, into an early Stuart historiography which has so far been preoccupied with Parliamentary debates, marital intrigues and perceived religious innovation. Above all, in this cultural history of war, I argue that the culture of Bellicose Days which pervaded every facet of early Stuart life, was fundamentally transcultural, fostered by the movement of exiles, soldiers, diplomats and ideas. Chapter One looks to the profound role cultural memory exerted upon how early Stuart subjects and their Continental contemporaries perceived the raging Thirty Years War and predicted grim futures. Memory was a polemical battleground which both rulers and ruled strived to control. Just as many potent cultural memories, from the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the more recent loss of the Palatinate were mediated by Continental polemicists, Chapter Two proceeds to reconstruct what is defined as the Kairos of the mid 1620s. From the ancient Greek denoting the time for action, an anti-Habsburg league across Europe was created by the movement of diplomats and translated ideas to argue the necessity of undertaking military campaigns to restore order to Europe.

Having established the trans-cultural milleux of the Bellicose Days, Chapter Three proceeds to the first disastrous Stuart interventions into the Continental tumult: at the Dutch city of Breda besieged by the Army of Flanders and in the Holy Roman Empire where Charles I’s uncle Christian IV of Denmark launched an armed intervention. Both events proved to be disasters. The fall of Breda was a media event across Europe and thereby presented a dilemma for English and Dutch news-writers, and the deterioration of Christian IV’s war effort even required Charles I to directly address his subjects through proclamations. Chapter Four looks to two factors which profoundly influenced how Stuart subjects ‘spectated’ the expedition to Cadiz: through cultural memories of Elizabethan victories over Spain which promised victory, and the dramatic meteorological events of the Little Ice Age which impeded the flow of news from the Iberian coast northwards. Chapter Five moves to the siege of the French Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, and the endeavours of the Stuart state to shape perceptions of an unfolding calamity through the sponsorship of periodical news and the manipulation of Huguenot memory. Finally, the conclusion reiterates the Stuart obsession with the Thirty Years War during the Bellicose Days. Above all, this urgent preoccupation defined the literature and art of the first half decade of Charles I’s reign as Stuart culture reverberated with voices from at home and abroad. Yet, this was not a passive reflection of war in art, but a culture which was of fundamental importance to the experience of wartime, to the signing of treaties and the sending of thousands of men to fight in the Thirty Years War.