At an uncovered table, upon which rested a clock, a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and some other trifles, there sat a prematurely aged man of fifty-two with a long, fair, sallow face and a white beard. His great, projecting nether-lip was cracked and sore with fever, and between it and the tongue there lay a fresh green leaf to give coolness and moisture. His hands and feet were distorted by gout; and his fur-lined, black gown clung around a once-stalwart frame now shrunken with sickness. On his right hand at the other side of the table a stout, somewhat pursy, middle-aged English gentleman, with his cap in his hand and in an attitude of profound respect, was delivering a speech in Italian, to which the old man was listening with eager attention, now and again painfully raising his hand to his flat black velvet cap in salute when the name of King Edward was mentioned. It was in the little city of Landau in the Bavarian Palatinate, and Sir Richard Moryson, the English Ambassador, had ridden from Spires, nearly twenty miles away, that day, the 4th October, 1552, bringing his message to the greatest potentate on earth, the Emperor Charles V. Fate had dealt hardly with the Emperor of late, and the impossible task he had assumed was breaking him down mentally and physically. Once again he had found himself faced, not only by his old enemy France, but by his own German Princes; and solely by flight and good luck had he escaped capture at the hands of the Judas whom he had made powerful at the expense of right and justice, Maurice of Saxony. From sheer impotence to struggle further, the Emperor had been forced to accept the humiliating terms of the Peace of Passau dictated to him by the Lutheran Princes. But free now from danger from his own people, he had turned again to cope with the foreign ally of his rebel vassals, determined this time to make a supreme effort to crush his French rival utterly before his growing infirmities crushed him.