the Estates retired thence to the house of Žerotín. Here was repeated the scene which had been enacted with the Cardinal, only that Žerotín maintained an attitude of more decision, and simply denied being accessory to these acts. Finally, the Estates went to Prince Liechtenstein with similar charges, though they pressed these less violently—indeed they took of him a somewhat friendly leave, as the Prince not only declared his innocence, but even promised that he would thenceforth hold himself bound to them for life and death, and he sealed his promise by the hand-grasp: at least the Estates, on the very same day, assumed a more friendly attitude towards Liechtenstein than towards the Cardinal and Z̃erotín; for while they did not restrain the freedom of the former, they subjected the two latter to imprisonment at their own houses, and placed over them guards of musketeers.
From this moment Z̃erotín’s part was at an end; he was now with those politically dead. He had, with a rare persistency, sought to maintain peace and reconcile oppositions, unmoved by losing the sympathies and incurring the suspicions of his own party by seeming to have become untrue to his own convictions. When he had reached the extreme, and the parties were intent upon each other’s ruin, his mission of peace was fulfilled. His real inclination and his religious confession would have thrown him into the arms of the Protestants, but he would not recognize this connection. Whether he was so deeply convinced that the grounds of the insurrection were reprehensible that nothing could move him, or whether new alliances brought about by a marriage into the family of the Waldsteins held him too strongly, none can know. He belonged now at least to the party of the King—no longer, however, as an active member of his
