Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/86

 curred. Doubtless there was in the court an earnest pondering as to the course to be pursued. What views were brought forward, and how these differed, is not known. We know only that the Emperor’s decision was formulated by Khlesl and sent as early as the 21st of March. Matthias declared that he would not suffer another meeting of the Protestant Diet; that his forbearance was exhausted, and that he would answer their menacing fire by summoning the movers of these proceedings to trial. This paper, which threatened with severe processes the asserters of religious liberty, caused great bitterness of feeling in Bohemia, and called down thousand-fold curses upon the heads of its authors. It was maintained that it was prepared by the Regents and only sent to the Emperor for his signature; but this was an error. The real author of the imperial paper was Cardinal Khlesl, who deemed this an advertiscment of the energetic language which was to be employed, and, as he expressed in a letter regarding certain secret agents, he deemed it proper that the Emperor should act, not sneakingly, “like a fox,” but with the “open violence of a lion.”

When the imperial paper reached Prague, the Defensors who were in the capital were requested to appear before the Regents in the chancery office, that they might learn its contents and act accordingly. They came and retired, promising an early answer, which indeed they returned in three days; it was, in effect, that it was impossible for them to conform to the Emperor’s command, since they had fixed, in pursuance of a resolution of the March meeting of the Protestant Diet, the 21st of May for the reassembling of the same, and could not reverse this action. The measures of the government against the Protestants were not exhausted by the threats and