orins. On
the other hand, in 1416, at the Council of Constance, the princes and
nobles of the Rhine, Saxony, Suabia, and Bavaria, had set up their
backs, made a revision of their own circle, and cashiered the
intruders. But the Emperor's patents did not cease on that account.
Charles V. himself, who sometimes looked down on the German lords with
galling irony, and willingly gave to his chancellor and secretaries the
chance of perquisites, had the sad repute "of audaciously raising, for
a few ducats, every salt-boiler to the order of nobility." Still more
business-like were these proceedings under Ferdinand II. and his
successor. For after the Thirty Years' War, not only the living, but
the bones in the graves of their ancestors were ennobled, nay, the dead
ancestors were even declared worthy of being admitted into noble
foundations and to tournaments. At last, after 1648, this traffic of
the Imperial court was carried on to such an extent that the princes
and states at the breaking up of the Imperial Diet of 1654, and a
hundred years later at the election of Charles VII., protested against
the detriment which accrued to their own rights of sovereignty and
revenues from such a privilege. The newly ennobled in the cities were
therefore not to be exempt from the burdens of citizens, and the
possessor of a property by villein tenure was not to be invested with
the privileges attached to a noble estate. In vain did the Imperial
court threaten those with punishment who would not concede the
purchased privileges to its patents of nobility. Those also who were
declared fit for tournaments and noble benefices, were not on that
account received into any knightly order, or noble endowment, nor in
any old noble provincial unions. The noble benefices generally did not
take patents of nobility, as proofs of noble extraction; it was only
the members of old noble families possessing no such patents who were
admissible into these endowments. It was only exceptionally that these
corporations gave way to a high recommendation. Even the court offices,
those of chamberlain, groom of the bed-chamber, equerry, hunting and
other noble pages, were privileges of the old nobility. The patents of
nobility never forgot to celebrate the virtues and the services
rendered both to the prince and commonwealth by the newly ennobled and
his ancestors; but, as a zealous defender of the old nobility
complains, it was too well-known that, in general, it was o