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Making The Thirty Years War Worse

DaleCoz

Well-known member
While I researched a couple other scenarios, it hit me that I hadn’t realized deep down just how badly the war tore at the infrastructure and people of European civilization—millions dead out of a relatively small population, areas devastated again and again by armies living off the land and the peasants, leaving starvation behind.

So didn’t they suffer enough? Sure, but one of the things you learn as an author is that making things worse often makes a more interesting story.

I’m especially interested in making it worse for the powers involved in the New World, Spain especially. Spain hit a crisis in 1640-41. Portugal had been under the Spanish king. It revolted in 1640, along with Catalonia, which resented Castile’s increasing dominance. France intervened in the resulting war and it looked briefly as though Spain might collapse into German-style anarchy. Then France lost its leadership, with Cardinal Richelieu dying at age 57 and King Louis the Thirteenth dying a few months later, in his early forties. That left France with a four-year-old king and a regency more occupied with internal affairs than following up on Spain’s weakness.

And Spain dodged the bullet. Portugal regained its independence, but the rest of Spain hung together. What if France had been in a position to press its advantage? What if French help allows the civil war grinds on, devastating Spain in much the way parts of Germany were devastated?

The powers of Europe were exhausted by this time, nearing bankruptcy and trying to find a way out of the war. However, the disintegration of Spain appears to offer the chance of a decisive France-Protestant-Swedish victory, so their peace proposals harden, and the Thirty Years War becomes the Thirty-Two Years War, or maybe the Thirty-Five Years War.

At the end of it, Spain is no longer a Great European Power or even a unified country, at least for a while.

Then what? A European scramble for Latin America? A defeated Spain probably wouldn’t be allowed to continue getting the gold and silver bonanzas that they got
historically with every treasure fleet.

On the other hand, historically when Spanish power declined, other Europeans mostly picked away at the periphery of Spanish control in the New World, and mostly got their cut of the Spanish treasure by trade concessions of various kinds, rather than a frontal assault on the cores of Spanish power.
 
Of course Spanish America is less well developed and established than it was when they declined later.

Quite possible that areas like the Rio de la Plata or Florida or Northern Brazil get picked up by other people.
 
One way of making the post-1640 situation worse for Spain is for her to respond to a proposal by Charles I in 1639-40 that she sign up to a formal alliance with him - England belatedly getting 'off the fence' in the Thirty Years' War after hedging its bets between France and Spain since 1629-30. That way Spain gets dragged into the run-up to the British civil war.

At this point, Charles has been husbanding his military and naval forces sooner than rush into supporting either F or Spain, unless either of them will pay for an expeditionary force to Europe (he can't afford to pay for a major war as he has stopped meeting Parliament and his non-Parl revenues can just about keep up his administration and navy). He will only intervene if his ally will (a) pay for the expedition (b) promise in a formal treaty to help return the Palatinate to his sister Elizabeth and his eldest nephew, Charles Louis. Some of his belligerently anti-Spanish nobles, eg the earl of Warwick who ends up as a Parliamentary leader in 1640-6, prefer a colonial war against Spain and send a private anti-Spanish colony off to the Caribbean (Providence Island off Honduras/ Belize) to raid local Spanish outposts. Charles ignores this but can't get better terms out of France; then in 1637 the Scots break into revolt and in 1639 the Spanish fleet, taking men and money to the Netherlands to fight the Dutch, is ambushed off Dover by the Dutch fleet in English waters and mauled while the local English ships (too few to stop the Dutch) fail to intervene. Spain decides it must get England as an official ally to force Charles to protect its shipping in the Channel and use his new navy to help blockade the Dutch; Charles fails to put the Scots down as his small, untrained, and poorly-led army is routed in 1639 and he's forced to a temporary truce. If he has to agree peace he will have to abandon his Anglicanization of the Kirk and leave the latter along in a firmly 'Puritan'/ Calvinist form, which will encourage English Puritans to defy him too; so he needs a new and better army quick. He wants to hire some expert, disciplined, ruthless Spanish infantry (the 'tercio' regiments) to turn on the Scots and an Anglo-Spanish treaty is suggested and negotiated.

London was awash with rumours in spring 1640 that a Spanish alliance would be signed and C would hire Spanish troops to attack Scotland. Setting Catholic troops on his 'godly' Scots Protestant subjects would infuriate the latter's English supporters, including Calvinist nobles like Warwick, Bedford, and the earl of Essex (soon to be Parl commander vs Charles in 1642-4). In the event, the outbreak of the Catalan rebellion and the Portuguese revolt means that Spain is otherwise engaged and pulls out of the agreement. But if the Catalan and Portuguese revolts are delayed a few months, we have a Spanish army in England aiding Charles I to attack Scotland - and this could easily encourage the French and Dutch, at war with Spain, to back Charles' opponents. With a part of their army off in Scotland, Spain collapses even quicker in 1640. We might also see a mutiny against 'Papist puppet' Charles by opposition peers in London, as was planned in OTL when Charles summoned his nobles to provide an army to invade Scotland in summer 1640 and about a third of them did not turn up to his muster but held an armed rally in London instead.

If this occurs, but aimed at an Anglo-Spanish army already invading Scotland, then we could have an English Civil War breaking out 2 years early with Spain on one side and France and the Dutch on the other. That would drain the resources of both sides, and get rather messy ... especially if the Catholic Irish then took the opportunity to revolt against a preoccupied British state. Given the way that Charles' governor of Ireland, Strafford, wanted in OTL to send a Catholic Irish army to help Charles invade Scotland, Charles and the Spanish could use him to raise a 'loyalist' Catholic army there to help the war, and the English rebels would then seize London claiming that Charles was selling out to the Papists and would expel the English Protestant colony in Ulster next. So we have Charles and the Spanish army in York vs a rebel force in London , probably with the latter calling Parliament to rally English support, and if Spain cannot disengage quickly and has to prop Charles up the prospect is that France will overrun Catalonia and the Dutch will attack her American colonies. In OTL Parliament secured the English fleet in 1642 as opinion there was strongly anti-Catholic; if this happens in 1640 the Spanish are cut off in N England and the English fleet can help the Dutch cut off their links to the Netherlands too and prop up rebel Portugal.
 
I can't see the Spanish signing up to any deal which sees them having to pay for an expeditionary force on the Protestant side of the Thirty Years War. Agreeing to restore the Palatinate sure, they ended up agreeing to that 8 years later anyway, but as outlined that agreement would see the Spanish forming an alliance with England against France, while fighting France by proxy in the Empire, and funding an army to fight with France against their own proxies.
 
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