no period, perhaps, was the prestige of English diplomacy so low. As no answer was received, it was decided at nine in the morning (November 9) that the queen should leave immediately with her youngest child. The king still pretended to have the intention of remaining in the town. The queen's travelling-carriage was prepared: "the resoluteness he had hitherto displayed now forsook the king; when Elizabeth, carrying her son, entered the carriage, it became impossible to hold him back. He mounted his horse, and gave the signal for a general flight."
Though Mansfeld shortly afterwards again attempted to oppose the Imperialists, and some slight resistance was still offered by Moravia and Silesia, the battle of the Bila Hora was shortly followed by the complete submission of all the lands of the Bohemian crown.
What were the reasons which caused the Bohemian nation, that had two centuries before, proved itself victorious under even more difficult circumstances, to succumb almost without a struggle? There is no doubt that the universal adoption of serfdom in Bohemia had entirely changed the character of the population. In the Hussite struggle large armies of peasants had freely and enthusiastically defended their country, and the democratic instinct, innate in the Slav race, had had full play. The Bohemian war of 1618 to 1620 was on both sides waged by mercenaries, and the better paid and better fed soldiers of Tilly and Bouquoi easily prevailed over the troops of Frederick, who were almost always on the verge of mutiny. The national enthusiasm which had animated the Bohemians on previous occasions was also naturally absent in this, the last of their wars. The German prince, whom their nobles had elected as king, ignorant as he was even of the language of the land, could not inspire them with the confidence which—in spite of temporary differences—they felt for men such as Žižka and Prokop, born Bohemians, thoroughly in touch with the national feeling. The miserable irresolution and weakness, not to call it cowardice, displayed by the German prince, who had undertaken to govern a headstrong people, ill disposed to all foreign, and especially to German, rule, made his position even more hopeless. The religious enthusiasm on which Budova, Ruppa, and other more far-seeing leaders probably reckoned as a substitute for the necessarily absent racial one, was always found wanting. In Bohemia, as in
