152 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
assistance in saving some of his lands from confiscation.^41 In seeking to
minimise his part in the revolt Schlick claimed that ‘no more than two
things can be held against me’, namely that he had supported the calling
of the meeting of the Protestant representatives in May 1618 despite the
emperor’s prohibition, and that he had been the author of the second
Apologiapublished after the revolt began. He could not, of course, deny
that he had been present at the defenestration, as he was too prominent
a person for this not to have been well known, so he claimed instead to
have attended only under duress:
As for the Prague defenestration, I neither began it nor caused it.
On the contrary I was only told of it around an hour and a half
beforehand, but although I loyally argued against it I could achieve
nothing against the author of the plan. Instead I was told, with great
vehemence and accompanied by threats, that by God it had to be
so. Anyone who didn’t want to be there could stay away, but should
anyone try to prevent it he would himself meet the same fate.A month later, having received a politely sympathetic but neverthe-
less noncommittal reply from Liechtenstein, Schlick tried again, as by
then it had become apparent that not only his property but also his life
were in the gravest danger.^42 A plea of being intimidated into attend-
ing the defenestration by an un-named ‘author of the plan’, as in his
first letter, would no longer do. The culprit had to be a person of high
standing in the Protestant leadership in order to make the supposed
plan and the alleged threats credible, and Thurn, as head of the defen-
sors and a long-standing opponent of the Habsburgs, was the obvious
choice, particularly as he was by then safely out of Imperial reach. More-
over Schlick realised that his original explanation of his presence at the
defenestration had not exonerated but rather further incriminated him,
in that he had admitted attending in full knowledge of what was to
occur. ‘Firstly one can ask of me accusingly why, since I knew of the
plan, I did not show Christian love and warn the persons in question,
and secondly why I did not at least stay at home on that day.’ To his own
first question he responded that ‘before that Count Thurn had already
blockaded the castle with cavalry and captured the gate’, an occurrence
which no other source reports and which begs the question as to what
the doubled castle guard were then doing. Furthermore, although Thurn
became commander of the estates forces after the defenestration, he
held only a civilian official post beforehand, and he had no cavalry at
his disposal.