account by demanding security for the threatened members of their Church. In December, 1535, at a diet of the Schmalkaldic League, they undertook to admit all who would subscribe to the Confession of Augsburg; and Württemberg, Pomerania, Anhalt, and the cities of Augsburg, Frankfort, Hanover, and Kempten became thus entitled to its protection. They renewed their repudiation of the Reichskammer-gericht as a partisan body, and declared that conscience would not allow them to respect its verdicts. They refused in fact to yield to the national and imperial authorities that obedience in religious matters which they rigorously exacted from the subjects of their own territorial jurisdiction; and at the moment when they were pleading conscience as a justification of their own conduct they declined to admit its validity when urged by their Catholic brethren.
The Lutherans had not remained untainted by the pride of power and the arrogance of success. In Ferdinand's own dominions at this time Faber declared that but for him and the King all Vienna would have turned Lutheran, and that it needed but a sign to arm all Germany against the Roman Church. Ferdinand himself was urging such concessions as the marriage of the clergy and communion under both kinds, and complained to the Papal Nuncio that he could not find a confessor who was not a fornicator, a drunkard, or an ignoramus. In England Lutheranism had reached its highest water-mark in Henry's reign; Melanchthon had dedicated an edition of his Loci Communes to the Tudor King, and was willing to undertake a voyage to England to reform the English Church. Francis I had invited Melanchthon and Bucer to France to discuss the religious situation. The new Pope, Paul III, who had succeeded Clement VII in 1534, began his pontificate by creating a number of reforming Cardinals, and sent Vergerio to Germany to investigate the possibilities of a concordat with the heretics and to ascertain the terms upon which they would support a General Council. In all the Scandinavian kingdoms the triumph of the new faith was complete, and the Protestant seemed to be the winning cause in Europe. Now, when Charles was threatened with a joint attack by Turks and French, it was no time to throw the Lutheran Princes into the enemy's arms. For the moment temporal security was a more urgent need than the maintenance of the Catholic Church, and the suspension of all the ecclesiastical cases in the Reichskammergericht was the price which Ferdinand paid for the Lutheran rejection of alliance with Henry VIII and Francis I.
One of Ferdinand's motives was fear lest Bavaria should, by executing the judicial sentence against Augsburg, acquire predominant influence in that important city; and he was by no means averse from the plan, proposed by the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, of persuading Zwinglian Augsburg to adopt the Lutheran Confession and of then admitting it to the Schmalkaldic League. Augsburg was thus saved
