The Thirty Years' War - James Aitken Wylie

of the Romans; and when he found how he had
been outwitted, he vented his rage, exclaiming, "A
rascally Capuchin has disarmed me with his rosary,
and crammed into his cowl six electoral
bonnets."[9]
All parties in this transaction appear as if
smitten with blindness and infatuation. We behold
each in turn laying the train for its own overthrow.
The cause of Protestantism seemed eternally ruined
in the land of Luther, and lo, the emperor and the
Jesuits combine to lift it up! Ferdinand prepares the
means for his own discomfiture and humiliation
when in the first place he quarrels with the League,
and in the second when he issues the Edict of
Restitution. He drives both Jesuits and Protestants
from him in turn. Next it is the Jesuits who plot
their own undoing. They compel the emperor to
reduce his army, and not only so, but they also
make him dismiss a general who is more to him
than an army. And what is yet more strange, the
time they select for making these great changes is
the moment when a hero, who had bound victory to
his standards by his surpassing bravery and skill,
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