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Updated: June 17, 2025
They closed this overwhelming announcement by demanding the immediate assembling of a diet to elect an emperor to succeed him on the throne of Germany. Rhodolph, not yet quite sufficiently humiliated to officiate as his own executioner, though he promised to summon a diet, evaded the fulfillment of his promise.
Rhodolph issued a proclamation forbidding them to meet. Regardless of this injunction they met, at the appointed time and place, opened the meeting with imposing ceremonies, and made quiet preparation to repel force with force.
Then ensued some politic matrimonial alliances. Wenceslaus, the boy king, was affianced to Judith, one of the daughters of Rhodolph. The princess Agnes, daughter of Cunegunda, was to become the bride of Rhodolph's second son. These matters being all satisfactorily settled, Rhodolph returned in triumph to Vienna.
Matthias hesitated in giving his assent to such demands, which seemed to reduce him to a cipher, conferring upon him only the shadow of a crown. Rhodolph, however, who was eager to make any concessions, had his agents busy through the diet, with assurances that the emperor would grant all these concessions. But Rhodolph had fallen too low to rise again.
Rhodolph III. was unanimously chosen to succeed him upon the imperial throne, and was crowned at Ratisbon on the 1st of November, 1575. Poland was strictly an elective monarchy. The tumultuous nobles had established a law prohibiting the election of a successor during the lifetime of the monarch.
They break over all the defenses, sweep all opposition before them, and in the fury of the fight, either by accident or as a necessity of war, sacrilegiously set fire to a nunnery. For this crime Rhodolph was excommunicated by the pope. Excommunication was then no farce. There were few who dared to serve a prince upon whom the denunciations of the Church had fallen.
So far as we can now judge, and making due allowance for the darkness of the age in which he lived, Rhodolph appears to have been, in the latter part of his life, a sincere, if not an enlightened Christian. He was devout in prayer, and punctual in attending the services of the Church.
The diet which Rhodolph had summoned, separated without coming to other result than rousing thoroughly the spirit of the Protestants. They boldly called another diet to meet in May, in the city of Prague itself, under the very shadow of the palace of Rhodolph, and sent deputies to Matthias, and to the Protestant princes generally of the German empire, soliciting their support.
He demanded of all the lords, Protestant as well as Catholic, an unconditional oath of allegiance, giving vague promises, that perhaps at some future time he would promulgate a decree of toleration, but declaring that he was not bound to do so, on the miserable quibble that, as he had received from Rhodolph a hereditary title, he was not bound to grant any thing but what he had received.
To a monarch in such a time of need, a family of brave sons and beautiful daughters, is an inestimable blessing. Rhodolph secured the Duke of Sclavonia by making him the happy husband of one of his daughters. His son Albert married Elizabeth, daughter of the Count of Tyrol, and thus that powerful and noble family was secured.
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