Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/187

 decrees, and the three Princes of the Palatinate, of Trier, and of Hesse had withdrawn their representatives from the Reichsregiment. The Swabian League was encouraged to resist encroachments on its autonomy, and the two main supports of the administration, the Electors of Mainz and Saxony, were engaged in personal quarrels. When the Diet opened, one after another of the representatives of the vested interests rose to denounce the government, and a practical vote of censure was carried by the refusal of the Diet to consider any scheme for raising revenue until the administration was changed.

So ended the last attempt to create a national government for the medieval German Empire. The Reichsregiment was indeed continued, but it was removed to Esslingen, where it sat under the shadow of Austrian domination, and was shorn of the little independent authority it had wielded before. Germany was submerged under a flood of constitutional chaos and personal rivalry. Ferdinand was plotting against the Elector of Saxony; many Princes were alienated from Charles by his failure to pay their pensions; and Francis I was seeking to fish in the troubled waters. The experiment of the Reichsregiment had, in fact, been foredoomed to failure from the first; the government contained within itself the seeds of its own disruption because its aims had not been single or disinterested. It was an attempt at national unity dominated by particularist interests. The opposition of the towns and of the knights had not been evoked because the government sought national unity but because it administered the national authority in the interests of territorial Princes; the single city of Nürnberg had for instance been taxed higher than any one of the Electors. Nor would national unity have been secured if the oligarchy of Princes had perpetuated its control of the government, for the individual members would soon have quarrelled among themselves. Their dissensions were, indeed, patent even when their collective authority was threatened by common enemies. Each, wrote Hannart to his master, wanted to have the affairs of the Empire regulated according to his individual taste; they all demanded a national government and a national system of judicature, but no one would tolerate the interference of these institutions in his own household and jurisdiction; everyone in short wished to be master himself.

In such circumstances Charles was perhaps justified in preferring, like the rest, the extension of his own territorial power to every other object. He may have perceived the impossibility of founding national unity on a discredited imperial system. Unity did not come through any of the methods suggested by the reforming Diets; it only came when the imperial decay, which they tried to check, had run its full course and the Emperor's supremacy had succumbed to the principle of territorial monarchy. To the extension of that principle by methods of blood and iron Germany owes her modern unity as England, France,