The signal for the outbreak of hostilities in the Germanics was given by a rebellion in Bohemia against the Habsburgs. Following the death of Rudolph II (1576-1612), a narrow-minded, art-loving, and unbalanced recluse, his childless brother Matthias (1612-1619) had desired to secure the succession of a cousin, Ferdinand II (1619-1637), who, although a man of blameless life and resolute character, was known to be devoted to the cause of absolutism and fanatically loyal to the Catholic Church. Little opposition to this settlement was encountered in the various Habsburg Bohemian dominions, except in Bohemia. In that country, however, the nobles, many of whom were Calvinists, dreaded the prospective accession of Ferdinand, who would be likely to deprive them of their special privileges and to impede, if not to forbid, the exercise of the Protestant religion in their territories. 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. Then, too, most of the Lutheran princes, led by the tactful John George, elector of Saxony, hoped by remaining neutral to obtain special concessions from the emperor. Within a very brief period, Tilly subdued Bohemia, drove out Frederick, and reestablished the Habsburg power. Many rebellious nobles lost their property and lives, and the practice of the Protestant religion was again forbidden in Bohemia. Nor was that all. The victorious imperialists drove the fugitive Frederick, now derisively dubbed the "winter king," out of his original wealthy possessions on the Rhine, into miserable exile, an outcast without land or money. The conquered Palatinate was turned over to Maximilian of Bavaria, who was further rewarded for his services by being recognized as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in place of the deposed Frederick.