The emperor had deposed Frederic the Elector of Saxony, and placed over his dominions, Maurice, a nephew of the deposed elector.  Maurice had married a daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel.  He was a man of commanding abilities, and as shrewd, sagacious and ambitious as the emperor himself.  He had been strongly inclined to the Lutheran doctrines, but had been bought over to espouse the cause of Charles V. by the brilliant offer of the territories of Saxony.  Maurice, as he saw blow after blow falling upon his former friends; one prince after another ejected from his estates, Protestantism crushed, and finally his own uncle and his wife’s father led about to grace the triumph of the conqueror; as he saw the vast power to which the emperor had attained, and that the liberties of the German empire were in entire subjection to his will, his pride was wounded, his patriotism aroused, and his Protestant sympathies revived.  Maurice, meeting Charles V. on the field of intrigue, was Greek meeting Greek.

Maurice now began with great guile and profound sagacity to plot against the despotic emperor.  Two circumstances essentially aided him.  Charles coveted the dukedoms of Parma and Placentia in Italy, and the Duke Ottavia had been deposed.  He rallied his subjects and succeeded in uniting France on his side, for Henry II. was alarmed at the encroachments the emperor was making in Italy.  A very fierce war instantly blazed forth, the Duke of Parma and Henry II. on one side, the pope and the emperor on the other.  At the same time the Turks, under the leadership of the Sultan Solyman himself, were organizing a formidable force for the invasion of Hungary, which invasion would require all the energies of Ferdinand, with all the forces he could raise in Austria, Hungary and Bohemia to repel.

Next to Hungary and Bohemia, Saxony was perhaps the most powerful State of the Germanic confederacy.  The emperor placed full reliance upon Maurice, and the Protestants in their despair would have thought of him as the very last to come to their aid; for he had marched vigorously in the armies of the emperor to crush the Protestants, and was occupying the territories of their most able and steadfast friend.  Secretly, Maurice made proposals to all the leading Protestant princes of the empire, and having made every thing ready for an outbreak, he entered into a treaty with the King of France, who promised large subsidies and an efficient military force.

Maurice conducted these intrigues with such consummate skill that the emperor had not the slightest suspicion of the storm which was gathering.  Every thing being matured, early in April, 1552, Maurice suddenly appeared before the gates of Augsburg with an army of twenty-five thousand men.  At the same time he issued a declaration that he had taken up arms to prevent the destruction of the Protestant religion, to defend the liberties of Germany which the emperor had infringed, and to rescue his relatives from their