166 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
and started to involve powers in the Empire and beyond in a more direct
way, and which ultimately led to the extension of the limited war in
Bohemia into a European conflict.
A structural problem had been foreseen almost from the outset of the
revolt, and it fell into two parts. Firstly, what sort of a monarchy was
there to be in the future, and secondly who was to be the monarch? The
parallel with the revolt in the Netherlands, where they had done away
with monarchy altogether, was as obvious to the Bohemians themselves
as to contemporary observers and later historians, but so was the con-
sequent war, which had by then lasted some fifty years and was about
to resume when the truce expired in 1621. Ten years earlier Zierotin
had expressed the more general feeling of the time, even among rad-
ical elements, that some kind of prince was still necessary, and this
assumption was the starting point for most of those involved in draw-
ing up the constitution for the planned confederation of the lands of the
Bohemian crown.^26 Nevertheless they envisaged a completely different
form of kingship from the Habsburg model, and indeed their concept
was some two hundred years ahead of its time, resembling an early form
of constitutional monarchy in which the role of the prince was greatly
reduced but effective power resided not with the people but with the
small controlling upper class.
The Act of Confederation set out a federal state constitution, but it
took the form of an Estates oligarchy, at the head of which stood a king.
It was however to be an explicitly elective monarchy for Bohemia and
the associated provinces, in which the king’s role would be carefully
regulated. The real power would lie with the Estates, who conferred the
crown on the king on licence, as it were, and any references sugges-
tive of the former rights of inheritance were carefully avoided, while the
designation of a successor during a king’s lifetime was forbidden. More-
over the king was bound both by the terms of the confederation and by
the legal practices of the individual provinces. He was not to establish
any military strongholds without the consent of the Estates, he was to
appoint officials in accordance with the proposals of the Estates, and in
all other important matters he was to be restricted by the Estates. A mul-
tiple right of resistance gave the Estates a legal entitlement to oppose a
king who acted contrary to these provisions, and the defensors had the
authority to suspend a king. The position of a king of Bohemia would
not in future be one of power, as it had been reduced to an essentially
nominal role as an honorific figurehead.^27
Although this constitution was only formally agreed a few weeks
before the processes of deposition and election were put into effect it