The Habsburg Brothers’ Feud 101expense of the Catholic church and the house of Habsburg. To retain
their support he was obliged to promise concessions, and this inevitably
ranged the Catholic hierarchy against him, while even Khlesl retreated
into implicitly critical neutrality during these events.
With a confrontation around Prague in the offing it was evident
that the attitude of the Bohemians would play a major part in deter-
mining the outcome. The presence of Rudolf’s court in the city was
a valuable asset, while there was also a small but significant Catholic
party among the Imperial office-holders in the kingdom. Moreover the
Bohemians were inclined to regard themselves as different, habitually
taking a highly independent line, an attitude which had long caused
tensions with the Estates of the other Bohemian lands, as well as limit-
ing the scope for cooperation in defending their freedoms and privileges
against their Habsburg prince. Zierotin had summed up the relation-
ship a couple of years earlier, complaining that the Bohemians ‘want
to dominate and subjugate us, so that they themselves can be the head
and we merely the tail of their kingdom’.^11 Moreover initiatives from
the other lands were often systematically rejected by the Bohemians,
so that support for Matthias originating in Hungary and Austria was as
likely to alienate as to attract them.^12 Nevertheless Bohemia had had
its own problems with Rudolf, and there had been an uneasy stand-
off since 1603, so that when he summoned the Estates in May the large
Protestant majority seized the opportunity. Well aware that they had the
option of switching their support to Matthias, they agreed to concede
nothing to Rudolf until he had accepted their list of demands, which
was drawn up by Wenzel Budowetz.
The principal claim was for religious freedom for all on the basis of the
Bohemian Confession of 1575, which was to be permanently incorpo-
rated into the constitution, together with the establishment of a body
of ‘defensors’ empowered to oversee the rights of the Protestants. The
consistory, which supervised the affairs of the authorised confessions
outside the Catholic church, then only the neo-Catholic Utraquists, was
to pass into Protestant control, as was Prague university. All government
offices were in future to be distributed equally between Catholics and
Protestants, with non-Bohemians excluded, and the Jesuits were not
to be allowed to acquire property without the prior approval of both
the king and the Estates. As the final draft was read out and signed by
several hundred members of the Estates it is reported that many were
heard to say that anyone who later wavered should be thrown out of the
window.^13 The Protestants then sought a personal audience with Rudolf