Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/45

 as also those of the Hanseatic cities, appeared in the Diet as the third Estate.

The three houses deliberated separately, and must all concur, and the Emperor, too, before the action could be announced as an imperial statute, and the third Estate has been known to negative the action of the others.

4. When the three houses came together, as they always did for dissolution by the reading from the throne of the enactments of the session, the Emperor sat on a throne with the Electors of Mentz, Bavaria, and Bohemia on his right, those of Cologne, Saxony, and Brandenburg on his left, and the Elector of Treves directly in front of him. The ecclesiastical princes sat on benches at his right, the secular at his left. The deputies of the imperial towns sat in front of the throne, on benches, crossing between the right and the left.

The constitution of the Empire was a growth, and changed from time to time, but the above statement is sufficiently exact for our purpose.

V. The terms of the religious peace of the Empire, as settled by the Diets of Passau (1552) and Augsburg (1555) should be steadily kept in mind during the reading of these volumes.

Charles V. would have extinguished the Reformation had he ever seen his way clear to do so without imperilling the execution of his own ambitious plans. He expected, however, to be able to effect this whenever he should choose, until, at the Diet of Augsburg, in 1530, the presentation of the Lutheran Confession more fully revealed the strength of the force which he would have to encounter.

Aside from the great numbers who had been carried along with the movement was the sole fact, which we stop