Counter-Reformation 91much larger body of armed farmers the soldiers quickly deserted, leaving
a handful of dead and the peasants in possession of the field.
Neither side really wanted to fight, particularly as the authorities
were divided among themselves. The largely Protestant nobility were
sympathetic to the peasants’ religious aspirations but hostile to their
economic demands, from which they would have been the principal
losers, whereas the emperor and his advisers might have been prepared
to compromise on the latter but were firm in rejecting any religious con-
cessions. The result was a half-hearted and long-drawn-out negotiation
spread over two years, punctuated by occasional further disturbances,
before a larger force of Imperial troopsen routeto Hungary was sent in
mid-1597, and the peasants capitulated without a battle.
The nobility soon discovered the cost of their reliance on the
emperor’s troops to put down the revolt. In October 1597 a new com-
mission was appointed to resume the recatholicisation of Upper Austria,
armed with a decree from Rudolf which set out to claw back all the
encroachments made by the Protestants beyond the narrowest interpre-
tation of the concessions which had been made by Emperor Maximilian
II. Essentially this limited the right to freedom of religion to the nobil-
ity alone, to be exercised only within the confines of the households
in which they actually lived, while all the country parishes over which
they had claimed influence and to which they had appointed Protestant
pastors were to be returned to the Catholics. Protestant worship was like-
wise to be eradicated from the towns and cities, even though in many
it had been established for half a century. A five-year struggle ensued
as these measures were forced through, step by step and place by place,
despite opposition from the peasantry in the countryside and from the
nobility in the Estates.
By 1604 the nobility were ready to counter-attack, and discussions
between Upper and Lower Austria led to a formal complaint to the
emperor and a warning that they were not prepared to submit to the lat-
ter’s restrictive version of Emperor Maximilian II’s religious concessions.
On the Catholic side a similarly pugnacious stance was being orches-
trated by Khlesl, by then the principal adviser to Archduke Matthias,
who had become the governor of the two Austrian provinces in succes-
sion to Ernst. Encouraged by Catholic successes in gaining control in
the towns and recovering parishes in the countryside, Khlesl favoured
pressing counter-Reformation further. Rather than arguing endlessly
about the detail of Maximilian’s concessions, he contended, the emperor
should simply annul them entirely, a proposal which he persuaded
Matthias to put forward to Vienna, where it met with some sympathy.