of the Habsburg dominions would at this moment have proved successful. The very numerous Bohemian exiles—sanguine, as all exiles are—believed that their ancient independent kingdom would now be re-established.
For reasons which it is not easy to comprehend, the king of Sweden determined to march into Southern Germany, and to leave the task of occupying Bohemia to his Saxon allies. The Saxon invasion of Bohemia was carried out in a very half-hearted fashion. The Elector, a worthy man of very limited intelligence, disliked the Swedes as being foreigners in Germany, and had reluctantly taken up arms against the Emperor, whom he considered his liege-lord, because of the Edict of Restitution and because of the depredations committed in Saxony by the Imperial troops. In the autumn of the year 1631 the Saxon troops entered Bohemia, and on November 11 they occupied Prague, the city surrendering without offering any resistance. With the Saxon troops many Bohemian exiles. Count Thurn, Venceslas of Ruppa, chancellor during the reign of Frederick, and others returned to Bohemia. One of the first acts of the exiles after their return was to remove the heads of their comrades—executed on June 21, 1621—which the Imperialists had exposed on the bridge tower of the old town. They were then solemnly buried in the Týn church. The Jesuits were again expelled from Bohemia, and eighty clergymen belonging to the Lutheran Church and to the unity of the Bohemian Brethren met at the Carolinum college to deliberate on the re-establishment of the utraquist Church. The Elector of Saxony, who now also arrived at Prague, seems for a moment to have intended to put himself in possession of the Bohemian crown, which, both in his own time and in that of his ancestors, appeared on several occasions to be within the reach of the Protestant princes of the house of Saxony. Should such a scheme, however, prove impracticable, the Lutheran Elector far preferred the continuation of Habsburg rule in Bohemia to the establishment of a Calvinistic kingdom in the immediate neighbourhood of his electorate. The distinctly hostile attitude which Arnim, who commanded the Saxon army, took up with regard to Thurn and the other Bohemian exiles, can be accounted for in this manner only.[1]
In his desperate position the Emperor decided to appeal
- ↑ This is well shown in Dr. Irmer's Johann Georg von Arnim.
