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 imperial influence. In the demand that the points already decided must be reconsidered, Vargas, Charles V's representative, concurred with the Protestants, and wrote to the Emperor a series of letters exposing the papal intrigues at the previous sessions of the Council, which has been used with effect by Protestant historians. He even welcomed the proposal of Maurice's commissioners that doctrines should be tested by the Scriptures, and pressed hotly for a practical reformation of the Papacy. It was Charles' view that if the Lutherans would come within the pale of the Church as he defined it, they would be useful allies against the Pope. But his definition was the Interim, and the effort to force that definition on his subjects electrified the atmosphere and prepared it for the storm which Charles' dynastic and absolutist projects brought down upon his head.

Nothing illustrates more vividly Charles' incurable want of sympathy with his German subjects or the incompatibility of his family ambitions with the national tendencies of the age than his attempt to force his son Philip into the seat of the German Emperors. National antipathy to France had contributed more than anything else to his own election, yet he thought he could defy a far deeper hostility to the Spaniards. The foreign character of his own aims had been responsible for much of the opposition he experienced in Germany, though he had at least been brought up in nominally imperial territory. Yet he imagined that Philip could succeed who had lived all his life in Spain and was purely Spanish in feeling. No Spaniard had hitherto ruled in Germany- for Alfonso of Castile can scarcely be cited as an exception-and the Reformation, added to other causes, made it impossible that a Spaniard should ever rule there in the future. Spain and Germany represented opposite poles of religious and political ideals, and the attempt to unite them under one rule would inevitably have proved as disastrous in Germany as a similar attempt did in the Netherlands. Charles in fact was a hybrid physically, politically, and to some extent ecclesiastically; and the parts of his cosmopolitan Empire necessarily reverted to their original national types.

In his endeavour to perform the impossible Charles nearly produced a rupture in the Habsburg family, and alienated all the German Princes. His plan was that Philip should be elected King of the Romans when Ferdinand became Emperor, and that thus after Ferdinand's death the Empire should remain with the elder line of the family. Ferdinand was led to believe, however, that the design extended to Philip's immediate succession and his own exclusion from the throne, and this was the current suspicion in Germany. He long and strenuously opposed his brothers plan; and the quarrel between them was only patched up by the intervention of their sister Maria from the Netherlands. Eventually it was agreed (1551) that Philip should succeed Ferdinand, but that Ferdinand's son Maximilian should succeed Philip. This healed the family