Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/42

 ment to take its own measures for securing the nationality and national language. But he supported every aggression on the part of the Romish priesthood and Jesuits against the Utraquists and others, and finally obtained the coronation of Ferdinand of Styria, in 1607, as his successor in Bohemia. Soon afterwards the Bohemian liberties were so plainly infringed by the Romish clergy, and justice so flatly refused by the king, that on May 23, 1618, his two principal councillors, Martinitz and Slawata, were thrown out of the window by the infuriated Utraquist Parliament, which, three days afterwards, nominated thirty directors with full powers, and soon afterwards issued an edict banishing, within fourteen days, the “poisonous order,” the “hypocritical, dangerous, and turbulent sect of the Jesuits,” from the kingdom. After several victories had been gained by the Bohemians over the imperial forces, and negotiations been begun, which promised to lead to a favourable issue, Mathias died, on March 20, 1619.

Ferdinand had already extirpated Lutheranism out of Styria, where it had been professed by the majority of the people; the Bohemians, therefore, refused to recognize him as their king, on the plea that he had already broken his coronation oath. Ferdinand, however, was elected emperor by the German electors, in spite of the efforts of some of the Protestant princes. Frederic, the Elector of the Palatinate, was chosen king, and crowned at Prague with his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of James I. of England, by the administrator of the Utraquist Consistory, and in the course of the winter received the homage of the Estates of Moravia. Frederic and his religious advisers, being strong Calvinists, soon came into collision with the prejudices of the Utraquists, who were still more nearly allied to the Catholics than the Lutherans, and in the excess of their zeal went so far as