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Updated: June 6, 2025
Foiled at the Court of Petersburg, Napoleon was more successful at the Court of Vienna. A few months after Napoleon’s last overtures had been rejected by Russia, the Habsburgs, who, after the Bourbons, were the most august, the most ancient dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the Romanovs had refused. The war of 1812 with Russia was the result of that pro-German policy of the Russian Court.
Successive Habsburgs who followed on these Polish rulers of Bohemia, Vladislav and his son Louis, benefited by the magnificent work which these two scions of the Royal House of Jagoilla left to posterity. Louis, we know, was drowned just after the battle of Moháč, and the short-lived Polish dynasty made way definitely for Kings of the House of Habsburg.
The ties of allegiance and conventional authority being, severed, it had become idle for the King to affect superiority of lineage to the man whose family had occupied illustrious stations when the Habsburgs were obscure squires in Switzerland, and had ruled as sovereign in the Netherlands before that overshadowing house had ever been named.
Although France had gained materially at their expense in the treaties of Westphalia and of the Pyrenees, much remained to be done by Louis XIV. When the Grand Monarch assumed direct control of affairs in 1661, the Spanish Habsburgs still ruled not only the peninsular kingdom south of France, but the Belgian Netherlands to the north, Franche Comte to the east, and Milan in northern Italy, while their kinsmen of Austria maintained shadowy imperial government over the rich Rhenish provinces on the northeastern boundary of France.
But from 1560 to 1689 England for the most part held herself aloof from the continental rivalries of Bourbons and Habsburgs, and never fought in earnest except against Philip II of Spain, who threatened England's economic and political independence, and against the Dutch, who were England's commercial rivals.
It was natural, therefore, that William III, as stadholder of Holland and king of England, should hold the balance of power between the Austrian Habsburgs and the French Bourbons. Both the claimants appreciated this fact and understood that neither would be allowed peacefully to appropriate the entire Spanish inheritance.
Of other Habsburgs on the throne of Bohemia, particularly that lonely bachelor Rudolph II; of his hobbies and the guests and visitors he welcomed to the castle. Of King Matthias and the "Winter King," and how Bohemia's independence was lost on the battlefield of the White Mountain.
We refuse to recognise the divine right of kings. Our nation elected the Habsburgs to the throne of Bohemia of its own free will and by the same right deposes them. We hereby declare the Habsburg dynasty unworthy of leading our nation and deny all their claims to rule in the Czecho-Slovak land, which we here and now declare shall henceforth be a free and independent people and nation.
The Habsburgs thereupon established extraordinary court-martials and hanged the greater part of the Hungarian patriots whom they had not been able to defeat in open battle. As for Italy, the island of Sicily declared itself independent from Naples and drove its Bourbon king away. In the Papal states the prime minister, Rossi, was murdered and the Pope was forced to flee.
In the summer of 1603 it had been firmly but mysteriously arranged between the monarchs of France and Great Britain that the House of Austria should be crushed, its territories parcelled out at the discretion of those two potentates, the imperial crown taken from the Habsburgs, the Spaniards driven out of the Netherlands, an alliance offensive and defensive made with the Dutch republic, while the East and West Indies were, to be wrested by main force of the allies, from Spain, whose subjects were thenceforth to be for ever excluded from those lucrative regions.
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