consort Queen Sophia acquired a very favourable influence over him.
It is certain that he oppressed Bohemia with taxation less than many other sovereigns, and therefore was popular with the people during his whole life.
The news of the death of the king caused renewed disturbances at Prague. The churches and convents which were in the hands of the Romanist clergy were attacked, and the priests and monks driven out of them. A great part of the higher clergy, and most of the German inhabitants, who were almost all opposed to the national or reform party, now fled from Prague. Disturbances also broke out in all the towns where the population was Bohemian, specially at Králove Hradec, Laun, and Pisek. These troubles rendered necessary the presence of Sigismund, over whose religious views great uncertainty at first prevailed. Nobles of both parties assembled at Prague, and begged King Sigismund, as heir to the throne, to proceed to Bohemia as soon as possible. A petition was also signed begging the king to grant to the Estates and to the people permission to continue to receive the communion in both kinds. The king was further requested to use his influence with the Pope to induce him to revoke the interdict, and to grant the Bohemians liberty to receive the sacrament in that manner in which their consciences required them to do so. Sigismund gave an evasive answer, merely saying that he would rule as did his father, Charles IV, whose memory he knew to be very popular in the land. His appointment of Queen Sophia as regent, and of Čeněk of Wartenberg as her first counsellor, were, however, considered conciliatory. Queen Sophia's Hussite sympathies were well known, whilst Čeněk was then considered a utraquist, though it is not easy to know what were the real opinions of a man who changed sides twice within a year. The nobles of the utraquist or Calixtine party were therefore for the present in favour of a peaceful policy, hoping that when Sigismund arrived in Bohemia he would see the necessity of tolerance towards a party to which the large majority of the nobles and knights belonged, as also the town population—with the exception of the Germanized citizens of some towns—and almost the whole of the peasantry.
The more advanced reformers judged the intentions of Sigismund differently, and, as events proved, more correctly.
