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evasive as before, keeping his substantial and strategically important ter-
ritory on the sidelines and sending observers rather than representatives
to meetings. Thus it was not until August 1619 that Maximilian’s south-
ern directorate held its first meeting, while the League was not fully
reconstituted until a joint meeting of the two directorates in December
of that year, and even then it was more of a federation than a single
entity.
Throughout the discussions all concerned emphasised the defensive
nature of the association, and the relevant article in the constitution
stressed that any particular problem would only become a matter for the
League after all other possible means of resolution had been exhausted.
The purpose of the League arming itself was not offensive, but so that
‘the one sword should constrain the other to stay in the scabbard’.^18 This
was the League’s position in relation to the Protestant Union, and its ini-
tial recruitment of troops was intended as a counterbalance to the latter’s
army, opposing one deterrent force to the other. Nevertheless the revolt
in Bohemia was seen as a general threat by Maximilian and the other
members, so that the defensive concept was extended to include the
possibility of intervention on the side of the emperor should the Union
enter the conflict to assist the Bohemians.
The key point about the developments in Germany during 1619 is
that, apart from a small group of mainly Calvinist hotheads, neither
the Protestants nor the Catholics were contemplating an attack on their
religious opponents, but each side was afraid that the unstable situation
created by the Bohemian revolt might encourage offensive action by
the other. Thus, in a kind of seventeenth-century Cold War, both the
Union and the League began recruiting armies which were intended
principally as deterrents, further adding to the increasing instability.
Both sides could also see potentially greater dangers should their oppo-
nents win a clear victory in Bohemia. For the Protestants this raised
the spectre of the militant Ferdinand, the arch-protagonist of counter-
Reformation, with a successful army at his disposal and the temptation
to use it to settle with the Protestants once and for all by seizing
and forcibly restoring the secularised church properties. This is exactly
what Ferdinand actually did ten years later, using the armies which
had recently defeated Christian IV of Denmark in a later phase of the
Thirty Years War. The Catholics in their turn were haunted by another
twentieth-century concept, the domino theory, whereby if Bohemia
were lost the other Habsburg provinces with largely Protestant popula-
tions would follow one by one, and the penetration of ‘heresy’ into even