The succession of Ferdinand excited especial dismay and indignation in the Palatinate.  The young elector had looked upon the prize as his own.  The marked advance of Protestant sentiment throughout the kingdom and its neighbour provinces had seemed to render the succession of an extreme Papist impossible.  When Frederic had sued for and won the hand of the fair Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Great Britain, it was understood that the alliance would be more brilliant for her than it seemed.  James with his usual vanity spoke of his son-in-law as a future king.

It was a golden dream for the Elector and for the general cause of the Reformed religion.  Heidelberg enthroned in the ancient capital of the Wenzels, Maximilians, and Rudolphs, the Catechism and Confession enrolled among the great statutes of the land, this was progress far beyond flimsy Majesty-Letters and Compromises, made only to be torn to pieces.

Through the dim vista of futurity and in ecstatic vision no doubt even the Imperial crown might seem suspended over the Palatine’s head.  But this would be merely a midsummer’s dream.  Events did not whirl so rapidly as they might learn to do centuries later, and—­the time for a Protestant to grasp at the crown of Germany could then hardly be imagined as ripening.

But what the Calvinist branch of the House of Wittelsbach had indeed long been pursuing was to interrupt the succession of the House of Austria to the German throne.  That a Catholic prince must for the immediate future continue to occupy it was conceded even by Frederic, but the electoral votes might surely be now so manipulated as to prevent a slave of Spain and a tool of the Jesuits from wielding any longer the sceptre of Charlemagne.

On the other hand the purpose of the House of Austria was to do away with the elective principle and the prescriptive rights of the Estates in Bohemia first, and afterwards perhaps to send the Golden Bull itself to the limbo of wornout constitutional devices.  At present however their object was to secure their hereditary sovereignty in Prague first, and then to make sure of the next Imperial election at Frankfurt.  Time afterwards might fight still more in their favour, and fix them in hereditary possession of the German throne.

The Elector-Palatine had lost no time.  His counsellors even before the coronation of Ferdinand at Prague had done their best to excite alarm throughout Germany at the document by which Archdukes Maximilian and Albert had resigned all their hereditary claims in favour of Ferdinand and his male children.  Should there be no such issue, the King of Spain claimed the succession for his own sons as great-grandchildren of Emperor Maximilian, considering himself nearer in the line than the Styrian branch, but being willing to waive his own rights in favour of so ardent a Catholic as Ferdinand.  There was even a secret negotiation going on a long time between the new king of Bohemia and Philip to arrange for the precedence of the Spanish males over the Styrian females to the hereditary Austrian states, and to cede the province of Alsace to Spain.