The Bohemian Phase

On May 23, 1618, a group of Protestant Bohemian noblemen marched to Prague Castle and threw three Catholic royal governors out of a third-story window. The men landed in a pile of refuse and survived — Catholics claimed angels bore them up; Protestants mocked that they had been saved only by the dung heap. But the act was not comedy. It was a declaration of war.

Bohemia was one of the most religiously diverse territories in Europe. Under the Letter of Majesty of 1609, Bohemian Protestants had won remarkable freedoms: the right to build churches, run schools, and effectively govern themselves. When the aggressively Catholic Ferdinand II became their king in 1617, they knew those freedoms were under threat. The Defenestration was their answer.

The Bohemian estates chose a new king: Frederick V, the young Elector Palatine — a Calvinist prince from the Rhineland who was married to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I of England. Frederick accepted with a confidence his military position did not warrant. He was crowned in Prague in November 1619 and earned the affectionate/mocking nickname 'the Winter King' from his enemies, who suspected correctly that he would not last.

He did not last. On November 8, 1620, the Catholic League army under Count Tilly and the forces of Maximilian of Bavaria crushed the Bohemian Protestant army in less than two hours on the White Mountain, a flat hill outside Prague. Frederick fled the city that same day, never to return. His kingdom had lasted one winter.

What followed was a Catholic reconquest of terrible thoroughness. The leaders of the Bohemian revolt were executed in the Old Town Square in Prague — 27 Protestant noblemen beheaded and their heads displayed on the Charles Bridge. Protestant pastors were expelled. Catholic nobles received the confiscated estates of Protestant rebels at bargain prices — Wallenstein acquired much of his enormous fortune this way. Bohemia's Protestant culture, which had flourished for two centuries, was systematically destroyed in a generation.

Meanwhile, Tilly's Catholic League army swept through the other Protestant territories of Germany. The Palatinate — Frederick's home territory — was occupied and divided between Spain and Bavaria. By 1625, the Protestant cause in Germany appeared to be on the verge of total collapse. The Emperor seemed poised to reverse the entire Reformation by force.