Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/285

 And yet Paul III was declaring at the same moment that the war was due to injuries done to the Church and to the Princes' refusal to acknowledge the Council of Trent. He sent the cross to his Legate Alessandro FarHese, and offered indulgences to all who assisted in the extirpation of heresy. In his eyes at least the war was a crusade, and as such he commended it to the Catholic Swiss. The Emperor himself in his private utterances confirmed this view. To his sister he admitted that the charges against Philip and John Frederick were a pretext intended to disguise the real issue of the war. To his son he wrote that his intention had been and was to wage war in defence of religion, and that the public declarations about punishing disobedience were only made for the sake of expediency; and when the war was over he told the Diet of Augsburg that the disturbance had originated in religious schism.

There was no irreconcilable contradiction between the two contentions. To repudiate Charles' religion was a civil as well as an ecclesiastical offence, because it was impossible to distinguish in Charles the person of the Emperor from the person of the protector of the Church, just as Henry VIII made it impossible for men to distinguish in him the Supreme Head from the sovereign. Henry utilised the divinity which hedged a king to combat the divinity of Rome; Charles employed the remnants of respect for the imperial authority to extinguish Lutheran doctrine. It was always possible to represent heresy as treason so long as Church and State were but two aspects of one body politic; it was always expedient to do so because the State in the sixteenth century was a more popular institution than the Church; numbers confessed to heresy, but few would confess to treason.

To all these advantages the Schmalkaldic League could oppose in July, 1546, an undoubted superiority of military force. Charles would depend mainly upon troops from the Netherlands, and his own and the papal levies from Spain and Italy. But the whole breadth of Germany separated him from the one and the Alps from the other; and prompt offensive action on the part of the League would have ended the war in a month. Promptness and boldness were, however, the last qualities to be expected from the League. Every question had to be referred by the commanders in the field to the League's council of war, where it was generally made the subject of acrimonious discussion between representatives of the south German cities and the Princes, or between the adherents of the adventurous Philip of Hesse and the sluggish Elector of Saxony. They were afraid to take the offensive lest it should damage their cause in public opinion. In particular they would not violate Bavarian territory, wherein Charles was established at Ratisbon, lest Bavaria should be driven into the Emperor's arms, where as a matter of fact it was already reposing. This timidity ruined their best chance of success. Schärtlin, the ablest of the League's commanders, who led the forces of Ulm and Augsburg, had conceived the bold plan of