Never had Jesuits an apter scholar than Ferdinand.  After leaving school, he made a pilgrimage to Loretto to make his vows to the Virgin Mary of extirpation of heresy, and went to Rome to obtain the blessing of Pope Clement VIII.

Then, returning to the government of his inheritance, he seized that terrible two-edged weapon of which the Protestants of Germany had taught him the use.

“Cujus regio ejus religio;” to the prince the choice of religion, to the subject conformity with the prince, as if that formula of shallow and selfish princelings, that insult to the dignity of mankind, were the grand result of a movement which was to go on centuries after they had all been forgotten in their tombs.  For the time however it was a valid and mischievous maxim.  In Saxony Catholics and Calvinists were proscribed; in Heidelberg Catholics and Lutherans.  Why should either Calvinists or Lutherans be tolerated in Styria?  Why, indeed?  No logic could be more inexorable, and the pupil of the Ingolstadt Jesuits hesitated not an instant to carry out their teaching with the very instrument forged for him by the Reformation.  Gallows were erected in the streets of all his cities, but there was no hanging.  The sight of them proved enough to extort obedience to his edict, that every man, woman, and child not belonging to the ancient church should leave his dominions.  They were driven out in hordes in broad daylight from Gratz and other cities.  Rather reign over a wilderness than over heretics was the device of the Archduke, in imitation of his great relative, Philip II. of Spain.  In short space of time his duchies were as empty of Protestants as the Palatinate of Lutherans, or Saxony of Calvinists, or both of Papists.  Even the churchyards were rifled of dead Lutherans and Utraquists, their carcasses thrown where they could no longer pollute the true believers mouldering by their side.

It was not strange that the coronation as King of Bohemia of a man of such decided purposes—­a country numbering ten Protestants to one Catholic—­should cause a thrill and a flutter.  Could it be doubted that the great elemental conflict so steadily prophesied by Barneveld and instinctively dreaded by all capable of feeling the signs of the time would now begin?  It had begun.  Of what avail would be Majesty-Letters and Compromises extorted by force from trembling or indolent emperors, now that a man who knew his own mind, and felt it to be a crime not to extirpate all religions but the one orthodox religion, had mounted the throne?  It is true that he had sworn at his coronation to maintain the laws of Bohemia, and that the Majesty-Letter and the Compromise were part of the laws.

But when were doctors ever wanting to prove the unlawfulness of law which interferes with the purposes of a despot and the convictions of the bigot?

“Novus rex, nova lex,” muttered the Catholics, lifting up their heads and hearts once more out of the oppression and insults which they had unquestionably suffered at the hands of the triumphant Reformers.  “There are many empty poppy-heads now flaunting high that shall be snipped off,” said others.  “That accursed German Count Thurn and his fellows, whom the devil has sent from hell to Bohemia for his own purposes, shall be disposed of now,” was the general cry.