The Search for Allies 187the Union would take the necessary further steps.^14 This imprecise threat
then conveniently enabled the members to defer the question of what
to do about the army, leaving it to the military leadership under the
command of the margrave of Ansbach to make further proposals in the
light of the situation when the response was received.
The principal point to emerge from this meeting is the small size of
the party among the German Protestants willing to contemplate mil-
itary intervention, essentially confined to the Palatinate and a few of
its traditional allies, mostly fellow Calvinists. As noted in Chapter 2, the
members of the Union were a minority among the Protestant estates as a
whole even before the withdrawal of Brandenburg and Neuburg, and the
very limited response to the invitation to non-members to attend shows
that there was no wider wish to become involved in a confrontation.
The members themselves were divided, with the activists ultimately a
minority even in the Union, and while the Palatinate was certainly fully
committed it seems questionable how far the others were in earnest.
Militant talk was cheap when it was clear from the outset that it would
not carry the day against the opposition of the cities and the more mod-
erate princes. In the end the best Christian of Anhalt could achieve from
the meeting was a formal reconfirmation of the Union’s commitment to
defend the Palatinate’s own territory against attack.
The Catholic League
Meanwhile efforts to resurrect the Catholic League had begun to make
progress. The problems leading to its decline were also described in
Chapter 2, and it had been dormant since 1613, before effectively ceas-
ing to exist in 1615 when Maximilian of Bavaria had resigned as director
even of his own southern division. Instead in 1617 he had formed a
small local defence group, comprising only Bavaria and a few neigh-
bouring ecclesiastical territories, but as the emperor had forbidden such
associations in that same year this had remained secret.
Although Maximilian was strongly opposed to the ‘heretical’
Bohemian revolt from the outset he was not inclined to make any early
move either to assist the emperor directly or to revive the League in
the Empire, as the problems he had experienced before still rankled.
A major source of friction had been the participation of Habsburg ter-
ritories and the resulting claim for a share in the leadership made by
Emperor Matthias’s brother, Archduke Maximilian, giving rise to a per-
sonal animosity between the two Maximilians. This had been further
aggravated more recently by competition between the same two to
acquire the small territory of Mindelheim, one of many examples of the