and Reutlingen, expressed their concurrence in the League at a second meeting in February, 1531, and three Dukes of Brunswick, Philip, Otto, and Francis, and the city of Lübeck also acceded to it, its full and final development depended upon the result of the contest then raging between Lutherans and Zwinglians for control of the south German cities.
Bucer, after his partial success with Luther at Coburg, proceeded to Zurich in the hope of bringing Zwingli to the point of concession where Luther had come to meet him. But as the German Reformer grew more conciliatory, the Swiss became more uncompromising. In February, 1531, the Swiss cities refused to join the Schmalkaldic League, and in the same month a Congress of Zwinglian divines at Memmingen attacked the Catholic ceremonial observed in Lutheran churches. This aggressive attitude may be traced to the rapid progress which Zwinglian doctrines were making in south Germany at the expense of the Augsburg Confession. At Augsburg itself the Tetrapolitan or Bucerian creed defeated its Lutheran rival; and in other German cities more violent manifestations of the Zwinglian spirit prevailed. Under the influence of Bucer, Blarer, and Oecolampadius, Ulm, Reutlingen, Biberach, and other hitherto Lutheran cities destroyed pictures, images, and organs in their churches, and selected pastors who looked for inspiration to Zurich and not to Wittenberg; those cities which had already joined the Schmalkaldic League refused at its meeting at Frankfort in June to subscribe to the League's project for military defence. South Germany seemed in fact to be about to fall like ripe fruit into Zwingli's lap, when his power suddenly waned at home, and the defeat of Kappel (October 11, 1531) cut short his life, and ruined his cause in Germany; it was left for Calvin to gather up the fragments of Zwingli's German party, and to establish an ultra-Protestant opposition to the Lutheran Church.
This unexpected disaster to the Reformation in Switzerland appeared to Ferdinand to offer a magnificent opportunity for crushing the movement in Germany. He was thoroughly convinced that Swiss political and religious radicalism was the most formidable of the enemies of German Catholicism and the Habsburg monarchy, and that deprived of this stimulant the milder Lutheran disease would soon yield to vigorous treatment. He proposed to his brother an armed support of the Five Catholic cantons, and the forcible restoration of Catholicism in Zurich and Bern. But the Emperor declined to involve himself in a Swiss campaign. His intervention in Switzerland would, he feared, precipitate war with Francis I, who was already beginning again to cast longing eyes on Milan, and feeling his way to an understanding with Clement VII. The Pope's fear of a General Council, which Catholics no less than Protestants were demanding from Charles V, was a powerful weapon in the hands of Francis I. Clement was haunted by the suspicion that a
