142 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
Ríˇˇcan, Ulrich Kinsky, Albrecht Jan Smiˇrický and Paul Kapliˇr. Even at this
stage the regents thought they were only going to be arrested, but as
they were dragged past the door and towards the window they began
to perceive their fate and to ask for confessors, requests which were sar-
castically rejected. Martinitz was first, and without further delay he was
thrust out of the window. Slavata was next, and although he tried to
hold on to the window frame a heavy blow on his fingers broke his grip,
and he went the same way. Finally Smiˇrický and Ehrenfried Berbisdorf
turned on the regents’ secretary, Philipp Fabricius, in pursuit of a private
quarrel, says Martinitz, and helped by others they threw him too out of
the window.
Despite a drop of some fifteen metres (fifty feet) all three survived,
Fabricius unharmed and Martinitz only slightly hurt, while although
Slavata sustained a severe head injury that was caused not by the fall
as such but by him hitting his head on a lower window ledge as he
fell. Various theories have been put forward to explain their escape,
the victims themselves claiming divine intervention, while Protestant
detractors maintained that they fell into a dung heap. Both are equally
unlikely, as even in the seventeenth century they did not put dung
heaps below council chamber windows with summer coming on, while
the suggestion that the men’s cloaks acted almost as parachutes is
merely fanciful. A more plausible explanation was put forward in a
pamphlet published soon afterwards, which stated that the area where
they landed was covered with ‘sweepings’, possibly the remains of
the previous autumn’s leaves from the castle courtyard, while the
ground itself was ‘soft pond-earth’, perhaps where water had stood
in the ditch over the winter.^13 The most likely answer is a combi-
nation of these and other factors. The lower part of the castle wall
slopes outwards rather than being vertical, while today there is a large
mature creeper standing out from the wall near the relevant window.
By late May there might also have been thick undergrowth and per-
haps bushes on the ground around the walls. One way or another the
men’s falls were broken, the fact being more significant than the precise
mechanism.
According to Slavata, a number of Thurn’s men – ‘so it is reported’ –
came running along a wall some way beyond the ditch, and in response
to shouted orders from the window above they opened fire on the
survivors of the fall, continuing to shoot while Martinitz attended to
his injured colleague.^14 Initially this drove off the retainers who came
to help them, but despite the fusillade they made a second attempt,
dragging Slavata away through a door into the castle precinct, while