seemed to have equal cause for resisting so perilous an abuse,
the Protestants alone, who most sensibly felt it, and even these not all
at once and in a body, came forward as the defenders of German liberty,
which the establishment of so arbitrary a tribunal had outraged
in its most sacred point, the administration of justice. In fact,
Germany would have had little cause to congratulate itself upon
the abolition of club-law, and in the institution of the Imperial Chamber,
if an arbitrary tribunal of the Emperor was allowed to interfere with
the latter. The Estates of the German Empire would indeed
have improved little upon the days of barbarism, if the Chamber of Justice
in which they sat along with the Emperor as judges, and for which
they had abandoned their original princely prerogative, should cease to be
a court of the last resort. But the strangest contradictions
were at this date to be found in the minds of men. The name of Emperor,
a remnant of Roman despotism, was still associated with an idea of autocracy,
which, though it formed a ridiculous inconsistency with
the privileges of the Estates, was nevertheless argued for by jurists,
diffused by the partisans of despotism, and believed by the ignorant.

To these general grievances was gradually added a chain of singular incidents,
which at length converted the anxiety of the Protestants into utter distrust.
During the Spanish persecutions in the Netherlands,
several Protestant families had taken refuge in Aix-la-Chapelle,
an imperial city, and attached to the Roman Catholic faith,
where they settled and insensibly extended their adherents.
Having succeeded by stratagem in introducing some of their members
into the municipal council, they demanded a church and the public exercise
of their worship, and the demand being unfavourably received, they succeeded
by violence in enforcing it, and also in usurping the entire government
of the city. To see so important a city in Protestant hands