From the Diet of Worms to the Augsburg Confession - James Aitken Wylie

heavens were contending in all their fury.
Continual perplexity was the lot of the
monarchs of that age. But all their Perplexities
grew out of that mysterious movement which was
springing up in the midst of them, and which
possessed the strange, and to them terrible, faculty
of converting everything that was meant for its
harm into the means of its advancement. The
uneasiness of the monarchs was shown in their
continual shiftings. Scarcely had one combination
been formed, when it was broken in pieces, and
another and a different one put in its place. We
have just seen the Pope and the emperor at feud.
We again behold them becoming confederates, and
joining their swords, so recently pointed at each
other, for the extinction of the heresy of
Wittenberg. The train of political events by which
this came about may be told in a few words.
The expedition of the French king into Italy, in
violation, as we have seen, of the Treaty of Madrid,
was at first successful. His general, Lautrec,
sweeping down from the Alps, took the cities of
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