Bohemia, from the earliest times to the fall of national independence in 1620 / With a short summary of later events

by C. Edmund Maurice

When, then, the Lutherans demanded that the Bohemian Brothers should accept the Augsburg Confession, and practically consent to absorption in the Lutheran body, Blahoslav and his friends resolved to offer a steady resistance to this proposal. Unfortunately, Blahoslav was forced to encounter, in this controversy, the most distinguished member of his own community. John Augusta, after his release from prison, had been welcomed back to his friends by the main body of the Brotherhood; but he soon found that the power which he desired to exercise over them was still resisted and resented. He proposed that, instead of the free exercise of preaching in the Brotherhood, certain definite parts of the gospel should be chosen for exposition each Sunday in the year; and he himself drew up a plan on which these discourses should be founded. Some of the Brothers objected that the doctrines suggested in his book were not altogether those held by the Brothers; while, no doubt, a still larger number resented the restrictions which such an arrangement would impose on the preachers. Irritated at the general opposition offered to his proposals, Augusta came to the conclusion that the Brotherhood was in a radically unsatisfactory condition; and he threw himself into the movement for union with the Lutherans, as a means of reform. So bitter was the opposition which he roused by this conduct, that he became entirely separated from the rest of the Brotherhood; and, when he died in 1572, his death passed almost unnoticed by those for whom he had done and suffered so much.

In the meantime Maximilian was endeavouring to take up a neutral position in this controversy. Personally in sympathy with the Brothers, but afraid of offending Catholics and Lutherans, he continually assured all parties that he was unable to assent to any legal sanction for religious liberty, since he had bound himself to oppose novelties; but that, if they would only settle their differences between themselves, nobody would interfere with the performance of their religion. Even this statement was more definite and consistent than his actual practice; for, when the Catholic or Utraquist priests applied to him for powers to suppress novelties or heresies, he assented to their proposals, though, when either Brothers or Lutherans complained to him, he assured them of his personal sympathy for them, and his desire to leave them untouched.

His great hope for the solution of these difficulties seems to have lain in some scheme of union among Protestants. If only the Lutheran sects, Bohemian Brothers, and Calvinists would give up their quarrels with one another, religious toleration would become such an easy affair. He therefore sympathised particularly with the new proposal, which was gradually shaping itself in the discussions between the Lutherans and the Brothers. This was a plan for a new Bohemian creed, to be drawn up at a combined meeting of the various sects. The Brothers looked upon this movement with great suspicion. They saw in it an attempt of the Lutherans to secure the acceptance of the Augsburg Confession by indirect means; and they noted their persistent attempts to exclude the Brothers from those Assemblies where ecclesiastical questions were discussed. Nevertheless, when Maximilian, on his return to Bohemia in 1575, consented to preside at the Assembly in which this new creed was to be proposed, the Brothers were willing to take part in the discussion. Doctor Crato, Maximilian’s physician, secretly urged the Brothers to stand firm, assuring them that the Emperor was really in sympathy with them. Encouraged by this hint, they not only resisted a motion for the acceptance of the Augsburg Confession, but they even objected to the appointment of a committee for the preparation of formulæ which were to unite all parties.

The committee was, nevertheless, appointed, and its actions soon justified the fears of the Brothers. In the introduction to the proposed creed, the committee pronounced an anathema against a number of heretics, and, amongst others, against all Calvinists. Now many of the Brothers had embraced Calvinistic doctrines; and their friendship with the champions of those doctrines had been strengthened by motives, both of personal resentment and of moral sympathy. The treatment of the exiled Brothers by the Lutherans of Prussia had repelled the Brotherhood generally from the creed of their unfriendly hosts; while the strict moral discipline maintained in the Calvinistic University of Heidelberg was more attractive to the followers of Peter of Chelc̆ic than the growing laxity of Wittenberg. They therefore offered a successful opposition to that sweeping condemnation of Calvinism to which the Lutherans desired to commit them. But this was, after all, but a minor point in the objections of the Brothers to the proposed creed. Apart from every detail, the proposal to surrender their own Confession in favour of any new form of words whatsoever, was wholly inconsistent with the position which they desired to maintain. They therefore offered such steady resistance to the proposed Confession, that they at last induced the Lutherans to consent to a petition to the King and the Assembly asking them to recognise each sect as a separate organisation. This result, however, was not reached till the controversy had become so fierce that the rival theologians came to blows in the streets.

Maximilian was heartily disgusted with the whole proceeding. He saw his hope of union among the Bohemian Protestants annihilated. He felt that he had injured his position with the Catholics by the concessions which he had already made; and he was further irritated that the Assembly should waste its time in these theological discussions, when he was wanting it to consider the acceptance of his son Rudolf as the future king of Bohemia, and to vote money for the Turkish war. He laid the chief blame of these failures upon the Brothers, who had resisted the new Confession, and on the towns, which had always made difficulties about the Turkish vote; and he sent down orders to the governors to suppress the meetings of the Brotherhood, and to forbid the towns to introduce any novelties. He even went so far as to order prosecutions of various Brothers for having attended meetings forbidden by the law; but, before these prosecutions could be carried out, this new policy was suddenly cut short by the death of Maximilian in 1576.

Few kings had more thoroughly disappointed the expectations formed of them than Maximilian II. had done; but, in a different way, his son Rudolf was to disappoint the hopes of the Catholics as completely as his father had done those of the Protestants. Brought up in Spain, and believed to be a strict Catholic in convictions, shy and repellent in manner, he seemed exactly the man to revive the reactionary policy of his grandfather. But in Rudolf, as in the majority of men, temperament and taste had a greater influence over his actions than either religious or political convictions. The same feelings which made him so repellent in general intercourse, led him also to shrink from the burdens of public life; and his fondness for art and science led him in the earlier part of his reign to leave politics to men of more active character. The interest, therefore, of this part of Rudolf’s reign, so far as his own influence is concerned, centres rather in the revival of literature and art, than in political or religious controversy. This revival was of a varied character, for it included not only poetry and history, but every kind of art and science. Carving, statuary, and mosaic work were brought to great perfection: while the presence of Tycho Brahe at Court shows the interest which Rudolf always maintained in astronomical science. The preference of the new Emperor for Prague as a place of residence naturally attracted all this brilliant company to the Bohemian Court; and it seemed as if, in this respect, the age of Charles IV. were to return.

At the same time, it should be noted that this revival, though generally connected with the name of Rudolf, had been already growing since the accession of Ferdinand. The greater security for life and property, which was gradually introduced by the House of Austria, had given more opportunity for quiet study than had been possible in the turbulent Bohemia of the fifteenth century; while the greater intercourse with foreign countries, which the renewed connection with the Empire had produced, naturally attracted a large number of foreign celebrities to the Court of Prague.

The reign of Ferdinand had been marked by the works of two most picturesque though untrustworthy historians—Wenceslaus Hajek of Libocany, and Dubravsky, better known as Dubravius, the Bishop of Olmütz; while Matthæus Collinus of Choterina called out an interest in the study of the great Greek and Latin authors, who had till then been rather neglected. The interest felt by Maximilian and Rudolf in the revival of poetry was much keener than that of Ferdinand; though they both, doubtless, stunted more than one poetical intellect by the absurd practice of turning poets into nobles, and crowning them as Court Laureates. A more curious result of this revival, considering the origin and sympathies of the ruling House, was the steady development of the Bohemian language during this period. Dictionaries and other scientific works were produced; and Daniel Adam, who was Professor of History at Prague in the time of Maximilian, was said to have done much to bring the language to great perfection. Nor did Maximilian and Rudolf fail to encourage scientific discovery. Thaddæus Hajek, who had studied, not only at Prague, but also at Vienna and Bologna, actually discovered a new star in 1572; and he showed himself so far in advance of his age, that he used his learning to expose and ridicule the astrological speculations which were then so popular.

It might be expected, perhaps, that all this stirring of thought and life would be favourable to the revival of civic and religious liberty; and some of the men who were eminent in the literature and art of the time did take an active part in the struggles at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But a power had arisen in Bohemia, which continued steadily to gain ground during the reign of Rudolf, that could turn even literature and art into the cause of opposition to reform. This was the Order of the Jesuits, which, since the time of Ferdinand, had been steadily gaining ground in Bohemia. They eagerly seized upon the literary and artistic revival, and made use of it for their own purposes. George Bartold Pontanus, one of the poets who were crowned by Rudolf, fell into the hands of the Jesuits, and became one of their most eloquent preachers. William of Rosenberg, who was a great patron of the Order, founded an institution for poor scholars, which must have greatly forwarded the Catholic reaction. Even students of languages, and men engaged in foreign discoveries, were made use of by the Order. Moreover their great power then, as ever, was through the education of children. Many of these came from the poorest ranks, and were educated gratuitously by the Jesuits; and, through them, an influence was prepared which it was very difficult to resist. But the Jesuits were intended by Ignatius Loyola to be, before everything, a fighting body; and, as they looked round on the forces opposed to them in Bohemia, they speedily marked the Bohemian Brotherhood as the foemen most worthy of their steel.

The Utraquists, as already mentioned, had been reduced almost to impotence in the time of Ferdinand. The Lutherans, divided among themselves, weak in organisation, and without any hold on the feeling of Bohemia, were almost equally an object of contempt to the Jesuits; but in the Brotherhood they saw a power of organisation, a capacity for intense self-devotion, and great educational faculties, which made them dangerous rivals even to the followers of Loyola. Just at this time the Brothers had taken a step which, while infinitely to their own credit, had yet raised up against them enemies whom the Jesuits could easily call in as their allies. The Brotherhood, as already hinted, had found, even more than most religious communities, a perpetual difficulty in solving that painful problem of the proper relation of the Church to the World; for, while they would never consent to drift tamely into the conventional morality of a comfortable and generally accepted Church, they were yet continually forced to make concessions to the prejudices of the world around them, which endangered the spiritual life of their community. Their concessions in the matter of war had, as we have seen, driven from their ranks some of the stricter members of the Society at a very early stage of their history; and a difficulty which was an even greater vexation to the minds of the Brothers, was the relation between the Community and the nobles.