to the building of places of
worship. Against them was the unquestioned text of the
Majestatsbrief, not yet nine years old. The new emperor did not
meditate a breach of faith. Real violence was unavailing where the
opponents were in a large majority. The Counter-Reformation had
produced in Central Europe a scheme of persecution, which stopped
short of tragedy, and laboured to accomplish, by infinite art and
trouble, what the readier methods of the Holy Office and the Penal Law
were expected to do. Ferdinand II was a slow, laborious, friendly
man, with a sense of duty and a certain strictness of private life,
but without initiative or imagination.

The Bohemian leaders saw the danger of submitting to a man who,
without being a persecutor like Henry VIII and Philip II, would know
how to oppress them wisely. Their crown had once been elective; and
the ceremony of election had been revived ten years before when the
last king ascended the throne. They resolved to resist Ferdinand, and
to call another in his place. War would inevitably follow; and in
order that the country might be committed to their quarrel, as there
was no strong popular movement at first, and no national or political
issue, they judged that they must begin by giving proof of their
deadly meaning. The conspirators, with Count Thurn at their head,
made their way into the Hradschin, the gloomy palace that overlooks
Prague, and deliberately threw two hostile members of the government,
Slavata and Martinitz, out of the window. It seems that there is a
contagious charm about that sort of exercise which is not evident to
those who have not practised it. For seeing an inoffensive secretary,
Fabricius, who was trying to make himself as small as possible in the
crowd, they threw him after the others. The victims had a fall of
fifty feet. None of the three was much the worse for it, or for the
shots that were fired at them; and it is difficult to account for
their escape.

Ferdinand, who possessed no army, and was not safe in his palace at
Vienna from the insurgents who sympathised with Prague, had no means
of coping with the insurrection. He turned for aid to his friends in
Germany. There, defensive confederacies had been formed both by
Protestants and Catholics. The Catholics, consisting chiefly of
ecclesiastical princes with the Duke of Bavaria at their head,
composed what was known as the League, to protect their interests
against more aggressi