In 1617, however, papal diplomats secured a temporary settlement of the Mantuan question, and Spanish troops hastened to the aid of Ferdinand. Before long, Venice made overtures for peace, and the archduke was able to leave his capital at Graz in order to join Matthias. The emperor, old and infirm, was anxious to establish Ferdinand as his heir, and, in the autumn of 1617, the Estates of both Bohemia and Hungary were persuaded to recognize the archduke unconditionally as king-designate. On the strength of this, Ferdinand proceeded over the winter of 1617–18 to halt the concessions being made to Protestants. He created a council of regency for Bohemia that was overwhelmingly Catholic, and it soon began to censor works printed in Prague and to prevent non-Catholics from holding government office. More inflammatory still, the regents ordered Protestant worship to stop in towns on church lands (which they claimed were not included in the Letter of Majesty).
The Defensors created by the Letter of Majesty expressed strong objection to these measures and summoned the Estates of the realm to meet in May 1618. When the regents declared the meeting illegal, the Estates invaded the council chamber and threw two Catholic regents, together with their secretary, from the window. Next, a provisional government (known as the Directors) was created and a small army was raised.
Apart from the famous “defenestration,” the events in Prague in May 1618 were, superficially, little different from those in 1609 and 1611. Yet no 30-year struggle arose from those earlier crises. The crucial difference lay in the involvement of foreign powers: in 1609 and 1611 the Habsburgs, represented by Rudolf and Matthias, had given in to their subjects’ demands; in 1618, led by Ferdinand, they did not. At first his defiant stance achieved nothing, for the army of the rebels expelled loyal troops from almost every part of the kingdom while their diplomats secured declarations of support from Silesia, Lusatia, and Upper Austria almost at once and from Moravia and Lower Austria shortly afterward. In May 1619 the rebel army even laid siege to Ferdinand in Vienna. Within weeks, however, they were forced to withdraw because a major Spanish army, partly financed by the pope, invaded Bohemia.
The appearance of Spanish troops and papal gold in eastern Europe immediately reawakened the fears of the Protestant rulers of the empire. To the government of Philip III, led by the former ambassador in Vienna, Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, the choice had seemed clear: “Your Majesty should consider,” wrote one minister, “which will be of the greater service to you: the loss of these provinces [to the house of Habsburg], or the dispatch of an army of 15 to 20 thousand men to settle the matter.” Seen in these terms, Spain could scarcely avoid military intervention in favour of Ferdinand; but to Protestant observers the logic of Spanish intervention seemed aggressive rather than defensive. Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Dutch Republic, observed that the new emperor “flatters himself with prophesies of extirpating the Reformed religion and restoring the Roman church to the ancient greatness” and accurately predicted that, if the Protestant cause were to be “neglected and by consequence suppressed, the Protestant princes adjoining [Bohemia] are like to bear the burden of a victorious army.”
This same argument carried weight with the director of the Protestant Union, Frederick V of the Palatinate, parts of whose territories adjoined Bohemia. So, when in the summer of 1619 the Bohemians deposed Ferdinand and offered the crown to Frederick, he was favourably disposed. Some of the elector’s advisers favoured rejecting this offer, since “acceptance would surely begin a general religious war”; but others pointed out that such a war was inevitable anyway when the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic expired in April 1621 and argued that allowing the Bohemian cause to fail would merely ensure that the conflict in the Netherlands would be resolved in Spain’s favour later, making a concerted Habsburg attack on the Protestants of the empire both ineluctable and irresistible.
Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown and in so doing rekindled the worst fears of the German Catholics. The Catholic League was re-created, and in December 1619 its leaders authorized the levy of an army of 25,000 men to be used as Maximilian of Bavaria thought fit. At the same time, Philip III and Archduke Albert each promised to send a new army into Germany to assist Ferdinand (who had succeeded the late Matthias as Holy Roman emperor). The crisis was now apparent, and, as the Palatine diplomat Count John Albert Solms warned his master,
If it is true that the Bohemians are about to depose Ferdinand and elect another king, let everyone prepare at once for a war lasting twenty, thirty or forty years. The Spaniards and the House of Austria will deploy all their worldly goods to recover Bohemia.
The underlying cause for the outbreak of a war that would last 30 years was thus the pathological fear of a Catholic conspiracy among the Protestants and the equally entrenched suspicion of a Protestant conspiracy among the Catholics. As a Bohemian noblewoman, Polyxena Lobkovic, perceptively observed from the vantage point of Prague: “Things are now swiftly coming to the pass where either the papists will settle their score with the Protestants, or the Protestants with the papists.” The triumph of the Catholics, 1619–29
Frederick V entered Prague and was crowned king by the rebel Estates in October 1619, but already the Catholic net was closing around him. The axis linking Vienna with Munich, Brussels, and Madrid enjoyed widespread support: subsidies came from Rome and Genoa, while Tuscany and Poland sent troops. Equally serious, states favourable to Frederick’s cause were persuaded to remain neutraclass="underline" Spanish diplomacy kept England out of the war, while French efforts persuaded the Protestant Union to remain aloof from the Bohemian adventure of their leader. The Dutch Republic also did nothing, so that in the summer of 1620 a Spanish army was able to cross from the Netherlands and occupy the Rhine Palatinate. Meanwhile, the armies of the emperor and League, reinforced with Spanish and Italian contingents, invaded the rebel heartland. On November 8, in the first significant battle of the war, at the White Mountain outside Prague, Frederick’s forces were routed. The unfortunate prince fled northward, abandoning his subjects to the mercy of the victorious Ferdinand.
This was total victory, and it might have remained the last word but for events in the Low Countries. Once the Twelve Years’ Truce expired in April 1621, the Dutch, fearing a concerted attack by both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, decided to provide an asylum for the defeated Frederick and to supply diplomatic and, eventually, military assistance to his cause. In 1622 and again in 1623, armies were raised for Frederick with Dutch money, but they were defeated. Worse, the shattered armies retreated toward the Netherlands, drawing the Catholic forces behind them. It began to seem that a joint Habsburg invasion of the republic was inevitable after all.
The emperor’s political position, however, weakened considerably in the course of 1623. Although his armies won impressive victories in the field, they were only able to do so thanks to massive financial and military support from the Catholic League, controlled by Maximilian of Bavaria. Ferdinand II, thanks to the Spanish and papal subsidies, maintained some 15,000 men himself, but the League provided him with perhaps 50,000. Thus, Maximilian’s armies had, in effect, won Ferdinand’s victories and, now that all common enemies had been defeated, Maximilian requested his reward: the lands and electoral title of the outlawed Frederick of the Palatinate. Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, chief minister of Ferdinand’s other major ally, Spain, warned that the consequences of acceding to this demand could be serious, but in October 1622 he died, and no one else in Madrid—least of all his successor as principal minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares—had practical experience of German affairs; so in January 1623 the emperor felt able to proceed with the investiture of Maximilian as elector Palatine.