Protestantism in Poland and Bohemia - James Aitken Wylie

and maidens violated; neither the child in its cradle
nor the corpse in its grave was spared. Prague was
given as a spoil, and the soldiers boasted that they
had gathered some millions from the Protestants;
nor, large as the sum is, is it an unlikely one, seeing
that all the valuables in the country had been
collected for security into the capital.
But by far the most melancholy result of this
battle was the overthrow, as sudden as it was
complete, of the Protestantism of Bohemia. The
position of the two parties was after this
completely reversed; the Romanists were now the
masters; and the decree went forth to blot out
utterly Protestant Bohemia. Not by the sword, the
halter, and the wheel in the first instance. The
Jesuits were recalled, and the work was committed
to them, and so skillfully did they conduct it that
Bohemia, which had been almost entirely
Protestant when Ferdinand II ascended the throne,
was at the close of his reign almost as entirely
Popish. No nation, perhaps, ever underwent so
great a change in the short term of fifteen years as
Bohemia.
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