Ferdinand of Styria, his cousin, trod closely upon his heels.  He was the presumptive successor to all his crowns, had not approved of the movements of Matthias in the lifetime of his brother, and hated the Vienna Protestant baker’s son, Cardinal Clesel, by whom all those movements had been directed.  Professor Taubmann, of Wittenberg, ponderously quibbling on the name of that prelate, had said that he was of “one hundred and fifty ass power.”  Whether that was a fair measure of his capacity may be doubted, but it certainly was not destined to be sufficient to elude the vengeance of Ferdinand, and Ferdinand would soon have him in his power.

Matthias, weary of ambitious intrigue, infirm of purpose, and shattered in health, had withdrawn from affairs to devote himself to his gout and to his fair young wife, Archduchess Anna of Tyrol, whom at the age of fifty-four he had espoused.

On the 29th June 1617, Ferdinand of Gratz was crowned King of Bohemia.  The event was a shock and a menace to the Protestant cause all over the world.  The sombre figure of the Archduke had for years appeared in the background, foreshadowing as it were the wrath to come, while throughout Bohemia and the neighbouring countries of Moravia, Silesia, and the Austrias, the cause of Protestantism had been making such rapid progress.  The Emperor Maximilian II. had left five stalwart sons, so that there had seemed little probability that the younger line, the sons of his brother, would succeed.  But all the five were childless, and now the son of Archduke Charles, who had died in 1590, had become the natural heir after the death of Matthias to the immense family honours—­his cousins Maximilian and Albert having resigned their claims in his favour.

Ferdinand, twelve years old at his father’s death, had been placed under the care of his maternal uncle, Duke William of Bavaria.  By him the boy was placed at the high school of Ingolstadt, to be brought up by the Jesuits, in company with Duke William’s own son Maximilian, five years his senior.  Between these youths, besides the tie of cousinship, there grew up the most intimate union founded on perfect sympathy in religion and politics.

When Ferdinand entered upon the government of his paternal estates of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, he found that the new religion, at which the Jesuits had taught him to shudder as at a curse and a crime, had been widely spreading.  His father had fought against heresy with all his might, and had died disappointed and broken-hearted at its progress.  His uncle of Bavaria, in letters to his son and nephew, had stamped into their minds with the enthusiasm of perfect conviction that all happiness and blessing for governments depended on the restoration and maintenance of the unity of the Catholic faith.  All the evils in times past and present resulting from religious differences had been held up to the two youths by the Jesuits in the most glaring colours.  The first duty of a prince, they had inculcated, was to extirpate all false religions, to give the opponents of the true church no quarter, and to think no sacrifice too great by which the salvation of human society, brought almost to perdition by the new doctrines, could be effected.