Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/92

 In considering the kind of death to be inflicted, Ulrich Kinský advised that the Regents be stabbed, in the royal chancery, and Thurn assented to this proposition; but it failed of general concurrence, and it was decided to throw them out of the windows, which choice was perhaps influenced by the remembrance that in Bohemia throwing out of the window has a kind of historical justification, since in this manner the exasperation of the multitude against persons disliked had repeatedly vented itself. It is thus evident why Thurn and the Estates wished to appear at the castle armed.

Thurn was, no doubt, extremely cautious in the choice of his fellow-conspirators; he could not, however, provide against the city’s being filled with mysterious rumors of the approach of an extraordinary event. These rumors reached the ears of the Regents, in a form, however, which amounted only to a vague warning, to which the persons whom it most concerned did not attach the deserved importance. Michna, the detested clerk of the chancery, was the only one who rightly judged his antagonists. Well aware of the measure of resentment which he deserved, he fled before the close of Tuesday, the 22d of May, on his way to Vienna, and by this precaution caused his antagonists not their last, but still their bitterest, mortification.

So dawned May 23d, the day of Bohemia’s doom, “the beginning and the cause of all the woe that followed,” thus ran, in after days, the fruitless lament of Bohemian exiles. The members of the Protestant Diet gathered in the Carolinum and moved thence towards the castle to