and the task of dealing with the religious, and with the no less troublesome political and social discord in Germany, was left to the Council of Regency and practically, for five years, to Ferdinand.
The composition and powers of this body were among the chief questions which came before the Diet of Worms. When the electors extorted from Charles a promise to re-establish the Reichsregiment, they had in their mind a national administration like that suggested by Berthold of Mainz; when Charles gave his pledge, he was thinking of a Council which should be, like Maximilian's, Aulic rather than national; and he imagined that he was redeeming his pledge when he proposed to the Diet the formation of a government which was to have no control over foreign affairs, and a control, limited by his own assent, over domestic administration. The Regent or head of the Council and six of its twenty members were to be nominated by the Emperor; these were to be permanent, but the other fourteen, representing the Empire, were to change every quarter. This body was to have no power over Charles' hereditary dominions, nor over the newly-won Württemberg. The Emperor, in short, was to control the national government, but the writs of the national government were not to run in the Habsburg territories. On the other hand, the Princes demanded a form of government which would have practically eliminated the imperial factor from the Empire; the governing Council was to have the same authority whether Charles himself were present or not, it was to decide foreign as well as domestic questions, and in it the Emperor should be represented only in the same way as other Princes, namely, by a proportionate number of members chosen from his hereditary lands.
In the compromise which followed Charles secured the decisive point. The government which was formed was too weak to weld Germany into a political whole, able to withstand the disintegrating influence of its own particularism and of the Habsburg dynastic interest; and Charles was left free to pursue throughout his reign the old imperial maxim, divide et impera. The Reichsregiment was to have independent power only during the Emperor's absence; at other times it was to sink into an advisory body, and important decisions must always have his assent. He was to nominate the president and four out of the Council's twenty-two members; but his own dominions were to be subject to its authority, the determination of religious questions was left largely in the hands of the Estates, and Charles undertook to form no leagues or alliances affecting the Empire without the Council's consent. The reconstitution of the supreme national court of justice or Reichs-kammergericht presented few variations from the form adopted at Constance in 1507, and the ordinance establishing it is almost word for word the same as the original proposal of Berthold of Mainz in 1495; the imperial influence was slightly increased by the provision permitting him to nominate two additional assessors to the Court, but, being paid
