But Ferdinand II. soon found that he could not carry out completely his purpose of Romanizing and Germanizing Bohemia without departing from that Constitutional line which he had attempted to follow in 1623. He could not trust a Bohemian Assembly to carry out his plans; and in 1627 he issued an ordinance which remained in force till 1848. By this edict the King claimed the right to add to, alter, or improve the Government of the country at his own pleasure. Yet even this he claimed to do in virtue of a previously existing royal right; the judges took advantage of this admission to interpret the new ordinance in the light of Ferdinand's previous promises to respect the Bohemian Constitution; and this interpretation was justified by the fact that Ferdinand, in the very same year in which he issued the ordinance, reiterated the Constitutional promises which he had made in 1623. The explanation of this apparent contradiction is that Ferdinand II. cared more for the unity of the Roman Catholic Church than for centralizing the Government of the Austrian dominions; and the same might be said of his successor, Ferdinand III. Nevertheless, from motives of convenience, both these Princes resided very little in Prague and much in Vienna; and thus those court officials who give the tone in these matters to the Government gradually gathered together, rather in the Archduchy of Austria than in the Kingdom of Bohemia; while the process of centralization was still further encouraged by that denationalizing movement which dated from the Battle of the White Hill. With the growth of an alien aristocracy there naturally grew up that union of class bitterness with race bitterness which intensifies both; and the difference of faith between the conquerors and conquered added another element of division. An attempt of the peasants to shake off the yoke of their conquerors led to the destruction of privileges which they had hitherto possessed; and thus the Estates of Bohemia became even more aristocratic than those of the neighbouring countries. Under such circumstances the gradual absorption of the Government of Bohemia in that of the other lands of the House of Austria seemed the natural consequence of the Austrian policy in the seventeenth century; and Maria Theresa propounded a plan for a Central Assembly in which Bohemia, Hungary, and Galicia were to share a common representation with the Archduchy of Austria. These schemes, like all measures for moderate unification in the Austrian dominions, received a fatal shock from the impetuous policy of Joseph II. The claim to Germanize Bohemia by force awoke in that country, as it had done in Hungary, a desire for new national life and a zeal for the old national literature. The opposition to Joseph did not, indeed, take so fierce a form in Bohemia as it assumed in Hungary and the Netherlands; but it was strong enough to induce Joseph's successor, Leopold II., to restore the old Constitution of Bohemia.