England, he had contracted an
alliance which gave him the appearance rather than the reality of
strength. He offered every encouragement to the Bohemians, but for the
time held back from giving them actual assistance.

CHARLES F. HORNE[32]

Ferdinand had crushed Protestantism in every estate he owned. In 1615 he
and Matthias began, or at least permitted, measures for its repression
in Bohemia. There were tumults, uprisings, and on May 23, 1618, a party
of angry citizens of Prague burst into the council hall, seized Slavata
and Martinitz, the two most obnoxious of the Catholic leaders, and
hurled them from the window. It was an ancient form of Bohemian
punishment, which had been used by Ziska and by others. The window this
time was over eighty feet from the ground, yet the fall did not prove
fatal. The men landed on a soft rubbish heap below, and one was unhurt;
the other, though much injured, survived. Their secretary was hurled
after them, and is said to have apologized to his masters, even as he
landed, for his unavoidable discourtesy in alighting upon them.

This semicomic tragedy opened the Thirty Years' War. At first the
struggle was confined to Bohemia and Austria. The other states, secure
in the fact that four-fifths of the populace of the empire was
Protestant, looked on with seeming indifference. The Bohemians drove the
scattered imperial troops from their country.

Meanwhile Matthias died, and Ferdinand was elected to the imperial
throne as Ferdinand II (1619-1637). The Bohemians besieged him in
Vienna. The Protestant Austrian nobles turned against him, and a
deputation forced its way into the presence of the helpless Emperor, and
insisted on his signing for them a grant of political and religious
liberty. Ferdinand resolutely refused; the deputation grew threatening.
One fierce noble seized the Emperor roughly by the coat front, crying,
with an offensive nickname for Ferdinand, "Sign it, Nandel!" A trumpet
from the castle yard interrupted them. It signalled the arrival of a
body of imperial troops, who had slipped through the lines of the
besiegers, and come to the Emperor's rescue.

The Austrian nobles withdrew. Spanish and Cossack troops were called by
Ferdinand into the country to crush all opposition. The Bohemians,
wasted by famine and plague, retreated into their own land, and the war
continued there. The people offered the Bohemian throne to Frederick,
the elector of the Rhenish Palatinate, and