The imperial edict against Luther threatened all his sympathisers with extermination. It practically proclaimed an Albigensian war in Germany. Charles had handed it to Aleander with a smile. Aleander despatched the document to Rome with an exultation which could only find due expression in a quotation from Ovid’s _Art of Love_. Pope Leo celebrated the arrival of the news by comedies and musical entertainments. But calm observers, foreigners in Germany, saw little cause for congratulation and less for mirth. Henry VIII. wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz congratulating him on the overthrow of the “rebel against Christ”; but Wolsey’s agent at the Diet informed his master that he believed there were one hundred thousand Germans who were still ready to lay down their lives in Luther’s defence.(294) Velasco, who had struck down the Spanish rebels in the battle of Villalar, wrote to the Emperor that the victory was God’s gratitude for his dealings with the heretic monk; but Alfonso de Valdès, the Emperor’s secretary, said in a letter to a Spanish correspondent: “Here you have, as some imagine, the end of this tragedy; but I am persuaded it is not the end, but the beginning of it. For I see that the minds of the Germans are greatly exasperated against the Roman See, and they do not seem to attach great importance to the Emperor’s edicts; for since their publication, Luther’s books are sold with impunity at every step and corner of the streets and market-places. From this you will easily guess what will happen when the Emperor leaves. This evil might have been cured with the greatest advantage to the Christian commonwealth, had not the Pope refused a General Council, had he preferred the public weal to his own private interests. But while he insists that Luther shall be condemned and burnt, I see the whole Christian commonwealth hurried to destruction unless God Himself help us.” Valdès, like Gattinara and other councillors of Charles, was a follower of Erasmus. He lays the blame of all on the Pope. But what a disillusion this Diet of Worms ought to have been to the Erasmians! The Humanist young sovereigns and the Humanist Pope, from whom so much had been expected, congratulating each other on Luther’s condemnation to the stake!