And not only were the Papists and the Reformers exchanging these blasts and counterblasts of hatred, not less deadly in their effects than the artillery of many armies, but as if to make a thorough exhibition of human fatuity when drunk with religious passion, the Lutherans were making fierce paper and pulpit war upon the Calvinists.  Especially Hoe, court preacher of John George, ceaselessly hurled savage libels against them.  In the name of the theological faculty of Wittenberg, he addressed a “truehearted warning to all Lutheran Christians in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and other provinces, to beware of the erroneous Calvinistic religion.”  He wrote a letter to Count Schlick, foremost leader in the Bohemian movement, asking whether “the unquiet Calvinist spirit, should it gain ascendency, would be any more endurable than the Papists.  Oh what woe, what infinite woe,” he cried, “for those noble countries if they should all be thrust into the jaws of Calvinism!”

Did not preacher Hoe’s master aspire to the crown of Bohemia himself?  Was he not furious at the start which Heidelberg had got of him in the race for that golden prize?  Was he not mad with jealousy of the Palatine, of the Palatine’s religion, and of the Palatine’s claim to “hegemony” in Germany?

Thus embittered and bloodthirsty towards each other were the two great sections of the Reformed religion on the first centennial jubilee of the Reformation.  Such was the divided front which the anti-Catholic party presented at the outbreak of the war with Catholicism.

Ferdinand, on the other hand, was at the head of a comparatively united party.  He could hardly hope for more than benevolent neutrality from the French government, which, in spite of the Spanish marriages, dared not wholly desert the Netherlands and throw itself into the hands of Spain; but Spanish diplomacy had enslaved the British king, and converted what should have been an active and most powerful enemy into an efficient if concealed ally.  The Spanish and archiducal armies were enveloping the Dutch republic, from whence the most powerful support could be expected for the Protestant cause.  Had it not been for the steadiness of Barneveld, Spain would have been at that moment established in full panoply over the whole surface of those inestimable positions, the disputed duchies.  Venice was lukewarm, if not frigid; and Savoy, although deeply pledged by passion and interest to the downfall of the House of Austria, was too dangerously situated herself, too distant, too poor, and too Catholic to be very formidable.

Ferdinand was safe from the Turkish side.  A twenty years’ peace, renewable by agreement, between the Holy Empire and the Sultan had been negotiated by those two sons of bakers, Cardinal Khlesl and the Vizier Etmekdschifade.  It was destined to endure through all the horrors of the great war, a stronger protection to Vienna than all the fortifications which the engineering art could invent.  He was safe too from Poland, King Sigmund being not only a devoted Catholic but doubly his brother-in-law.