My review of Prince Rupert of the Rhine – King Charles I’s Cavalier Commander, a new biography of Prince Rupert of the Rhine by Mark Turnbull.

Any biography of a major seventeenth-century figure that receives praise from two such giants in the field as Professor Ronald Hutton and Professor Nadine Akkerman has to be something a bit special.
Prince Rupert has always been a divisive individual. Even on the day he was born, half the Bohemian Estates wanted to vote him as heir to their throne, and half didn’t.
He reached the apogee of his fame during the First English Civil War, when he was seen as an inspiring hero by those who supported his uncle, King Charles I, and was cast as a vile, possibly demonic, foreign mercenary by his enemies. Which was rather ironic. In that most religiously motivated of wars, Rupert’s strong Calvinist faith (something he had been so staunch in that he had endured years as a prisoner of war rather than abandon it) was much closer to the creed Parliament professed than his uncle’s Laudism.

For a generation, the image of Rupert as Timothy Dalton with a lap dog tucked up on his saddle in the film ‘Cromwell’ influenced how the prince was perceived. But just as Cromwell was not one of the five MPs the king tried to arrest, as that film falsely claimed, so Rupert was not a pretentious fop, and Boye was not a small ball of fluff but a full-sized and highly trained hunting dog.
Today, there are those who are Rupert’s unstinting admirers, and there are those who like to cast him as no better than an aristocratic thug. The heat of emotion on both sides tends to obscure the reality and leaves us with the same two-dimensional hero or villain stereotype he was depicted as during those brutal and divisive wars. And of course, the truth is nothing like that simple. Just as much as any other human being, Rupert was complex and deserves better than to be pigeon-holed in one box or another.
Beginning with Rupert’s birth in Prague, at the epicentre of events which exploded into the Thirty Years’ War, this biography takes the reader through what is known of the prince’s education as one of a large and growing family of children born to the exiled Elector Palatine and his wife, the Winter King and Queen. For half a decade, his mother was heir to the English throne, and she held the devotion of many Englishmen who saw her cause as their own. A devotion which made them demand that King Charles support her cause. But they were not quite devoted enough to vote the kind of money that support required on an ongoing basis, whilst at the same time chastising the king volubly for failing to do so.

Of necessity as well as inclination, Rupert was raised to be a soldier, and Mark Turnbull looks at new evidence of how the prince developed his skills as a military commander and the consequences of that. He was fighting in his family’s cause from his teens. So, even despite their religious differences, it is not surprising that he was quick to support his uncle when the English Parliament declared war against him and raised an army to try and force the king to their will. Indeed, had it not been for Rupert, there might not have been an adequate military response in time.
His deeds of daring – or despoilation, depending on the perspective taken – in the First English Civil War are well known, but the biography brings some new insights to this part of Rupert’s life, especially around his conduct of the Battle of Marston Moor and his relationship with the king. What is much less well known is that after the king’s defeat, Rupert took to the seas and for some years became pretty much a pirate working for the Royalist cause.

After the Restoration, Rupert was a major figure in the court of Charles II, involving himself in culture, art, science and trade as well as continuing his military role as a naval commander. But it is this last phase of Rupert’s life, so often seen as almost irrelevant compared to his early fame, that this biography illuminates particularly well, and adds to through looking closely at the women he shared his life with. We are shown Rupert as a family man, which is something usually glossed over and diminished. His chosen life partner is generally cast as a mere mistress, as if she were no one of any real significance in his life, when in truth, his devotion to her and their daughter was central to who he was in his later years.
It has been almost twenty years since there has been a new biography of the prince, so in many ways this is a long overdue reappraisal of his life. As well as including the latest published research, Mark Turnbull has gone back to the archives and looked with fresh eyes at the documents available, and even decoded some letters for probably the first time. He also brings a modern approach to the biography, seeing Prince Rupert in the round, significant for being a man of his time rather than just for his impact on events. So, as well as showing the familiar Rupert striding out on the stage of history, this book also explores the private man, his personal relationships with family and friends, and the women with whom he was intimate.

This is not a hagiography of the warrior prince; this is – as Professor Akkerman says – ‘a fresh and balanced’ approach to the life of a man who even today gathers both ardent supporters and passionate detractors.
There have been several excellent modern biographies of Prince Rupert, mostly highlighting his career as a commander on land and at sea: Morrah, Thompson, Kitson, Spencer – I’ve read them all, and they paint a collective portrait of the prince which fits very well with the formal paintings we have of him. In this new biography, Mark Turnbull does that too, but he does something else as well. He shows us the prince as a man, with all the strengths and weaknesses of the human condition, with family, friends and lovers, with principles, passions, hopes and regrets. And that is something quite remarkable.

Prince Rupert of the Rhine – King Charles I’s Cavalier Commander is available to purchase directly from the publisher, Pen and Sword, and from other retailers, including Amazon.

After a visit to Helmsley Castle at the age of 10, Mark Turnbull bought a pack of ‘top trump’ cards featuring the monarchs of England. The card portraying King Charles I fascinated him. Van Dyck’s regal portrait of the King and the fact that he was executed by his own people were the beginnings of Mark’s passionate interest in the English Civil War that has lasted ever since.
He thoroughly enjoys bringing this period to life through writing, having written articles for magazines, local newspapers and online educational sites, and used to re-enact battles with The Sealed Knot.
Mark is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He also produces a War of the Three Kingdoms podcast called ‘CavalierCast – The Civil War in Words’. This was the first (and is the longest running) podcast solely dedicated to the civil wars. It explores a variety of topics with leading historians and authors. He is also the author of another biography, Charles I’s Private Life and The Rebellion Series, historical fiction set in the civil wars.
He is one of the co-founders (with Dr Erica Canela and Andrea Zuvich) of the Stuart History Festival, the world’s first-ever festival dedicated to Stuart history.
You can follow Mark on X(Twitter) and Facebook.

Paula Lofting has a new book out Searching for the Last Anglo-Saxon King, Harold Godwinson, England’s Golden Warrior. I always find it fascinating to see the similarities there can be between eras and asked her some questions about the ways in which events in 11th Century England can be compared (and contrasted) with those in the 17th century, and Harold can be compared with Charles I.

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I know very little about the Anglo-Saxon Era and the Norman Conquest, except what every schoolchild learns about it, but it strikes me there are a number of points where it has some interesting congruence with the First English Civil War. As Tostig was Harold’s brother, were there aspects of Harold’s fight for the crown which were in a sense a civil war or was it entirely about fighting foreign invaders?

So, there’s no real evidence that Harold had his eye on the crown until January 1066 when Edward died, and he was suddenly proclaimed king. Here is a brief potted history of what led to his ascendancy to the crown:
– August 1065 – Tostig rules as Earl in the north. The leading chieftains decide they have had enough of his rule. They claimed he had committed crimes against them. They marched on his HQ in York where they killed 200 of his huscarls. Luckily for Tostig, he was in the south with the king, hunting.
– The protest didn’t end there. The rebels wanted to oust Tostig and replace him with the younger brother of Earl Edwin of Mercia, Morcar. Both these young men were the sons of the deceased Alfgar, who was a rival of the Godwinsons.
– The Northumbrians and Yorkshiremen called Morcar to them, and they planned to head south to Tostig’s lands in Northampton gathering an army through the lands of shires on the way, meeting up with Edwin, Morcar’s brother at Northampton, bringing his Mercians and also a large number of Welshmen too.
– When word got through to Tostig and the king what was going on, Tostig demanded that Harold go to parley with them and sort out the mess, but the leaders of the rebel army refused to compromise. They were adamant that Tostig needed to go because of the charges against him and wanted the king to gird Morcar as their earl.
– Harold was in a difficult position. As second to no one but the king, his job was to do the king’s bidding, and the king wanted him to use force to reinstate Tostig. Harold was faced with choosing between creating a civil war or betraying his brother and going against his king. If he chose civil war, there would be enormous bloodshed between which the south had no stomach for anyway, and if he chose to accept the conditions laid out by the rebels, he risked losing the respect of the court, his family, the king and his brother. He chose to put the country before his king and blood.
– The king was backed into a corner and had to agree to the rebel’s demands. It was unlikely that the leading thegns, in the south wanted to go to war with the north anyway, so this also added to Harold’s dilemma. In any case, civil war would have only served to leave England open to invasion. Whilst the king was thinking with his heart, Harold was thinking with his brain and the preservation of his country, and the safety of his people was more important.
–Tostig and his wife had to leave and went into exile in Flanders, to her brother who gave them refuge. Tostig got himself together with the King of Norway, Harald Hardrada, to set the Norwegian king on the English throne. Bent on revenge, he set about planning his invasion with his ally.

– Sadly for Tostig, Harold was to defeat him at Stamford Bridge and his hopes of reinstatement in England as Hardrada’s deputy were wiped out in one day’s battle. Both men were killed by the English forces.
So you see, it was not civil war that tore the brothers apart but their inability to work together on this crisis. Tostig accused Harold of orchestrating his downfall, however I don’t believe that was the case. I think there may have been jealousy between them which had festered. After all, they had worked together very well after their successful invasion of Wales in 1063. Something had possibly gone wrong between them, but it is difficult to know, but there is evidence that they had become rivals. The mysterious destruction of the hunting lodge Harold was building for King Edward may have played a part in their schism.

I notice that Charles I was descended from Harold. Harold’s grandson (through his daughter, Gytha) was Mstislav I, Grand Prince of Kiev and by separate lines of descent, Mstilav was an ancestor to both James I and Anna of Denmark. So I was wondering how important was descent in legitimising kingship in Anglo-Saxon culture?

It was generally believed that if you were the son of a king from the line of Cerdic of Wessex, you were entitled to be addressed as ætheling, meaning of the noble family, therefore one would be ‘throneworthy’. This did not necessarily mean that the eldest son would automatically take the throne. It was the king’s privilege to nominate his designated heir, but ultimately it was down to the witan (the king’s council) to cast their vote as to who they would accept as king. So we might have a situation where the king nominates his eldest son from his first marriage, but a rival faction might support a younger son from his second marriage or, as in the case of Cnut, a son from an unofficial marriage. It would be up to the witan, to choose who they believed was the strongest candidate who would lead the country well.
In Harold’s case, having no known connection to the House of Wessex, but his status as sub regulas (underking) overrode the claim of young Ætheling Edgar due to his seniority, strength, and power.

Thinking of kingship, in 17th-century England, the notion of Divine Right had evolved. This was the idea that God had chosen and appointed the king and given him full authority to rule. This was not a licence to do what he wanted, but a responsibility for the well-being of his kingdom and its people, for which he would be held to account by God. Is this at all similar to the concept of his kingship that Harold held?

I would say definitely, kings were crowned and anointed with holy oil from the days of Edgar, who was the first to be referred to as King of England. This was taken from the bible as many kings or chosen prophets were anointed with oil recognising their divine appointment from God. As with the 17th century, the early English kings were not given licence to do as they pleased. They had to rule with the permission of the witan but had ultimate authority to make decisions that affected the kingdom. He was responsible for the safety and security of his kingdom, and I suspect he knew that it was his duty to be accountable to God for his governance of the realm.
Harold did his best to see to the safety of the kingdom, and even as earl of Wessex, he was given the authority to make decisions on Edward’s behalf, being sub regulas and dux Anglorum. These gave him the ability to make both kingly and military decisions.
During his short reign, Harold was to spend it securing England’s shores with naval and military might. He had to ally himself with the difficult northerners by marrying the sister of Edwin and Morcar. He then had to march north at lightning speed to fight the might of his brother and Hardrada then did the same back south to face William of Normandy.
Harold took his duties seriously. Because the Normans were assaulting his lands, burning homesteads, and killing his people, he refused to let his brother, Gyrth, fight on his behalf whilst he waited for the rest of the fyrd to catch up in London. He was angry and infuriated at what was happening in Sussex and he marched with less than his army than he could have had to face William to stop the invaders in their tracks.
Unfortunately, his efforts were in vain.

Charles I was in conflict with his parliament long before the outbreak of civil war. What was the nature of the ‘parliament’ Harold had to contend with, and what kind of issues did they cause him?

The parliament was the Witanegemót, the meeting of wise men, which was made up of nobles, earls, archbishops and bishops and other important people. The function of the body of the Witan was to advise the king, assist with law-making. As said previously the king had the ultimate power so didn’t have to act on what the witan suggested, however in Edward’s case he was often given little choice as the earls in the 11thc had great power and were able to overpower Edward’s decision, as we see when he wanted Harold to gather the southern fyrd to force the north into obeying his command to reinstate Tostig Godwinson in his position as earl of Northumbria.
When Edward died, he appeared to have most of the witan supporting him into the kingship. However not all of the earls had given their oaths. Edwin and Morcar, who ran the northern parts of England, had left court before giving their fealty to their new king. After Harold had his coronation, and had seen to some admin and the security of his shores in case William was to invade, he set off up north to York to treat with the young earls and in return for their support, he married their sister Aldith as previously mentioned.

Yorkshire is a place that held great significance to the fortunes of both kings. For Harold it was winning a battle there, at Stamford Bridge to defeat his brother Tostig and the invading Harald Hardrada. For Charles I, although very much a place of strength early in the war, it became the site of the first major defeat for his cause at Marston Moor, a loss that ultimately led to the greater defeat at Naseby the following year. Do you think Harold’s Yorkshire victory contributed to his defeat at Hastings?

It definitely had a part to play in Harold’s well-being. It was a stressful time. The relationship between himself and his brother was fractured, which may have affected his relationship with his sister, the queen and the king, for they were excruciatingly fond of Tosti. He’d had to bring north and south together by entering into a marriage he may not have really wanted. He already had a wife, Eadgifu – also known as Edith – Swanneck. She was his more Danico wife, a type of marriage that was not blessed by the church, but legitimate in the eyes of the law, nonetheless. Harold may have always known that one day he might have to ally himself in order to keep peace in the land, but he had evaded it for more than twenty years, which suggests the marriage between himself and Eadgifu was a faithful and loving union. It cannot have been easy to reject her for another.
Harold had to live up to his duty of kingship, keeping his people safe. He organized his armies and lined his shores in Sussex and Kent with men and naval forces. However, he miscalculated when he disbanded the fyrd in September because he thought that William would by that time have called off his invasion. He thought he was able to march north to fight his brother and Hardrada without leaving his lands properly defended – but how wrong he was. And when he heard after a hard-won victory against the Norwegians, that William had landed in Pevensey and was ravaging his lands, he had to abandon his plans to reorganise the militia in York and divi up the booty they had taken from the defeated Vikings to march south and face William at Hastings within a few weeks.
No doubt all this would have an effect on his mind and body and may have upset his decision-making processes.
It is a myth to think that the same body of army was the one that went up to Stamford Bridge and back to London. The elite huscarls – his personal bodyguard – would have likely to have been with him forward and back, as long as they were not too badly wounded from Stamford. But the fyrd that came back down could have been a mixture of the fyrd that went up from the lands close to the south, especially the men of Sussex whose lands were being plundered, were likely to have been a new army gathered from the counties that had not been called to York.
Even so, the long march and the long day’s battle would have meant that they were weary, and their desperation to finish the battle may had led some of the more undisciplined men to leave their lines and run down the hill to their deaths at the hands of William’s chevaliers, his mounted horsemen.

One last parallel I can see is that both kings were defeated and died violent deaths – Harold in battle and Charles I on the scaffold – which were followed by dramatic regime change. Despite that some things endured. What was the greatest legacy Harold left England, in your opinion?

I think probably his greatest legacy was not as king, for he failed miserably there, not that he didn’t try heroically and most of what he did that day I cannot fault, but that aside, he put an end to the Welsh incursion into England, the raids, the stealing of cattle and humans for slaves, and the devastation they caused for a long time by decisively defeating the Welsh with the help of his brother, Tostig. Unlike the Normans, he didn’t try to conquer the Welsh but rather he diminished their power, and he did this by getting the Welsh to kill their King Gruffudd, who in actual fact had a lot of enemies in Wales. With their figurehead dead, Harold was able to get them to submit and Gruffudd’s brothers were allowed to take over Wales in Gruffudd’s stead.
Of course, this meant that the Normans found them easier foe to deal with than if Gruffudd had remained in power.

Finally, the civil wars have been well represented in reenactment for decades, but Anglo-Saxon reenactment is most definitely a thing too! How have you found being a reenactor of the period has shaped or changed your view of the period?

Reenactment is more about experimental archaeology and very useful for writing the novels I have written and am still writing. I think it has been researching the sources that have changed my view more than reenactment, but I do try to think what can my writing bring to reenactment as well as what can I learn from reenactment.

This has been fascinating, seeing parallels and differences between the two kings and their times. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Thank you for having me on your blog, Eleanor. I have really enjoyed seeing my period of interest and my king in the contexts that you have given me. It’s really interesting to compare historical eras, and actually, there isn’t a lot of difference when it comes down to it. Same problems, different times.

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Paula was born in the ancient Saxon County of Middlesex in 1961. She grew up in Australia, hearing stories from her dad about her homeland and its history. As a youngster, she read books by Rosemary Sutcliff and Leon Garfield and her love of English history grew. At 16, her family decided to travel back to England and resettle. She was able to visit the places she’d dreamt about as a child, bringing the stories of her childhood to life. It wasn’t until later in life that Paula realised her dream to write and publish her own books. Her debut historical novel , Sons of the Wolf, was first published in 2012 and then revised and republished in 2016 along with the sequel, The Wolf Banner, in 2017. The third in the series, Wolf’s Bane, will be ready for publishing later this year.

 In the midst of all this, Paula has recently had her book, Searching for the Last Anglo-Saxon King, Harold Godwinson, England’s Golden Warrior published with Pen and Sword Books and is working on a biographic of King Edmund Ironside for them. She has also written a short essay about Edmund for Iain Dale’s Kings and Queens, as well as articles for historical magazines. When she is not writing, she is a psychiatric nurse, mother of three grown up kids and grandmother of two and also reenacts the Anglo-Saxon/Viking period with the awesome Regia Anglorum. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X(Twitter), Bluesky, and her own Website.

The title image is a fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry showing Harold as he comes to Normandy to inform William he is the successor of King Edward – via Wikimedia.

The great appeal about the card game Piquet (which can be pronounced either P.K. or ‘picket’) is that, unlike most games of cards, the element of declaration and the possibility of exchanging cards with a stock pile, means it is possible to have a very good idea of the cards in your opponent’s hand. This turns Piquet from a game of pure chance into one with far more intellectual rigour. Chance might dictate the original fall of the cards in each hand, but the individual player’s skill determines the play. It is this element of the game that made it popular for the best part of four centuries.
Piquet first appeared around 1500, and it was then universally called some version of ‘cent’ as the aim of the original game was to be the first to 100 points. In England, this meant it was usually known as Saunt, Saint and oddly, by the early 17th century, sometimes with the prefix ‘mount’, hence appearing as ‘Mount-Saint’ or ‘Mount-Cent’. It became known as Piquet only towards the middle of that century. Cavendish, writing in the 19th century, suggests this was due to the arrival of Queen Henrietta Maria, who brought the French version of the game and its name with her.
There is some debate as to where Piquet began. As it became France’s national game, the French naturally enough lay claim to it and have a number of charming myths surrounding its origins. However, Spain or Italy are today considered more likely. It is hard to be sure since ‘cent’ is one hundred in Latin, and Latin was the universal language of educated Europe at the time. But, whatever was its nation of origin, over the course of the Sixteenth Century, the game gained impetus and popularity, spreading across the continent.

The first description of Piquet is in a German account written in 1620 by one Gustavus Selenus. This was the pseudonym of Augustus, the younger son of Henry III, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and a member of the noble House of Welf. As well as writing about Piquet and penning a treatise on chess, Augustus was fascinated by cryptography and wrote a book on it in 1624, which was largely based on Trithemius’ works, including Steganographia a book which features in my story Fortuna’s Fool about which more below. Augustus went on to become Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg following the death of Frederick Ulrich (a man we meet in one of my Lord’s Learning books, The Soldier’s Stand) in 1634. In his account of Piquet, Gustavus/Augustus described the game with most of the key features already in place.
The first book in English to give the rules was published in 1651. It claimed to be a translation of an earlier French work and was called The royall and delightfull game of picquet. The author was anonymous, but the text declared it was Printed for J. Martin, and J. Ridley, and was to be sold at the Castle in Fleet-street nere Ram-Alley.
Piquet was played with a deck of thirty-six cards (from six up), and the ace was ranked above the king. The advantage in every hand played went to the non-dealer (Elder), not the dealer (Younger). After cutting for the deal, the Younger would give each player twelve cards (dealing two to four cards each time), and the remaining cards would be placed in a stack (talon). Then the Elder could exchange up to seven cards with those in the talon, before the Younger could exchange with as many as were left.

After this, there would be a declaration stage where each player (Elder first, and then the Younger) would announce if they had any sequences and sets in their hands, and score points for them before the game was played. The Elder hand would then lead, and each lead would score a point, as would winning the trick, and an extra point was awarded for winning the final trick. The game would end when someone reached a hundred points or after a certain number of hands had been played, with the winner being the one with the highest score at that point.
As with all card games, especially in an era where writing such things down was still almost unknown, the rules would frequently have had such minor differences. Local variations, house rules and, of course, individual preferences all contributed. Some of these variations would have been more widely adopted and eventually entered the mainstream gameplay, whilst others were discarded over time. Even when books detailing the rules began to appear, the game continued to evolve. In the modern game, for example, the deck is smaller than that described in the older sets of rules – something that was likely born from a variation played long before it was standardised.
Interestingly, the decline of Piquet roughly corresponds to the rise of Contract Bridge, and books like that by Cavendish share affinity with many later books on Bridge in style and devotion to technical detail. This is perhaps not surprising as the two games would have appealed to the same kind of card player, and the added complexity (not to mention the additional social opportunity) of having four players and partnership bidding in Bridge quickly won out over the simpler, two-player Piquet.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Here is a brief extract featuring the game of Piquet from Fortuna’s Fool, a short story I wrote that appears in The Ring, a charity anthology of historical fiction stories which comes out on Kindle on 1 May. All the stories feature the same Roman-era ring as it progresses through time, from Julius Caesar up to the present day, influencing the lives of those it comes into contact with for good or ill. Fortuna’s Fool is set in September 1633, at the Siege of Nancy in Lorraine, as Danny Bristow is just starting his military career.

The small pool of light provided by the candle at his table illuminated the cards in play and the face of Danny’s opponent, who was frowning at his cards as if trying to decipher them. It was that face Danny watched. His own cards he held folded, not fanned, the edge of them pressed into his palm and fingers, his knuckles resting on the rough wood of the table. He knew what the cards were and had no need to remind himself. Besides, the men clustered about the table, intent on the game, were not his friends and allies but those of the man who sat opposite. A glance of his hand from one of them would be enough to betray the bluff he was making.
Bluffing in Piquet was an art all of its own and one in which he knew he excelled. For Danny, who loved the thrill of gambling, it was the headiest nectar, because in Piquet, your bluff would always be called. It wasn’t enough to convince your opponent that you held whatever card or cards you wanted them to believe in. No, you had also to bring them to play the cards you needed them to play so the cards you actually held became winners. He’d said those exact words the previous day, having beaten Captain Rider at a hand or two. The captain had nodded sagely, his look the one he so often seemed to wear when he talked to Danny. His ‘I’m more than twice as old as you and one day you’ll understand’ look that made Danny want to roll his eyes heavenwards. But of course, he never did. Captain Rider was his employer after all.
“You need to be careful who you do that with,” the captain told him. “Few men mind being beaten fairly in a gambling game, but no one likes to be taken for a fool—and that’s what you’re doing. The wrong time, the wrong man and you’ll find it’s your skill with a sword that’s being tested, not your skill with cards.”

As well as my Fortuna’s Fool, The Ring features stories from, Alistair Forrest, Fiona Forsyth, Jacquie Rogers, Alistair Tosh, Graham Brack, Mark Turnbull, Maggie Richell-Davies, Robert Bordas and Val Penny. The cover was designed and donated by Ian Bristow.

The Ring is now available to preorder on Kindle and will be out both on Kindle and as a paperback from 1 May. All proceeds will go to The Reading Agency.

To be sure not to miss all the news on this and my other projects, you can sign up for my newsletter here and receive a free Lord’s Legacy short story.

The title painting is ‘Argument over a Card Game’, Jan Steen (1625/26–1679) in the Gemäldegalerie collection, from Wikimedia.

Such an arresting word ‘defenestration’.
The kind of word that sticks in the mind.
Unfortunately, its definition is not very delightful at all. It is the act of throwing someone out of a window but carries the implicit intent of killing them by doing so. Unlike many words in the English language, we know when it was invented and why.
It was invented in 1620 to describe a specific event that happened in Prague in 1618.
But in Prague, defenestration has something of a history.
The 1618 event that led to the creation of a new English word was not the first time the action it described had happened there. Indeed, the practice of throwing people from windows already had precedents in Prague and therefore carried a great deal of symbolism. To understand what was really going on in 1618, we need to look briefly at those.

The First Defenestration of Prague

On the 30th July 1419, the Hussites, a popular religious movement which sought urgent reform of the Catholic church, marched on the New Town Hall in Prague to demand the release of their co-religionists. A stone thrown from the town hall window hit their leader.

Infuriated, the Hussite protesters stormed the town hall and threw the leader of the council and several councillors from a high window, killing them.

The Second Defenestrations of Prague

On the 24 September 1483, fearing that a new king might deny them those hard won religious rights, the Hussites seized control of Prague and hurled the leading councillors from the windows of the Old and New Town Halls. Some of the unfortunate men were killed by the fall, some were already dead when they were thrown out. The religious rights of the Hussites were confirmed soon after and Bohemia continued under its Hussite majority.

The Third Defenestrations of Prague

It is against this backdrop that we have to view the events of 23 May 1618.
Less than a decade before, the previous King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf (who incidentally lived in Prague rather than the usual Habsburg capital of Vienna), had signed a letter which guaranteed freedom of worship for the Protestants in his kingdom of Bohemia and essentially established a Protestant state church there. When Rudolf died, his successor, both as King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias, confirmed the Letter of Majesty, which enshrined those religious rights. But Matthias was not a young man and had no children. So he wanted to be sure his heir was well established. On being assured their religious rights would be upheld, the Protestant Bohemian Estates agreed to elect his chosen heir, Ferdinand, as their new king.
That was the interesting thing about Bohemia. Unlike most nations where the crown passed down the generations automatically, it had an elective monarchy. Admittedly once elected, the job was for life, and it was a given that the elected king was always going to be the next Habsburg emperor, but even so, the Bohemian Estates did get that vote.
The problem was Ferdinand wasn’t just a Catholic. He was a fanatical Catholic and a champion of the Counter-Reformation. Before his election, Ferdinand gave assurances he would uphold the Letter of Majesty. But his interpretation of it was not the same as that of the Bohemians or of Emperor Mattias. Mattias had allowed the building of new Protestant churches on royal lands. Ferdinand claimed the Protestants had no right to do so. Even worse, he also declared that the Protestant estates could no longer meet.
The Protestant nobles weren’t going to stand for that.
Led by Count von Thurn and supported by a great crowd of ordinary people, they cornered the four Catholic lords that Ferdinand had appointed to see that his will was enacted.

When it became clear that two of those lords didn’t care what was going on and weren’t going to try and speak up for the majority of their countrymen, Thurn declared “You are enemies of us and of our religion”. The duo was thrown out of the window of one of the castle towers, together with their secretary.
However, there is a bit of an unexpected twist in this tale.
That window the three men were thrown from was some seventy feet (21.3m) above the ground. But all three survived. Two were able to get up and run off, the third was unconscious and carried away swiftly by his servants. We don’t know for sure why they survived. Clearly something broke their fall. Protestant propaganda said it was a heap of manure set by the wall of the tower. The Catholics claimed it was divine intervention, but whatever it was the two noblemen lived to take refuge in the fortified palace of one of Ferdinand’s loyal supporters in the city. The secretary raced with the news to Vienna and was later ennobled by Ferdinand as Baron von Hohenfall, or Baron of Highfall.

The Protestant estates went on to elect a new king, the leading Protestant prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick, Elector Palatine. He was married to Elizabeth, the daughter of James VI and I, King of Scotland, England and Ireland.
By the time the new royal couple were crowned in November 1619, Matthias had died, and Ferdinand was emperor. Now he had all the power that allowed him to command armies to redeem what he saw as his stolen kingdom.
Thus, the stage was set both for the outbreak of war and for the events that would bring forward great mercenary commanders. Men like Mansfeld, Wallenstein—and in my books at least—the Schiavono, Philip Lord.

You can begin reading the story of how Philip Lord becomes the Schiavono in The Fugitive’s Blade first book in Lord’s Learning series.

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The first picture is a 1662 woodcut of the 1618 event, by engraver Matthäus Merian the Elder for chronicler Johann Philipp Abelin‘s Theatrvm Evropaevm

Much of this piece first appeared on susanappleyardwriter.wordpress.com