‘IT STARTED OFF IN FIFE, IT ENDED UP IN TEARS’ SCOTLAND AND THE THIRTY YEARS WAR, 1618-1648
2018 witnessed a host of conferences commemorating the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. At least three of these events were framed around British involvement in the war, albeit such gatherings seemed more like an exercise in giving the English Civil War another platform. Moreover, it is actually 2019 that marks the four centuries since there was either a Scottish or wider British involvement or interest in the conflict. The Thirty Years’ War itself is generally taken to refer to the series of European conflicts that took place between 1618 and 1648.
In truth, some of these had a much older pedigree, most importantly the Dutch conflict with Spain, later known as the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648), of which the last 30 years overlapped with what contemporary Britons called the ‘German Warres’. Other conflicts rumbled on for years after 1648, most notably from a Scottish perspective being the Franco-Spanish War (1635-59). Clearly the terminology concerning the duration of the war can seem anachronistic, yet it was nevertheless a contemporary term used in several pamphlets in and after 1648. The conflicts engulfed Europe and at various points engaged almost every European kingdom, duchy and city-state in some way or another.
Introduction to the war
The war began in 1618 when the protestant nobles of Bohemia (roughly equating to the modern-day Czech Republic) rejected Ferdinand II of Austria as their elected monarch and threw his representatives out of the window in the famous second defenestration of Prague. Those who were flung survived, but there would be severe consequences thereafter. Ferdinand became Holy Roman Emperor in 1619, the same year that the Bohemians elected Frederick V of the Palatinate as their new king. With Frederick as leader of the Protestant Union (a loose coalition that involved much of reformed Europe), and Ferdinand now at the head of the conglomerate Holy Roman Empire which nominally had control over some of the Protestant Union, the scene was set for a
