CHAPTER VIII. RELIGIOUS WAR IN GERMANY.

CHARLES V achieved a masterpiece of unscrupulous statecraft when he extricated himself from his war with France and left his English ally entangled in its toils. Cogent military reasons for the peace concluded at Crépy could doubtless be alleged ; the position of the imperial army in the heart of France was more imposing than secure, and the disasters of the retreat from Marseilles in 1524 might have been repeated in Champagne or Picardy. But there were deeper motives at work ; however promising the military situation might have been, no prosecution of the war could have been attended with greater advantages than was its conclusion at that juncture. Charles was left with a freer hand to deal with Germany than he had ever had before. He had been- more brilliantly victorious in 1530, but England and France were then at peace, and at liberty to harass him with underhand intrigues. Now, they were anxious suitors for his favour, ready, instead of reluctant, to purchase his support against each other by furthering the Emperor's efforts to cope with his remaining difficulties. These were now three, Turkish, Lutheran, and papal ; with the two latter he must deal to some extent simultaneously; the Turkish problem he was enabled by the friendly offices of Francis I to postpone.

With these ideas it was impossible for Charles even to contemplate a permanent toleration of schism or heresy. His concessions to the Lutherans from 1526 to 1544 were not made with any such intention ; they were simply payments extorted from Charles by necessity for indispensable services to be rendered against the Turks and the French ; they were all provisional and were limited in time to the meeting of a General Council. That they sprang from necessity and not from any reluctance of Charles to persecute is proved by his conduct in other lands than Germany. He did not attempt a policy of toleration or comprehension in Spain or in the Netherlands ; there his methods were the Inquisition and the stake. Wherever he had the power to persecute he persecuted ; he abstained in Germany only because he had no other choice and because he thought his abstention was not for ever ; and in the end the most powerful motive for his abdication was his desire to escape the necessity of countenancing permanent schism.

These perils, and the persistency with which the Lutherans turned the Empire's necessities to their own advantage, convinced Charles that the issues at stake were worth the risks of war. He was sure that there was no remedy but force, without perhaps being certain that force was any remedy. At the same time his experience in Germany from 1541 to 1544 had shown him how those risks might be minimised. The Landgrave's bigamy had driven a wedge into the Protestant ranks ; and the success with which the Emperor had widened the breach between Electoral Saxony and Hesse had opened the prospect of further divisions among the Lutheran Princes. Charles declares in his Commentaries that his success in isolating Cleves proved to him the lack of coherence among his enemies, and made him hope for victory in case of war; and that he intended in 1544 if not earlier to make war on the Lutherans is hardly a matter of doubt. He would not have made such great concessions at the Diet of Speier in 1544, had he not foreseen that a final settlement of accounts with France would enable him to render those concessions nugatory; and the fact that the Lutherans fell so easily into the trap has been considered the most conclusive proof of their political incapacity. Within three months from the date of the truce with France Charles was discussing with the Pope details of a war against the Lutherans. People would be glad, he wrote, if the Pope devoted to that object the vast sums he had amassed for a war against the Turks, "especially if the undertaking against the Turk had ceased to be a pressing necessity"; he declared that one of his chief objects in concluding peace with France was to be able to conduct these two wars against Turks and Lutherans successfully; and there was a secret stipulation that Francis I should assist in his endeavours. The war against the Turks had been one of the pretexts for requiring Lutheran aid at the Diet of Speier ; but Charles was taking care that it should "cease to be a pressing necessity" or to stand in the way of the other war he had in his mind.

Maximilian, subject to dreams, and his dream from 1545 to the disasters of 1552 was to assemble a General Council by means of which he would reduce the Lutherans to Catholicism and the Pope to reform ; then having united and purified Western Christendom he would march at its head against the Infidel, regain the East for the orthodox faith, and be crowned in Jerusalem. Maximilian had contemplated all these achievements, and had also hoped to encircle his brow with the tiara of a Pope and the halo of a saint ; but Charles would have been content to crown his life with monastic retirement. The object immediately under consideration in 1545 was the General Council for which he had laboured so long in vain. By this means he hoped to work his will both with the Pope and with the Protestants. The Lutherans had for m an v years expressed a desire for a General Council; if it met and they accepted its decrees, unity would be achieved: if they refused to be bound by them, the refusal would be a justification for war and a good ground on which to appeal for help to the Catholic Powers. Secondly, the mere fact of its meeting would annul the concessions which Charles had made ; and thirdly, the demand of a free General Council from an obstructive Pope would enhance the illusion under which the Lutherans laboured that Charles was their ally against the Papacy. In August, 1544, Paul III had denounced the Emperor's compliance at Speier, had reminded him of the fate of his predecessors, from Nero to Frederick II, who had persecuted the Church, and had threatened him with an even more terrible doom ; and Luther and Calvin had thereupon seized their pens in his defence. The Pope in fact was the chief obstacle to the Council ; but the peace between Charles and Francis destroyed all chance of successful resistance ; and Paul III made a virtue of necessity by summoning a Council to meet at Trent in December. As the Edict of Worms had been dated the same day as Charles' alliance with Leo X, so the summons to the Council of Trent was dated the same day as the Peace of Crépy (November 19, 1544).

War thus became inevitable, but Charles still sought to postpone it. He was not yet sure of peace with the Turks, of the Pope, or of the allies he hoped to win from the Lutheran side. Although the Spaniards at his Court spoke openly of the approaching extirpation of Protestantism, and although his confessor, Domenico de Soto, reinforced by the influence of Peter Canisius and other early missionaries of the Company of Jesus in Germany, was constantly urging him to take the decisive step, Granvelle and even Alva were still for peace, and the Emperor halted between the two opinions. To bring the Pope to terms he again made show of listening to the Lutherans. He expressed his intention of carrying out the decisions of the Diet of Speier, and annoyed the Catholics by again holding out the prospect of a national Council on religion, in case the General Council at Trent proved abortive. To this national assembly was also postponed the consideration of the various projects of reform which had been drawn up as a result of the Diet of Speier. The most notable of them was the "Wittenberg Reformation," which was drawn up by the Elector John Frederick, and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, and Melanchthon, although it contains few traces of Luther's spirit. It recommended the establishment of a Protestant. episcopacy on the ground that Princes were too much immersed in secular affairs to exert a proper supervision over those of the Church; possibly also it was intended to reconcile the great Catholic Bishops to a change of faith.

In these circumstances the doctrinal discussions which the Emperor renewed in the winter can be regarded as little more than a blind to delude the Protestants or a screen behind which he made his preparations for war. His representatives at the conference, Cochlaeus, Eberhard Billick, and Malvenda all held extreme views, and their arguments were principally aimed against the compromise of 1541. They revived the scholastic dogmas which had then been abandoned ; and the interest of their discussions consists, for English readers at any rate, mainly in the fact that Malvenda based his defence on the teaching of a forgotten English Dominican, Robert Holcot (d. 1349). Charles' real efforts were directed towards the more useful work of consolidating the Catholic and disintegrating the Protestant party. The leading Catholic opponent of the Habsburgs, Duke William III of Bavaria, who ruled the whole duchy since the death of his younger brother Ludwig, was won over to something more than benevolent neutrality by the alliance between Pope and Emperor, by the marriage of his son with Ferdinand's eldest daughter, and a promise of the throne of Bohemia for their descendants if Ferdinand's male issue failed, and by the offer of the coveted hat of the Elector Palatine, if the latter sided openly with Charles' enemies.

Maurice's uncle Duke George (1500-39), the main representative of the Albertine branch of the House of Wettin, had been the staunchest Catholic in the north of Germany; but his father Duke Henry (1539-41) had been a no less zealous Protestant. Maurice, who succeeded to the duchy in 1541, when twenty-one years of age, was neither. The hereditary jealousy between the Albertine and Ernestine Houses of Saxony was neutralised to some extent by Duke Henry's adoption of the Protestant cause and by Maurice's marriage with Agnes, the daughter of Philip of Hesse. But Maurice was less influenced perhaps by religious motives than any other Prince of the age ; and he poured scorn on those who thought that the interests of the State should be subordinate to theological dogma. His Protestant education at the Elector John Frederick's Court did not prevent his recalling the Catholic counsellors of his uncle Duke George. He readily followed his father-in-law, Philip of Hesse, in making a compact with Charles in 1541, though he had not Philip's personal motive of fear; and he assisted the Emperor to reduce John Frederick's brother-in-law, Duke William of Cleves. This first aroused enmity between him and the Elector ; the dispute concerning the bishoprics of Meissen and Merseburg increased it ; and a fresh source of discord arose in the question of the protectorate of the sees of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, which Maurice wanted for himself and .declared that John Frederick coveted. Carlowitz, an old adviser of Duke George and a member of one of the noble families of Meissen, which had sided against John Frederick as to the question of the bishopric, was untiring in his efforts to win over Maurice from the Elector's side to that of the Emperor ; and the attempts of the Archbishop of Cologne to reconcile the cousins in the summer of 1546 proved futile. Luther had succeeded in allaying their quarrels about Meissen ; but Luther was now no more. He passed away on February 18,1546, full of forebodings of evil to come, and more dominated than ever by wrath against Sacramentaries on the one hand and the Pope on the other ; and revenge was taken for his diatribes against Rome by the invention of a legend that the great reformer died by his own hand.

League was held at Frankfort from December, 1545, to February, 1546, without resulting in harmony between Philip and John Frederick or in the adoption of satisfactory financial or military preparations for war. Philip had been alarmed early in 1545 by rumours of the approaching peace with the Turks, and wished to send embassies to England, France, and Denmark, to form an alliance with the Swiss and- with Holland, and to take the offensive before Charles1 measures were complete. But John Frederick believed in peace to the last. He was deluded by Charles' assurances that he meant no war on the Lutherans, but rather another expedition against Algiers, and by the Emperor's apparent confidence in peace, evinced by his crossing Germany almost unattended from the Netherlands to Ratisbon, which base it was in fact essential for Charles to reach.

So the time passed until the opening of the Diet at Ratisbon in June, 1546. Eric of Brunswick, Margrave Hans of Ciistrin, and some other Protestants whom Charles had won over were present; but Philip and John Frederick were absent. Maurice, who was still ostensibly on the best of terms with his cousin and his father-in-law, was told by Granvelle that he must come to Ratisbon to conclude his agreement with the Emperor. Maurice came, but he was determined not to sell himself too cheaply. Besides the grant of the practical administration of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, a demand which ran counter to all the principles Charles was bent on enforcing, he required the transference to himself of his cousin's electoral dignity and-what cost Charles a greater effort to concede-immunity from the decrees of the Council of Trent, so far as they might touch the doctrine of justification by faith, clerical marriages, and communion in both elements. Without these concessions Maurice despaired of maintaining his position in Protestant Saxony, and with some modifications they were all granted by Charles. The Emperor's confessor had advised him to tempt some of the Protestant Princes with the bait of their neighbours' vineyards; but it was a sore test for Charles when, in order to attain his purpose, he had to grant in private to particular Princes terms which he refused to them all in public, and to surrender that principle of submission to the Church on which the whole war was based.

The Elector of Saxony must have been the only leading Protestant who was surprised by the decision. Philip of Hesse had long been seeking in vain to awake the Schmalkaldic League from its lethargy. But, expected or not, the war certainly found the Protestants unfitted if not unprepared to cope with the crisis. Long immunity had created a false sense of security; and the League, whose military strength appeared imposing, was honeycombed with disaffection. It had not escaped the workings of that particularism which had proved fatal to the Swabian League and to the Reichsregiment ; and its members were discontented because it could not grind all their private axes. The cities, and still more the knights, were hostile as ever to the encroaching territorial power of the Princes, among whom Philip of Hesse was considered the protagonist. At his door was laid the ruin of Sickingen, and Sickingen's son mustered many a knight to Charles' standard. Charles moreover could appeal to public opinion as the champion of the imperial constitution, which the Lutheran Princes attacked without suggesting a substitute. They had repudiated the Kammergericht, protested against the Diet's recesses whenever they pleased, and denied the authority of General Councils and of the Emperor himself; he was no longer Emperor, they said, but a bailiff of the Pope. But if authority were denied to all these institutions, where was the bulwark against anarchy ? They might seem to have resolved that the Empire should not exist at all unless it served their particular purpose.

And yet Paul III was declaring at the same moment that the war was due to injuries done to the Church and to the Princes' refusal to acknowledge the Council of Trent. He sent the cross to his Legate Alessandro FarHese, and offered indulgences to all who assisted in the extirpation of heresy. In his eyes at least the war was a crusade, and as such he commended it to the Catholic Swiss. The Emperor himself in his private utterances confirmed this view. To his sister he admitted that the charges against Philip and John Frederick were a pretext intended to disguise the real issue of the war. To his son he wrote that his intention had been and was to wage war in defence of religion, and that the public declarations about punishing disobedience were only made for the sake of expediency ; and when the war was over he told the Diet of Augsburg that the disturbance had originated in religious schism.

There was no irreconcilable contradiction between the two contentions. To repudiate Charles' religion was a civil as well as an ecclesiastical offence, because it was impossible to distinguish in Charles the person of the Emperor from the person of the protector of the Church, just as Henry VIII made it impossible for men to distinguish in him the Supreme Head from the sovereign. Henry utilised the divinity which hedged a king to combat the divinity of Rome ; Charles employed the remnants of respect for the imperial authority to extinguish Lutheran doctrine. It was always possible to represent heresy as treason so long as Church and State were but two aspects of one body politic ; it was always expedient to do so because the State in the sixteenth century was a more popular institution than the Church ; numbers confessed to heresy, but few would confess to treason.

Recalled from the south, ScharUin occupied Donauwörth, a city where the Catholic Fuggers were strong; and here he was joined by the Elector and the Landgrave. The total force now amounted to fifty thousand foot and seven thousand horse, but this formidable army wasted the whole month of August, while Charles advanced to Landshut with little more than six thousand men, and effected a junction with his Italian and Spanish troops. He then moved on to Ingolstadt and threatened to cut the Protestant communications with Upper Swabia, whence they drew their supplies. On the last day of August the two armies were only separated by a few miles of swamp. Philip of Hesse succeeded in planting a hundred and ten guns within range of the imperial camp ; but the bombardment failed to compel Charles either to attack or to evacuate, while the Protestants, for reasons which were afterwards disputed between Philip and Schärtlin, declined to risk an assault on Charles' entrenchments. The only result was a series of indecisive skirmishes between the light horse of either party ; but the Emperor gradually extended his control up the banks of the Danube in the direction of the forces from the Netherlands under van Buren, who crowned a brilliant march across Germany by eluding the main Protestant army and uniting with Charles at Ingolstadt on September 17.

He had reasons for confidence unknown to the enemy. His diplomacy had in fact made victory certain almost before the war began. On October 27, in his camp at Sontheim, he signed the formal transference of the Saxon Electorate from John Frederick to Maurice, and a few days later Maurice and Ferdinand entered upon the conquest of Ernestine Saxony. The partnership was the result of mutual distrust. Maurice would have held aloof, could he have obtained his ends by peaceful means. But he could not hope for the Electorate unless he won it by arms. Ferdinand was preparing for war in Saxony ; and if Maurice remained inactive, he might find himself in as evil a plight as John Frederick, and at the mercy of a victorious Habsburg army. His desire to remain neutral was overcome by force of circumstances ; and the most favourable view of his conduct is that in self-defence he was driven to attack his still more defenceless cousin.

However this may be, Maurice had experienced great difficulty in inducing his Lutheran Estates to concur in an attack on his cousin's lands. His preachers had declared that Charles was warring on the Gospel, and that whoever abetted him would incur everlasting damnation. To discount these denunciations Maurice produced a declaration from the Emperor that religion should remain untouched where it was established; he represented to his Estates that if he did not execute the ban against John Frederick, Ferdinand would, and that it would be much safer for them politically and theologically that Electoral Saxony should fall into his Protestant hands than into the Catholic hands of Ferdinand. The counterpart of the argument was employed by Ferdinand to secure the co-operation of his Bohemian nobles ; it would, he said, be fatal to Bohemia's claims on Saxon lands if Maurice were to execute the ban alone. So each Prince joined to execute the ban ostensibly as a check upon the other, and they agreed on a partition of the spoils. On October 30 Bohemian troops crossed the Saxon frontier and terrified the neighbouring towns. Maurice undertook to defend them on condition that they did him homage, while he promised to protect their religion and to treat the Elector with every respect consistent with his own obligations to the Emperor. Zwickau, Borna, Altenburg, and Torgau all accepted these terms, and the greater part of the Electorate passed into Maurice's possession.

In the north-west, too, the imperial cause made strides. At the end of January imperial commissioners were sent to enforce the long-threatened Catholic restoration in Cologne. The Protestant Archbishop, Hermann von Wied, had been suspended by the Pope, and his offer to abdicate in return for a guarantee for the maintenance of Protestantism was rejected ; Count Adolf of Schaumburg was elected coadjutor ; on February 25 Hermann resigned and Catholicism was forcibly re-established. In the same month Duke Henry of Brunswick captured Minden and regained his duchy. For these successes the inactivity of Landgrave Philip was largely responsible. At the critical moment his former vigour was lost in vacillation. His son-in-law Maurice was seeking to separate him from the Elector, and Philip gave Maurice warning when John Frederick marched against him. But he could not make up his mind to accept the terms that were offered, and the final catastrophe, which he did nothing to avert, left him at Charles' uncovenanted mercy.

The Landgrave and the Elector seemed to have exchanged their accustomed parts, for while Philip was wasting the precious moments John Frederick was exerting himself with unwonted resolution and success. Maurice's treachery had alienated the whole of Saxony; and John Frederick's appearance at the beginning of December, 1546, was the signal for a great outburst of enthusiasm for his cause. He rapidly recovered the whole of his own territories, extended his influence over the sees of Merseburg, Halberstadt, and Magdeburg, and invaded Albertine Saxony. He defeated and captured Margrave Albrecht of Culmbach at Rochlitz, and overran all Maurice's lands with the exception of Leipzig. His cousin complained that most of his subjects favoured John Frederick, and thought of fleeing to Königsberg. The Lutherans of Lusatia and Silesia and the Utraquists of Bohemia refused to follow Ferdinand in support of Maurice. They were much more anxious to preserve their own lands from Spanish troops ; they entered into negotiations with John Frederick, threatened to withdraw their allegiance from Ferdinand, whose hold on the Bohemian throne was at that moment weakened by the death of his wife, the daughter of Wladislav II, and received John Frederick with open arms when he crossed the frontier. North Germany seemed at last to be roused to a sense of danger; a league was in course of formation including Magdeburg, Bremen, Brunswick, and Hamburg, and Christopher of Oldenburg and Albrecht of Mansfeld were prepared to support it.

Emperor went straight for Mühlberg, where he found the Elector at nine a.m. on April 24. A bridge of boats was moored to the right bank of the Elbe, but some Spaniards swam the river with swords in their mouths, cut down the guards, and secured the bridge. By it the bulk of the infantry crossed, while the cavalry found a ford higher up. Without attempting to defend his position the Elector commenced a retreat to the north. About sunset the imperialists overtook him and routed his slender forces with great slaughter. John Frederick fought with conspicuous courage, and was brought into the Emperor's presence with blood streaming from a wound in his cheek. Charles was not generous in the hour of victory ; he taunted the Elector with his previous disobedience, while Ferdinand demanded his execution. A sentence of death was actually passed, but it was only used to extort the surrender of Wittenberg, which the Spanish troops were afraid to storm. By the capitulation of Wittenberg Maurice received his cousin's electoral dignity, and a considerable slice of his territories, while Sagan and the Voigtland fell to the share of Ferdinand. John Frederick was carried about a prisoner in the Emperor's suite ; but no threats could shake his steadfast adherence to the Lutheran faith, and three years later Charles secretly decreed that his detention should last as long as his life.

In the north-east of Germany the Dukes of Pomerania made peace with Charles through their agent Bartholomew Sastrow, whose memoirs present a gloomy picture of the condition of Germany during the war. Bremen held out, but more important was the resistance of Magdeburg, which ultimately defied all the force which Maurice was able or willing to bring against it. A proposal to bring Albrecht of Prussia to terms was rejected lest warlike measures should precipitate a conflict with his suzerain Sigismund of Poland ; but in Bohemia Ferdinand used his opportunity to crush its remaining constitutional liberties, and to reduce it to a footing more nearly resembling that of his own hereditary lands.

Except for Constance and these outlying regions on the Baltic, Charles was now dictator in Germany. No Emperor since Frederick II had wielded such power, and at the Diet of Augsburg which was opened on September 1, 1547, he endeavoured to reap the fruits of his victory. He never had a greater opportunity, but the inherent antagonism between the aims of the Habsburg dynasty and those of the German nation was too fundamental to be eradicated by the defeat of a section of Lutheran Princes. The constitutional reforms which he laid before the Diet were inspired by the same family motives which actuated Charles in 1521, and they provoked the same kind of national and territorial opposition. Bavaria reverted to its natural attitude, partly because Charles had quarrelled with the Pope, but more because he had not repaid Bavaria for her exertions in the war by an increase of territory, nor shown any inclination to transfer the Electoral dignity of the Palatinate from his old friend, the Elector Frederick II, to Duke William. Maurice was not satisfied with the partial ruin of his cousin, and felt that Charles had purposely left his position insecure.

However, the real flaw in the Emperor's plan was that he did not seek to reform the Diet, but left it standing, while a new organisation was introduced which was bound to come into conflict with existing institutions and could only supersede them after a long and wearisome constitutional struggle. Both its good points and its defects excited discontent. The territorial Princes feared to lose their hold over mediate lords when the latter would look not to them but to the League for protection ; the cities dreaded the expense of having to keep internal and external peace in outlying lands like Burgundy and the Austrian Duchies. Bavaria had resolved to refuse, even if all the other Estates agreed ; the College of Electors was unanimously hostile ; the Diet as a whole disliked a measure which would bring its own authority into dispute, and Charles dropped the proposal without a struggle.

He was more fortunate in his reconstitution of the Reichskammer-gericht; he arrogated to himself the immediate nomination of its judges, reserved to his own Hofgericht questions of Church property and episcopal jurisdiction, and persuaded the Diet to adopt a codification of the principles by which the action of the Court should be governed, and to promise contributions for the Court's support. He was able to defy the remonstrances addressed to him on account of the Spanish troops, which, contrary to his election pledges, he had quartered in the Empire. He secured the establishment of a fund for the maintenance of internal and external peace, which was not, however, to be used without the Diet's consent ; and obtained preferential treatment for the Netherlands by means of a perpetual treaty between them and the Empire. They were to contribute to national taxation but to be exempt from the national jurisdiction ; they were thus partly removed from imperial control, though Germany was perpetually bound to the arduous task of their defence ; the transfer of Utrecht and Gelders to the Burgundian circle was a mark of their incorporation in the Habsburg inheritance.

Was Charles also among the prophets ? He, even as Philip of Hesse and John Frederick of Saxony, had protested against a General Council and refused to be bound by its decrees. Had he been as devoid of religious scruples as Maurice of Saxony or Henry of Navarre, and had he had only German feelings to consult, he would in 1548 have become an ostensible Protestant. But Charles would never have bought a kingdom with a Mass ; he preferred to lose a kingdom for a Mass, and, in spite of his enmity with the Papacy, he was bent on making Germany Catholic, and on using his victory to decide questions upon which he had declared the struggle would not be fought. At the same time his refusal to accept the Tridentine decrees as the standard of faith made it necessary for him to evolve some criterion of his own which should serve its purpose during the interval until a General Council should formulate conclusions acceptable both to him and the Pope. With this object in view, after a fruitless discussion by a committee consisting of representative laymen as well as ecclesiastics, he took into consultation Michael Helding, the suffragan Bishop of Mainz, who represented the high Catholic point of view, the Erasmian Julius von Pflug, whom the result of the Schmal-kaldic War had at last established as Bishop of Naumburg, and John Agricola, whose views were Lutheran, of a moderate type. The compromise, known as the Interim, which this commission drew up, conceded clerical marriages, the use of the cup by the laity, and accepted a modification of the doctrine of justification by faith. Pflug also explained away enough of the sacrificial character of the Mass to satisfy some of the Lutherans, and denied some of the prerogatives claimed by the Pope. On the other hand the Interim retained all the seven Sacraments, the worship of the Virgin and the Saints, fasts, processions, and other Catholic ceremonies, and reaffirmed the dogma of transubstantiation.

It needed more than sleight of hand to compel the edict's observance, but Charles was resolved to stick at no measures, however violent. He disregarded the oral assurances given to the cities before their surrender, and his councillor Hase averred that Spanish troops should teach them Catholic truth. At Augsburg and Ulm the city franchises were violated, the democratic Councils purged of refractory members, and their places supplied by rich Catholic merchants like the Fuggers and Welsers. Constance yielded after a brilliant defence of its bridge which recalled the exploit of Horatius Codes, and surrendered its privileges as an imperial city to be merged in the Habsburg domains. Divines who refused to submit became exiles. Osiander left Nürnberg, Brenz left Swabian Hall, and Blarer Constance ; Schnepf was driven from Tübingen, and Bucer and Fagius from Strassburg. The last two found a home in Cambridge, and many others came to spread the doctrines of reform in England; over four hundred divines are said to have left southern Germany.

Over almost the whole of Germany the Interim was now enforced, and Charles was so elated by his success that he thought of pressing its acceptance upon the Scandinavian kingdoms, upon England, and even upon Russia. Yet his triumph was illusory and short-lived; even Melanchthon, who conformed, secretly counselled resistance, and people followed his private precept rather than his public example. Three years later two English ambassadors at Charles1 court gave a description of the situation in Augsburg. An imperial commission had charged the ministers of that city with preaching against the Interim and refusing to say Mass in their churches. The divines replied that they durst say none, being more loth to offend God than willing to please man ; the Apostles had neither said nor heard Mass ; and for themselves if they were in fault the fault was no new one, for they had said no masses for fourteen years. They were then compelled to leave the city, which remained disconsolate; there were few shops in which people might not be seen in tears ; a hundred women besieged the Emperor's gates " howling and asking in their outcries where they should christen their children," and where they should marry. "For all this the Papist churches have no more customers than they had ; not ten of the townsmen in some of their greatest synagogues. The churches where the Protestants did by thousands at once communicate are locked up, and the people, being robbed of all their godly exercises, sit weeping and wailing at home.1' Strassburg and Nürnberg were in no better mood ; when Charles required the young Duke Christopher of Württemberg to expel John Brenz, he replied that he was as willing as the Emperor to do so, but it was not in his power unless he could expel all his subjects with him.

Nothing illustrates more vividly Charles1 incurable want of sympathy with his German subjects or the incompatibility of his family ambitions with the national tendencies of the age than his attempt to force his son Philip into the seat of the German Emperors. National antipathy to France had contributed more than anything else to his own election, yet he thought he could defy a far deeper hostility to the Spaniards. The foreign character of his own aims had been responsible for much of the opposition he experienced in Germany, though he had at least been brought up in nominally imperial territory. Yet he imagined that Philip could succeed who had lived all his life in Spain and was purely Spanish in feeling. No Spaniard had hitherto ruled in Germany- for Alfonso of Castile can scarcely be cited as an exception-and the Reformation, added to other causes, made it impossible that a Spaniard should ever rule there in the future. Spain and Germany represented opposite poles of religious and political ideals, and the attempt to unite them under one rule would inevitably have proved as disastrous in Germany as a similar attempt did in the Netherlands. Charles in fact was a hybrid physically, politically, and to some extent ecclesiastically; and the parts of his cosmopolitan Empire necessarily reverted to their original national types.

The whole nation in fact was growing day by day more hostile to Charles and his Spanish troops. The garrisons scattered throughout the Empire, few though they were in numbers, created the impression that Germany was a conquered country ; and Spanish arrogance lost no opportunity of bringing this sense home to the German mind. Granvelle was suspected of harbouring a design for the partition of Germany. Hatred, which was at first limited to the Spaniards themselves, began to embrace the Emperor as he repeatedly refused to listen to the Diet's complaints of their conduct and of his infraction of his engagements. He also wounded military feelings by forbidding the service of German mercenaries in foreign armies-a practice which he had often licensed himself-and by summarily hanging Sebastian Vogelsberger for defying his commands. Discontent was expressed with Charles' proposal to invest his son with the Netherlands on terms which rendered those provinces an hereditary appanage of the Habsburg family, independent of the Empire and transmissible to female heirs; and even Catholics were offended at the persecution to which Philip of Hesse and John Frederick were subjected. The former believed that the Emperor intended to cany him off to Spain, and when he attempted to escape his German guards were exchanged for Spaniards. The three lay Electors, most of the Princes, and even Ferdinand, petitioned for Philip's release ; but Charles turned a deaf ear and decided that his detention should last for fifteen years, though he was afraid to publish the sentence.

Under these circumstances men began to desert the Emperor's failing cause. Maurice, who had betrayed his cousin, would not adhere too scrupulously to Charles ; he was highly unpopular in Saxony on account of his religious backsliding and his political treachery, and unless he found independent means of support he would go down with the Emperor's ruin ; his own subjects were already thinking of placing his brother Augustus in his place, and his nobles declined to assist him in the siege of Magdeburg. So gradually he began to dissociate himself from the Emperor's fortunes ; he supported Maximilian in his opposition to Philip's succession, and the Landgrave's sons in their attempt to secure some mitigation of their father's lot. He obtained in the autumn of 1550 a useful basis of operations, being entrusted by the Diet, in spite of the reluctance of Charles, who already suspected his intentions, with the conduct of the siege of Magdeburg. That city had been placed under the ban of the Empire for its continued resistance to Charles and to his religious measures ; on September 22, 1550, its troops had been defeated by Duke George of Mecklenburg, but the citizens spurned all proposals for submission. Their indomitable resistance had stirred a fever of enthusiasm in Lutheran Germany ; and the acceptance of the task of subduing them evoked renewed taunts of "Judas" against the Saxon usurper.

The popular antipathy to Charles and his Spaniards, the genuine devotion of the middle classes to Lutheranism, were the levers which Maurice and his fellow-Princes used for their own ends. They rebelled neither to free the German nation, nor to redeem the true religion. Their real motive was fear lest Charles should establish a strong monarchy, and reduce their oligarchy to the impotence to which they had endeavoured to reduce his sovereignty. This apprehension had begun to work soon after the battle of Mühlberg. As early as 1548 Otto of Brunswick-Harburg was intriguing in France with Henry II, who suggested a North-German-Polish league, the germ of the later alliance between France and Poland against the House of Habsburg. Negotiations were soon in train between the young Landgrave William of Hesse, Margrave Hans of Cüstrin, Duke Albrecht of Prussia, and his suzerain Sigismund Augustus, the King of Poland. The soul of the movement was Hans of Cüstrin, whose refusal to acknowledge the Interim had provoked the wrath of Charles V, and whose dominions in Cottbus and Crössen, the one surrounded and the other bounded by Ferdinand's lands, excited that King's desires. In February, 1550, a defensive league was formed between Hans of Cüstrin, Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, and Duke Albrecht of Prussia at Königsberg; and secret agents were busy in foreign lands, Schärtlin in Switzerland and George von Heideck, a cadet of the House of Württemberg, in England and the Hanse towns.

The appeal to France involved a radical alteration of Hans of Cüstrin's original plan. His object had been merely defence against the threatening aspect assumed by Charles V, but mere defence was of no use to Henry II. French support could only be bought by making the league offensive, and offence was also Maurice's plan. Chagrined at having to yield the first place in the league to Maurice, and alarmed, perhaps, by the terms which Henry II demanded, Hans broke away from the league. A German who was both a patriot and a Protestant could indeed have been offered no more painful choice. The French stipulations were that the Princes should undertake to vote as Henry wished at the next imperial election, and connive at his conquest and administration as imperial vicar of the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Cambray. The imperial lands were to be sacrificed as the price of religious security, or rather of princely privilege. Particularism was at least as strong a motive with the Princes as Protestant or patriotic feeling. They had not crushed the knight, the peasant, and the Anabaptist in order to smooth Charles1 path to absolutism, but their own. The Emperor was the last obstacle to the full development of territorial despotism, and the real inwardness of the struggle is illustrated by the fact that the cities, Protestant though they were, for the most part stood aloof or sided with the Emperor. The Lutheran North remained passive, and the so-called war of liberation presents many of the features of an oligarchic plot.

The treaty between the German Princes and the King of France was signed at Chambord and at Friedwald in January, 1552. Henry intervened in Germany, as he did in Italy, as the champion of national liberties against the Emperor ; and while in March he threw thirty-five thousand men into Lorraine he hardened his heart against the heretics in France. In fact his devotion to German freedom although more specious was no more real than his love of toleration ; and the German lands which fell into his power fared at least as ill as ever they would have done under Charles V. The double face which France showed from 1532 to 1648, Catholic at home and Protestant abroad, was a religious guise adopted to help her in her secular rivalry with the House of Austria, and never did it stand her in better stead than in 1552. In that year Henry II avenged the defeats and imprisonment inflicted on his father by Charles V and thus embittered the close of the Emperor's life with failure and humiliation.

His courage had its reward. Margrave Albrecht 'had separated from his allies and was pursuing a wild career of murder and sacrilege in Franconia, where he dreamt of carving a secular duchy out of the Bishops' spiritualities ; in six weeks he extorted nearly a million crowns by way of ransom. Maurice failed in his attack on Frankfort, where he lost one of his ablest lieutenants by the death of George of Mecklenburg. The advance of Henry II had been checked by the valour of Strassburg ; Charles had released John Frederick, and with a little help the Ernestine Wettin could raise a storm which would drive his cousin from Saxony ; while Hans of Custrin would willingly join in the fray in return for a share of the Albertine lands. Conscious that the nation was not really behind him and that he would lose his all by defeat, Maurice reluctantly yielded to Charles' demand that the religious question should be left to a Diet. Margrave Albrecht roughly refused to accept the peace; and when Maurice marched to help Ferdinand against the Turks, many of his troops mutinied and took service with Albrecht. The Margrave's disgust was not due to zeal for the Protestant faith, but to the fact that Maurice had played both hands in the game and reduced his partner to a dummy. Fortune seemed to be turning and Charles thought of refusing to ratify the treaty, delayed the liberation of Philip of Hesse, and returned to his schemes for creating a friendly league and securing the Empire for his son. He appeared to have learnt and forgotten nothing, but his advisers were more amenable. Queen Maria opposed these plans, Ferdinand denounced them, and the fear lest his obstinacy should drive his brother into Maurice's arms induced Charles to submit and sign the Treaty of Passau.

Germany and sanctioned his sacrilegious plunder of Bamberg and Würzburg. But Albrecht could not remedy the defects of Alva's generalship, produce harmony between Germans and Spaniards in the Emperor's army, or make any impression on Metz. For a month after his generals had recognised that success was impossible Charles refused to admit his defeat. But at length the havoc wrought among his Italian and Spanish troops by a mid-winter siege conquered even his obstinacy. With a grumble at the fickleness of Fortune who preferred a young King to an old Emperor, he raised the siege on January 1, 1553, and turned his back on his German dominions for ever. Success in the war with France would have meant a renewed effort to divide and crush the Lutheran Princes, to rivet the Spanish succession on Germany, and to restore the Catholic faith. Charles' failure left Germany free to settle these questions herself. Already meditating abdication and retirement from the world, the Emperor journeyed to Brussels ; he was cheered by the capture of Térouanne from the French and the triumph of Mary in England, but German affairs were resigned into the hands of the King of the Romans.

The evil which Charles had done by his bargain with Albrecht survived his departure, and it is a lurid comment upon the Emperor's reign that its last days were characterised by as wild an anarchy as Germany had known in all her turbulent history. The Margrave, having performed a last service to Charles by saving his guns during the retreat from Metz, proceeded once more to trouble his foes in Germany ; and, as nearly all Germany hated the Emperor, Albrecht was free to turn his arms in whatever direction he chose. The League of Heidelberg, formed in March, 1553, for the preservation of the peace and prevention of Philip's election, consisted of Catholics and Protestants and was too general to be very effective. Moreover Albrecht's onslaughts on Bishops and priests won him a good deal of secret sympathy. The situation was full of confusion; the Emperor, the extreme Protestants, and the Ernestine Wettins and Margrave Albrecht, were all in more or less open opposition to the Albertine Maurice, King Ferdinand, and the Heidelberg League. Charles had more than once divided the Lutherans; he had now divided the House of Habsburg.

Maurice succeed amid this maze of impotence, no prize might be beyond his reach. At Eger he concerted measures with Ferdinand and despatched his brother for Danish aid. Albrecht, after winning another victory at Pommersfelden on April 11, renewed his ravages in Franconia, and his excesses were worse than those of the Peasants' War. He then turned against the Catholic Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, and thought of utilising John Frederick's hatred of Maurice and Elector Joachim's friendship with Charles to draw them both to his side ; even Landgrave Philip of Hesse was loth to assist his son-in-law against so good an enemy of the priests. On July 9, 1553, at Sievershausen, the forces of Albrecht and Maurice met. It was the fiercest battle fought in German lands for many a day; beside it Mühlberg was the merest skirmish. Maurice won the day, but lost his life ; a wound from a musket-ball proved fatal on the llth, and one of the most extraordinary careers in history was cut short at the age of thirty-two years.

The death of Maurice brought no redress to his injured and aged cousin. The Saxon Electorate continued in the Albertine branch of the family, passing to Maurice's brother Augustus, a man of conciliatory temper, who had incurred none of the odium attaching to Maurice and could look for support to his Danish father-in-law Christian III. Charles V had no longer a private grudge to revenge by restoring his former captive. John Frederick did not survive the disappointment by many months. He died on March 3,1554, a classic instance of fortune's perversity. He suffered more severely than any Prince of his age, and his coveted electoral dignity passed into a rival House, never to be restored ; and the only solace vouchsafed to the Ernestine branch was the restitution of Altenburg, Neustadt, and some other districts ceded to Maurice in 1547. Yet John Frederick was the most blameless of men, " the example of constancy and very mirror of true magnanimity in these our days to all Princes." Such is the verdict of one contemporary ; better known is the glowing description by Boger Ascham : "one in all fortunes desired of his friends, reverenced of his foes, favoured of the Emperor, loved of all."

The city which had witnessed the birth of the Lutheran Faith was also to see its legitimation, and on February 5, 1555, Ferdinand opened another great Diet at Augsburg. No Elector was present in person; of the ecclesiastical Princes only two, the Bishops of Augsburg and Eichstadt, attended, and of temporal Princes only four, the young Archduke Charles, the Dukes of Bavaria and Württemberg, and the Margrave of Baden. The Catholics still had a majority in the Diet, and it cost them a severe mental struggle to relinquish the fundamental position of Catholicism, the seamless unity of the Christian Church. But common action with Protestants in opposition to the Spanish Succession, in defence of princely privilege against Charles and of public peace against Albrecht, had paved the way, not to an agreement in religious matters, but to an agreement to differ about them. Yet even this compromise was not reached till Ferdinand had made one more effort to save ecclesiastical unity. He proposed that the Diet should first deal with the question of public peace and refer religion to a Council or to a conference. Duke Christopher of Württemberg and the Elector of Brandenburg were not averse to the idea, and the latter even suggested the Interim as the basis of an agreement. But the hand of the Diet was forced by the Lutheran Convention at Naumburg, which was attended by more German Princes than the Diet itself. Here it was determined to abide by the Confession of Augsburg, and this decision was upheld by the Elector Augustus, the sons of John Frederick, and the Landgraves of Hesse, while the Elector Joachim hastily withdrew his ill-advised suggestion with regard to the Interim.

The Catholics were not yet brought so low as to submit to such terms ; for months the struggle of parties went on, and it seemed possible that another religious war might ensue. Eventually a compromise was arranged mainly by Ferdinand and Augustus of Saxony. Security was granted to all Lutheran Princes ; episcopal jurisdiction in their lands was to cease ; and they might retain all ecclesiastical property secularised before the Treaty of Passau (1552), provided it was not immediately subject to the Empire. For the future each territorial secular Prince might choose between the Catholic and Lutheran faith, and his decision was to bind all his subjects. If a subject rejected his sovereign's religion the only privilege he could claim was liberty to migrate into other lands. There remained two all-important points in dispute. The Lutherans still required toleration for the adherents of their confession in Catholic States ; and the Catholics demanded that any ecclesiastical Prince, who abjured Catholicism, should forfeit his lands and dignities. The Catholic objections to the first demand were insuperable ; and the Lutherans were compelled to content themselves with an assurance by Ferdinand, which was not incorporated in the Recess, did not become law of the Empire, and of which the Reichsleammergerwht could therefore take no cognisance. The Catholic requirement about spiritual Princes was met by the famous "ecclesiastical reservation" which imposed forfeiture of lands and dignities on Bishops who forsook the Catholic faith. This was incorporated in the Recess ; but the Lutherans made their own reservation, and declared that they did not consider themselves bound by the proviso.

The so-called Peace of Augsburg, embodied in the Recess which was published on September £5,1555, thus rested upon a double equivocation, and contained in itself the seeds of the Thirty Years' War. It was in fact no more than a truce concluded, not because the two parties had decided the issues upon which they fought, but because they were for the moment tired of fighting; and no half-measure was ever pursued by a more relentless Nemesis. The " ecclesiastical reservation " has been condemned as the worst sin of omission of which Protestant Germany was guilty, as a criminal and cowardly evasion of a vital decision, which delay could only make more difficult. The artificial perpetuation of spiritual principalities only served to buttress the Habsburg power and postpone the achievement of national unity. In the other scale a Catholic would place the fact that to the rescue of the ecclesiastical Electorates from the rising tide of Protestantism must be attributed in no small measure the hold which Catholicism still retains on western Germany.

But even this meagre liberty of choice between two exclusive communions was denied to the mass of the German people. For them the change consisted in this, that instead of having their faith determined for them by the Church, it was settled by their territorial Princes ; instead of a clerical, there was a lay persecution ; instead of a remote prospect of being burnt, the German dissenter, after 1555, enjoyed a much more imminent prospect of being banished; for the tyranny of Wittenberg, if it was less than that of Rome after the Council of Trent, was certainly greater than that of the Catholic Church before the appearance of Luther. Luther enunciated the principle of religious liberty, of individual priesthood. But he and his followers imposed another bondage, which went far to render this declaration ineffectual. The chief actual contribution of the Lutheran Reformation to religious liberty was thus indirect, almost undesigned. It produced the first Church independent of Rome, and prepared the way for countless other religious communities, which, however narrowly they may define their individual formularies, tend by their number to enforce mutual toleration. Private morality has been evolved out of the conflicting interests of an infinite mass of individuals ; international law depends upon the multiplicity of independent States; and the best guarantee for the freedom of conscience consists in the multitude and relative impotence of the Churches.

The triumph of this principle is really the dominant note of the period. Territorialism ruined the Empire, captured the Reformation, crushed the municipal independence of the cities, and lowered the status of the peasant. The fall of the imperial power was perhaps inevitable, but it was hastened by Charles V. In the first place, his dynastic and Spanish policy weakened his authority as a national monarch; in the second, his adoption of the cause of the Church threw the Reformers into the arms of the territorial Princes. The success of the Reformation thus meant that of the oligarchic principle and the ruin of German monarchy. The Reformation of the Empire became incompatible with the Reformation of the Church ; and the seal on Charles' failure was set by the Diet of Augsburg, which, besides concluding a truce of religion, removed the Reichskammergericht, the organisation of the Circles, and the preservation of the peace from the sphere of imperial influence. Henceforward Germany was not a kingdom, but a collection of petty States, whose rulers were dominated by mutual jealousies. From the time of Charles V to that of Frederick the Great, Germany ceased to be an international force ; it was rather the arena in which the other nations of Europe, the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Swede, the Pole, and the Turk, fought out their diplomatic and military struggles.

The Kaisertum was but one of the Princes' victims ; the Bürgertum also fell before them. The vigorous city life of the Middle Ages was a thing of the past; in many a German town the representative of the territorial sovereign domineered over the elect of the burghers, interfered in their administration, and even controlled their finances. On the shores of the Baltic the destruction of town independence involved the loss of Germany's maritime power, and not till our own day has this eclipse begun to pass. With the decay of civic life went also the ruin of municipal arts and civilisation, and in its stead there was only the mainly formal culture of the petty German Court. No age in Germany was more barren of intellectual inspiration than that which succeeded the Peace of Augsburg. The internecine struggles of the reign of Charles V had exhausted all classes in the nation, and an era of universal lassitude followed : intellectually, morally, and politically, Germany was a desert, and it was called Religious Peace.