THE DOWNFALL
The Bohemians preserved their independence till 1620. That year they rebelled against the king for political and religious reasons and were defeated at the battle of White Hill (Bílá Hora) near Prague. From the effects of this disastrous event the nation has never recovered, for even now, after the lapse of 295 years, the scars received at Bílá Hora are not wholly healed.
Ferdinand II. punished the rebels with traditional Austrian fury. On June 21, 1621, he caused the execution at Prague of twenty-seven leaders of the revolution—all men belonging to the most noted families in the country. A number of them were condemned to humiliating physical punishment and the estates of all were confiscated. The first to lay his head on the block of the executioner was Count Joachim Andrew Šlik (Schlick). During the interregnum Šlik had been a Director; besides, he had served as Chief Justice and Governor of Upper Lusatia. The next victim was Václav Budovec of Budova, “a man of splendid talents and illustrious learning, distinguished as a writer, widely known as a traveler, and an ornament to his country.” Pelcl said of Budova that he belonged “to that old cast of serious, thoughtful, inflexible Bohemians, by which the nation was characterized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” The third to suffer was Christopher Harant of Polžic, “a learned man, distinguished writer, and noted traveler.” The next on the death list was Caspar Kaplíř of Sulevic, a venerable man of eighty-six. The fifth was Prokop Dvořecký of Olbramovic, a scion of an old family. The sixth was Baron Frederick Bílý, “an upright and learned man, one of the Directors at the time of the interregnum.” The seventh, Henry Otto of Los, who, under Frederick, was connected with the exchequer. Then followed successively Dionys Černín, William Konechlumský, aged seventy years, Bohuslav of Michalovic, “a man of splendid talents who deserved well of his country,” Valentine Kochan of Prachov, a learned master of arts; Tobias Štefek of Koloděj, a citizen of Prague and a Director of the Revolution; John Jesenský of Jesen (Jessenius), a scholar, scientist, and orator, “whose writings shed lustre on the university;” Christopher Kober, a noted citizen of Prague; Burgomasters John Šultys of Kutná Hora and Maximilian Hošťálek of Žatec (Saaz), (the two latter having been Directors during the interregnum), John Kutnaur, a Councilor of Prague, Kutnaur’s father-in-law Simon Sušický, Nathaniel Vodňanský of Uračov, Václav Jizbický. The last to undergo death were Henry Kozel, Andrew Kocour of Otín, George Řečický, Michael Wittman, Simon Vokáč of Chyš and Špicberk, Leander Rüppel, and George Hauenschild. On the tower of the ancient Charles Bridge, which connects the Old Town with the Small Town in Prague, twelve heads of the rebels were set up in small wire cages, six on each side of the tower, to awe the populace. There these gruesome evidences of Hapsburg hatred remained for years. On the same tower were exposed to public view the hands of Šlik and Michalovic and the tongue of Jesenský. Rüppel’s head and hand were nailed on the wall of the Town House.
So ended the “Bloody Day at Prague”—a day that Bohemians may have forgiven, but which none have forgotten. What now followed is probably without parallel in the history of European nations. Edmund de Schweinitz, in commenting on the consequences of the Bohemian Revolution, says that “in the history of Christendom there were few events more mournful. From the pinnacle of prosperity Bohemia and Moravia were plunged into the depths of adversity.”
The month the executions took place, the emperor, or rather the so-called Liechtenstein’s Commission on Confiscations which had been appointed by the emperor, pronounced forfeiture on the estates of 658 landowners of the nobility out of a total of 728, whose names were on the list of accused. Thomas Bílek, a writer of unimpeachable authority, has published a voluminous book on these confiscations from which it would appear that the Liechtenstein Commission had confiscated fully two-thirds of all the lands in Bohemia. Some of the choicest estates taken away from the rebels the emperor retained for the Hapsburg family. A goodly portion of the forfeited lands was given to the church, of which the emperor was a devout member. “Take, fathers, take,” he used to say to the ecclesiastics when endowing this or that foundation with gifts of confiscated estates. “It is not always that you will have a Ferdinand.” Still other lands reverted to the state. What was left the emperor magnanimously distributed among those of his favorites whose military prowess in the rebellion entitled them to some special recognition or compensation. Albrecht, Count of Wallenstein or Waldstein, at one time a Generalissimo of Ferdinand’s army against Gustavus Adolphus, was able to “purchase” sixty confiscated estates of an enormous value.
Struve has remarked that of all the nobles in the world those in the Hapsburg Monarchy had probably the least reason to boast of their ancestry. This is especially true of the nobility whose advent into Bohemia antedates the first half of the seventeenth century. From the events here related began the rise in Bohemia of such families as Buquoy, Clary de Riva, Aldringen, Trautmansdorff, Metternich, Marradas, Verduga, Colloredo, Piccolomini, Wallis, Gallas, Millesimo, Liechtenstein, Goltz, Villani, Defours, Huerta, Vasques—names indicating Spanish, Italian, German, and Walloon birth. These aliens, enriched by property taken away from Bohemian nobility, surrounded themselves with foreign officials, who treated the natives with the scorn and insolence of victors. Their châteaux formed in many cases the nucleus of German settlements which later threatened to overwhelm the nation. Some of these “islands,” or settlements, which were situated farther inland, were in time absorbed by the native population. But not so with the colonies on the border. These latter not only preserved the lingual and national characteristics of the owners, but they even contrived to Germanize the home element that came into contact with them. It was during this calamitous period that the Germans made the greatest inroads upon Bohemian national territory.
Prior to the Thirty Years’ War Bohemia was overwhelmingly Protestant,[5] but Ferdinand determined that in his empire there should be “unity of faith and tongue.” A unity of faith he and his successors have achieved, but it has been denied to the Hapsburgs—much as they have tried to achieve it—the unity of language.
In 1620 Jesuit fathers were invited to come to Bohemia and to take charge of the once renowned University of Prague and of the provincial schools. “The Jesuits buried the spirit of the Bohemian nation for centuries.” This is the severe judgment of no less a person than V. V. Tomek, the noted historian. Accompanied by Liechtenstein’s dragoons these ecclesiastics went from town to town, searched libraries, carried off books written in Bohemian and burned them whether they were “tainted” or not. Sometimes the books were privately thrown in the flames in the houses where they had been seized; at other times they were brought to the market-place or to the public gallows and there publicly burned. The Jesuits were indefatigable in their search for heretical literature, ransacking houses from cellar to garret, opening every closet and chest, prying into the very dog kennels and pig-sties. People hid their most precious books from the ferreting eyes of the inquisitioners in baking ovens, cellars, and caves. There are cases on record of rare Bohemian volumes having been saved from destruction by being hidden under manure piles.
One zealot, Koniáš by name, boasted that he had burned or otherwise mutilated 60,000 Bohemian volumes. According to him “all Bohemian books printed between the years 1414 and 1620, treating of religious subjects, were generally dangerous and suspicious.” From their seat in the Clementinum (Prague University) they presided over the intellectual life of the country; that is to say, they wholly suppressed it. In order to more systematically supervise the work, a censor was appointed by them for each of the three lands,—Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia,—and it was the duty of this censor to see to it that no books were published or reprinted that did not meet the approval of the general of the order. Easy was the labor of the censor, for in Moravia, for instance, only one printer was fortunate enough to secure a license. In Bohemia they set up the so-called University Printing Office. Besides this only five or six other establishments were licensed to print books. In a few decades these zealots destroyed Bohemian literature altogether. The almanacs, tracts, hymnals, and prayer books that issued from their printing presses could not be dignified by the term literature. Count Lützow, in his “History of Bohemian Literature,” frankly admits that, with few exceptions, all the men who, during the last years of Bohemian independence, were most prominent in literature and politics belonged to the Bohemian Church. Living in exile in foreign countries, there was no one left at home to resume their tasks.
Ferdinand began his anti-reformation crusade in earnest in 1621. In December of that year he issued a patent by virtue of which about one thousand teachers and ministers of the gospel of the Bohemian Church were forced to leave the country. The Lutherans did not come under this ban, inasmuch as the emperor was anxious to please his ally, the Elector of Saxony, who pleaded clemency for his co-religionists. In 1624 seven patents were promulgated. Some of these were directed against the laity, which, till then, had escaped the wrath of the conqueror. It ordered the expulsion from trade guilds of all those who could not agree with the emperor in matters of faith. Discriminatory measures against nonconformist merchants and traders went into effect, which quickly resulted in their ruin. Another patent, bearing date July 31, 1627, was more severe than those preceding it. By it dissenters of both sexes and irrespective of rank were ordered to renounce their faith within six months, or failing to do so, leave the country. The operation of this patent extended to Moravia, but not to Silesia and Lusatia. The two latter-named provinces had been spared because of a promise given by the emperor to the Elector of Saxony.
So severely did the country suffer by forced expatriation, as a result of these edicts, that Ferdinand saw himself compelled to issue other patents to check it. In the hope of conciliating he remitted fines in certain cases, discontinued suits for treason, and made restitution of confiscated property. In some cases he extended the time within which heretics could become reconciled with the church, but the clemency was extended too late, for while some individuals yielded to the formidable pressure, the great mass of nonconformists, comprising the very flower of the nation, were determined rather to lose their property and leave the fatherland than to renounce that which they held most sacred.
Count Slavata, who himself took no inconsiderable part in this terrible drama of anti-reformation, and who, owing to his religious convictions, cannot be accused of partiality, is authority for the statement that about 36,000 families, including 185 houses of nobility (some of these houses numbered as many as 50 persons each), statesmen, distinguished authors, professors, preachers,—spurning to accept the emperor’s terms, went into exile.
In 1627 Ferdinand promulgated what he designated the “Amended Statute.” The “amendment” really consisted in the abolishment of those ancient rights and liberties of the land which were incompatible with autocratic powers.
Under the “Amended Statute” the kingdom, heretofore free to elect its sovereign, was declared to be an hereditary possession, both in the male and female line, of the Hapsburg family. The three estates—lords, knights, and the cities—which till then constituted the legislative branch of the government, were augmented by a fourth unit, the clergy. The fourth estate was destined to exercise, as subsequent events have shown, the greatest influence on the affairs of the government. The Diet at Prague was divested practically of all its power and initiative; from now on its sole function was to levy and collect taxes. And because the king had invited to the country so many alien nobles (or commoners later ennobled) who were ignorant of the language of the land, the amended statute provided that henceforth the German language should enjoy equal rights with the Bohemian. A disastrous blow to the unity of the Bohemian Crown was further dealt by the annulment of the right of the estates in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia to meet at a General Assembly for the purpose of deliberating on matters common to the crown. By this clever stroke the emperor tore asunder the ancient ties of the kingdom. He rightly reasoned that by isolating each of the integral parts of the kingdom he could easier hope to hold in leash the whole of it.
In time the administration of the Bohemian Crown was entrusted to an executive who received the title of Chancellor, and when the kings no longer resided in Prague, having taken up a permanent abode in Vienna, the Chancellory was removed thither, ostensibly on the ground that the Chancellor was required to be near the person of the sovereign. In reality, however, the transfer was a part of a preconceived plan to make Vienna the centre of the empire, from which the Hapsburg “provinces” were to be ruled. Under one pretext or another the Chancellory was being gradually shorn of its powers, until Maria Theresa (1740-1780) abolished it altogether. Henceforth even purely local matters were administered from Vienna direct, and the officials began to style the once proud kingdom a “province of Austria.”
During the Thirty Years’ War thousands of villages were destroyed by fire and many of them have never been rebuilt. The population, which before the war was estimated at 3,000,000, was reduced by fire, sword, and pestilence to about 800,000. Fields lay fallow for years for lack of workers to cultivate them. Of the 151,000 farms before the war hardly 50,000 remained. Native nobility was reduced to beggary by the confiscation of their estates, and the peasantry that survived was reduced by alien lords to a degrading condition of serfdom. Between 1621 and 1630 400 Prague citizens went into exile. The Nové Město (one of the Prague quarters) alone had at one time 500 vacant houses. The town of Žatec, which in 1618 had 460 citizens, counted ten years later 205 of them. In Kutná Hora, of a total of 600 houses, 200 remained without owners or tenants. The population of the city of Olomouc in Moravia, by 1640, was reduced from 30,000 to 1,670. Wherever the armies marched nothing was seen but waste and ruins. According to notes taken by Swedish soldiers, 138 cities and 2,171 villages were totally ravaged by fire. The textile industry, which had been the source of the wealth of the country, was almost wholly destroyed by the war.
The defeat at White Mountain could not have been productive of such disastrous consequences had it not been for the fact that the nobles were the standard-bearers of Bohemian nationalism and the sole representatives of the nation’s culture and traditions. The peasantry in those days and for a long time afterward was yet helplessly dependent on the aristocracy.
Bohemian Huguenots were scattered over every land in Central Europe, most of them seeking refuge in nearby Saxony, Silesia, Hungary, and Poland. Many emigrated to more distant lands, such as Sweden, serving in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, Russia, Holland, England. A few of the more adventurous spirits wandered off with the English and the Dutch to America. One of them, Augustine Herman, a noted figure among the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, made an attempt to establish a colony of compatriots on a grant of land that he had received from Lord Baltimore and which he named in honor of his native land, Bohemia Manor, a place famous in early Maryland history. Numerous exiles settled in the first half of the seventeenth century in Virginia. In the beginning the exiles hoped to be permitted to return home, but the terms of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) made such a return definitely impossible. They repeatedly called for help. Oliver Cromwell, it is said, had a project under consideration whereby Bohemian exiles were to be settled in Ireland. John Amos Comenius, the bishop of the Bohemian Church, a distinguished educator, himself an exile living in Holland, presented the history of his church to King Charles II. of England in 1660, with a stirring account of its suffering.
Suspecting that the dissenters were yet unsuppressed, the government caused other patents to be issued, one of which, published in 1650, imposed severe penalties such as the billeting of troops, banishment from the country, confiscation of property and, in extreme cases, death. A patent dated April 9th of that year required that within six weeks all parishes should instal conformist clergy or close. Under Josef I. (1705-1711), and again under Charles VI. (1711-1740), the work of anti-reformation was renewed with increased severity. Loyal subjects were enjoined under pain of death from harboring or aiding heretic teachers or ministers, the reading and smuggling into the country or otherwise circulating Bohemian books on the prohibited list. Other patents followed in 1721, 1722, 1723, 1724, 1725, 1726, with the result that non-Catholics who still secretly clung to the forbidden faith emigrated to Saxony and Prussia, where they sought the protection of the rulers of those countries. The suffering of the unfortunates was somewhat, though not wholly, relieved when the German princes, assembled in the Diet at Regensburg in 1735, sent a strong appeal to the Austrian Emperor to treat his subjects with more toleration. When the Edict of Toleration was issued in 1781, permitting free worship, there still remained in Bohemia about 100,000 Protestants.[6] Of the refugees who fled to Germany in the first quarter of the eighteenth century many found their way with the Herrnhuters, or Moravians, as they are called in the United States, to Georgia, and others to Pennsylvania, where they established, in 1741, the flourishing town of Bethlehem, now the recognized centre of the Moravian Church in the United States.[7]