Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/82

 heroic personage, except that which he himself deplored on his death-bed, that he had not sufficiently cultivated the study of literature.’

Peter of Rosenberg died in 1611, only seven years before the general conflagration broke out which Christian of Anhalt and he had foreseen, and in view of which they had formed deep-laid plans. It is only since the works of Gindely (to whom I shall refer in my next lecture) have appeared that it has become obvious how inevitable the Bohemian rising of 1618 was. Through the indefatigable and not always scrupulous energy of the Jesuits, a part of the Bohemian nobility not as yet a considerable one, but it included some of the greatest nobles had been converted to the Church of Rome. The outspoken hostility of these men to the national Church irritated the large majority of the Bohemian people who belonged to it. On the other hand, many Protestants no doubt thought it better to precipitate the inevitable conflict, before the energy of the Jesuits had further thinned the nationalist ranks. A temporary lull was indeed the result of the document signed in 1609 by King Rudolph, which is known in history as the ‘Letter of Majesty,’ and which guaranteed the rights and liberties of the Protestants, as all those who did not conform with the Church of Rome were now called. On the same day another agreement was signed by the Romanist and Protestant members of the Diet, in which they guaranteed full religious liberty to each other. Unfortunately, in December, 1617, the Romanists violated this agreement.