History of the English People, Volume IV | Page 6

to Lutheranism; and the belief gathered strength as he sent
Lutheran armies over the Alps to sack Rome and to hold the Pope a
prisoner. The belief was a false one, for Charles remained utterly
untouched by the religious movement about him; but even when his
strife with the Papacy was to a great extent lulled by Clement's
submission, he still turned a deaf ear to the Papal appeals for dealing
with Lutheranism by fire and sword. His political interests and the
conception which he held of his duty as Emperor alike swayed him to
milder counsels. He purposed indeed to restore religious unity. His
political aim was to bring Germany to his feet as he had brought Italy;
and he saw that the religious schism was the great obstacle in the way
of his realizing this design. As the temporal head of the Catholic world
he was still more strongly bent to heal the breaches of Catholicism. But
he had no wish to insist on an unconditional submission to the Papacy.
He believed that there were evils to be cured on the one side as on the
other; and Charles saw the high position which awaited him if as
Emperor he could bring about a reformation of the Church and a
reunion of Christendom. Violent as Luther's words had been, the
Lutheran princes and the bulk of Lutheran theologians had not yet
come to look on Catholicism as an irreconcileable foe. Even on the
papal side there was a learned and active party, a party headed by
Contarini and Pole, whose theological sympathies went in many points
with the Lutherans, and who looked to the winning back of the
Lutherans as the needful prelude to any reform in the doctrine and
practice of the Church; while Melancthon was as hopeful as Contarini
that such a reform might be wrought and the Church again become
universal. In his proposal of a Council to carry on the double work of
purification and reunion therefore Charles stood out as the
representative of the larger part both of the Catholic and the Protestant
world. Against such a proposal however Rome struggled hard. All her
tradition was against Councils, where the assembled bishops had in
earlier days asserted their superiority to the Pope, and where the
Emperor who convened the assembly and carried out its decrees rose
into dangerous rivalry with the Papacy. Crushed as he was, Clement the
Seventh throughout his lifetime held the proposal of a Council
stubbornly at bay. But under his successor, Paul the Third, the

influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more
favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541,
conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which
Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question of
justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the
other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg
publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms on the
yet more vexed questions of the Mass and the Papal supremacy.
[Sidenote: Charles and Henry.]
Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and the hopes that
were stirring found an echo in England as well as in Germany. We can
hardly doubt indeed that it was the revival of these hopes which had
brought about the fall of Cromwell and the recall of Norfolk to power.
Norfolk, like his master, looked to a purification of the Church by a
Council as the prelude to a reconciliation of England with the general
body of Catholicism; and both saw that it was by the influence of the
Emperor alone that such a Council could be brought about. Charles on
the other hand was ready to welcome Henry's advances. The quarrel
over Catharine had ended with her death; and the wrong done her had
been in part atoned for by the fall of Anne Boleyn. The aid of Henry
too was needed to hold in check the opposition of France. The chief
means which France still possessed of holding the Emperor at bay lay
in the disunion of the Empire, and it was resolute to preserve this
weapon against him at whatever cost to Christendom. While Francis
remonstrated at Rome against the concessions made to the Lutherans
by the Legates, he urged the Lutheran princes to make no terms with
the Papacy. To the Protestants he held out hopes of his own conversion,
while he promised Pope Paul that he would defend him with his life
against Emperor and heretics. His intrigues were aided by the
suspicions of both the religious parties. Luther refused to believe in the
sincerity of the concessions made by the Legates; Paul the Third held
aloof from them in sullen silence. Meanwhile Francis