siastical politics of the empire, and with the character and schemes of its numerous princes. But he became dissatisfied ere long; with the luxurious and frivolous life which prevailed among the courtiers of the cardinal-elector; and following the advice of his father, who had now declared for the Reformation and joined the league of Schmalkald, he betook himself to Torgau, the residence of his excellent kinsman John Frederick of Saxony. Here his religious views were gained over to the same side, and his distinguished talents and high spirit excited general admiration; but already it began to be surmised that the love of greatness and power was his master passion. "What do you think of my cousin?" said the elector one day aside to Luther as he sat at table with him. Luther cast a searching glance at the young prince, and after a pause replied, that "the elector had better take heed how he nursed up a young lion." "I hope the best," rejoined thoughtfully the elector. In 1540 Duke Henry succeeded to the dominions of Duke George, into which he immediately introduced the Reformation, and in 1541 Maurice married Agnes, the daughter of Philip, landgrave of Hesse. In the same year his father died and left him and his younger brother Augustus co-heirs of his possessions; but this testamentary disposition was set aside as illegal, and he assumed the sole government of his states after making a suitable provision for the dignity of Augustus. He was now free to unfold the whole force of his character, and to adopt the line of policy which was most agreeable to his uncommon genius. He adhered to his father's ecclesiastical policy, and showed his protestant zeal by liberal endowments granted to the reformed university of Leipsic, and by establishing gymnasia at Pforta Meissen and Merseburg. But in secular politics he followed a line of his own. He kept aloof from the league of Schmalkald, to the great disgust of the other protestant princes, particularly of the Elector John Frederick; and he formed the secret design of attaching himself to the service of the Emperor Charles V. as the surest way of raising himself to greatness. He flattered himself he could do so without betraying the interests of religion, and allowed his ambition so completely to blind him as to think that he could ally himself to the most powerful enemy of the Reformation, and forsake the side of its best friends and protectors, without inflicting upon it the most severe wounds. Just at this time the emperor was calling loudly for help against the Turks, and against France, who were pressing upon the empire from opposite sides, and Maurice hastened to his aid with a considerable body of horse and foot. The war with the Turks was raging in Hungary, and he distinguished himself by his energy and valour under the walls of Pesth, then held by the powerful Soliman. Charles rewarded the young hero by giving him the command of a portion of the imperial army which he sent against France—a service in which he acquired still higher distinction and fame. It was in vain that his father-in-law, the landgrave, and the elector renewed their efforts to induce him to join the protestant league; but he avoided coming as yet to the open breach which this conduct rendered inevitable, by assisting them in a war with their furious enemy Duke Henry of Brunswick. At length in 1546, the year of Luther's death, the crisis came. Charles resolved upon attacking the princes of the league in open war, pretending political offences only as the moving cause, and Maurice bound himself by a secret treaty to assist him in this war against his own kinsmen and coreligionists, on condition of succeeding to the electorate, from which the emperor was now resolved to degrade John Frederick. The war commenced in good earnest; and to the scandal of all protestant Europe, Maurice united his evangelical forces with the popish host of Charles, and invaded and laid waste the territories of his unsuspecting neighbour the elector. This perfidious and unnatural act excited the warmest resentment, and the elector hurried from the south of Germany to chastise the invader by a retaliatory invasion. Leipsic, Dresden, and Pirna all fell before his arms, and but for an armistice of five weeks, which John Frederick unwisely consented to, Maurice would have been driven from the field. But the delay enabled the emperor to come up to his relief, and the campaign ended in the memorable disaster of Mühlberg, which made the elector a prisoner, stripped him of all but a small portion of his dominions and transferred part of these with his electoral crown to the hands of Maurice. How deeply the religious interest of the protestant states was compromised by these events was soon apparent, for in 1548 the emperor felt himself strong enough to enact and to enforce in several of these states the Augsburg Interim, which in all but a few particulars was a return to the corruptions of Rome; and though Maurice shrank from carrying it out in Saxony, he introduced in 1549 the Leipsic Interim, which, though moderate enough to have received the reluctant acquiescence of Melancthon, was yet retrograde enough to call forth among many of the most loyal friends of the Reformation the loudest complaints. After inflicting such heavy blows as these upon a cause which he still professed to love, it could little have been expected that Maurice would in a few years stand forward as the chief champion and deliverer of that very cause. But so it came to pass. He conceived the idea of making a truly patriotic use of his ill-gotten power and greatness; and he showed as much secrecy and address in concealing his design from the penetration of the unsuspecting emperor, as he displayed vigour, and daring, and true heroism in the steps by which he at length carried it into effect. Having been appointed by the emperor at the close of 1550 to reduce Magdeburg to subjection, he seized the opportunity for collecting an army much larger than was needed for the purposes of the siege; and having entered into a secret treaty with Henry II. of France against Charles, and engaged the assistance of his brother-in-law the young landgrave of Hesse, he suddenly threw off the mask, and boldly declared war against the emperor, in the interest both of the religious and political liberty of the German fatherland. Augsburg opened her gates to him, and he marched with an army of more than thirty thousand men to attack the emperor, who was then at Innspruck. Reaching by forced marches the mountain barriers of the Tyrol, he stormed the fortress of Ehrenberg, and drove Charles in hasty flight from Innspruck across the Alps to Villach in Carinthia. The council of Trent was broken up in confusion, a panic fell upon the pillars of the papacy, and the glorious issue of the campaign was the peace of Passau, signed 2nd August, 1552, and afterwards formally ratified by the diet of Augsburg in 1555—an event which put an end to the long-cherished designs of Charles against the religion and liberties of evangelical Germany, and far more than compensated for all the misfortunes which the ambition of the young conqueror had previously brought upon his country. But he did not live to see the formal ratification of this celebrated treaty. He died upon the field of battle, 11th July, 1553, at Sievershausen in Luneburg, in a victorious engagement with the Margrave Albert who had repudiated the treaty, and had been put under the ban of the empire as a public enemy. "His was a nature," says Ranke, "like none other that Germany has ever produced—so secret, so enterprizing, so energetic, so much a man of flesh and blood, and not of mere ideas. The fate of protestantism hung upon his actions; his desertion from that cause brought it to the verge of ruin; and his desertion from the emperor was the salvation of liberty."—P. L.
MAURICE of Nassau, Prince of Orange, one of the founders of the Dutch republic, was the son of William I., prince of Orange, by his second wife, Anne, daughter of the famous Maurice of Saxony, whom young Maurice resembled both in visage and character. At the time of his father's murder he was little more than seventeen years of age—"a handsome youth with dark blue eyes, well-chiselled features, and full, red lips." Maurice, who had already manifested a courage and concentration of character beyond his years (as his elder brother, Philip, had been basely kidnapped from school and detained a captive in Spain for seventeen years) was appointed stadtholder and captain-general by the states of Holland and Zealand. He assumed for his device a fallen oak with a young sapling springing from its root, with the motto, "Tandem fit surculus arbor" (The twig shall yet become a tree); and resolutely girded himself for his life-long contest with Spain in behalf of the independence of his country. The United Provinces earnestly entreated help from England in their struggle; and Elizabeth at length consented to furnish six thousand troops under her favourite, Leicester, whose imprudence and ambition gave great offence to the states, and thwarted rather than assisted their operations. Through his misconduct Zutphen and Deventer were lost to the republic. The queen herself, by her mingled caprice and parsimony, crippled his energies; and at last the earl and the greater part of his troops were recalled in 1587. Young Maurice had exerted himself to the utmost, and expressed his willingness to sacrifice his own interests and wants to promote the success of Leicester's measures. He readily consented to place his patrimonial town. Flushing, in the hands of the English as part of the guarantee demanded by the queen. He even united with
