82 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
the ruling dynasty, and Albrecht V, who became duke in 1550, was
initially forced by financial necessity to make concessions. In 1563,
however, he changed tack, launching proceedings against the Lutheran
nobility on grounds of a supposed conspiracy, as well as reforming and
reactivating the church for a campaign of recatholicisation, in course of
which many who would not comply were forced to emigrate. Although
undertaken ostensibly on religious grounds, these measures also laid the
foundations for increasingly absolutist rule, as the exclusion of Protes-
tant nobles and city representatives broke the power of the Estates,
reducing their assembly to little more than a committee summoned
from time to time to provide for the financial needs of the ruler. Bavaria
thus largely dispensed with the traditional sharing of power between
prince and Estates, a process which was extended and consolidated by
Albrecht’s son, and particularly by his grandson Maximilian I in the last
decade of the century.^1
Emperor Ferdinand I had already made much more cautious attempts
to limit religious dissent in Bohemia, including bringing about the
reunification of the Catholics and the ‘old’ Utraquists, who by this time
were effectively neo-Catholics apart from the question of communion in
both kinds. The Protestant majority also came under pressure, and some
fifty Lutheran preachers were forced into exile in 1555, but otherwise
Ferdinand’s efforts met with only limited success in the face of Estates
opposition, although he did succeed in having the Catholic archbish-
opric of Prague, vacant since the Hussite period, re-established in 1561.
His son Maximilian II, who succeeded him in 1564, was more concil-
iatory, perhaps because of his personal sympathies, as well as equally
constrained by the Estates because of his need for grants of taxation.
As noted in the previous chapter, he thus made significant religious con-
cessions in both Upper and Lower Austria in 1568, as well as giving oral
approval to the Bohemian Confession of 1575 in the last year of his
life. Unlike the Augsburg Confession upon which it was based, however,
this document was never formally adopted by the relevant constituent
body, in this case the Bohemian Estates, so that although the Lutherans
and some other Protestant groups claimed for the next 45 years that
it had granted them legitimacy and associated rights this was far from
well-founded legally.^2
Ferdinand of Styria
Before pursuing the twists and turns of counter-Reformation in the
main Habsburg lands it is convenient to digress both territorially