Anhalt, arriving in Prague very shortly after this decision, was
at first somewhat startled to find the matter settled without his
intervention; but he soon discovered that neither Rudolf nor the
Assembly were satisfied. Budovĕc and his friends were eager to follow
up their victory by securing the removal of Lobkovic from the councils
of Rudolf, while they wished to guard themselves against future
attacks by an amnesty for any offences committed during the struggle.
Rudolf, on his part, while conceding the amnesty, tried hard to throw
difficulties in the way of the complete equality between Protestants
and Catholics; and he further hoped to stir up division between the
different sections of the Protestants. Had Rudolf been left to himself,
these intrigues might have proved the mere fitful caprices of a weak
mind, and might have been followed by equally startling concessions.
But he had now fallen into the hands of a much more daring and
unscrupulous adviser than any who had hitherto swayed his counsels.
This was his young kinsman, the Archduke Leopold, who had stood
by him when the rest of the family had demanded his submission to
Matthias, and who now flattered him with the hopes of recovering his
power in Bohemia. Leopold seems, from first to last, to have been as
self-seeking in his objects as he was unscrupulous in his methods. His
first wish was to secure for himself that province of Jülich which was
the subject of so much controversy between several of the Protestant
princes, and which Leopold had been allowed by Rudolf to occupy in
the Emperor’s name. Soon, however, he discovered that his hopes of
Jülich would be frustrated even by Powers to whom he had looked for
support; and, from that time, he fixed his hopes on the succession to
the Bohemian crown. Rudolf, while listening to the violent proposals of
Leopold, was anxious to secure, if possible, the recovery of the lands
which Matthias had conquered; and for that recovery he expected help
from the discontented Austrian Protestants and from some of the princes
of the Empire. He therefore summoned a Convention of princes to Prague,
and distinctly demanded the restoration to him of Austria, Hungary, and
Moravia.
The times were terribly critical. The occupation of Donauwörth by the
Elector of Bavaria, the controversy about the succession to Jülich, the
formation of the Protestant Union by Christian of Anhalt, and of the
Catholic League by Maximilian of Bavaria, all seemed to point to an
approaching war in the Empire; while the military preparations which
Henry IV. was making in France foreshadowed a European character for
any conflict that might take place. Under these circumstances, however,
the wiser statesmen in the Empire were anxious to minimise the evil as
far as possible, and to make efforts for the preservation of peace.
Foremost among the peacemakers was the Archbishop of Köln; but
unfortunately he was too much in advance of his age to produce the
results which a more commonplace politician might have accomplished.
He proposed a scheme of universal disarmament, and he suggested
the reference of the Jülich controversy to the arbitration of the
Universities. These proposals were cut short by a new outbreak of
war between some of the claimants to the Jülich estate; while the
assassination of Henry IV. once more raised the hopes of Rudolf and his
friends, and made them disinclined to concession. But others besides
the Archbishop of Köln desired to reconcile Rudolf to Matthias; and in
spite of evasions and resistances, Rudolf was forced, in September,
1610, to recognise his brother as holding under him the lands of
Hungary, Moravia, and Austria.
This concession was, if possible, even less honest in intention than
the confirmation of the Letter of Majesty had been; for the coldness
with which he had been treated by the princes of the Empire had made
Rudolf even more inclined than before to throw himself into the
dangerous plans of the Archduke Leopold. Even while the Convention of
Princes was sitting and the negotiations with Matthias were proceeding,
Leopold was raising troops in the Bavarian district of Passau, and by
the time that the agreement was concluded this force had grown to a
considerable size. Peter Vok of Rosenberg had called attention to the
danger incurred by his town of Krumov through the neighbourhood of
these soldiers; and the Bohemian Assembly demanded that, since peace
had now been made, this force should be disbanded. Rudolf pleaded that
he could not yet dismiss them, because he had no money for the payment
of their wages; and he proposed that, to secure them better quarters,
they should be sent to Krumov and Budweis (Budejóvice). The Bohemian
Assembly indignantly protested against the introduction of foreign
troops into their country, and they refused to vote any money for their
support.
Rudolf thereupon appealed to the Duke of Brunswick to advance him
money; and the Duke succeeded in getting various promises which soon
amounted to the sum required. When he arrived at Passau, he found that
Leopold and several of the other commanders had left for Prague; that
Colonel Ramée, who was in command, would not listen to proposals of
delay; and that the paymaster of the forces was being hindered from
receiving the money which had been raised for the troops. At last,
when the soldiers had been worked up to a state of frenzy by the
non-fulfilment of the promises of payment, Ramée suddenly led them
into Upper Austria, where they committed every kind of cruelty on the
defenceless inhabitants. Rudolf had cherished the wild hope that the
discontent of the Austrian Protestants with Matthias would make them
willing to revolt from him; but he soon found that, whatever might
be their disagreements with their present ruler, they at any rate
preferred him to Rudolf. So, after failing to obtain any success in
Austria, Leopold suddenly changed his plans; and in February, 1611,
the Bohemian Assembly were startled by the news that the Passau forces
had entered Bohemia, had seized Krumov, and had soon after captured
Budejóvice and Tabor. A little later came the news that Ramée was on
his march to Prague.
Leopold offered to go out to meet the troops, and to order them to
return to Krumov; but on February 13th he suddenly reappeared before
Prague at the head of the very forces that he had pretended to disband.
Two days later they broke into the Small Division of the town; and,
though gallantly resisted by Count Thurn at the head of both soldiers
and citizens, Leopold succeeded in mastering that division of the
city. But in the Old and New Town the citizens rallied and drove back
the Passauer. The old fierce spirit now awoke in Prague; and, as soon
as Leopold and his forces had been expelled from the Old Town, the
citizens attacked and destroyed several of the monasteries; and the
troops of the Assembly with difficulty succeeded in saving the Jesuit
College from a similar fate. Leopold now marched against the Castle,
and, after a short parley, persuaded the troops to surrender. A herald
was next despatched to the Karlsbrücke to demand that the Old Town
should receive a Passau garrison. Count Thurn and two of the other
generals were wounded, and prisoners in the hands of the enemy; and
Budovĕc had been sent into Moravia shortly before the advance of the
Passauer. But though deprived of their leaders, both military and
spiritual, the Praguer still held out against the enemy. The Imperial
herald was dismissed with scorn; and when Ramée threatened to fire upon
the town, several workmen announced that, at the first shot, every
Catholic in the city should be put to death. Rudolf himself became
shocked at the cruelties which had been committed, and refused to
allow Ramée to set the town on fire. The peasantry flocked in from the
surrounding districts to help in the defence; while they cut off and
killed all the supporters of the Passauer whom they could find in the
outskirts of the town. Budovĕc returned from Moravia at this crisis,
and encouraged the Praguer by promises of fresh help, and it soon
became known that Matthias was on his march to Prague.
Leopold, as cowardly as he was cruel, now proposed to desert the cause
of Rudolf, and offered his services to Matthias. The latter, however,
would have nothing to say to him; and Ramée, in his turn becoming
alarmed, tried to make sure of his spoil by sending it in waggons
out of the city. The Praguer, however, succeeded in intercepting
these waggons, and in arresting, at the same time, one of Leopold’s
intriguers. The prisoner at once confessed the whole plot; and Ramée,
fearing the results of the discovery, secretly marched away from the
city. In order to persuade his troops to go the more readily, he
produced a portion of their long withheld pay. This suddenly revealed
to them the base intrigue of which they had been at once the victims
and the tools; and they called upon their colonel to lead them back to
Prague, to execute vengeance on Leopold. Leopold however, succeeded in
escaping secretly from the city, and went to Budejóvice, where he still
hoped to make a stand; but when the Pope himself wrote to tell him that
he had injured and disgraced the Catholic cause, the miserable creature
felt the helplessness of his position, and tried to convince the Pope
that he had been in no way responsible for the march of the Passauer.
In the meantime, Matthias was welcomed as a deliverer. On April 12,
1611, the Bohemian Assembly once more met; and, after some wrangling
between the Estates of the different provinces, about the language to
be used and the methods to be followed, they deposed Rudolf from the
throne of Bohemia; and on May 22nd he himself consented to free his
subjects from their allegiance, and to allow Matthias to be crowned in
his place. Even now the unfortunate Emperor still hoped to redeem his
position by fresh intrigues; and he seems actually to have entertained
the idea of appealing to Christian of Anhalt, and the Protestants,
against Matthias; but ill health, misfortunes, and growing old age
interfered to cut short any further plots; and his miserable life at
last ended in January, 1612.
XVII.
FROM THE DEATH OF RUDOLF II. TO THE BATTLE OF THE WHITE HILL.
(1612-1620.)
Although Matthias seemed now to be securely seated on the throne of
Bohemia, he was quite aware that his difficulties were by no means at
an end. He had been put forward, originally, as the candidate rather of
his family than of the Bohemian people; and his necessary concessions
to popular feeling, in the matter of civil and religious liberty, had
often roused the opposition of his kinsmen.
The difficulties of his position had been somewhat mitigated during
his first triumphs in Moravia by the judicious statesmanship,
administrative ability, and personal popularity of Z̆erotin. On the
one hand he had persuaded his friends to keep in the background their
extremer demands for religious liberty; and on the other hand he had
contrived, by ingenious exercises of administrative power, to strain
the actual concessions of the new ruler to such an extent that they
proved a better check on the tyranny of nobles and priests than the
(verbally) larger concessions of Rudolf’s Letter of Majesty. Illyezhazy
and the Hungarian Protestants had consented to follow the lead of
Z̆erotin in these matters; but in Austria Matthias had already had
a foretaste of the embarrassments which were to be increased by his
conquest of Bohemia.
Tschernembl, who led the Protestants of Upper Austria, was by no means
disposed to be content with half measures, either in civil or religious
liberty. He was a strong Calvinist; and while he had none of Z̆erotin’s
scruples about religious wars, he was also far more indifferent than
the Moravian noble to kings in general, and to the House of Hapsburg
in particular. Under his leadership the Protestants of Upper Austria
demanded the fullest securities for their liberties, before they would
accept Matthias as their Duke; and they seized on a castle in Linz,
as a pledge for future concessions. In Lower Austria the Protestants
were, at this time, less numerous or less determined; for when, in
September, 1608, Matthias summoned representatives of both the Austrian
provinces to meet at Vienna, he found himself able to resist and defeat
the demands of the Protestants. Upon this, Tschernembl and his friends
at once left the city, and took up their quarters at Horn, from which
step they became known as the “Horner.” This policy of Tschernembl’s
produced some coolness between him and Z̆erotin; Tschernembl was in
consequence thrown into closer relations with the German Protestants;
so when, in November, 1608, Peter Vok von Rosenberg invited Christian
of Anhalt to meet Z̆erotin and Tschernembl at Tr̆ebon̆, the Austrian
consented to come, but the Moravian refused.
Z̆erotin, however, while anxious to hinder violent opposition to
Matthias, had no wish to hinder the growth of Austrian liberty nor to
break the link between the Austrian and Bohemian Protestants; so he
strongly urged Matthias to concede the demands of Tschernembl and his
friends, in a peaceable manner. This advice was the more important
because Tschernembl was inclined, in a moment of irritation, to listen
to advances from Rudolf; but he soon discovered the folly of that
course, and at the same time he began to lose faith in the promises
of Christian of Anhalt. Thus Z̆erotin was able once more to bring his
king and his friend together; and in March, 1609, Matthias granted much
wider liberties to the Austrian Protestants than he had yet conceded in
Moravia.
But this triumph of Z̆erotin’s policy brought on him the fierce
hostility of Bishop Khlesl, who even refused to give the Sacrament
to Matthias and his councillors, on the occasion of the festival of
reconciliation between the Duke of Austria and his subjects. Nor was
Z̆erotin contented with Matthias’s own action; for the latter began
to show signs, at that time, of an inclination to treat with Rudolph;
and a proposal of the Moravian Assembly to disband some of its forces
just before the outbreak of the Passau rising, was in vain resisted
by Z̆erotin. When, then, Matthias finally succeeded in winning the
crown of Bohemia, he found himself surrounded by Councillors who were
bitterly opposed to each other, and who had each their own reasons for
distrusting their King.
Nor were Matthias’s difficulties confined to those larger questions
of civil and religious liberty which affected the whole kingdom.
The reunion of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia under one king, at
once reawakened controversies which had, for some time, fallen into
the background. Silesia was by no means disposed to abandon that
position of equal alliance with Bohemia which had been granted in the
hour of danger; and Moravia did not desire to exchange the complete
independence which she had gained by separation, for the subordinate
condition in which the Bohemians wished to place her. Concessions
therefore had to be made to the local feeling of the dependent
provinces--concessions which might conceivably have worked well in a
time of complete peace, but which, in a time of continual disorder and
mutual suspicion, led necessarily to further difficulties.
But Khlesl saw that these local divisions, though they might at first
sight seem to embarrass Matthias, could yet be made, by judicious
management, to promote those schemes for the increase of the royal
power which the ambitious bishop had been always devising. It was in
Hungary that he specially hoped to lay the foundations of a firmer
despotism; and the method by which he hoped to accomplish it was a war
for the conquest and annexation of Transylvania. For this purpose he
stirred up the Transylvanians against their Prince, and then backed
the insurgents by an invasion of their territory. The suspicions of
the Hungarian Protestants were, however, quickly aroused; and Matthias
was deserted by his troops. Then he appealed to Moravia for help, on
the ground of the dangers to which their province would be exposed
by a Turkish invasion, and the consequent need of consolidating the
Hungarian power for their protection.
Here again Khlesl was, for the time, defeated by Z̆erotin, who opposed
the war on the ground that no Hungarian Assembly had sanctioned it;
but when Z̆erotin followed up this victory by attempting to revive
his scheme for a common Assembly of all Matthias’s subjects, he was
successfully opposed by the Bohemians, who declined any close union
with Austria or Hungary.
But if, for the time, Khlesl’s hopes for strengthening Matthias, by
the divisions among his subjects, had been scarcely realised to the
full, he soon found a new encouragement in the increased power and
dignity which the King of Bohemia gained by his election to the throne
of the Holy Roman Empire. Z̆erotin, indeed, had himself supported
Matthias’s candidature in order to exclude a more dangerous claimant;
but, nevertheless, the election was felt to be a distinct gain to the
Catholic and despotic party; and Khlesl took advantage of it to renew
his attacks on the Protestants. In these attacks he was backed by
Dietrichstein, the Bishop of Olmütz, who hoped that Matthias would help
him to increase his power over the clergy and their dependants.
But again Z̆erotin succeeded in resisting the clerical encroachments
in Moravia; and his opposition so impressed the Archduke Maximilian
that he used his influence with Matthias to obtain concessions to the
Protestants. Matthias, however, soon found that no concessions would
induce the Moravian Estates to sanction the Hungarian war; and even an
appeal to the Presburg Assembly had no better success.
Imperial authority having thus failed, Matthias once more fell back
on his old attempt to sow division among his subjects. This time,
however, he appealed not to provincial jealousies, but to the old class
rivalries between citizen and noble. He had, no doubt, heard how his
original conquest of Moravia had been hindered by the opposition of
the city burgomasters to the decision of the nobles; and he therefore
hoped that, now that the nobles were his most dangerous enemies, the
municipal authorities might be induced to rally round him. He was
further strengthened in this belief by the recollection that his
aristocratic supporters had been willing to abandon on behalf of the
towns those religious liberties which they had claimed to exercise on
their own estates.
This time he hit the mark. The Town Councils of Brünn and Olmütz
readily responded to his appeal to support him against his rebellious
nobles; and they even denounced to the King those citizens who had
complained of the exclusion of Protestants from the government of the
towns. Matthias encouraged these appeals, and disregarded the protest
of Z̆erotin, who maintained that the towns could only approach the King
through the Captain of Moravia.
Having secured this weapon, Matthias determined to use it to the
uttermost. Hitherto, the houses of the nobles had been free from any
interference, in the matter of religious worship; and citizens, who
had been excluded from Protestant services elsewhere, had been allowed
to attend them when celebrated in a nobleman’s house. Now, however,
Matthias not only took away this liberty, but summoned to Vienna some
of the citizens who attended these services.
Yet no threats nor tyrannies could induce the Estates to sanction
the Transylvanian war; and Matthias’s insistence on this expedition
only roused the suspicion of the German Princes, and once more drew
Christian of Anhalt into alliance with the Protestants of Bohemia,
Austria, and Hungary.
Had Matthias been a shrewder politician, he would have abstained from
giving artificial stimulus to the local jealousies of his subjects, and
would have suffered them to grow into importance of their own accord.
It soon appeared that, whatever reaction might be exerted by the
king’s mischief-making policy, the rivalry between Moravia and Bohemia
was still an important force in national politics. It is not easy to
estimate the exact force of all the considerations which influenced
the leaders of the rival provinces. The name of liberty, for instance,
could be appealed to, with some sincerity, on either side of the
controversy. Z̆erotin, for his part, was thoroughly convinced that a
centralised administration at Prague would hinder the free play of the
local institutions of Moravia, and would also weaken the possibilities
of that independent alliance between Austria, Bohemia, Silesia,
Moravia, and Hungary, which seemed to him the best protection for the
Protestants against the encroachments of the Catholic party.
On the other hand, the Bohemians could justly maintain that Rudolf’s
Letter of Majesty gave them, and all who united with them, wider
liberties than any which were secured by the laws of Moravia; and,
curiously enough, the most dependent classes of Moravia had been
deprived by their separation from Bohemia of a right of appeal to a
court at Prague which still gave them some slight protection against
the power of their lords.
But, important as all these questions were, they were gradually driven
into the background by one of more immediate interest to the rival
leaders. Z̆erotin had, as already mentioned, a special feeling of
loyalty to the House of Hapsburg, which was not shared in the same
degree by the leaders of the Bohemian Protestants. So Budovĕc and his
friends were rapidly arriving at the conclusion that the best security
for their liberties was to be found, not in the substitution of one
Hapsburg for another, but in the deposition of the whole family in
favour of some king who had a real respect for religious liberty. To
such a step Z̆erotin could not consent; and it was no doubt because he
was aware of this difference, that Matthias now began to recognise the
Bohemian leaders as his chief enemies, and to devote himself to the
special oppression of their province.
In 1613, the freedom of the press was suspended in Bohemia, and a
censorship was re-established. A Jesuit preacher denounced the Letter
of Majesty, declaring that it had never been formally sanctioned by
Rudolf. The Archbishop of Prague began to close Protestant churches and
to turn out Protestant priests. But a still more ominous hint of the
bitterness of the approaching struggle was to be found in the character
of the man whom the Archdukes now chose as the representative of their
family in the controversy. The conciliatory policy of the Archduke
Maximilian seemed a hopeless failure. Matthias, in the opinion of his
kinsmen, was becoming as incapable as Rudolf had been. They therefore
resolved to choose from their family a man of strong and determined
character, who would be willing if necessary to take the most extreme
measures for enforcing their policy.