he confidently looked his
threats might any day become serious dangers. But the peace with England
had set the French government free to act in Germany, and it found
allies in the great middle party of princes whose secession from the
League of Schmalkald had seemed to bring ruin to the Protestant cause.
The aim of Duke Maurice in bringing them to desert the League had been
to tie the Emperor's hands by the very fact of their joining him, and
for a while this policy had been successful. But the death of Paul the
Third, whose jealousy had till now foiled the Emperor's plans, and the
accession of an Imperial nominee to the Papal throne, enabled Charles to
move more boldly to his ends, and at the close of 1551 a fresh assembly
of the Council at Trent, and an Imperial summons of the Lutheran powers
to send divines to its sessions and to submit to its decisions, brought
matters to an issue. Maurice was forced to accept the aid of the
stranger and to conclude a secret treaty with France. He was engaged as
a general of Charles in the siege of Magdeburg; but in the spring of
1552 the army he had then at command was suddenly marched to the south,
and through the passes of the Tyrol the Duke moved straight on the
Imperial camp at Innspruck. Charles was forced to flee for very life
while the Council at Trent broke hastily up, and in a few months the
whole Imperial design was in ruin. Henry the Second was already moving
on the Rhine; to meet the French king Charles was forced to come to
terms with the Lutheran princes; and his signature in the summer of a
Treaty at Passau secured to their states the free exercise of the
reformed religion and gave the Protestant princes their due weight in
the tribunals of the empire.

[Sidenote: The Protestant Misrule.]

The humiliation of the Emperor, the fierce warfare which now engaged
both his forces and those of France, removed from England the danger of
outer interference. But within the misrule went recklessly on. All that
men saw was a religious and political chaos, in which ecclesiastical
order had perished and in which politics were dying down into the
squabbles of a knot of nobles over the spoils of the Church and the
Crown. Not content with Somerset's degradation, the Council charged him
in 1551 with treason, and sent him to the block. Honours and lands were
lavished as ever on themselves and their adherents. Warwick became Duke
of Northumberland, Lord Dorset was made Duke of Suffolk,