Nicholas and the Thirty Years’ War

What caught my attention was a security guard sitting outside reading a book. It’s unusual enough these days to see someone sitting outside a supermarket reading anything other than a phone. But this was no ordinary book. It was a great thick volume, full of fine print, the sort of thing you only had to glance at to realise it required some serious commitment to get through.

And the man holding it was already three quarters of the way through.

I suppose I just had to ask.

“That looks like a fairly serious read,” I said, and that’s how I met Nicholas.

The book was The Thirty Years War, by an author named Peter Wilson. I knew very little about that war, if anything at all. Nicholas broke out into an explanation of the whole thing: the mercenaries, the various countries and their roles.

The war is often remembered as a religious struggle between Catholics and Protestants. Nicholas’s take, more in line with the author’s, was that it was just as much about geopolitics.

He talked about the various European powers, the Spanish, the Germans, Denmark, Sweden and the mercenary armies that fought on their behalf.

I looked into it afterwards to fill some of the gaps. The war began in 1618 within the Holy Roman Empire, when Protestant nobles in Bohemia rebelled against their Catholic Habsburg rulers. The rebellion was crushed in 1620, but other countries kept getting involved. Denmark entered the war in 1625, Sweden in 1630, and eventually France in 1635. Spain, meanwhile, was fighting the Dutch and supporting its Austrian Habsburg relatives.

France is the interesting one. A Catholic country, it funded the Protestant side and then joined the war directly because it was more concerned about cutting down Habsburg power than about religious allegiance.

Which was precisely the point Nicholas was making.

I asked him about the mercenaries.

“Were they financially motivated, or were they devoted to the cause?”

Part of his answer was both. Once they were paid the coin to join a side, they found themselves locked in to that cause.

He told me about one mercenary commander who came from aristocratic stock but was something like eleventh in line for an inheritance, which meant he was effectively in line for nothing. Instead, he went around various cities charging them for protection.

I looked into that afterwards, and it sounds rather like Wallenstein, although I’m not certain.

Nicholas had also visited Prague, where he’d seen the site of the famous defenestration of 1618.

“You’ve probably heard of the defenestration,” he said.

I hadn’t.

Apparently, some rather unhappy Protestant nobles threw two Catholic officials and their secretary out of a window at Prague Castle. All three survived, but the incident helped set in motion a war that would devastate much of Central Europe.

I looked up the word afterwards. Defenestration comes from the Latin de, meaning down or away from, and fenestra, meaning window.

Literally, throwing someone out of a window.

Even more interestingly, the word entered English around 1620, apparently because of that very incident.

Nicholas mentioned something like 35,000 Irish mercenaries fighting in the war, and an estimated eight million people dying from the fighting, famine and disease.

When the war finally ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, much of Central Europe had been devastated. The Dutch gained formal recognition of their independence from Spain, Switzerland’s independence from the Empire was recognised, and France and Sweden emerged with greater influence. Some German regions had lost more than half their population.

Thirty years is an awfully long time to be fighting over anything.

The mention of the Irish took me somewhere else.

I began telling Nicholas about my recollection of Irish soldiers serving in the British forces during the colonisation of New Zealand, and accounts I’d come across of men going AWOL, reportedly because they sympathised with Māori.

I’d barely got into my version of events when we were interrupted.

A woman, somewhere in her mid to late fifties, came out of Mother’s carrying some eggs.

As she approached, she slowed her walk. Her eyes were firmly fixed on Nicholas.

She walked directly between us and stopped.

Just stood there.

“Hello, Mary. How are you today?” Nicholas asked.

“I’m doing great,” she replied.

And then nothing.

She continued staring at him.

I stood there wondering what exactly was going on.

My immediate suspicion was that Mary was a regular visitor to Mother’s and that Nicholas was someone she rather enjoyed talking to. I also had the distinct impression that I was currently an inconvenience.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether the eggs were merely an excuse to visit Mother’s in the first place.

There seemed to be some history there, judging by the way she planted herself between us and looked at him without saying much at all.

Nicholas, whom I’d pegged at somewhere in his early thirties, was considerably younger than Mary.

Perhaps there was a blossoming romance underway.

Perhaps I was standing in the middle of it.

I decided this might be my cue to leave.

But before I could make my exit, Nicholas wished her a lovely day in a tone that suggested the visit had reached its natural conclusion.

Mary moved on.

She’d barely taken a couple of steps when Nicholas turned back to me.

“Tell me more about your Irish story.”

Well, apparently the Irish had won out over Mary.

I continued telling him about the Irish soldiers in New Zealand, and how I’d long thought there was a thesis to be written on their involvement in the colonial wars, particularly the question of whether sympathy for Māori had played a part in desertions.

Whether my recollections would survive a proper historical examination is another matter, but there was certainly something worth investigating.

Nicholas seemed genuinely interested.

Our conversation eventually wandered into the Commonwealth, New Zealand and Australia.

He wanted to know how the Commonwealth relationship worked these days and whether Australia was still part of it.

I told him it was, and that the question of Australia becoming a republic was one of those conversations that popped its head up from time to time.

I suspect we’ll see more movement on that during my lifetime.

Somewhere along the way I asked him what Wilson was actually trying to say in his book. What was his particular angle?

Nicholas mentioned another book called The Thirty Years War, written by C. V. Wedgwood back in the 1930s, and suggested Wilson was probably following on from her work in some respects.

The conversation could easily have gone on longer.

But the biggest surprise came towards the end.

Nicholas had just completed his master’s degree.

And there he was, guarding Mother’s and CVS as a security guard, three quarters of the way through a substantial academic history of seventeenth-century Europe.

I don’t know what his master’s was in, why he was working security, or what he intends to do next. I didn’t ask.

I had gone out to pick up a few things and found myself learning about a war I knew almost nothing about, hearing about a rather unusual incident involving a window in Prague, revisiting a bit of New Zealand’s colonial history, and possibly interrupting a romance involving a woman carrying eggs.

All because I noticed a bloke reading a rather serious book.