ade among them in these menacing
times;--Pfalz-Neuburg too, this young Wolfgang Wilhelm, if he do not
break off kind, might be very awkward to the Kaiser in Cleve-Julich.
Nay Saxony itself; for they are all Protestants:--unless perhaps Saxony
might become pliant, and try to make itself useful to a munificent
Imperial House?

Evidently what would best suit the Kaiser and Spaniards, were this, That
no strong Power whatever got footing in Cleve, to grow stronger by the
possession of such a country:--BETTER than best it would suit, if he,
the Kaiser, could himself get it smuggled into his hands, and there
hold it fast! Which privately was the course resolved upon at
headquarters.--In this way the "Succession Controversy of the Cleve
Duchies" is coming to be a very high matter; mixing itself, up with the
grand Protestant-Papal Controversy, the general armed-lawsuit of mankind
in that generation. Kaiser, Spaniard, Dutch, English, French Henri IV.
and all mortals, are getting concerned in the decision of it.

Chapter XIV. -- SYMPTOMS OF A GREAT WAR COMING.

Meanwhile Brandenburg and Neuburg both hold grip of Cleve in that
manner, with a mutually menacing inquiring expression of countenance;
each grasps it (so to speak) convulsively with the one hand, and has
with the other hand his sword by the hilt, ready to fly out. But to
understand this Brandenburg-Neuburg phenomenon and the then significance
of the Cleve-Julich Controversy, we must take the following bits
of Chronology along with us. For the German Empire, with Protestant
complaints, and Papist usurpations and severities, was at this time
all a continent of sour thick smoke, already breaking out into dull-red
flashes here and there,--symptoms of the universal conflagration of a
Thirty-Years War, which followed. SYMPTON FIRST is that of Donauworth,
and dates above a year back.

FIRST SYMPTOM; DONAUWORTH, 1608.

Donauworth, a Protestant Imperial Free-town, in the Bavarian regions,
had been, for some fault on the part of the populace against a flaring
Mass-procession which had no business to be there, put under Ban of the
Empire; had been seized accordingly (December, 1607), and much cuffed,
and shaken about, by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, as executor of the
said Ban; [Michaeelis, ii. 216; Buddaei LEXICON, i. 853.]--who, what was
still worse, would by no means give up the Town when he had done with
it; Town being handy to him, and the man being stout and vio