124 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
localised, had a cumulative effect in creating an apparent threat to
the gains the Protestants had made, and in provoking the predictable
defensive response.
The most contentious issue was the right to build churches, or more
precisely the right of Protestants living on Catholic church lands to
build their own churches, as although the general right was clear the
drafting of the Letter was insufficiently specific in this latter respect.
Lawyers then and since have debated earnestly, and often ingeniously,
over the wording of the text. That the right extended to royal lands was
not disputed, but some have argued that the term ‘royal lands’ as used
in the Bohemian bureaucracy of the time was understood to include
church lands, not least because the Catholic church had lost most of
its property in the Hussite period, so that by the early seventeenth cen-
tury many church estates were in fact tenancies held from the crown.
Catholics, on the other hand, argued that church land was only pro-
tected, not owned, by the crown.^19 In the end the exact legal position,
if there is one, is largely irrelevant, the key point being that both sides
interpreted the Letter according to their own interests, and both held
firm as the resultant disputes escalated during the following years.
The churches in question were only two in number, in the other-
wise insignificant small towns of Braunau (Broumov) and Klostergrab
(Hrob), respectively on the north-eastern and north-western borders of
Bohemia. Both were on ecclesiastical estates, so that the feudal over-
lords were Catholic clerics, in the former case the abbot of a Benedictine
monastery and in the latter the archbishop of Prague. Their Protestant
subjects were quick off the mark in exercising their claimed right to
build churches, and Matthias had scarcely gained the Bohemian throne
when in August 1611 he received a complaint from the abbot of Braunau
about their activities. He and his advisers duly upheld the Catholic inter-
pretation of the Letter of Majesty in this respect, and he issued an order
forbidding the Protestants of Braunau to continue with their building.
The Bohemian defensors, appointed to safeguard the privileges granted
to the Protestants by the Letter of Majesty, then assembled in November,
declared the order to be a breach of its terms, and instructed the citizens
of Braunau to carry on. This they did, as the abbot lacked the resources
to prevent them and the authorities made no move to enforce their pro-
hibition, and in due course Protestant services were held in the new
church.
In Klostergrab the archbishop made his own attempts to forbid the
building work, expelling the Protestant pastor in November 1614, and
he too obtained a declaration from Matthias’s Bohemian government