sense of the Electors, to suppose that in their final decision they were guided by pecuniary and personal considerations alone. Francis might offer the best terms, but at the same time terms which it would be neither advantageous nor safe to accept. A concurrence of events in the spring of 1519 put a preponderance of physical force in the hands of the House of Hapsburg, which was the more considerable because it had behind it an overwhelming strength of national and patriotic feeling. Franz von Sickingen, the adventurous knight, whose power in the Rhineland exceeded that of many princes, after some coquetting with France, threw the weight of his lanzknechts into the opposite scale. But the most important event of this kind was a revolution which in the spring of 1519 took place in Würtemberg. Duke Ulrich, the arbitrary and passionate prince who had murdered Hans von Hutten, was an avowed partisan of France, and formidable, inasmuch as he had at his disposal a large force of disciplined Swiss soldiers. The Confederated Cantons, it is true, had severed themselves from the Empire, but they were conterminous with it, and the fact that they were ready to sell their swords to the highest bidder gave them a certain political importance. They had not forgotten Marignano, and envoys sent by Charles found a friendly welcome; although they would not openly declare for the King of Spain, they renewed their old alliance with Austria, and recalled their troops from Würtemberg. This was the signal for Ulrich's downfall. He had filled up the measure of his offences by an attack upon the free city of Reutlingen, which he had besieged, taken, and added to his own dominions. Then the Swabian League, a powerful confederacy in South-East Germany, moved. The Duke of Bavaria, whose sister, Sabina, was Ulrich's much-injured wife, raised an army, and after a brief and bloodless campaign took possession of Würtemberg, driving its ruler into deserved exile. But the troops were not disbanded when the immediate results of the war were attained, and lay not too far from Frankfurt to be, if not a menace to the Electors, at least a mute witness to the influence of the Austrian House within the Empire.

It was indeed made abundantly plain, as the day of elec

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ELECTION OF THE EMPEROR

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tion drew near, that the, sympathies of the people were all in favour of a prince of German blood, and that if the Electors decided for Francis, it would be at their own personal peril. A strong wave of Teutonic patriotism was rising throughout the land, which humanism and the study of history helped to swell. That Leo was on the side of France made in the same direction all Germany, and not merely the part which was under Luther's influence, was weary of Papal extortion and oppression. Maximilian, too, had been a popular monarchaffable, easy of access, touching the common imagination by attributes of chivalry; his contemporaries did not know him as posterity does, stooping to all ignoble shifts to get money, and thwarting his own policy by an incurable levity and treachery. And when the Electors came to compare the two candidates, the very terms in which Francis set forth his claims were such as to awaken caution. He was rich, powerful, successful in war, absolute ruler of his own subjects, disposing of the resources of the first monarchy of Europe; why should the Electors put such a master over their own heads? The silent, backward boy, who was content to leave his affairs in the hands of his aunt and his ministers, who had as yet developed no military talents, and whose ability to rule was still doubtful, offered, notwithstanding the vastness of his dominions, the promise of an Emperor who would be plastic in their hands. In despite, therefore, of the arguments and promises of France, the Austrian began finally to prevail. An attempt which, almost at the last moment, Henry VIII made to put himself forward was naturally futile. When the Electors were actually assembled at Frankfurt for the choice, a final effort was made to set aside both candidates, and to put some German prince in their place. For a few hours the highest crown in the world was at the disposal of Frederick of Saxony. But he firmly pushed it away. He was too old, his health was too broken, possibly, at the bottom, the temper of his mind was too irresolute, to assume so vast a burthen of responsibility. He thought, perhaps rightly, that a prince who should restore the ancient glories of the Empire, reorganising it within, and making it respected abroad, should have at his command greater resources than his. But it is impossible not to speculate upon

what the after-history of Germany might have been if the Elector who loved and protected Luther had, at the very crisis of his fortune, been placed at the rudder of the State.

The formal proceedings of the election began at Frankfurt on the 17th of June; on the 28th Charles was unanimously chosen Emperor. The "capitulation" which he was required to sign consisted of thirty-four articles. Besides promising in general terms to protect the rights and privileges of all Estates of the Empire, he bound himself to enter into no alliance with foreign States, to impose no tax, to summon no Diet without the consent of the Electors; he was not voluntarily to enter upon any war, but to defend the Empire if attacked; he was to bring no foreign soldiers into the Empire; and to appoint to its offices only men of native birth and good standing. The language of intercourse between himself and the Estates was to be either German or Latin. The "Reichsregiment" was to be re-established; the increasing Papal demands of every kind to be brought within bounds; the coinage to be reformed. articles were intended to save the rights of the Princes and other lower grades of the political hierarchy; no one was to be placed under the ban of the Empire unheard, or without just cause; no new laws were to be enacted except in accordance with the Golden Bull and with the assent of the Estates. The first Diet of the new reign was summoned to meet at Nürnberg. Charles promised, lastly, to come to Germany to receive his crown, to reside within the Empire as much as possible, and at a convenient season to go to Rome to be crowned by the Pope.

Other

These articles much more express the wish of the seven Electors to interpose themselves as a ruling order in the State between Emperor and people, than give any indication of the course which attempts at administrative reform actually took in Germany. It will be enough to remark in this place that, in pursuance of them, Charles was crowned at Aachen on the 23d of October 1520.1

1 For the story of Charles's election see Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, vol. i. pp. 248303; R. Rösler, Die Kaiserwahl Karls

V; Mignet, Une Election à l'Empire en 1519, Revue des deux Mondes, 1854, pp. 209-264; Baumgarten, Geschichte Karls V, vol. i. pp. 102-158.

CHAPTER VII

THE YEAR 1520: LUTHER'S APPEAL TO THE NATION

No great revolution in thought, and especially no great revolution in religious thought, wholly depends upon the intellectual activity of a single thinker. It is, at least in part, the function of a powerful mind, a vivid personality, to gather into one focus tendencies of thought and feeling widely diffused, in a less concrete and concentrated form, through society, to give consciousness to emotions that before were half unconsciously felt, to find articulate voice for convictions that were only silently entertained. The question always arises, Did the age make the man, or the man mould the age?—and can never be fully answered in either sense. Forces act and react; there is a subtle correspondence between the master-thinker and the society which his thoughts quicken and change; at any other time, in any other circumstances, he would be impossible; yet again he bends circumstance to his purposes, and leads on a new time. The more individual a leader of men is, and the more he stands out from the common level, the easier it is to trace the reaction of contemporary tendencies upon him; sometimes opposition strengthens the tenacity of his purpose, sometimes he acts in the line of least resistance; often forces which rise out of a strange region of thought and feeling deflect him from his course; and again he may become the unconscious mouthpiece of passions with which he sympathises only in part. All this was true of Luther, though perhaps never so true as in the earlier stages of his revolt from Rome. No sooner had he ventured out from the retirement of his cell at Wittenberg,

and become involved in the current of German thought, than he found himself in the presence of intellectual and social forces which in part determined the line of his development. There was the strong feeling of anger and disgust, which the vices of the clergy and the corruptions of the system which they administered aroused in the common people of Germany. There was the revolt against exactions and oppressions, which patriots represented as the work of an alien power. There was the slowly growing rebellion against scholasticism, against monkery, against mediavalism in general, of which Erasmus and the humanists were the leaders. There was the desire for the reform of the Church and the revival of religion, which manifested itself on the one side in the Greek New Testament of 1516 and all that gathered round it, and on the other in the popular broadsheets and pamphlets which circulated from hand to hand of citizen and peasant. National and political was strangely mingled with ethical and religious feeling, and, for different reasons and with different methods, the learned and the ignorant found themselves in pursuit of the same object. And the year 1520, in which these forces were still in strongest interaction but had not yet found their resultant, was decisive in the history of the Reformation. It was that year which saw the publication of the books in which Luther laid down the principles of the revolt: the Address to the German Nobility, the Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the tractate on the Freedom of a Christian Man. In June 1520 the Pope solemnly anathematises him in a Bull, which he no less solemnly burns in December. In April 1521 he appears before the Emperor and the States of Germany at the Diet of Worms.

Nothing more vividly illustrates the fact that Europe in 1520 was one literary republic than the rapidity with which Luther's first books became known. Myconius, it is impossible to say on what authority, declares that in a fortnight the Ninety-five Theses had run through all Germany, in a month through all Christendom. The assertion is rendered credible by the number of editions of Luther's earlier works which are still extant. Of the Exposition of the Penitential Psalms the 1 Myconius, p. 23.