have both a great mission to fulfill," exclaimed Count Adam, "and it
is well for us sometimes to place this clearly before our eyes, in order
to be ever mindful of it, and never to forget it even in the pursuance of
private ends. You, too, remember this, my son, and act accordingly. To the
Emperor and the Church be all our services dedicated! To render the
Emperor great and mighty, to strengthen his consideration throughout the
German Empire, is and shall be my aim as a statesman. To extend
continually the power and dominion of the Catholic religion is and shall
be my task as a Christian, as a son of the Church, within whose pale alone
is salvation. God himself has chosen me for his tool, else how would it
have been possible that the bigoted, reformed Elector should have selected
me for his first and mightiest minister? God wills that through me the
influence of the Holy Roman See and the German Emperor be promoted and
advanced; therefore has he caused me, the subject of the Emperor, an
Austrian born, to become the servant of the Elector of Brandenburg. But
the servant has become master, and the Catholic Austrian is Stadtholder in
the Mark, the almighty minister in the land of the heretic. It is so,
because through him this land is to be led back to the true faith and the
Emperor, because through him is to be re-established the endangered
supremacy of the Emperor of Germany! The Protestant Electors would have
exalted themselves against the power of Emperor and empire; with the help
of the Swedes they would have cut up the Holy Roman Empire into a number
of free, independent States, great and small, where Protestants,
Reformers, and Lutherans would have enjoyed as great consideration as the
Catholics, and over which the Emperor would no longer have exercised
control. The Protestant Elector of the Palatinate was to have been changed
into a King, waving his scepter over Catholic Bohemia, and in place of the
little Elector of Brandenburg was to have arisen a mighty Prince, who was
to have broken the power of the German Emperor in the north, and become
the chief and center of Protestant Germany! To that end were they leagued
with the Swedes, to that end was King Gustavus Adolphus to have furnished
help to his cousins and brothers-in-law. But the fates were against them!
In the battle of the White Mountain the Count Palatine lost his Bohemian
throne, in the battle of Luetzen the Swedish King his life, and in the
peace of Prague