The Story of Prague
town hall of the Nové Mesto. Budova, who presided, always began the deliberations by calling on all present to pray. All then knelt down and sang a hymn.
For a moment civil war seemed inevitable. Rudolph’s attitude, indeed, had at first been conciliatory. He has been credited by various historians with a religious fanaticism that was absolutely alien to his nature. Yet the Spanish ambassador, Zuniga, and Archduke Leopold, a kinsman of Rudolph’s and a brother of Archduke Ferdinand, afterwards King of Bohemia, succeeded in persuading the apathetic Sovereign to send a message to the Estates, in which he promised the Protestants the same amount of toleration which they had enjoyed under Ferdinand I.; he thus withdrew even the concessions that had been made to the Protestants by the more liberal-minded Maximilian. The Protestant Estates considered this message as a declaration of war; they decided to arm, and chose thirty ‘directors’—ten from each order—who established themselves at the town hall of the Staré Mesto, forming, as the historian Gindely says, a provisional government. Rudolph, however, finally gave way, and on July 9, 1609, signed the famed ‘letter of Majesty.’ He recognised the ‘Confessio Bohemica,’[1] granted the Protestants the administration of the University, and empowered them to elect thirty ‘defenders’ from their number who were to act as guardians of the rights of the Protestants.
There is no doubt that Rudolph granted these extensive concessions reluctantly, and that he sought an opportunity for retracting them. He entered into negotiations with Archduke Leopold, who was then Bishop of Passau. Under the pretence of interfering in the religious troubles that had broken out in Germany,
- ↑ See p. 100.
