Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/265

 and the Lutheran Princes Francis I more than held his own, and the ten years' truce negotiated by Paul III at Nice in 1538 marked a considerable recovery from the humiliation of 1525-9. The real import of the agreement between the two great Catholic Powers, which followed at Aiguës-Mortes, was and is a matter of doubt. Ostensibly the alliance was to be directed against infidels and heretics; and Henry VIII, the Lutheran Princes, and the Turks had all some ground for alarm. Even if war was not intended the Lutherans dreaded the General Council which peace brought perceptibly nearer. They had brusquely declined to concur in the assembly vainly summoned by Paul to meet at Mantua in May, 1537, because the terms of the summons implied that its object was the extirpation of Lutherans and not of abuses. They justified their refusal to the Emperor by arguing that the proposed Papal Council was very different from that General Council contemplated by the Diets of 1523 and 1524; and the Elector John Frederick suggested a counter ecumenical council to be held at Augsburg under the protection of the Schmalkaldic League. One and all they denied the Pope's authority to summon a Council and read with delight Henry VIIFs manifesto to that effect.

Apart from the General Council which the union of Paul, Charles, and Francis seemed to portend, the Lutherans had been thrown into alarm by the mission to Germany of the Emperor's Vice-Chancellor, Held, who had received his instructions in October, 1536. Held had been a zealous member of the Reichskammergericht, and he was burning to avenge the contumely with which Protestants had treated the verdicts of that Court. He interpreted Charles' cautious and somewhat ambiguous language as an order to form a Catholic League with the object of restraining, if not of attacking, the Lutheran Princes. He ignored the Treaty of Cadan and Ferdinand's later concessions, required that the Protestants should promise submission to the proposed Council and to the Kammergericht, and, when they refused, proceeded to build up his Catholic alliance. The Habsburg rulers, Ferdinand and the Queen-Regent of the Netherlands, were alarmed at Held's proceedings; but the King could not afford to break with the ultra-Catholics whose tool Held was; and on June 10, 1538, the League of Nürnberg was formed under the nominal patronage of Charles V. Its organisation was a faithful copy of that of the Schmalkaldic League, and its members were the Emperor, the King, the Archbishops of Mainz and Salzburg, and the Dukes of Bavaria, George of Saxony, and Eric and Henry of Brunswick. The League was professedly defensive, but its determination to execute the decrees of the Kammergericht, which the Schmalkaldic League had repudiated, really threatened war; and the occasion for it was almost provided by Duke Henry of Brunswick. He was chafing at the support given by the Schmalkaldic League to his two towns of Brunswick and Goslar, which had been condemned by the Kammergericht to restore the confiscated goods of the Church; and with a view to consolidating his