Matthias was still apprehensive that the emperor might rally the Catholic forces of Germany, and in union with the pope and the formidable power of the Spanish court, make an attempt to recover his Bohemian throne.  It was manifest that with any energy of character, Rhodolph might combine Catholic Europe, and inundate the plains of Germany with blood.  While it was very important, therefore, that Matthias should do every thing he could to avoid exasperating the Catholics, it was essential to his cause that he should rally around him the sympathies of the Protestants.

The ambassadors of Matthias respectfully announced to the congress the events which had transpired in Bohemia in the transference of the crown, and solicited the support of the congress.  The Protestant princes received this communication with satisfaction, promised their support in case it should be needed, and, conscious of the danger of provoking Rhodolph to any desperate efforts to rouse the Catholics, recommended that he should be treated with brotherly kindness, and, at the same time, watched with a vigilant eye.

Rhodolph, disappointed here, summoned an electoral meeting of the empire, to be held at Nuremburg on the 14th of December, 1711.  He hoped that a majority of the electors would be his friends.  Before this body he presented a very pathetic account of his grievances, delineating in most melancholy colors the sorrows which attend fallen grandeur.  He detailed his privations and necessities, the straits to which he was reduced by poverty, his utter inability to maintain a state befitting the imperial dignity, and implored them, with the eloquence of a Neapolitan mendicant, to grant him a suitable establishment, and not to abandon him, in his old age, to penury and dishonor.

The reply of the electors to the dispirited, degraded, downtrodden old monarch was the unkindest cut of all.  Much as Rhodolph is to be execrated and despised, one can hardly refrain from an emotion of sympathy in view of this new blow which fell upon him.  A deputation sent from the electoral college met him in his palace at Prague.  Mercilessly they recapitulated most of the complaints which the Protestants had brought against him, declined rendering him any pecuniary relief, and requested him to nominate some one to be chosen as his successor on the imperial throne.

“The emperor,” said the delegation in conclusion, “is himself the principal author of his own distresses and misfortunes.  The contempt into which he has fallen and the disgrace which, through him, is reflected upon the empire, is derived from his own indolence and his obstinacy in following perverse counsels.  He might have escaped all these calamities if, instead of resigning himself to corrupt and interested ministers, he had followed the salutary counsels of the electors.”

They closed this overwhelming announcement by demanding the immediate assembling of a diet to elect an emperor to succeed him on the throne of Germany.  Rhodolph, not yet quite sufficiently humiliated to officiate as his own executioner, though he promised to summon a diet, evaded the fulfillment of his promise.  The electors, not disposed to dally with him at all, called the assembly by their own authority to meet on the 31st of May.