XV.
FROM THE DEATH OF FERDINAND I. TO THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION UNDER RUDOLF II.
(1564-1600.)
In describing a struggle between two rival powers in a State, it is extremely difficult to give a correct impression of the exact balance of success on either side at a particular crisis in the controversy; and this difficulty is enormously increased when the struggle is concerned partly with the question of spiritual (and therefore mainly individual) liberty; and partly with the growth of those more material forms of centralisation which check constitutional freedom and local self-government. When we hear of Ferdinand yielding on his deathbed to the prisoner whom he had been trying for so many years to crush into obedience, we feel that the victory lies, in the main, with those spiritual forces which were working against ecclesiastical uniformity. Nor does the resistance of the Moravian Estates seem less important as a victory of constitutional freedom, than the firmness of Augusta as a security for spiritual independence.
But the real importance of such episodes as these lies in the contrast which they offer to the main tendencies of Bohemian history during the sixteenth century; and the proof which they consequently give of the survival of forces which seem elsewhere to be crushed out. For centralisation was, after all, steadily growing in the dominions of Ferdinand; and national life, however it might struggle for existence, was being sapped by arbitrary power.
Nor must we forget that there was one moral consideration which worked on the side of Ferdinand. The terrible danger to which Europe was exposed by the Turkish invader was not really removed until the latter part of the seventeenth century; and even Vienna itself was to be once more endangered, before the barbarian could be induced to settle down peaceably beside his neighbours, and confine himself to the oppression of his Christian subjects. When, therefore, Ferdinand found that the local assemblies of the different provinces grudged him their help in this important struggle, and that even at Prague he had difficulty in obtaining both money and soldiers, it was not unnatural that he should feel a growing indifference to liberties which seemed to him so dangerous to the peace and order of Europe.
So when in 1555 he had summoned representatives from all his dominions to meet at Vienna, to devise a common scheme of action against the Turk, he must have bitterly resented the absence of the Bohemians, who refused to attend an Assembly where they might be swamped by Germans and Hungarians. An even more fatal point of opposition between the National desire for peace and independence, and the Imperial scheme for the defence of Europe, was found in the question of military organisation. The old privilege of the Bohemians, to refuse their services for foreign wars, was continually insisted on by them in opposition to Ferdinand; and he was almost unavoidably compelled to raise armies which should be independent of national sentiment, and to garrison the frontier towns of Moravia with soldiers drawn from all parts of his dominions.
Nor, while he was so successful in his schemes of State centralisation, was Ferdinand wholly worsted in his struggle for ecclesiastical unity. One victory at least he gained; and by a curious irony of fortune, he won it by granting a concession which had once been most ardently desired by the Bohemian leaders, but which had now, by change of circumstances, become worse than useless. Just at the close of the Council of Trent, he succeeded in obtaining from the Pope a formal concession to the Bohemians of their right to grant the Cup to the laity. Thus the old watchword of the Hussite wars, separated from all that had given it life and force, now became a step towards the absorption of the Utraquists by the Catholics. When once this concession was granted, Ferdinand insisted that the Utraquists could no longer refuse to accept the authority of the Roman Catholic Archbishop. From this time forward, Utraquism ceases to be a force in Bohemian history. Their separate Consistory was indeed revived by Maximilian; and from time to time the members of it continued to assert themselves in the religious controversies of the day; but every such effort tended more and more plainly to show that the champions of the old faith were but the impotent and unworthy representatives of traditions of former greatness. With the death of Ferdinand, all these questions enter on a new phase. The strength and weakness of the late king’s ideals were to be put to new tests during the reign of his son.
Maximilian is one of those men who seem to the careful student of history all the more pathetic, because their failures are not of that striking and dramatic kind which at once excite the sympathy of the observer; but are rather gathered from a careful comparison of the objects aimed at with those actually accomplished. Hampered by the continual distrust and the domineering influence of his father, half inclined to the extremer doctrines of Protestantism, and yet never able to shake off the recollection that he was the heir of a Catholic tradition; angry with the Jesuits for their intriguing interference with his affairs, and no less angry with the Protestants for those divisions which prevented a completely artistic settlement of the ecclesiastical question; anxious to recognise the local and other liberties of his Bohemian subjects, but conscious of the difficulties which those liberties placed in the way of the struggle against the Turk, Maximilian was continually drifting backwards and forwards in a way which tended to weaken the system of government which his father had tried to establish, without substituting anything freer or more national in its place.
Nor must we forget that Maximilian had to deal with the same insoluble problem for which Charles IV. had only provided a temporary solution. Ferdinand had reigned for nearly thirty years as King of Bohemia, before he had been forced to assume the burden of the German Empire. Maximilian had to take up both these responsibilities at the same time; and, apart from the enormous intellectual and moral difference between Maximilian of Austria and Charles of Luxemburg, the problem with which the later Emperor had to deal was infinitely more complicated than any which presented itself to the statesmen of the fourteenth century. The difference between Protestant and Catholic was in itself enough to introduce years of division and war into the Empire; but that element of confusion was now trebly increased by the new sects into which Lutheranism had been divided, and by the still keener political divisions between the Lutherans and Calvinists. In Bohemia, again, the same difficulties presented themselves in an even more complicated form; for, while many of the Bohemian Reformers had identified their cause with that of the Lutherans, the old feeling of national distinction was driving many into opposition to the aggressive character of the German movement, and compelling them to seek for a new religious centre which should be neither Papal nor German. As the Utraquists could no longer supply such a centre, the championship of Bohemian feeling rapidly passed to the leaders of the Bohemian Brotherhood. The great defender of the national and distinctive position of the Brotherhood, against the encroachments of the Lutherans, was that Blahoslav who had already become prominent as a negotiator with foreign Protestants, and who was ultimately to become the historian of the Brotherhood. He had already vindicated the specially Bohemian character of the Brotherhood against a critic who had tried to identify them with the Franco-Italian sect of the Waldenses; and so keen had Blahoslav and his friends been in the assertion of their national position, that they had been willing sometimes to speak of themselves as “the remains of the Taborites,” choosing rather to identify their cause with a Bohemian sect so different from them both in spirit and doctrine, than with a French or Italian community, however like them in every respect but race.