“We cannot get rid of the fact,” writes Georg Ellinger, Melanchthon’s latest Protestant biographer, “that, on the whole, his attitude at the Diet of Augsburg does not make a pleasing impression.” “That the apprehension of seeing the realisation of his principles frustrated led him to actions which can in no wise be approved, may be freely admitted.” It is true that Ellinger emphasises very strongly the “mitigating circumstances,” but he also remarks: “He had no real comprehension of the importance of the ecclesiastical forms involved [in his concessions], and this same lack of penetration served him badly even later. The method by which he attempted to put his plans into execution displays nothing of greatness but rather that petty slyness which seeks to overreach opponents by the use of ambiguous words.... He had recourse to this means in the hope of thus arriving more easily at his goal.” His “little tricks,” he proceeds, “at least delayed the business for a while,” to the manifest advantage of the Protestant cause.[1124] He candidly admits that Melanchthon, both before and after the Diet of Augsburg, owing to his weak and not entirely upright character, was repeatedly caught “having recourse to the subterfuges of a slyness not far removed from dissimulation.”[1125] In proof of this he instances the expedient invented by Melanchthon for the purpose of evading the conference with Zwingli at Marburg which was so distasteful to him. “The Elector was to behave as though Melanchthon had, in a letter, requested permission to attend such a conference, and had been refused it. Melanchthon would then allege this to the Landgrave of Hesse [who was urging him to attend the conference] ‘in order that His Highness may be pacified by so excellent an excuse.’”[1126] Ellinger, most impartially, also adduces other devices to which Melanchthon had recourse at a later date.[1127] The conduct of the leader of the Protestant party at the Diet of Augsburg, more particularly his concern in the document addressed to the Legate Campeggio, is stigmatised as follows by Karl Sell, the Protestant historian. “This tone, this sudden reduction of the whole world-stirring struggle to a mere wrangle about trifles, and this recognition, anything but religious, of the Roman Church, comes perilously near conscious deception. Did Melanchthon really believe it possible to outwit diplomats so astute by such a blind? In my opinion it is unfair to reproach him with treason or even servility; what he was guilty of was merely duplicity.” Campeggio, Sell continues, of these and similar advances made by the Protestant spokesmen, wrote: “They answer as heretics are wont, viz. in cunning and ambiguous words.”[1128]