Already there
had been encroachments on their religious liberty.
One day in 1618, a group of Bohemian noblemen broke into the room where
the imperial envoys were stopping and hurled them out of a window into
a castle moat some sixty feet below. This so-called "defenestration" of
Ferdinand's representatives was followed by the proclamation of the
dethronement of the Habsburgs in Bohemia and the election to the
kingship of Frederick, the Calvinistic Elector Palatine. Frederick was
crowned at Prague and prepared to defend his new lands. Ferdinand II,
raising a large army in his other possessions, and receiving assistance
from Maximilian of Bavaria and the Catholic League as well as from
Tuscany and the Spanish Habsburgs, intrusted the allied forces to an
able veteran general, Count Tilly (1559-1632). King Frederick had
expected support from his father-in-law, James I of England, and from
the Lutheran princes of northern Germany, but in both respects he was
disappointed. What with parliamentary quarrels at home and a curiously
mistaken foreign policy of a Spanish alliance, James confined his
assistance to pompous advice and long words.
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