Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/136

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98
THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

condition of affairs in Upper and Lower Austria, which had before been threatening to the Emperor, now grew rapidly worse; the orators of the Estates, especially Baron von Tschernembl, in Upper, and Herr von Thonradel, in Lower Austria, held the most hostile language. If the lead of these men and their friends had been followed, the archduchy would have joined the insurrection. But even among the Protestant nobility the ancient attachment to the hereditary family so prevailed, that its enemies could not bring about an open rebellion, and the invasion of the Bohemians had only the effect of pressing the Emperor with all sorts of demands from the Estates. Fortunately the danger threatened by the Bohemian army began to subside. Impassable roads, the want of provisions, and the clothing needed in that raw season of the year, cooled the inclination to further advance. So much the more desirous were the Bohemians to follow up the results hitherto attained in Moravia, and carry this land with them. In the Diet which assembled in Brünn, in the month of December, appeared a Bohemian deputation to which Thurn, attended by a cavalry escort, attached himself, and attempted to persuade the Estates to join immediately the insurrection. Here again, Z̃erotín sought to keep his countrymen from taking this step, struggling eloquently with the suspicions which rose thickly on all sides around him. Such, however, was the respect for him, that he succeeded still this once, and for the last time, in holding the Moravians true to the house of Hapsburg. Tschernembl came from Austria for the special purpose of winning him to the Protestant cause; but all his endeavors could not change Z̃erotín’s conviction that the Bohemians, in their rising, sought political ends, and that Thurn and Ruppa, especially, had an eye to their own