84 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
the course of a normal day, another hour was spent in either mental
or vocal prayer. Besides this, on Sundays and feast days he partici-
pated in the Solemn Mass in the court chapel in the morning and in
vesper services in the afternoon.The same source reports that Ferdinand ‘often asserted both in writing
and orally that he would give up his provinces and kingdoms more read-
ily and more gladly than knowingly neglect an opportunity to extend
the faith’, an attitude which is confirmed by his actions, both in Inner
Austria as a young man and later as emperor, when he pursued his
religious objectives apparently regardless of the political and indeed
physical risks. Rather than indicating a blind faith that God would be
on his side, though, this seems to have stemmed more from a kind of
religious fatalism, a belief that God’s will would be done, whatever it
might be, a view which he himself enunciated at one particular time of
crisis in his life, observing that ‘human resources and power are at His
disposal, and He gives them and takes them away as He will’.^4
After a long regency Ferdinand’s personal rule in Inner Austria began
in December 1596, when the emperor formally declared him to be of
age, but it was not until 1598, after returning from a journey to Rome,
that he began his moves against the Protestant majority in his domains.
It has been argued that these should be principally attributed not to the
man himself, barely twenty and generally agreed to have been imma-
ture, impressionable, and in more worldly matters somewhat indecisive,
but to the prelates, Jesuits, and above all his mother, who pressed him
to act.^5 Nevertheless Ferdinand had enough other councillors who were
advising caution, pointing to the risks of tackling the majority head on,
and warning of disturbances, armed resistance and even civil war, par-
ticularly at a time when the long-standing Turkish threat had escalated
again into open war. Exactly these considerations had led his father
to compromise, whereas Ferdinand approached the issue in a deter-
mined, even reckless manner in which his own conviction that he was
performing his religious duty must have played a considerable part.
He did not, of course, act completely on his own initiative and accord-
ing to his own plan. On the contrary he followed the shrewd advice of
one of his councillors, an elderly bishop, who recommended a step by
step campaign, taking on the weakest opponents first, seeking to isolate
them from potential wider support, and defeating them before mov-
ing on to others. The nobility were the most likely to resist and the
most capable of arming themselves to do so, so they should not be chal-
lenged, in the expectation that if not directly threatened they would