As for me I neither saw nor heard all this.  It did not make me thankful nor even serve to comfort me.

All things were alike to me, even the Queen’s gracious admonitions.  The diligent humility of great and small alike in their demeanor chilled me in truth; sometimes meseemed it was in scorn.

To my lover, if to any man, Heaven’s gates might open; yet had he perished without shrift or sacrament, and I could never bear to be absent when masses were said for his soul’s redemption.  Nay, and I was fain to go to churches and chapels, inasmuch as I was secure there from the speech of man.  All that life could give or ask of me, I had ceased to care for.

If, from the first, I had been required to bestir myself and bend my will, matters had not perchance have gone so hard with me.  The first call on my strength worked as it were a charm.  The need to act restored the power to act:  and a new and bitter experience which now befell was as a draught of wine, making my heavy heart beat high and steady once more.  Nought, indeed, but some great matter could have roused me from that dull half-sleep; nor was it long in coming, by reason that my brother Herdegen’s safety and life were in peril.  This danger arose from the fact that, not long ere the passage of arms at Altenperg, in despite of strait enactments, the peace of the realm had many times been broken under the very eyes of his Majesty by bloody combats, and the Elector Conrad of Maintz had gone hand in hand with him of Brandenburg to entreat his Majesty to make an example of this matter.  These two were likewise the most powerful of all the electors; the spiritual prince had, at the closing of the Diet, been named Vicar of the Empire, and he of Brandenburg was commander-in-chief of all the Imperial armies.  And his voice was of special weight in this matter, inasmuch as the great friendship which had hitherto bound him to the Emperor had of late cooled greatly, and both before and during the sitting of the Diet, his Majesty had keenly felt what power the Brandenburger could wield, and with what grave issues to himself.

Thus, when my lord the Elector and the high constable Frederick demanded that the law should be carried out with the utmost rigor in the matter of Herdegen, it was not, as many deemed, by reason that the King was not at one with our good town and the worshipful council, and that he was well content to vent his wrath on the son of one of its patrician families, but contrariwise, that his Majesty, who hated all baseness, had heard tidings of Herdegen’s bloody deeds at Padua and his wild ways at Paris.  Likewise it had come to his Majesty’s ears that he had falsely plighted his troth to two maidens.  Nay, and my grand-uncle had made known to King Sigismund that Ursula, who had been known to the Elector from her childhood up, had been driven by despair at Herdegen’s breach of faith to give her hand to the sick Bohemian Knight, Sir Franz von Welemisl.