40 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
and with a view to smoothing the Habsburg succession to the Impe-
rial crown. Events overtook them, in the form of the Bohemian revolt
and Matthias’s death. Thereafter Emperor Ferdinand II preferred to man-
age without the Reichstag, in essence because there was no chance of
securing a grant of taxation in the absence of an external war against
the Turks. Nor would the Protestant estates have voted for taxes dur-
ing the internal conflict within the Empire, while the resources of their
Catholic counterparts were committed to supporting the League army.
Instead Ferdinand confined himself to a couple of meetings of the elec-
tors, and even these he called only when circumstances or pressure made
it inevitable. Thus it was left to his successor to call the next Reichstag,
three years after Ferdinand’s death.
The Protestant activists of 1613 were still mostly the so-called ‘cor-
responding princes’ of the early 1590s who had formed the main
opposition at the Reichstag meetings of 1598 and 1608, and who were
also the principal members of the Protestant Union. The size of this
group needs to be kept in perspective, as it comprised the princes of only
five significant territories, the Palatinate, Brandenburg, Baden-Durlach,
Hessen-Kassel and Württemberg, together with four minor ones, Anhalt,
Ansbach, Kulmbach and Zweibrücken, plus the count of Öttingen.
Against this a total of 31 temporal princes, almost all Protestants, were
present or represented at the 1613 Reichstag, together with a further
38 counts and barons, as well as 58 ecclesiastical princes and prelates
with worldly domains.^27 The picture is similar for the cities, where of
the total of 58 represented only 17 belonged to the Protestant Union,
and these were mostly small. The Protestant militants were so opposed
to majority voting precisely because they were a small minority. Their
significance thus lay not in their numbers or size, but in a lingering
attachment to the consensual traditions of the Reichstag, together with
the more practical need of the emperor to secure a tax grant after the
failure of 1608.
Dissension at Reichstag meetings was nothing new, as it had been
more the rule than the exception for most of a century since the
Reformation. 1608 was indeed exceptional, but by comparison 1613
was a return to type rather than a further escalation. Thus in the lat-
ter year the ‘corresponding princes’, more than half of whom were
Calvinists or Calvinist-inclined, obtained significantly less support from
the conservative Lutheran Protestants than had been the case in 1608.
As will be discussed below, the Palatinate had its own political and
religious motives for placing itself at the centre of an anti-Catholic
and anti-Habsburg group of irreconcilables, and for exploiting available