The Bohemians were not long in feeling the effects of the change. Hitherto the hold of the House of Austria upon the country had been limited to the life of one old man. It had now, by the admission of the Diet itself, fixed itself for ever upon Bohemia. The proceedings against the Protestants on the royal domains assumed a sharper character. The Braunau worshippers were rigorously excluded from their church. The walls of the new church of Klostergrab were actually levelled with the ground. SECTION II.--_The Revolution at Prague._ [Sidenote: 1618. § 1. The Bohemians petition Matthias.] The Bohemians had thus to resist in 1618, under every disadvantage, the attack which they had done nothing to meet in 1617. Certain persons named Defensors had, by law, the right of summoning an assembly of representatives of the Protestant Estates. Such an assembly met on March 5, and having prepared a petition to Matthias, who was absent from the kingdom, adjourned to May 21. [Sidenote: § 2. Reply of Matthias.] Long before the time of meeting came, an answer was sent from Matthias justifying all that had been done, and declaring the assembly illegal. It was believed at the time, though incorrectly, that the answer was prepared by Slawata and Martinitz, two members of the regency who had been notorious for the vigour of their opposition to Protestantism. [Sidenote: § 3. Violent counsels.] 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. [Sidenote: § 4. Martinitz and Slawata thrown out of window.] Accordingly, on the morning of May 23, 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 Slawata 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 some one mockingly, 'Whether his Mary will help him.' A moment later he added: 'By God, his Mary has helped him.' Slawata 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. [Sidenote: § 5. A bad beginning.]