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 Council might be as fatal to him as that of Basel had threatened to be to his predecessors; and the Emperor's enemies suggested that if it met Charles would propose the restoration of the Papal States to the Empire from which they had been wrung. Rather than risk such a fate, some at least of his friends urged Clement to accede to the Lutheran demand for communion in both kinds and clerical marriage, and maintained that the Augsburg Confession was not repugnant to the Catholic faith. Without the help of the heretics it seemed impossible for Charles to resist the approaching Turkish onslaught; and the Emperor's confessor, Loaysa, urged him not to trouble if their souls went to hell, so long as they served him on earth. And so the term of grace accorded to the Lutherans by the Recess of Augsburg expired in April, 1531, without a thought of resort to compulsion; and instead of this, the Emperor suspended, on July 8, the action of the Reichskammergericht. He had missed the golden opportunity; it did not recur for fifteen years, during which two wars with the Turk in Europe, two wars in Africa, and two wars with France distracted his attention from German affairs.

This inaction on Charles' part cooled the martial ardour of the Schmalkaldic League; and Zwinglian aggression in south Germany increased their disinclination to help the Swiss in their domestic troubles. In reality the battle of Kappel was of greater advantage to Luther than to the Emperor. For a second time the Reformation was freed from the embarrassment of a mutinous left wing; and Luther, although he professed to lament Zwingli's fate, regarded the battle as the judgment of God, and Zwingli as damned unless the Almighty made an irregular exception in his favour. The cities of Upper Germany, deprived of their mainstay at Zurich, gravitated in the direction of Wittenberg; while the defeat of one section of the Reformers convinced the rest of the need for common defence. Under the pressure of these circumstances the Schmalkaldic League completed its organisation, and of necessity assumed a predominantly Lutheran and territorial character. At two conferences held at Nordhausen and Frankfort (November-December, 1531) the military details of the League were settled, and the respective contributions of its various members fixed; the Princes obtained a large majority of votes in its council of war and exclusive command of its armies. Saxony and Hesse were treated as equal; if the seat of war was in Saxony or Westphalia the supreme command was to fall to the Elector, if in Hesse or Upper Germany to the Landgrave.

The accession of Göttingen, Goslar, and Eimbeck to the League, and the success of the Reformation at Hamburg, at Rostock, and in Denmark, where Christian's return to Catholicism brought 110 nearer his restoration to the throne, left the Schmalkaldic League in almost undisputed possession of north Germany; and it became a veritable Imperium in imperio with a foreign policy of its own. It might now be