‘God grant a good and universal Peace’

This prayer concluded a letter from Mainz with news that the Elector of Saxony was treating with the Habsburg emperor for peace at Pirna. It was included inconspicuously towards the end of chapter 4 of a London publication, The German History Continued that appeared in the mid-1630s, at a time when, according to conventional historical wisdom, the publication of news in London was subject to a ban that lasted from October 1632 to December 1638. In fact, this German History followed upon a dozen or more publications in London covering recent events in the Thirty Years War that appeared after the 1632 ban. Others included The Swedish Intelligencer … with the Discipline, The History of the Present Warres and A True Relacon of the Duke of Ffreidlands death.

The events reported may now seem far removed from the day-to-day concerns of seventeenth-century Londoners. By the autumn of 1634, the emperor, Ferdinand, was capitalising on success at the Battle of Nordlingen by negotiating from strength for peace within the Empire and England had little say in the matter. Yet many Scottish and English lives were lost at Nordlingen and government reaction in London was swift, and far more draconian than the better-known ban of 1632 that stopped London production of weekly newsbooks only. This was a crackdown on all foreign news reporting that lasted until 1637. Only one further news digest was published in the whole of 1635 and 1636 and this was probably allowed only to correspond with the arrival in England of Charles I’s nephew, the new Palatine Elector, Charles Louis, late in November 1635. The November 1635 news digest belatedly recounted details of the Protestant losses at Nordlingen and plainly showed that Peace of Prague, concluded in May 1635, made no provision for the restitution of the Palatinate.

The reason for the government’s reaction is not immediately obvious: a prayer for peace was entirely consistent with the foreign policy Charles had settled upon when, following long discussions with Sweden, he determined not to put his backing behind Gustavus Adolphus’s successful military campaign in Germany.