What is it about?
The Siege of Breda: A European Media Phenomenon and Stuart Obsession The 1624-25 siege of Breda was a pivotal event at the heart of both European politics and its burgeoning news landscape. As the Thirty and Eighty Years' Wars converged, tens of thousands of Dutch, Stuart, and Spanish soldiers battled for control of this crucial Dutch town in a grueling year-long siege. Thanks to the explosion of printed news, Breda dominated the European imagination. Readers and viewers from London to Naples avidly followed developments through maps depicting skirmishes and the grim arrival of disease. This chapter explores how Breda's siege truly became a media phenomenon. Across the North Sea, the siege became an obsession for Stuart monarchs and their subjects. Tens of thousands of Stuart soldiers fought and died at Breda, and news of their struggles captivated an eager and anxious audience. Mentions of the siege filled newsbooks, maps, sermons, and polemics throughout the mid-1620s. This chapter also examines how the cultural memory of past Spanish atrocities, like the Spanish Fury at Antwerp, shaped perceptions of Breda, and how the town's plight influenced Londoners facing a virulent plague outbreak. Finally, the chapter broadens its scope beyond Breda to explore how Charles I, facing an unravelling foreign policy, desperately tried to support the collapsing war effort of his uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, through printed proclamations to raise men and money to try and halt a Danish collapse in the Holy Roman Empire.
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Why is it important?
This chapter provides a holistic case study in how early modern Europeans experienced the news of war in a profoundly multi-sensory way.
Perspectives
This work is part of a wider endeavour to firmly re-situate the Thirty Years War into early Stuart culture, as the burning issue which defined the early reign of Charles I. By reconstructing the movement of people- soldiers, refugees, royals, artists, merchants and exiles-, and ideas, news and polemic, between the Stuart kingdoms and the war-torn Continent, this study charts the experience of wartime in the 1620s.
Tamsin Pritchard
University of Edinburgh
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This page is a summary of: ‘The Action on Which the World’s Eye Is Turned’: the Siege of Breda and Disaster in the North, May 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004696211_005.
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