no actual war
between France and the empire, Henry entered into an
alliance with German princes against the Emperor. Several of
those princes, headed by Maurice of Saxony, had secretly
formed a league to resist by force of arms the "measures
employed by Charles to reduce Germany to insupportable and
perpetual servitude."

Charles V was on the point of becoming as despotic in Germany as he was
in Spain. The long interval of peace, though not very profound--war
being always threatened and attempts to provoke it frequent--yet was
sufficiently so to enable him to devote himself to his favorite scheme
of humbling the princes and free states of the empire. He had sown
dissension among them, succeeded in breaking up the League of Smalkald,
and detained in prison, threatened with perpetual captivity, the
Landgrave of Hesse and the elector John Frederick of Saxony. They had
been sentenced to death, having taken up arms against him. Frequently
appealed to to release them, Charles declared that to trouble him
further on their account would be to bring on them the execution of the
sentence they so richly merited.

His political aims he believed to be now accomplished, and the spirit of
German independence nearly, if not wholly, extinguished. But with this
he was not content. The time had arrived, he thought, for the full and
final extirpation of heresy, and the carrying out of his grand scheme of
"establishing uniformity of religion in the empire." The formula of
faith, called the "Interim," which he had drawn up for general
observance until the council reassembled, had been for the sake of peace
accepted with slight resistance, except at Magdeburg, which, for its
obstinate rejection of it, was placed under the ban of the empire. But
the prelates were assembling at Trent, and the full acquiescence of all
parties in their decisions--given, of course, in conformity with the
views of Charles V--was to be made imperative.

Henry II had already renewed the French alliance with Sultan Solyman,
and was urged to send his lieutenants to ravage the coast of Sicily--a
suggestion he was not at all loath to follow. Yet the proposal of an
alliance with the heretic German princes--though the league was not
simply a Protestant one--met with strenuous opposition from that
excellent Catholic, Anne de Montmorency. The persecuting King, too,
anxious as he was to oppose his arms to those of the Emperor, feared to
do