‘Now published for the satisfaction of every true English heart’: The war over the Palatinate, Protestant identity, and subjecthood in British pamphlets, 1620-26
Abstract
This thesis explores the presentation of the war over the Rhine Palatinate in British printed
pamphlets of the 1620s, looking at the relationship between writing and reading about the
conflict and notions of religious and civic duty. It examines how printed news pamphlets,
sermons and polemics dealt both with developing events in the Palatinate and with changes
in British foreign policy. The importance of this conflict to British culture and politics has
been widely debated. However, there has not been a study specifically charting the
development of discourse about the Palatinate in cheap print. This thesis explores such
texts within multiple contexts: political and military developments, Calvinist theology, and
the British print market. It argues that pamphlets dealing with the Palatinate articulated
subject positions which challenged royal notions of decorum, and promoted a model of
active Protestant subjecthood.
The first chapter contextualises the significance of the Palatinate to British Protestants,
through an overview of the relationship between the two countries: from the 1613 marriage
of the Elector Frederick V to Elizabeth, daughter of James I and VI, through Frederick’s
doomed bid for the Bohemian crown and the resulting battle to recover his ancestral lands.
James’s attempts to deal with the crisis through diplomacy met with dissatisfaction from
many British subjects, who pushed instead for direct military action. The two central
chapters deal with the period 1620-23, in which the defence of the Palatinate was largely in
the hands of British volunteers; first examining the connection forged through printed
‘news from the Palatinate’, and then the ways in which polemical texts and printed sermons
relate the conflict both to Calvinist eschatology and notions of subjecthood. The fourth and
final chapter considers how these ideas developed through preparations for war with Spain
in 1624, and the military and domestic upheavals during 1625-26.
Authors
Rolfe, KirstyCollections
- Theses [3706]