Epilogue 263the Calvinist spectre began to intrude its noxious seeds and weeds’.^6
He though, like many subsequent historians, probably over-estimated
the political significance of the Calvinists, notably from the Palatinate,
as although they were a noisy long-term irritant they were never likely
to achieve anything of consequence against the Catholics unless they
could enlist the support of Saxony and the like-minded Lutheran territo-
ries. In military terms the Calvinist-led Union was never strong enough
to have confronted what they perceived as the Catholic and Habsburg
threat without powerful allies, which they found only briefly in 1610.
Given the anti-Calvinist hostility among the north-German
Lutherans, the only issue with the potential to impel them into united
action would have been a physical Catholic attempt to repossess the
secularised properties. Some of the more alarmist Protestant princes and
politicians took this to be a serious possibility, claiming to be ready to
fight over it if necessary, but the more moderate Saxons and their allies
generally discounted this and other aspects of the supposed Catholic
threat. Such an attempt would have required substantial military sup-
port, and even with the unpredictable Rudolf II still on the Imperial
throne this was not a realistic proposition, while after Matthias’s acces-
sion it was out of the question. Even so the threat, however remote,
was a large part of theraison d’êtreof the Protestant Union, together
with the Donauwörth incident which seemed to confirm the possibil-
ity, while even the north-German Lutherans took care to get guarantees
against forcible repossession in the Mühlhausen agreement of 1620
before supporting or remaining neutral to the invasion of Bohemia.
On the Catholic side too there were some who worried about a possible
pre-emptive Protestant attack, although this was equally unrealistic, not
least because it is hard to see what form such a move could in practice
have taken.
The ramifications of the wrangle over secularised church properties in
Germany could have caused a war but did not, at least not until after
1629, when Emperor Ferdinand II actually set repossession in motion,
but in entirely different circumstances after a decade of war and with
two large armies available to him after the defeat of Denmark. Thus the
origins of the Thirty Years War lay not in Germany but in Bohemia, and
the origins of the war are in fact largely the origins of the revolt, which
is why they have been described and discussed in detail in the central
chapters of this book.
There is nevertheless a distinction to be drawn between the origins
of the war and the causes of its continuation during the remainder
of the thirty years. As noted above, the latter mutated along with the