judge not suspected. This also was a virtual denial of the supremacy of the pope. It is also important to remember, that these diets were political bodies; as truly so, as a parliament, a cortes or states general. At the diet of 1526, Ferdinand, the brother of the emperor, presided. The diet of 1529 was convened by the emperor himself. It was composed of princes, electors, and the representatives of imperial cities. The protest, therefore, was a political act—the assertion of a civil or political