9 - War in Britain and Peace at Westphalia

Summary

The impact of foreign news during the turbulent years that were heralded by the Bishops’ Wars is perhaps best understood in terms of reaping the effects of twenty years of war reporting, diplomacy and recruitment. Readers followed the Thirty Years War as a single conflict, and we can track some of the effects as the lines of engagement within the Stuart kingdoms took shape. Charles had set out in 1637 preparing the nation for one war. In 1639, he set out upon a different one, with royalist forces arraigned against veterans who had fought in the Protestant armies of Europe. The deal with Spain to help transport bullion for the Spanish war effort on the Continent was to help with his finances. To many people, it must have seemed as if the war had finally crossed the Channel. Soldiers came home to fight, naval engagement took place in offshore waters, and reports of atrocities against Protestants came from Ireland. It was only after the royalist defeat at Naseby in 1645 that the situation in London became sufficiently settled for a new approach to reporting on the European conflict to emerge and, by this time, with delegates gathered in Munster, the end of the Thirty Years War was finally in sight.

The Bishops’ Wars and Battle of the Downs

Charles’s lack of understanding of popular opinion was dramatically demonstrated through military engagement in the north involving many of the soldiers that the London press had reported upon as warriors for the Protestant cause in Germany and the Netherlands, and by a humiliating naval stand off in the Channel. The response of the military and the public was to have practical and pressing implications.

To draw upon the military experience of those serving in the wars on the Continent, Charles issued a circular letter calling for their return to support his stand against the Covenanters. The response was meagre by contrast with the exodus to Scotland. The Swedes agreed to release men to support the Covenanters in large numbers and supplied arms. Scottish merchants procured munitions in Zealand and the Baltic with loans from puritan Englishmen, then shipped them to Scotland with the connivance of sympathetic Protestant powers.