An Inevitable War? 33must be regarded as the “century of the Reichskammergericht”’.^8 Its
main problem remained the long-standing one of its extreme slowness.
Baumann indicates that in the first decade of the seventeenth century
half the cases at the Kammergericht had lasted over five years, and a
quarter over ten years.^9
Prior to 1620 the Kammergericht had a greater workload than the
Hofrat, but after that date the latter became the busier court as more
cases were referred to it, probably not least because its processes were
somewhat less slow. Further analysis of the figures provided by Ortlieb
and Polster’s research shows that for the seventy years from 1550 to
1619 the number of new cases at the Hofrat, although fluctuating
sharply from year to year, was broadly stable as a ten-year rolling
average. Although the caseload declined appreciably during the 1580s
it increased again in the 1590s and beyond, so that in each of the
two decades 1600–1609 and 1610–1619 the number was well above
the average for the previous half century. Combining the figures for
the two courts, the Kammergericht and the Hofrat, shows that they
were only marginally less active in 1600–1619 than in 1580–1599, but
substantially busier than in previous periods.^10
Given that many of the appellants to these courts were the high and
mighty, those owing fealty directly to the emperor, among them ruling
princes, it is clear that there was no general breakdown of confidence in
the legal system in the years leading up to 1618. Thus in 1613 the bishop
of Würzburg felt it worth writing to the president of the Kammergericht
pressing for an early decision in a case in which he was involved.^11
Nor were the litigants limited to Catholics. In the period from 1590 to
1621 there were some six hundred cases at the Hofrat involving those
who were or became members of the Protestant Union, although there
was a reduction in the number from 1615 onwards, which Ehrenpreis
attributes to a general decline in tension under Emperor Matthias.^12
Wilson shares this latter view, noting that ‘the number of complaints
about breaches of the religious peace dropped dramatically after 1612’,
while by 1614 the efforts of Matthias’s leading minister, Cardinal Khlesl,
‘had reconciled most Protestants to Imperial justice’.^13 Thus complaints
from the more politically minded of the Protestants about the growing
influence of the Hofrat, Catholic-dominated and under the emperor’s
personal control, largely fizzled out in the early 1600s. Embarrassingly,
a number of princes had to decline involvement in those protests on the
grounds that they either had or were proposing to use the court them-
selves, including Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, a leading Calvinist
figure in the Palatinate-led opposition within the Empire.^14 His Lutheran