Omens from the Thirty Years War

On the night of 15 July 1633 a party travelling to Strasbourg observed ‘a prodigious apparition of the Moone’. First a smaller moon appeared, gyrating around the real moon before merging with it; then the moon’s face transformed into that of the late king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, killed at the Battle of Lützen seven months before. This ‘portentuous’ event, noted the English news pamphlet A Relation of the Funerall Pompe … of Gustavus the Great, raised ‘divers opinions and discourses … among the people’. Some linked it to the king’s prophecy that his armies would remain victorious and his own death would ‘for a long time not bee generally believed’. Others focused on the moons: the Ottomans were represented by the false moon, which would soon join the true moon of the Christian Church.

By the 1630s German prodigies must have seemed almost mundane to English audiences, who for more than a decade had been tracking the devastation across the Channel through newsprint. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) drew most of the great Protestant and Catholic states into a bloody fight to determine the balance of political and religious power, not just in the Holy Roman Empire but across the entire continent. England’s Stuarts never became openly involved, but this did nothing to curb public interest: the English watched as Frederick V of the Palatinate, son-in-law of James I, fought to maintain the throne of Bohemia against the might of Catholic Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II (and lost), and were equally invested when a new hero arose in Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, who invaded Germany in 1630 and seemed poised to restore Protestant ascendancy. Many English and Scots joined the Swedes as mercenaries; those who stayed home could follow along in printed news, in both ‘one-off’ pamphlets and serials.

Most of the latter were put out by a London publishing syndicate, run by Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne, that began producing foreign news semi-regularly in the early 1620s. From the start, that included prodigies. In 1618 a comet streaked across the autumn skies: too late to portend the defenestration at Prague Castle in May that precipitated the first phase of the war, but not too late to herald the death and destruction that followed. Subsequently, printed news about the conflict included ghostly apparitions, celestial aberrations, blood rains, ‘monstrous’ births, and abnormal animal behaviour. Butter and Bourne’s reports were derived from earlier accounts, such as the long-running Continental serial Mercurius Gallobelgicus, or from handwritten newsletters. Preferably, correspondents would be ‘trustworthy’ individuals: Gustavus’ lunar death mask was said to have been seen by a postal courier (ensuring speedy reporting) and by a doctor and a mathematician (ensuring credibility).