fectual warning to all
others.

The prisoners were terrified into the immediate ratification of these
hard terms. They were then all released, excepting forty, who were
reserved for more rigorous punishment. In the same manner the king sent
a summons to all the towns of the kingdom; and by the same terrors the
same terms were extorted. All the rural nobles, who had manifested a
spirit of resistance, were also summoned before a court of justice for
trial. Some fled the kingdom. Their estates were confiscated to
Ferdinand, and they were sentenced to death should they ever return.
Many others were deprived of their possessions. Twenty-six were thrown
into prison, and two condemned to public execution.

The king, having thus struck all the discontented with terror, summoned
a diet to meet in his palace at Prague. They met the 22d of August,
1547. A vast assemblage was convened, as no one who was summoned dared
to stay away. The king, wishing to give an intimation to the diet of
what they were to expect should they oppose his wishes, commenced the
session by publicly hanging four of the most illustrious of his
captives. One of these, high judge of the kingdom, was in the seventieth
year of his age. The Bloody Diet, as it has since been called, was
opened, and Ferdinand found all as pliant as he could wish. The royal
discipline had effected wonders. The slightest intimation of Ferdinand
was accepted with eagerness.

The execrable tyrant wished to impress the whole kingdom with a salutary
dread of incurring his paternal displeasure. He brought out the forty
prisoners who still remained in their dungeons. Eight of the most
distinguished men of the kingdom were led to three of the principal
cities, in each of which, in the public square, they were ignominiously
and cruelly whipped on the bare back. Before each flagellation the
executioner proclaimed--

"These men are punished because they are traitors, and because they
excited the people against their _hereditary_ master."

They then, with eight others, their property being confiscated, in utter
beggary, were driven as vagabonds from the kingdom. The rest, after
being impoverished by fines, were restored to liberty. Ferdinand adopted
vigorous measures to establish his despotic power. Considering the
Protestant religion as peculiarly hostile to despotism, in the
encouragement it afforded to education, to the elevation of the masses,
and to the diffusion of those principles