The Search for Allies 181regency. Still only seventeen in 1618, Louis had no wish to intervene in
a religious quarrel abroad which could only too easily contribute to a
renewal of religious conflict at home, and so he too offered mediation
rather than help. France and others were also wary of involvement in
what could be seen as an internal Habsburg matter, but which, if out-
siders rushed in, could possibly escalate into a much more widespread
war. This was an eventuality few wanted and none were prepared for,
while European princes were always reluctant to appear to be supporting
revolt, wherever it might occur.
One such opponent of revolt was Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony,
the conservative, constitutionalist Lutheran who ruled the only major
Protestant territory apart from the Upper Palatinate which bordered on
Bohemia. Nevertheless the Bohemians had initially hoped for support
from that direction, and as previously noted one party led by Schlick
actively promoted the elector as a candidate for the Bohemian crown,
although without any encouragement from him. Saxony had in the
past been an active supporter of Lutherans in the Habsburg lands, and
emissaries and messages of support sent by the then elector Christian
II during the confrontation with Emperor Rudolf II which eventually
led to the Letter of Majesty had played a significant part in securing the
final concessions. Thereafter Christian had provided further help for the
many German-speaking Lutheran émigrés who had settled in Bohemia,
especially Prague, for whom two churches were built with financial sup-
port from the Saxon treasury, and he also despatched pastors from his
own court to serve in them.^4 Hence there was some sympathy for the
Bohemian revolt at the outset in Saxony, as it had originated from
infringements of the Protestant rights established with Saxon help in
- Here too, however, sympathy did not extend to financial or mili-
tary support, and Johann Georg confined himself to mediation, seeking
to arrange a cease-fire in December 1618, but this was refused by the
Bohemians.^5
One of the factors limiting Saxon support was the extent to which
members of the Bohemian Brethren, notable among them Ruppa and
Budowetz, quickly became the leading influences in the directorate.
This was seen in Dresden as bringing the revolt under the control of
Calvinists, a confession to which the Saxon court had long been bitterly
opposed. In 1602 the court preacher had published an anti-Calvinist
tract in which he argued that ‘the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics
are more closely related to each other in religion than to the Calvinists’,
going on to detail sixteen ‘heresies’ which separated the Calvinists from
the Lutherans. His successor at the time of the Bohemian revolt, Hoë