Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/22



All we know for certain about the ancestry of Augustine Herrman is that he was born in the city of Prague, the beautiful capital the ancient kingdom of Bohemia, and that his parents were natives of that city. H. A. Rattermann, without citing the authority for his statement, contends that Herrman’s father, “Augustine Ephraim Herrman was a prominent citizen of Prague and a member of the City Council, who kept a store at the Coal Market (a square in Prague) of the Old Town. His mother Beatrix was the daughter of a patrician. Kasper Redel by name, of whom nothing else is known except that he affiliated with the rebellious Estates which met in the Collegium Carolinum (Charles University) May 10–20, 1618. The father, too, was an ardent partisan of the so-called Sub-Utraque (Church of the Hussites believing in and practicing communion in both kinds, that is, bread and wine), he having joined in a Memorial Protest to the Emperor, thereby falling under the ruler’s Patent (of expulsion).”

Mr. Thomas Čapek has spent many years investigating from the original Czech sources the question of Herrman’s antecedents. Quoting Dr. Miloš Lier, assistant archivist of the Central Library of the city of Prague who aided him in his researches, Mr. Čapek writes, “If Augustin Ephraim Herrman