His triumphal entrance into Vienna succeeded, where, surrounded by great nobles and burghers, with his brother Maximilian at his side, with immense pomp and with flowers strewn before his feet, he ratified that truce with Ahmed which Rudolph had rejected.  Three months later he was crowned at Pressburg, having first accepted the conditions proposed by the estates of Hungary.  Foremost among these was the provision that the exercise of the reformed religion should be free in all the cities and villages beneath his sceptre, and that every man in the kingdom was to worship God according to his conscience.

In the following March, at the very moment accordingly when the conclusive negotiations were fast ripening at Antwerp, Matthias granted religious peace for Austria likewise.  Great was the indignation of his nephew Leopold, the nuncius, and the Spanish ambassador in consequence, by each and all of whom the revolutionary mischief-maker, with his brother’s crown on his head, was threatened with excommunication.

As for Ferdinand of Styria, his wrath may well be imagined.  He refused religious peace in his dominions with scorn ineffable.  Not Gomarus in Leyden could have shrunk from Arminianism with more intense horror than that with which the archduke at Gratz recoiled from any form of Protestantism.  He wrote to his brother-in-law the King of Spain and to other potentates—­as if the very soul of Philip ii. were alive within him—­that he would rather have a country without inhabitants than with a single protestant on its soil.  He strongly urged upon his Catholic Majesty—­as if such urging were necessary at the Spanish court—­the necessity of extirpating heresy, root and branch.

Here was one man at least who knew what he meant, and on whom the dread lessons of fifty years of bloodshed had been lost.  Magnificent was the contempt which this pupil of the Jesuits felt for any little progress made by the world since the days of Torquemada.  In Ferdinand’s view Alva was a Christian hero, scarcely second to Godfrey of Bouillon, Philip ii. a sainted martyr, while the Dutch republic had never been born.

And Ferdinand was one day to sit on the throne of the holy Roman Empire.  Might not a shudder come over the souls of men as coming events vaguely shaped themselves to prophetic eyes?

Meantime there was religious peace in Hungary, in Austria, in Bohemia, in France, in Great Britain, in the Netherlands.  The hangman’s hands were for a period at rest, so far as theology had need of them.  Butchery in the name of Christ was suspended throughout Christendom.  The Cross and the Crescent, Santiago and the Orange banner, were for a season in repose.

There was a vast lull between two mighty storms.  The forty years’ war was in the past, the thirty years’ war in the not far distant future.

CHAPTER LIII.

CONCLUSION.