154 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
own involvement, and the assassination plan upon which they rely is so
convenient that it seems more than probable that they were lying about
that too.
Thurn’s central part in the whole episode is not in question, but he
may well have been more the front man than the principal driving
force. In a hierarchical age he and Schlick, as counts, ranked above
the other prominent Protestant figures, and furthermore Thurn was the
last remaining Protestant holding one of the traditional royal offices in
Bohemia. As Fruewein pointed out, he was also ‘the head of the defen-
sors’, and while he probably held this post mainly because of his status,
at 51 and with a career as a soldier and senior officer behind him Thurn
had the necessary standing to speak for the Protestant estates.^46 Hence it
would have been normal, appropriate and expected for him to take the
lead, both in the assembly called by the defensors and in the confronta-
tion with the regents, but whether he was the real leader as well as the
titular head is open to doubt.
Firstly he appears to have been rather pedestrian and undistinguished,
at least as a general, and one noted historian has repeatedly labelled him
as stupid.^47 Moreover he was an outsider, coming not from Bohemia but
from Styria, a fact emphasised by his poor command of Czech. It may
well be significant that during the acceptance process for Ferdinand as
successor king of Bohemia in 1617 Thurn’s influence on his peers was
so limited that he could find only Fels, a fellow Styrian, to support his
objections, while even as a general he seems not to have been trusted,
as the directorate were quick to bring in an outsider from Germany to
share his command in 1618.
Had there been a conspiracy, whether with Thurn or someone else at
its head, this would almost certainly have become well known in Prague
in the days after the defenestration, and the new directors would have
been aware of it. Several of those on trial were ready enough to report
what they had heard about other aspects of the revolt, particularly if it
might have helped to shift the blame away from themselves, but none
did so about a plot, even though it could not have harmed the alleged
culprits, as not only Fels but also Smiˇrický and Ulrich Kinsky were all
dead, while as noted Thurn had long since escaped abroad.
One other factor to set against the conspiracy theory is the attack on
the secretary Fabricius, possibly because of some personal enmity. This
was obviously not part of any plan, as Fabricius was politically insignif-
icant, and conspirators would not have wanted the random murder
of a clerk to discredit what was intended as a demonstration of righ-
teous anger against the emperor’s evil councillors. Thus it suggests that