Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  The Revolt of 1618 and the Battle of the White Mountain

  The intransigent Catholics had refused to sign any document that extended equal privileges to all Christian confessions, and when Matthias, the new king of Bohemia, moved the imperial and royal court back to Vienna after Rudolf’s death, the Prague Catholics, firmly supported by the Spanish party in Vienna and the new Prague archbishop, Johannes Lohelius, began to increase pressure on the Protestants. Inevitably, they provoked a radical group among the Bohemian Estates to think of violent solutions, all other means failing. It was almost a civil war by attrition. Protestants were deprived of traditional offices, the self-rule of the Prague towns was diminished by decree, and tempers ran especially high when two newly built Protestant churches, erected on land belonging to a Benedictine monastery and the archbishop, were razed. The Catholics thought the Protestants were wrong to build their chapels on ecclesiastical ground, while the Protestants, in turn, assumed that all church lands belonged, ultimately, to the king (a difficult question never elucidated by earlier documents). The non-Catholic Estates immediately convened a meeting at the Carolinum to address their grievances to the king, yet a group of radicals, among them Václav Budova, of the Czech Brethren, and the impetuous Count Matthias Thum, met at the town house of Jan Smiický of Smiice in the Minor Town to plan the murder of the royal administrator at Hradany Castle. When the members of the Estates learned of the king’s uncompromising response to the Bohemian grievances, they decided to march to the castle to confront the royal administrators whom they thought responsible for the condescending tone of the king’s answer. It was just the occasion for which the radical conspirators had waited.

  The towns were restive when, on the morning of May 23, 1618, the members of the Estates went to the castle and, exactly as the radical group had planned, seized the staircase and the offices of the royal administrators and their staff. Six of the officials, sensing something in the air, had left for Vienna on sudden business, and the angry Protestant representatives confronted Adam of Sternberg, Dpold of Lobkovic, Vilém Slavata of Chlum, and Jaroslav of Martinic, who tried to explain that they were not personally responsible for the king’s answer. (True, the document had been mainly composed by Melchior Cardinal Khlesl, the éminence grise of Matthias’s court.) The radicals did not want to listen to these protestations, but at least they had the good sense to spare two of the moderate royal officials, who were shoved into an adjacent chamber and let go. That left Martinic and Slavata, who had been among the most active of the intransigent Catholics for twenty years. An exchange of views, if there ever was one, had long ceased; Count Thurn, the military man, demanded (probably in German) action not speeches, and many hands seized Slavata and Martinic and threw them out of the window. Slavata, calling for the presence of his father confessor, clung to the window until somebody hit him on the hand with a dagger hilt and he fell out too; when the conspirators noticed that Johannes Fabricius, a secretary, quietly wanted to leave the room, they seized him for good measure and tossed him out also. A few random pistol shots were fired after them, but fortunately all three survived the fall; the Protestants claimed that this was because they fell on a dunghill, while the Catholics argued that the Virgin Mary had miraculously spread out her celestial mantle to break their fall. Fabricius hobbled away and escaped; he was later ennobled by the emperor and awarded the title of “von Hohenfall” (of High Fall). Slavata, who badly hurt his head, made his way to the house of the imperial chancellor and, personally protected by the chancellor’s courageous wife, Polyxena of Lobkovic, stayed there until his wound had healed. When the news about the defenestration reached the towns, people (much aware of the Hussite precedents) went wild, ransacking and setting fire to churches and monasteries once again; Franciscan monks were killed; and, as usual, the mob invaded the Jewish Town to rob and pillage. People felt that something important had happened, and they were not wrong.

  The Estates elected thirty directors, ten each for barons, knights, and towns, and, though these were headed by radicals, the majority was moderate and believed that the new situation should be handled by old-fashioned negotiations (after all, in the summer of 1617 the Estates had accepted Archduke Ferdinand as king of Bohemia without much resistance). In Vienna, Emperor Matthias himself, hesitant as ever, wanted to give negotiations a try, while the Spanish party and Ferdinand wanted to crush any Protestant opposition without mercy. At the same time, both Prague and Vienna began to mobilize international support and consolidate the first army corps clashing in southern Bohemia; Count Thurn operated near Vienna but had to withdraw again.

  When Matthias died in 1619, he was succeeded on the imperial throne by Ferdinand, and Catholics and Protestants prepared for an international conflict: the Austrian Hapsburgs sought the support of Spain, Bavaria, Saxony, Poland, and Tuscany, while the Prague Estates, who rightly believed they could not go it alone, discussed financial and military help from Holland, England, Venice, and the Italian Piedmont; though their inexperienced diplomats were astonishingly skillful, they also had many illusions, and few people wanted to fight, or die, for Prague In the summer of 1619 the Bohemian Estates (joined by the Protestant Estates of Lower and Upper Austria) constituted a confederation of all the enemies of Hapsburg in the crown lands, expelled the Jesuits from Prague “for all time,” and confiscated Catholic property to pay for the war. Ferdinand was formally dethroned, and the Estates offered the elected crown of the lands to Friedrich, Calvinist prince-elector of the Palatinate, a young and prominent German Protestant ruler married to Elizabeth, daughter of King James I of England; it was clear that the choice was dictated by the hope for international support.

  Friedrich and Elizabeth would have made an exemplary and decorative royal couple at the best of times, but not at the beginning of a war that was to devastate Europe for thirty years. He was twenty-three years old when he accepted “the divine call,” as he declared it, to legitimize the revolt of the Bohemian nobles. Well educated by French Calvinists, slim, elegant, serious, and totally green in war or diplomacy, Friedrich lacked energy and judgment; the best one could expect of him, his French educator once remarked, was that he would duly follow honest advice. His wife, Elizabeth (among whose earlier suitors had been the French dauphin and the Swedish crown prince Gustavus Adolphus), did not lack high intelligence and wit—Ferdinard would “make a lousy emperor,” she said—but, constantly pregnant, she was too well bred not to accept happily whatever her husband resolved to do; since they were essentially spoiled children who liked to entertain, to ride, and to hunt, they were at the mercy of events. In late September 1619, they left Friedrich’s residence in Heidelberg with a train of 153 wagons, hundreds of servants, and a thousand soldiers, and were welcomed at the Bohemian border in Latin; they entered jubilant Prague on October 21, 1619, to be crowned king and queen at St. Vitus Cathedral in festive and separate ceremonies.

  While the armies of the Catholic “League” and the Protestant “Union,” mostly made up of mercenaries, began to organize on a large scale, Friedrich and Elizabeth played the royal couple with dedication; they were welcomed by everybody at first, but they were also different and it showed; when they asked the Prague burghers for a personal loan to pay for the army, they were brusquely refused. Friedrich spent his time inspecting his (mostly unpaid) troops and dealing with ambassadors; Elizabeth, celebrated in famous poems by John Donne and Sir Henry Wotton, tried to be nice and yet irritated the Bohemians with her expensive dresses, her outlandish hairdo, and her plunging décolletage. (Her court chaplain, Scultetus, in the meantime, almost caused a popular revolt because he tried to transform St. Vitus Cathedral into a Calvinist chapel.) King and queen conversed in French, did not try to learn the languages of the land, and when in early November 1620 the Catholics were preparing to enter Prague, they left in such an undignified hurry that the queen absentmindedly (her biographers hope) left her youngest baby untended at the castle; and it had to be handed over to her by Baron Christopher Dohn
a, in a bundle, through the windows of the departing coach. They were without a home and a country; after a long pilgrimage via Küstrin and Berlin, they settled in Holland, where Friedrich continued to call himself king of Bohemia (he died in 1632); Elizabeth returned to England only a year before her demise. “A debonair but plain woman,” Samuel Pepys noted when he caught a glimpse of her in London.

  Protestants of the Union and Catholic armies of the League engaged in bloody confrontations in the provinces in the course of the year and circumspectly marched on the Prague region, where they inevitably clashed in a fierce short battle—the saddest day in the Czech tradition (to be compared only with that other melancholy day when, after the Munich conference of 1938, President Eduard Beneš decided not to engage the German armies, and ordered Czechoslovakia’s mobilized soldiers, willing to fight, to go home). On November 8, 1620, the tactical advantage was on the side of the Protestants, with about 21,000 men, who occupied the flat top of a low hill called the White Mountain (now easily reached by tram number 22). The Catholics, about 28,000 strong, had the numerical advantage, but they were below the hill and had to fight upward. Still, the Protestants had arrived on the White Mountain only after long marches, were exhausted by lack of sleep, and failed to prepare entrenchments for their artillery pieces as they should have done. The Union armies, comprising Czechs, Moravians, Austrians, Germans, and Hungarians, were arranged in the “Dutch” manner, considered by military doctrine more flexible: three columns of three lines of mixed infantry and cavalry companies (the king’s guard taking positions in the garden of the Villa Hvzda). The Catholics of the League, an equally international group of Bavarians, Spanish, Walloons, Germans, and French (among them the future philosopher René Descartes), preferred the “Spanish” way, thought to be more stable: four square infantry formations in the middle of their ranks, supported by infantry and cavalry on the side, a strong lateral concentration of Lothringians and Germans facing the right wing of the Protestants, commanded by brave Joachim Schlick.

  The battle started with a probing movement of the Catholics against the Protestant left wing—the imperial general merely wanted to assess the strength of the enemy—but it quickly developed into a fierce fight when the Hungarians turned to run and Thurn’s more experienced men were exposed to a cutting attack. The Protestant counterattack tried to pierce the Spanish center, while the courageous Moravians attacked the Catholic right wing; the League’s Lothringian and German troops, held in reserve, were ordered to intervene. Now the tide turned against the Protestants, and the king’s guard in the Hvzda garden was massacred by Italian troops. Within an hour, more than two thousand soldiers on both sides were dead; while the Moravians and Austrians fought a last rearguard action to save the Protestant cause, their companions tried to reach Prague, and the victorious armies of the Catholic League rested on the field. At Hradany Castle, a nightlong discussion of the war council was held. Count Matthias Thurn and the Austrian Calvinist Georg Erasmus Tschernembl demanded that Prague be defended, but they were turned down, and in the morning the royal couple and the leaders of the revolt packed their bags. The imperial army entered Prague without a shot being fired, and within the day the Protestants formally submitted to Maximilian of Bavaria, who accepted their humiliation in the name of Emperor Ferdinand II.

  Maximilian of Bavaria left after a week, with his long wagon train of loot, and the emperor, disregarding the moderate Prague Catholics and relying on the Spanish party, appointed Karl of Liechtenstein, a convert, as eager to make a profit as he was newly ardent in his religion, to chair the commission charged with prosecuting those responsible for the revolt. The Viennese offices and the Prague commission proceeded quietly and deliberately, knowing only too well who had escaped abroad (in the best NKVD manner, a Colonel Tiefenbach was abducted from Switzerland and executed on Austrian soil) and who believed, naively, that their lives would be spared. The order to arrest people on the commission’s list was given only in late February 1621, and prisoners were meanwhile held at the Hradany White Tower or in the Old Town hall. In order to avoid examination under torture, Martin Frühwein, an articulate magistrate of the Old Town who had written a treatise on the defense of the Estates, committed suicide by jumping to his death from the window, but his body was quartered and the pieces of his corpse exhibited at different town squares, his head and one hand nailed to the gallows. In late spring, the Prague commission made its recommendation to Vienna; it was accepted quickly enough, with a few brutal changes, and the executions of twenty-seven barons, knights, and burghers, old and young, Czech and German, Protestant and (one) Catholic, were set for June 21, 1621.

  The town was full of soldiers, thirty-nine workers had erected a huge scaffold against the wall of the Old Town hall, black cloth was laid out theatrically, and drums were rolling; an eyewitness remarked, “You couldn’t understand your own word or anybody else’s.” The sequence of the executions was by rank. Joachim Andreas Count Schlick was beheaded first (his Lutheran forebears had been among the leaders of the revolt of 1547) and, after him, seventy-four-year-old Václav Budova, patriarch of the Czech Brethren, Kryštof Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice, famous musician at the court of Rudolf II and artillery commander when Count Thurn lay brief siege to Vienna. Among the many knights were eighty-six-year-old Kašpar Kaplín of Sulevice, Bedich of Bílá, Otto of Loos, Bohuslav of Michalovice (whose right hand was cut off before he was beheaded), and the Catholic Diviš ernín of Chudenice, who had made the fateful mistake of opening the gates of Hradany to representatives of the Estates on the morning of the defenestration. There were three German civil servants, Leander Rüpel, of the Palatinate, Georg Hauschild, of the appellate courts, and Dr. Friedrich Georg of Oldenburg. Among the burghers of the Old, New, and other towns, Valentin Kochan was executed because he had raised his voice against Ferdinand at the meeting of the Estates in 1617; Johann Kutnauer, the youngest of the townspeople, was hanged on a beam jutting out of the town hall window. In the case of Jessenius, his majesty the emperor revised the commission’s recommendation—his tongue was cut off (he had negotiated on behalf of the Estates with the Hungarians in Bratislava) and then he was beheaded and quartered, rather than the other way around. Minor offenders were dealt with later: a few burghers publicly whipped, those sentenced to life carted away to Castle Zbiroh, and Mikuláš Diviš for two hours nailed by his tongue to the gallows because he had had the temerity to welcome Friedrich and Elizabeth to Prague at the head of a joyful group of people dressed as Hussite peasants who had made a great deal of noise with their flails, or so Queen Elizabeth thought. The severed heads of twelve were carried in iron baskets to the tower of the stone bridge and exhibited there. Only in 1631, when Saxons briefly occupied Prague (among them the indefatigable Count Thurn), were they taken down and buried at the Týn Church, where they were found in 1766.

  After the executions, confiscations and expropriations went on for two years or more, and substantially changed Prague’s social scene. The emperor gave vast stretches of land, forfeited by Protestant nobles, to his Spanish generals and Austrian advisers (the Eggenbergs were awarded the Rožmberk lands in southern Bohemia), and the new archbishop of Prague and other church dignitaries who demanded restitution of everything the Hussites of old had taken had little reason to be dissatisfied. The imperial commission condemned 680 persons and fifty towns all over Bohemia to loss of property and possessions, and those who were spared outright confiscation and were allowed to sell their belongings were paid in coin that was low in silver—virtually robbed. All non-Catholic clergy had to leave; Lutherans, being protected by the emperor’s Saxon allies, were allowed to stay for a year. In 1622, the Jesuits, who had taken back St. Clement, united the old Carolinum and the Clementinum in a single new university institution and were given supervision of all schools and printing presses in Bohemia; it so happened that Bedfich Bride], chief Jesuit censor, turned out to be the most gifted metaphysical poet of the Baroque Czech tongue. By 1624, the Catholic r
eligion was declared to be the only legal one, with a special commission overseeing forced conversions (six months or else), and a new wave of exiles—German Lutheran burghers and Czech Brethren, among them the philosopher and pedagogue Comenius—left to work, pray, teach, and die abroad: all in all, about 36,000 families. In 1627, the imperial offices issued new administrative rules, the Verneuerte Landesordnung, actually a new constitution, which declared Bohemia to be a land of the Hapsburg Empire ruled by inheritance (not election), in its religious life exclusively Catholic, and yielding to the Estates only those rights that did not clash with the intentions and demands of the Viennese court. The question who, or what, was responsible for the defeat of the revolt of the nobles, was answered as early as 1620 by the sharp-eyed Austrian Tschernembl, who deplored that his brothers in arms the Bohemian nobles had been unwilling to arm the peasants (whom they feared) against the imperial power, to mobilize a levée en masse, in the ancient Hussite way. Palacký, the father of Czech historiography, advanced a similar idea two hundred years later.