this Agreement they guaranteed to each other full liberty of religious worship, which was to be extended to the peasants also; the full right of the Protestants to appoint priests to the livings in their gift was recognized, and it was further agreed that on the lands of the crown[1] both religious parties should be allowed to worship freely according to their creed, and to build churches.
This last provision requires special notice. The great Hussite revolution had been followed by a complete confiscation of the property of the Romanist Church in Bohemia; the poverty of the clergy being one of the most important points of the early Hussite creed, and one that is specially referred to in the Compacts. Through the good-will of King Sigismund and his successors—all of whom, with the exception of George of Poděbrad, were Romanists—the Catholic Church had again received gifts of land and other property. These gifts were, however, assumed to have been made temporarily to individuals, and the Church property continued legally to be a portion of the lands of the crown; this fiction was undoubtedly maintained out of respect to the strong feeling of the utraquists on this matter.
For the same reason the clergy did not, till after the complete reaction which followed the battle of the White Mountain, constitute one of the Estates of the realm. The right of building churches, granted to those who dwelt on the lands of the crown, therefore included those who lived on land owned by the Church. It is this question that was—nine years later—the immediate cause of the Thirty Years' War, the Archbishop of Prague having caused the Protestant Church of Hrob[2] to be destroyed while the Abbot of Břevnov closed a church in the town of Broumov which was under his authority.[3]
- ↑ The estates belonging to the king and the towns under his immediate sovereignty, and enjoying special immunities, were thus designated. They were in this way distinguished from the estates of the nobles and the towns which were built on land belonging to nobles.
- ↑ In German "Klostergrab."
- ↑ This important question is fully elucidated by Dr. Gindely. In his earlier work (Geschichte der Ertheilung des Böhmischen Majestâtsbriefes) the great Bohemian historian attempted to defend the conduct of the Archbishop of Prague and of the Abbot of Břevnov. He then only considered the Letter of Majesty, ignoring the Agreement signed at the same time. In his Rudolph II und seine Zeit, Dr. Gindely with great frankness modifies his former opinion. The right of Protestants to build churches on lands owned by Roman ecclesiastics was
