The Emperor, proud of his new scheme, and believing that he was on the high road to victory, and the consummation of his plans, proceeded to enforce the Interim. But to his great astonishment he found all parties declaiming against it with equal violence. The Protestants condemned it as a system containing the grossest errors of popery. The papists condemned it because some of the doctrines of the holy catholic church were impiously given up. But at Rome the indignation of the ecclesiastics rose to the greatest height. They exclaimed against the Emperor's profane encroachment on the sacerdotal office, and compared him to that apostate, Henry VIII. of England, who had usurped the title as well as the jurisdiction belonging to the supreme pontiff.
Among the Protestant princes there was great diversity of feeling, into the details of which we need not enter. Some yielded a feigned submission, but there were others who made a firm stand and a faithful protest against the Interim. Charles, well knowing the great influence which the example of his prisoner, Frederick, would have with all the Protestant party, labored with the utmost earnestness to gain his approbation of the scheme. But he was not to be moved, either by the hope of liberty, or the threats of greater harshness. He now met the Emperor with weapons mightier far than all the imperial power-conscience and the word of God. And well would it have been for the Protestants and the cause of Protestantism, had no others ever been opposed to the threatenings of the pope and the Emperor. Some might have been honored with martyrdom, but the country would have been saved from the desolations of war, and the moral glory of this divine principle would have been stamped on the Reformation.
After having declared his firm belief in the doctrines of the Reformation, he added, "I cannot now in my old age, abandon the principles for which I early contended; nor, in order to procure freedom during a few declining years, will I betray that good cause on account of which I have suffered so much, and am still willing to suffer. Better for me to enjoy, in this solitude, the esteem of virtuous men, together with the approbation of my own conscience, than to return into the world, with the imputation and guilt of apostasy, to disgrace and embitter the remainder of my days." For this magnanimous resolution, in which he set his countrymen a noble pattern, he was rewarded by the Emperor with fresh marks of his displeasure. "The rigor of his confinement was increased; the number of his servants diminished; the Lutheran clergymen, who had hitherto been permitted to attend him, were dismissed, and even the books of devotion, which had been his chief consolation during a tedious imprisonment, were taken from him."