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.

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.