Rodolph's policy served to diminish instead of swelling his numbers. He devoted himself, at the sacrifice of everything else, to gain the Pope to acknowledge him as king. He appeared the inflexible chastiser of simony and ecclesiastical corruption. The very day of his coronation he had obtained the dismissal of a simoniacal deacon. Everywhere he compelled the nominees of Henry to fly, and filled their places with zealous champions of the canonical discipline. At Constance and Zurich he drove the irregularly appointed bishops from their sees: he placed Lutold, a zealous champion of the Pope, over the monastery of St. Gall, which had been devoted to his rival. Many, frightened by these severities, deserted his standards, and others recoiled from the presence of so rigorous an enforcer of spiritual purity.
Thus, while the cause of Henry was flourishing under his criminal artifices, Rodolph was weakened by his honest severity. Yet there was this difference between the parties. The minions of Henry were goaded on by individual interests—the partisans of Rodolph by a common resolution to die in defence of a sublime principle; the first were incited by the hope of plunder, the lust of empire, ambition, avarice, or a lawless appetite for war—the last were animated by a love of liberty, and fought for future security from oppression; the one prepared to preserve unrighteous license and ill-gotten gains—the other were inspired by the hope of regaining the freedom of which they had been unjustly deprived, and by the resolve to regain their ancestral rights and to protect the outraged Church of God.
Albert of Hers with all his energy and address had not succeeded in extracting from Suabia more than two thousand men. With this small force he joined Rodolph, who was then encamped at the little village of Sommeringen, with scarce three thousand Suabians. Here they learned that Henry, at the head of twelve thousand effective troops, was advancing upon Suabia through Ratisbon. Rodolph soon heard of the atrocities of his rival, who abandoned the country to fire, sword, and rapine. Old men and women, pale with fear, came crowding into camp with thrilling tales of the brutality of the Bohemians and their associates. The war had begun; and Henry was devastating the region bordering on the Danube and the Rhine, from Esslingen to Ulm.
Though his force did not amount to half that of his opponent, Rodolph, enraged by the crimes he could not prevent, would have gone to meet his competitor, but for the unanimous opposition of his nobles. While the Suabian party were deliberating upon the best course to pursue, Henry, by a forced march, fell unexpectedly upon their rear. Taken by surprise and overpowered by numbers, they fled in all directions, and Rodolph, accompanied only by a remnant of his army, escaped with difficulty into Saxony. Suabia was now at the mercy of the victor.
Tidings of this disastrous defeat had not yet reached the Lady Margaret. The scanty intelligence she could occasionally glean was not such as to brighten the melancholy caused by the absence of her father and brother. Her fears thickened daily, as rumor, for once unable to exaggerate, divulged the massacres and impieties of the old imperialists. Her only relief was in the Sacraments, administered by the saintly Herman, and in prayer. The wives of the yeomen, not knowing when to expect the enemy, sought shelter in the castle with their parents and children. There were gathered the innocent, the aged, the young, the beautiful, and the Lady Margaret experienced some relief in administering to their wants and calming their anxiety. She did not rely much upon the few faithful soldiers who were left to guard the castle; but though womanly apprehension would often blanch her cheek, and her frame quiver as some recent deed of shame was unfolded, her confidence in God continued unabated.
One afternoon, as the Lady Margaret, surrounded by the inmates of the castle, was seated in the hall, Bertha, clad in a black mantle, stole silently into the room, and glancing wildly around, began to traverse the apartment with rapid strides. Her excited manner attracted much attention, and many anxious conjectures were made as to the cause of her meaning gestures. At length, stopping before the Lady Margaret, who watched her movements with a troubled eye, she sang, almost in a whisper:
The sunbeam was bright on their shields as they came,
But dim on their blood-rusted spears;
They gave up the hamlet to pillage and flame,
And scoffed at the kneeling one's tears!
"Perhaps the enemy are upon us," said a graycoated palmer, who for some days had shared the bounty of the Lady Margaret.
At these words, a general murmur ran round the group, and then all was still as death.
Bertha resumed, in a louder tone: