EVANGELICAL BODY AT RATISBON.

When the protestant states in arms against the court of Vienna were put
under the ban of the empire, the evangelical body, though without the
concurrence of the Swedish and Danish ministers, issued an arret at
Ratisbon, in the month of November of the last year, and to this annexed
the twentieth article of the capitulation signed by the emperor at his
election, in order to demonstrate that the protestant states claimed
nothing but what was agreeable to the constitution. They declared, that
their association was no more than a mutual engagement, by which they
obliged themselves to adhere to the laws without suffering, under any
pretext, that the power of putting under the ban of the empire should
reside wholly in the emperor. They affirmed that this power was
renounced, in express terms, by the capitulation: they therefore refused
to admit, as legal, any sentence of the ban deficient in the requisite
conditions: and inferred that, according to law, neither the elector of
Brandenburgh, nor the elector of Hanover, nor the duke of Wolfenbuttel,
nor the landgrave of Hesse, nor the count of Lippe-Buckebourg, ought to
be proscribed. The imperial protestant cities having acceded to this
arret or declaration, the emperor, in a rescript, required them to
retract their accession to the resolution of the evangelic body; which,
it must be owned, was altogether inconsistent with their former
accession to the resolutions of the diet against the king of Prussia.
This rescript having produced no effect, the arret was answered in
February by an imperial decree of commission carried to the dictature,
importing, that the imperial court could no longer hesitate about the
execution of the ban, without infringing that very article of the
capitulation which they had specified: that the invalidity of the arret
was manifest, inasmuch as the electors of Brandenburgh and Brunswick,
the dukes of Saxe-Gotha and Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, and the landgrave of
Hesse-Cassel, were the very persons who disturbed the empire, this,
therefore, being an affair in which they themselves were parties, they
could not possibly be qualified to concur in a resolution of this
nature; besides, the number of the other states which had acceded was
very inconsiderable: for these reasons, the emperor could not but
consider the resolution in question as an act whereby the general peace
of the empire was disturbed, both by the parties that had in