The Thirty Years' War - James Aitken Wylie

not only indifferent to the misfortunes of the
Elector Frederick, but saw without concern the
cruel suppression of Protestantism in Bohemia.
Content to be left in peace in his own dominions,
and not ill-pleased, it may be, to see his rivals the
Calvinists humbled, he refused to act the part
which his descent and his political power made
incumbent upon him. The Elector of Brandenburg,
the next in rank to Saxony, showed himself at this
crisis equally unpatriotic and shortsighted. But now
they saw -- what they might have foreseen long
before, but for the blindness that selfishness ever
inflicts that the policy of Ferdinand had placed
them in a new and most critical position.[3] East
and west the Catholic reaction had hemmed them
in; Protestantism had disappeared in the kingdoms
beyond the Danube, and now the Rhine Electorate
had undergone a forced conversion. On all sides
the wave of a triumphant reaction was rolling
onward, and how soon it might sweep over their
own territories, now left almost like islands in the
midst of a raging sea, they could not tell. The
tremendous blunder they had committed was plain
enough, but how to remedy it was more than their
66