into a Protestant oligarchy; and such was the meaning of the proposal of the Lutheran Princes in 1545 to revive the dignity of the Electorate, when by the evangelisation of Cologne and of the Palatinate they had acquired a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Nor was that the only danger. A portion of the Netherlands would naturally follow the religious lead of its metropolitan city, Cologne; the accession of the Palatinate to the Lutheran cause threatened the Habsburg lands in Elsass; and a majority of Protestant Electors might mean a Protestant Emperor at the next vacancy.
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.
Yet it would be a mistake to represent a religious war as the Emperor's prime object. It would in any case be only the means to an end, and he was still seeking if not hoping to attain that end by other means. He had moreover greater schemes in view than a mere conquest of the Lutherans. He was, though to a less extent than his grandfather
