144 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
Other writers follow the same line. Schormann states simply that ‘the
radical group around Thurn stepped in....What was designed to look
like the spontaneous act of an incensed crowd was in reality the planned
deed of a few people.’^17 Asch goes further. ‘This defenestration was not as
spontaneous as it may have seemed....Thurn and his close friends had
planned this “execution” carefully. Its real purpose was to close the door
to any compromise between the reigning dynasty, the Habsburgs, with
their Catholic advisers, and the Protestant opposition. By killing the
regents, the Protestants would burn their boats.’^18 Burkhardt concurs.
‘The defenestration of Prague did not correspond to the idealised picture
of a revolution. The spontaneous act of communal anger was agreed
upon beforehand in the palace of the of the richest and most polit-
ically influential nobleman in the city, Albrecht Jan Smiˇrický.’ There,
says Burkhardt, ‘the activist party in the Estates decided on a takeover
of power and took the necessary steps to achieve it’.^19 Kampmann
too contends that ‘the radicals around Thurn’ used the crisis over the
Braunau church and the resulting defensors meeting ‘to stage-manage
the deposition of the ruling dynasty....As Count Thurn and his radi-
cal fellow-travellers had planned, the angry battle of words turned into
open violence....The planned murder was unsuccessful, but the radi-
cals around Thurn nevertheless achieved their objective....The Protes-
tant estates were firmly committed to a confrontation with Vienna.’^20
Schmidt notes more briefly that ‘under the leadership of Count Heinrich
Matthias von Thurn...the estates were set upon a breach, a “liberat-
ing” act, in order to win back the initiative....The defenestration was
deliberately linked to the action of the Hussites in the New Town city
hall in 1419.’^21 Arndt is less specific, although he too presents the
event as being pre-planned: ‘The symbolic attack on the regents was
deliberately carried out.’^22
This consensus rests on very shaky foundations, indeed hardly any
foundations at all in terms of positive evidence, as the present author
has been able to find only one work which cites any primary sources to
support it. The concept apparently stems entirely from the first volume
of Gindely’s major study of the Thirty Years War, published in 1869,
before which this conviction that the defenestration was deliberately
planned and organised does not appear in either contemporary accounts
or earlier histories.
The near-contemporary chronicles, theTheatrum Europaeum and
Khevenhüller’sAnnales Ferdinandei, the former a Protestant and the lat-
ter a Catholic source, both give relatively brief accounts, but neither
claims that the act was planned or that Thurn was the main instigator.