Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/51

 croachments which had long been felt. The new faith, at the highest point of its success, had, as has been roughly estimated, won about ninety per cent. of the population of the Empire. Force and artful measures on one side, and inaction on the other, had taken many of these back to the Catholic Church. The parties to this Union, finally incited by the forced conversion of the Protestant imperial city of Donauwerth, brought this organization into life, with the Count Palatine for its nominal head, though its most active member was Christian, of Anhalt. But the Protestants were not all in it, and did not come strongly to the aid of the Bohemian insurrection, where it might have defeated the Emperor’s first movement and prevented Ferdinand II. from taking possession of the thrones of Bohemia, Hungary, and the Empire.

In short, let the reader keep steadily in mind that the Emperor was ceremonial head of the Imperial Diet, and also its chief executive. He was generally, also, a local prince, and had seats in the Diet for his several principalities, as Ferdinand II., for Bohemia and the Austrian duchies, which seats were occupied by his deputies. The princes were supreme in their respective territories, and appeared in the Diet for themselves, and not for their subjects, unless they had given their power away, as in the religious peace of 1552 and 1555. In this peace, whatever good it might have done at the time, were sown the seeds of the Thirty Years’ War. Some of its provisions were so absurdly artificial, and so in contravention of the natural course of the Reformation and of all progress, that the Protestant sovereigns could scarcely be expected to observe them. They were an attempt to crystallize the Reformation. This could not be done