1637 AR Thaler

By the late 1630s the Thirty Years' War had ground Hesse-Cassel almost to nothing. Landgrave Wilhelm V had thrown the small Calvinist landgraviate behind Sweden in the Protestant cause, fighting alongside Gustavus Adolphus against the combined Imperial, Spanish, and Catholic League armies. After Sweden's defeat at Nördlingen in 1634 the tide turned violently against the Protestant princes. The Imperial army under generals Götz and Hatzfeldt overran most of Hesse-Cassel, and Wilhelm and his court were driven into exile in East Frisia, where Wilhelm died in 1637 - in the same year this thaler was struck.

To finance the mercenaries needed to retake his own lands, Wilhelm authorised an entire propaganda series of thirteen different thalers built around a single emblem: a willow tree being whipped by a storm, sheltered by the hand of God descending from a sunburst above, with a city (representing Cassel) just visible in the background. The image is a direct visual programme. The willow is Wilhelm and the landgraviate; the storm is the Catholic Imperial armies battering it; the hand of God reaching down through the rays is the Protestant cause refusing to let it break. The reverse legend, DEO VOLENTE HVMILIS LEVABOR ("God willing, my humble self will be raised up by Him"), is the explicit theological reading of the same image, and the underlying motto of the type - which collectors today simply call the "Willow Tree" or "Storm" thaler - is the proverb that the willow bends in the storm rather than breaking.

The reverse carries the rampant Hessian lion under the long titular legend WILHELM·D·G·LANDGRAV·HASSIAE·COM·C·D·Z· (etc.) of Wilhelm V as Landgrave of Hesse, Count of Catzenelnbogen, Dietz, Ziegenhain, and Nidda, with the date 1637 in the field. Davenport catalogues the type as Dav. 6772, the standard reference number for the 1637 Hesse-Cassel willow-tree thaler.

NGC has graded this example AU 55 with the "Top Pop" designation - the finest currently certified by NGC for the type. The strike is sharp on a heavy original silver flan with the deep grey cabinet patina that authentic Thirty Years' War thalers acquire, the sun rays and the hand of God are fully struck above the bending willow, and the rampant lion on the reverse is complete to the smallest mane detail. It is, as the legend literally promises, the bent-but-unbroken Protestant landgraviate cast in silver - a piece of 17th-century propaganda that doubled as a coin and a sermon.