and other princes issued similar
declarations. The smothered disaffection with the emperor instantly
blazed forth all over the German empire. The cause of Maurice was
extremely popular. The Protestants in a mass, and many others, flocked
to his standard. As by magic and in a day, all was changed. The imperial
towns Augsburg, Nuremberg and others, threw open their gates joyfully to
Maurice. Whole provinces rushed to his standard. He was everywhere
received as the guardian of civil and religious liberty. The ejected
Protestant rulers and magistrates were reinstated, the Protestant
churches opened, the Protestant preachers restored. In one month the
Protestant party was predominant in the German empire, and the Catholic
party either neutral or secretly favoring one who was humbling that
haughty emperor whom even the Catholics had begun to fear. The prelates
who were assembling at Trent, alarmed by so sudden and astounding a
revolution, dissolved the assembly and hastened to their homes.

The emperor was at Innspruck seated in his arm chair, with his limbs
bandaged in flannel, enfeebled and suffering from a severe attack of the
gout, when the intelligence of this sudden and overwhelming reverse
reached him. He was astonished and utterly confounded. In weakness and
pain, unable to leave his couch, with his treasury exhausted, his armies
widely scattered, and so pressed by their foes that they could not be
concentrated from their wide dispersion, there was nothing left for him
but to endeavor to beguile Maurice into a truce. But Maurice was as much
at home in all the arts of cunning as the emperor, and instead of being
beguiled, contrived to entrap his antagonist. This was a new and a very
salutary experience for Charles. It is a very novel sensation for a
successful rogue to be the dupe of roguery.

Maurice pressed on, his army gathering force at every step. He entered
the Tyrol, swept through all its valleys, took possession of all its
castles and its sublime fastnesses, and the blasts of his bugles
reverberated among the cliffs of the Alps, ever sounding the charge and
announcing victory, never signaling a defeat. The emperor was reduced to
the terrible humiliation of saving himself from capture only by flight.
The emperor could hardly credit his senses when told that his conquering
foes were within two days' march of Innspruck, and that a squadron of
horse might at any hour appear and cut off his retreat. It was in the