It was a flagrant case of religious aggression under the name of the
law. The knowledge that a partial tribunal was ready to give effect to
the complaints of Catholics at once threw the great Protestant cities of
the South--Nueremberg, Ulm, and Strasburg into the arms of the
neighbouring princes of whom they had hitherto been jealous. Yet there
was much in the policy of those princes which would hardly have
reassured them. At the Diet of 1608 the representatives of the Elector
Palatine were foremost in demanding that the minority should not be
bound by the majority in questions of taxation or religion; that is to
say, that they should not contribute to the common defence unless they
pleased, and that they should not be subject to any regulation about
ecclesiastical property unless they pleased. Did this mean only that
they were to keep what they had got, or that they might take more as
soon as it was convenient? The one was the Protestant, the other the
Catholic interpretation of their theory.