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Tells of Emperor Sigismund, King of Bohemia, his rare and troubled visits to this country. Of an emigration from Prague University, and the founding of another at Leipzig. Of the two Habsburgs who followed Sigismund, and more about another great Bohemian already mentioned in this book, George Podiebrad. King George's Peace League.
From the foregoing chapters it is clear that by continuous misrule and by the attempt to reduce the Czecho-Slovak nation to impotence through terrorism and extermination during this war, the Habsburgs have created a gulf between themselves and their Czecho-Slovak subjects which can never again be bridged over.
In their place appeared as great world powers the northern monarchies of Prussia and Russia, whose royal lines Hohenzollerns and Romanovs were to vie in ambition and prowess, before the close of the period, with Habsburgs and Bourbons. Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined.
Louis was ten years old when the peace of Westphalia was concluded and the House of Habsburg, as a result of the Thirty Years War, lost its predominant position in Europe. It was inevitable that a man with his ambition should use so favourable a moment to gain for his own dynasty the honours which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs.
The desire of the Tory ministry to bring the long drawn-out hostilities to an end was accentuated by the death, on April 17, 1711, of the Emperor Joseph, an event which left his brother Charles heir to all the possessions of the Austrian Habsburgs. The Grand Alliance had been formed and the war waged to maintain the balance of power in Europe.
In the year 1660 Louis had married Maria Theresa, daughter of the King of Spain. Soon afterward, his father-in-law, Philip IV, one of the half-witted Spanish Habsburgs, died. Such an acquisition would have been disastrous to the peace of Europe, and would have threatened the safety of the Protestant states.
For the League, hardly yet thoroughly organized under the leadership of Maximilian of Bavaria, was rather a Catholic corrival than cordial ally of the Imperial house. It was universally suspected that Henry meant to destroy and discrown the Habsburgs, and it lay not in the schemes of Maximilian to suffer the whole Catholic policy to be bound to the fortunes of that one family.
It is most likely that it would have been a more shameful peace than was concluded at Brest-Litovsk, and that it would have resulted in an actual and active alliance of the Romanov dynasty with the dynasties of the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs.
There followed Vladislav, a Pole, and various Habsburgs as Kings of Bohemia, but I see little that the river cares to reflect, of their work or doings. Instead of reflections in the waters, I see them troubled, and anxiety on the face of Prague. There seems to have been a brightening up after the Bohemians had cleared the atmosphere by letting loose the War of Thirty Years.
Meanwhile the situation of the captives was not free from embarrassment. When Clyde explained to the Kurdish headmen the nature of his relationship with the runaway couple they were gravely sympathetic, but vetoed any idea of summary vengeance, since the Habsburgs would be sure to insist on the delivery of Dobrinton alive, and in a reasonably undamaged condition.
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