Protestantism in Poland and Bohemia - James Aitken Wylie

thereafter, several hundreds were sent into
banishment; and the crafty persecutors now paused
to mark the effect of these severities upon the
common people. Terrified, ground down into
poverty, suffering from imprisonment and other
inflictions, and deprived of their leaders, they
found the people, as they had hoped, very pliant. A
small number, who voluntarily exiled themselves,
excepted, the citizens conformed. Thus the
populous and once Protestant Prague bowed its
neck to the Papal yoke.[12] In a similar way, and
with a like success, did the "Commissioners of the
Reformation" carry out their instructions in all the
chief cities of Bohemia.
After the same fashion were the villages and
rural parts "unprotestantized." The Emperor
Matthias, in 1610, had guaranteed the peasantry of
Bohemia in the free exercise of the Protestant
religion. This privilege was now abolished,
beginning was made in the villages, where the
flocks were deprived of their shepherds. Their
Bibles and other religious books were next taken
from them and destroyed, that the flame might go
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