help of the peasants and Swiss mercenaries had made the governments at Ensisheim and Innsbruck suspicious of Switzerland. The grievances of the peasants, intensified by the effect of the Reformation upon the public lands, remained unredressed, and, a century later, led to the Peasants' War (1653). Few chapters in the history of federalism are more instructive than this failure on the part of a democratic federation to govern its conquests or to respect their liberties.
The Reformation had brought a new cause of division into the Confederacy. Religious disunion-save in the occasional form of heresy- was an unlooked-for thing, and the Federal authority scarcely knew how to treat it. The Forest Cantons were keen enemies of change; they regarded the Zurich innovations as threatening to themselves. On the other hand Zurich naturally regarded herself as free to make what changes she wished. This difficulty would have strained Federal relations, especially where much of Church government had been already taken over by the civil power; but it might have been overcome. When Zurich- disregarding the principle of government by the majority of the Cantons -pushed religious change into the Subject Lands the difficulty was increased. The frequent division of the higher and lower jurisdiction between the Confederates and a single Canton gave rise to the further question: under which jurisdiction came religious offences? The majority of the Cantons governing the Subject Lands were Catholic; Zurich in many places held the lower jurisdiction. As early as November, 1522, the Federal Diet ordered the bailiffs in the Subject Lands to bring before them the priests who spoke against the faith, thus claiming religious offences for the higher jurisdiction. But these beginnings of discord in the Federation were bound up with the beginnings of a local reformation upon Catholic lines.
The Bishop of Constance, like his brother-Bishop Christopher von Uttenheim of Basel, had tried to improve his diocese, as his pastoral letter of 1517 shows. With these efforts there was widespread sympathy, and when the three Bishops of Basel, Lausanne, and Constance complained to the Diet at Luzern (January 26, 1524) of the disturbed state of things in their dioceses, the Diet not only (as already noted) sent an embassy to Zurich urging caution, but proposed to undertake a reformation on the lines of unity, admitting that abuses ought to be redressed. Exactions, traffic in benefices, Indulgences were condemned; the Diet would consult with Zurich as to the best means of shaking off the yoke which the injustice of Popes, Cardinals, and prelates had laid upon the Swiss people. But this reformation was to be undertaken by the State, and the Federal Diet was to be the ruling authority. Nothing could better prove the ecclesiastical anarchy into which Switzerland had fallen, and the chance that a reforming Papacy would have had of preserving unity and yet securing progress. Luzern, whence these proposals came, was afterwards a centre of the Counter-Reformation.
