A red-faced, heavy fowled, bald-headed, somewhat goggle-eyed old
gentleman, Rudolph did his best to lead the life of a hermit, and escape
the cares of royalty. Timid by temperament, yet liable to fits of
uncontrollable anger, he broke his furniture to pieces when irritated,
and threw dishes that displeased him in his butler's face, but left
affairs of state mainly to his valet, who earned many a penny by selling
the Imperial signature.

He had just signed the famous "Majestatsbrief," by which he granted vast
privileges to the Protestants of Bohemia, and had bitten the pen to
pieces in a paroxysm of anger, after dimly comprehending the extent of
the concessions which he had made.

There were hundreds of sovereign states over all of which floated the
shadowy and impalpable authority of an Imperial crown scarcely fixed
on the head of any one of the rival brethren and cousins; there was a
confederation of Protestants, with the keen-sighted and ambitious
Christian of Anhalt acting as its chief, and dreaming of the Bohemian
crown; there was the just-born Catholic League, with the calm, far-
seeing, and egotistical rather than self-seeking Maximilian at its head;
each combination extending over the whole country, stamped with
imbecility of action from its birth, and perverted and hampered by
inevitable jealousies. In addition to all these furrows ploughed by
the very genius of discord throughout the unhappy land was the wild and
secret intrigue with which Leopold, Archduke and Bishop, dreaming also
of the crown of Wenzel, was about to tear its surface as deeply as he
dared.

Thus constituted were the leading powers of Europe in the earlier part of