represented the surrender as a complete imperial victory; but in reality the terms of the capitulation guaranteed to the townsfolk the religion they desired, and secured to Maurice control of the city and a basis of operations.
The appeal to France involved a radical alteration of Hans of Cüstrin's original plan. His object had been merely defence against the threatening aspect assumed by Charles V, but mere defence was of no use to Henry II. French support could only be bought by making the league offensive, and offence was also Maurice's plan. Chagrined at having to yield the first place in the league to Maurice, and alarmed, perhaps, by the terms which Henry II demanded, Hans broke away from the league. A German who was both a patriot and a Protestant could indeed have been offered no more painful choice. The French stipulations were that the Princes should undertake to vote as Henry wished at the next imperial election, and connive at his conquest and administration as imperial vicar of the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Cambray. The imperial lands were to be sacrificed as the price of religious security, or rather of princely privilege. Particularism was at least as strong a motive with the Princes as Protestant or patriotic feeling. They had not crushed the knight, the peasant, and the Anabaptist in order to smooth Charles' path to absolutism, but their own. The Emperor was the last obstacle to the full development of territorial despotism, and the real inwardness of the struggle is illustrated by the fact that the cities, Protestant though they were, for the most part stood aloof or sided with the Emperor. The Lutheran North remained passive, and the so-called war of liberation presents many of the features of an oligarchic plot.
The treaty between the German Princes and the King of France was signed at Chambord and at Friedwald in January, 1552. Henry intervened in Germany, as he did in Italy, as the champion of national liberties against the Emperor; and while in March he threw thirty-five thousand men into Lorraine he hardened his heart against the heretics in France. In fact his devotion to German freedom although more specious was no more real than his love of toleration; and the German lands which fell into his power fared at least as ill as ever they would have done under Charles V. The double face which France showed from 1532 to 1648, Catholic at home and Protestant abroad, was a religious guise adopted to help her in her secular rivalry with the House of Austria, and never did it stand her in better stead than in 1552. In that year Henry II avenged the defeats and imprisonment inflicted on his father by Charles V and thus embittered the close of the Emperor's life with failure and humiliation.
As the French troops crossed the frontier, Maurice, William of Hesse and Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades concentrated thirty thousand men in Franconia. The Emperor was not so ignorant of Maurice's designs as
