The king, having thus struck all the discontented with terror, summoned a diet to meet in his palace at Prague.  They met the 22d of August, 1547.  A vast assemblage was convened, as no one who was summoned dared to stay away.  The king, wishing to give an intimation to the diet of what they were to expect should they oppose his wishes, commenced the session by publicly hanging four of the most illustrious of his captives.  One of these, high judge of the kingdom, was in the seventieth year of his age.  The Bloody Diet, as it has since been called, was opened, and Ferdinand found all as pliant as he could wish.  The royal discipline had effected wonders.  The slightest intimation of Ferdinand was accepted with eagerness.

The execrable tyrant wished to impress the whole kingdom with a salutary dread of incurring his paternal displeasure.  He brought out the forty prisoners who still remained in their dungeons.  Eight of the most distinguished men of the kingdom were led to three of the principal cities, in each of which, in the public square, they were ignominiously and cruelly whipped on the bare back.  Before each flagellation the executioner proclaimed—­

“These men are punished because they are traitors, and because they excited the people against their hereditary master.”

They then, with eight others, their property being confiscated, in utter beggary, were driven as vagabonds from the kingdom.  The rest, after being impoverished by fines, were restored to liberty.  Ferdinand adopted vigorous measures to establish his despotic power.  Considering the Protestant religion as peculiarly hostile to despotism, in the encouragement it afforded to education, to the elevation of the masses, and to the diffusion of those principles of fraternal equality which Christ enjoined; and considering the Catholic religion as the great bulwark of kingly power, by the intolerance of the Church teaching the benighted multitudes subjection to civil intolerance, Ferdinand, with unceasing vigilance, and with melancholy success, endeavored to eradicate the Lutheran doctrines from the kingdom.  He established the most rigorous censorship of the press, and would allow no foreign work, unexamined, to enter the realm.  He established in Bohemia the fanatic order of the Jesuits, and intrusted to them the education of the young.

It is often impossible to reconcile the inconsistencies of the human heart.  Ferdinand, while guilty of such atrocities, affected, on some points, the most scrupulous punctilios of honor.  The clearly-defined privileges which had been promised the Protestants, he would not infringe in the least.  They were permitted to give their children Protestant teachers, and to conduct worship in their own way.  He effected his object of changing Bohemia from an elective to a hereditary monarchy, and thus there was established in Bohemia the renowned doctrine of regal legitimacy; of the divine right of kings to govern.  With such a bloody hand was the doctrine of the sovereignty, not of the people, but of the nobles, overthrown in Bohemia.  The nobles are not much to be commiserated, for they trampled upon the people as mercilessly as the king did upon them.  It is merely another illustration of the old and melancholy story of the strong devouring the weak:  the owl takes the wren; the eagle the owl.