By way of attributing something good to Rudolph, I will make him responsible for a garden, said to have been very beautiful, which occupied some ground at the higher westward end of the "Stag's Moat." Here was a pleasance, where gallants and fair ladies disported themselves and watched the antics of wild animals. It was in this garden that Schiller placed the little drama he describes in _Der Handschuh_. Schiller gives the Spanish version of the story, where the gallant smacks the lady's face with the glove he had retrieved for her from among the lions, and then struts away for evermore. Romantic, but ill-tempered, whereas the local version here is that the gallant married the lady--perhaps she became insistent; anyway, a useful if commonplace ending. I gave you an instance of Rudolph's statecraft in that little matter of the "Passauer," and am not inclined to give you any more. His doings and those of his Habsburg successors brought so much suffering to Bohemia and Prague that I would rather be excused from giving any account of them. We have heard of Rudolph's brother Matthias, and how under him the strain put upon the people of Bohemia grew too severe, and how the Estates cut the Gordian Knot by throwing the King's lieutenants out of a window on the Hradšany. They happened to fall soft, on a midden, and got away unhurt. As a diplomatic action, this measure taken by the Estates lacked finesse, but it had one advantage over the usual diplomatic transactions in their devious course, that it was direct and final in its effect, namely, to precipitate a great devastating war, and to leave Bohemia hopelessly enchained for close on three centuries. We have seen the "Winter King"[1] pass this way with his English wife, pause here to be crowned, and then after a short year's reign, fly from the country that trusted him when his army and the cause he was called upon to stand for went under in a sea of blood on the White Mountain. It is only about an hour on foot to the battlefield where the army of Protestant Bohemia, after retiring before the Imperialist host, made its final, fatal stand. After all, Frederick's short reign was only an interlude: the hand of the Habsburg had closed over Bohemia when Ferdinand I ascended its throne in 1526 by virtue of his marriage with Anna, and also, as I have said, by the free use of Austrian gold; and the victory won by Charles V at Mühlberg in 1547 had almost crushed the cause of Protestantism out of existence. [Footnote 1: Frederick, Count of the Palatinate, was called the "Winter King," probably because he came to Prague one winter and left the next one.]