Thirty Years’ War, it will be remembered, opened in Bohemia, with the sensational incident known as the “Defenestration of Prague,” the brief interlude of the Elector Palatine’s kingship and his defeat and expulsion by the Imperialists in that memorable battle outside the walls of Prague. His wife, the Winter Queen, daughter of our own James I, still holds her own place in English literature as “the eclipse and glory of her kind.”
The victor of the White Mountain, the fanatical Ferdinand II of Habsburg, set himself to exterminate heresy from his dominions. He expelled the preachers and introduced the Jesuits. Utraquism was sternly suppressed. The ancient Bohemian nobility was to a large extent destroyed and replaced by foreign upstarts. Above all, systematic efforts were made to destroy Czech national literature, owing to its Hussite tinge. Indeed, one Jesuit boasted that he alone had burnt no fewer that sixty thousand Czech volumes. Ferdinand acted only too literally upon the advice of his Capuchin confessor, to show no mercy to the Bohemians, but to comply with the words of the Psalmist: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
Thanks to the tyranny of the Habsburgs and their Jesuit advisers, the condition of Bohemia was one of utter stagnation from the Thirty Years’ War down to the second quarter of the
