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 alliance of France, the Pope, and the Emperor, involved no attack upon him, he repudiated his Low German connexions and his plain wife from Cleves, and Charles' ministers marvelled at the ways of Providence. They succeeded also in keeping Philip of Hesse in good humour and in preventing Duke William's admission into the Schmalkaldic League. The clear-sighted Bucer deplored the Emperor's good fortune, and augured the same treatment for Protestant Germany which Charles had meted out to Ghent. But the hour was not yet come. In July, 1540, Francis I rejected the Emperor's conditions for the settlement of their disputes, betrothed his niece, Jeanne of Navarre, to Duke William of Cleves, and refused to surrender his claims on Milan and Savoy, or to join in action against Turk or heretic. Parties in Germany were more confounded than ever. The spread of Lutheranism produced no union in the Catholic ranks, and at Frankfort Catholics as well as Lutherans had refused to serve against the Turks. Charles appears to have reached the not unreasonable conclusion that Catholicism, especially in the ecclesiastical principalities, would only be safe under the shadow of his territorial power. The Electors of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz, and other great Bishops, were ever being tempted to follow the example of Albrecht of Prussia and turn the lands of their sees into secular hereditary fiefs. Bucer had suggested this measure as necessary for the firm foundation of Protestantism, and the Elector of Cologne was beginning to waver. But these non-heritable ecclesiastical fiefs were the chief bulwark of Habsburg imperialism against the encroaching territorial tide; and it was natural that Charles should dream of extending his influence from Burgundy over Cologne, Münster, Bremen, and Osnabrück, so that if they were to be secularised at all, he might do the work and deal with them as he had dealt with Utrecht. This, of course, was not the view of the ecclesiastical Princes, who wished at least to choose between the advantages of their independent spiritual rule and those of an equally independent territorial authority; and there was actually talk of an alliance between them, backed by the Bavarian Dukes, and the Schmalkaldic League, for the defence of national freedom against the Habsburgs. Yet at the same time ultra-Catholics were denouncing Charles for his concessions at Frankfort. The Pope censured the Regent Maria and the Archbishop of Lund, and required the Emperor to annul the agreement with the Protestants on pain of being pronounced schismatic; while Cardinal Pole hinted that the Church had more to fear from Charles V than it had from Henry VIII.

For a while the Emperor had to tread delicately, and he took refuge in a series of religious conferences. The first was held at Hagenau in June, 1540, but produced no result. Another met at Worms in November; there were present eleven Catholics and eleven Protestants, but the former included Ludwig of the Palatinate, Joachim of Brandenburg, and William of Cleves, whose Catholicism was not of the Roman