Protestantism in Poland and Bohemia - James Aitken Wylie

they could say, with some little plausibility, that no
one had died for his religion.
But in trampling out its Protestantism the
persecutor trampled out the Bohemian nation. First
of all, the flower of the nobles perished on the
scaffold. Of the great families that remained 185
sold their castles and hinds and left the kingdom.
Hundreds of the aristocratic families followed the
nobles into exile. Of the common people not fewer
than 36,000 families emigrated. There was hardly a
kingdom in Europe where the exiles of Bohemia
were not to be met with. Scholars, merchants,
traders, fled from a land which was given over as a
prey to the disciples of Loyola, and the dragoons of
Ferdinand. Of the 4,000,000 who inhabited
Bohemia in 1620, a miserable remnant, amounting
not even to a fifth, were all that remained in 1648.
[13] Its fanatical sovereign is reported to have said
that he would rather reign over a desert than over a
kingdom peopled by heretics. Bohemia was now a
desert.
This is not our opinion only, it is that of Popish
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