take closely to heart.

But the year 1609 was not only memorable as marking an epoch in Dutch
history. It was the beginning of a great and universal pause. The world
had need of rest. Disintegration had been going on too rapidly, and it
was absolutely necessary that there should be a new birth, if
civilization were not to vanish.

A twenty years' truce between the Turkish and Holy Roman empires was
nearly simultaneous with the twelve years' truce between Spain and the
United Provinces. The Emperor Rudolph having refused to ratify the treaty
which his brother Matthias had made, was in consequence partially
discrowned. The same archduke who, thirty years before, had slipped away
from Vienna in his nightgown; with his face blackened, to outwit and
outgeneral William the Silent at Brussels, was now--more successful in
his manoeuvres against his imperial brother. Standing at the head of his
army in battle array, in the open fields before the walls of Prague, he
received--from the unfortunate Rudolph the crown and regalia of Hungary,
and was by solemn treaty declared sovereign of that ancient and
chivalrous kingdom.

His triumphal entrance into Vienna succeeded, where, surrounded by great
nobles and burghers, with his brother Maximilian at his side, with
immense pomp and with flowers strewn before his feet, he ratified that
truce with Ahmed which Rudolph had rejected. Three months later he was
crowned at Pressburg, having first accepted the conditions proposed by
the estates of Hungary. Foremost among these was the provision that the
exercise of the reformed religion should be free in all the cities and
villages beneath his sceptre, and that every man in the kingdom was to
worship God according to his conscience.

In the following March, at the very moment accordingly when the
conclusive negotiations were fast ripening at Antwerp, Matthias granted
religious peace for Austria likewise. Great was the indignation of his
nephew Leopold, the nuncius, and the Spanish ambassador in consequence,
by each and all of whom the revolutionary mischief-maker, with his
brother's crown on his head, was threatened with excommunication.

As for Ferdinand of Styria, his wrath may well be imagined. He refused
religious peace in his dominions with scorn ineffable. Not Gomarus in
Leyden could have shrunk from Arminianism with more intense horror than
that with which the archduke at Gratz recoiled from any form of
Protestantism. He wrote to his