Charles's proposals for the diet asked for the Edict of Worms to be carried out, heresy and rebellion to be put down and any final decisions on religion to be postponed until the meeting of a general council.
On 27 August, the Diet came to the unanimous conclusion, with the consent of Ferdinand, that a general or national council should be convened for the settlement of the church question and that in the meantime, in matters concerning the Edict of Worms, "every State shall so live, rule, and believe as it may hope and trust to answer before God and his imperial Majesty".
That action was not designed to annul the Edict of Worms nor to be a permanent law of religious liberty to give to each member of the Diet the right to act as he pleased.
Rather, it was merely an armistice, or a temporary suspension of the edict, until the meeting of a general council and within the limits of obedience to the Catholic emperor, who had no plans to grant religious liberty or even toleration to Protestants.
In the meantime, the Protestant princes, notably Philip of Hesse at the Synod of Homberg (20 October 1526) and Elector John of Saxony interpreted the decree according to their own wishes and made the best use of the temporary privilege of independent action, regardless of its limitations or the views of the Emperor.
Had the Emperor then embraced the Protestant doctrines, he might have become the head of a German imperial state church, but his instincts were all against Protestantism, and his kingdoms of Spain and the Sicilies would have revolted against him.
The action of the Diet of 1526 and the quarrel between the Emperor and the Pope, were highly favourable to the progress of the Reformation, but the good effect was in great part neutralised by a stupendous fraud, which brought Germany to the brink of a civil war.
Philip of Hesse, an ardent, passionate, impulsive and ambitious prince who was a patron of Protestantism, was deceived by an unprincipled and avaricious politician, Otto von Pack, the provisional chancellor of the Duchy of Saxony, into the belief that Ferdinand of Austria, the Electors of Mainz, Brandenburg and Saxony, the Duke of Bavaria and other Catholic rulers had concluded a league at Breslau, on 15 May 1527, for the extermination of Protestantism.
The rash conduct of Philip put the Protestant princes in the position of aggressors and disturbers of the public peace, and the whole affair brought shame and disgrace upon their cause.
Every Protestant prince claimed and exercised the so-called jus reformandi religionem (the right to reform religion) and decided the church question according to his own faith and that of the majority of his subjects.
Saxony, Hesse, Prussia, Anhalt, Lüneburg, East Friesland, Schleswig-Holstein, Silesia, and the cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Ulm, Strasburg, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, adopted Protestantism.