In the Protestant assembly there was a knot of men, headed by Count Henry of Thurn, which was bent on the dethronement of Ferdinand. They resolved to take advantage of the popular feeling to effect the murder of the two Regents, and so to place an impassable gulf between the nation and the King. Accordingly, on the morning of May 23d, the "beginning and cause," as a contemporary calls it, "of all the coming evil," the first day, though men as yet knew it not, of thirty years of war, Thurn sallied forth at the head of a band of noblemen and their followers, all of them with arms in their hands. Trooping into the room where the Regents were seated, they charged the obnoxious two with being the authors of the King's reply. After a bitter altercation both Martinitz and Slavata were dragged to a window which overlooked the fosse below from a dizzy height of some seventy feet. Martinitz, struggling against his enemies, pleaded hard for a confessor. "Commend thy soul to God," was the stern answer. "Shall we allow the Jesuit scoundrels to come here?" In an instant he was hurled out, crying, "Jesus, Mary!" "Let us see," said someone mockingly, "whether his Mary will help him." A moment later he added, "By God, his Mary has helped him." Slavata followed, and then the secretary Fabricius. By a wonderful preservation, in which pious Catholics discerned the protecting hand of God, all three crawled away from the spot without serious hurt. There are moments when the character of a nation or party stands revealed as by a lightning flash, and this was one of them. It is not in such a way as this that successful revolutions are begun. The first steps to constitute a new government were easy. Thirty directors were appointed, and the Jesuits were expelled from Bohemia. The Diet met and ordered soldiers to be levied to form an army. But to support this army money would be needed, and the existing taxes were insufficient. A loan was accordingly thought of, and the nobles resolved to request the towns to make up the sum, they themselves contributing nothing. The project falling dead upon the resistance of the towns, new taxes were voted, but no steps were taken to collect them, and the army was left to depend in a great measure upon chance. Would the princes of Germany come to the help of the directors? John George of Saxony told them that he deeply sympathized with them, but that rebellion was a serious matter. To one who asked him what he meant to do he replied, "Help to put out the fire." There was more help for them at Heidelberg than at Dresden. Frederick IV had died in 1610, and his son, the young Frederick V, looked up to Christian of Anhalt as the first statesman of his age. By his marriage with Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England, he had contracted an alliance which gave him the appearance rather than the reality of strength. He offered every encouragement to the Bohemians, but for the time held back from giving them actual assistance.