It is related in the Rhymed Chronicle of Ottocar, how he had been kept alive for a whole year by the skill of his physicians, but that they told him at last, as he sat playing at draughts, that death was upon him, and that he could live but five days.  “Well, then,” he said, “on to Spires!” that he might lay him in the Imperial vault in the great Cathedral there,—­where many Emperors slept their long sleep, till, in the Orleans Succession War in the time of Louis XIV., as afterwards in 1794, under the revolutionary commander Custine, French soldiers rudely disturbed it, with every circumstance of outrage which Frenchmen only could devise.  Rudolph went forth thither, but fell by the way, and died at Germersheim, a dirty little village which he had founded.  And in the Cathedral at Spires, where he rested from his activities, you may see this day a monumental statue of him, executed by that great artist, the late Ludwig Schwanthaler of Munich, for his art-loving patron, Ludwig I., King of Bavaria.

Rudolph was succeeded by his son Albrecht, then forty-three years old, likewise a vigorous man, whose restless spirit of aggrandizement gave the Swiss much uneasiness.  His purpose seems to have been to acquire the sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and baronial fiefs, and, having thus encompassed the free cities and the Three Cantons, to compel submission to his authority.  In the seventh week after Rudolph’s death, they met together to renew the ancient bond with the people of Uri and Unterwalden; and they swore, in or out of their valleys, to stand by one another, if harm should be done to any of them.  “In this we are as one man,” ran their oath, among other things, “in that we will receive no judge who is not a countryman and an inhabitant, or who has bought his office.”

After several years of troubles and frights among them, the Emperor sent to the Forest Cantons to say, that it would be well for them and their posterity, if they submitted to the protection of the Royal House, as all neighboring cities and counties had done; he wished them to be his dear children; he was the descendant of their Bailiff of Lenzburg, son of their Emperor Rudolph; if he offered them the protection of his glorious line, it was not that he lusted after their flocks or would make merchandise of their poverty, but because he knew from his father and from history what brave men they were, whom he would lead to victory and knighthood and plunder.

Then spake the nobles and the freemen of the Forest Cantons:  “They know very well, and will ever remember, how his father of blessed memory was a good leader and Bailiff to them; but they love the condition of their ancestors, and will abide by it.  If the King would but confirm it!”