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IV
IT is not my purpose to refer here in any detail to the enormous changes in Bohemia that were the consequence of the battle of the White Mountain. The ancient constitution of the country was suppressed, and a system of slightly veiled absolutism replaced it. Confiscations of land took place on an enormous scale, and foreign nobles, mainly generals of the imperial army, obtained the estates of the ancient Protestant nobility of Bohemia. The inhabitants of the towns, many of which had been strongholds of the national Church, were driven into exile; and immigrants, generally of German birth, took their place. As regards the peasantry whom the system of serfdom attached to the soil, for the cultivation of which they were required, sinister arguments such as the pillory, the whipping-post, and the gallows, gradually induced them to conform to the Church of Rome. It is, however, to the credit of my countrymen to mention that many long remained true to their ancient faith and secretly held their religious services at night-time in the dense pine-forests of Bohemia, and preserved, as hidden treasures, copies of the Bible of Králice, the Bohemian version of the Scriptures which was the joint work of several divines of the Brotherhood.
The modern historian Dr. Gindely has given a graphic account of the sufferings of the Bohemians at
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