Page:Namier The case of Bohemia (1917).pdf/10

 the ancestor of Pan-German “Mittel-Europa.” The supremacy of the Empire was put to the proof, but finally the small, isolated Czech nation had to pay the penalty of its daring. It was vanquished. Two centuries went by and once more it took up arms against Catholicism in Church and State. In 1618 the Czechs renounced their allegiance to the Hapsburg Emperor, the embodiment of the new World Empire, and declared their national independence. It was not after all by conquest that they had come under the House of Austria in 1526, but by an agreement, ever since disregarded by the Hapsburgs. The Czechs now summoned to their throne a prince who was a son-in-law to the King of England, hoping that England, the enemy of Hapsburg Spain and Papal Rome, would help those who raised the banner of revolt within the camp of her foes. But James I., with an insular aloofness, a pharisaic honesty and a political blindness not yet altogether extinct in these islands, was busy studying the constitution of Bohemia, and the rights and wrongs of the case, whilst the rebels were succumbing in the desperate, unequal battle on the White Mountain. Never has so great a disaster befallen any other civilised nation. Execution and banishment swept away its upper classes, its wealth and education. Nothing remained but a peasant people as indestructible as the soil, and as passive.

Again two centuries went by. Time, unmea-