About a year after this incident King Matthias died and was succeeded by Ferdinand of Styria, who was not recognised by the Protestants. They chose instead Frederick, the Elector Palatine, who had married the daughter of James I. of England. About two months after his coronation in Prague his wife Elizabeth gave birth to a son called Rupert; he lived to be known as the dashing Prince Rupert, who played such a gallant part in the English Civil Wars. He and his brother Maurice both died without children, and it was through their sister Sophia that the Hanoverian kings of England came to the British throne after the unhappy termination of the Stuart line. Sophia’s son was George I. of England. The Elector Frederick is known as “the Winter King,” because hardly had he assumed the crown than the forces of the Austrian Empire met the Bohemians in a severe battle, called the Battle of the White Mountain, near Prague, in which the Bohemians were completely routed and their newly made king was forced to fly. His brief reign therefore extended only over a few winter months. The battle was followed by wholesale executions and confiscations among the Protestants; in the market-place at Prague, on June 21 in the same year, twenty-six leading Protestants, headed by Count Slik, were executed. After this, national aspiration was crushed, and the country was Germanised by its rulers; the House of Hapsburg was in the ascendant and became the reigning hereditary rulers of Bohemia. It is only since the settlement of 1867 that there has been a revival, and the Czechs have once more been warmed into animation in the desire to keep alive their national tongue within the Empire. [Illustration: PRAGUE · CARL’S BRIDGE] Prague is a mediæval town and one of the most interesting existing, in spite of some very unsatisfactory buildings dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though it has been again and again the scene of conflict, there is still enough remaining from the past to afford a rich feast to the lover of antiquities. The castle of Vysehead, built of the stones of a still older fortress, stands high above the city, and is a monumental chapter of history in itself if properly studied. The town is on the river Moldau, and overlooking this is the Hradcany Palace of the ancient kings, dating mainly from the fourth century, but since greatly rebuilt and added to. The fine bridge of Charles IV., fourteenth century, has a high ornamental tower at one end, a very leviathan of its kind, rich in decorative effects, though simple in general style. The Cathedral of St. Vitus is only one of numerous religious buildings well worth seeing. Many of the houses are quaint and irregular, but the modernisation of the town, and the inevitable arrival of trams, has given a certain veneer which sits oddly on the ancient framework.