The feelings of the boy king were evidently somewhat painfully divided. The education which Frederick had given him had produced in him a great zeal for the Catholic cause; but the zeal was modified, and somewhat counteracted, by his deeply rooted conviction that it was to George of Podĕbrad alone that he owed the possibility of becoming King of Bohemia. Both these feelings were made manifest on his arrival in Prague. When Rokycana came out at the head of the clergy to welcome the young king, Ladislaus turned away and would hardly notice the Archbishop, until George induced him to thank Rokycana for his address. But, when the procession reached the Catholic College, the king sprang from his horse and did special reverence to those clergy who had been restored to their livings on the occasion of Sigismund’s coronation. The struggle between Ladislaus and his strong-willed viceroy was of short duration. George was resolved not to yield on the question of Rokycana’s position; and the young king left Prague in great indignation. He did not, indeed, at once abandon his efforts for effecting a reconciliation between the Pope and the Bohemians, at the expense of the popular Archbishop; but, on his second visit to Prague in 1457, he found both George and Rokycana still obstinate in their resistance; and the poor boy’s efforts at the settlement of the difficulties of the Church were cut short by illness and death. On his deathbed he again renewed to George his admission that he owed the crown to his influence; and he entreated him to govern the dependent provinces justly, and to secure that those, who had followed the young King from Austria to Bohemia, should be allowed to return peaceably to their own country. The death of Ladislaus extinguished the last claim to direct descent from the old Bohemian kings; and the consequence was that a larger number of candidates than usual came forward to claim the Bohemian crown. Charles VII., King of France, based his pretensions to the throne on the ground that, had Ladislaus lived, he would have been married to Charles’s daughter. The Duke of Saxony pleaded that he had actually married the sister of Ladislaus. The Dukes of Austria tried to revive the recollection of the promise of Charles IV.; while the King of Poland appealed to the fact of his former election, which had fallen into abeyance after the birth of Ladislaus. Of these candidates, the King of France and the Duke of Saxony seem to have been by far the most pressing and sanguine in their candidature; and both of them paid court to George; while both of them hoped, by securing a dependency of Bohemia, to get a footing in the kingdom before their actual election. The King of France declared his intention of taking Luxemburg under his special protection, while William of Saxony appealed to the desire of some of the Silesians to choose him as their ruler.