has often been supposed. His commissioner, Lazarus Schwendi, had sounded warning notes from the camp at Magdeburg; but success had made Charles confident and careless, and he failed to realise the danger until it was too late to organise resistance. On April 6 he was thinking of flight to the Netherlands, but the way was blocked already. He suspected Ferdinand's loyalty, and others have believed that the King of the Romans had a secret understanding with Maurice. Ferdinand had ample grounds for discontent, but there seems to be no proof of treason on his part. Maurice, who had outwitted the keenest diplomats at Charles' Court, may well have duped his brother; he had promised to meet the King at Linz on April 4, but Ferdinand was not prepared for the guise in which he came. On that day Augsburg fell before the Princes; the resistance of Nürnberg, Ulm, and Strassburg alone marred the completeness of their victory, for Bavaria and Württemberg were their secret allies. On the 18th Maurice was at Linz. Ferdinand sought to negotiate an armistice, but Maurice refused to date it earlier than May 26, and used the interval to draw his net round Charles. In spite of the words attributed to him, that he had no cage big enough for such a bird, Maurice did not shrink from pressing his illustrious fugitive, and hoped, as he said, to run the fox to earth. On the nights of May 18-19 he seized the pass of Ehrenberg. Twelve days earlier Charles had been foiled in an attempt to escape to Constance and to pass on thence to the Netherlands. He had no troops to withstand Maurice; but a mutiny in the Elector's forces gave him a few hours' respite, and towards evening, with a few attendants, he fled amid rain and snow across the Brenner. The victor of Mühlberg was an almost solitary fugitive in his Empire; the assembled Fathers at Trent broke up in dismay, having, it was said, no mind to argue points of doctrine with soldiers in arms; and the Emperor's soaring plans dissolved like castles in Spain.
It was the darkest hour in Charles' career, but soon the twilight began to glimmer. The Emperor found a refuge at Villach in Carinthia, while Maurice went to the conference at Passau, where his own troubles began to gather. He demanded as the price of peace security against Habsburg aggression in Germany, restoration of princely privilege, and a guarantee of the Lutheran religion irrespective of the decrees of the Council of Trent. The Catholic Princes assembled at Passau were disposed to concede these terms, but to connive at permanent schism was incompatible with Charles' rigid Catholic conscience. Nothing could bend his iron will, not the advance of the Turk nor the success of the French in Italy nor his own personal peril. He insisted that the question of religious peace must be referred to a Diet. On that point he refused to yield an inch; and among the circumstances which preserved so large a portion of Germany to the Roman Catholic faith not the least is the unshaken constancy which Charles V evinced at the sorest crisis of the Catholic cause in Germany.
