30YearsWar: #9 - "First of His Name"
When Diplomacy Fails Podcast
Zack Twamley
4.8 • 773 Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2020
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why be first of your name when you get the first instalment of my historical fiction series, set during this very war! Matchlock begins in 1622, when Matthew Lock lands in Europe to investigate the brutal murder of his parents.
Order your copy of Matchlock and the Embassy by clicking here.
Episode 9 of the Thirty Years War, First of His Name, is out NOW!
You can’t have a Habsburg protagonist without also having the anti-Habsburg antagonist, and in the years before the war, few individuals were better placed to challenge the Habsburg position than the Elector Palatine, one of seven men granted the honour of voting for the next Emperor, and a greatly influential ruler in his own right, holding sway over the disconnected lands that snaked along the Rhineland and beyond. Frederick V, Elector Palatine, was a Calvinist member of the House of Wittelsbach, but that wasn’t all. He was also pledged to be married to Elizabeth, daughter of King James I and VI.
This granted him supremely useful connections, which he proved determined to make use of in the coming years, to the detriment of the Empire, but to the wonder and fascination of history friends like us. Check out this instalment of the series to get up close and personal with the REAL Elector Palatine, rather than the idealised version which tends to paint Frederick as feckless, lazy or just plain stupid. On the contrary, Frederick was an amiable, considerate, intelligent ruler, in possession of something profoundly important for posterity – an inherited mission to combat Habsburg influence wherever it could be found.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for your support on Patreon, Deborah Matthews. |
| 0:03.6 | Deborah supports this podcast at the Catherine the Great tier. |
| 0:07.2 | And Deborah Matthews was in fact pretty famous during Catherine the Great's time, |
| 0:11.2 | mostly because she and Catherine the Great used to have tea together and plot how best to |
| 0:16.8 | parcel up the unfortunate country of Poland. |
| 0:19.7 | That of course is a lie, but if you would like me to tell, |
| 0:22.4 | a lie about you, and also give you a shout out on this show, |
| 0:25.8 | then why not check out Patreon and support this podcast from $7 or up. |
| 0:29.7 | More on that later, but for now, enjoy the show. |
| 0:32.8 | The show. You're listening to the Thirty Years' War episode nine. |
| 0:52.3 | In previous episodes, we've looked at Ottoman and Habsburg wars, and we've also seen how the Holy Roman Empire itself was changed by these wars. |
| 1:02.9 | By 1606, as we know, the war was over. |
| 1:06.7 | But the damage, as we've seen, was also done. |
| 1:09.7 | The relationship between the emperor and his princes, in particular the Protestant ones, |
| 1:14.3 | had frayed notably, and there seemed to be a real deficit of trust in the system, |
| 1:19.6 | which meant that traditional methods for redress or appeal, or even for debate, |
| 1:24.4 | such as the Imperial Deitor, the Imperial Supreme Court, had pretty much faded from view. |
| 1:30.3 | If princes of the Empire were not willing to make use of traditional avenues for protest, then what |
| 1:36.5 | avenues would they go down? Well, as we'll see in this episode, the trend was moving towards |
| 1:42.3 | independent action on the part of the |
| 1:44.4 | Protestant princes of the empire. But this scorn for the old institutions didn't represent |
| 1:49.6 | a scorn for the imperial constitution. No figure represented this stance better in my mind |
... |
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