258

The League begins to dissolve

[1546-7 Germany. On the 23rd the Protestant army broke up, and John Frederick hastened to the defence of his Electorate. The League's plan was to leave an army of observation in the south to protect the Protestant cities if attacked, and to occupy the Franconian bishoprics while the Elector reconquered Saxony. Only the last part of the programme was carried out. The departure northwards of the main army was followed by a stampede among the south German cities. The Protestant light horse went home for want of pay, and the army of observation came to nothing. Philip of Hesse failed to raise the peasants and artisans in Franconia and practically retired from the contest; while Giengen, Nördlingen, and Rothenburg rapidly fell into the Emperor's power. The moment had come for breaking up the disjointed League. The southern cities had never forgotten their Zwinglian leanings or been happy in their political and religious relations with the north German princes. They at least had no territorial ambitions to gratify, and, if Charles could give them security for their religion, there was no reason for them to continue the struggle. Nürnberg, in spite of its strong Lutheranism, had from the first refused to fight. Granvelle, always peaceably inclined, pressed on Charles the dangers of war, and the Emperor himself had not the personal feeling against the cities which he exhibited towards the Landgrave and the Elector.

Negotiations were first opened with Ulm, which stood out strongly for a religious guarantee, but was ultimately satisfied with a verbal promise that it should enjoy the same advantages in that respect as Maurice of Saxony and the Hohenzollerns. The agreement was concluded on December 23, and similar terms were soon arranged with Memmingen, Biberach, Heilbronn, Esslingen, and Reutlingen - all of them among the original fourteen Protestant cities of 1529. Frankfort submitted two days before the end of the year, and Augsburg and Strassburg in January, 1547. Augsburg was moved by the influence of the big trading families; Anton Fugger conducted the negotiations; and the city contented itself with Granvelle's oral promise of religious toleration. Next came Strassburg, the surrender of which caused Bucer and Jacob Sturm some bitter pangs; but the dangerous proximity of the city to France and Switzerland induced Charles to offer exceptionally liberal terms. The others were all compelled to contribute as much to the Emperor's war expenses as they had paid to his opponents. By February all the south German cities had yielded with the exception of Constance; and the Protestant Princes of the south could no longer hold out. Charles' old friend the Elector Palatine, Frederick II, the lover of his sister and the husband of his niece, and his old enemy, Ulrich of Württemberg, both came to crave his forgiveness. The Elector suffered nothing beyond reproaches; but Ulrich was forced to pay an indemnity of three hundred thousand crowns, to surrender some of his strongest fortresses to permanent imperial garrisons, and to engage in service against his former

1546-7]

Successes of John Frederick

259

allies. He was fortunate to escape so lightly; he had not learnt wisdom with years, and his people detested his rule. Ferdinand pressed for the abrogation of the Treaty of Cadan and the restitution of the duchy, but Charles was afraid that such a step would revive Bavarian and other jealousies of the Habsburg power.

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.

At this moment, when the fortune of war seemed to be turning, the tide began to set against Charles in other quarters. The spiritual and

260

The campaign of Mühlberg

[1547

the temporal head of Christendom could never agree long together even when fighting a common foe, and Charles V and Paul III were now at enmity. The Emperor had demanded the Council of Trent because a Council was essential to his policy; the Pope had summoned the Council because he could not help it. Charles wanted to reform the Papacy, Paul did not. Paul desired an emphatic restatement of dogma; Charles, with his eye on wavering Lutherans, required a discreet silence; and this fundamental difference between the imperial and papal parties soon provoked a breach. So early as July, 1546, there were rumours that the Pope would remove the Council to an Italian city where it would be under his exclusive control, and against this proposal Charles protested in October. His concessions to his Lutheran allies and to the southwestern cities offended papal orthodoxy, while his success in the field alarmed a Pope who dreaded nothing so much as a drastic reform of the Church at the hands of a militant Emperor. In January, 1547, the publication of the decrees of the Council on the question of Justification by Faith extinguished Charles' chances of conciliating the Lutherans ; and at the same moment Paul did what he could to prevent their subjection by recalling the papal contingent. To such a pass had things come that the Pope was rejoicing at the Elector's successes; and in March the Council of Trent, on the pretext of the plague, removed to Bologna. The Emperor now joined the Lutherans in refusing to recognise the Council's authority; while papal agents stirred up plots against the imperialists in Siena and Venice, Genoa and Naples. Charles overwhelmed the Pope and his legate with abuse, and his threats to find a remedy for this evil again turned men's thoughts back to 1527.

But first he must deal with the successful rebel in northern Germany. John Frederick, however, was not really dangerous, and the successive deaths of Henry VIII (January 28) and Francis I (March 31) guaranteed Charles immunity from external complications. Charles rose to the crisis and wisely determined, in spite of Granvelle's protests, to march north himself. He spent Easter at Eger, and on April 13 crossed the Saxon frontier. The Elector had formed a prudent plan of avoiding pitched battles, retiring to Magdeburg, and leaving Charles to fritter away his strength in sieges; but unfortunately for himself John Frederick could not resist the temptation to keep in touch with Bohemia, whence he expected material help. So he stationed part of his forces on the Bohemian frontier, and with the rest occupied Meissen on the right bank of the Elbe. Charles advanced by rapid marches through Plauen, Altenburg, and Kolditz, cut off the Elector from Thuringia, and threatened his communications with the north, where he trusted, in case of defeat, to find refuge. Alarmed by this movement John Frederick broke up his camp at Meissen and made his way down the Elbe towards Wittenberg. He hoped that Charles would march on Meissen and thus give him time to escape; but the

1547] The Elector and the Landgrave prisoners

261

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.

From the Elector he turned to the Landgrave, whose submission was delayed by the successful resistance of Bremen to Eric of Brunswick and Christopher von Wrisberg, and by the defeat, much more sanguinary than the battle of Mühlberg, which Christopher of Oldenburg and Albrecht of Mansfeld inflicted upon the imperialists near the Drakensberg. But these victories only saved the Baltic lands; in the west Philip could find no support, and after much hesitation he was induced to surrender by Maurice and Joachim of Brandenburg. The two Princes pledged their word to Philip that he should not be imprisoned, but for this they apparently had no warrant. The popular legend that the term ohne einigen Gefängnis (without any imprisonment) was altered by a secretary to ohne ewigen Gefängnis (without perpetual imprisonment) has no satisfactory basis; but it is clear that both Philip and the two Princes understood that the Landgrave should go free, and there were high words between them and Alva, when, after Philip had made his submission (June 20), the Duke placed him under arrest. Such had been Charles' intention throughout; he does not appear to have encouraged any deception, and subsequently the two Princes admitted that the mistake had been theirs. It was an unfortunate mistake for Charles' reputation; but for the rest Philip escaped more lightly than John Frederick, a circumstance which he owed to Maurice, and not to his deserts. In 1550 his term of detention was fixed at fifteen years; he was to dismantle all his fortresses save one, and to give up his artillery; his territories were to remain intact and his people unmolested on account of their religion;

262

The Diet of Augsburg

[1547

though subsequently half of Darmstadt was transferred from Hesse to the House of Nassau.

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.

The Emperor's first object was to strengthen the executive with a view to preventing such outbreaks as the Peasants' War, the Anabaptist revolt, the lawless enterprises of Lübeck, and Philip of Hesse's conquests of Württemberg and Brunswick. A proposal for the preservation of peace would naturally meet with much support; but that support was neutralised by the conviction that the League, which Charles proposed to establish on the model of the old Swabian League, was really designed to strengthen the Habsburgs against other Princes and against the nation itself. The League was to embrace the whole of Germany, to be directed by a number of permanent officials who although representative of the various orders would tend to fall under government influence, and to have at its disposal an efficient military force. This League and its organisation was to lie entirely outside the ordinary constitution of the Empire; and the Electors discovered the chief motive for it in the fact that the Habsburgs would command a far greater share of influence in it than they did in the three Councils which constituted the Diet.