Title: The Age of the Reformation
Author: Preserved Smith
Release date: July 20, 2006 [eBook #18879]
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines
E-text prepared by Al Haines
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by
PRESERVED SMITH, Ph.D.
New York
Henry Holt and Company
American Historical Series
General Editor
Charles H. Haskins
Professor of History in Harvard University
Copyright, 1920
by
Henry Holt and Company
The excuse for writing another history of the Reformation is the need for putting that movement in its proper relations to the economic and intellectual revolutions of the sixteenth century. The labor of love necessary for the accomplishment of this task has employed most of my leisure for the last six years and has been my companion through vicissitudes of sorrow and of joy. A large part of the pleasure derived from the task has come from association with friends who have generously put their time and thought at my disposal. First of all, Professor Charles H. Haskins, of Harvard, having read the whole in manuscript and in proof with care, has thus given me the unstinted benefit of his deep learning, and of his ripe and sane judgment. Next to him the book owes most to my kind friend, the Rev. Professor William Walker Rockwell, of Union Seminary, who has added to the many other favors he has done me a careful revision of Chapters I to VIII, Chapter XIV, and a part of Chapter IX. Though unknown to me personally, the Rev. Dr. Peter Guilday, of the Catholic University of Washington, consented, with gracious, characteristic urbanity, to read Chapters VI and VIII and a part of Chapter I. I am grateful to Professor N. S. B. Gras, of the University of Minnesota, for reading that part of the book directly concerned with economics (Chapter XI and a part of Chapter X); and to Professor Frederick A. Saunders, of Harvard, for a like service in technical revision of the section on science in Chapter XII. While acknowledging with hearty thanks the priceless services of these eminent scholars, it is only fair to relieve them of all responsibility for any rash statements that may have escaped their scrutiny, as well as for any conclusions from which they might dissent.
For information about manuscripts and rare books in Europe my thanks are due to my kind friends: Mr. P. S. Allen, Librarian of Merton College, Oxford, the so successful editor of Erasmus's Epistles; and Professor Carrington Lancaster, of Johns Hopkins University. To several libraries I owe much for the use of books. My friend, Professor Robert S. Fletcher, Librarian of Amherst College, has often sent me volumes from that excellent store of books. My sister, Professor Winifred Smith, of Vassar College, has added to many loving services, this: that during my four years at Poughkeepsie, I was enabled to use the Vassar library. For her good offices, as well as for the kindness of the librarian, Miss Amy Reed, my thanks. My father, the Rev. Dr. Henry Preserved Smith, professor and librarian at Union Theological Seminary, has often sent me rare books from that library; nor can I mention this, the least of his favors, without adding that I owe to him much both of the inspiration to follow and of the means to pursue a scholar's career. My thanks are also due to the libraries of Columbia and Cornell for the use of books. But the work could not easily have been done at all without the facilities offered by the Harvard Library. When I came to Cambridge to enjoy the riches of this storehouse, I found the great university not less hospitable to the stranger within her gates than she is prolific in great sons. After I was already deep in debt to the librarian, Mr. W. C. Lane, and to many of the professors, a short period in the service of Harvard, as lecturer in history, has made me feel that I am no longer a stranger, but that I can count myself, in some sort, one of her citizens and foster sons, at least a dimidiatus alumnus.
This book owes more to my wife than even she perhaps quite realizes. Not only has it been her study, since our marriage, to give me freedom for my work, but her literary advice, founded on her own experience as writer and critic, has been of the highest value, and she has carefully read the proofs.
Cambridge,
Massachusetts,
May 16, 1920.
1. The World. Economic changes in the later Middle Ages. Rise of the bourgeoisie. Nationalism. Individualism. Inventions. Printing. Exploration. Universities.
2. The Church. The papacy. The Councils of Constance and Basle. Savonarola.
3. Causes of the Reformation. Corruption of the church not a main cause. Condition of the church. Indulgences. Growth of a new type of lay piety. Clash of the new spirit with old ideals.
4. The Mystics. The German Theology. Tauler. The Imitation of Christ.
5. The Pre-reformers. Waldenses. Occam. Wyclif. Huss.
6. Nationalizing the churches. The Ecclesia Anglicana. The Gallican Church. German church. The Gravamina.
7. The Humanists. Valla. Pico della Mirandola. Lefèvre d'Étaples. Colet. Reuchlin. Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. Hutten. Erasmus.
1. The Leader. Luther's early life. Justification by faith only. The Ninety-five Theses. The Leipzig Debate. Revolutionary Pamphlets of 1520.
2. The Revolution. Condition of Germany. Maximilian I. Charles V.
The bull Exsurge Domine burned by Luther. Luther at Worms and in the
Wartburg. Turmoil of the radicals. The Revolt of the Knights.
Efforts at Reform at the Diets of Nuremberg 1522-4. The Peasants'
Revolt: economic causes, propaganda, course of the war, suppression.
3. Formation of the Protestant Party. Defection of the radicals: the Anabaptists. Defection of the intellectuals: Erasmus. The Sacramentarian Schism: Zwingli. Growth of the Lutheran party among the upper and middle classes. Luther's ecclesiastical polity. Accession of many Free Cities, of Ernestine Saxony, Hesse, Prussia. Balance of Power. The Recess of Spires 1529; the Protest.
4. Growth of Protestantism until the death of Luther. Diet of Augsburg 1530: the Confession. Accessions to the Protestant cause. Religious negotiations. Luther's last years, death and character.
5. Religious War and Religious Peace. The Schmalkaldic War. The Interim. The Peace of Augsburg 1555. Catholic reaction and Protestant schisms.
6. Note on Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary.
1. Zwingli. The Swiss Confederacy. Preparation for the Reformation. Zwingli's early life. Reformation at Zurich. Defeat of Cappel.
2. Calvin. Farel. Calvin's early life. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Reformation at Geneva. Theocracy. The Libertines. Servetus. Character and influence of Calvin.
1. Renaissance and Reformation. Condition of France. Francis I. War with Charles. The Christian Renaissance. Lutheranism. Defection of the humanists.
2. The Calvinist Party. Henry II. Expansion of France. Growth and persecution of Calvinism.
3. The Wars of Religion. Catharine de' Médicis. Massacre of Vassy. The Huguenot rebellion. Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The League. Henry IV. Edict of Nantes. Failure of Protestantism to conquer France.
1. The Lutheran Reform. The Burgundian State. Origins of the Reformation. Persecution. The Anabaptists.
2. The Calvinist Revolt. National feeling against Spain. Financial difficulties of Philip II. Egmont and William of Orange. The new bishoprics. The Compromise. The "Beggars." Alva's reign of terror. Requesens. Siege of Leyden. The Revolt of the North. Division of the Netherlands. Farnese. The Dutch Republic.
1. Henry VIII and the National Church. Character of Henry VIII. Foreign policy. Wolsey. Early Lutheranism. Tyndale's New Testament. Tracts. Anticlerical feeling. Divorce of Catharine of Aragon. The Submission of the Clergy. The Reformation Parliament 1520-30. Act in Restraint of Appeals. Act of Succession. Act of Supremacy. Cranmer. Execution of More. Thomas Cromwell. Dissolution of the monasteries. Union of England and Wales. Alliance with the Schmalkaldic League. Articles of Faith. The Pilgrimage of Grace. Catholic reaction. War. Bankruptcy.
2. The Reformation under Edward VI. Somerset Regent. Repeal of the treason and heresy laws. Rapid growth of Protestant opinion. The Book of Common Prayer. Social disorders. Conspiracy of Northumberland and Suffolk.
3. The Catholic reaction under Mary. Proclamation of Queen Jane. Accession and policy of Mary. Repeal of Reforming Acts. Revival of Treason Laws. The Protestant Martyrs.
4. The Elizabethan Settlement 1558-88. Policy of Elizabeth. Respective numbers of Catholics and Protestants. Conversion of the masses. The Thirty-nine Articles. The Church of England. Underhand war with Spain. Rebellion of the Northern Earls. Execution of Mary Stuart. The Armada. The Puritans.
5. Ireland.
Backward condition of Scotland. Relations with England. Cardinal
Beaton. John Knox. Battle of Pinkie. Knox in Scotland. The Common
Band. Iconoclasm. Treaty of Edinburgh. The Religious Revolution.
Confession of Faith. Queen Mary's crimes and deposition. Results of
the Reformation.
1. Italy. The pagan Renaissance; the Christian Renaissance. Sporadic Lutheranism.
2. The Papacy 1521-90. The Sack of Rome. Reforms.
3. The Council of Trent. First Period (1545-7). Second Period (1551-2). Third Period (1562-3). Results.
4. The Company of Jesus. New monastic orders. Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises. Rapid growth and successes of the Jesuits. Their final failure.
5. The Inquisition and the Index. The medieval Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition. Censorship of the press. The Index of Prohibited Books.
1. Spain. Unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. Charles
V. Revolts of the Communes and of the Hermandad. Constitution of
Spain. The Spanish empire. Philip II. The war with the Moriscos.
The Armada.
2. Exploration. Columbus. Conquest of Mexico and of Peru. Circumnavigation of the globe. Portuguese exploration to the East. Brazil. Decadence of Portugal. Russia. The Turks.
1. Population.
2. Wealth and Prices. Increase of wealth in modern times. Prices and wages in the Sixteenth Century. Value of money. Trend of prices.
3. Social Institutions. The monarchy, the Council of state, the Parliament. Public finance. Maintenance of Order. Sumptuary laws and "blue laws." The army. The navy.
4. Private life and manners. The nobility; the professions; the clergy. The city, the house, dress, food, drink. Sports. Manners. Morals. Position of Women. Health.
1. The Rise of the Power of Money. Rise of capitalism. Banking. Mining. Commerce. Manufacture. Agriculture.
2. The Rise of the Money Power. Ascendancy of the bourgeoisie over the nobility, clergy, and proletariat. Class wars. Regulation of Labor. Pauperism.
1. Biblical and classical scholarship. Greek and Hebrew Bibles. Translations. The classics. The vernaculars.
2. History. Humanistic history and church history.
3. Political theory. The state as power: Machiavelli. Constitutional liberty: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hotman, Mornay, Bodin, Buchanan. Radicals: the Utopia.
4. Science. Inductive method. Mathematics. Zoölogy. Anatomy. Physics. Geography. Astronomy; Copernicus. Reform of the calendar.
5. Philosophy. The Catholic and Protestant thinkers. Skeptics. Effect of the Copernican theory: Bruno.
1. Tolerance and Intolerance. Effect of the Renaissance and Reformation.
2. Witchcraft. Causes of the mania. Protests against it.
3. Education. Schools. Effect of the Reformation. Universities.
4. Art. The ideals expressed. Painting. Architecture. Music. Effect of the Reformation and Counter-reformation.
5. Reading. Number of books. Typical themes. Greatness of the Sixteenth Century.
1. The Religious and Political Interpretations. Burnet, Bossuet, Sleidan, Sarpi.
2. The Rationalist Critique. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Goethe, Lessing.
3. The Liberal-Romantic Appreciation. Heine, Michelet, Froude, Hegel, Ranke, Buckle.
4. The Economic and Evolutionary Interpretations. Marx, Lamprecht, Berger, Weber, Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Santayana, Harnack, Beard, Janssen, Pastor, Acton.
5. Concluding Estimate.
{3}
Though in some sense every age is one of transition and every generation sees the world remodelled, there sometimes comes a change so startling and profound that it seems like the beginning of a new season in the world's great year. The snows of winter melt for weeks, the cold winds blow and the cool rains fall, and we see no change until, almost within a few days, the leaves and blossoms put forth their verdure, and the spring has come.
Such a change in man's environment and habits as the world has rarely seen, took place in the generation that reached early manhood in the year 1500. [Sidenote: 1483-1546] In the span of a single life—for convenience let us take that of Luther for our measure—men discovered, not in metaphor but in sober fact, a new heaven and a new earth. In those days masses of men began to read many books, multiplied by the new art of printing. In those days immortal artists shot the world through with a matchless radiance of color and of meaning. In those days Vasco da Gama and Columbus and Magellan opened the watery ways to new lands beyond the seven seas. In those days Copernicus established the momentous truth that the earth was but a tiny planet spinning around a vastly greater sun. In those days was in large part accomplished the economic shift from medieval gild to modern production by capital and wages. In those days wealth was piled up in the coffers of the merchants, and a new power was {4} given to the life of the individual, of the nation, and of the third estate. In those days the monarchy of the Roman church was broken, and large portions of her dominions seceded to form new organizations, governed by other powers and animated by a different spirit.
[Sidenote: Antecedents of the Reformation]
Other generations have seen one revolution take place at a time, the sixteenth century saw three, the Rise of Capitalism, the end of the Renaissance, and the beginning of the Reformation. All three, interacting, modifying each other, conflicting as they sometimes did, were equally the consequences, in different fields, of antecedent changes in man's circumstances. All life is an adaptation to environment; and thus from every alteration in the conditions in which man lives, usually made by his discovery of new resources or of hitherto unknown natural laws, a change in his habits of life must flow. Every revolution is but an adjustment to a fresh situation, intellectual or material, or both.
[Sidenote: Economic]
Certainly, economic and psychological factors were alike operative in producing the three revolutions. The most general economic force was the change from "natural economy" to "money economy," i.e. from a society in which payments were made chiefly by exchange of goods, and by services, to one in which money was both the agent of exchange and standard of value. In the Middle Ages production had been largely co-operative; the land belonged to the village and was apportioned out to each husbandman to till, or to all in common for pasture. Manufacture and commerce were organized by the gild—a society of equals, with the same course of labor and the same reward for each, and with no distinction save that founded on seniority—apprentice, workman, master-workman. But {5} in the later Middle Ages, and more rapidly at their close, this system broke down under the necessity for larger capital in production and the possibility of supplying it by the increase of wealth and of banking technique that made possible investment, rapid turn-over of capital, and corporate partnership. The increase of wealth and the changed mode of its production has been in large part the cause of three developments which in their turn became causes of revolution: the rise of the bourgeoisie, of nationalism, and of individualism.
[Sidenote: The bourgeoisie]
Just as the nobles were wearing away in civil strife and were seeing their castles shot to pieces by cannon, just as the clergy were wasting in supine indolence and were riddled by the mockery of humanists, there arose a new class, eager and able to take the helm of civilization, the moneyed men of city and of trade. Nouveaux riches as they were, they had an appetite for pleasure and for ostentation unsurpassed by any, a love for the world and an impatience of the meek and lowly church, with her ideal of poverty and of chastity. In their luxurious and leisured homes they sheltered the arts that made life richer and the philosophy, or religion, that gave them a good conscience in the work they loved. Both Renaissance and Reformation were dwellers in the cities and in the marts of commerce.
[Sidenote: National states]
It was partly the rise of the third estate, but partly also cultural factors, such as the perfecting of the modern tongues, that made the national state one of the characteristic products of modern times. Commerce needs order and strong government; the men who paid the piper called the tune; police and professional soldiery made the state, once so racked by feudal wars, peaceful at home and dreaded abroad. If the consequence of this was an increase in royal power, the kings were among those who had greatness thrust upon them, rather than achieving it for themselves. {6} They were but the symbols of the new, proudly conscious nation, and the police commissioners of the large bankers and traders.
[Sidenote: Individualism]
The reaction of nascent capitalism on the individual was no less marked than on state and society, though it was not the only cause of the new sense of personal worth. Just as the problems of science and of art became most alluring, the man with sufficient leisure and resource to solve them was developed by economic forces. In the Middle Ages men had been less enterprising and less self-conscious. Their thought was not of themselves as individuals so much as of their membership in groups. The peoples were divided into well-marked estates, or classes; industry was co-operative; even the great art of the cathedrals was rather gild-craft than the expression of a single genius; even learning was the joint property of universities, not the private accumulation of the lone scholar. But with every expansion of the ego either through the acquisition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great exploits, came a rising self-consciousness and self-confidence, and this was the essence of the individualism so often noted as one of the contrasts between modern and medieval times. The child, the savage, and to a large extent the undisciplined mind in all periods of life and of history, is conscious only of object; the trained and leisured intellect discovers, literally by "reflection," the subjective. He is then no longer content to be anything less than himself, or to be lost in anything greater.
Just as men were beginning again to glory in their own powers came a series of discoveries that totally transformed the world they lived in. So vast a change is made in human thought and habit by some apparently trivial technical inventions that it sometimes {7} seems as if the race were like a child that had boarded a locomotive and half accidentally started it, but could neither guide nor stop it. Civilization was born with the great inventions of fire, tools, the domestication of [Sidenote: Inventions] animals, writing, and navigation, all of them, together with important astronomical discoveries, made prior to the beginnings of recorded history. On this capital mankind traded for some millenniums, for neither classic times nor the Dark Ages added much to the practical sciences. But, beginning with the thirteenth century, discovery followed discovery, each more important in its consequences than its last. One of the first steps was perhaps the recovery of lost ground by the restoration of the classics. Gothic art and the vernacular literatures testify to the intellectual activity of the time, but they did not create the new elements of life that were brought into being by the inventors.
What a difference in private life was made by the introduction of chimneys and glass windows, for glass, though known to antiquity, was not commonly applied to the openings that, as the etymology of the English word implies, let in the wind! By the fifteenth century the power of lenses to magnify and refract had been utilized, as mirrors, then as spectacles, to be followed two centuries later by telescopes and microscopes. Useful chemicals were now first applied to various manufacturing processes, such as the tinning of iron. The compass, with its weird power of pointing north, guided the mariner on uncharted seas. The obscure inventor of gunpowder revolutionized the art of war more than all the famous conquerors had done, and the polity of states more than any of the renowned legislators of antiquity. The equally obscure inventor of mechanical clocks—a great improvement on the {8} older sand-glasses, water-glasses, and candles—made possible a new precision and regularity of daily life, an untold economy of time and effort.
[Sidenote: Printing]
But all other inventions yield to that of printing, the glory of John Gutenberg of Mayence, one of those poor and in their own times obscure geniuses who carry out to fulfilment a great idea at much sacrifice to themselves. The demand for books had been on the increase for a long time, and every effort was made to reproduce them as rapidly and cheaply as possible by the hand of expert copyists, but the applications of this method produced slight result. The introduction of paper, in place of the older vellum or parchment, furnished one of the indispensable pre-requisites to the multiplication of cheap volumes. In the early fifteenth century, the art of the wood-cutter and engraver had advanced sufficiently to allow some books to be printed in this manner, i.e. from carved blocks. This was usually, or at first, done only with books in which a small amount of text went with a large amount of illustration. There are extant, for example, six editions of the Biblia Pauperum, stamped by this method. It was afterwards applied, chiefly in Holland, to a few other books for which there was a large demand, the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example, and a guide-book to Rome known as the Mirabilia Urbis Romae. But at best this method was extremely unsatisfactory; the blocks soon wore out, the text was blurred and difficult to read, the initial expense was large.
The essential feature of Gutenberg's invention was therefore not, as the name implies, printing, or impression, but typography, or the use of type. The printer first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was called the punch; with it he stamped a mould known as the {9} matrix in which he was able to found a large number of exactly identical types of metal, usually of lead.
These, set side by side in a case, for the first time made it possible satisfactorily to print at reasonable cost a large number of copies of the same text, and, when that was done, the types could be taken apart and used for another work.
The earliest surviving specimen of printing—not counting a few undated letters of indulgence—is a fragment on the last judgment completed at Mayence before 1447. In 1450 Gutenberg made a partnership with the rich goldsmith John Fust, and from their press issued, within the next five years, the famous Bible with 42 lines to a page, and a Donatus (Latin grammar) of 32 lines. The printer of the Bible with 36 lines to a page, that is the next oldest surviving monument, was apparently a helper of Gutenberg, who set up an independent press in 1454. Legible, clean-cut, comparatively cheap, these books demonstrated once for all the success of the new art, even though, for illuminated initials, they were still dependent on the hand of the scribe.
[Sidenote: Books and Reading]
In those days before patents the new invention spread with wonderful rapidity, reaching Italy in 1465, Paris in 1470, London in 1480, Stockholm in 1482, Constantinople in 1487, Lisbon in 1490, and Madrid in 1499. Only a few backward countries of Europe remained without a press. By the year 1500 the names of more than one thousand printers are known, and the titles of about 30,000 printed works. Assuming that the editions were small, averaging 300 copies, there would have been in Europe by 1500 about 9,000,000 books, as against the few score thousand manuscripts that lately had held all the precious lore of time. In a few years the price of books sank to one-eighth of what it had been before. "The gentle reader" had started on his career.
{10} The importance of printing cannot be over-estimated. There are few events like it in the history of the world. The whole gigantic swing of modern democracy and of the scientific spirit was released by it. The veil of the temple of religion and of knowledge was rent in twain, and the arcana of the priest and clerk exposed to the gaze of the people. The reading public became the supreme court before whom, from this time, all cases must be argued. The conflict of opinions and parties, of privilege and freedom, of science and obscurantism, was transferred from the secret chamber of a small, privileged, professional, and sacerdotal coterie to the arena of the reading public.
[Sidenote: Exploration]
It is amazing, but true, that within fifty years after this exploit, mankind should have achieved another like unto it in a widely different sphere. The horror of the sea was on the ancient world; a heart of oak and triple bronze was needed to venture on the ocean, and its annihilation was one of the blessings of the new earth promised by the Apocalypse. All through the centuries Europe remained sea-locked, until the bold Portuguese mariners venturing ever further and further south along the coast of Africa, finally doubled the Cape of Good Hope—a feat first performed by Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, though it was not until 1498 that Vasco da Gama reached India by this method.
Still unconquered lay the stormy and terrible Atlantic,
"Where, beyond the extreme sea-wall,
and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder,
and deep death waits."
But the ark of Europe found her dove—as the name Columbus signifies—to fly over the wild, western {11} waves, and bring her news of strange countries. The effect of these discoveries, enormously and increasingly important from the material standpoint, was first felt in the widening of the imagination. Camoens wrote the epic of Da Gama, More placed his Utopia in America, and Montaigne speculated on the curious customs of the redskins. Ariosto wrote of the wonders of the new world in his poem, and Luther occasionally alluded to them in his sermons.
[Sidenote: Universities]
If printing opened the broad road to popular education, other and more formal means to the same end were not neglected. One of the great innovations of the Middle Ages was the university. These permanent corporations, dedicated to the advancement of learning and the instruction of youth, first arose, early in the twelfth century, at Salerno, at Bologna and at Paris. As off-shoots of these, or in imitation of them, many similar institutions sprang up in every land of western Europe. The last half of the fifteenth century was especially rich in such foundations. In Germany, from 1450 to 1517, no less than nine new academies were started: Greifswald 1456, Freiburg in the Breisgau 1460, Basle 1460, Ingolstadt 1472, Trèves 1473, Mayence 1477, Tübingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502, and Frankfort on the Oder 1506. Though generally founded by papal charter, and maintaining a strong ecclesiastical flavor, these institutions were under the direction of the civil government.
In France three new universities opened their doors during the same period: Valence 1459, Nantes 1460, Bourges 1464. These were all placed under the general supervision of the local bishops. The great university of Paris was gradually changing its character. From the most cosmopolitan and international of bodies it was fast becoming strongly nationalist, and was the chief center of an Erastian Gallicanism. Its {12} tremendous weight cast against the Reformation was doubtless a chief reason for the failure of that movement in France.
Spain instituted seven new universities at this time: Barcelona 1450, Saragossa 1474, Palma 1483, Sigüenza 1489, Alcalá 1499, Valencia 1500, and Seville 1504. Italy and England remained content with the academies they already had, but many of the smaller countries now started native universities. Thus Pressburg was founded in Hungary in 1465, Upsala in Sweden in 1477, Copenhagen in 1478, Glasgow in 1450, and Aberdeen in 1494. The number of students in each foundation fluctuated, but the total was steadily on the increase.
Naturally, the expansion of the higher education brought with it an increase in the number and excellence of the schools. Particularly notable is the work of the Brethren of the Common Life, who devoted themselves almost exclusively to teaching boys. Some of their schools, as Deventer, attained a reputation like that of Eton or Rugby today.
The spread of education was not only notable in itself, but had a more direct result in furnishing a shelter to new movements until they were strong enough to do without such support. It is significant that the Reformations of Wyclif, Huss, and Luther, all started in universities.
[Sidenote: Growth of intelligence]
As the tide rolls in, the waves impress one more than the flood beneath them. Behind, and far transcending, the particular causes of this and that development lies the operation of great biological laws, selecting a type for survival, transforming the mind and body of men slowly but surely. Whether due to the natural selection of circumstance, or to the inward urge of vital force, there seems to be no doubt that the average intellect, not of leading thinkers or of select groups, {13} but of the European races as a whole, has been steadily growing greater at every period during which it can be measured. Moreover, the monastic vow of chastity tended to sterilize and thus to eliminate the religiously-minded sort. Operating over a long period, and on both sexes, this cause of the growing secularization of the world, though it must not be exaggerated, cannot be overlooked.
Over against "the world," "the church." . . . As the Reformation was primarily a religious movement, some account of the church in the later Middle Ages must be given. How Christianity was immaculately conceived in the heart of the Galilean carpenter and born with words of beauty and power such as no other man ever spoke; how it inherited from him its background of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture; how it was enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who assimilated it to the current mysteries with their myth of a dying and rising god and of salvation by sacramental rite; how it decked itself in the white robes of Greek philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony and custom snatched from the flamen's vestry; how it created a pantheon of saints to take the place of the old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and then the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church on the immovable rock of the Eternal City, asserting like her a dominion without bounds of space or time; how it conquered and tamed the barbarians;—all this lies outside the scope of the present work to describe. But of its later fortunes some brief account must be given.
[Sidenote: Innocent III 1198-1216]
By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged triumphant from their long strife with the German emperors, successfully asserted their claim to the {14} suzerainty of all Western Europe. Innocent III took realms in fief and dictated to kings. The pope, asserting that the spiritual power was as much superior to the civil as the sun was brighter than the moon, acted as the vicegerent of God on earth. But this supremacy did not last long unquestioned. Just a century after Innocent III, Boniface VIII [Sidenote: Boniface VIII 1294-1303] was worsted in a quarrel with Philip IV of France, and his successor, Clement V, a Frenchman, by transferring the papal capital to Avignon, virtually made the supreme pontiffs subordinate to the French government and thus weakened their influence in the rest of Europe. This "Babylonian Captivity" [Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity 1309-76] was followed by a greater misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, [Sidenote: The Great Schism 1378-1417] for the effort to transfer the papacy back to Rome led to the election of two popes, who, with their successors, respectively ruled and mutually anathematized each other from the two rival cities. The difficulty of deciding which was the true successor of Peter was so great that not only were the kingdoms of Europe divided in their allegiance, but doctors of the church and canonized saints could be found among the supporters of either line. There can be no doubt that respect for the pontificate greatly suffered by the schism, which was in some respects a direct preparation for the greater division brought about by the Protestant secession.
[Sidenote: Councils—Pisa, 1409, Constance, 1414-18]
The attempt to end the schism at the Council of Pisa resulted only in the election of a third pope. The situation was finally dealt with by the Council of Constance which deposed two of the popes and secured the voluntary abdication of the third. The synod further strengthened the church by executing the heretics Huss and Jerome of Prague, and by passing decrees intended to put the government of the church in the hands of representative assemblies. It asserted that it {15} had power directly from Christ, that it was supreme in matters of faith, and in matters of discipline so far as they affected the schism, and that the pope could not dissolve it without its own consent. By the decree Frequens it provided for the regular summoning of councils at short intervals. Beyond this, other efforts to reform the morals of the clergy proved abortive, for after long discussion nothing of importance was done.
For the next century the policy of the popes was determined by the wish to assert their superiority over the councils. The Synod of Basle [Sidenote: Basle 1431-43] reiterated all the claims of Constance, and passed a number of laws intended to diminish the papal authority and to deprive the pontiff of much of his ill-gotten revenues—annates, fees for investiture, and some other taxes. It was successful for a time because protected by the governments of France and Germany, for, though dissolved by Pope Eugene IV in 1433, it refused to listen to his command and finally extorted from him a bull ratifying the conciliar claims to supremacy.
In the end, however, the popes triumphed. The bull Execrabilis [Sidenote: 1458] denounced as a damnable abuse the appeal to a future council, and the Pastor Aeternus [Sidenote: 1516] reasserted in sweeping terms the supremacy of the pope, repealing all decrees of Constance and Basle to the contrary, as well as other papal bulls.
[Sidenote: The secularization of the papacy]
At Rome the popes came to occupy the position of princes of one of the Italian states, and were elected, like the doges of Venice, by a small oligarchy. Within seventy years the families of Borgia, Piccolomini, Rovere, and Medici were each represented by more than one pontiff, and a majority of the others were nearly related by blood or marriage to one of these great stocks. The cardinals were appointed from the pontiff's sons or nephews, and the numerous other {16} offices in their patronage, save as they were sold, were distributed to personal or political friends.
Like other Italian princes the popes became, in the fifteenth century, distinguished patrons of arts and letters. The golden age of the humanists at Rome began under Nicholas V [Sidenote: Nicholas V 1447-55] who employed a number of them to make translations from Greek. It is characteristic of the complete secularization of the States of the Church that a number of the literati pensioned by him were skeptics and scoffers. Valla, who mocked the papacy, ridiculed the monastic orders, and attacked the Bible and Christian ethics, was given a prebend; Savonarola, the most earnest Christian of his age, was put to death.
[Sidenote: 1453]
The fall of Constantinople gave a certain European character to the policy of the pontiffs after that date, for the menace of the Turk seemed so imminent that the heads of Christendom did all that was possible to unite the nations in a crusade. This was the keynote of the statesmanship of Calixtus III [Sidenote: Calixtus III 1455-8] and of his successor, Pius II. [Sidenote: Pius II 1458-64] Before his elevation to the see of Peter this talented writer, known to literature as Aeneas Sylvius, had, at the Council of Basle, published a strong argument against the extreme papal claims, which he afterwards, as pope, retracted. His zeal against the Turk and against his old friends the humanists lent a moral tone to his pontificate, but his feeble attempts to reform abuses were futile.
[Sidenote: Paul II 1464-71]
The colorless reign of Paul II was followed by that of Sixtus IV, [Sidenote: Sixtus IV 1471-84] a man whose chief passion was the aggrandizement of his family. He carried nepotism to an extreme and by a policy of judicial murder very nearly exterminated his rivals, the Colonnas.
[Sidenote: Innocent VIII 1484-92]
The enormous bribes paid by Innocent VIII for his election were recouped by his sale of offices and spiritual graces, and by taking a tribute from the Sultan, {17} in return for which he refused to proclaim a crusade. The most important act of his pontificate was the publication of the bull against witchcraft.
[Sidenote: Alexander VI 1492-1503]
The name of Alexander VI has attained an evil eminence of infamy on account of his own crimes and vices and those of his children, Caesar Borgia and Lucretia. One proof that the public conscience of Italy, instead of being stupified by the orgy of wickedness at Rome was rather becoming aroused by it, is found in the appearance, just at this time, of a number of preachers of repentance. These men, usually friars, started "revivals" marked by the customary phenomena of sudden conversion, hysteria, and extreme austerity. The greatest of them all was the Dominican Jerome Savonarola [Sidenote: Savonarola] who, though of mediocre intellectual gifts, by the passionate fervor of his convictions, attained the position of a prophet at Florence. He began preaching here in 1482, and so stirred his audiences that many wept and some were petrified with horror. His credit was greatly raised by his prediction of the invasion of Charles VIII of France in 1494. He succeeded in driving out the Medici and in introducing a new constitution of a democratic nature, which he believed was directly sanctioned by God. He attacked the morals of the clergy and of the people and, besides renovating his own order, suppressed not only public immorality but all forms of frivolity. The people burned their cards, false hair, indecent pictures, and the like; many women left their husbands and entered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and blasphemers had their tongues pierced. A police was instituted with power of searching houses.
It was only the pope's fear of Charles VIII that prevented his dealing with this dangerous reformer, who now began to attack the vices of the curia. In 1495, however, the friar was summoned to Rome, and {18} refused to go; he was then forbidden to preach, and disobeyed. In Lent 1496 he proclaimed the duty of resisting the pope when in error. In November a new brief proposed changes in the constitution of his order which would bring him more directly under the power of Rome. Savonarola replied that he did not fear the excommunication of the sinful church, which, when launched against him May 12, 1497, only made him more defiant. Claiming to be commissioned directly from God, he appealed to the powers to summon a general council against the pope.
At this juncture one of his opponents, a Franciscan, Francis da Puglia, proposed to him the ordeal by fire, stating that though he expected to be burnt he was willing to take the risk for the sake of the faith. The challenge refused by Savonarola was taken up by his friend Fra Domenico da Peseta, and although forbidden by Alexander, the ordeal was sanctioned by the Signory and a day set. A dispute as to whether Domenico should be allowed to take the host or the crucifix into the flames prevented the experiment from taking place, and the mob, furious at the loss of its promised spectacle, refused further support to the discredited leader. For some years, members of his own order, who resented the severity of his reform, had cherished a grievance against him, and now they had their chance. Seized by the Signory, he was tortured and forced to confess that he was not a prophet, and on May 22, 1498, was condemned, with two companions, to be hung. After the speedy execution of the sentence, which the sufferers met calmly, their bodies were burnt. All effects of Savonarola's career, political, moral, and religious, shortly disappeared.
Alexander was followed by a Rovere who took the name of Julius II. [Sidenote: Julius II 1503-13] Notwithstanding his advanced age this pontiff proved one of the most vigorous and able {19} statesman of the time and devoted himself to the aggrandizement, by war and diplomacy, of the Papal States. He did not scruple to use his spiritual thunders against his political enemies, as when he excommunicated the Venetians. [Sidenote: 1509] He found himself at odds with both the Emperor Maximilian and Louis XII of France, who summoned a schismatic council at Pisa. [Sidenote: 1511] Supported by some of the cardinals this body revived the legislation of Constance and Basle, but fell into disrepute when, by a master stroke of policy, Julius convoked a council at Rome. [Sidenote: 1512-16] This synod, the Fifth Lateran, lasted for four years, and endeavored to deal with a crusade and with reform. All its efforts at reform proved abortive because they were either choked, while in course of discussion, by the Curia, or, when passed, were rendered ineffective by the dispensing power.
[Sidenote: Leo X 1513-21]
While the synod was still sitting Julius died and a new pope was chosen. This was the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici Leo X. Having taken the tonsure at the age of seven, and received the red hat six years later, he donned the tiara at the early age of thirty-eight. His words, as reported by the Venetian ambassador at Rome, "Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us," exactly express his program. To make life one long carnival, to hunt game and to witness comedies and the antics of buffoons, to hear marvellous tales of the new world and voluptuous verses of the humanists and of the great Ariosto, to enjoy music and to consume the most delicate viands and the most delicious wines—this was what he lived for. Free and generous with money, he prodigally wasted the revenues of three pontificates. Spending no less than 6000 ducats a month on cards and gratuities, he was soon forced to borrow to the limit of his credit. Little recked he that Germany was being {20} reft from the church by a poor friar. His irresolute policy was incapable of pursuing any public end consistently, save that he employed the best Latinists of the time to give elegance to his state papers. His method of governing was the purely personal one, to pay his friends and flatterers at the expense of the common good. One of his most characteristic letters expresses his intention of rewarding with high office a certain gentleman who had given him a dinner of lampreys.
[Sidenote: Corruption of the church not a main cause of the Reformation]
In the eyes of the early Protestants the Reformation was a return to primitive Christianity and its principal cause was the corruption of the church. That there was great depravity in the church as elsewhere cannot be doubted, but there are several reasons for thinking that it could not have been an important cause for the loss of so many of her sons. In the first place there is no good ground for believing that the moral condition of the priesthood was worse in 1500 than it had been for a long time; indeed, there is good evidence to the contrary, that things were tending to improve, if not at Rome yet in many parts of Christendom. If objectionable practices of the priests had been a sufficient cause for the secession of whole nations, the Reformation would have come long before it actually did. Again, there is good reason to doubt that the mere abuse of an institution has ever led to its complete overthrow; as long as the institution is regarded as necessary, it is rather mended than ended. Thirdly, many of the acts that seem corrupt to us, gave little offence to contemporaries, for they were universal. If the church sold offices and justice, so did the civil governments. If the clergy lived impure lives, so did the laity. Probably the standard of the {21} church (save in special circumstances) was no worse than that of civil life, and in some respects it was rather more decent. Finally, there is some reason to suspect of exaggeration the charges preferred by the innovators. Like all reformers they made the most of their enemy's faults. Invective like theirs is common to every generation and to all spheres of life. It is true that the denunciation of the priesthood comes not only from Protestants and satirists, but from popes and councils and canonized saints, and that it bulks large in medieval literature. Nevertheless, it is both a priori probable and to some extent historically verifiable that the evil was more noisy, not more potent, than the good. But though the corruptions of the church were not a main cause of the Protestant secession, they furnished good excuses for attack; the Reformers were scandalized by the divergence of the practice and the pretensions of the official representatives of Christianity, and their attack was envenomed and the break made easier thereby. It is therefore necessary to say a few words about those abuses at which public opinion then took most offence.
[Sidenote: Abuses: Financial]
Many of these were connected with money. The common man's conscience was wounded by the smart in his purse. The wealth of the church was enormous, though exaggerated by those contemporaries who estimated it at one-third of the total real estate of Western Europe. In addition to revenues from her own land the church collected tithes and taxes, including "Peter's pence" in England, Scandinavia and Poland. The clergy paid dues to the curia, among them the servitia charged on the bishops and the annates levied on the income of the first year for each appointee to high ecclesiastical office, and the price for the archbishop's pall. The priests recouped themselves by charging high fees for their ministrations. At a time {22} when the Christian ideal was one of "apostolic poverty" the riches of the clergy were often felt as a scandal to the pious.
[Sidenote: Simony]
Though the normal method of appointment to civil office was sale, it was felt as a special abuse in the church and was branded by the name of simony. Leo X made no less than 500,000 ducats[1] annually from the sale of more than 2000 offices, most of which, being sinecures, eventually came to be regarded as annuities, with a salary amounting to about 10 per cent. of the purchase price.
Justice was also venal, in the church no less than in the state. Pardon was obtainable for all crimes for, as a papal vice-chamberlain phrased it, "The Lord wishes not the death of a sinner but that he should pay and live." Dispensations from the laws against marriage within the prohibited degrees were sold. Thus an ordinary man had to pay 16 grossi[2] for dispensation to marry a woman who stood in "spiritual relationship" [3] to him; a noble had to pay 20 grossi for the same privilege, and a prince or duke 30 grossi. First cousins might marry for the payment of 27 grossi; an uncle and niece for from three to four ducats, though this was later raised to as much as sixty ducats, at least for nobles. Marriage within the first degree of affinity (a deceased wife's mother or daughter by another husband) was at one time sold for about ten ducats; marriage within the second degree[4] was {23} permitted for from 300 to 600 grossi. Hardly necessary to add, as was done: "Note well, that dispensations or graces of this sort are not given to poor people." [5] Dispensations from vows and from the requirements of ecclesiastical law, as for example those relating to fasting, were also to be obtained at a price.
[Sidenote: Indulgences]
One of the richest sources of ecclesiastical revenue was the sale of indulgences, or the remission by the pope of the temporal penalties of sin, both penance in this life and the pains of purgatory. The practice of giving these pardons first arose as a means of assuring heaven to those warriors who fell fighting the infidel. In 1300 Boniface VIII granted a plenary indulgence to all who made the pilgrimage to the jubilee at Rome, and the golden harvest reaped on this occasion induced his successors to take the same means of imparting spiritual graces to the faithful at frequent intervals. In the fourteenth century the pardons were extended to all who contributed a sum of money to a pious purpose, whether they came to Rome or not, and, as the agents who were sent out to distribute these pardons were also given power to confess and absolve, the papal letters were naturally regarded as no less than tickets of admission to heaven. In the thirteenth century the theologians had discovered that there was at the disposal of the church and her head an abundant "treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints," which might be applied vicariously to anyone by the pope. In the fifteenth century the claimed power to free living men from purgatory was extended to the {24} dead, and this soon became one of the most profitable branches of the "holy trade."
The means of obtaining indulgences varied. Sometimes they were granted to those who made a pilgrimage or who would read a pious book. Sometimes they were used to raise money for some public work, a hospital or a bridge. But more and more they became an ordinary means for raising revenue for the curia. How thoroughly commercialized the business of selling grace and remission of the penalties of sin had become is shown by the fact that the agents of the pope were often bankers who organized the sales on purely business lines in return for a percentage of the net receipts plus the indirect profits accruing to those who handle large sums. Of the net receipts the financiers usually got about ten per cent.; an equal amount was given to the emperor or other civil ruler for permitting the pardoners to enter his territory, commissions were also paid to the local bishop and clergy, and of course the pedlars of the pardons received a proportion of the profits in order to stimulate their zeal. On the average from thirty to forty-five per cent. of the gross receipts were turned into the Roman treasury.
It is natural that public opinion should have come to regard indulgences with aversion. Their bad moral effect was too obvious to be disregarded, the compounding with sin for a payment destined to satisfy the greed of unscrupulous prelates. Their economic effects were also noticed, the draining of the country of money with which further to enrich a corrupt Italian city. Many rulers forbade their sale in their territories, because, as Duke George of Saxony, a good Catholic, expressed it, before Luther was heard of, "they cheated the simple layman of his soul." Hutten mocked at Pope Julius II for selling to others the heaven he could not win himself. Pius II [Sidenote 1458-64] was obliged {25} to confess: "If we send ambassadors to ask aid of the princes, they are mocked; if we impose a tithe on the clergy, appeal is made to a future council; if we publish an indulgence and invite contributions in return for spiritual favors, we are charged with greed. People think all is done merely for the sake of extorting money. No one trusts us. We have no more credit than a bankrupt merchant."
[Sidenote: Immorality of clergy]
Much is said in the literature of the latter Middle Ages about the immorality of the clergy. This class has always been severely judged because of its high pretensions. Moreover the vow of celibacy was too hard to keep for most men and for some women; that many priests, monks and nuns broke it cannot be doubted. And yet there was a sprinkling of saintly parsons like him of whom Chancer [Transcriber's note: Chaucer?] said
"Who Christes lore and his apostles twelve
He taught, but first he folwed it himselve,"
and there were many others who kept up at least the appearance of decency. But here, as always, the bad attracted more attention than the good.
The most reliable data on the subject are found in the records of church visitations, both those undertaken by the Reformers and those occasionally attempted by the Catholic prelates of the earlier period. Everywhere it was proved that a large proportion of the clergy were both wofully ignorant and morally unworthy. Besides the priests who had concubines, there were many given to drink and some who kept taverns, gaming rooms and worse places. Plunged in gross ignorance and superstition, those blind leaders of the blind, who won great reputations as exorcists or as wizards, were unable to understand the Latin service, and sometimes to repeat even the Lord's prayer or creed in any language.
{26}
[Sidenote: Piety]
The Reformation, like most other revolutions, came not at the lowest ebb of abuse, but at a time when the tide had already begun to run, and to run strongly, in the direction of improvement. One can hardly find a sweeter, more spiritual religion anywhere than that set forth in Erasmus's Enchiridion, or in More's Utopia, or than that lived by Vitrier and Colet. Many men, who had not attained to this conception of the true beauty of the gospel, were yet thoroughly disgusted with things as they were and quite ready to substitute a new and purer conception and practice for the old, mechanical one.
Evidence for this is the popularity of the Bible and other devotional books. Before 1500 there were nearly a hundred editions of the Latin Vulgate, and a number of translations into German and French. There were also nearly a hundred editions, in Latin and various vernaculars, of The Imitation of Christ. There was so flourishing a crop of devotional handbooks that no others could compete with them in popularity. For those who could not read there were the Biblia Pauperum, picture-books with a minimum of text, and there were sermons by popular preachers. If some of these tracts and homilies were crude and superstitious, others were filled with a spirit of love and honesty. Whereas the passion for pilgrimages and relics seemed to increase, there were men of clear vision to denounce the attendant evils. A new feature was the foundation of lay brotherhoods, like that of the Common Life, with the purpose of cultivating a good character in the world, and of rendering social service. The number of these brotherhoods was great and their popularity general.
[Sidenote: Clash of new spirit with old institutions]
Had the forces already at work within the church been allowed to operate, probably much of the moral reform desired by the best Catholics would have been {27} accomplished quietly without the violent rending of Christian unity that actually took place. But the fact is, that such reforms never would or could have satisfied the spirit of the age. Men were not only shocked by the abuses in the church, but they had outgrown some of her ideals. Not all of her teaching, nor most of it, had become repugnant to them, for it has often been pointed out that the Reformers kept more of the doctrines of Catholicism than they threw away, but in certain respects they repudiated, not the abuse but the very principle on which the church acted. In four respects, particularly the ideals of the new age were incompatible with those of the Roman communion.
[Sidenote: Sacramental theory of the church]
The first of these was the sacramental theory of salvation and its corollary, the sacerdotal power. According to Catholic doctrine grace is imparted to the believer by means of certain rites: baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony. Baptism is the necessary prerequisite to the enjoyment of the others, for without it the unwashed soul, whether heathen or child of Christian parents, would go to eternal fire; but the "most excellent of the sacraments" is the eucharist, in which Christ is mysteriously sacrificed by the priest to the Father and his body and blood eaten and drunk by the worshippers. Without these rites there was no salvation, and they acted automatically (ex opere operato) on the soul of the faithful who put no active hindrance in their way. Save baptism, they could be administered only by priests, a special caste with "an indelible character" marking them off from the laity. Needless to remark the immense power that this doctrine gave the clergy in a believing age. They were made the arbiters of each man's eternal destiny, and their moral character had no more to do with their binding and loosing sentence than does the moral {28} character of a secular officer affect his official acts. Add to this that the priests were unbound by ties of family, that by confession they entered into everyone's private life, that they were not amenable to civil justice—and their position as a privileged order was secure. The growing self-assurance and enlightenment of a nascent individualism found this distinction intolerable.
[Sidenote: Other-worldliness]
Another element of medieval Catholicism to clash with the developing powers of the new age was its pessimistic and ascetic other-worldliness. The ideal of the church was monastic; all the pleasures of this world, all its pomps and learning and art were but snares to seduce men from salvation. Reason was called a barren tree but faith was held to blossom like the rose. Wealth was shunned as dangerous, marriage deprecated as a necessary evil. Fasting, scourging, celibacy, solitude, were cultivated as the surest roads to heaven. If a good layman might barely shoulder his way through the strait and narrow gate, the highest graces and heavenly rewards were vouchsafed to the faithful monk. All this grated harshly on the minds of the generations that began to find life glorious and happy, not evil but good.
[Sidenote: Worship of saints]
Third, the worship of the saints, which had once been a stepping-stone to higher things, was now widely regarded as a stumbling-block. Though far from a scientific conception of natural law, many men had become sufficiently monistic in their philosophy to see in the current hagiolatry a sort of polytheism. Erasmus freely drew the parallel between the saints and the heathen deities, and he and others scourged the grossly materialistic form which this worship often took. If we may believe him, fugitive nuns prayed for help in hiding their sin; merchants for a rich haul; gamblers for luck; and prostitutes for generous {29} patrons. Margaret of Navarre tells as an actual fact of a man who prayed for help in seducing his neighbor's wife, and similar instances of perverted piety are not wanting. The passion for the relics of the saints led to an enormous traffic in spurious articles. There appeared to be enough of the wood of the true cross, said Erasmus, to make a ship; there were exhibited five shin-bones of the ass on which Christ rode, whole bottles of the Virgin's milk, and several complete bits of skin saved from the circumcision of Jesus.
[Sidenote: Temporal power of the church]
Finally, patriots were no longer inclined to tolerate the claims of the popes to temporal power. The church had become, in fact, an international state, with its monarch, its representative legislative assemblies, its laws and its code. It was not a voluntary society, for if citizens were not born into it they were baptized into it before they could exercise any choice. It kept prisons and passed sentence (virtually if not nominally) of death; it treated with other governments as one power with another; it took principalities and kingdoms in fief. It was supported by involuntary contributions.[6]
The expanding world had burst the bands of the old church. It needed a new spiritual frame, and this frame was largely supplied by the Reformation. Prior to that revolution there had been several distinct efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limitations imposed by the Catholic faith; this was done by the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by the patriots and by the humanists.
[1] A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine shillings, at a time when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has.
[2] The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which varied considerably in value. It may here be taken as intrinsically worth about 8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many times the purchasing power that it now has.
[3] A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were sponsors to the same child at baptism.
[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.
[5] "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non conceduntur pauperibus." Taxa cancellariae apostolicae, in E. Friedberg: Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts, 1903, pp. 389 ff.
[6] Maitland: Canon Law in the Church of England, p. 100.
One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy of salvation offered by the church was made by a school of mystics in the fourteenth and fifteenth {30} century. In this, however, there was protest neither against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldliness, for in these respects the mystics were extreme conservatives, more religious than the church herself. They were like soldiers who disregarded the orders of their superiors because they thought these orders interfered with their supreme duty of harassing the enemy. With the humanists and other deserters they had no part nor lot; they sought to make the church more spiritual, not more reasonable. They bowed to her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly joy and glory; they accepted her guidance without question; they rejoiced in her sacraments as aids to the life of holiness. But they sorrowed to see what they considered merely the means of grace substituted for the end sought; they were insensibly repelled by finding a mechanical instead of a personal scheme of salvation, an almost commercial debit and credit of good works instead of a life of spontaneous and devoted service. Feeling as few men have ever felt that the purpose and heart of religion is a union of the soul with God, they were shocked to see the interposition of mediators between him and his creature, to find that instead of hungering for him men were trying to make the best bargain they could for their own eternal happiness. While rejecting nothing in the church they tried to transfigure everything. Accepting priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they declined to regard them as necessary intermediaries.
[Sidenote: Eckhart, 1260-1327]
The first of the great German mystics was Master Eckhart, a Dominican who lived at Erfurt, in Bohemia, at Paris, and at Cologne. The inquisitors of this last place summoned him before their court on the charge of heresy, but while his trial was pending he died. He was a Christian pantheist, teaching that God was the only true being, and that man was capable of reaching {31} the absolute. Of all the mystics he was the most speculative and philosophical. Both Henry Suso and John Tauler were his disciples. [Sidenote: Suso, 1300-66] Suso's ecstatic piety was of the ultra-medieval type, romantic, poetic, and bent on winning personal salvation by the old means of severe self-torture and the constant practice of good works. Tauler, a Dominican of Strassburg, belonged to a society known as The Friends of God. [Sidenote: Tauler c. 1300-61] Of all his contemporaries he in religion was the most social and practical. His life was that of an evangelist, preaching to laymen in their own vernacular the gospel of a pure life and direct communion with God through the Bible and prayer. Like many other popular preachers he placed great emphasis on conversion, the turning (Kehr) from a bad to a good life. Simple faith is held to be better than knowledge or than the usual works of ecclesiastical piety. Tauler esteemed the holiest man he had ever seen one who had never heard five sermons in his life. All honest labor is called God's service, spinning and shoe-making the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Pure religion is to be "drowned in God," "intoxicated with God," "melted in the fire of his love." Transcending the common view of the average Christian that religion's one end was his own salvation, Tauler taught him that the love of God was greater than this. He tells of a woman ready to be damned for the glory of God—"and if such a person were dragged into the bottom of hell, there would be the kingdom of God and eternal bliss in hell."
One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a book written anonymously—"spoken by the Almighty, Eternal God, through a wise, understanding, truly just man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic Order at Frankfort." The German Theology, [Sidenote: The German Theology] as it was named by Luther, teaches in its purest form entire abandonment to God, simple passivity in his hands, utter {32} self-denial and self-surrender, until, without the interposition of any external power, and equally without effort of her own, the soul shall find herself at one with the bridegroom. The immanence of God is taught; man's helpless and sinful condition is emphasized; and the reconciliation of the two is found only in the unconditional surrender of man's will to God. "Put off thine own will and there will be no hell."
Tauler's sermons, first published 1498, had an immense influence on Luther. They were later taken up by the Jesuit Canisius who sought by them to purify his church. [Sidenote: 1543] The German Theology was first published by Luther in 1516, with the statement that save the Bible and St. Augustine's works, he had never met with a book from which he had learned so much of the nature of "God, Christ, man, and all things." But other theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, did not agree with him. Calvin detected secret and deadly poison in the author's pantheism, and in 1621 the Catholic Church placed his work on the Index.
The Netherlands also produced a school of mystics, later in blooming than that of the Germans and greater in its direct influence. The earliest of them was John of Ruysbroeck, a man of visions and ecstasies. [Sidenote: Ruysbroeck, 1293-1381] He strove to make his life one long contemplation of the light and love of God. Two younger men, Gerard Groote and Florence Radewyn, socialized his gospel by founding the fellowship of the Brethren of the Common Life. [Sidenote: Groote, 1340-84] [Sidenote: Radewyn, 1350-1400] Though never an order sanctioned by the church, they taught celibacy and poverty, and devoted themselves to service of their fellows, chiefly in the capacity of teachers of boys.
The fifteenth century's rising tide of devotion brought forth the most influential of the products of all the mystics, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. [Sidenote: Thomas à Kempis, c. 1380-1471] Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's personal life approach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint, asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and a diligent use of the sacramental grace of the eucharist are the means recommended to form the character of the perfect Christian. It was doubtless because all this was so perfect an expression of the medieval ideal that it found such wide and instant favor. There is no questioning of dogma, nor any speculation on the positions of the church; all this is postulated with child-like simplicity. Moreover, the ideal of the church for the salvation of the individual, and the means supposed to secure that end, are adopted by à Kempis. He tacitly assumes that the imitator of Christ will be a monk, poor and celibate. His whole endeavor was to stimulate an enthusiasm for privation and a taste for things spiritual, and it was because in his earnestness and single-mindedness he so largely succeeded that his book was eagerly seized by the hands of thousands who desired and needed such stimulation and help. The Dutch canon was not capable of rising to the heights of Tauler and the Frankfort priest, who saw in the love of God a good in itself transcending the happiness of one's own soul. He just wanted to be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with all his might. But this careful self-cultivation made his religion self-centered; it was, compared even with the professions of the Protestants and of the Jesuits, personal and unsocial.
Notwithstanding the profound differences between the Mystics and the Reformers, it is possible to see that at least in one respect the two movements were similar. It was exactly the same desire to get away from the mechanical and formal in the church's scheme of salvation, that animated both. Tauler and Luther {34} both deprecated good works and sought justification in faith only. Important as this is, it is possible to see why the mystics failed to produce a real revolt from the church, and it is certain that they were far more than the Reformers fundamentally, even typically Catholic. [Sidenote: Mysticism] It is true that mysticism is at heart always one, neither national nor confessional. But Catholicism offered so favorable a field for this development that mysticism may be considered as the efflorescence of Catholic piety par excellence. Hardly any other expression of godliness as an individual, vital thing, was possible in medieval Christendom. There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus. It could never be anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to solipsism as to a complete abnegation of the reason. Moreover it was slightly morbid, liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and emotion for a moment of vision and of union with God. How much more truly than he knew did Ruysbroeck speak when he said that the soul, turned inward, could see the divine light, just as the eyeball, sufficiently pressed, could see the flashes of fire in the mind!
The men who, in later ages, claimed for their ancestors a Protestantism older than the Augsburg Confession, referred its origins not to the mystics nor to the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the church as heretics. Though from the earliest age Christendom never lacked minds independent enough {35} to differ from authority and characters strong enough to attempt to cut away what they considered rotten in ecclesiastical doctrine and practice, the first heretics that can really be considered as harbingers of the Reformation were two sects dwelling in Southern France, the Albigenses and the Waldenses. [Sidenote: Albigenses] The former, first met with in the eleventh century, derived part of their doctrines from oriental Manichaeism, part from primitive gnosticism. The latter were the followers of Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, about 1170, sold his goods and went among the poor preaching the gospel. [Sidenote: Waldenses] Though quite distinct in origin both sects owed their success with the people to their attacks on the corrupt lives of the clergy, to their use of the vernacular New Testament, to their repudiation of part of the sacramental system, and to their own earnest and ascetic morality. The story of their savage suppression, at the instigation of Pope Innocent III, [Sidenote: 1209-29] in the Albigensian crusade, is one of the darkest blots on the pages of history. A few remnants of them survived in the mountains of Savoy and Piedmont, harried from time to time by blood-thirsty pontiffs. In obedience to a summons of Innocent VIII King Charles VIII of France massacred many of them. [Sidenote: 1437]
The spiritual ancestors of Luther, however, were not so much the French heretics as two Englishmen, Occam and Wyclif. [Sidenote: Occam, d. c. 1349] William of Occam, a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, was the most powerful scholastic critic of the existing church. Untouched by the classic air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could be said against the church from her own medieval standpoint. He taught determinism; he maintained that the final seat of authority was the Scripture; he showed that such fundamental dogmas as the existence of God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot be deduced by logic from the given premises; he {36} proposed a modification of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the interests of reason, approaching closely in his ideas to the "consubstantiation" of Luther. Defining the church as the congregation of the faithful, he undermined her governmental powers. This, in fact, is just what he wished to do, for he went ahead of almost all his contemporaries in proposing that the judicial powers of the clergy be transferred to the civil government. Not only, in his opinion, should the civil ruler be totally independent of the pope, but even such matters as the regulation of marriage should be left to the common law.
[Sidenote: Wyclif, 1324-84]
A far stronger impression on his age was made by John Wyclif, the most significant of the Reformers before Luther. He, too, was an Oxford professor, a schoolman, and a patriot, but he was animated by a deeper religious feeling than was Occam. In 1361 he was master of Balliol College, where he lectured for many years on divinity. At the same time he held various benefices in turn, the last, the pastorate of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, from 1374 till his death. He became a reformer somewhat late in life owing to study of the Bible and of the bad condition of the English church. [Sidenote: 1374] At the peace congress at Bruges as a commissioner to negotiate with papal ambassadors for the relief of crying abuses, he became disillusioned in his hope for help from that quarter. He then turned to the civil government, urging it to regain the usurped authority of the church. This plan, set forth in voluminous writings, in lectures at Oxford and in popular sermons in London, soon brought him before the tribunal [Sidenote: 1377] of William Courtenay, Bishop of London, and, had he not been protected by the powerful prince, John of Lancaster, it might have gone hard with him. Five bulls launched against him by Gregory XI from Rome only confirmed him in his course, for he {37} appealed from them to Parliament. Tried at Lambeth he was forbidden to preach or teach, and he therefore retired for the rest of his life to Lutterworth. [Sidenote: 1378] He continued his literary labors, resulting in a vast host of pamphlets.
Examining his writings we are struck by the fact that his program was far more religious and practical than rational and speculative. Save transubstantiation, he scrupled at none of the mysteries of Catholicism. It is also noticeable that social reform left him cold. When the laborers rose under Wat Tyler, [Sidenote: 1381] Wyclif sided against them, as he also proposed that confiscated church property be given rather to the upper classes than to the poor. The real principles of Wyclif's reforms were but two: to abolish the temporal power of the church, and to purge her of immoral ministers. It was for this reason that he set up the authority of Scripture against that of tradition; it was for this that he doubted the efficacy of sacraments administered by priests living in mortal sin; it was for this that he denied the necessity of auricular confession; it was for this that he would have placed the temporal power over the spiritual. The bulk of his writings, in both Latin and English, is fierce, measureless abuse of the clergy, particularly of prelates and of the pope. The head of Christendom is called Antichrist over and over again; the bishops, priests and friars are said to have their lips full of lies and their hands of blood; to lead women astray; to live in idleness, luxury, simony and deceit; and to devour the English church. Marriage of the clergy is recommended. Indulgences are called a cursed robbery.
To combat the enemies of true piety Wyclif relied on two agencies. The first was the Bible, which, with the assistance of friends, he Englished from the {38} Vulgate. None of the later Reformers was more bent upon giving the Scriptures to the laity, and none attributed to it a higher degree of inspiration. As a second measure Wyclif trained "poor priests" to be wandering evangelists spreading abroad the message of salvation among the populace. For a time they attained considerable success, notwithstanding the fact that the severe persecution to which they were subjected caused all of Wyclif's personal followers to recant. [Sidenote: 1401] The passage of the act De Haeretico Comburendo was not, however, in vain, for in the fifteenth century a number of common men were found with sufficient resolution to die for their faith. It is probable that, as Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London wrote in 1523, the Lollards, as they were called, were the first to welcome Lutheranism into Britain.
But if the seed produced but a moderate harvest in England it brought forth a hundred-fold in Bohemia. Wyclif's writings, carried by Czech students from Oxford to Prague, were eagerly studied by some of the attendants at that university, the greatest of whom was John Huss. [Sidenote: Huss, 1369-1415] Having taken his bachelor's degree there in 1393, he had given instruction since 1398 and became the head of the university (Rector) for the year 1402. Almost the whole content of his lectures, as of his writings, was borrowed from Wyclif, from whom he copied not only his main ideas but long passages verbatim and without specific acknowledgment. Professors and students of his own race supported him, but the Germans at the university took offence and a long struggle ensued, culminating in the secession of the Germans in a body in 1409 to found a new university at Leipsic. The quarrel, having started over a philosophic question,—Wyclif and Huss being realists and the Germans nominalists,—took a more serious turn when it came to a definition of the church {39} and of the respective spheres of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Defining the church as the body of the predestinate, and starting a campaign against indulgences, Huss soon fell under the ban of his superiors. After burning the bulls of John XXIII Huss withdrew from Prague. Summoned to the Council of Constance, he went thither, under safe-conduct from the Emperor Sigismund, and was immediately cast into a noisome dungeon. [Sidenote: 1411, 1412]
[Sidenote: 1414]
The council proceeded to consider the opinions of Wyclif, condemning 260 of his errors and ordering his bones to be dug up and burnt, as was done twelve years later. Every effort was then made to get Huss to recant a list of propositions drawn up by the council and attributed to him. Some of these charges were absurd, as that he was accused of calling himself the fourth person of the Trinity. Other opinions, like the denial of transubstantiation, he declared, and doubtless with truth, that he had never held. Much was made of his saying that he hoped his soul would be with the soul of Wyclif after death, and the emperor was alarmed by his argument that neither priest nor king living in mortal sin had a right to exercise his office. He was therefore condemned to the stake.
His death was perfect. His last letters are full of calm resolution, love to his friends, and forgiveness to his enemies. Haled to the cathedral where the council sat on July 6, 1415, he was given one last chance to recant and save his life. Refusing, he was stripped of his vestments, and a paper crown with three demons painted on it put on his head with the words, "We commit thy soul to the devil"; he was then led to the public square and burnt alive. Sigismund, threatened by the council, made no effort to redeem his safe-conduct, and in September the reverend fathers passed a decree that no safe-conduct to a heretic, and {40} no pledge prejudicial to the Catholic faith, could be considered binding. Among the large concourse of divines not one voice was raised against this treacherous murder.
Huss's most prominent follower, Jerome of Prague, after recantation, returned to his former position and was burnt at Constance on May 30, 1416. A bull of 1418 ordered the similar punishment of all heretics who maintained the positions of Wyclif, Huss, or Jerome of Prague.
As early as September a loud remonstrance against the treatment of their master was voiced by the Bohemian Diet. The more radical party, known as Taborites, rejected transubstantiation, worship of the saints, prayers for the dead, indulgences, auricular confession, and oaths. They allowed women to preach, demanded the use of the vernacular in divine service and the giving of the cup to the laity. A crusade was started against them, but they knew how to defend themselves. The Council of Basle [Sidenote: 1431-6] was driven to negotiate with them and ended by a compromise allowing the cup to the laity and some other reforms. Subsequent efforts to reduce them proved futile. Under King Podiebrad the Ultraquists maintained their rights.
Some Hussites, however, continued as a separate body, calling themselves Bohemian Brethren. First met with in 1457 they continue to the present day as Moravians. They were subject to constant persecution. In 1505 the Catholic official James Lilienstayn drew up an interesting list of their errors. It seems that their cardinal tenet was the supremacy of Scripture, without gloss, tradition, or interpretation by the Fathers of the church. They rejected the primacy of the pope, and all ceremonies for which authority could not be found in the Bible, and they denied the efficacy of masses for the dead and the validity of indulgences.
{41} With much reason Wyclif and Huss have been called "Reformers before the Reformation." Luther himself, not knowing the Englishman, recognized his deep indebtedness to the Bohemian. All of their program, and more, he carried through. His doctrine of justification by faith only, with its radical transformation of the sacramental system, cannot be found in these his predecessors, and this was a difference of vast importance.
Inevitably, the growth of national sentiment spoken of above reacted on the religious institutions of Europe. Indeed, it was here that the conflict of the international, ecclesiastical state, and of the secular governments became keenest. Both kings and people wished to control their own spiritual affairs as well as their temporalities.
[Sidenote: The ecclesia Anglicana]
England traveled farthest on the road towards a national church. For three centuries she had been asserting the rights of her government to direct spiritual as well as temporal matters. The Statute of Mortmain [Sidenote: 1279] forbade the alienation of land from the jurisdiction of the civil power by appropriating it to religious persons. The withdrawing of land from the obligation to pay taxes and feudal dues was thus checked. The encroachment of the civil power, both in England and France, was bitterly felt by the popes. Boniface VIII endeavored to stem the flood by the bull Clericis laicos [Sidenote: 1296] forbidding the taxation of clergy by any secular government, and the bull Unam Sanctam [Sidenote: 1302] asserting the universal monarchy of the Roman pontiff in the strongest possible terms. But these exorbitant claims were without effect. The Statute of Provisors [Sidenote: 1351 and 1390] forbade the appointment to English benefices by the pope, and the Statute of Praemunire [Sidenote: 1353 and 1393] took away the right of {42} English subjects to appeal from the courts of their own country to Rome. The success of Wyclif's movement was largely due to his patriotism. Though the signs of strife with the pope were fewer in the fifteenth century, there is no doubt that the national feeling persisted.
[Sidenote: The Gallican Church]
France manifested a spirit of liberty hardly less fierce than that of England. It was the French King Philip the Fair who humiliated Boniface VIII so severely that he died of chagrin. During almost the whole of the fourteenth century the residence of a pope subservient to France at Avignon prevented any difficulties, but no sooner had the Council of Constance restored the head of the unified church to Rome than the old conflict again burst forth. [Sidenote: 1438] The extreme claims of the Gallican church were asserted in the law known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, by which the pope was left hardly any right of appointment, of jurisdiction, or of raising revenue in France. The supremacy of a council over the pope was explicitly asserted, as was the right of the civil magistrate to order ecclesiastical affairs in his dominions. When the pontiffs refused to recognize this almost schismatical position taken by France, the Pragmatic Sanction was further fortified by a law sentencing to death any person who should bring into the country a bull repugnant to it. Strenuous efforts of the papacy were directed to secure the repeal of this document, and in 1461 Pius II induced Louis XI to revoke it in return for political concessions in Naples. This action, opposed by the University and Parlement of Paris, proved so unpopular that two years later the Gallican liberties were reasserted in their full extent.
Harmony was established between the interests of the curia and of the French government by the compromise known as the Concordat of Bologna. [Sidenote: 1516] The {43} concessions to the king were so heavy that it was difficult for Leo X to get his cardinals to consent to them. Almost the whole power of appointment, of jurisdiction, and of taxation was put into the royal hands, some stipulations being made against the conferring of benefices on immoral priests and against the frivolous imposition of ecclesiastical punishments. What the pope gained was the abandonment of the assertion made at Bourges of the supremacy of a general council. The Concordat was greeted by a storm of protest in France. The Sorbonne refused to recognize it and appealed at once to a general council. The king, however, had the refractory members arrested and decreed the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction in 1518.
In Italy and Germany the growth of a national state [Sidenote: Italy] was retarded by the fact that one was the seat of the pope, the other of the emperor, each of them claiming a universal authority. Moreover, these two powers were continually at odds. The long investiture strife, culminating in the triumph of Gregory VII at Canossa [Sidenote: 1077] and ending in the Concordat of Worms, [Sidenote: 1122] could not permanently settle the relations of the two. Whereas Aquinas and the Canon Law maintained the superiority of the pope, there were not lacking asserters of the imperial preëminence. William of Occam's argument to prove that the emperor might depose an heretical pope was taken up by Marsiglio of Padua, whose Defender of the Peace [Sidenote: c. 1324] ranks among the ablest of political pamphlets. In order to reduce the power of the pope, whom he called "the great dragon and old serpent," he advanced the civil government to a complete supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. He stated that the only authority in matters of faith was the Bible, with the necessary interpretation given it by a general council composed of both clergy and laymen; that the emperor had the right to convoke and {44} direct this council and to punish all priests, prelates and the supreme pontiff; that the Canon Law had no validity; that no temporal punishment should be visited on heresy save by the state, and no spiritual punishment be valid without the consent of the state.
[Sidenote: Germany]
With such a weapon in their hands the emperors might have taken an even stronger stand than did the kings of England and France but for the lack of unity in their dominions. Germany was divided into a large number of practically independent states. It was in these and not in the empire as a whole that an approach was made to a form of national church, such as was realized after Luther had broken the bondage of Rome. When Duke Rudolph IV of Austria in the fourteenth century stated that he intended to be pope, archbishop, archdeacon and dean in his own land, when the dukes of Bavaria, Saxony and Cleves made similar boasts, they but put in a strong form the program that they in part realized. The princes gradually acquired the right of patronage to church benefices, and they permitted no bulls to be published, no indulgences sold, without their permission. The Free Cities acted in much the same way. The authority of the German states over their own spiritualities was no innovation of the heresy of Wittenberg.
For all Germany's internal division there was a certain national consciousness, due to the common language. In no point were the people more agreed than in their opposition to the rule of the Italian Curia. [Sidenote: 1382] At one time the monasteries of Cologne signed a compact to resist Gregory XI in a proposed levy of tithes, stating that, "in consequence of the exactions by which the Papal Court burdens the clergy the Apostolic See has fallen into contempt and the Catholic faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled." Again, {45} a Knight of the Teutonic Order in Prussia [Sidenote: 1430] wrote: "Greed reigns supreme in the Roman Court, and day by day finds new devices and artifices for extorting money from Germany under pretext of ecclesiastical fees. Hence arise much outcry, complaint and heart-burning. . . . Many questions about the papacy will be answered, or else obedience will ultimately be entirely renounced to escape from these outrageous exactions of the Italians."
The relief expected from the Council of Basle failed, and abuses were only made worse by a compact between Frederick III and Nicholas V, known as the Concordat of Vienna. [Sidenote: 1448] This treaty was by no means comparable with the English and French legislation, but was merely a division of the spoils between the two supreme rulers at the expense of the people. The power of appointment to high ecclesiastical positions was divided, annates were confirmed, and in general a considerable increase of the authority of the Curia was established.
Protests began at once in the form of "Gravamina" or lists of grievances drawn up at each Diet as a petition, and in part enacted into laws. In 1452 the Spiritual Electors demanded that the emperor proceed with reform on the basis of the decrees of Constance. In 1457 the clergy refused to be taxed for a crusade. In 1461 the princes appealed against the sale of indulgences. The Gravamina of this year were very bitter, complaining of the practice of usury by priests, of the pomp of the cardinals and of the pope's habit of giving promises of preferment to certain sees and then declaring the places vacant on the plea of having made a "mental reservation" in favor of some one else. The Roman clergy were called in this bill of grievances "public fornicators, keepers of concubines, ruffians, pimps and sinners in various other {46} respects." Drastic proposals of reform were defeated by the pope.
[Sidenote: Gravamina]
The Gravamina continued. Those of 1479 appealed against the Mendicant Orders and against the appointment of foreigners. They clamored for a new council and for reform on the basis of the decrees of Basle; they protested against judicial appeals to Rome, against the annates and against the crusade tax. It was stated that the papal appointees were rather fitted to be drivers of mules than pastors of souls. Such words found a reverberating echo among the people. The powerful pen of Gregory of Heimburg, sometimes called "the lay Luther," roused his countrymen to a patriotic stand against the Italian usurpation.
The Diet of 1502 resolved not to let money raised by indulgences leave Germany, but to use it against the Turks. Another long list of grievances relating to the tyranny and extortion of Rome was presented in 1510. The acts of the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1518 are eloquent testimony to the state of popular feeling when Luther had just begun his career. To this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal Cajetan, requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk. It was proposed that an impost of ten per cent. be laid on the incomes of the clergy and one of five per cent. on the rich laity. This was refused on account of the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and refused in language of the utmost violence. It was stated that the real enemy of Christianity was not the Turk but "the hound of hell" in Rome. Indulgences were branded as blood-letting.
When such was the public opinion it is clear that Luther only touched a match to a heap of inflammable material. The whole nationalist movement redounded to the benefit of Protestantism. The state-churches of {47} northern Europe are but the logical development of previous separatist tendencies.
But the preparation for the great revolt was no less thorough on the intellectual than it was on the religious and political sides. The revival of interest in classical antiquity, aptly known as the Renaissance, brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval standards and, most of all, of medieval religion. The Renaissance stands in the same relationship to the Reformation that the so-called "Enlightenment" stands to the French Revolution. The humanists of the fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the eighteenth.
The new spirit was born in Italy. If we go back as far as Dante [Sidenote: Dante, 1265-1321] we find, along with many modern elements, such as the use of the vernacular, a completely medieval conception of the universe. His immortal poem is in one respect but a commentary on the Summa theologiae of Aquinas; it is all about the other world. The younger contemporaries of the great Florentine [Sidenote: Petrarch, 1304-1374] began to be restless as the implications of the new spirit dawned on them. Petrarch lamented that literary culture was deemed incompatible with faith. Boccaccio was as much a child of this world as Dante was a prophet of the next. [Sidenote: Boccaccio, 1313-1375] Too simple-minded deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was instinctively opposed to ecclesiastical professions. Devoting himself to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, representing them as the quintessence of all impurity and hypocrisy. The first story in his famous Decameron is of a scoundrel who comes to be reputed as a saint, invoked as such and performing miracles {48} after death. The second story is of a Jew who was converted to Christianity by the wickedness of Rome, for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could survive such desperate depravity as he saw there. The third tale, of the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what religion is the true one. The fourth narrative, like many others, turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere the author describes the most absurd relics, and tells how a priest deceived a woman by pretending that he was the angel Gabriel. The trend of such a work was naturally the reverse of edifying. The irreligion is too spontaneous to be called philosophic doubt; it is merely impiety.
[Sidenote: Valla, 1406-56]
But such a sentiment could not long remain content with scoffing. The banner of pure rationalism, or rather of conscious classical skepticism, was raised by a circle of enthusiasts. The most brilliant of them, and one of the keenest critics that Europe has ever produced, was Lorenzo Valla, a native of Naples, and for some years holder of a benefice at Rome. Such was the trenchancy and temper of his weapons that much of what he advanced has stood the test of time.
[Sidenote: The Donation of Constantine]
The papal claim to temporal supremacy in the Western world rested largely on a spurious document known as the Donation of Constantine. In this the emperor is represented as withdrawing from Rome in order to leave it to the pope, to whom, in return for being cured of leprosy, he gives the whole Occident. An uncritical age had received this forgery for five or six centuries without question. Doubt had been cast on it by Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Peacock, but Valla demolished it. He showed that no historian had spoken of it; that there was no time at which it could have occurred; that it is contradicted by other contemporary acts; that the barbarous style contains {49} expressions of Greek, Hebrew, and German origin; that the testimony of numismatics is against it; and that the author knew nothing of the antiquities of Rome, into whose council he introduced satraps. Valla's work was so thoroughly done that the document, embodied as were its conclusions in the Canon Law, has never found a reputable defender since. In time the critique had an immense effect. Ulrich von Hutten published it in 1517, and in the same year an English translation was made. In 1537 Luther turned it into German.
[Sidenote: Valla attacks the Pope]
And if the legality of the pope's rule was so slight, what was its practical effect? According to Valla, it was a "barbarous, overbearing, tyrannical, priestly domination." "What is it to you," he apostrophizes the pontiff, "if our republic is crushed? You have crushed it. If our temples have been pillaged? You have pillaged them. If our virgins and matrons have been violated? You have done it. If the city is innundated with the blood of citizens? You are guilty of it all."
[Sidenote: Annotations on the New Testament]
Valla's critical genius next attacked the schoolman's idol Aristotle and the humanist's demigod Cicero. More important were his Annotations on the New Testament, first published by Erasmus in 1505. The Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent defined to be, the authentic or official form of the Scriptures. Taking in hand three Latin and three Greek manuscripts, Valla had no difficulty in showing that they differed from one another and that in some cases the Latin had no authority whatever in the Greek. He pointed out a number of mistranslations, some of them in passages vitally affecting the faith. In short he left no support standing for any theory of verbal inspiration. He further questioned, and successfully, the authorship of the Creed attributed {50} to the Apostles, the authenticity of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and of the letter of Christ to King Abgarus, preserved and credited by Eusebius.
[Sidenote: Attack on Christian ethics]
His attack on Christian ethics was still more fundamental. In his Dialogue on Free Will he tried with ingenuity to reconcile the freedom of the will, denied by Augustine, with the foreknowledge of God, which he did not feel strong enough to dispute. In his work on The Monastic Life he denied all value to asceticism. Others had mocked the monks for not living up to their professions; he asserted that the ideal itself was mistaken. But it is the treatise On Pleasure that goes the farthest. In form it is a dialogue on ethics; one interlocutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the Stoical, and the third the Christian standard. The sympathies of the author are plainly with the champion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is the supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the prostitute is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any other ideal. . . . It is noteworthy that the representative of the Christian standpoint accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness is the supreme good, only he places that happiness in the next life.
Valla's ideas obtained throughout a large circle in the half-century following his death. Masuccio indulged in the most obscene mockery of Catholic rites. Poggio wrote a book against hypocrites, attacking the monks, and a joke-book largely at the expense of the faithful. Machiavelli assailed the papacy with great ferocity, attributing to it the corruption of Italian morals and the political disunion and weakness of {51} Italy, and advocating its annihilation. [Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1530] In place of Christianity, habitually spoken of as an exploded superstition, dangerous to the state, he would put the patriotic cults of antiquity.
It is not strange, knowing the character of the popes, that pagan expressions should color the writings of their courtiers. Poggio was a papal secretary, and so was Bembo, a cardinal who refused to read Paul's epistles for fear of corrupting his Latinity. In his exquisite search for classical equivalents for the rude phrases of the gospel, he referred, in a papal breve, to Christ as "Minerva sprung from the head of Jove," and to the Holy Ghost as "the breath of the celestial Zephyr." Conceived in the same spirit was a sermon of Inghirami heard by Erasmus at Rome on Good Friday 1509. Couched in the purest Ciceronian terms, while comparing the Saviour to Gurtius, Cecrops, Aristides, Epaminondas and Iphigenia, it was mainly devoted to an extravagant eulogy of the reigning pontiff, Julius II.
But all the Italian humanists were not pagans. There arose at Florence, partly under the influence of the revival of Greek, partly under that of Savonarola, a group of earnest young men who sought to invigorate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of Plato. The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola [Sidenote: Pico della Mirandola, 1462-94] and Marsiglio Ficino, sought to show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the Galilean were the same. Approaching the Bible in the simple literary way indicated by classical study, Pico really rediscovered some of the teachings of the New Testament, while in dealing with the Old he was forced to adopt an ingenious but unsound allegorical interpretation. "Philosophy seeks the truth," he wrote, "theology finds it, religion possesses it." His extraordinary personal influence extended through {52} lands beyond the Alps, even though it failed in accomplishing the rehabilitation of Italian faith.
[Sidenote: Faber Stapulensis, c. 1455-1536]
The leader of the French Christian Renaissance, James Lefèvre d'Étaples, was one of his disciples. Traveling in Italy in 1492, after visiting Padua, Venice and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know Pico, and received from him a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics made by Cardinal Bessarion. Returning to Paris he taught, at the College of Cardinal Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy. He did not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists, for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to himself. He therefore labored to restore the true text, on which he wrote a number of treatises. It was with the same purpose that he turned next to the early Fathers and to the writer called Dionysius the Areopagite. But he did not find himself until he found the Bible. In 1509 he published the Quintuplex Psalterium, the first treatise on the Psalms in which the philological and personal interest was uppermost. Hitherto it had not been the Bible that had been studied so much as the commentaries on it, a dry wilderness of arid and futile subtlety. Lefèvre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary. Though he spoke of the apostle as a simple instrument of God, he yet did more to uncover his personality than any of the previous {53} commentators. Half mystic as he was, Lefèvre discovered in Paul the doctrine of justification by faith only. To I Corinthians viii, he wrote: "It is almost profane to speak of the merit of works, especially towards God. . . . The opinion that we can be justified by works is an error for which the Jews are especially condemned. . . . Our only hope is in God's grace." Lefèvre's works opened up a new world to the theologians of the time. Erasmus's friend Beatus Rhenanus wrote that the richness of the Quintuplex Psalter made him poor. Thomas More said that English students owed him much. Luther used the two works of the Frenchman as the texts for his early lectures. From them he drew very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefèvre who first suggested to him the formula of his famous "sola fide."
The religious renaissance in England was led by a disciple of Pico della Mirandola, John Colet, [Sidenote: Colet, d. 1519] a man of remarkably pure life, and Dean of St. Paul's. He wrote, though he did not publish, some commentaries on the Pauline epistles and on the Mosaic account of creation. Though he knew no Greek, and was not an easy or elegant writer of Latin, he was allied to the humanists by his desire to return to the real sources of Christianity, and by his search for the historical sense of his texts. Though in some respects he was under the fantastic notions of the Areopagite, in others his interpretation was rational, free and undogmatic. He exercised a considerable influence on Erasmus and on a few choice spirits of the time.
The humanism of Germany centered in the universities. At the close of the fifteenth century new courses in the Latin classics, in Greek and in Hebrew, began to supplement the medieval curriculum of logic and philosophy. At every academy there sprang up a circle of "poets," as they called themselves, often of {54} lax morals and indifferent to religion, but earnest in their championship of culture. Nor were these circles confined entirely to the seats of learning. Many a city had its own literary society, one of the most famous being that of Nuremberg. Conrad Mutianus Rufus drew to Gotha, [Sidenote: Mutian, 1471-1526] where he held a canonry, a group of disciples, to whom he imparted the Neo-Platonism he had imbibed in Italy. Disregarding revelation, he taught that all religions were essentially the same. "I esteem the decrees of philosophers more than those of priests," he wrote.
[Sidenote: Reuchlin, 1455-1522]
What Lefèvre and Colet had done for the New Testament, John Reuchlin did for the Old. After studying in France and Italy, where he learned to know Pico della Mirandola, he settled at Stuttgart and devoted his life to the study of Hebrew. His De Rudimentis Hebraicis, [Sidenote: 1506] a grammar and dictionary of this language, performed a great service for scholarship. In the late Jewish work, the Cabbala, he believed he had discovered a source of mystic wisdom. The extravagance of his interpretations of Scriptual passages, based on this, not only rendered much of his work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of trouble. The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, in a series of pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, should be compelled to hear sermons and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to be burnt, except the Old Testament. When Reuchlin's aid in this pious project was requested it was refused in a memorial dated October 6, 1510, pointing out the great value of much Hebrew literature. The Dominicans of Cologne, headed by their inquisitor, James Hochstraten, made this the ground for a charge of heresy. The case was appealed to Rome, and the trial, lasting six years, excited the interest of all Europe. In Germany it was argued with much heat in a host of {55} pamphlets, all the monks and obscurantists taking the side of the inquisitors and all the humanists, save one, Ortuin Gratius of Cologne, taking the part of the scholar. The latter received many warm expressions of admiration and support from the leading writers of the time, and published them in two volumes, the first in 1514, under the title Letters of Eminent Men. It was this that suggested to the humanist, Crotus Bubeanus, the title of his satire published anonymously, The Letters of Obscure Men. In form it is a series of epistles from monks and hedge-priests to Ortuin Gratius. [Sidenote: Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum]
Writing in the most barbarous Latin, they express their admiration for his attack on Reuchlin and the cause of learning, gossip about their drinking-bouts and pot-house amours, expose their ignorance and gullibility, and ask absurd questions, as, whether it is a mortal sin to salute a Jew, and whether the worms eaten with beans and cheese should be considered meat or fish, lawful or not in Lent, and at what stage of development a chick in the egg becomes meat and therefore prohibited on Fridays. The satire, coarse as it was biting, failed to win the applause of the finer spirits, but raised a shout of laughter from the students, and was no insignificant factor in adding to contempt for the church. The first book of these Letters, published in 1515, was followed two years later by a second, even more caustic than the first. This supplement, also published without the writer's name, was from the pen of Ulrich von Hutten.
[Sidenote: Hutten, 1488-1523]
This brilliant and passionate writer devoted the greater part of his life to war with Rome. His motive was not religious, but patriotic. He longed to see his country strong and united, and free from the galling oppression of the ultramontane yoke. He published Valla's Donation of Constantine, and wrote epigrams on the popes. His dialogue Fever the First is a {56} vitriolic attack on the priests. His Vadiscus or the Roman Trinity [Sidenote: 1520] scourges the vices of the curia where three things are sold: Christ, places and women. When he first heard of Luther's cause he called it a quarrel of monks, and only hoped they would all destroy one another. But by 1519 he saw in the Reformer the most powerful of allies against the common foe, and he accordingly embraced his cause with habitual zeal. His letters at this time breathe out fire and slaughter against the Romanists if anything should happen to Luther. In 1523, he supported his friend Francis von Sickingen, in the attempt to assert by force of arms the rights of the patriotic and evangelic order of knights. When this was defeated, Hutten, suffering from a terrible disease, wandered to Switzerland, where he died, a lonely and broken exile. His epitaph shall be his own lofty poem:
I have fought my fight with courage,
Nor have I aught to rue,
For, though I lost the battle,
The world knows, I was true!
[Sidenote: Erasmus, 1466-1536]
The most cosmopolitan, as well as the greatest, of all the Christian humanists, was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Though an illegitimate child, he was well educated and thoroughly grounded in the classics at the famous school of Deventer. At the age of twenty he was persuaded, somewhat against his will, to enter the order of Augustinian Canons at Steyn. Under the patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai he was enabled to continue his studies at Paris. [Sidenote: 1499-1509] For the next ten years he wandered to England, to various places in Northern France and Flanders, and Italy, learning to know many of the intellectual leaders of the time. From 1509-14 he was in England, part of the time lecturing at Cambridge. He then spent some {57} years at Louvain, seven years at Basle and six years at Freiburg in the Breisgau, returning to Basle for the last year of his life.
Until he was over thirty Erasmus's dominant interest was classical literature. Under the influence of Colet and of a French Franciscan, John Vitrier, he turned his attention to liberalizing religion. His first devotional work, The Handbook of the Christian Knight, perfectly sets forth his program of spiritual, as opposed to formal, Christianity. [Sidenote: Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 1503] It all turns upon the distinction between the inner and the outer man, the moral and the sensual. True service of Christ is purity of heart and love, not the invocation of saints, fasting and indulgences.
In The Praise of Folly Erasmus mildly rebukes the foibles of men. [Sidenote: 1511] There never was kindlier satire, free from the savage scorn of Crotus and Hutten, and from the didactic scolding of Sebastian Brant, whose Ship of Fools [Sidenote: 1494] was one of the author's models. Folly is made quite amiable, the source not only of some things that are amiss but also of much harmless enjoyment. The besetting silliness of every class is exposed: of the man of pleasure, of the man of business, of women and of husbands, of the writer and of the pedant. Though not unduly emphasized, the folly of current superstitions is held up to ridicule. Some there are who have turned the saints into pagan gods; some who have measured purgatory into years and days and cheat themselves with indulgences against it; some theologians who spend all their time discussing such absurdities as whether God could have redeemed men in the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a squash or a stone, others who explain the mystery of the Trinity.
In following up his plan for the restoration of a simpler Christianity, Erasmus rightly thought that a return from the barren subtleties of the schoolmen to {58} the primitive sources was essential. He wished to reduce Christianity to a moral, humanitarian, undogmatic philosophy of life. His attitude towards dogma was to admit it and to ignore it. Scientific enlightenment he welcomed more than did either the Catholics or the Reformers, sure that if the Sermon on the Mount survived, Christianity had nothing to fear. In like manner, while he did not attack the cult and ritual of the church, he never laid any stress on it. "If some dogmas are incomprehensible and some rites superstitious," he seemed to say, "what does it matter? Let us emphasize the ethical and spiritual content of Christ's message, for if we seek his kingdom, all else needful shall be added unto us." His favorite name for his religion was the "philosophy of Christ," [Sidenote: Philosophy of Christ] and it is thus that he persuasively expounds it in a note, in his Greek Testament, to Matthew xi, 30:
Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden light, if petty human institutions added nothing to what he himself imposed. He commanded us nothing save love one for another, and there is nothing so bitter that charity does not soften and sweeten it. Everything according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords better with the nature of man than the philosophy of Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to fallen nature its innocence and integrity. . . . How pure, how simple is the faith that Christ delivered to us! How close to it is the creed transmitted to us by the apostles, or apostolic men. The church, divided and tormented by discussions and by heresy, added to it many things, of which some can be omitted without prejudice to the faith. . . . There are many opinions from which impiety may be begotten, as for example, all those philosophic doctrines on the reason of the nature and the distinction of the persons of the Godhead. . . . The sacraments themselves were instituted for the salvation of men, but we abuse them for lucre, for vain glory or for the oppression of the humble. . . . What rules, what superstitions we have about vestments! How many are judged as to {59} their Christianity by such trifles, which are indifferent in themselves, which change with the fashion and of which Christ never spoke! . . . How many fasts are instituted! And we are not merely invited to fast, but obliged to, on pain of damnation. . . . What shall we say about vows . . . about the authority of the pope, the abuse of absolutions, dispensations, remissions of penalty, law-suits, in which there is much that a truly good man cannot see without a groan? The priests themselves prefer to study Aristotle than to ply their ministry. The gospel is hardly mentioned from the pulpit. Sermons are monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for their profit. . . . Would that men were content to let Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant tyranny by human decrees!
[Sidenote: Colloquies]
In the Familiar Colloquies, first published in 1518 and often enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious ideas most sharply. Enormous as were the sales and influence of his other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work, intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style. The first conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art. Erasmus is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in writing a really exquisite Latin. But his supreme gift was his dry wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule. Thus, in the Colloquies, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine at Canterbury, the bloody bones and the handkerchief covered with the saint's rheum offered to be kissed—all without a disapproving word and yet in such a way that when the reader has finished it he wonders how anything so silly could ever have existed. Thus again he strips the worship of Mary, and all the {60} stupid and wrong projects she is asked to abet. In the conversation called The Shipwreck, the people pray to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan times, only it is Mary, not Venus that is meant. They offer mountains of wax candles to the saints to preserve them, although one man confides to his neighbor in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not pay one penny taper on his vow. Again, in the Colloquy on the New Testament, a young man is asked what he has done for Christ. He replies:
A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testament of Erasmus in his sermons. Well, one day I called on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left hand and punished him with my right. I gave him so sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a mere jelly. What do you say to that? Isn't that maintaining the gospel? And then, by way of absolution for his sins I took this book [Erasmus's New Testament, a folio bound with brass] and gave him three resounding whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel by the gospel. But really it is time you were turning from a brute beast into a man."
So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"—for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (subdubito). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average" (paulo latinius). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only admitted—except when he was addressing his patrons—"that he was not altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be quoted as often again.
[Sidenote: His wit]
But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so delicately conveyed.
Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 1517—though he sometimes retouched his letters on publishing them—he foresaw. "In this part of the world," he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was already knocking at the door!
{62}
It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel. The need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful reagent possible.
On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of the son would have been impossible.
Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to death. God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into hell. "They painted Christ," says Luther—and such pictures can still be seen in old churches—"sitting on a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors against his frightful wrath."
At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study. He contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics and in their later imitators. Ranking among the better {64} scholars Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in 1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence. While his diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He was generous, even prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made "an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune and good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am settled at college as pleasantly as possible."
For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one no adequate explanation has been offered. Pious and serious as he was, his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well substantiated. As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]
During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he was doomed to hell. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a gracious God?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in Lefèvre d'Étaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith, like the thief on the cross.
In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith." [Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely to make him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote; the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and over their souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims, and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of justification by faith only.
The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He started to purge his order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle. Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars today. Mayence was already in debt and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. To help him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence. In order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. [Sidenote: Tetzel] This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured plenary remission of sins and the grace of God.
The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy heaven at a bargain. Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith. He accordingly called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church on October 31, 1517. [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517] He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain, especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that contrition was the only gate to God's pardon; that works of charity were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment heresy among the simple. In all this he did not directly deny the whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.
The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other cities. They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo by the whole nation. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy. All welcomed the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it. Tetzel was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X directed the general of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant. [Sidenote: February 3, 1518] The matter was accordingly brought up at the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was present, was asked to retract, and refused. On the contrary he published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses stating his points more strongly than before.
The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The Diet which met at Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to his legate, Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, who had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried. On August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was procured. Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on indulgences, and refused. [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518] A few days later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again from the pope to a future oecumenical council. In the meantime Leo X, in the bull Cum postquam, authoritatively defined the doctrine of indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.
The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to Germany a special agent, the Saxon Charles von Miltitz, with instructions either to cajole the heretic into retraction or the Elector into surrendering him. In neither of these attempts was he successful. [Sidenote: January 1519] At an interview with Luther the utmost he could do was to secure a general statement that the accused man would abide by the decision of the Holy See, and a promise to keep quiet as long as his opponents did the same.
Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the champions of the church could not let the heretic rest for a moment. The whole affair was given a wider publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the same time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position than he had yet reached, by the attack of a theologian of Ingolstadt, John Eck. When he assailed the Theses on the ground that they seriously impaired the authority of the Roman see, Luther retorted:
{69} The assertion that the Roman Church is superior to all other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal decrees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all councils, the Nicene.
[Sidenote: The Leipzig Debate, 1519]
A debate on this and other propositions between Eck on the one side and Luther and his colleague Carlstadt on the other took place at Leipzig in the days from June 27 to July 16, 1519. The climax of the argument on the power of popes and councils came when Eck, skilfully manoeuvring to show that Luther's opinions were identical with those of Huss, forced from his opponent the bold declaration that "among the opinions of John Huss and the Bohemians many are certainly most Christian and evangelic, and cannot be condemned by the universal church." The words sent a thrill through the audience and throughout Christendom. Eck could only reply: "If you believe that a general council, legitimately convoked, can err, you are to me a heathen and a publican." Reconciliation was indeed no longer possible. When Luther had protested against the abuse of indulgences he did so as a loyal son of the church. Now at last he was forced to raise the standard of revolt, at least against Rome, the recognized head of the church. He had begun by appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, then from the pope to a universal council; now he declared that a great council had erred, and that he would not abide by its decision. The issue was a clear one, though hardly recognized as such by himself, between the religion of authority and the right of private judgment.
His opposition to the papacy developed with extraordinary rapidity. His study of the Canon Law made him, as early as March, 1519, brand the pope as either Antichrist or Antichrist's apostle. He {70} applauded Melancthon, a brilliant young man called to teach at Wittenberg in 1518, for denying transubstantiation. He declared that the cup should never have been withheld from the laity, and that the mass considered as a good work and a sacrifice was an abomination. His eyes were opened to the iniquities of Rome by Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine, published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1519. After reading it he wrote:
Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at Rome! You wonder at the judgment of God that such unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but prevailed for many centuries, that they were incorporated into the Canon Law, and (that no degree of horror might be wanting) that they became as articles of faith.
Like German troops Luther was best in taking the offensive. These early years when he was standing almost alone and attacking one abuse after another, were the finest of his whole career. Later, when he came to reconstruct a church, he modified or withdrew much of what he had at first put forward, and re-introduced a large portion of the medieval religiosity which he had once so successfully and fiercely attacked. The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he ever attained. It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the popular force of their language.
[Sidenote: To the Christian Nobility, 1520]
His greatest appeal to his countrymen was made in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of the Christian Estate. In this he asserts the right of the civil power to reform the spiritual, and urges the government to exercise this right. The priests, says he, defend themselves against all outside interference by three "walls," of {71} which the first is the claim that the church is superior to the state, in case the civil authority presses them; the second, the assertion, if one would correct them by the Bible, that no one can interpret it but the pope; the third, if they are threatened with a general council, the contention that no one can convoke such a council save the pope. Luther demolishes these walls with words of vast import. First, he denies any distinction between the spiritual and temporal estates. Every baptized Christian, he asserts, is a priest, and in this saying he struck a mortal blow at the great hierarchy of privilege and theocratic tyranny built up by the Middle Ages. The second wall is still frailer than the first, says the writer, for anyone can see that in spite of the priests' claims to be masters of the Bible they never learn one word of it their whole life long. The third wall falls of itself, for the Bible plainly commands everyone to punish and correct any wrong-doer, no matter what his station.
[Sidenote: Reform measures]
After this introduction Luther proposes measures of reform equally drastic and comprehensive. The first twelve articles are devoted to the pope, the annates, the appointment of foreigners to German benefices, the appeal of cases to Rome, the asserted authority of the papacy over bishops, the emperor, and other rulers. All these abuses, as well as jubilees and pilgrimages to Rome should be simply forbidden by the civil government. The next three articles deal with sacerdotal celibacy, recommending that priests be allowed to marry, and calling for the suppression of many of the cloisters. It is further urged that foundations for masses and for the support of idle priests be abolished, that various vexatious provisions of the Canon Law be repealed, and that begging on any pretext be prohibited. The twenty-fourth article deals with the Bohemian schism, saying that Huss was wrongly {72} burned, and calling for union with the Hussites who deny transubstantiation and demand the cup for the laity. Next, the writer takes up the reform of education in the interests of a more biblical religion. Finally, he urges that sumptuary laws be passed, that a bridle be put in the mouth of the great monopolists and usurers, and that brothels be no longer tolerated.
Of all the writer's works this probably had the greatest and most immediate influence. Some, indeed, were offended by the violence of the language, defended by Luther from the example of the Bible and by the necessity of rousing people to the enormities he attacked. But most hailed it as a "trumpet-blast" calling the nation to arms. Four thousand copies were sold in a few days, and a second edition was called for within a month. Voicing ideas that had been long, though vaguely, current, it convinced almost all of the need of a reformation. According to their sympathies men declared that the devil or the Holy Ghost spoke through Luther.
[Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity, 1520]
Though less popular both in form and subject, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church was not less important than the Address to the German Nobility. It was a mortal blow at the sacramental system of the church. In judging it we must again summon the aid of our historical imagination. In the sixteenth century dogmas not only seemed but were matters of supreme importance. It was just by her sacramental system, by her claim to give the believer eternal life and salvation through her rites, that the church had imposed her yoke on men. As long as that belief remained intact progress in thought, in freedom of conscience, in reform, remained difficult. And here, as is frequently the case, the most effective arguments were not those which seem to us logically the strongest. Luther made no appeal to reason as such. He {73} appealed to the Bible, recognized by all Christians as an authority, and showed how far the practice of the church had degenerated from her standard. [Sidenote: Sacraments] In the first place he reduced the number of sacraments, denying that name to matrimony, orders, extreme unction and confirmation. In attacking orders he demolished the priestly ideal and authority. In reducing marriage to a civil contract he took a long step towards the secularization of life. Penance he considered a sacrament in a certain sense, though not in the strict one, and he showed that it had been turned by the church from its original significance of "repentance" [1] to that of sacramental penance, in which no faith was required but merely an automatic act. Baptism and the eucharist he considered the only true sacraments, and he seriously criticized the prevalent doctrine of the latter. He denied that the mass is a sacrifice or a "good work" pleasing to God and therefore beneficial to the soul either of living or of dead. He denied that the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus, though he held that the body and blood are really present with the elements. He demanded that the cup be given to the laity.
The whole trend of Luther's thought at this time was to oppose the Catholic theory of a mechanical distribution of grace and salvation (the so-called opus operatum) by means of the sacraments, and to substitute for it an individual conception of religion in which faith only should be necessary. How far he carried this idea may be seen in his Sermon on the New Testament, that is on the Holy Mass,[2] published in the same year as the pamphlets just analysed. In it he makes the essence of the sacrament forgiveness, and the vehicle of this forgiveness the word of God apprehended by {74} faith, not the actual participation in the sacred bread and wine. Had he always been true to this conception he would have left no place for sacrament or priest at all. But in later years he grew more conservative, until, under slightly different names, almost the old medieval ideas of church and religion were again established, and, as Milton later expressed it, "New presbyter was but old priest writ large."
[1] In Latin penitentia means both penance and repentance.
[2] Cf. Matthew, xxvi, 28.
[Sidenote: Germany]
Although the Germans had arrived, by the end of the fifteenth century, at a high degree of national self-consciousness, they had not, like the French and English, succeeded in forming a corresponding political unity. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, though continuing to assert the vast claims of the Roman world-state, was in fact but a loose confederacy of many and very diverse territories. On a map drawn to the scale 1:6,000,000 nearly a hundred separate political entities can be counted within the limits of the Empire and there were many others too small to appear. The rulers of seven of these territories elected the emperor; they were the three spiritual princes, the Archbishops of Mayence, Trèves and Cologne, the three German temporal princes, the Electors of the Rhenish Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg, and in addition the King of Bohemia, who, save for purposes of the imperial choice, did not count as a member of the Germanic body. Besides these there were some powerful dukedoms, like Austria and Bavaria, and numerous smaller bishoprics and counties. There were also many free cities, like Augsburg and Nuremberg, small aristocratic republics. Finally there was a large body of "free knights" or barons, whose tiny fiefs amounted often to no more than a castle and a few acres, but who owned no feudal superior save {75} the emperor. The unity of the Empire was expressed not only in the person of the emperor, but in the Diet which met at different places at frequent intervals. Its authority, though on the whole increasing, was small.
With no imperial system of taxation, no professional army and no centralized administration, the real power of the emperor dwindled. Such as it was he derived it from the fact that he was always elected from one of the great houses. Since 1438 the Hapsburgs, Archdukes of Austria, had held the imperial office. Since 1495 there was also an imperial supreme court of arbitration. [Sidenote: 1495] The first imperial tax was levied in 1422 to equip a force against the Hussites. In the fifteenth century also the rudiments of a central administration were laid in the division of the realm into ten "circles," and the levy of a small number of soldiers. And yet, at the time of the Reformation, the Empire was little better than a state in dissolution through the centrifugal forces of feudalism.
So little was the Empire an individual unit that the policy of her rulers themselves was not imperial. The statesmanship of Maximilian was something smaller than national; it was that of his Archduchy of Austria. The policy of his successor, on the other hand, was determined by something larger than Germany, the consideration of the Spanish and Burgundian states that he also ruled. Maximilian tried in every way to aggrandize his personal power, not that of the German Nation. [Sidenote: Maximilian I, 1493-1519] The Diet of Worms of 1495 tried to remodel the constitution. It proclaimed a perpetual public peace, provided that those who broke it should be outlawed, and placed the duty of executing the ban upon all territories within ninety miles of the offender. It also passed a bill for taxation, called the "common penny," which combined features of a poll tax, an {76} income tax and a property tax. The difficulty of collecting it was great; Maximilian himself as a territorial prince tried to evade it instead of setting his subjects the good example of paying it. He probably derived no more than the trifling sum of 50,000-100,000 gulden from it annually. The Diet also revived the Supreme Court and gave it a permanent home at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Feeble efforts to follow up this beginning of reform were made in subsequent Diets, but they failed owing to the insuperable jealousies of the princes and because the party of national unity lost the sympathy of the common people, to whom alone they could look for support.
Maximilian's external policy, though adventurous and unstable, was somewhat more successful. His only principle was to grasp whatever opportunity seemed to offer. Thus at one time he seriously proposed to have himself elected pope. His marriage with Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, added to the estates of his house Burgundy—the land comprising what is now Belgium, Luxemburg, most of Holland and large portions of north-eastern France. On the death of Mary, in 1482, Maximilian had much trouble in getting himself acknowledged as regent of her lands for their son Philip the Handsome. A part of the domain he also lost in a war with France. This was more than made up, however, by the brilliant match he made for Philip in securing for him the hand of Mad Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. This marriage produced two sons, Charles and Ferdinand. The deaths of Isabella (1504), of Philip (1506) and of Ferdinand of Aragon (1516) left Charles at the age of sixteen the ruler of Burgundy and of Spain with its immense dependencies in Italy and in America. [Sidenote: Charles V, 1500-1558] From this time forth the policy of Maximilian concentrated in the effort to {77} secure the succession of his eldest grandson to the imperial throne.
When Maximilian died on January 12, 1519, there were several candidates for election. So little was the office considered national that the kings of France and England entered the lists, and the former, Francis I, actually at one time secured the promise of votes from the majority of electors. Pope Leo made explicit engagements to both Charles and Francis to support their claims, and at the same time instructed his legate to labor for the choice of a German prince, either Frederic of Saxony, if he would in return give up Luther, or else Joachim of Brandenburg. But at no time was the election seriously in doubt. The electors followed the only possible course in choosing Charles on June 28. They profited, however, by the rivalry of the rich king of France to extort enormous bribes and concessions from Charles. The banking house of Fugger supplied the necessary funds, and in addition the agents of the emperor-elect were obliged to sign a "capitulation" making all sorts of concessions to the princes. One of these, exacted by Frederic of Saxony in the interest of Luther, was that no subject should be outlawed without being heard.
The settlement of the imperial election enabled the pope once more to turn his attention to the suppression of the rapidly growing heresy. After the Leipzig debate the universities of Cologne and Louvain had condemned Luther's positions. Eck went to Rome in March, 1520, and impressed the curia, which was already planning a bull condemning the heretic, with the danger of delay. After long discussions the bull Exsurge Domine was ratified by the College of Cardinals and promulgated by Leo on June 15. [Sidenote: Bull against Luther, 1520] In this, forty-one of Luther's sayings, relating to the sacraments of penance and the eucharist, to indulgences and {78} the power of the pope, to free will and purgatory, and to a few other matters, were anathematized as heretical or scandalous or false or offensive to pious ears. His books were condemned and ordered to be burnt, and unless he should recant within sixty days of the posting of the bull in Germany he was to be considered a heretic and dealt with accordingly. Eck was entrusted with the duty of publishing this fulmination in Germany, and performed the task in the last days of September.
The time given Luther in which to recant therefore expired two months later. Instead of doing so he published several answers to "the execrable bull of Anti-christ," and on December 10 publicly and solemnly burnt it, together with the whole Canon Law. This he had come to detest, partly as containing the "forged decretals," partly as the sanction for a vast mechanism of ecclesiastical use and abuse, repugnant to his more personal theology. The dramatic act, which sent a thrill throughout Europe, symbolized the passing of some medieval accretions on primitive Christianity. There was nothing left for the pope but to excommunicate the heretic, as was done in the bull Decet Pontificem Romanum drawn up at Rome in January, [Sidenote: 1521] and published at Worms on May 6.
In the meantime Charles had come to Germany. For more than a year after his election he remained in Spain, where his position was very insecure on account of the revolt against his Burgundian officers. Arriving in the Netherlands in the summer of 1520 Charles was met by the special nuncios of the pope, Caracciolo and Aleander. After he was crowned emperor at Aix-la-Chapelle, he opened his first Diet, at Worms. [Sidenote: October 23, 1520 January 27, 1521 The Diet of Worms]
Before this august assembly came three questions of highest import. The first related to the dynastic {79} policy of the Hapsburgs. For the chronic war with France an army of 24,000 men and a tax of 128,000 gulden was voted. The disposition of Württemberg caused some trouble. Duke Ulrich had been deposed for rebellion in 1518, and his land taken from him by the Swabian League and sold to the emperor in 1520. Together with the Austrian lands, which Charles secretly handed over to his young brother Ferdinand, this territory made the nucleus of Hapsburg power in Germany.
The Diet then took up the question of constitutional reform. In order to have a permanent administrative body, necessary during the long absences of the emperor, an Imperial Council of Regency was established and given a seat at Nuremberg. [Sidenote: Council of Regency] The emperor nominated the president and four of the twenty-two other members; each of the six German electors nominated one member; six were chosen by the circles into which the Empire was divided and six were elected by the other estates. The powers of the council were limited to the times when the emperor was away.
The third question treated by the Diet was the religious one. As usual, they drew up a long list of grievances against the pope, to which many good Catholics in the assembly subscribed. Next they considered what to do with Luther. Charles himself, who could speak no language but French, and had no sympathy whatever with a rebel from any authority spiritual or temporal, would much have preferred to outlaw the Wittenberg professor at once, but he was bound by his promise to Frederic of Saxony. Of the six electors, who sat apart from the other estates, Frederic was strongly for Luther, the Elector Palatine was favorably inclined towards him, and the Archbishop of Mayence represented a mediating policy. The other three electors were opposed. Among the {80} lesser princes a considerable minority was for Luther, whereas among the representatives of the free cities and of the knights, probably a majority were his followers. The common people, though unrepresented, applauded Luther, and their clamors could not pass unheeded even by the aristocratic members of the Diet. [Sidenote: February 13] The debate was opened by Aleander in a speech dwelling on the sacramental errors of the heretic and the similarity of his movement to that of the detested Bohemians. After a stormy session the estates decided to summon the bold Saxon before them and accordingly a citation, together with a safe-conduct, was sent him.
Though there was some danger in obeying the summons, Luther's journey to Worms, was a triumphal progress. Brought before the Diet in the late afternoon of April 17, he was asked if a certain number of books, the titles of which were read, were his and if he would recant the heresy contained in them. The form of the questions took him by surprise, for he had expected to be confronted with definite charges and to be allowed to defend his positions. He accordingly asked for time, and was granted one more day. [Sidenote: April 18, 1521] On his second appearance he made a great oration admitting that the books were his and closing with the words:
Unless I am convicted by Scripture or by right reason (for I trust neither popes nor councils since they have often erred and contradicted themselves) . . . I neither can nor will recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen.
There he stood, braving the world, for he could do no other. . . . He left the hall the hero of his nation.
Hoping still to convince him of error, Catholic theologians held protracted but fruitless conferences with him before his departure from Worms on the 26th of {81} April. The sympathy of the people with him was shown by the posting at Worms of placards threatening his enemies. Charles was sincerely shocked and immediately drew up a statement that he would hazard life and lands on the maintenance of the Catholic faith of his fathers. An edict was drafted by Aleander on the model of one promulgated in September in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: Luther banned] The Edict of Worms put Luther under the ban of the Empire, commanded his surrender to the government at the expiration of his safe-conduct, and forbade all to shelter him or to read his writings. Though dated on May 8, to make it synchronize with a treaty between Charles and Leo, the Edict was not passed by the Diet until May 26. At this time many of the members had gone home, and the law was forced on the remaining ones, contrary to the wishes of the majority, by intrigue and imperial pressure.
After leaving Worms Luther was taken by his prince, Frederic the Wise, and placed for safe-keeping in the Wartburg, a fine old castle near Eisenach. [Sidenote: The Wartburg] Here he remained in hiding for nearly a year, while doing some of his most important work. Here he wrote his treatise On Monastic Vows, declaring that they are wrong and invalid and urging all priests, nuns and monks to leave the cloister and to marry. In thus freeing thousands of men and women from a life often unproductive and sterile Luther achieved one of the greatest of his practical reforms. At the Wartburg also Luther began his translation of the Bible. The New Testament appeared in September 1522, and the Old Testament followed in four parts, the last published in 1532.
[Sidenote: The radicals]
While Luther was in retirement at the Wartburg, his colleagues Carlstadt and Melanchthon, and the Augustinian friar Gabriel Zwilling, took up the movement at Wittenberg and carried out reforms more radical {82} than those of their leader. The endowments of masses were confiscated and applied to the relief of the poor on new and better principles. Prostitution was suppressed. A new order of divine service was introduced, in which the words purporting that the mass was a sacrifice were omitted, and communion was given to the laity in both kinds. Priests were urged to marry, and monks were almost forced to leave the cloister. An element of mob violence early manifested itself both at Wittenberg and elsewhere. An outbreak at Erfurt against the clergy occurred in June, 1521, and by the end of the year riots took place at Wittenberg.
Even now, at the dawn of the revolution, appeared the beginnings of those sects, more radical than the Lutheran, commonly known as Anabaptist. The small industrial town of Zwickau had long been a hotbed of Waldensian heresy. Under the guidance of Thomas Münzer the clothweavers of this place formed a religious society animated by the desire to renovate both church and state by the readiest and roughest means. Suppression of the movement at Zwickau by the government resulted only in the banishment, or escape, of some of the leaders. [Sidenote: December 27, 1521] Three of them found their way to Wittenberg, where they proclaimed themselves prophets divinely inspired, and conducted a revival marked with considerable, though harmless, extravagance.
[Sidenote: January 20, 1522]
As the radicals at Wittenberg made the whole of Northern Germany uneasy, the Imperial Council of Regency issued a mandate forbidding all the innovations and commanding the Elector of Saxony to stop them. It is remarkable that Luther in this felt exactly as did the Catholics. Early in March he returned to Wittenberg with the express purpose of checking the reforms which had already gone too far {83} for him. His personal ascendency was so great that he found no trouble in doing so. Not only the Zwickau prophets, but Carlstadt and Zwilling were discredited. Almost all their measures were repealed, including those on divine service which was again restored almost to the Catholic form. Not until 1525 were a simple communion service and the use of German again introduced.
[Sidenote: Rebellion of the knights, 1522-3]
It soon became apparent that all orders and all parts of Germany were in a state of ferment. The next manifestation of the revolutionary spirit was the rebellion of the knights. This class, now in a state of moral and economic decay, had long survived any usefulness it had ever had. The rise of the cities, the aggrandizement of the princes, and the change to a commercial from a feudal society all worked to the disadvantage of the smaller nobility and gentry. About the only means of livelihood left them was freebooting, and that was adopted without scruple and without shame. Envious of the wealthy cities, jealous of the greater princes and proud of their tenure immediately from the emperor, the knights longed for a new Germany, more centralized, more national, and, of course, under their special direction. In the Lutheran movement they thought they saw their opportunity; in Ulrich von Hutten they found their trumpet, in Francis von Sickingen their sword. A knight himself, but with possessions equal to those of many princes, a born warrior, but one who knew how to use the new weapons, gold and cannon, Sickingen had for years before he heard of Luther kept aggrandizing his power by predatory feuds. So little honor had he, that though appointed to high military command in the campaign against France, he tried to win personal advantage by treason, playing off the emperor against King Francis, with whom, for a long time, he almost {84} openly sided. In 1520 he fell under the influence of Hutten, who urged him to espouse the cause of the "gospel" as that of German liberty. By August 1522 he became convinced that the time was ripe for action, and issued a manifesto proclaiming that the feudal dues had become unbearable, and giving the impression that he was acting as an ally of Luther, although the latter knew nothing of his intentions and would have heartily disapproved of his methods.
Sickingen's first march was against Trèves. The archbishop's "unchristian cannon" forced him to retire from this city. On October 10 the Council of Regency declared him an outlaw. A league formed by Trèves, the Palatinate and Hesse, defeated him and captured his castle at Landstuhl in May, 1523. Mortally wounded he died on May 7.
Alike unhurt and unhelped by such incidents as the revolt of the knights, the main current of religious revolution swept onwards. Leo X died on December 1, 1521, and in his place was elected Adrian of Utrecht, a man of very different character. [Sidenote: Adrian VI, 1522-33] Though he had already taken a strong stand against Luther, he was deeply resolved to reform the corruption of the church. To the Diet called at Nuremberg [Sidenote: Diet of Nuremberg, 1522] in the latter part of 1522 he sent as legate Chieregato with a brief demanding the suppression of the schism. It was monstrous, said he, that one little brother should seduce a whole nation from the path trodden by so many martyrs and learned doctors. Do you suppose, he asked, that the people will longer respect civil government if they are taught to despise the canons and decrees of the spiritual power? At the same time Adrian wrote to Chieregato:
Say that we frankly confess that God permits this
persecution of his church on account of the sins of men,
especially those of the priests and prelates. . . . We
{85}
know that in this Holy See now for some years there have
been many abominations, abuses in spiritual things,
excesses in things commanded, in short, that all has become
perverted. . . . We have all turned aside in our ways,
nor was there, for a long time, any who did right,—no,
not one.
This confession rather strengthened the reform party, than otherwise, making its demands seem justified; and all that the Diet did towards the settlement of the religious question was to demand that a council, with representation of the laity, should be called in a German city. A long list of grievances against the church was again drawn up and laid before the emperor.
The same Diet took up other matters. The need for reform and the impotence of the Council of Regency had both been demonstrated by the Sickingen affair. A law against monopolies was passed, limiting the capital of any single company to fifty thousand gulden. In order to provide money for the central government a customs duty of 4 per cent. ad valorem was ordered. Both these measures weighed on the cities, which accordingly sent an embassy to Charles. They succeeded in inducing him to disallow both laws.
[Sidenote: Diet of Nuremberg, 1524]
The next Diet, which assembled at Nuremberg early in 1524, naturally refrained from passing more futile laws for the emperor to veto, but on the other hand it took a stronger stand than ever on the religious question. The Edict of Worms was still nominally in force and was still to all intents and purposes flouted. Luther was at large and his followers were gaining. In reply to a demand from the government that the Edict should be strictly carried out, the Diet passed a resolution that it should be observed by each state as far as its prince deemed it possible. Despairing of an oecumenical council the estates demanded that a {86} German national synod be called at Spires before the close of the year with power to decide on what was to be done for the time being.
There is no doubt that by this time the public opinion of North Germany, at least, was thoroughly Lutheran. Ferdinand hardly exaggerated when he wrote his brother that throughout the Empire there was scarce one person in a thousand not infected with the new doctrines. [Sidenote: 1523] The place now occupied by newspapers and weekly reviews was taken by a vast swarm of pamphlets, most of which have survived. [Sidenote: Popular pamphlets] Those of the years immediately following the Diet of Worms reveal the first enthusiasm of the people for the "gospel." The greater part of the broadsides produced are concerned with the leader and his doctrines. The comparison of him to Huss was a favorite one. One pamphleteer, at least, drew the parallel between his trial at Worms and that of Christ before Pilate. The whole bent of men's minds was theological. Doctrines which now seem a little quaint and trite were argued with new fervor by each writer. The destruction of images, the question of the real presence in the sacrament, justification by faith, and free will were disputed. Above all the Bible was lauded in the new translation, and the priests continued, as before, to be the favorite butt of sarcasm.
Among the very many writers of these tracts the playwright of Nuremberg, Hans Sachs, took a prominent place. In 1523 he published his poem on "the Nightingale of Wittenberg, whose voice sounds in the glorious dawn over hill and dale." This bird is, of course, Luther, and the fierce lion who has sought his life is Leo. [Sidenote: Hans Sachs] The next year Hans Sachs published no less than three pamphlets favoring the reform. They were: 1. A Disputation between a Canon and a Shoemaker, defending the Word of God and the Christian {87} Estate. 2. Conversation on the Hypocritical Works of the Clergy and their Vows, by which they hope to be saved to the disparagement of Christ's Blood. 3. A Dialogue against the Roman Avarice. Multiply these pamphlets, the contents of which is indicated by their titles, by one hundred, and we arrive at some conception of the pabulum on which the people grew to Protestantism. Of course there were many pamphlets on the other side, but here, as in a thousand other cases, the important thing proved to be to have the cause ventilated. So long as discussion was forced in the channels selected by the reformers, even the interest excited by their adversaries redounded ultimately to their advantage.
[Sidenote: The Peasants' War, 1524-5]
The denunciation of authority, together with the message of the excellence of the humblest Christian and the brotherhood of man, powerfully contributed to the great rising of the lower classes, known as the Peasants' War, in 1524-5. It was not, as the name implied, confined to the rustics, for probably as large a proportion of the populace of cities as of the tillers of the soil joined it. Nor was there in it anything entirely new. The cry for justice was of long standing, and every single element of the revolt, including the hatred of the clergy and demand for ecclesiastical reform, is to be found also in previous risings. Thus, the rebellion of peasants under Hans Böhm, commonly called the Piper of Niklashausen, in 1476, was brought about by a religious appeal. The leader asserted that he had special revelations from the Virgin Mary that serfdom was to be abolished, and the kingdom of God to be introduced by the levelling of all social ranks; and he produced miracles to certify his divine calling. There had also been two risings, closely connected, the first, in 1513, deriving its name of "Bundschuh" from the peasant's tied shoe, a class emblem, and the {88} second, in 1514, called "Poor Conrad" after the peasant's nickname. If the memory of the suppression of all these revolts might dampen the hopes of the poor, on the other hand the successful rise of the Swiss democracy was a perpetual example and encouragement to them.
[Sidenote: Causes]
The most fundamental cause of all these risings alike was, of course, the cry of the oppressed for justice. This is eternal, as is also one of the main alignments into which society usually divides itself, the opposition of the poor and the rich. It is therefore not very important to inquire whether the lot of the third estate was getting better or worse during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In either case there was a great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown off. But the question is not uninteresting in itself. As there are diametrically opposite answers to it, both in the testimony of contemporaries and in the opinion of modern scholars, it is perhaps incapable of being answered. In some districts, and in some respects, the lot of the poor was becoming a little easier; in other lands and in different ways it was becoming harder. The time was one of general prosperity, in which the peasant often shared. The newer methods of agriculture, manufacture and commerce benefited him who knew how to take advantage of them. That some did so may be inferred from the statement of Sebastian Brant that the rustics dress like nobles, in satin and gold chains. On the other hand the rising prices would bear hard on those laborers dependent on fixed wages, though relieving the burden of fixed rents. The whole people, except the merchants, disliked the increasing cost of living and legislated against it to the best of their ability. Complaints against monopoly were common, and the Diets sometimes enacted laws against them. Foreign trade was looked on with {89} suspicion as draining the country of silver and gold. Again, although the peasants benefited by the growing stability of government, they felt as a grievance the introduction of the new Roman law with its emphasis upon the rights of property and of the state. Burdens directly imposed by the territorial governments were probably increasing. If the exactions from the landlords were not becoming greater, it was simply because they were always at a maximum. At no time was the rich gentleman at a loss to find law and precedent for wringing from his serfs and tenants all that they could possibly pay. [Sidenote: Peasant classes] The peasants were of three classes: the serfs, the tenants who paid a quit-rent, and hired laborers. The former, more than the others, perhaps, had now arrived at the determination to assert their rights. For them the Peasants' War was the inevitable break with a long economic past, now intolerable and hopeless. There is some evidence to show that the number of serfs was increasing. This process, by menacing the freedom of the others, united all in the resolve to stop the gradual enslavement of their class, to reckon with those who benefited by it.
How little now there was in the ideals of the last and most terrible of the peasant risings may be seen by a study of the programs of reform put forward from time to time during the preceding century. There is nothing in the manifestos of 1525 that may not be found in the pamphlets of the fifteenth century. The grievances are the same, and the hope of a completely renovated and communized society is the same. One of the most influential of these socialistic pamphlets was the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund, written by an Augsburg clergyman about 1438, first printed in 1476, and reprinted a number of times before the end of the century. Its title bears witness to the Messianic belief of the people that one of their {90} great, old emperors should sometime return and restore the world to a condition of justice and happiness. The present tract preached that "obedience was dead and justice sick"; it attacked serfdom as wicked, denounced the ecclesiastical law and demanded the freedom given by Christ.
The same doctrine, adapted to the needs of the time, is preached in the Reformation of the Emperor Frederic III, published anonymously in 1523. Though more radical than Luther it reflects some of his ideas. Still more, however, does it embody the reforms proposed at Nuremberg in 1523. It may probably have been written by George Rüxner, called Jerusalem, an Imperial Herald prominent in these circles. It advocated the abolition of all taxes and tithes, the repeal of all imperial civil laws, the reform of the clergy, the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and the limitation of the amount of capital allowed any one merchant to 10,000 gulden.
Though there was nothing new in either the manner of oppression or in the demands of the third estate during the last decade preceding the great rebellion, there does seem to be a new atmosphere, or tone, in the literature addressed to the lower classes. While on the one hand the poor were still mocked and insulted as they always had been by foolish and heartless possessors of inherited wealth and position, from other quarters they now began to be also flattered and courted. The peasant became in the large pamphlet literature of the time an ideal figure, the type of the plain, honest, God-fearing man. [Sidenote: The peasant idealized] Nobles like Duke Ulrich of Württemberg affected to be called by popular nicknames. Carlstadt and other learned men proclaimed that the peasant knew better the Word of God and the way of salvation than did the learned. Many radical preachers, especially the Anabaptist {91} Münzer, carried the message of human brotherhood to the point of communism. There were a number of lay preachers, the most celebrated being the physician Hans Maurer, who took the sobriquet "Karsthans." This name, "the man with the hoe," soon became one of the catch-words of the time, and made its way into popular speech as a synonym for the simple and pious laborer. Hutten took it up and urged the people to seize flails and pitchforks and smite the clergy and the pope as they would the devil. [Sidenote: 1521] Others preached hatred of the Jews, of the rich, of lawyers. Above all they appealed to the Bible as the devine law, and demanded a religious reform as a condition and preliminary to a thorough renovation of society. Although Luther himself from the first opposed all forms of violence, his clarion voice rang out in protest against the injustice of the nobles. "The people neither can nor will endure your tyranny any longer," he said to them in 1523, "God will not endure it; the world is not what it once was when you drove and hunted men like wild beasts."
The rising began at Stühlingen, not far from the Swiss frontier, in June 1524, and spread with considerable rapidity northward, until the greater part of Germany was in the throes of revolution. The rebels were able to make headway because most of the regular troops had been withdrawn to the Turkish front or to Italy to fight the emperor's battle against France. In South Germany, during the first six months, the gatherings of peasants and townsmen were eminently peaceable. They wished only to negotiate with their masters and to secure some practical reforms. But when the revolt spread to Franconia and Saxony, a much more radically socialistic program was developed and the rebels showed themselves readier to enforce their demands by arms. For the year 1524 there {92} was no general manifesto put forward, but there were negotiations between the insurgents and their quondam masters. In this district or in that, lists of very specific grievances were presented and redress demanded. In some cases merely to gain time, in others sincerely, the lords consented to reply to these petitions. They denied this or that charge, and they promised to end this or that form of oppression. Neither side was prepared for civil war. In all it was more like a modern strike than anything else.
In the early months of 1525 several programs were drawn up of a more general nature than those previously composed, and yet by no means radical. The most famous of these was called The Twelve Articles, printed and widely circulated in February. [Sidenote: The Twelve Articles] The exact place at which they originated is unknown. The authorship has been much disputed, and necessarily so, for they were the work of no one brain, but were as composite a production as is the Constitution of the United States. The material in them is drawn from the mouths of a whole people. Far more than in other popular writings one feels that they are the genuine expression of the public opinion of a great class. Probably their draftsman was Sebastian Lotzer, the tanner who for years past had preached apostolic communism. It is not impossible that the Anabaptist Balthasar Hübmaier had a hand in them. Their demands are moderate and would be considered matters of self-evident justice to-day. The first article is for the right of each community to choose its own pastor. The second protests against the minor tithes on vegetables paid to the clergy, though expressly admitting the legality of the tithes on grain. The third article demands freedom for the serfs, the fourth and fifth, ask for the right to hunt and to cut wood in the forests. The sixth, seventh and eighth articles {93} protest against excessive forced labor, illegal payments and exorbitant rents. The ninth article denounces the new (Roman) law, and requests the reëstablishment of the old (German) law. The tenth article voices the indignation of the poor at the enclosure by the rich of commons and other free land. The eleventh demands the abolition of the heriot, or inheritance-tax, by which the widow of a rustic was obliged to yield to her lord the best head of cattle or other valuable possession. The final article expresses the willingness of the insurgents to have all their demands submitted to the Word of God. Both here and in the preamble the entire assimilation of divine and human law is postulated, and the charge that the Lutheran Gospel caused sedition, is met.
[Sidenote: Other manifestos]
Though the Twelve Articles were adopted by more of the bands of peasants than was any other program, yet there were several other manifestos drawn up about the same time. Thus, in the Fifty-nine Articles of the Stühlingen peasants the same demands are put forth with much more detail. The legal right to trial by due process of law is asserted, and vexatious payments due to a lord when his peasant marries a woman from another estate, are denounced. But here, too, and elsewhere, the fundamental demands were the same: freedom from serfdom, from oppressive taxation and forced labor, and for unrestricted rights of hunting and woodcutting in the forests. Everywhere there is the same claim that the rights of the people are sanctioned by the law of God, and generally the peasants assume that they are acting in accordance with the new "gospel" of Luther. The Swabians expressly submitted their demands to the arbitration of a commission of four to consist of a representative of the emperor, Frederic of Saxony, Luther and either Melanchthon or Bugenhagen.
{94} When the revolt reached the central part of Germany it became at once more socialistic and more bloody. [Sidenote: Münzer] The baleful eloquence of Thomas Münzer was exerted at Mühlhausen to nerve the people to strike down the godless with pitiless sword. Already in September 1524 he preached: "On! on! on! This is the time when the wicked are as fearful as hounds. . . . Regard not the cries of the godless. . . . On, while the fire is hot. Let not your swords be cold from blood. Smite bang, bang on the anvil of Nimrod; cast his tower to the ground!" Other leaders took up the message and called for the extirpation of the tyrants, including both the clergy and the lords. Communism was demanded as in the apostolic age; property was denounced as wrong. Regulation of prices was one measure put forward, and the committing of the government of the country to a university another.
The propaganda of deeds followed close upon the propaganda of words. During the spring of 1525 in central Germany forty-six cloisters and castles were burned to the ground, while violence and rapine reigned supreme with all the ferocity characteristic of class warfare. On Easter Sunday, April 16, one of the best-armed bands of peasants, under one of the most brutal leaders, Jäcklein Rohrbach, attacked Weinsberg. The count and his small garrison of eighteen knights surrendered and were massacred by the insurgents, who visited mockery and insult upon the countess and her daughters. Many of the cities joined the peasants, and for a short time it seemed as if the rebellion might be successful.
[Sidenote: Suppression of the rising]
But in fact the insurgents were poorly equipped, untrained, without coöperation or leadership. As soon as the troops which won the battle of Pavia in Italy were sent back to Germany the whole movement collapsed. [Sidenote: February 24, 1525] The Swabian League inflicted decisive {95} defeats upon the rebels at Leipheim on April 4, and at Wurzach ten days later. Other blows followed in May. In the center of Germany the Saxon Electorate lay supine. Frederic the Wise died in the midst of the tumult [Sidenote: May 5, 1525] after expressing his opinion that it was God's will that the common man should rule, and that it would be wrong to resist the divine decree. His young neighbor, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, acted vigorously. After coming to terms with his own subjects by negotiations, he raised troops and met a band of insurgents at Frankenhausen. He wished to treat with them also, but Münzer's fanaticism, promising the deluded men supernatural aid, nerved them to reject all terms. In the very ancient German style they built a barricade of wagons, and calmly awaited the attack of the soldiers. [Sidenote: May 15] Undisciplined and poorly armed, almost at the first shot they broke and fled in panic, more than half of them perishing on the field. Münzer was captured, and, after having been forced by torture to sign a confession of his misdeeds, was executed. After this there was no strength left in the peasant cause. The lords, having gained the upper hand, put down the rising with great cruelty. The estimates of the numbers of peasants slain vary so widely as to make certainty impossible. Perhaps a hundred thousand in all perished. The soldiers far outdid the rebels in savage reprisals. The laborers sank back into a more wretched state than before; oppression stalked with less rebuke than ever through the land.
[Sidenote: Defections from Luther]
In the sixteenth century politics were theological. The groups into which men divided had religious slogans and were called churches, but they were also political parties. The years following the Diet of {96} Worms saw the crystallization of a new group, which was at first liberal and reforming and later, as it grew in stability, conservative. At Worms almost all the liberal forces in Germany had been behind Luther, the intellectuals, the common people with their wish for social amelioration, and those to whom the religious issue primarily appealed. But this support offered by public opinion was vague; in the next years it became, both more definite and more limited. At the same time that city after city and state after state was openly revolting from the pope, until the Reformers had won a large constituency in the Imperial Diets and a place of constitutional recognition, there was going on another process by which one after another certain elements at first inclined to support Luther fell away from him. During these years he violently dissociated himself from the extreme radicals and thus lost the support of the proletariat. In the second place the growing definiteness and narrowness of his dogmatism and his failure to show hospitality to science and philosophy alienated a number of intellectuals. Third, a great schism weakened the Protestant church. But these losses were counterbalanced by two gains. The first was the increasing discipline and coherence of the new churches; the second was their gradual but rapid attainment of the support of the middle and governing classes in many German states.
[Sidenote: The Radicals]
Luther's struggle with radicalism had begun within a year after his stand at Worms. He had always been consistently opposed to mob violence, even when he might have profited by it. At Worms he disapproved Hutten's plans for drawing the sword against the Romanists. When, from his "watchtower," he first spied the disorders at Wittenberg, he wrote that notwithstanding the great provocation given to the common man by the clergy, yet tumult was the work of {97} the devil. When he returned home he preached that the only weapon the Christian ought to use was the Word. "Had I wished it," said he then, "I might have brought Germany to civil war. Yes, at Worms I might have started a game that would not have been safe for the emperor, but it would have been a fool's game. So I did nothing, but only let the Word act." Driven from Wittenberg, the Zwickau prophets, assisted by Thomas Münzer, continued their agitation elsewhere. As long as their propaganda was peaceful Luther was inclined to tolerate it. "Let them teach what they like," said he, "be it gospel or lies." But when they began to preach a campaign of fire and sword, Luther wrote, in July 1524, to his elector begging him "to act vigorously against their storming and ranting, in order that God's kingdom may be advanced by word only, as becomes Christians, and that all cause of sedition may be taken from the multitude [Herr Omnes, literally Mr. Everybody], more than enough inclined to it already."
When the revolt at last broke out Luther was looked up to and appealed to by the people as their champion. In April 1525 he composed an Exhortation to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants, [Sidenote: Exhortation to Peace] in which he distributed the blame for the present conditions liberally, but impartially, on both sides, aristocrats and peasants. To the former he said that their tyranny, together with that of the clergy had brought this punishment on themselves, and that God intended to smite them. To the peasants he said that no tyranny was excuse for rebellion. Of their articles he approved of two only, that demanding the right to choose their pastors and that denouncing the heriot or death-duty. Their second demand, for repeal of some of the tithes, he characterized as robbery, and the third, for freedom of the serf, as unjustified because it made Christian {98} liberty a merely external thing, and because Paul had said that the bondman should not seek to be free (I Cor. vii, 20 f). The other articles were referred to legal experts.
Hardly had this pamphlet come from the press before Luther heard of the deeds of violence of Rohrbach and his fellows. Fearing that complete anarchy would result from the triumph of the insurgents, against whom no effective blow had yet been struck, he wrote a tract Against the Thievish, Murderous Hordes of Peasants. [Sidenote: The peasants denounced] In this he denounced them with the utmost violence of language, and urged the government to smite them without pity. Everyone should avoid a peasant as he would the devil, and should join the forces to slay them like mad dogs. "If you die in battle against them," said he to the soldiers, "you could never have a more blessed end, for you die obedient to God's Word in Romans 13, and in the service of love to free your neighbor from the bands of hell and the devil." A little later he wrote: "It is better that all the peasants be killed than that the princes and magistrates perish, because the rustics took the sword without divine authority. The only possible consequence of their Satanic wickedness would be the diabolic devastation of the kingdom of God." And again: "One cannot argue reasonably with a rebel, but one must answer him with the fist so that blood flows from his nose." Melanchthon entirely agreed with his friend. "It is fairly written in Ecclesiasticus xxxiii," said he, "that as the ass must have fodder, load, and whip, so must the servant have bread, work, and punishment. These outward, bodily servitudes are needful, but this institution [serfdom] is certainly pleasing to God."
Inevitably such an attitude alienated the lower classes. From this time, many of them looked not to {99} the Lutheran but to the more radical sects, called Anabaptists, for help. The condition of the Empire at this time was very similar to that of many countries today, where we find two large upper and middle-class parties, the conservative (Catholic) and liberal (Protestant) over against the radical or socialistic (Anabaptist).
[Sidenote: The Anabaptists]
The most important thing about the extremists was not their habit of denying the validity of infant baptism and of rebaptizing their converts, from which they derived their name. What really determined their view-point and program was that they represented the poor, uneducated, disinherited classes. The party of extreme measures is always chiefly constituted from the proletariat because it is the very poor who most pressingly feel the need for change and because they have not usually the education to judge the feasibility of the plans, many of them quack nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes. A complete break with the past and with the existing order has no terrors for them, but only promise.
A radical party almost always includes men of a wide variety of opinions. So the sixteenth century classed together as Anabaptists men with not only divergent but with diametrically opposite views on the most vital questions. Their only common bond was that they all alike rejected the authoritative, traditional and aristocratic organization of both of the larger churches and the pretensions of civil society. It is easy to see that they had no historical perspective, and that they tried to realize the ideals of primitive Christianity, as they understood it, without reckoning the vast changes in culture and other conditions, and yet it is impossible not to have a deep sympathy with the men most of whose demands were just and who sealed their faith with perpetual martyrdom. {100} [Sidenote: Spread of radicalism] Notwithstanding the heavy blow to reform given in the crushing of the peasants' rising, radical doctrines continued to spread among the people. As the poor found their spiritual needs best supplied in the conventicle of dissent, official Lutheranism became an established church, predominantly an aristocratic and middle-class party of vested interest and privilege.
It is sometimes said that the origin and growth of the Anabaptists was due to the German translation of the Bible. This is not true and yet there is little doubt that the publication of the German version in 1522 and the years immediately following, stimulated the growth of many sects. The Bible is such a big book, and capable of so many different interpretations, that it is not strange that a hundred different schemes of salvation should have been deduced from it by those who came to it with different prepossessions. While many of the Anabaptists were perfect quietists, preaching the duty of non-resistance and the wickedness of bearing arms, even in self-defence, others found sanction for quite opposite views in the Scripture, and proclaimed that the godless should be exterminated as the Canaanites had been. In ethical matters some sects practised the severest code of morals, while others were distinguished by laxity. By some marriage was forbidden; others wanted all the marriage they could get and advocated polygamy. The religious meetings were similar to "revivals," frequently of the most hysterical sort. Claiming that they were mystically united to God, or had direct revelations from him, they rejected the ceremonies and sacraments of historic Christianity, and sometimes substituted for them practices of the most absurd, or most doubtful, character. When Melchior Rink preached, his followers howled like dogs, bellowed like cattle, neighed like horses, and brayed like asses—some of them very {101} naturally, no doubt. In certain extreme cases the meetings ended in debauchery, while we know of men who committed murder in the belief that they were directed so to do by special revelation of God. Thus at St. Gall one brother cut another's throat, while one of the saints trampled his wife to death under the influence of the spirit. But it is unfair to judge the whole movement by these excesses.
The new sectaries, of course, ran the gauntlet of persecution. In 1529 the emperor and Diet at Spires passed a mandate against them to this effect: "By the plenitude of our imperial power and wisdom we ordain, decree, oblige, declare, and will that all Anabaptists, men and women who have come to the age of understanding, shall be executed and deprived of their natural life by fire, sword, and the like, according to opportunity and without previous inquisition of the spiritual judges." Lutherans united with Catholics in passing this edict, and showed no less alacrity in executing it. As early as 1525 the Anabaptists were persecuted at Zurich, where one of their earliest communities sprouted. Some of the leaders were drowned, others were banished and so spread their tenets elsewhere. Catholic princes exterminated them by fire and sword. In Lutheran Saxony no less than thirteen of the poor non-conformists were executed, and many more imprisoned for long terms, or banished.
And yet the radical sects continued to grow. The dauntless zeal of Melchior Hofmann braved all for the propagation of their ideas. For a while he found a refuge at Strassburg, but this city soon became too orthodox to hold him. He then turned to Holland, where the seed sowed fell into fertile ground. Two Dutchmen, the baker John Matthys of Haarlem and the tailor John Beuckelssen of Leyden went to the episcopal city of Münster in Westphalia [Sidenote: Münster] near the Dutch {102} border, and rapidly converted the mass of the people to their own belief in the advent of the kingdom of God on earth. An insurrection expelled the bishop's government and installed a democracy in February, 1534. After the death of Matthys on April 5, a rising of the people against the dictatorial power of Beucklessen was suppressed by this fanatic who thereupon crowned himself king under the title of John of Leyden. Communism of goods was introduced and also polygamy. The city was now besieged by its suzerain, the Bishop of Münster, and after horrible sufferings had been inflicted on the population, taken by storm on June 25, 1535. The surviving leaders were put to death by torture.
The defeat itself was not so disastrous to the Anabaptist cause as were the acts of the leaders when in power. As the Reformer Bullinger put it: "God opened the eyes of the governments by the revolt at Münster, and thereafter no one would trust even those Anabaptists who claimed to be innocent." Their lack of unity and organization told against them. Nevertheless the sect smouldered on in the lower classes, constantly subject to the fires of martyrdom, until, toward the close of the century, it attained some cohesion and respectability. The later Baptists, Independents, and Quakers all inherited some portion of its spiritual legacies. To the secular historian its chief interest is in the social teachings, which consistently advocated tolerance, and frequently various forms of anarchy and socialism.
[Sidenote: Defection of the humanists]
Next to the defection of the laboring masses, the severest loss to the Evangelical party in these years was that of a large number of intellectuals, who, having hailed Luther as a deliverer from ecclesiastical bondage, came to see in him another pope, not less {103} tyrannous than he of Rome. Reuchlin the Hebrew scholar and Mutian the philosopher had little sympathy with any dogmatic subtlety. Zasius the jurist was repelled by the haste and rashness of Luther. The so-called "godless painters" of Nuremberg, George Penz and the brothers Hans and Bartholomew Beham, having rejected in large part Christian doctrine, were naturally not inclined to join a new church, even when they deserted the old.
But a considerable number of humanists, and those the greatest, after having welcomed the Reformation in its first, most liberal and hopeful youth, deliberately turned their backs on it and cast in their lot with the Roman communion. The reason was that, whereas the old faith mothered many of the abuses, superstitions, and dogmatisms abominated by the humanists, it had also, at this early stage in the schism, within its close a large body of ripe, cultivated, fairly tolerant opinion. The struggling innovators, on the other hand, though they purged away much obsolete and offensive matter, were forced, partly by their position, partly by the temper of their leaders, to a raw self-assertiveness, a bald concentration on the points at issue, incompatible with winsome wisdom, or with judicial fairness. How the humanists would have chosen had they seen the Index and Loyola, is problematical; but while there was still hope of reshaping Rome to their liking they had little use for Wittenberg.
I admit that for some years I was very favorably
inclined to Luther's enterprise [wrote Crotus Rubeanus in
1531] [Sidenote: Rubeanus], but when I saw that nothing
was left untorn and undefiled . . . I thought the devil
might bring in great evil in the guise of something good,
using Scripture as his shield. So I decided to remain
in the church in which I was baptized, reared and taught.
Even if some fault might be found in it, yet in time it
{104}
might have been proved, sooner, at any rate, than in the
new church which in a few years has been torn by so many sects.
Wilibald Pirckheimer, the Greek scholar and historian of Nuremberg, hailed Luther so warmly at first that he was put under the ban of the bull Exsurge Domine. By 1529, however, he had come to believe him insolent, impudent, either insane or possessed by a devil.
I do not deny [he wrote] that at the beginning all Luther's acts did not seem to be vain, since no good man could be pleased with all those errors and impostures that had accumulated gradually in Christianity. So, with others, I hoped that some remedy might be applied to such great evils, but I was cruelly deceived. For, before the former errors had been extirpated, far more intolerable ones crept in, compared to which the others seemed child's play.
[Sidenote: Appeal to Erasmus]
To Erasmus, the wise, the just, all men turned as to an arbiter of opinion. From the first, Luther counted on his support, and not without reason, for the humanist spoke well of the Theses and commentaries of the Wittenberger. On March 28, 1519, Luther addressed a letter to him, as "our glory and hope," acknowledging his indebtedness and begging for support. Erasmus answered in a friendly way, at the same time sending a message encouraging the Elector Frederic to defend his innocent subject.
Dreading nothing so much as a violent catastrophe, the humanist labored for the next two years to find a peaceful solution for the threatening problem. Seeing that Luther's two chief errors were that he "had attacked the crown of the pope and the bellies of the monks," Erasmus pressed upon men in power the plan of allowing the points in dispute to be settled by an impartial tribunal, and of imposing silence on both parties. At the same time he begged Luther to do nothing {105} violent and urged that his enemies be not allowed to take extreme measures against him. But after the publication of the pamphlets of 1520 and of the bull condemning the heretic, this position became untenable. Erasmus had so far compromised himself in the eyes of the inquisitors that he fled from Louvain in the autumn of 1521, and settled in Basle. He was strongly urged by both parties to come out on one side or the other, and he was openly taunted by Ulrich von Hutten, a hot Lutheran, for cowardice in not doing so. Alienated by this and by the dogmatism and intolerance of Luther's writings, Erasmus finally defined his position in a Diatribe on Free Will. [Sidenote: 1524] As Luther's theory of the bondage of the will was but the other side of his doctrine of justification by faith only—for where God's grace does all there is nothing left for human effort—Erasmus attacked the very center of the Evangelical dogmatic system. The question, a deep psychological and metaphysical one, was much in the air, Valla having written on it a work published in 1518, and Pomponazzi having also composed a work on it in 1520, which was, however, not published until much later. It is noticeable that Erasmus selected this point rather than one of the practical reforms advocated at Wittenberg, with which he was much in sympathy. Luther replied in a volume on The Bondage of the Will reasserting his position more strongly than ever. [Sidenote: 1525] How theological, rather than philosophical, his opinion was may be seen from the fact that while he admitted that a man was free to choose which of two indifferent alternatives he should take, he denied that any of these choices could work salvation or real righteousness in God's eyes. He did not hesitate to say that God saved and damned souls irrespective of merit. Erasmus answered again in a large work, the Hyperaspistes (Heavy-Armed Soldier), which came {106} out in two parts. [Sidenote: 1526-7] In this he offers a general critique of the Lutheran movement. Its leader, he says, is a dogmatist, who never recoils from extremes logically demanded by his premises, no matter how repugnant they may be to the heart of man. But for himself he is a humanist, finding truth in the reason as well as in the Bible, and abhorring paradoxes.
The controversy was not allowed to drop at this point. Many a barbed shaft of wit-winged sarcasm was shot by the light-armed scholar against the ranks of the Reformers. "Where Lutheranism reigns," he wrote Pirckheimer, "sound learning perishes." "With disgust," he confessed to Ber, "I see the cause of Christianity approaching a condition that I should be very unwilling to have it reach . . . While we are quarreling over the booty the victory will slip through our fingers. It is the old story of private interests destroying the commonwealth." Erasmus first expressed the opinion, often maintained since, that Europe was experiencing a gradual revival both of Christian piety and of sound learning, when Luther's boisterous attack plunged the world into a tumult in which both were lost sight of. On March 30, 1527, he wrote to Maldonato:
I brought it about that sound learning, which among the Italians and especially among the Romans savored of nothing but pure paganism, began nobly to celebrate Christ, in whom we ought to boast as the sole author of both wisdom and happiness if we are true Christians. . . . I always avoided the character of a dogmatist, except in certain obiter dicta which seemed to me conducive to correct studies and against the preposterous judgments of men.
In the same letter he tells how hard he had fought the obscurantists, and adds: "While we were waging a fairly equal battle against these monsters, behold {107} Luther suddenly arose and threw the apple of Discord into the world."
In short, Erasmus left the Reformers not because they were too liberal, but because they were too conservative, and because he disapproved of violent methods. His gentle temperament, not without a touch of timidity, made him abhor the tumult and trust to the voice of persuasion. In failing to secure the support of the humanists Protestantism lost heavily, and especially abandoned its chance to become the party of progress. Luther himself was not only disappointed in the disaffection of Erasmus, but was sincerely rebelled by his rationalism. A man who could have the least doubt about a doctrine was to him "an Arian, an atheist, and a skeptic." He went so far as to say that the great Dutch scholar's primary object in publishing the Greek New Testament was to make readers doubtful about the text, and that the chief end of his Colloquies was to mock all piety. Erasmus, whose services to letters were the most distinguished and whose ideal of Christianity was the loveliest, has suffered far too much in being judged by his relation to the Reformation. By a great Catholic[1] he has been called "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," by an eminent Protestant scholar[2] "a John the Baptist and Judas in one."
[Sidenote: Sacramentarian schism]
The battle with the humanists was synchronous with the beginnings of a fierce internecine strife that tore the young evangelical church into two parts. Though the controversy between Luther and his principal rival, Ulrich Zwingli, was really caused by a wide difference of thought on many subjects, it focused its rays, like a burning-glass, upon one point, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the {108} eucharist. The explanation of this mystery evolved in the Middle Ages and adopted by the Lateran Council of 1215, was the theory, called "transubstantiation," that the substance of the bread turned into the substance of the body, and the substance of the wine into the substance of the blood, without the "accidents" of appearance and taste being altered. Some of the later doctors of the church, Durand and Occam, opposed this theory, though they proposed a nearly allied one, called "consubstantiation," that the body and blood are present with the bread and wine. Wyclif and others, among whom was the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, proposed the theory now held in most Protestant churches that the bread and wine are mere symbols of the body and blood.
At the dawn of the Reformation the matter was brought into prominence by the Dutch theologian Hoen, from whom the symbolic interpretation [Sidenote: Symbolism] was adopted first by Carlstadt and then by the Swiss Reformers Zwingli and Oecolampadius. Luther himself wavered. He attacked the sacrifice of the mass, in which he saw a "good work" repugnant to faith, and a great practical abuse, as in the endowed masses for souls, but he finally decided on the question of the real presence that the words "this is my body" were "too strong for him" and meant just what they said.
After a preliminary skirmish with Carlstadt, resulting in the latter's banishment from Saxony, there was a long and bitter war of pens between Wittenberg and the Swiss Reformers. Once the battle was joined it was sure to be acrimonious because of the self-consciousness of each side. Luther always assumed that he had a monopoly of truth, and that those who proposed different views were infringing his copyright, so to speak. "Zwingli, Carlstadt and Oecolampadius would never have known Christ's gospel rightly," he {109} opined, "had not Luther written of it first." He soon compared them to Absalom rebelling against his father David, and to Judas betraying his Master. Zwingli on his side was almost equally sure that he had discovered the truth independently of Luther, and, while expressing approbation of his work, refused to be called by his name. His invective was only a shade less virulent than was that of his opponent.
The substance of the controversy was far from being the straight alignment between reason and tradition that it has sometimes been represented as. Both sides assumed the inerrancy of Scripture and appealed primarily to the same biblical arguments. Luther had no difficulty in proving that the words "hoc est corpus meum" meant that the bread was the body, and he stated that this must be so even if contrary to our senses. Zwingli had no difficulty in proving that the thing itself was impossible, and therefore inferred that the biblical words must be explained away as a figure of speech. In a long and learned controversy neither side convinced the other, but each became so exasperated as to believe the other possessed of the devil. In the spring of 1529 Lutherans joined Catholics at the Diet of Spires in refusing toleration to the Zwinglians. The division of Protestants of course weakened them. Their leading statesman, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, seeing this, did his best to reconcile the leaders. For several years he tried to get them to hold a conference, but in vain. Finally, he succeeded in bringing together at his castle at Marburg on the Lahn, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and a large number of other divines. [Sidenote: Marburg colloquy October 1-3, 1529] The discussion here only served to bring out more strongly the irreconcilability of the two "spirits." Shortly afterwards, when the question of a political alliance came up, the Saxon theologians drafted a memorial stating that {110} they would rather make an agreement with the heathen than with the "sacramentarians." [Sidenote: 1530] The same attitude was preserved at the Diet of Augsburg, where the Lutherans were careful to avoid all appearance of friendship with the Zwinglians lest they should compromise their standing with the Catholics. Zwingli and his friends were hardly less intransigeant.
[Sidenote: October 11, 1531]
When Zwingli died in battle with the Catholic cantons and when Oecolampadius succumbed to a fever a few weeks later, Luther loudly proclaimed that was a judgment of God and a triumph for his own party. Though there was no hope of reconciling the Swiss, the South German Zwinglians, headed by the Strassburg Reformers Bucer and Capito, hastened to come to an understanding with Wittenberg, without which their position would have been extremely perilous. Bucer claimed to represent a middle doctrine, such as was later asserted by Calvin. As no middle ground is possible, the doctrine is unintelligible, being, in fact, nothing but the statement, in strong terms, of two mutually exclusive propositions. After much humiliation the divines succeeded, however, in satisfying Luther, with whom they signed the Wittenberg Concord on May 29, 1536. The Swiss still remained without the pale, and Luther's hatred of them grew with the years. Shortly before his death he wrote that he would testify before the judgment-seat of God his loathing for the sacramentarians. He became more and more conservative, bringing back to the sacrament some of the medieval superstitions he had once expelled. He began again to call it an offering and a sacrifice and again had it elevated in church for the adoration of the faithful. He wavered on this point, because, as he said, he doubted whether it were more his duty to "spite" the papists or the sacramentarians. He finally decided on the latter, "and if necessary," {111} continued he, "I will have the host elevated three, seven, or ten times, for I will not let the devil teach me anything in my church."
[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism in middle and upper classes]
Notwithstanding the bitter controversies just related Lutheranism flourished mightily in the body of the people who were neither peasants nor intellectuals nor Swiss. The appeal was to the upper and middle classes, sufficiently educated to discard some of the medievalism of the Roman Church and impelled also by nationalism and economic self-interest to turn from the tyranny of the pope. City after city and state after state enlisted under the banner of Luther. He continued to appeal to them through the press. As a popular pamphleteer he must be reckoned among the very ablest. His faults, coarseness and unbridled violence of language, did not alienate most of his contemporaries. Even his Latin works, too harshly described by Hallam as "bellowing in bad Latin," were well adapted to the spirit of the age. But nothing like his German writings had ever been seen before. In lucidity and copiousness of language, in directness and vigor, in satire and argument and invective, in humor and aptness of illustration and allusion, the numerous tracts, political and theological, which poured from his pen, surpassed all that had hitherto been written and went straight to the hearts of his countrymen. And he won his battle almost alone, for Melanchthon, though learned and elegant, had no popular gifts, and none of his other lieutenants could boast even second-rate ability.
[Sidenote: German Bible, 1522-32]
Among his many publications a few only can be singled out for special mention. The continuation of the German Bible undoubtedly helped his cause greatly. In many things he could appeal to it against the Roman tradition, and the very fact that he claimed to do so while his opponents by their attitude seemed to {112} shrink from this test, established the Protestant claim to be evangelical, in the eyes of the people. Next came his hymns, many popular, some good and one really great. [Sidenote: Hymns, 1528] Ein' feste Burg has been well called by Heine the Marseillaise of the Reformation. The Longer and Shorter Catechisms [Sidenote: Catechisms, 1529] educated the common people in the evangelical doctrine so well that the Catholics were forced to imitate their enemy, though tardily, by composing, for the first time, catechisms of their own.
Having overthrown much of the doctrine and discipline of the old church Luther addressed himself with admirable vigor and great success to the task of building up a substitute for it. In this the combination of the conservative and at the same time thoroughly popular spirit of the movement manifested itself. In divine service the vernacular was substituted for Latin. New emphasis was placed upon preaching, Bible-reading and hymn-singing. Mass was no longer incomprehensible, but was an act of worship in which all could intelligently participate; bread and wine were both given to the laity, and those words of the canon implying transubstantiation and sacrifice were omitted. Marriage was relegated from the rank of a sacrament to that of a civil contract. Baptism was kept in the old form, even to the detail of exorcizing the evil spirit. Auricular confession was permitted but not insisted upon.
[Sidenote: Church government]
The problems of church government and organization were pressing. Two alternatives, were theoretically possible, Congregationalism or state churches. After some hesitation, Luther was convinced by the extravagances of Münzer and his ilk that the latter was the only practicable course. The governments of the various German states and cities were now given supreme power in ecclesiastical matters. They took over the property belonging to the old church and {113} administered it generally for religious or educational or charitable purposes. A system of church-visitation was started, by which the central authority passed upon the competence of each minister. Powers of appointment and removal were vested in the government. The title and office of bishop were changed in most cases to that of "superintendent," though in some German sees and generally in Sweden the name bishop was retained.
[Sidenote: Lutheran accessions]
How genuinely popular was the Lutheran movement may be seen in the fact that the free cities, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strassburg, Ulm, Lübeck, Hamburg, and many others were the first to revolt from Rome. In other states the government led the way. Electoral Saxony evolved slowly into complete Protestantism. Though the Elector Frederic sympathized with almost everything advanced by his great subject, he was too cautious to interfere with vested interests of ecclesiastical property and endowments. On his death [Sidenote: May 5, 1525] his brother John succeeded to the title, and came out openly for all the reforms advocated at Wittenberg. The neighboring state of Hesse was won about 1524, [Sidenote: 1424-5] though the official ordinance promulgating the evangelical doctrine was not issued until 1526. A very important acquisition was Prussia. [Sidenote: 1525] Hitherto it had been governed by the Teutonic Order, a military society like the Knights Templars. Albert of Brandenburg became Grand Master in 1511, [Sidenote: Albert of Brandenburg, 1490-1568] and fourteen years later saw the opportunity of aggrandizing his personal power by renouncing his spiritual ties. He accordingly declared the Teutonic Order abolished and himself temporal Duke of Prussia, shortly afterwards marrying a daughter of the king of Denmark. He swore allegiance to the king of Poland.
The growth of Lutheranism unmolested by the imperial government was made possible by the {114} absorption of the emperor's energies in his rivalry with France and Turkey and by the decentralization of the Empire. [Sidenote: Leagues] Leagues between groups of German states had been quite common in the past, and a new stimulus to their formation was given by the common religious interest. The first league of this sort was that of Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1524] between Bavaria and other South German principalities; its purpose was to carry out the Edict of Worms. This was followed by a similar league in North Germany between Catholic states, known as the League of Dessau, [Sidenote: 1525] and a Protestant confederation known as the League of Torgau.
[Sidenote: The Diet of Spires, 1526]
The Diet held at Spires in the summer of 1526 witnessed the strength of the new party, for in it the two sides treated on equal terms. Many reforms were proposed, and some carried through against the obstruction by Ferdinand, the emperor's brother and lieutenant. The great question was the enforcement of the Edict of Worms, and on this the Diet passed an act, known as a Recess, providing that each state should act in matters of faith as it could answer to God and the emperor. In effect this allowed the government of every German state to choose between the two confessions, thus anticipating the principle of the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555.
The relations of the two parties were so delicate that it seemed as if a general religious war were imminent. In 1528, this was almost precipitated by a certain Otto von Pack, who assured the Landgrave of Hesse that he had found a treaty between the Catholic princes for the extirpation of the Lutherans and for the expropriation of their champions, the Elector of Saxony and Philip of Hesse himself. This was false, but the Landgrave armed and attacked the Bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg, named by Pack as parties to the treaty, and he forced them to pay an indemnity.
{115}
[Sidenote: Recess of Spires]
The Diet which met at Spires early in 1529 endeavored to deal as drastically as possible with the schism. The Recess passed by the Catholic majority on April 7 was most unfavorable to the Reformers, repealing the Recess of the last Diet in their favor. Catholic states were commanded to execute the persecuting Edict of Worms, although Lutheran states were forbidden to abolish the office of the (Catholic) mass, and also to allow any further innovations in their own doctrines or practices until the calling of a general council. The princes were forbidden to harbor the subjects of another state. The Evangelical members of the Diet, much aggrieved at this blow to their faith, published a Protest [Sidenote: Protest, April 19] taking the ground that the Recess of 1526 had been in the nature of a treaty and could not be abrogated without the consent of both parties to it. As the government of Germany was a federal one, this was a question of "states' rights," such as came up in our own Civil War, but in the German case it was even harder to decide because there was no written Constitution defining the powers of the national government and the states. It might naturally be assumed that the Diet had the power to repeal its own acts, but the Evangelical estates made a further point in their appeal to the emperor, [Sidenote: April 25] by alleging that the Recess of 1526 had been passed unanimously and could only be repealed by a unanimous vote. The Protest and the appeal were signed by the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, a few smaller states, and fourteen free cities. From the Protest they became immediately known as "the Protesting Estates" and subsequently the name Protestant was given to all those who left the Roman communion.
[1] Alexander Pope.
[2] Walther Köhler.
{116}
Certain states having announced that they would not be bound by the will of the majority, the question naturally came up as to how far they would defend this position by arms. [Sidenote: March 6, 1530] Luther's advice asked and given to the effect that all rebellion or forcible resistance to the constituted authorities was wrong. Passive resistance, the mere refusal to obey the command to persecute or to act, otherwise contrary to God's law, he thought was right but he discountenanced any other measures, even those taken in self-defence. All Germans, said he, were the emperor's subjects, and the princes should not shield Luther from him, but leave their lands open to his officers to do what they pleased. This position Luther abandoned a year later, when the jurists pointed out to him that the authority of the emperor was not despotic but was limited by law.
The Protest and Appeal of 1529 at last aroused Charles, slow as he was, to the great dangers to himself that lurked in the Protestant schism. Having repulsed the Turk and having made peace with France and the pope he was at last in a position to address himself seriously to the religious problem. Fully intending to settle the trouble once for all, he came to Germany and opened a Diet at Augsburg [Sidenote: June 20, 1530] to which were invited not only the representatives of the various states but a number of leading theologians, both Catholic and Lutheran, all except Luther himself, an outlaw by the Edict of Worms.
The first action taken was to ask the Lutherans to state their position and this was done in the famous Augsburg Confession, [Sidenote: June 25] read before the Diet by the Saxon Chancellor Brück. It had been drawn up by {117} Melanchthon in language as near as possible to that of the old church. Indeed it undertook to prove that there was in the Lutheran doctrine "nothing repugnant to Scripture or to the Catholic church or to the Roman church." Even in the form of the Confession published 1531 this Catholicizing tendency is marked, but in the original, now lost, it was probably stronger. The reason of this was not, as generally stated, Melanchthon's "gentleness" and desire to conciliate all parties, for he showed himself more truculent to the Zwinglians and Anabaptists than did Luther. It was due to the fact that Melanchthon [Sidenote: Melanchthon] was at heart half a Catholic, so much so, indeed, that Contarini and others thought it quite possible that he might come over to them. In the present instance he made his doctrine conform to the Roman tenets to such an extent that (in the lost original, as we may judge by the Confutation) even transubstantiation was in a manner accepted. The first part of the Confession is a creed: the second part takes up certain abuses, or reforms, namely: the demand of the cup for the laity, the marriage of priests, the mass as an opus operatum or as celebrated privately, fasting and traditions, monastic vows and the power of the pope.
But the concessions did not satisfy the Catholics. A Refutation was prepared by Eck and others, and read before the Diet on August 3. Negotiations continued and still further concessions were wrung from Melanchthon, concessions of so dangerous a nature that his fellow-Protestants denounced him as an enemy of the faith and appealed to Luther against him. Melanchthon had agreed to call the mass a sacrifice, if the word were qualified by the term "commemorative," and also promised that the bishops should be restored to their ancient jurisdictions, a measure justified by him as a blow at turbulent sectaries but one also most {118} perilous to Lutherans. On the other hand, Eck made some concessions, mostly verbal, about the doctrine of justification and other points.
That with this mutually conciliatory spirit an agreement failed to materialize only proved how irreconcilable were the aims of the two parties. [Sidenote: September 22] The Diet voted that the Confession had been refuted and that the Protestants were bound to recant. The emperor promised to use his influence with the pope to call a general council to decide doubtful points, but if the Lutherans did not return to the papal church by April 15, 1531, they were threatened with coercion.
[Sidenote: League of Schmalkalden]
To meet this perilous situation a closer alliance was formed by the Protestant states at Schmalkalden in February 1531. This league constantly grew by the admission of new members, but some attempts to unite with the Swiss proved abortive.
On January 5, 1531, Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans—the title taken by the heir to the Empire—by six of the electors against the vote of Saxony. Three months later when the time granted the Lutherans expired, the Catholics were unable to do anything, and negotiations continued. [Sidenote: July 23, 1532] These resulted in the Peace of Nuremberg, a truce until a general council should be called. It was an important victory for the Lutherans, who were thus given time in which to grow.
The seething unrest which found expression in the rebellion of the knights, of the peasants and of the Anabaptists at Münster, has been described. One more liberal movement, which also failed, must be mentioned at this time. It was as little connected with religion as anything in that theological age could be. [Sidenote: Lübeck, 1533-35] The city of Lübeck, under its burgomaster George Wullenwever, tried to free itself from the influence of Denmark and at the same time to get a more popular {119} government. In 1536 it was conquered by Christian III of Denmark, and the old aristocratic constitution restored. The time was not ripe for the people to assert its rights in North Germany.
[Sidenote: May 1534]
The growth of Protestantism was at times assisted by force of arms. Thus, Philip of Hesse restored the now Protestant Duke Ulrich of Wurttemberg, who had been expelled for his tyranny by the Swabian League fifteen years before. This triumph was the more marked because the expropriated ruler was Ferdinand, King of the Romans. If in such cases it was the government which took the lead, in others the government undoubtedly compelled the people to continue Catholic even when there was a strongly Protestant public opinion. Such was the case in Albertine Saxony,[1] whose ruler, Duke George, though an estimable man in many ways, was regarded by Luther as the instrument of Satan because he persecuted his Protestant subjects. When he died, his brother, [Sidenote: April, 1539] the Protestant Henry the Pious, succeeded and introduced the Reform amid general acclamation. Two years later this duke was followed by his son, the versatile but treacherous Maurice. In the year 1539 a still greater acquisition came to the Schmalkaldic League in the conversion of Brandenburg and its Elector Joachim II.
[Sidenote: Philip of Hesse, 1504-67]
Shortly afterwards the world was scandalized by the bigamy of Philip of Hesse. This prince was utterly spoiled by his accession to the governing power at the age of fifteen. Though he lived in flagrant immorality, his religion, which, soon after he met Luther at Worms, became the Evangelical, was real enough to make his sins a burden to conscience. Much attracted {120} by the teachings of some of the Anabaptists and Carlstadt that polygamy was lawful, and by Luther's assertion in the Babylonian Captivity that it was preferable to divorce, [Sidenote: 1526] he begged to be allowed to take more wives, but was at first refused. His conscience was quickened by an attack of the syphilis in 1539, and at that time he asked permission to take a second wife and received it on December 10, from Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer. His secret marriage to Margaret von der Saal [Sidenote: March 4, 1540] took place in the presence of Melanchthon, Bucer, and other divines. Luther advised him to keep the matter secret and if necessary even to "tell a good strong lie for the sake and good of the Christian church." Of course he was unable to conceal his act, and his conduct, and that of his spiritual advisers, became a just reproach to the cause. As no material advantages were lost by it, Philip might have reversed the epigram of Francis I and have said that "nothing was lost but honor." Neither Germany nor Hesse nor the Protestant church suffered directly by his act. [Sidenote: 1541] Indeed it lead indirectly to another territorial gain. Philip's enemy Duke Henry of Brunswick, though equally immoral, attacked him in a pamphlet. Luther answered this in a tract of the utmost violence, called Jack Sausage. Henry's rejoinder was followed by war between him and the Schmalkaldic princes, in which he was expelled from his dominions and the Reformation introduced.
[Sidenote: 1541]
Further gains followed rapidly. The Catholic Bishop of Naumburg was expelled by John Frederic of Saxony, and a Lutheran bishop instituted instead. About the same time the great spiritual prince, Hermann von Wied, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, became a Protestant, and invited Melanchthon and Bucer to reform his territories. One of the last gains, before the Schmalkaldic war, was the Rhenish Palatinate, under {121} its Elector Frederic III. [Sidenote: 1545] His troops fought then on the Protestant side, though later he turned against that church.
The opportunity of the Lutherans was due to the engagements of the emperor with other enemies. In 1535 Charles undertook a successful expedition against Tunis. The war with France simmered on until the Truce of Nice, intended to be for ten years, signed between the two powers in 1538. In 1544 war broke out again, and fortune again favored Charles. He invaded France almost to the gates of Paris, but did not press his advantage and on September 18 signed the Peace of Crépy giving up all his conquests.
Unable to turn his arms against the heretics, Charles continued to negotiate with them. The pressure he brought to bear upon the pope finally resulted in the summoning by Paul III of a council to meet at Mantua the following year. [Sidenote: June 2, 1536] The Protestants were invited to send delegates to this council, and the princes of that faith held a congress at Schmalkalden to decide on their course. [Sidenote: February 1537] Hitherto the Lutherans had called themselves a part of the Roman Catholic church and had always appealed to a future oecumenical or national synod. They now found this position untenable, and returned the papal citation unopened. Instead, demands for reform, known as the Schmalkaldic Articles, were drawn up by Luther. The four principal demands were (1) recognition of the doctrine of justification by faith only, (2) abolition of the mass as a good work or opus operatum, (3) alienation of the foundations for private masses, (4) removal of the pretentions of the pope to headship of the universal church. As a matter of fact the council was postponed.
[Sidenote: April 19, 1539]
Failing to reach a permanent solution by this method, Charles was again forced to negotiate. The {122} Treaty of Frankfort agreed to a truce varying in length from six to fifteen months according to circumstances. This was followed by a series of religious conferences with the purpose of finding some means of reconciling the two confessions. [Sidenote: Religious Colloquies] Among the first of these were the meetings at Worms and Hagenau. Campeggio and Eck were the Catholic leaders, Melanchthon the spokesman for the Lutherans. [Sidenote: 1540-1] Each side had eleven members on the commission, but their joint efforts were wrecked on the plan for limiting the papal power and on the doctrine of original sin. When the Diet of Ratisbon was opened in the spring of 1541 a further conference was held at which the two parties came closer to each other than they had done since Augsburg. The Book of Ratisbon was drawn up, emphasizing the points of agreement and slurring over the differences. Contarini made wide concessions, later condemned by the Catholics, on the doctrine of justification. Discussion of the nature of the church, the power of the pope, the invocation of saints, the mass, and sacerdotal celibacy seemed likely to result in some modus vivendi. What finally shattered the hopes of union was the discussion of transubstantiation and the adoration of the host. As Contarini had found in the statements of the Augsburg Confession no insuperable obstacle to an understanding he was astonished at the stress laid on them by the Protestants now.
[Sidenote: 1542]
It is not remarkable that with such results the Diet of Spires should have avoided the religious question and have devoted itself to more secular matters, among them the grant to the emperor of soldiers to fight the Turk. Of this Diet Bucer wrote "The Estates act under the wrath of God. Religion is relegated to an agreement between cities. . . . The cause of our evils is that few seek the Lord earnestly, but {123} most fight against him, both among those who have rejected, and of those who still bear, the papal yoke." At the Diet of Spires two years later the emperor promised the Protestants, in return for help against France, recognition until a German National Council should be called. For this concession he was sharply rebuked by the pope. [Sidenote: 1545] The Diet of Worms contented itself with expressing its general hope for a "Christian reformation."
[Sidenote: 1545]
During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged. His last book, Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil, surpassed Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III" and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"—and so on for page after page. Of course such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent." Our judgment of it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quantities of alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.
Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones. His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him much happiness. Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty of openings for reviling him as an apostate, [Sidenote: June 13, 1525] and though it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that what had begun as a tragedy ended as a comedy, it {124} crowned his career, symbolizing the return from medieval asceticism to modern joy in living. Dwelling in the fine old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality many poor relatives, famous strangers, and students, notwithstanding unremitting toil and not a little bodily suffering, he expanded in his whole nature, mellowing in the warmth of a happy fireside climate. His daily routine is known to us intimately through the adoring assiduity of his disciples, who noted down whole volumes of his Table Talk.
[Sidenote: Death and character of Luther]
On February 18, 1546, he died. Measured by the work that he accomplished and by the impression that his personality made both on contemporaries and on posterity, there are few men like him in history. Dogmatic, superstitious, intolerant, overbearing, and violent as he was, he yet had that inscrutable prerogative of genius of transforming what he touched into new values. His contemporaries bore his invective because of his earnestness; they bowed to "the almost disgraceful servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he imposed upon his followers, because they knew that he was leading them to victory in a great and worthy cause. Even so, now, many men overlook his narrowness and bigotry because of his genius and bravery.
His grandest quality was sincerity. Priest and public man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and hell." Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring and his strength to labor for it must command our respect.
Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a {125} wonderful gift of language that made him the tongue, as well as the spear-point, of his people. [Sidenote: His eloquence] In love of nature, in wonder, in the power to voice some secret truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he was a poet. He looked out on the stars and considered the "good master-workman" that made them, on the violets "for which neither the Grand Turk nor the emperor could pay," on the yearly growth of corn and wine, "as great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on the "pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowler's net, or holding a Diet "in a hall roofed with the vault of heaven, carpeted with the grass, and with walls as far as the ends of the earth." Or he wrote to his son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where good children eat apples and pears and cherries and plums, and where they ride on pretty ponies with golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day and play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows.
Luther's character combined traits not usually found in the same nature. He was both a dreamy mystic and a practical man of affairs; he saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a God-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for results. His faith was as simple and passionate as his dogmatic distinctions were often sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a woman can. His hymns soar to heaven and his coarse jests trail in the mire. He was touched with profound melancholy and yet he had a wholesome, ready laugh. His words are now brutal invectives and again blossom with the most exquisite flowers of the soul—poetry, music, idyllic humor, tenderness. He was subtle and simple; superstitious and wise; limited in his cultural sympathies, but very great in what he achieved.
[1] Saxony had been divided in 1485 into two parts, the Electorate, including Wittenberg, Weimar and Eisenach, and the Duchy, including Leipzig and Dresden. The former was called after its first ruler Ernestine, the latter Albertine.
{126}
[Sidenote: The Schmalkaldic War, 1546-7]
Hardly had Luther been laid to rest when the first general religious war broke out in Germany. There had been a few small wars of this character before, such as those of Hesse against Bamberg and Wurzburg, and against Württemberg, and against Brunswick. But the conflicts had been successfully "localized." Now at last was to come a general battle, as a foretaste of the Thirty Years War of the next century.
It has sometimes been doubted whether the Schmalkaldic War was a religious conflict at all. The emperor asserted that his sole object was to reduce rebellious subjects to obedience. Several Protestant princes were his allies, and the territories he conquered were not, for the most part, forced to give up their faith. Nevertheless, it is certain that the fundamental cause of the strain was the difference of creed. A parallel may be found in our own Civil War, in which Lincoln truly claimed that he was fighting only to maintain the union, and yet it is certain that slavery furnished the underlying cause of the appeal to arms.
It has recently been shown that the emperor planned the attack on his Protestant subjects as far back, at least, as 1541. All the negotiations subsequent to that time were a mere blind in disguise his preparations. For he labored indefatigably to bring about a condition in which it would be safe for him to embark on the perilous enterprise. Though he was a dull man he had the two qualities of caution and persistence that stood him in better stead than the more showy talents of other statesmen. If, with his huge resources, he never did anything brilliant, still less did he ever take a gambler's chance of failing.
{127} The opportune moment came at last in the spring of 1546. Two years before, he had beaten France with the help of the Protestants, and had imposed upon her as one condition of peace that she should make no allies within the Empire. In November of the same year he made an alliance with Paul III, receiving 200,000 ducats in support of his effort to extirpate the heresy.
Other considerations impelled him to attack at once. The secession of Cologne and the Palatinate from the Catholic communion gave the Protestants a majority in the Electoral College. Still more decisive was it that Charles was able at this time by playing upon the jealousies and ambitions of the states, to secure important allies within the Empire, including some of the Protestant faith. First, Catholic Bavaria forgot her hatred of Austria far enough to make common cause against the heretics. Then, two great Protestant princes, Maurice of Albertine Saxony and John von Küstrin—a brother of Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg—abandoned their coreligionists and bartered support to the emperor in return for promises of aggrandizement.
[Sidenote: January 1546]
A final religious conference held at Ratisbon demonstrated more clearly than ever the hopelessness of conciliation. Whereas a semi-Lutheran doctrine of justification was adopted, the Protestants prepared two long memoirs rejecting the authority of the council recently convened at Trent. And then, in the summer, war broke out. At this moment the forces of the Schmalkaldic League were superior to those of its enemies. But for poor leadership and lack of unity in command they would probably have won.
Towards the last of August and early in September the Protestant troops bombarded the imperial army at Ingolstadt, but failed to follow this up by a decisive {128} attack, as was urged by General Schärtlin of Augsburg. Lack of equipment was partly responsible for this failure. When the emperor advanced, the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse retired each to his own land. Another futile attempt of the League was a raid on the Tyrol, possibly influenced by the desire to strike at the Council of Trent, certainly by no sound military policy. The effect of these indecisive counsels was that Charles had little trouble in reducing the South German rebels, Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremberg, and Württemberg. The Elector Palatine hastened to come to terms by temporarily abandoning his religion. [Sidenote: February, 1547] A counter-reformation was also effected in Cologne. Augsburg bought the emperor's pardon by material concessions.
[Sidenote: October 1546]
In the meantime Duke Maurice of Albertine Saxony, having made a bargain with the emperor, attacked his second cousin the Elector. Though Maurice was not obliged to abjure his faith, his act was naturally regarded as one of signal treachery and he was henceforth known by the nickname "Judas." Maurice conquered most of his cousin's lands, except the forts of Wittenberg and Gotha. Charles's Spanish army under Alva now turned northward, forced a passage of the Elbe and routed the troops of John Frederic at the battle of Mülberg, near Torgau, on April 24, 1547. John Frederic was captured wounded, and kept in durance several years. Wittenberg capitulated on May 19, and just a month later Philip of Hesse surrendered at Halle. He also was kept a prisoner for some years. Peace was made by the mediation of Brandenburg. The electoral vote of Saxony was given to Maurice, and with it the best part of John Frederic's lands, including Wittenberg. No change of religion was required. The net result of the war was to {129} increase the imperial power, but to put a very slight check upon the expansion of Protestantism.
And yet it was for precisely this end that Charles chiefly valued his authority. Immediately, acting independently of the pope, he made another effort to restore the confessional unity of Germany. The Diet of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1547-8] accepted under pressure from him a decree called the Interim because it was to be valid only until the final decisions of a general council. Though intended to apply only to Protestant states—the Catholics had, instead, a formula reformationis—the Interim [Sidenote: The Interim, June 30, 1548], drawn up by Romanist divines, was naturally Catholic in tenor. The episcopal constitution was restored, along with the canon of the mass, the doctrine of the seven sacraments, and the worship of saints. On some doctrinal points vagueness was studied. The only concessions made to the Reformation were the pro tempore recognition of the marriage of the clergy and the giving of the cup to the laity. Various other details of practical reform were demanded. The Interim was intensely unpopular with both parties. The pope objected to it and German Catholics, especially in Bavaria, strongly opposed it. The South German Protestant states accepted it only under pressure. Maurice of Saxony adopted it in a modified form, known as the Leipzig Interim, in December 1548. The assistance rendered him by Melanchthon caused a fierce attack on the theologian by his fellow-Lutherans. In enforcing the Interim Maurice found his own profit, for when Magdeburg won the nickname of "our Lord God's pulpit" by refusing to accept it, Maurice was entrusted with the execution of the imperial ban, and captured the city on November 9, 1551.
Germany now fell into a confused condition, every state for itself. The emperor found his own {130} difficulties in trying to make his son Philip successor to his Brother Ferdinand. His two former Protestant allies, Maurice and John von Küstrin, made an alliance with France and with other North German princes and forced the emperor to conclude the Convention of Passau. [Sidenote: 1552] This guaranteed afresh the religious freedom of the Lutherans until the next Diet and forced the liberation of John Frederic and Philip of Hesse. Charles did not loyally accept the conditions of this agreement, but induced Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg-Culmbach, to attack the confederate princes in the rear. After Albert had laid waste a portion of North Germany he was defeated by Maurice at the battle of Sievershausen. [Sidenote: July 9, 1553] Mortally wounded, the brilliant but utterly unscrupulous victor died, at the age of thirty-two, soon after the battle. As the conflict had by this time resolved itself into a duel between him and Charles, the emperor was now at last able to put through, at the Diet of Augsburg, a settlement of the religious question.
[Sidenote: Religious Peace of Augsburg, September 25, 1555]
The principles of the Religious Peace were as follows:
(1) A truce between states recognizing the Augsburg Confession and Catholic states until union was possible. All other confessions were to be barred—a provision aimed chiefly at Calvinists.
(2) The princes and governments of the Free Cities were to be allowed to choose between the Roman and the Lutheran faith, but their subjects must either conform to this faith—on the maxim famous as cujus regio ejus religio—or emigrate. In Imperial Free Cities, however, it was specially provided that Catholic minorities be tolerated.
(3) The "ecclesiastical reservation," or principle that when a Catholic spiritual prince became Protestant he should be deposed and a successor appointed {131} so that his territory might remain under the church. In respect to this Ferdinand privately promised to secure toleration for Protestant subjects in the land of such a prince. All claims of spiritual jurisdiction by Catholic prelates in Lutheran lands were to cease. All estates of the church confiscated prior to 1552 were to remain in the hands of the spoliators, all seized since that date to be restored.
The Peace of Augsburg, like the Missouri Compromise, only postponed civil war and the radical solution of a pressing problem. But as we cannot rightly censure the statesmen of 1820 for not insisting on emancipation, for which public opinion was not yet prepared, so it would be unhistorical and unreasonable to blame the Diet of Augsburg for not granting the complete toleration which we now see was bound to come and was ideally the right thing. Mankind is educated slowly and by many hard experiences. Europe had lain so long under the domination of an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization that the possibility of complete toleration hardly occurred to any but a few eccentrics. And we must not minimize what the Peace of Augsburg actually accomplished. It is true that choice of religion was legally limited to two alternatives, but this was more than had been allowed before. [Sidenote: Actual results] It is true that freedom of even this choice was complete only for the rulers of the territories or Free Cities; private citizens might exercise the same choice only on leaving their homes. The hardship of this was somewhat lessened by the consideration that in any case the nonconformist would not have to go far before finding a German community holding the Catholic or Lutheran opinions he preferred. Finally, it must be remembered that, if the Peace of Augsburg aligned the whole nation into two mutually hostile camps, it at least kept them from war for more than {132} half a century. Nor was this a mere accident, for the strain was at times severe. When the imperial knight, Grumbach, broke the peace by sacking the city of Würzburg, [Sidenote: 1563-7] he was put under the ban, captured and executed. His protector, Duke John Frederic of Saxony, was also captured and kept in confinement in Austria until his death.
Notwithstanding such an exhibition of centralized power, it is probable that the Peace of Augsburg increased rather than diminished the authority of the territorial states at the expense of the imperial government. Charles V, worn out by his long and unsuccessful struggle with heresy, after giving the Netherlands to his son Philip in 1555, abdicated the crown of the Empire to his brother Ferdinand in 1556. [Sidenote: Ferdinand, 1556-64] He died two years later in a monastery, a disappointed man, having expressed the wish that he had burned Luther at Worms. The energies of Ferdinand were largely taken up with the Turkish war. His son, Maximilian II, [Sidenote: Maximilian II, 1564-76] was favorably inclined to Protestantism.
[Sidenote: Catholic reaction]
Before Maximilian's death, however, a reaction in favor of Catholicism had already set in. The last important gains to the Lutheran cause in Germany came in the years immediately following the Peace of Augsburg. Nothing is more remarkable than the fact that practically all the conquests of Protestantism in Europe were made within the first half century of its existence. After that for a few years it lost, and since then has remained, geographically speaking, stationary in Europe. It is impossible to get accurate statistics of the gains and losses of either confession. The estimate of the Venetian ambassador that only one-tenth of the German empire was Catholic in 1558 is certainly wrong. In 1570, at the height of the Protestant tide, probably 70 per cent. of Germans—including Austrians—were Protestant. In 1910 the Germans of the {133} German Empire and of Austria were divided thus: Protestants 37,675,000; Catholics 29,700,000. The Protestants were about 56 per cent., and this proportion was probably about that of the year 1600.
[Sidenote: Lutheran schisms]
Historically, the final stemming of the Protestant flood was due to the revival of energy in the Catholic Church and to the internal weakness and schism of the Protestants. Even within the Lutheran communion fierce conflicts broke out. Luther's lieutenants fought for his spiritual heritage as the generals of Alexander fought for his empire. The center of these storms was Melanchthon until death freed him from "the rage of the theologians." [Sidenote: April 19, 1560] Always half Catholic, half Erasmian at heart, by his endorsement of the Interim, and by his severe criticisms of his former friends Luther and John Frederic, he brought on himself the bitter enmity of those calling themselves "Gnesio-Lutherans," or "Genuine Lutherans." Melanchthon abolished congregational hymn-singing, and published his true views, hitherto dissembled, on predestination and the sacrament. He was attacked by Flacius the historian, and by many others. The dispute was taken up by still others and went to such lengths that for a minor heresy a pastor, Funck, was executed by his fellow-Lutherans in Prussia, in 1566. "Philippism" as it was called, at first grew, but finally collapsed when the Formula of Concord was drawn up in 1580 and signed by over 8000 clergy. This document is to the Lutheran Church what the decrees of Trent were to the Catholics. The "high" doctrine of the real presence was strongly stated, and all the sophistries advanced to support it canonized. The sacramental bread and wine were treated with such superstitious reverence that a Lutheran priest who accidentally spilled the latter was punished by having his fingers cut off. Melanchthon was against such "remnants of {134} papistry" which he rightly named "artolatry" or "bread-worship."
But the civil wars within the Lutheran communion were less bitter than the hatred for the Calvinists. By 1550 their mutual detestation had reached such a point that Calvin called the Lutherans "ministers of Satan" and "professed enemies of God" trying to bring in "adulterine rites" and vitiate the pure worship. The quarrel broke out again at the Colloquy of Worms. Melanchthon and others condemned Zwingli, thus, in Calvin's opinion, "wiping off all their glory." Nevertheless Calvin himself had said, in 1539, that Zwingli's opinion was false and pernicious. So difficult is the path of orthodoxy to find! In 1557 the Zwinglian leader M. Schenck wrote to Thomas Blaurer that the error of the papists was rather to be borne than that of the Saxons. Nevertheless Calvinism continued to grow in Germany at the expense of Lutheranism. Especially after the Formula of Concord the "Philippists" went over in large numbers to the Calvinists.
[Sidenote: Effect on the nation]
The worst thing about these distressing controversies was that they seemed to absorb the whole energies of the nation. No period is less productive in modern German history than the age immediately following the triumph of the Reformation. The movement, which had begun so liberally and hopefully, became, temporarily at least, narrower and more bigoted than Catholicism. It seemed as if Erasmus had been quite right when he said that where Lutheranism reigned culture perished. Of these men it has been said—and the epigram is not a bad one—that they made an intellectual desert and called it religious peace.
And yet we should be cautious in history of assuming post hoc propter hoc. That there was nothing {135} necessarily blighting in Protestantism is shown by the examples of England and Poland, where the Reform was followed by the most brilliant literary age in the annals of these peoples. [Sidenote: 16th century literature] The latter part of the sixteenth century was also the great period of the literature of Spain and Portugal, which remained Catholic, whereas Italy, equally Catholic, notably declined in artistic production and somewhat also in letters. The causes of the alterations, in various peoples, of periods of productivity and of comparative sterility, are in part inscrutable. In the present case, it seems that when a relaxation of intellectual activity is visible, it was not due to any special quality in Protestantism, but was rather caused by the heat of controversy.
[Transcriber's note: The above section number is what appears in the original book, but it is a case of misnumbering, and is actually the chapter's sixth section.]
A few small countries bordering on the Empire, neither fully in the central stream of European culture, nor wholly outside of it, may be treated briefly. All of them were affected by the Protestant revolution, the Teutonic peoples permanently, the others transiently.
Scandinavia looms large in the Middle Ages as the home of the teeming multitudes of emigrants, Goths and Vandals, who swarmed over the Roman Empire. Later waves from Denmark and the contiguous portion of Germany flooded England first in the Anglo-Saxon conquest and then in the Danish. The Normans, too, originally hailed from Scandinavia. But though the sons of the North conquered and colonized so much of the South, Scandinavia herself remained a small people, neither politically nor intellectually of the first importance. The three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden became one in 1397; and, after Sweden's temporary separation from the other two, were again united. The fifteenth century saw the {136} great aggrandizement of the power of the prelates and of the larger nobles at the expense of the bönder, who, from a class of free and noble small proprietors degenerated not only into peasants but often into serfs. [Sidenote: 1513] When Christian II succeeded to the throne, it was as the papal champion. His attempt to consolidate his power in Sweden by massacring the magnates under the pretext that they were hostile to the pope, [Sidenote: November 8-11, 1520] an act called the "Stockholm bath of blood," aroused the people against him in a war of independence.
[Sidenote: Denmark]
Christian found Denmark also insubordinate. It is true that he made some just laws, protecting the people and building up their prosperity, but their support was insufficient to counterbalance the hatred of the great lords spiritual and temporal. He was quick to see in the Reformation a weapon against the prelates, and appealed for help to Wittenberg as early as 1519. His endeavors throughout 1520 to get Luther himself to visit Denmark failed, but early in 1521 he succeeded in attracting Carlstadt for a short visit. This effort, however, cost him his throne, for he was expelled on April 13, 1523, and wandered over Europe in exile until his death. [Sidenote: 1559]
The Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, to whom the crown was offered, reigned for ten years as Frederic I. Though his coronation oath bound him to do nothing against the church, he had only been king for three years before he came out openly for the Reformation. In this again we must see primarily a policy, rather than a conviction. He was supported, however, by the common people, who had been disgusted by the indulgences sold by Arcimboldi [Sidenote: 1516-19] and by the constant corruption of the higher clergy. The cities, as in Germany, were the strongest centers of the movement. The Diet of 1527 decreed that Lutherans should be recognized on equal terms with Catholics, that marriage of priests {137} and the regular clergy be allowed. In 1530 a Lutheran confession was adopted.
Christian III, who reigned until 1559, took the final step, though at the price of a civil war. His victory enabled him to arrest all the bishops, August 20, 1536, and to force them to renounce their rights and properties in favor of the crown. Only one, Bishop Rönnow of Roskilde, refused, and was consequently held prisoner until his death. The Diet of 1536 abolished Catholicism, confiscated all church property and distributed it between the king and the temporal nobles. Bugenhagen was called from Wittenberg to organize the church on Lutheran lines. [Sidenote: 1537-9] In the immediately following years the Catholics were deprived of their civil rights. The political benefits of the Reformation inured primarily to the king and secondarily to the third estate.
[Sidenote: Norway]
Norway was a vassal of Denmark from 1380 till 1814. At no time was its dependence more complete than in the sixteenth century. Frederic I introduced the Reformation by royal decree as early as 1528, and Christian III put the northern kingdom completely under the tutelage of Denmark, [Sidenote: 1536] in spiritual as well as in temporal matters. The adoption of the Reformation here as in Iceland seemed to be a matter of popular indifference.
[Sidenote: Sweden]
After Sweden had asserted her independence by the expulsion of Christian II, Gustavus Vasa, an able ruler, ascended the throne. [Sidenote: Gustavus Vasa, 1523-60] He, too, saw in the Reformation chiefly an opportunity for confiscating the goods of the church. The way had, indeed, been prepared by a popular reformer, Olaus Petri, but the king made the movement an excuse to concentrate in his own hands the spiritual power. The Diet of Westeras [Sidenote: 1527] passed the necessary laws, at the same time expelling the chief leader of the Romanist party, John Brask, {138} Bishop of Linköping. The Reformation was entirely Lutheran and extremely conservative. Not only the Anabaptists, but even the Calvinists, failed to get any hold upon the Scandinavian peoples. In many ways the Reformation in Sweden was parallel to that in England. Both countries retained the episcopal organization founded upon the "apostolical succession." Olaus Magni, Bishop of Westeras, had been ordained at Rome in 1524, and in turn consecrated the first Evangelical Archbishop, Lawrence Petri, [Sidenote: Petri 1499-1573] who had studied at Wittenberg, and who later translated the Bible into Swedish [Sidenote: 1541] and protected his people from the inroads of Calvinism. The king, more and more absolutely the head of the church, as in England, did not hesitate to punish even prominent reformers when they opposed him. The reign of Gustavus's successor, Eric XIV, [Sidenote: Eric XIV, 1560-8] was characterless, save for the influx of Huguenots strengthening the Protestants. King John III [Sidenote: John III, 1569-92] made a final, though futile, attempt to reunite with the Roman Church. As Finland was at this time a dependency of Sweden, the Reformation took practically the same course as in Sweden itself.
[Sidenote: Poland]
A complete contrast to Sweden is furnished by Poland. If in the former the government counted for almost everything, in the latter it counted for next to nothing. The theater of Polish history is the vast plain extending from the Carpathians to the Düna, and from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. This region, lacking natural frontiers on several sides, was inhabited by a variety of races: Poles in the west, Lithuanians in the east, Ruthenians in the south and many Germans in the cities. The union of the Polish and Lithuanian states was as yet a merely personal one in the monarch. Since the fourteenth century the crown of Poland had been elective, but the grand-ducal crown of Lithuania was {139} hereditary in the famous house of Jagiello, and the advantages of union induced the Polish nobility regularly to elect the heir to the eastern domain their king. Though theoretically absolute, in practice the king had been limited by the power of the nobles and gentry, and this limitation was given a constitutional sanction in the law Nihil novi, [Sidenote: 1505] forbidding the monarch to pass laws without the consent of the deputies of the magnates and lesser nobles.
The foreign policy of Sigismund I [Sidenote: Sigismund I, 1506-1548] was determined by the proximity of powerful and generally hostile neighbors. It would not be profitable in this place to follow at length the story of his frequent wars with Muscovy and with the Tartar hordes of the Crimea, and of his diplomatic struggles with the Turks, the Empire, Hungary, and Sweden. On the whole he succeeded not only in holding his own, but in augmenting his power. He it was who finally settled the vexatious question of the relationship of his crown to the Teutonic Order, which, since 1466, had held Prussia as a fief, though a constantly rebellious and troublesome one. The election of Albert of Brandenburg as Grand Master of the Order threatened more serious trouble, [Sidenote: 1511] but a satisfactory solution of the problem was found when Albert embraced the Lutheran faith and secularized Prussia as an hereditary duchy, at the same time swearing allegiance to Sigismund as his suzerain. [Sidenote: 1525] Many years later Sigismund's son conquered and annexed another domain of the Teutonic order further north, namely Livonia. [Sidenote: 1561] War with Sweden resulted from this but was settled by the cession of Esthonia to the Scandinavian power.
Internally, the vigorous Jagiello strengthened both the military and financial resources of his people. To meet the constant inroads of the Tartars he established the Cossacks, a rough cavalry formed of the hunters, {140} fishers, and graziers of the Ukraine, quite analogous to the cowboys of the American Wild West. From being a military body they developed into a state and nation that occupied a special position in Poland and then in Russia. Sigismund's fiscal policy, by recovering control of the mint and putting the treasury into the hands of capable bankers, effectively provided for the economic life of the government.
[Sidenote: Reformation]
Poland has generally been as open to the inroads of foreign ideas as to the attacks of enemies; a peculiar susceptibility to alien culture, due partly to the linguistic attainments of many educated Poles and partly to an independent, almost anarchical disposition, has made this nation receive from other lands more freely than it gives. Every wave of new ideas innundates the low-lying plain of the Vistula. So the Reformation spread with amazing rapidity, first among the cities and then among the peasants of that land. In the fifteenth century the influence of Huss and the humanists had in different ways formed channels facilitating the inrush of Lutheranism. The unpopularity of a wealthy and indolent church predisposed the body politic to the new infection. Danzig, that "Venice of the North," had a Lutheran preacher in 1518; while the Edict of Thorn, intended to suppress the heretics, indicates that as early as 1520 they had attracted the attention of the central government. But this persecuting measure, followed thick and fast by others, only proved how little the tide could be stemmed by paper barriers. The cities of Cracow, Posen, and Lublin, especially susceptible on account of their German population, were thoroughly infected before 1522. Next, the contagion attacked the country districts and towns of Prussia, which had been pretty thoroughly converted prior to its secularization.
The first political effect of the Reformation was to {141} stimulate the unrest of the lower classes. Riots and rebellions, analogous to those of the Peasants' War in Germany, followed hard upon the preaching of the "gospel." Sigismund could restore order here and there, as he did at Danzig in 1526 by a military occupation, by fining the town and beheading her six leading innovators, but he could not suppress the growing movement. For after the accession of the lower classes came that of the nobles and gentry who bore the real sovereignty in the state. Seeing in the Reformation a weapon for humiliating and plundering the church, as well as a key to a higher spiritual life, from one motive or the other, they flocked to its standard, and, under leadership of their greatest reformer, John Laski, organized a powerful church.
The reign of Sigismund II [Sidenote: Sigismund II, 1548-1572] saw the social upheaval by which the nobility finally placed the power firmly in their own hands, and also the height of the Reformation. By a law known as the "Execution" the assembly of nobles finally got control of the executive as well as of the legislative branch of the government. At the same time they, with the cordial assistance of the king, bound the country together in a closer bond known as the Union of Lublin. [Sidenote: 1569] Though Lithuania and Prussia struggled against incorporation with Poland, both were forced to submit to a measure that added power to the state and opened to the Polish nobility great opportunity for political and economic exploitation of these lands. Not only the king, but the magnates and the cities were put under the heel of the ruling caste. This was an evolution opposite to that of most European states, in which crown and bourgeoisie subdued the once proud position of the baronage. But even here in Poland one sees the rising influence of commerce and the money-power, in that the Polish nobility was largely composed of small {142} gentry eager and able to exploit the new opportunities offered by capitalism. In other countries the old privilege of the sword gave way to the new privilege of gold; in Poland the sword itself turned golden, at least in part; the blade kept its keen, steel edge, but the hilt by which it was wielded glittered yellow.
[Sidenote: Protestantism]
Unchecked though they were by laws, the Protestants soon developed a weakness that finally proved fatal to their cause, lack of organization and division into many mutually hostile sects. [Sidenote: 1537] The Anabaptists of course arrived, preached, gained adherents, and were suppressed. [Sidenote: 1548] Next came a large influx of Bohemian Brethren, expelled from their own country and migrating to a land of freedom, where they soon made common cause with the Lutherans. [Sidenote: 1558] Calvinists propagated the seeds of their faith with much success. Finally the Unitarians, led by Lelio Sozini, found a home in Poland and made many proselytes, at last becoming so powerful that they founded the new city of Racau, whence issued the famous Racovian Catechism. At one time they seemed about to obtain the mastery of the state, but the firm union of the Trinitarian Protestants at Sandomir [Sidenote: 1570] checked them until all of them were swept away together by the resurging tide of Catholicism. Several versions of the Bible, Lutheran, Socinian, and Catholic, were issued.
So powerful were the Evangelicals that at the Diet of 1555 they held services in the face of the Catholic king, and passed a law abolishing the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. This measure, of course, allowed freedom of all new sects, both those then in control of the Diet and the as yet unfledged Antitrinitarians. Nevertheless a strong wish was expressed for a national, Protestant church, and had Sigismund had the advantages, as he had the matrimonial difficulties, of Henry VIII, he might have {143} established such a body. But he never quite dared to take the step, dreading the hostility of Catholic neighbors. Singularly enough the championship of the Catholic cause was undertaken by Greek-Catholic Muscovy, [Sidenote: 1562] whose Czar, Ivan, represented his war against Poland as a crusade against the new iconoclasts. Unable to act with power, Sigismund cultivated such means of combating Protestantism as were ready to his hand. His most trenchant weapon was the Order of Jesuits, who were invited to come in and establish schools. Moreover, the excellence of their colleges in foreign lands induced many of the nobility to send their sons to be educated under them, and thus were prepared the seeds of the Counter-Reformation.
The death of Sigismund without an heir left Poland for a time masterless. During the interregnum the Diet passed the Compact of Warsaw by which absolute religious liberty was granted to all sects—"Dissidentes de Religione"—without exception. [Sidenote: January 28, 1573] But, liberal though the law was, it was vitiated in practice by the right retained by every master of punishing his serfs for religious as well as for secular causes. Thus it was that the lower classes were marched from Protestant pillar to Catholic post and back without again daring to rebel or to express any choice in the matter.
The election of Henry of Valois, [Sidenote: Henry, May 11, 1573] a younger son of Catharine de' Medici, was made conditional on the acceptance of a number of articles, including the maintenance of religious liberty. The prince acceded, with some reservations, and was crowned on February 21, 1574. Four months later he heard of the death of his brother, Charles IX, making him king of France. Without daring to ask leave of absence, he absconded from Poland on June 18, thereby abandoning a throne which was promptly declared vacant.
The new election presented great difficulties, and {144} almost led to civil war. While the Senate declared for the Hapsburg Maximilian II, the Diet chose Stephen Báthory, prince of Transylvania. [Sidenote: Stephen Báthory, 1576-86] Only the unexpected death of Maximilian prevented an armed collision between the two. Báthory, now in possession, forced his recognition by all parties and led the land of his adoption into a period of highly successful diplomacy and of victorious war against Muscovy. His religious policy was one of pacification, conciliation, and of supporting inconspicuously the Jesuit foundations at Wilna, Posen, Cracow, and Eiga. But the full fruits of their propaganda, resulting in the complete reconversion of Poland to Catholicism were not reaped until the reign of his successor, Sigismund III, a Vasa, of Sweden. [Sidenote: Sigismund III, 1586-1632]
[Sidenote: Bohemia]
Bohemia, a Slav kingdom long united historically and dynastically with the Empire, as the home of Huss, welcomed the Reformation warmly, the Brethren turning first to Luther and then to Calvin. After various efforts to suppress and banish them had failed of large success, the Compact of 1567 granted toleration to the three principal churches. As in Poland, the Jesuits won back the whole land in the next generation, so that in 1910 there were in Bohemia 6,500,000 Catholics and only 175,000 Protestants.
[Sidenote: Hungary, 1526]
Hungary was so badly broken by the Turks at the battle of Mohács that she was able to play but little part in the development of Western civilization. Like her more powerful rival, she was also distracted by internal dissention. After the death of her King Lewis at Mohács there were two candidates for the throne, Ferdinand the Emperor's brother and John Zapolya, [Sidenote: Zapolya, 1526-40] "woiwod" or prince of Transylvania. Protestantism had a considerable hold on the nobles, who, after the shattering of the national power, divided a portion of the goods of the church between them. {145} The Unitarian movement was also strong for a time, and the division this caused proved almost fatal to the Reformation, for the greater part of the kingdom was won back to Catholicism under the Jesuits' leadership. [Sidenote: 1576-1612] In 1910 there were about 8,600,000 Catholics in Hungary and about 3,200,000 Protestants.
[Sidenote: Transylvania]
Transylvania, though a dependency of the Turks, was allowed to keep the Christian religion. The Saxon colonists in this state welcomed the Reformation, formally recognizing the Augsburg Confession in a synod of 1572. Here also the Unitarians attained their greatest strength, being recruited partly from those expelled from Poland. They drew their inspiration not merely from Sozini, but from a variety of sources, for the doctrine appeared simultaneously among certain Anabaptist and Spiritualist sects. Toleration was granted them on the same terms as other Christians. The name "Unitarian" first appears in a decree of the Transylvania Diet of the year 1600. An appreciable body of this persuasion still remains in the country, together with a number of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Romanists, but the large majority of the people belong to two Greek Catholic churches.
{146}
[Sidenote: The Swiss Confederation]
Amid the snow-clad Alps and azure lakes of Switzerland there grew up a race of Germans which, though still nominally a part of the Empire, had, at the period now considered, long gone on its own distinct path of development. Politically, the Confederacy arose in a popular revolt against the House of Austria. The federal union of the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, first entered into in 1291 and made permanent in 1315, was strengthened by the admission of Lucerne (1332), Zug (1352), Glarus (1351) and of the Imperial Cities of Zurich (1351) and Berne (1353). By the admission of Freiburg and Solothurn (1481), Basle (1501), Schaffhausen (1501) and Appenzell (1513) the Confederacy reached the number of thirteen cantons at which it remained for many years. By this time it was recognized as a practically independent state, courted by the great powers of Europe. Allied to this German Confederacy were two Romance-speaking states of a similar nature, the Confederacies of the Valais and of the Grisons.
The Swiss were then the one free people of Europe. Republican government by popular magistrates prevailed in all the cantons. Liberty was not quite democratic, for the cantons ruled several subject provinces, and in the cities a somewhat aristocratic electorate held power; nevertheless there was no state in Europe approaching the Swiss in self-government. Though they were generally accounted the best soldiers of the {147} day, their military valor did not redound to their own advantage, for the hardy peasantry yielded to the solicitations of the great powers around them to enter into foreign, mercenary service. The influential men, especially the priests, took pensions from the pope or from France or from other princes, in return for their labors in recruiting. The system was a bad one for both sides. Swiss politics were corrupted and the land drained of its strongest men; whereas the princes who hired the mercenaries often found to their cost that such soldiers were not only the most formidable to their enemies but also the most troublesome to themselves, always on the point of mutiny for more pay and plunder. The Swiss were beginning to see the evils of the system, and prohibited the taking of pensions in 1503, though this law remained largely a dead letter. [Sidenote: September 13-14, 1515] The reputation of the mountaineers suffered a blow in their defeat by the French at Marignano, followed by a treaty with France, intended by that power to make Switzerland a permanent dependency in return for a large annual subsidy payable to each of the thirteen cantons and to the Grisons and Valais as well. The country suffered from faction. The rural or "Forest" cantons were jealous of the cities, and the latter, especially Berne, the strongest, pursued selfish policies of individual aggrandizement at the expense of their confederates.
As everywhere else, the cities were the centers of culture and of social movements. Basle was famous for its university and for the great printing house of Froben. Here Albert Dürer had stayed for a while during his wandering years. Here Sebastian Brant had studied and had written his famous satire. Here the great Erasmus had come to publish his New Testament.
But the Reformation in Switzerland was only in [Sidenote: 1521-9] {148} part a child of humanism. Nationalism played its rôle in the revolt from Rome, memories of councils lingered at Constance and Basle, and the desire for a purer religion made itself felt among the more earnest. Switzerland had at least one great shrine, that of Einsiedeln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in hopes of the plenary indulgence, expressly promising forgiveness of both guilt and penalty of sin. Berne was the theater of one of the most reverberating scandals enacted by the contemporary church. [Sidenote: The Jetzer scandal] A passionately contested theological issue of the day was whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the immaculate, manner. [Sidenote: 1509] When the fraud was at last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved were burnt at the stake.
But the vague forces of discontent might never have crystallized into a definite movement save for the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli. [Sidenote: Zwingli] He was born January 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg, amidst the lofty mountains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and beauty from the first. As he wandered in the wild passes he noticed how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of danger, and how the squirrel crossed the stream on a chip. When he returned to the home of his father, a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard {149} stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that planted in his soul a deep love of his native land. The religion he learned was good Catholic; and the element of popular superstition in it was far less weird and terrible than in Northern Germany. He remembered one little tale told him by his grandmother, how the Lord God and Peter slept together in the same bed, and were wakened each morning by the housekeeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside man.
Education began early under the tuition of an uncle, the parish priest. At ten Ulrich was sent to Basle to study. Here he progressed well, becoming the head scholar, and here he developed a love of music and considerable skill in it. Later he went to school at Berne, where he attracted the attention of some friars who tried to guide him into their cloister, an effort apparently frustrated by his father. In the autumn of 1498 he matriculated at Vienna. For some unknown cause he was suspended soon afterwards, but was readmitted in the spring of 1500. Two years later he went to Basle, where he completed his studies by taking the master's degree. [Sidenote: 1506] While here he taught school for a while. Theology apparently interested him little; his passion was for the humanities, and his idol was Erasmus. Only in 1513 did he begin to learn Greek.
If, at twenty-two, before he had reached the canonical age, Zwingli took orders, and became parish priest at Glarus, it was less because of any deep religious interest than because he found in the clerical calling the best opportunity to cultivate his taste for letters. He was helped financially by a papal pension of fifty gulden per annum. His first published work was a fable. [Sidenote: 1510] The lion, the leopard, and the fox (the Emperor, France, and Venice) try to drive the ox {150} (Switzerland) out of his pasture, but are frustrated by the herdsman (the pope). The same tendencies—papal, patriotic, and political—are shown in his second book, [Sidenote: 1512] an account of the relations between the Swiss and French, and in The Labyrinth, [Sidenote: 1516] an allegorical poem. The various nations appear again as animals, but the hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the monsters of sin, shame, and vice. Zwingli's natural interest in politics was nourished by his experiences as field chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of Novara [Sidenote: 1513] and Marignano. [Sidenote: 1515]
Was he already a Reformer? Not in the later sense of the word, but he was a disciple of Erasmus. Capito wrote to Bullinger in 1536: "While Luther was in the hermitage and had not yet emerged into the light, Zwingli and I took counsel how to cast down the pope. For then our judgment was maturing under the influence of Erasmus's society and by reading good authors." Though Capito over-estimated the opposition of the young Swiss to the papacy, he was right in other respects. Zwingli's enthusiasm for the prince of humanists, perfectly evident in his notes on St. Paul, stimulated him to visit the older scholar at Basle in the spring of 1516. Their correspondence began at the same time. Is it not notable that in The Labyrinth the thread of Ariadne is not religion, but reason? His religious ideal, as shown by his notes on St. Paul, was at this time the Erasmian one of an ethical, undogmatic faith. He interpreted the Apostle by the Sermon on the Mount and by Plato. He was still a good Catholic, without a thought of breaking away from the church.
[Sidenote: October, 1516-December, 1518]
From Glarus Zwingli was called to Einsiedeln, where he remained for two years. Here he saw the superstitious absurdities mocked by Erasmus. Here, too, {151} he first came into contact with indulgences, sold throughout Switzerland by Bernard Samson, a Milanese Franciscan. Zwingli did not attack them with the impassioned zeal of Luther, but ridiculed them as "a comedy." His position did not alienate him from the papal authorities, [Sidenote: September 1, 1516] for he applied for, and received, the appointment of papal acolyte. How little serious was his life at this time may be seen from the fact that he openly confessed that he was living in unchastity and even joked about it.
Notwithstanding his peccadillos, as he evidently regarded them, high hopes were conceived of his abilities and independence of character. When a priest was wanted at Zurich, [Sidenote: January 1, 1519] Zwingli applied for the position and, after strenuous canvassing, succeeded in getting it.
Soon after this came the turning-point in Zwingli's life, making of the rather worldly young man an earnest apostle. Two causes contributed to this. The first was the plague. Zwingli was taken sick in September and remained in a critical condition for many months. As is so often the case, suffering and the fear of death made the claims of the other world so terribly real to him that, for the first time, he cried unto God from the depths, and consecrated his life to service of his Saviour.
[Sidenote: 1519]
The second influence that decided and deepened Zwingli's life was that of Luther. He first mentions him in 1519, and from that time forth, often. All his works and all his acts thereafter show the impress of the Wittenberg professor. Though Zwingli himself sturdily asserted that he preached the gospel before he heard of Luther, and that he learned his whole doctrine direct from the Bible, he deceived himself, as many men do, in over-estimating his own originality. He was truly able to say that he had formulated some {152} of his ideas, in dependence on Erasmus, before he heard of the Saxon; and he still retained his capacity for private judgment afterwards. He never followed any man slavishly, and in some respects he was more radical than Luther; nevertheless it is true that he was deeply indebted to the great German.
Significantly enough, the first real conflict broke out at Zurich early in 1520. Zwingli preached against fasting and monasticism, and put forward the thesis that the gospel alone should be the rule of faith and practice. He succeeded in carrying through a practical reform of the cathedral chapter, but was obliged to compromise on fasting. Soon afterwards Zurich renounced obedience to the bishop. The Forest Cantons, already jealous of the prosperity of the cities, endeavored to intervene, but were warned by Zwingli not to appeal to war, as it was an unchristian thing. Opposition only drove his reforming zeal to further efforts.
In the spring of 1522 Zwingli formed with Anna Reinhard Meyer a union which he kept secret for two years, when he married her in church. In the marriage itself, though it was by no means unhappy, there was something lacking of fine feeling and of perfect love.
[Sidenote: Reformation in Zurich]
As the reform progressed, the need of clarification was felt. This was brought about by the favorite method of that day, a disputation. The Catholics tried in vain to prevent it, and it was actually held in January, 1523, on 67 theses drawn up by Zwingli. Here, as so often, it was found that the battle was half won when the innovators were heard. They themselves attributed this to the excellence of their cause; but, without disparaging that, it must be said that, as the psychology of advertising has shown, any thesis presented with sufficient force to catch the public ear, is {153} sure to win a certain number of adherents. [Sidenote: October 27, 1523] The Town Council of Zurich ordered the abolition of images and of the mass. The opposition of the cathedral chapter considerably delayed the realization of this program. In December the Council was obliged to concede further discussion. It was not until Wednesday, April 12, 1525, that mass was said for the last time in Zurich. Its place was immediately taken, the next day, Maundy Thursday, by a simple communion service. At the same time the last of the convents were suppressed, or put in a condition assuring their eventual extinction. Other reforms included the abolition of processions, of confirmation and of extreme unction. With homely caution, a large number of simple souls had this administered to them just before the time allotted for its last celebration. Organs were taken out of the churches, and regular lectures on the Bible given.
Alarmed by these innovations the five original cantons,—Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, Lucerne and Zug,—formed a league in 1524 to suppress the "Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian heresies." For a time it looked like war. Zwingli and his advisers drew up a remarkably thorough plan of campaign, including a method of securing allies, many military details, and an ample provision for prayer for victory. War, however, was averted by the mediation of Berne as a friend of Zurich, and the complete religious autonomy of each canton was guaranteed.
The Swiss Reformation had to run the same course of separation from the humanists and radicals, and of schism, as did the German movement. Though Erasmus was a little closer to the Swiss than he had been to the Saxon Reformers, he was alienated by the outrageous taunts of some of them and by the equally unwarranted attempts of others to show that he agreed {154} with them. "They falsely call themselves evangelical," he opined, "for they seek only two things: a salary and a wife."
Then came the break with Luther, of which the story has already been told. The division was caused neither by jealousy, nor by the one doctrine—that of the real presence—on which it was nominally fought. There was in reality a wide difference between the two types of thought. The Saxon was both mystic and a schoolman; to him religion was all in all and dogma a large part of religion. Zwingli approached the problem of salvation from a less personal, certainly from a less agonized, and from a more legal, liberal, empiric standpoint. He felt for liberty and for the value of common action in the state. He interpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his reason under the tuition of the Bible in its apparent meaning.
[Sidenote: Anabaptists, 1522]
Next came the turn of the Anabaptists—those Bolsheviki of the sixteenth century. Their first leaders appeared at Zurich and were for a while bosom friends of Zwingli. But a parting of the ways was inevitable, for the humanist could have little sympathy with an uncultured and ignorant group—such they were, in spite of the fact that a few leaders were university graduates—and the statesman could not admit in his categories a purpose that was sectarian as against the state church, and democratic as against the existing aristocracy.
[Sidenote: 1523]
His first work against them shows how he was torn between his desire to make the Bible his only guide and the necessity of compromising with the prevailing polity. As he was unable to condemn his opponents on any consistent grounds he was obliged to prefer against them two charges that were false, though probably believed true by himself. As they were {155} ascetics in some particulars he branded them as monastic; for their social program he called them seditious.
The suppression of the Peasants' Revolt had the effect in Switzerland, as elsewhere, of causing the poor and oppressed to lose heart, and of alienating them from the cause of the official Protestant churches. A disputation with the Anabaptist leaders was held at Zurich; [Sidenote: November 6-8, 1525] they were declared refuted, and the council passed an order for all unbaptized children to be christened within a week. The leaders were arrested and tried; Zwingli bearing testimony that they advocated communism, which he considered wrong as the Bible's injunction not to steal implied the right of private property. The Anabaptists denied that they were communists, but the leaders were bound over to keep the peace, some were fined and others banished. As persecuting measures almost always increase in severity, it was not long before the death penalty was denounced against the sectaries, and actually applied. In a polemic against the new sect entitled In Catabaptistarum Strophas Elenchus, [Sidenote: July 1527] Zwingli's only argument is a criticism of some inconsistencies in the Anabaptists' biblicism; his final appeal is to force. His strife with them was harder than his battle with Rome. It seems that the reformer fears no one so much as him who carries the reformer's own principles to lengths that the originator disapproves. Zwingli saw in the fearless fanatics men prepared to act in political and social matters as he had done in ecclesiastical affairs; he dreaded anarchy or, at least, subversion of the polity he preferred, and, like all the other men of his age, he branded heresy as rebellion and punished it as crime.
[Sidenote: Theocracy]
By this time Zurich had become a theocracy of the same tyrannical type as that later made famous by {156} Geneva. Zwingli took the position of an Old Testament prophet, subordinating state to church. At first he had agreed with the Anabaptists in separating (theoretically) church and state. But he soon came to believe that, though true Christians might need no government, it was necessary to control the wicked, and for this purpose he favored an aristocratic polity. All matters of morals were strictly regulated, severe laws being passed against taverns and gambling. The inhabitants were forced to attend church. After the suppression of the Catholics and the radicals, there developed two parties just as later in Geneva, the Evangelical and the Indifferent, the policy of the latter being one of more freedom, or laxity, in discipline, and in general a preference of political to religious ends.
[Sidenote: Basle November, 1522]
The Reformation had now established itself in other cities of German Switzerland. Oecolampadius coming to Basle as the bearer of Evangelical ideas, won such success that soon the bishop was deprived of authority, [Sidenote: 1524] two disputations with the Catholics were held, [Sidenote: 1525] and the monasteries abolished. [Sidenote: 1527] Oecolampadius, after taking counsel with Zwingli on the best means of suppressing Catholic worship, branded the mass as an act worse than theft, harlotry, adultery, treason, and murder, called a meeting of the town council, and requested them to decree the abolition of Catholic worship. [Sidenote: October 27, 1527] Though they replied that every man should be free to exercise what religion he liked, on Good Friday, 1528, the Protestants removed the images from Oecolampadius's church, and grumbled because their enemies were yet tolerated. Liberty of conscience was only assured by the fairly equal division of the membership of the town council. On December 23, 1528, two hundred citizens assembled and presented a petition, drawn up by Oecolampadius, for the suppression of {157} the mass. On January 6, 1529, under pressure from the ambassadors of Berne and Zurich, the town council of Basle decreed that all pastors should preach only the Word of God, and asked them to assemble for instruction on this point. The compromise suited no one and on February 8 the long prepared revolution broke out. Under pretence that the Catholics had disobeyed the last decree, a Protestant mob surrounded the town hall, planted cannon, and forced the council to expel the twelve Catholic members, meanwhile destroying church pictures and statues. "It was indeed a spectacle so sad to the superstitious," Oecolampadius wrote to Capito, "that they had to weep blood. . . . We raged against the idols, and the mass died of sorrow."
A somewhat similar development took place in Berne, St. Gall, Schaffhausen, and Glarus. The favorite instrument for arousing popular interest and support was the disputation. Such an one was held at Baden in May and June, 1526. Zwingli declined to take part in this and the Catholics claimed the victory. This, however, did them rather harm than good, for the public felt that the cards had been stacked. A similar debate at Berne in 1528 turned that city completely to the Reformation. A synod of the Swiss Evangelical churches was formed in 1527. This made for uniformity. The publication of the Bible in a translation by Leo Jud and others, with prefaces by Zwingli, proved a help to the Evangelical cause. [Sidenote: 1530] This translation was the only one to compete at all successfully with Luther's.
The growing strength of the Protestant cantons encouraged them to carry the reform by force in all places in which a majority was in favor of it. Zwingli's far-reaching plans included an alliance with Hesse and with Francis I to whom he dedicated his {158} two most important theological works, True and False Religion and An Exposition of the Christian Faith. [Sidenote: April, 1529] The Catholic cantons replied by making a league with Austria. War seemed imminent and Zwingli was so heartily in favor of it that he threatened resignation if Zurich did not declare war. This was accordingly done on June 8. Thirty thousand Protestant soldiers marched against the Catholic cantons, which, without the expected aid from Austria, were able to put only nine thousand men into the field. Seeing themselves hopelessly outnumbered, the Catholics prudently negotiated a peace without risking a battle. [Sidenote: First Peace of Cappel] The terms of this first Peace of Cappel forced the Catholics to renounce the alliance with Austria, and to allow the majority of citizens in each canton to decide the religion they would follow. Toleration for Protestants was provided for in Catholic cantons, though toleration of the old religion was denied in the Evangelical cantons.
This peace marked the height of Zwingli's power. He continued to negotiate on equal terms with Luther, and he sent missionaries into Geneva to win it to his cause and to the Confederacy. The Catholic cantons, stung to the quick, again sought aid from Austria and raised another and better army. [Sidenote: Defeat of Zwingli] Zwingli heard of this and advocated a swift blow to prevent it—the "offensive defence." Berne refused to join Zurich in this aggression, but agreed to bring pressure to bear on the Catholics [Sidenote: May 1531] by proclaiming a blockade of their frontiers. An army was prepared by the Forest Cantons, but Berne, whose entirely selfish policy was more disastrous to the Evangelical cause than was the hostility of the league, still refused to engage in war. Zurich was therefore obliged to meet it alone. An army of only two thousand Zurichers marched out, accompanied by Zwingli as field chaplain. Eight thousand Catholic troops attacked, utterly defeated them, and {159} killed many on the field of battle. [Sidenote: October 11, 1531] Zwingli, who, though a non-combatant, was armed, was wounded and left on the field. Later he was recognized by enemies, killed, and his body burned as that of a heretic.
The defeat was a disaster to Protestant Switzerland not so much on account of the terms of peace, which were moderate, as because of the loss of prestige and above all of the great leader. His spirit however, continued to inspire his followers, and lived in the Reformed Church. Indeed it has been said, though with exaggeration, that Calvin only gave his name to the church founded by Zwingli, just as Americus gave his name to the continent discovered by Columbus. In many respects Zwingli was the most liberal of the Reformers. In his last work he expressed the belief that in heaven would be saved not only Christians and the worthies of the Old Testament but also "Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and Scipios. . . . In a word no good man has ever existed, nor shall there exist a holy mind, a faithful soul, from the very foundation of the world to its consummation, whom you will not see there with God." Nevertheless, Zwingli was a persecutor and was bound by many of the dogmatic prepossessions of his time. But his religion had in it less of miracle and more of reason than that of any other founder of a church in the sixteenth century. He was a statesman, and more willing to trust the people than were his contemporaries, but yet he was ready to sacrifice his country to his creed.
For a short time after the death of so many of its leading citizens in the battle of Cappel, Zurich was reduced to impotence and despair. Nor was she much comforted or assisted by her neighbors. Oecolampadius died but a few weeks after his friend; while {160} Luther and Erasmus sang paeans of triumph over the prostration of their rivals. Even Calvin considered it a judgment of God. Gradually by her own strength Zurich won her way back to peace and a certain influence. [Sidenote: Bullinger, 1504-75] Zwingli's follower, Henry Bullinger, the son of a priest, was a remarkable man. He not only built up his own city but his active correspondence with Protestants of all countries did a great deal to spread the cause of the Evangelical religion. In conjunction with Myconius, he drew up the first Swiss confession, [Sidenote: 1536] accepted by Zurich, Berne, Basle, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, Mülhausen and Biel; [Sidenote: 1549] and later he made the agreement with Calvin known as the Consensus Tigurinus. In this the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doctrines of the eucharist were harmonized as far as possible. But while the former decreased the latter increased, and Geneva took the place of Zurich as the metropolis of the Reformed faith.
On January 15, 1527, Thomas von Hofen wrote Zwingli from Geneva that he would do all he could to exalt the gospel in that city but that he knew it would be vain, for there were seven hundred priests working against him. This letter gives an insight into the methods by which new territory was evangelized, the quarters whence came the new influences, and the forces with which they had to contend.
Among the early missionaries of "the gospel" in French-speaking lands, one of the most energetic was William Farel. [Sidenote: Farel, 1489-1565] He had studied at Paris under Lèfevre d'Étaples, and was converted to Lutheranism as early as 1521. He went first to Basle, where he learned to know Erasmus. Far from showing respect to the older and more famous man, he scornfully told him to his face that Froben's wife knew more theology than {161} did he. Erasmus's resentment showed itself in the nickname Phallicus that he fastened on his antagonist. From Basle Farel went to Montbéliard and Aigle, preaching fearlessly but so fiercely that his friend Oecolampadius warned him to remember rather to teach than to curse. [Sidenote: 1528] After attending the disputation at Berne he evangelized western Switzerland. His methods may be learned from his work at Valangin on August 15, 1530. He attended a mass, but in the midst of it went up to the priest, tore the host forcibly from his hands, and said to the people: "This is not the God whom you worship: he is above in heaven, even in the majesty of the Father." In 1532 he went to Geneva. Notwithstanding the fact that here, as often elsewhere, he narrowly escaped lynching, he made a great impression. His red hair and hot temper evidently had their uses.
[Sidenote: Calvin, 1509-64]
The Reformer of French Switzerland was not destined to be Farel, however, but John Calvin. Born at Noyon, Picardy, his mother died early and his father, who did not care for children, sent him to the house of an aristocratic friend to be reared. In this environment he acquired the distinguished manners and the hauteur for which he was noted. When John was six years old his father, Gerard, had him appointed to a benefice just as nowadays he might have got him a scholarship. At the age of twelve Gerard's influence procured for his son another of these ecclesiastical livings and two years later this was exchanged for a more lucrative one to enable the boy to go to Paris. Here for some years, at the College of Montaigu, Calvin studied scholastic philosophy and theology under Noel Beda, a medieval logic-chopper and schoolman by temperament. At the university Calvin won from his fellows the sobriquet of "the accusative case," on account of his censorious {162} and fault-finding disposition. At his father's wish John changed from theology to law. For a time he studied at the universities of Orleans and Bourges. At Orleans he came under the influence of two Protestants, Olivetan and the German Melchior Volmar. On the death of his father, in 1531, he began to devote himself to the humanities. His first work, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, witnesses his wide reading, his excellent Latin style, and his ethical interests.
It was apparently through the humanists Erasmus and Lefèvre that he was led to the study of the Bible and of Luther's writings. Probably in the fall of 1533 he experienced a "conversion" such as stands at the head of many a religious career. A sudden beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living. He thereupon abandoned his former life with tears.
In the spring of 1534 Calvin gave up the sinecure benefices he had held, and towards the end of the year left France because of the growing persecution, for he had already rendered himself suspect. After various wanderings he reached Basle, where he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. [Sidenote: Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536] It was dedicated, like two of Zwingli's works, to Francis I, with a strong plea for the new faith. It was, nevertheless, condemned and burnt publicly in France in 1542. Originally written in Latin it was translated by the author into French in 1541, and reissued from time to time in continually larger editions, the final one, of 1559, being five times as bulky as the first impression. The thought, too, though not fundamentally changed, was rearranged and developed. Only in the redaction of 1541 was {163} predestination made perfectly clear. The first edition, like Luther's catechism, took up in order the Decalogue, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sacraments. To this was added a section on Christian liberty, the power of the church, and civil government. In the last edition the arrangement followed entirely the order of articles in the Apostles' Creed, all the other matter being digested in its relation to faith.
[Sidenote: A system of theology]
In the Institutes Calvin succeeded in summing up the whole of Protestant Christian doctrine and practice. It is a work of enormous labor and thought. Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity have secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches that the Summa of Aquinas has in the Roman theology. It is like the Summa, in other ways, primarily in that it is an attempt to derive an absolute, unchangeable standard of dogma from premises considered infallible. Those who have found great freshness in Calvin, a new life and a new realism, can do so only in comparison with the older schoolmen. Calvin simply went over their ground, introducing into their philosophy all the connotations that three centuries of progress had made necessary. This is not denying that his work was well written and that it filled a need urgently felt at the time. Calvin cultivated style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he saw its immense utility for propaganda. He studied especially brevity, and thought that he carried it to an extreme, though the French edition of the Institutes fills more than eight hundred large octavo pages. However, all things are relative, and compared to many other theologians Calvin is really concise and readable.
There is not one original thought in any of Calvin's works. I do not mean "original" in any narrow sense, for to the searcher for sources it seems that {164} there is literally nothing new under the sun. But there is nothing in Calvin for which ample authority cannot be found in his predecessors. Recognizing the Bible as his only standard, he interpreted it according to the new Protestant doctors. First and foremost he was dependent on Luther, and to an extent that cannot be exaggerated. Especially from the Catechisms, The Bondage of the Will, and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Calvin drew all his principal doctrines even to details. He also borrowed something from Bucer, Erasmus and Schwenckfeld, as well as from three writers who were in a certain sense his models. Melanchthon's Commonplaces of Theology, Zwingli's True and False Religion, and Farel's Brief Instruction in Christian Faith had all done tentatively what he now did finally.
[Sidenote: Theocentric character]
The center of Calvin's philosophy was God as the Almighty Will. His will was the source of all things, of all deeds, of all standards of right and wrong and of all happiness. The sole purpose of the universe, and the sole intent of its Creator, was the glorification of the Deity. Man's chief end was "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." God accomplished this self-exaltation in all things, but chiefly through men, his noblest work, and he did it in various ways, by the salvation of some and the damnation of others. And his act was purely arbitrary; he foreknew and predestined the fate of every man from the beginning; he damned and saved irrespective of foreseen merit. "God's eternal decree" Calvin himself called "frightful." [1] The outward sign of election to grace he thought was moral behavior, and in this respect he demanded the uttermost from himself and from his followers. The elect, he thought, were certain of salvation. The highest virtue was faith, a matter more {165} of the heart than of the reason. The divinity of Christ, he said, was apprehended by Christian experience, not by speculation. Reason was fallacious; left to itself the human spirit "could do nothing but lose itself in infinite error, embroil itself in difficulties and grope in opaque darkness." But God has given us his Word, infallible and inerrant, something that "has flowed from his very mouth." "We can only seek God in his Word," he said, "nor think of him otherwise than according to his Word."
Inevitably, Calvin sought to use the Bible as a rigid, moral law to be fulfilled to the letter. His ethics were an elaborate casuistry, a method of finding the proper rule to govern the particular act. He preached a new legalism; [Sidenote: Legalism] he took Scripture as the Pharisees took the Law, and Luther's sayings as they took the Prophets, and he turned them all into stiff, fixed laws. Thus he crushed the glorious autonomy of his predecessor's ethical principles. It was Kant, who denied all Luther's specific beliefs, but who developed his idea of the individual conscience, that was the true heir of his spirit, not Calvin who crushed the spirit in elaborating every jot and tittle of the letter. In precisely the same manner Calvin killed Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. To Calvin the church was a sacramental, aristocratic organization, with an authoritative ministry. The German rebelled against the idea of the church as such; the Frenchman simply asked what was the true church. So he brought back some of the sacramental miracle of baptism and the eucharist. In the latter he remained as medieval as Luther, never getting beyond the question of the mode of the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine. His endeavor to rationalize the doctrine of Augsburg, especially with reference to the Zwinglians, had disastrous results. Only two {166} positions were possible, that the body and blood were present, or that they were not. By endeavoring to find some middle ground Calvin upheld a contradiction in terms: the elements were signs and yet were realities; the body was really there when the bread was eaten by a believer, but really not there when the same bread was eaten by an infidel. The presence was actual, and yet participation could only occur by faith. While rejecting some of Luther's explanations, Calvin was undoubtedly nearer his position than that of Zwingli, which he characterized as "profane."
As few instructed and thinking persons now accept the conclusions of the Institutes, it is natural to underestimate the power that they exercised in their own day. This book was the most effective weapon of Protestantism. This was partly because of the style, but, still more because of the faultless logic. [Sidenote: His logic] The success of an argument usually depends far less on the truth of the premises than on the validity of the reasoning. And the premises selected by Calvin not only seemed natural to a large body of educated European opinion of his time, but were such that their truth or falsity was very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. Calvin's system has been overthrown not by direct attack, but by the flank, in science as in war the most effective way. To take but one example out of many that might be given: what has modern criticism made of Calvin's doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture? But this science was as yet all but unknown: biblical exegesis there was in plenty, but it was only to a minute extent literary and historical; it was almost exclusively philological and dogmatic.
Calvin's doctrine of the arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation irrespective of merit has often excited a moral rather than an intellectual revulsion. To his true followers, indeed, like Jonathan {167} Edwards, it seems "a delightful doctrine, exceeding bright, pleasant and sweet." [Sidenote: Eternal damnation] But many men agree with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious tyrant and with William James that it is sovereignly irrational and mean. Even at that time those who said that a man's will had no more to do with his destiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose where to strike or than a saddled beast could choose its rider, aroused an intense opposition. Erasmus argued that damnation given for inevitable crimes would make God unjust, and Thomas More blamed Luther for calling God the cause of evil and for saying "God doth damn so huge a number of people to intolerable torments only for his own pleasure and for his own deeds wrought in them only by himself." An English heretic, Cole of Faversham, said that the doctrine of predestination was meeter for devils than for Christians. "The God of Calvin," exclaimed Jerome Bolsec, "is a hypocrite, a liar, perfidious, unjust, the abetter and patron of crimes, and worse than the devil himself."
But there was another side to the doctrine of election. There was a certain moral grandeur in the complete abandon to God and in the earnestness that was ready to sacrifice all to his will. And if we judge the tree by its fruits, at its best it brought forth a strong and good race. The noblest examples are not the theologians, Calvin and Knox, not only drunk with God but drugged with him, much less politicians like Henry of Navarre and William of Orange, but the rank and file of the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England, "the choice and sifted seed wherewith God sowed the wilderness" of America. These men bore themselves with I know not what of lofty seriousness, and with a matchless disdain of all mortal peril and all earthly grandeur. Believing themselves chosen vessels and elect instruments of grace, they could neither {168} be seduced by carnal pleasure nor awed by human might. Taught that they were kings by the election of God and priests by the imposition of his hands, they despised the puny and vicious monarchs of this earth. They remained, in fact, what they always felt themselves to be, an elite, "the chosen few."
Having finished his great work, Calvin set out on his wanderings again. For a time he was at the court of the sympathetic Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara. When persecution broke out here, he again fled northward, and came, by chance, to Geneva. [Sidenote: Geneva] Here Farel was waging an unequal fight with the old church. Needing Calvin's help he went to him and begged his assistance, calling on God to curse him should he not stay. "Struck with terror," as Calvin himself confessed, he consented to do so.
Beautifully situated on the blue waters of Lake Leman in full view of Mont Blanc, Geneva was at this time a town of 16,000 inhabitants, a center of trade, pleasure, and piety. The citizens had certain liberties, but were under the rule of a bishop. As this personage was usually elected from the house of the Duke of Savoy, Geneva had become little better than a dependency of that state. The first years of the sixteenth century had been turbulent. The bishop, John, had at one time been forced to abdicate his authority, but later had tried to resume it. The Archbishop of Vienne, Geneva's metropolitan, had then excommunicated the city and invited Duke Charles III of Savoy to punish it. The citizens rose under Bonivard, renounced the authority of the pope, expelled the bishop and broke up the religious houses. To guard against the vengeance of the duke, a league was made with Berne and Freiburg.
On October 2, 1532, William Farel arrived from Berne. At Geneva as elsewhere tumult followed his {169} preaching, but it met with such success that by January, 1534, he held a disputation which decided the city to become evangelical. The council examined the shrines [Sidenote: 1535] and found machinery for the production of bogus miracles; provisionally abolished the mass; [Sidenote: May 21, 1536] and soon after formally renounced the papal religion.
At this point Calvin arrived, and began preaching and organizing at once. He soon aroused opposition from the citizens, galled at his strictness and perhaps jealous of a foreigner. [Sidenote: Calvin expelled, February 1538] The elections to the council went against him, and the opposition came to a head shortly afterwards. The town council decided to adopt the method of celebrating the eucharist used at Rome. For some petty reason Calvin and Farel refused to obey, and when a riot broke out at the Lord's table, the council expelled them from the city.
Calvin went to Strassburg, where he learned to know Bucer and republished his Institutes. Here he married Idelette de Bure, the widow of an Anabaptist, [Sidenote: August, 1540] who was never in strong health and died, probably of consumption, on March 29, 1549. Calvin's married life lacked tenderness and joy. The story that he selected his wife because he thought that by reason of her want of beauty she would not distract his thoughts from God, is not well founded, but it does illustrate his attitude towards her. The one or more children born of the union died in infancy.
Calvin attended the Colloquy at Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1541] in the result of which he was deeply disappointed. In the meantime he had not lost all interest in Geneva. When Cardinal Sadoleto wrote, in the most polished Latin, an appeal to the city to return to the Roman communion, Calvin answered it. [Sidenote: September 1, 1539] The party opposed to him discredited itself by giving up the city's rights to Berne, and, was therefore overthrown. The perplexities presenting themselves to the council were {170} beyond their powers to solve, and they felt obliged to recall Calvin, [Sidenote: Calvin returns, 1541] who returned to remain for the rest of his life.
[Sidenote: Theocracy]
His position was so strong that he was able to make of Geneva a city after his own heart. The form of government he caused to prevail was a strict theocracy. The clergy of the city met in a body known as the Congregation, a "venerable company" that discussed and prepared legislation for the consideration of the Consistory. In this larger body, besides the clergy, the laity were represented by twelve elders chosen by the council, not by the people at large. The state and church were thus completely identified in a highly aristocratic polity.
"The office of the Consistory is to keep watch on the life of every one." Thus briefly was expressed the delegation of as complete powers over the private lives of citizens as ever have been granted to a committee. The object of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances was to create a society of saints. The Bible was adopted as the norm; all its provisions being enforced except such Jewish ceremonies as were considered abrogated by the New Testament. The city was divided into quarters, and some of the elders visited every house at least once a year and passed in review the whole life, actions, speech, and opinions of the inmates. The houses of the citizens were made of glass; and the vigilant eye of the Consistory, served by a multitude of spies, was on them all the time. In a way this espionage but took the place of the Catholic confessional. A joke, a gesture was enough to bring a man under suspicion. The Elders sat as a regular court, hearing complaints and examining witnesses. It is true that they could inflict only spiritual punishments, such as public censure, penance, excommunication, or forcing the culprit to demand pardon in church on his knees. But when {171} the Consistory thought necessary, it could invoke the aid of the civil courts and the judgment was seldom doubtful. Among the capital crimes were adultery, blasphemy, witchcraft, and heresy. Punishments for all offences were astonishingly and increasingly heavy. During the years 1542-6 there were, in this little town of 16,000 people, no less than fifty-eight executions and seventy-six banishments.
In judging the Genevan theocracy it is important to remember that everywhere, in the sixteenth century, punishments were heavier than they are now, and the regulation of private life minuter.[2] Nevertheless, though parallels to almost everything done at Geneva can be found elsewhere, it is true that Calvin intensified the medieval spirit in this respect and pushed it to the farthest limit that human nature would bear.
First of all, he compelled the citizens to fulfil their religious duties. He began the process by which later the Puritans identified the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's Day. Luther had thought the injunction to rest on the Seventh Day a bit of Jewish ceremonial abrogated by the new dispensation and that, after attending church, the Christian might devote the day to what work or pleasure he thought proper. Calvin, however, forbade all work and commanded attendance on sermons, of which an abundance were offered to the devout. In addition to Sunday services there were, as in the Catholic church, morning prayers every work day and a second service three days a week. All ceremonies with a vestige of popery about them were forbidden. [Sidenote: 1555] The keeping of Christmas was prohibited under pain of fine and imprisonment.
"As I see that we cannot forbid men all diversions," sighed Calvin, "I confine myself to those that are really bad." This class was sufficiently large. The {172} theater was denounced from the pulpit, especially when the new Italian habit of giving women's parts to actresses instead of to boys was introduced. According to Calvin's colleague Cop, "the women who mount the platform to play comedies are full of unbridled effrontery, without honor, having no purpose but to expose their bodies, clothes, and ornaments to excite the impure desires of the spectators. . . . The whole thing," he added, "is very contrary to the modesty of women who ought to be shamefaced and shy." Accordingly, attendance on plays was forbidden.
[Sidenote: Supervision of conduct]
Among other prohibited amusements was dancing, especially obnoxious as at that time dances were accompanied by kisses and embraces. Playing cards, cursing and swearing were also dealt with, as indeed they were elsewhere. Among the odd matters that came before the Consistory were: attempted suicide, possessing the Golden Legend (a collection of saints' lives called by Beza "abominable trash"), paying for masses, betrothing a daughter to a Catholic, fasting on Good Friday, singing obscene songs, and drunkenness. A woman was chastized for taking too much wine even though it did not intoxicate. Some husbands were mildly reprimanded, not for beating their wives which was tolerated by contemporary opinion, but for rubbing salt and vinegar into the wales. Luxury in clothing was suppressed; all matters of color and quality regulated by law, and even the way in which women did their hair. In 1546 the inns were put under the direct control of the government and strictly limited to the functions of entertaining—or rather of boarding and lodging—strangers and citizens in temporary need of them. Among the numerous rules enforced within them the following may be selected as typical:
[Sidenote: Rules for inns]
If any one blasphemes the name of God or says, "By {173} the body, 'sblood, zounds" or anything like, or who gives himself to the devil or uses similar execrable imprecations, he shall be punished. . . .
If any one insults any one else the host shall be obliged to deliver him up to justice.
If there are any persons who make it their business to frequent the said inns, and there to consume their goods and substance, the host shall not receive them.
Item the host shall be obliged to report to the government any insolent or dissolute acts committed by the guests.
Item the host shall not allow any person of whatever quality he be, to drink or eat anything in his house without first having asked a blessing and afterwards said grace.
Item the host shall be obliged to keep in a public place a French Bible, in which any one who wishes may read, and he shall not prevent free and honest conversation on the Word of God, to edification, but shall favor it as much as he can.
Item the host shall not allow any dissoluteness like dancing, dice or cards, nor shall he receive any one suspected of being a debauche or ruffian.
Item he shall only allow people to play honest games without swearing or blasphemy, and without wasting more time than that allowed for a meal.
Item he shall not allow indecent songs or words, and if any one wishes to sing Psalms or spiritual songs he shall make them do it in a decent and not in a dissolute way.
Item nobody shall be allowed to sit up after nine o'clock at night except spies.
Of course, such matters as marriage were regulated strictly. When a man of seventy married a girl of twenty-five Calvin said it was the pastor's duty to reprehend them. The Reformer often selected the women he thought suitable for his acquaintances who wanted wives. He also drew up a list of baptismal names which he thought objectionable, including the names of "idols,"—i.e. saints venerated near Geneva—the names of kings and offices to whom God alone {174} appoints, such as Angel or Baptist, names belonging to God such as Jesus and Emanuel, silly names such as Toussaint and Noel, double names and ill-sounding names. Calvin also pronounced on the best sort of stoves and got servants for his friends. In fact, there was never such a busy-body in a position of high authority before nor since. No wonder that the citizens frequently chafed under the yoke.
If we ask how much was actually accomplished by this minute regulation accompanied by extreme severity in the enforcement of morals, various answers are given. When the Italian reformer Bernardino Occhino visited Geneva in 1542, he testified that cursing and swearing, unchastity and sacrilege were unknown; that there were neither lawsuits nor simony nor murder nor party spirit, but that universal benevolence prevailed. Again in 1556 John Knox said that Geneva was "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In other places," he continued, "I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides." But if we turn from these personal impressions to an examination of the acts of the Consistory, we get a very different impression. [Sidenote: Morals of Geneva] The records of Geneva show more cases of vice after the Reformation than before. The continually increasing severity of the penalties enacted against vice and frivolity seem to prove that the government was helpless to suppress them. Among those convicted of adultery were two of Calvin's own female relatives, his brother's wife and his step-daughter Judith. What success there was in making Geneva a city of saints was due to the fact that it gradually became a very select population. The worst of the incorrigibles were soon either executed or banished, and their places taken by a large influx of {175} men of austere mind, drawn thither as a refuge from persecution elsewhere, or by the desire to sit at the feet of the great Reformer. Between the years 1549 and 1555 no less than 1297 strangers were admitted to citizenship. Practically all of these were immigrants coming to the little town for conscience's sake.
[Persecution]
Orthodoxy was enforced as rigidly as morality. The ecclesiastical constitution adopted in 1542 brought in the Puritan type of divine service. Preaching took the most important place in church, supplemented by Bible reading and catechetical instruction. Laws were passed enforcing conformity under pain of losing goods and life. Those who did not expressly renounce the mass were punished. A little girl of thirteen was condemned to be publicly beaten with rods for saying that she wanted to be a Catholic. Calvin identified his own wishes and dignity with the commands and honor of God. One day he forbade a citizen, Philibert Berthelier, to come to the Lord's table. Berthelier protested and was supported by the council. "If God lets Satan crush my ministry under such tyranny," shrieked Calvin, "it is all over with me." The slightest assertion of liberty on the part of another was stamped out as a crime. Sebastian Castellio, a sincere Christian and Protestant, but more liberal than Calvin, fell under suspicion because he called the Song of Songs obscene, and because he made a new French version of the Bible to replace the one of Olivetan officially approved. He was banished in 1544. Two years later Peter Ameaux made some very trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he was forced to fall on his knees in public and ask pardon.
But opposition only increased. The party opposing Calvin he called the Libertines—a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as the word "miscreant" had formerly done. [Sidenote: January, 1547] One of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's church at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the city. He was at once arrested and a house to house search made for his accomplices. This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a whole month. The frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate anyone else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy. He was charged with "disparaging authors like Moses, who by the Spirit of God wrote the divine law, saying that Moses had no more power than any other man. . . . He also said that all laws, human and divine, were made at the pleasure of man." He was therefore sentenced to death for blasphemy and beheaded on July 26, 1547, "calling on God as his Lord." After his death one of his books was found and condemned. To justify this course Calvin alleged that Gruet said that Jesus Christ was a good-for-nothing, a liar, and a false seducer, and that he (Gruet) denied the existence of God and immortality. Evangelical freedom had now arrived at the point whore its champions first took a man's life and then his character, merely for writing a lampoon!
Naturally such tyranny produced a reaction. The enraged Libertines nicknamed Calvin Cain, and saved from his hands the next personal enemy, Ami Perrin, whom he caused to be tried for treason. [Sidenote: October 16, 1551] A still more bitter dose for the theocrat was that administered by Jerome Bolsec, who had the audacity to preach against the doctrine of predestination. Calvin and Farel refuted him on the spot and had him arrested. Berne, Basle and Zurich intervened and, when solicited for {177} an expression on the doctrine in dispute, spoke indecisively. The triumph of his enemies at this rebuke was hard for Calvin to bear and prepared for the commission of the most regrettable act of his career.
[Sidenote: Servetus, 1531]
The Spanish physician Michael Servetus published, in Germany, a work on the Errors concerning the Trinity. His theory was not that of a modern rationalist, but of one whose starting point was the authority of the Bible, and his unitarianism was consequently of a decidedly theological brand, recalling similar doctrines in the early church. Leaving Germany he went to Vienne, [Sidenote: 1553] in France, and got a good practice under an assumed name. He later published a work called, perhaps in imitation of Calvin's Institutio, The Restitution of Christianity, setting forth his ideas about the Trinity, which he compared to the three-headed monster Cerberus, but admitting the divinity of Christ. He also denied the doctrine of original sin and asserted that baptism should be for adults only. He was poorly advised in sending this book to the Reformer, with whom he had some correspondence. With Calvin's knowledge and probably at his instigation, though he later issued an equivocating denial, William Trie, of Geneva, denounced Servetus to the Catholic inquisition at Vienne and forwarded the material sent by the heretic to Calvin. On June 17, 1553, the Catholic inquisitor, expressly stating that he acted on this material, condemned Servetus to be burnt by slow fire, but he escaped and went to Geneva.
Here he was recognized and arrested. Calvin at once appeared as his prosecutor for heresy. The charges against him were chiefly concerned with his denial of the Trinity and of infant baptism, and with his attack on the person and teaching of Calvin. As an example of the point to which Bibliolatry could suppress candor it may be mentioned that one of the {178} charges against him was that he had asserted Palestine to be a poor land. This was held to contradict the Scriptural statement that it was a land flowing with milk and honey. The minutes of the trial are painful reading. It was conducted on both sides with unbecoming violence. Among other expressions used by Calvin, the public prosecutor, were these: that he regarded Servetus's defence as no better than the braying of an ass, and that the prisoner was like a villainous cur wiping his muzzle. Servetus answered in the same tone, his spirit unbroken by abuse and by his confinement in a horrible dungeon, where he suffered from hunger, cold, vermin, and disease. He was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to be burnt with slow fire. Calvin said that he tried to alter the manner of execution, but there is not a shred of evidence, in the minutes of the trial or elsewhere, that he did so. Possibly, if he made the request, it was purely formal, as were similar petitions for mercy made by the Roman inquisitors. At any rate, while Calvin's alleged effort for mercy proved fruitless, he visited his victim in prison to read him a self-righteous and insulting lecture. Farel, also, reviled him on the way to the stake, at which he perished on October 26, 1553, [Sidenote: Death of Servetus] crying, "God preserve my soul! O Jesus, Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" Farel called on the bystanders to witness that these words showed the dying man to be still in the power of Satan.
This act of persecution, one of the most painful in the history of Christianity, was received with an outburst of applause from almost all quarters. Melanchthon, who had not been on speaking terms with Calvin for some years, was reconciled to him by what he called "a signal act of piety." Other leading Protestants congratulated Calvin, who continued persecution systematically. Another victim of his was Matthew {179} Gribaldi, whom he delivered into the hands of the government of Berne, with a refutation of his errors. [Sidenote: 1564.] Had he not died of the plague in prison he would probably have suffered the same fate as Servetus.
[Sidenote: Complete theocracy, 1555]
Strengthened by his victory over heresy, Calvin now had the chance to annihilate his opponents. On May 15, 1555, he accused a number of them of treason, and provided proof by ample use of the rack. With the party of Libertines completely broken, Calvin ruled from this time forth with a rod of iron. The new Geneva was so cowed and subservient that the town council dared not install a new sort of heating apparatus without asking the permission of the theocrat. But a deep rancor smouldered under the surface. "Our incomparable theologian Calvin," wrote Ambrose Blaurer to Bullinger, "labors under such hatred of some whom he obscures by his light that he is considered the worst of heretics by them." Among other things he was accused of levying tribute from his followers by a species of blackmail, threatening publicly to denounce them unless they gave money to the cause.
[Sidenote: International Calvinism]
At the same time his international power and reputation rose. Geneva became the capital of Protestantism, from which mandates issued to all the countries of Western Europe. Englishmen and Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Italians, thronged to "this most perfect school of Christ since the apostles" to learn the laws of a new type of Christianity. For Calvin's Reformation was more thorough and logical than was Luther's. The German had regarded all as permitted that was not forbidden, and allowed the old usages to stand in so far as they were not repugnant to the ordinances of the Bible. But Calvin believed that all was forbidden save what was expressly allowed, and hence abolished as superstitious accretions all the elements of the medieval cult that could find no warrant in the {180} Bible. Images, vestments, organs, bells, candles, ritual, were swept away in the ungarnished meeting-house to make way for a simple service of Bible-reading, prayer, hymn and sermon. The government of the church was left by Calvin in close connection with the state, but he apparently turned around the Lutheran conception, making the civil authority subordinate to the spiritual and not the church to the state.
Whereas Lutheranism appealed to Germans and Scandinavians, Calvinism became the international form of Protestantism. Even in Germany Calvin made conquests at the expense of Luther, but outside of Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, he moulded the type of reformed thought in his own image. It is difficult to give statistics, for it is impossible to say how far each particular church, like the Anglican for example, was indebted to Calvin, how far to Luther, and how far to other leaders, and also because there was a strong reaction against pure Calvinism even in the sixteenth century. But it is safe to say that the clear, cold logic of the Institutes, the good French and Latin of countless other treatises and letters, and the political thought which amalgamated easily with rising tides of democracy and industrialism, made Calvin the leader of Protestantism outside of the Teutonic countries of the north. His gift for organization and the pains he took to train ministers and apostles contributed to this success.
[Sidenote: Death of Calvin, May 27, 1564]
On May 27, 1564 Calvin died, worn out with labor and ill health at the age of fifty-five. With a cold heart and a hot temper, he had a clear brain, an iron will, and a real moral earnestness derived from the conviction that he was a chosen vessel of Christ. Constantly tortured by a variety of painful diseases, he drove himself, by the demoniac strength of his will, to perform labor that would have taxed the strongest. {181} The way he ruled his poor, suffering body is symbolic of the way he treated the sick world. To him the maladies of his own body, or of the body politic, were evils to be overcome, at any cost of pain and sweat and blood, by a direct effort of the will. As he never yielded to fever and weakness in himself, so he dealt with the vice and frivolity he detested, crushing it out by a ruthless application of power, hunting it with spies, stretching it on the rack and breaking it on the wheel. But a gentler, more understanding method would have accomplished more, even for his own purpose.
[Sidenote: Beza, 1519-1605]
His successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, was a man after his own heart but, as he was far weaker, the town council gradually freed itself from spiritual tyranny. Towards the end of the century the pastors had been humbled and the questions of the day were far less the dogmatic niceties they loved than ethical ones such as the right to take usury, the proper penalty for adultery, the right to make war, and the best form of government.
[1] "Decretum Dei aeternum horribile."
[2] See below. Chapter X, section 3.
{182}
[Sidenote: France]
Though, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the French may have attained to no greater degree of national self-consciousness than had the Germans, they had gone much farther in the construction of a national state. The significance of this evolution, one of the strongest tendencies of modern history, is that it squares the outward political condition of the people with their inward desires. When once a nation has come to feel itself such, it cannot be happy until its polity is united in a homogeneous state, though the reverse is also true,—that national feeling is sometimes the result as well as the cause of political union. With the growth of a common language and of common ideals, and with the improvement of the methods of communication, the desire of the people for unity became stronger and stronger, until it finally overcame the centrifugal forces of feudalism and of particularism. These were so strong in Germany that only a very imperfect federation could be formed by way of national government, but in France, though they were still far from moribund, external pressure and the growth of the royal power had forged the various provinces into a nation such as it exists today. The most independent of the old provinces, Brittany, was now united to the crown by the marriage of its duchess Anne to Louis XII. [Sidenote: Louis XII, 1498-1515]
{183}
Anne ==Louis XII Charles, Count==Louise
Duchess of | 1498-1515 of Angoulême | of Savoy
Brittany | |
| |
| |
| |
+————-+——————-+ |
|2 1| |
Renée==Hercules II, Claude==(1)Francis I Margaret==(1)Charles,
Duke of | 1515-47 Duke of
Ferrara | (2)==Eleanor, Alençon
| sister of ==(2)Henry II,
| Emperor | King of
| Charles V | Navarre
| |
Henry II==Catharine de' |
1547-59 | Medici d. 1589 Joan ==Anthony
| d'Albret| of
| | Bourbon
| | Duke of
| | Vendôme
+————+———+———+——+-+————————+ |
| | | | | | |
Francis II, | Henry III | Elizabeth (1)Margaret==Henry IV,
1559-60 | 1574-89 | ==(3)Philip II (2)Mary de' 1589-1610
==Mary, Queen | | King of Spain Medici
of Scots | |
| |
Charles IX Francis, Duke
1560-74 of Alençon and
Anjou, d. 1584
[Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the person's year of death.]
Geographically, France was nearly the same four hundred years ago as it is today, save that the eastern {184} frontier was somewhat farther west. The line then ran west of the three Bishoprics, Verdun, Metz and Toul, west of Franche Comté, just east of Lyons and again west of Savoy and Nice.
Politically, France was then one of a group of semi-popular, semi-autocratic monarchies. The rights of the people were asserted by the States General which met from time to time, usually at much longer intervals than the German Diets or the English Parliaments, and by the Parlements of the various provinces. These latter were rather high courts of justice than legislative assemblies, but their right to register new laws gave them a considerable amount of authority. The Parlement of Paris was the most conspicuous and perhaps the most powerful.
[Sidenote: Concordat, 1516]
The power of the monarch, resting primarily on the support of the bourgeois class, was greatly augmented by the Concordat of 1516, which made the monarch almost the supreme head of the Gallican church. For two centuries the crown had been struggling to attain this position. It was because so large a degree of autonomy was granted to the national church that the French felt satisfied not to go to the extreme of secession from the Roman communion. It was because the king had already achieved a large control over his own clergy that he felt it unnecessary or inadvisable to go to the lengths of the Lutheran princes and of Henry VIII. In that one important respect the Concordat of Bologna took the place of the Reformation.
[Sidenote: Francis I, 1515-47]
Francis I was popular and at first not unattractive. Robust, fond of display, ambitious, intelligent enough to dabble in letters and art, he piqued himself on being chivalrous and brave. But he wasted his life and ruined his health in the pursuit of pleasure. His face, as it has come down to us in contemporary paintings, is disagreeable. He was, as with unusual candor a {185} contemporary observer put it, a devil even to the extent of considerably looking it.
While to art and letters Francis gave a certain amount of attention, he usually from mere indolence allowed the affairs of state to be guided by others. Until the death of his mother, Louise of Savoy, [Sidenote: 1531] he was ruled by her. Thereafter the Constable Anne de Montmorency was his chief minister. The policy followed was the inherited one which was, to a certain point, necessary in the given conditions. In domestic affairs, the king or his advisors endeavored to increase the power of the crown at the expense of the nobles. The last of the great vassals strong enough to assert a quasi-independence of the king was Charles of Bourbon. [Sidenote: 1523-4] He was arrested and tried by the Parlement of Paris, which consistently supported the crown. Fleeing from France he entered the service of Charles V, [Sidenote: 1526] and his restoration was made an article of the treaty of Madrid. His death in the sack of Rome closed the incident in favor of the king. [Sidenote: May, 1527]
The foreign policy of France was a constant struggle, now by diplomacy, now by arms, with Charles V. The principal remaining powers of Europe, England, Turkey and the pope, threw their weight now on one side now on the other of the two chief antagonists. Italy was the field of most of the battles. Francis began his reign by invading that country and defeating the Swiss at Marignano, thus conquering Milan. [Sidenote: September 14-15, 1515] The campaigns in Italy and Southern France culminated in the disastrous defeat of the French at Pavia. [Sidenote: February 24, 1525] Francis fought in person and was taken prisoner. "Of all things nothing is left me but honor and life," he wrote his mother.
Francis hoped that he would be freed on the payment of ransom according to the best models of chivalry. He found, however, when he was removed to {186} Madrid in May, that his captor intended to exact the last farthing of diplomatic concession. Discontent in France and the ennui and illness of the king finally forced him to sign a most disadvantageous treaty, [Sidenote: January 14, 1526] renouncing the lands of Burgundy, Naples and Milan, and ceding lands to Henry VIII. The king swore to the document, pledged his knightly honor, and as additional securities married Eleanor the sister of Charles and left two of his sons as hostages.
Even when he signed it, however, he had no intention of executing the provisions of the treaty which, he secretly protested, had been wrung from him by force. The deputies of Burgundy refused to recognize the right of France to alienate them. Henry VIII at once made an alliance against the "tyranny and pride" of the emperor. Charles was so chagrined that he challenged Francis to a duel. This opera bouffe performance ended by each monarch giving the other "the lie in the throat."
Though France succeeded in making with new allies, the pope and Venice, the League of Cognac, [Sidenote: May, 1526] and though Germany was at that time embarrassed by the Turkish invasion, the ensuing war turned out favorably to the emperor. The ascendancy of Charles was so marked that peace again had to be made in his favor in 1529. The treaty of Cambrai, as it was called, was the treaty of Madrid over again except that Burgundy was kept by France. She gave up, however, Lille, Douai and other territory in the north and renounced her suzerainty over Milan and Naples. Francis agreed to pay a ransom of two million crowns for his sons. Though he was put to desperate straits to raise the money, levying a 40 per cent. income tax on the clergy and a 10 per cent. income tax on the nobles, he finally paid the money and got back his children in 1530.
By this time France was so exhausted, both in {187} money and men, that a policy of peace was the only one possible for some years. Montmorency, the principal minister of the king, continued by an active diplomacy to stir up trouble for Charles. While suppressing Lutherans at home he encouraged the Schmalkaldic princes abroad, going to the length of inviting Melanchthon to France in 1535. With the English minister Cromwell he came to an agreement, notwithstanding the Protestant tendencies of his policy. An alliance was also made with the Sultan Suleiman, secretly in 1534, and openly proclaimed in 1536. In order to prepare for the military strife destined to be renewed at the earliest practical moment, an ordinance of 1534 reorganized and strengthened the army.
Far more important for the life of France than her incessant and inconclusive squabbling with Spain was the transformation passing over her spirit. It is sometimes said that if the French kings brought nothing else back from their campaigns in Italy they brought back the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Reformation] There is a modicum of truth in this, for there are some traces of Italian influence before the reign of Francis I. But the French spirit hardly needed this outside stimulus. It was awakening of itself. Scholars like William Budé and the Estiennes, thinkers like Dolet and Rabelais, poets like Marot, were the natural product of French soil. Everywhere, north of the Alps no less than south, there was a spontaneous efflorescence of intellectual activity.
The Reformation is often contrasted or compared with the Renaissance. In certain respects, where a common factor can be found, this may profitably be done. But it is important to note how different in kind were the two movements. One might as well compare Darwinism and Socialism in our own time. The one was a new way of looking at things, a fresh {188} intellectual start, without definite program or organization. The other was primarily a thesis: a set of tenets the object of which was concrete action. The Reformation began in France as a school of thought, but it soon grew to a political party and a new church, and finally it evolved into a state within the state.
[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]
Though it is not safe to date the French Reformation before the influence of Luther was felt, it is possible to see an indigenous reform that naturally prepared the way for it. Its harbinger was Lefèvre d'Étaples. This "little Luther" wished to purify the church, to set aside the "good works" thereof in favor of faith, and to make the Bible known to the people. He began to translate it in 1521, publishing the Gospels in June 1523 and the Epistles and Acts and Apocalypse in October and November. The work was not as good as that of Luther or Tyndale. It was based chiefly on the Vulgate, though not without reference to the Greek text. Lefèvre prided himself on being literal, remarking, with a side glance at Erasmus's Paraphrases, that it was dangerous to try to be more elegant than Scripture. He also prided himself on writing for the simple, and was immensely pleased with the favorable reception the people gave his work. To reach the hearts of the poor and humble he instituted a reform of preaching, instructing his friends to purge their homilies of the more grossly superstitious elements and of the scholastic theology. Instead of this they were to preach Christ simply with the aim of touching the heart, not of dazzling the mind.
Like-minded men gathering around Lefèvre formed a new school of thought. It was a movement of revival within the church; its leaders, wishing to keep all the old forms and beliefs, endeavored to infuse into them a new spirit. To some extent they were in conscious reaction against the intellectualism of Erasmus {189} and the Renaissance. On the other hand they were far from wishing to follow Luther, when he appeared, in his schism.
Among the most famous of these mystical reformers were William Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, and his disciple, Margaret d'Angoulême, sister of Francis I. Though a highly talented woman Margaret was weak and suggestible. She adored her dissolute brother and was always, on account of her marriages, first with Charles, duke of Alençon, [Sidenote: 1509] and then with Henry d'Albret, king of Navarre, [Sidenote: 1527] put in the position of a suppliant for his support. She carried on an assiduous correspondence with Briçonnet as her spiritual director, being attracted first by him and then by Luther, chiefly, as it seems, through the wish to sample the novelty of their doctrines. She wrote The Mirror of the Sinful Soul in the best style of penitent piety. [Sidenote: 1531] Its central idea is the love of God and of the "debonnaire" Jesus. She knew Latin and Italian, studied Greek and Hebrew, and read the Bible regularly, exhorting her friends to do the same. She coquetted with the Lutherans, some of whom she protected in France and with others of whom in Germany she corresponded. She was strongly suspected of being a Lutheran, though a secret one. Capito dedicated to her a commentary on Hosea; Calvin had strong hopes of winning her to an open profession, but was disappointed. Her house, said he, which might have become the family of Jesus Christ, harbored instead servants of the devil. Throughout life she kept the accustomed Catholic rites, and wrote with much respect to Pope Paul III. But fundamentally her religious idealism was outside of any confession.
This mystically pious woman wrote, in later life, the Heptameron, a book of stories published posthumously. Modelled on the Decameron, it consists {190} almost entirely of licentious stories, told without reprobation and with gusto. If the mouth speaketh from the fullness of the heart she was as much a sensualist in thought as her brother was in deed. The apparent contradictions in her are only to be explained on the theory that she was one of those impressionable natures that, chameleon-like, always take on the hue of their environment.
But though the work of Lefèvre and of Briçonnet, who himself gave his clergy an example of simple, biblical preaching, won many followers not only in Meaux but in other cities, it would never have produced a religious revolt like that in Germany. The Reformation was an importation into France; "The key of heresy," as John Bouchet said in 1531, "was made of the fine iron of Germany." At first almost all the intellectuals hailed Luther as an ally. Lefèvre sent him a greeting in 1519, and in the same year Budé spoke well of him. His books were at this time approved even by some doctors of the Sorbonne. But it took a decade of confusion and negation to clarify the situation sufficiently for the French to realize the exact import of the Lutheran movement, which completely transformed the previously existing policy of Lefèvre. The chief sufferer by the growth of Lutheranism was not at first the Catholic church but the party of Catholic reform. The schism rent the French evangelicals before it seriously affected the church. Some of them followed the new light and others were forced back into a reactionary attitude.
[Sidenote: Luther's books.]
The first emissaries of Luther in France were his books. Froben exported a volume containing nearly all he had published up to October, 1518, immediately and in large quantities to Paris. In 1520 a student there wrote that no books were more quickly bought. At first only the Latin ones were intelligible to the {191} French, but there is reason to believe that very early translations into the vernacular were made, though none of this period have survived. It was said that the books, which kept pouring in from Frankfort and Strassburg and Basle, excited the populace against the theologians, for the people judged them by the newly published French New Testament. A bishop complained that the common people were seduced by the vivacity of the heretic's style. [Sidenote: 1523]
It did not take the Sorbonne long to define its position as one of hostility. The university, which had been lately defending the Gallican liberties and had issued an appeal from pope to future council, was one of the judges selected by the disputants of the Leipzig debate. Complete records of the speeches, taken by notaries, were accordingly forwarded to Paris by Duke George of Saxony, with a request for an opinion. After brief debate the condemnation of Luther by the university was printed. [Sidenote: April 15, 1521]
Neither was the government long in taking a position. That it should be hostile was a foregone conclusion. Francis hated Lutheranism because he believed that it tended more to the overthrow of kingdoms and monarchies than to the edification of souls. He told Aleander, the papal nuncio, that he thought Luther a rascal and his doctrine pernicious. [Sidenote: March, 1521]
[Sidenote: April 1523]
The king was energetically seconded by the Parlement of Paris. A royal edict provided that no book should be printed without the imprimatur of the university. The king next ordered the extirpation of the errors of Martin Luther of Saxony, and, having begun by burning books, continued, as Erasmus observed was usually the case, by burning people. The first to suffer was John Vallière. At the same time Briçonnet was summoned to Paris, [Sidenote: 1523] sharply reprimanded for leniency to heretics and fined two hundred livres, in {192} consequence of which he issued two decrees against the heresy, charging it with attempting to subvert the hierarchy and to abolish sacerdotal celibacy. [Sidenote: 1524] When Lefèvre's doctrines were condemned, he submitted; those of his disciples who failed to do so were proscribed. But the efforts of the government became more strenuous after 1524. Francis was at this time courting the assistance of the pope against the emperor, and moreover he was horrified by the outbreak of the Peasants' War in Germany. Convinced of the danger of allowing the new sect to propagate itself any further he commanded the archbishops and bishops of his realm to "proceed against those who hold, publish and follow the heresies, errors and doctrines of Martin Luther." [Sidenote: 1525] Lefèvre and some of his friends fled to Strassburg. Arrests and executions against those who were sometimes called "heretics of Meaux," and sometimes Lutherans, followed.
The theologians did not leave the whole burden of the battle to the government. A swarm of anti-Lutheran tracts issued from the press. Not only the heresiarch, but Erasmus and Lefèvre were attacked. Their translations of the Bible were condemned as blasphemies against Jerome and against the Holy Ghost and as subverting the foundations of the Christian religion. Luther's sacramental dogmas and his repudiation of monastic vows were refuted.
Nevertheless the reform movement continued. At this stage it was urban, the chief centers being Paris, Meaux, and Lyons. Many merchants and artisans were found among the adherents of the new faith. While none of a higher rank openly professed it, theology became, under the lead of Margaret, a fashionable subject. Conventicles were formed to read the Bible in secret not only among the middle classes but also at court. Short tracts continued to be the best {193} methods of propaganda, and of these many were translations. Louis de Berquin of Artois, [Sidenote: Berquin, 1490-1529] a layman, proved the most formidable champion of the new opinions. Though he did little but translate other men's work he did that with genius. His version of Erasmus's Manual of a Christian Knight was exquisitely done, and his version of Luther's Tesseradecas did not fall short of it. Tried and condemned in 1523, he was saved by the king at the behest of Margaret. [Sidenote: 1526] The access of rigor during the king's captivity gave place to a momentary tolerance. Berquin, who had been arrested, was liberated, and Lefèvre recalled from exile. But the respite was brief. Two years later, Berquin was again arrested, tried, condemned, and executed speedily to prevent reprieve on April 17, 1529. But the triumph of the conservatives was more apparent than real. Lutheranism continued to gain silently but surely.
While the Reformation was growing in strength and numbers, it was also becoming more definite and coherent. Prior to 1530 it was almost impossible to tell where Lutheranism began and where it ended. There was a large, but vague and chaotic public opinion of protest against the existing order. But after 1530 it is possible to distinguish several parties, three of which at first reckoned among the supporters of the Reformation, now more or less definitely separated themselves from it. The first of these was the party of Meaux, the leaders of which submitted to the government and went their own isolated way. Then there was a party of Erasmian reform, mainly intellectual but profoundly Christian. Its leader, William Budé, felt, as did Erasmus, that it was possible to unite the classical culture of the Renaissance with a purified Catholicism. Attached to the church, and equally repelled by some of the dogmas and by the apparent {194} social effects of the Reformation, Budé, who had spoken well of Luther in 1519, repudiated him in 1521.
[Sidenote: Humanists]
Finally there was the party of the "Libertines" or free-thinkers, the representatives of the Renaissance pure and simple. Revolutionaries in their own way, consciously rebels against the older culture of the Middle Ages, though prepared to canvass the new religion and to toy with it, even to use it as an ally against common enemies, the interest of these men was fundamentally too different from that of the Reformers to enable them to stand long on the same platform. There was Clement Marot, [Sidenote: Marot] a charming but rather aimless poet, a protégé of Margaret and the ornament of a frivolous court. Though his poetic translation of the Psalms became a Protestant book, his poetry is often sensual as well as sensuous. Though for a time absenting himself from court he re-entered it in 1536 at the same time "abjuring his errors."
[Sidenote: Rabelais]
Of the same group was Francis Rabelais, whose Pantagruel appeared in 1532. Though he wrote Erasmus saying that he owed all that he was to him, he in fact appropriated only the irony and mocking spirit of the humanist without his deep underlying piety. He became a universal skeptic, and a mocker of all things. The "esprit gaulois," beyond all others alive to the absurdities and inconsistency of things, found in him its incarnation. He ridiculed both the "pope-maniacs" and the "pope-phobes," the indulgence-sellers and the inquisitors, the decretals "written by an angel" and the Great Schism, priests and kings and doubting philosophers and the Scripture. Paul III called him "the vagabond of the age." Calvin at first reckoned him among those who "had relished the gospel," but when he furiously retorted that he considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when he wrote Calvin on May 25, 1553: "I fear that avarice, that root of evil, has extinguished all faith and piety in the poets of Margaret. Judas, having sold Christ and taken the biretta, instead of Christ has that hard master Satan." [1]
[Sidenote: Catholic reform]
The stimulus given by the various attacks on the church, both Protestant and infidel, showed itself promptly in the abundant spirit of reform that sprang up in the Catholic fold. The clergy and bishop braced themselves to meet the enemy; they tried in some instances to suppress scandals and amend their lives; they brushed up their theology and paid more attention to the Bible and to education.
But the "Lutheran contagion" continued to spread and grow mightily. In 1525 it was found only at Paris, Meaux, Lyons, Grenoble, Bourges, Tours and Alençon. Fifteen years later, though it was still confined largely to the cities and towns, there were centers of it in every part of France except in Brittany. The persecution at Paris only drove the heretics into hiding or banished them to carry their opinions broadcast over the land. The movement swept from the north and east. The propaganda was not the work of one class but of all save that of the great nobles. It was not yet a social or class affair, but a purely intellectual and religious one. It is impossible to {196} estimate the numbers of the new sect. In 1534 Aleander said there were thirty thousand Lutherans in Paris alone. On the contrary René du Bellay said that there were fewer in 1533 than there were ten years, previous. [Sidenote: Protestant progress] True it is that the Protestants were as yet weak, and were united rather in protest against the established order than as a definite and cohesive party. Thus, the most popular and successful slogans of the innovators were denunciation of the priests as anti-Christs and apostates, and reprobation of images and of the mass as idolatry. Other catchwords of the reformers were, "the Bible" and "justification by faith." The movement was without a head and without organization. Until Calvin furnished these the principal inspiration came from Luther, but Zwingli and the other German and Swiss reformers were influential. More and more, Lefèvre and his school sank into the background.
For a time it seemed that the need of leadership was to be supplied by William Farel. His learning, his eloquence, and his zeal, together with the perfect safety of action that he found in Switzerland, were the necessary qualifications. The need for a Bible was at first met by the version of Lefèvre, printed in 1532. But the Catholic spirit of this work, based on the Vulgate, was distasteful to the evangelicals. Farel asked Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new version, which was completed by February 1535. Calvin wrote the preface for it. It was dedicated to "the poor little church of God." In doctrine it was thoroughly evangelical, replacing the old "évêques" and "prêtres" by "surveillants" and "anciens," and omitting some of the Apocrypha.
Encouraged by their own growth the Protestants became bolder in their attacks on the Catholics. The situation verged more and more towards violence; {197} neither side, not even the weaker, thought of tolerance for both. On the night of October 17-18 some placards, written by Anthony de Marcourt, were posted up in Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Tours and Blois and on the doors of the king's chamber at Amboise. They excoriated the sacrifice of the mass as a horrible and intolerable abuse invented by infernal theology and directly counter to the true Supper of our Lord. The government was alarmed and took strong steps. Processions were instituted to appease God for the sacrilege. Within a month two hundred persons were arrested, twenty of whom were sent to the scaffold and the rest banished after confiscation of their goods.
But the government could not afford to continue an uninterruptedly rigorous policy. The Protestants found their opportunity in the exigencies of the foreign situation. In 1535 Francis was forced by the increasing menace of the Hapsburgs to make alliance not only with the infidel but with the Schmalkaldic League. He would have had no scruples in supporting abroad the heresy he suppressed at home, but he found the German princes would accept his friendship on no terms save those of tolerance to French Protestants. Accordingly on July 16, 1535, Francis was obliged to publish an edict ordering persecution to cease and liberating those who were in prison for conscience's sake.
But the respite did not last long. New rigors were undertaken in April 1538. Marot retracted his errors, and Rabelais, while not fundamentally changing his doctrine, greatly softened, in the second edition of his Pantagruel, [Sidenote: 1542] the abusive ridicule he had poured on the Sorbonne. But by this time a new era was inaugurated. The deaths of Erasmus and Lefèvre in 1536 gave the coup de grace to the party of the Christian {198} Renaissance, and the publication of Calvin's Institutes in the same year finally gave the French Protestants a much needed leader and standard.
[1] Harvard Theological Review, 1919, p. 209. Margaret had died several years before, but Rabelais was called her poet because he had claimed her protection and to her wrote a poem in 1545. Oeuvres de Rabelais, ed. A. Lefranc, 1912, i, pp. xxiii, cxxxix. Cf. also Calvin's letter to the Queen of Navarre, April 28, 1545. Opera, xii, pp. 65 f.
[Sidenote: Truce of Nice, 1538]
The truce of Nice providing for a cessation of hostilities between France and the Hapsburgs for ten years, was greeted with much joy in France. Bonfires celebrated it in Paris, and in every way the people made known their longing for peace. Little the king cared for the wishes of his loyal subjects when his own dignity, real or imagined, was at stake. The war with Charles, that cursed Europe like an intermittent fever, broke out again in 1542. Again France was the aggressor and again she was worsted. The emperor invaded Champagne in person, arriving, in 1544, at a point within fifty miles of Paris. As there was no army able to oppose him it looked as if he would march as a conqueror to the capital of his enemy. But he sacrificed the advantage he had over France to a desire far nearer his heart, that of crushing his rebellious Protestant subjects. Already planning war with the League of Schmalkalden he wished only to secure his own safety from attack by his great rival. [Sidenote: Treaty of Crépy, 1544] The treaty made at Crépy was moderate in its terms and left things largely as they were.
[Sidenote: Henry II, 1547-59]
On March 31, 1547, Francis I died and was succeeded by his son, Henry II, a man of large, strong frame, passionately fond of all forms of exercise, especially of hunting and jousting. He had neither his father's versatility nor his fickleness nor his artistic interests. His policy was influenced by the aim of reversing his father's wishes and of disgracing his father's favorites.
[Sidenote: 1533]
While his elder brother was still alive, Henry had married Catharine de' Medici, a daughter of Lorenzo {199} II de' Medici of Florence. The girl of fourteen in a foreign country was uncomfortable, especially as it was felt, after her husband became Dauphin, that her rank was not equal to his. The failure to have any children during the first ten years of marriage made her position not only unpleasant but precarious, but the birth of her first son made her unassailable. In rapid succession she bore ten children, seven of whom survived childhood. Though she had little influence on affairs of state during her husband's reign, she acquired self-confidence and at last began to talk and act as queen.
[Sidenote: Diana of Poitiers]
At the age of seventeen Henry fell in love with a woman of thirty-six, Diana de Poitiers, to whom his devotion never wavered until his death, when she was sixty. Notwithstanding her absolute ascendancy over her lover she meddled little with affairs of state.
[Sidenote: Admiral Coligny, 1519-72]
The direction of French policy at this time fell largely into the hands of two powerful families. The first was that of Coligny. Of three brothers the ablest was Gaspard, Admiral of France, a firm friend of Henry's as well as a statesman and warrior. Still more powerful was the family of Guise, the children of Claude, Duke of Guise, who died in 1527. [Sidenote: Francis of Guise] The eldest son, Francis, Duke of Guise, was a great soldier. His brother, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, won a high place in the councils of state, and his sister Mary, by her marriage with James V of Scotland, brought added prestige to the family. The great power wielded by this house owed much to the position of their estates, part of which were fiefs of the French king and part subject to the Empire. As suited their convenience they could act either as Frenchmen or as foreign nobles.
[Sidenote: Expansion]
Under Henry France enjoyed a period of expansion such as she had not had for many years. The {200} perpetual failures of Francis were at last turned into substantial successes. This was due in large part to the civil war in Germany and to the weakness of England's rulers, Edward VI and Mary. It was due in part to the irrepressible energy of the French bourgeois and gentlemen, in part to the genius of Francis of Guise. The co-operation of France and Turkey, rather an identity of interests than a formal alliance, a policy equally blamed by contemporaries and praised by historians, continued. But the successes achieved were due most of all to the definite abandonment of the hope of Italian conquests and to the turning of French arms to regions more suitable for incorporation under her government.
War having been declared on Charles, the French seized the Three Bishoprics, at that time imperial fiefs, Metz, Verdun, and Toul. A large German army under Alva besieged Metz, but failed to overcome the brilliant defence of Francis of Guise. Worn by the attrition of repulsed assaults and of disease the imperial army melted away. When the siege was finally raised Guise distinguished himself as much by the humanity with which he cared for wounded and sick enemies as he had by his military prowess.
Six years later Guise added fresh laurels to his fame and new possessions to France by the conquest of Calais and Guines, the last English possessions in French territory. The loss of Calais, which had been held by England since the Hundred Years War, was an especially bitter blow to the islanders. These victories were partly counterbalanced by the defeats of French armies at St. Quentin on the Somme [Sidenote: 1557] and by Egmont at Gravelines. [Sidenote: 1558] When peace was signed at Cateau-Cambrésis, [Sidenote: Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, 1559] France renounced all her conquests in the south, but kept the Three Bishoprics and Calais, all of which became her permanent possessions.
[Sidenote: Calvinism]
{201} While France was thus expanding her borders, the internal revolution matured rapidly. The last years of Francis and the reign of Henry II saw a prodigious growth of Protestantism. What had begun as a sect now became, by an evolution similar to that experienced in Germany, a powerful political party. It is the general fate of new causes to meet at first with opposition due to habit and the instinctive reaction of almost all minds against "the pain of a new idea." But if the cause is one suited to the spirit and needs of the age, it gains more and more supporters, slowly if left to itself, rapidly if given good organization and adequate means of presenting its claims. The thorough canvassing of an idea is absolutely essential to win it a following. Now, prior to 1536, the Protestants had got a considerable amount of publicity as well through their own writings as through the attacks of their enemies. But not until Calvin settled at Geneva and began to write extensively in French, was the cause presented in a form capable of appealing to the average Frenchman. Calvin gave not only the best apology for his cause, but also furnished it with a definite organization, and a coherent program. He supplied the dogma, the liturgy, and the moral ideas of the new religion, and he also created ecclesiastical, political, and social institutions in harmony with it. A born leader, he followed up his work with personal appeals. His vast correspondence with French Protestants shows not only much zeal but infinite pains and considerable tact in driving home the lessons of his printed treatises.
Though the appeal of Calvin's dogmatic system was greater to an age interested in such things and trained to regard them as highly important, than we are likely to suppose at present, this was not Calvinism's only or even its main attraction to intelligent people. Like {202} every new and genuine reform Calvinism had the advantage of arousing the enthusiasm of a small but active band of liberals. The religious zeal as well as the moral earnestness of the age was naturally drawn to the Protestant side. As the sect was persecuted, no one joined it save from conscientious motives. Against the laziness or the corruption of the prelates, too proud or too indifferent to give a reason for their faith, the innovators opposed a tireless energy in season and out of season; against the scandals of the court and the immorality of the clergy they raised the banner of a new and stern morality; to the fires of martyrdom they replied with the fires of burning faith.
The missionaries of the Calvinists were very largely drawn from converted members of the clergy, both secular and regular, and from those who had made a profession of teaching. For the purposes of propaganda these were precisely the classes most fitted by training and habit to arouse and instruct the people. Tracts were multiplied, and they enjoyed, notwithstanding the censures of the Sorbonne, a brisk circulation. The theater was also made a means of propaganda, and an effective one.
Picardy continued to be the stronghold of the Protestants throughout this period, though they were also strong at Meaux and throughout the north-east, at Orleans, in Normandy, and in Dauphiné. Great progress was also made in the south, which later became the most Protestant of all the sections of France.
[Sidenote: Catholic measures]
Catholics continued to rely on force. There was a counter-propaganda, emanating from the University of Paris, but it was feeble. The Jesuits, in the reign of Henry II, had one college at Paris and two in Auvergne; otherwise there was hardly any intellectual effort made to overcome the reformers. Indeed, the Catholics hardly had the munitions for such a combat. {203} Apart from the great independents, holding themselves aloof from all religious controversy, the more intelligent and enterprising portion of the educated class had gone over to the enemy.
But the government did its best to supply the want of argument by the exercise of authority. New and severe edicts against "the heresies and false doctrines of Luther and his adherents and accomplices" were issued. The Sorbonne prohibited the reading and sale of sixty-five books by name, including the works of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Dolet, and Marot, and all translations of the Bible issued by the publishing house of Estienne.
The south of France had in earlier centuries been prolific in sects claiming a Protestantism older than that of Augsburg. Like the Bohemian Brethren they eagerly welcomed the Calvinists as allies and were rapidly enrolled in the new church. Startled by the stirring of the spirit of reform, the Parlement of Aix, acting in imitation of Simon de Monfort, [Sidenote: 1540] ordered two towns, Merindol and Cabrières, destroyed for their heresy. The sentence was too drastic for the French government to sanction immediately; it was therefore postponed by command of the king, but it was finally executed, at least in part. [Sidenote: 1545] A ghastly massacre took place in which eight hundred or more of the Waldenses perished. A cry of horror was raised in Germany, in Switzerland, and even in France, from which the king himself recoiled in terror.
Only a few days after his accession Henry issued an edict against blasphemy, and this was followed by a number of laws against heresy. A new court of justice was created to deal with heretics. [Sidenote: October 8, 1547] From its habit of sending its victims to the stake it soon became known as the Chambre Ardente. Its powers were so extensive that the clergy protested against them as {204} infringements of their rights. In its first two years it pronounced five hundred sentences,—and what sentences! Even in that cruel age its punishments were frightful. Burning alive was the commonest. If the heretic recanted on the scaffold he was strangled before the fire was lit; if he refused to recant his tongue was cut out. [Sidenote: June, 1551] Those who were merely suspected were cast into dungeons from which many never came out alive. Torture was habitually used to extract confession. For those who recanted before sentence milder, but still severe, punishments were meted out: imprisonment and various sorts of penance. By the edict of Chateaubriand a code of forty-six articles against heresy was drawn up, and the magistrate empowered to put suspected persons under surveillance.
In the face of this fiery persecution the conduct of the Calvinists was wonderfully fine. They showed great adroitness in evading the law by all means save recantation and great astuteness in using what poor legal means of defence were at their disposal. On the other hand they suffered punishment with splendid constancy and courage, very few failing in the hour of trial, and most meeting death in a state of exaltation. Large numbers found refuge in other lands. During the reign of Henry II fourteen hundred fled to Geneva, not to mention the many who settled in the Netherlands, England, and Germany.
[Sidenote: Protestant growth]
Far from lying passive, the Calvinists took the offensive not only by writing and preaching but by attacking the images of the saints. Many of these were broken or defaced. One student in the university of Paris smashed the images of the Virgin and St. Sebastian and a stained glass window representing the crucifixion, and posted up placards attacking the cult of the saints. For this he was pilloried three times and then shut into a small hole walled in on all sides {205} save for an aperture through which food was passed him until he died.
Undaunted by persecution the innovators continued to grow mightily in numbers and strength. The church at Paris, though necessarily meeting in secret, was well organized. The people of the city assembled together in several conventicles in private houses. By 1559 there were forty fully organized churches (églises dressées) throughout France, and no less than 2150 conventicles or mission churches (églises plantées). Estimates of numbers are precarious, but good reason has been advanced to show that early in the reign of Henry the Protestants amounted to one-sixth of the population. Like all enthusiastic minorities they wielded a power out of proportion to their numbers. Increasing continually, as they did, it is probable, but for the hostility of the government, they would have been a match for the Catholics. At any rate they were eager to try their strength. A new and important fact was that they no longer consisted entirely of the middle classes. High officers of government and great nobles began to join their ranks. In 1546 the Bishop of Nîmes protected them openly, being himself suspected, probably with justice, of Calvinism. In 1548 a lieutenant-general was among those prosecuted for heresy. Anthony of Bourbon, a descendant of Louis IX, a son of the famous Charles, Constable of France, and husband of Joan d 'Albret, queen of Navarre, who was a daughter of Margaret d'Angoulême, became a Protestant. [Sidenote: 1555] About the same time the great Admiral Coligny was converted, though it was some years before he openly professed his faith. His brother, d'Andelot, also adhered to the Calvinists but was later persuaded by the king and by his wife to go back to the Catholic fold.
So strong had the Protestants become that the {206} French government was compelled against its will to tolerate them in fact if not in principle, and to recognize them as a party in the state with a quasi-constitutional position. The synod held at Paris in May, 1559, was evidence that the first stage in the evolution of French Protestantism was complete. This assembly drew up a creed called the Confessio Gallicana, setting forth in forty articles the purest doctrine of Geneva. Besides affirming belief in the common articles of Christianity, this confession asserted the dogmas of predestination, justification by faith only, and the distinctive Calvinistic doctrine of the eucharist. The worship of saints was condemned and the necessity of a church defined. For this church an organization and discipline modelled on that of Geneva was provided. The country was divided into districts, the churches within which were to send to a central consistory representatives both clerical and lay, the latter to be at least equal in number to the former. Over the church of the whole nation there was to be a national synod or "Colloque" to which each consistory was to send one clergyman and one or two lay elders.
Alarmed by the growth of the Protestants, Henry II was just preparing, after the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, to grapple with them more earnestly than ever, when he died of a wound accidentally received in a tournament. [Sidenote: July 10, 1559] His death, hailed by Calvin as a merciful dispensation of Providence, conveniently marks the ending of one epoch and the beginning of another. For the previous forty years France had been absorbed in the struggle with the vast empire of the Hapsburgs. For the next forty years she was completely occupied with the wars of religion. Externally, she played a weak rôle because of civil strife and of a contemptible government. Indeed, all her interests, both foreign and domestic, were from this {207} time forgotten in the intensity of the passions aroused by fanaticism. The date of Henry's demise also marks a change in the evolution of the French government. Hitherto, for some centuries, the trend had been away from feudalism to absolute monarchy. The ideal, "une foi, une loi, un roi" had been nearly attained. But this was now checked in two ways. The great nobles found in Calvinism an opportunity to assert their privileges against the king. The middle classes in the cities, especially in those regions where sectionalism was still strong, found the same opportunity but turned it to the advantage of republicanism. A fierce spirit of resistance not only to the prelates but to the monarch, was born. There was even a considerable amount of democratic sentiment. The poor clergy, who had become converted to Calvinism, were especially free in denouncing the inequalities of the old régime which made of the higher clergy great lords and left the humbler ministers to starve. The fact is that the message of Calvinism was essentially democratic in that the excellence of all Christians and their perfect equality before God was preached. [Sidenote: Equality preached] Interest in religion and the ability to discuss it was not confined to a privileged hierarchy, but was shared by the humblest. In a ribald play written in 1564 it is said:[1]
If faut que Jeanne [a servant] entre les pots
Parle de reformation;
La nouvelle religion
A tant fait que les chambrières,
Les serviteurs et les tripières
En disputent publiquement.
But while the gay courtier and worldling sneered at the religion of market women and scullerymaids, he had little cause to scoff when he met the Protestants {208} in debate at the town hall of his city, or on the field of battle.
Finally, the year 1559 very well marks a stage in the development of French Protestantism. Until about 1536 it had been a mere unorganized opinion, rather a philosophy than a coherent body. From the date of the publication of the Institutes to that of the Synod of 1559 the new church had become organized, self-conscious, and definitely political in aims. But after 1559 it became more than a party; it became an imperium in imperio. There was no longer one government and one allegiance in France but two, and the two were at war.
[Sidenote: The Huguenots]
It was just at this time that the name of Huguenot applied to the Protestants, hitherto called "Lutherans," "heretics of Meaux" and, more rarely, "Calvinists." The origin of the word, first used at Tours in 1560, is uncertain. It may possibly come from "le roi Huguet" or "Hugon," a night spectre; the allusion then would be to the ghostly manner in which the heretics crept by night to their conventicles. Huguenot is also found as a family name at Belfort as early as 1425. It may possibly come from the term "Hausgenossen" as used in Alsace of those metal-workers who were not taken into the gild but worked at home, hence a name of contempt like the modern "scab." It may also come from the name of the Swiss Confederation, "Eidgenossen," and perhaps this derivation is the most likely, though it cannot be considered beyond doubt. Whatever the origin of the name the picture of the Huguenot is familiar to us. Of all the fine types of French manhood, that of the Huguenot is one of the finest. Gallic gaiety is tempered with earnestness; intrepidity is strengthened with a new moral fibre like that of steel. Except in the case of a few great lords, who joined the party without serious conviction, the high standard of the Huguenot morals was recognized even by their enemies. In an age of profligacy the "men of the religion," as they called themselves, walked the paths of rectitude and sobriety.
[1] Remy Belleau: La Reconnue, act 4, scene 2.
{209}
Charles, Duke of Bourbon,
Constable of France, d. 1527
|
|
+————————————-+——-+—————————+
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Anthony, Duke of Vendôme Charles, Cardinal Louis, Prince
==Joan d'Albret, Queen of of Bourbon of Condé
| Navarre, d. 1562
|
|
Henry IV
1589-1610
==(1)Margaret of France
==(2)Mary de' Medici
______________________________________________________________________
Claude, Duke of Guise, d. 1527
|
|
+————————————+—+——————+
| | |
| | |
Francis, Duke of Guise Charles, Cardinal Mary==James V
d. 1563 of Lorraine | of Scotland
| |
| Mary, Queen
| of Scots
|
+———————————-+——————————+
| | |
Henry, Duke of Guise Charles, Duke of Louis, Cardinal of
d. 1588 Mayenne Guise, d. 1588
[Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the person's year of death.]
{210}
[Sidenote: Francis II, 1559-60]
Henry II was followed by three of his sons in succession, each of them, in different degrees and ways, a weakling. The first of them was Francis II, a delicate lad of fifteen, who suffered from adenoids. Child as he was he had already been married for more than a year to Mary Stuart, a daughter of James V of Scotland and a niece of Francis of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. As she was the one passion of the morose and feeble king, who, being legally of age was able to choose his own ministers, the government of the realm fell into the strong hands of "the false brood of Lorraine." Fearing and hating these men above all others the Huguenots turned to the Bourbons for protection, but the king of Navarre was too weak a character to afford them much help. Finding in the press their best weapon the Protestants produced a flood of pamphlets attacking the Cardinal of Lorraine as "the tiger of France."
A more definite plan to rid the country of the hated tyranny was that known as the Conspiracy of Amboise. Godfrey de Barry, Sieur de la Renaudie, pledged several hundred Protestants to go in a body to present a petition to the king at Blois. How much further their intentions went is not known, and perhaps was not definitely formulated by themselves. The Venetian ambassador spoke in a contemporary dispatch of a plot to kill the cardinal and also the king if he would not assent to their counsels, and said that the conspirators relied, to justify this course, on the {211} declaration of Calvin that it was lawful to slay those who hindered the preaching of the gospel. Hearing of the conspiracy, Guise and his brother were ready. They transferred the court from Blois to Amboise, by which move they upset the plans of the petitioners and also put the king into a more defensible castle. Soldiers, assembled for the occasion, met the Huguenots as they advanced in a body towards Amboise, [Sidenote: The tumult of Amboise, March 1560] shot down La Renaudie and some others on the spot and arrested the remaining twelve hundred, to be kept for subsequent trial and execution. The suspicion that fastened on the prince of Condé, a brother of the king of Navarre, was given some color by his frank avowal of sympathy with the conspirators. Though the Guises pressed their advantage to the utmost in forbidding all future assemblies of heretics, the tumult of Amboise was vaguely felt, in the sultry atmosphere of pent-up passions, to be the avant-courier of a terrific storm.
The early death of the sickly king left the throne to his brother Charles IX, a boy of nine. [Sidenote: Charles IX, 1560-74] As he was a minor, the regency fell to his mother, Catharine de' Medici, who for almost thirty years was the real ruler of France. [Sidenote: Policy of Catharine de' Medici] Notwithstanding what Brantôme calls "ung embonpoint très-riche," she was active of body and mind. Her large correspondence partly reveals the secrets of her power: much tact and infinite pains to keep in touch with as many people and as many details of business as possible. Her want of beauty was supplied by gracious manners and an elegant taste in art. As a connoisseur and an indefatigable collector she gratified her love of the magnificent not only by beautiful palaces and gorgeous clothes, but in having a store of pictures, statues, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, silver, books, and manuscripts.
A "politique" to her fingertips, Catharine had neither sympathy nor patience with the fanatics who {212} would put their religion above peace and prosperity. Surrounded by men as fierce as lions, she showed no little of the skill and intrepidity of the tamer in keeping them, for a time, from each others' throats. Soon after Charles ascended the throne, she was almost hustled into domestic and foreign war by the offer of Philip II of Spain to help her Catholic subjects against the Huguenots without her leave. She knew if that were done that, as she scrawled in her own peculiar French, "le Roy mon fils nave jeames lantyere aubeysance," [1] and she was determined "que personne ne pent nous brouller en lamitie en la quele je desire que set deus Royaumes demeurent pendant mauye." [2] Through her goggle eyes she saw clearly where lay the path that she must follow. "I am resolved," she wrote, "to seek by all possible means to preserve the authority of the king my son in all things, and at the same time to keep the people in peace, unity and concord, without giving them occasion to stir or to change anything." Fundamentally, this was the same policy as that of Henry IV. That she failed where he succeeded is not due entirely to the difference in ability. In 1560 neither party was prepared to yield or to tolerate the other without a trial of strength, whereas a generation later many members of both parties were sick of war.
[Sidenote: December 13, 1560]
Just as Francis was dying, the States General met at Orleans. This body was divided into three houses, or estates, that of the clergy, that of the nobles, and that of the commons. The latter was so democratically chosen that even the peasants voted. Whether they had voted in 1484 is not known, but it is certain that they did so in 1560, and that it was in the interests of the crown to let them vote is shown by the increase in {213} the number of royal officers among the deputies of the third estate. The peasants still regarded the king as their natural protector against the oppression of the nobles.
The Estates were opened by Catharine's minister, Michael de L'Hôpital. Fully sympathizing with her policy of conciliation, he addressed the Estates as follows: [Sidenote: February 24, 1561] "Let us abandon those diabolic words, names of parties, factions and seditions:—Lutherans, Huguenots, Papists; let us not change the name of Christians." Accordingly, an edict was passed granting an amnesty to the Huguenots, nominally for the purpose of allowing them to return to the Catholic church, but practically interpreted without reference to this proviso.
But the government found it easier to pass edicts than to restrain the zealots of both parties. The Protestants continued to smash images; the Catholics to mob the Protestants. Paris became, in the words of Beza, "the city most bloody and murderous among all in the world." Under the combined effects of legal toleration and mob persecution the Huguenots grew mightily in numbers and power. Their natural leader, the King of Navarre, indeed failed them, for he changed his faith several times, his real cult, as Calvin remarked, being that of Venus. His wife, Joan d'Albret, however, became an ardent Calvinist.
At this point the government proposed a means of conciliation that had been tried by Charles V in Germany and had there failed. The leading theologians of both confessions were summoned to a colloquy at Poissy. [Sidenote: Colloquy of Poissy, August, 1561] Most of the German divines invited were prevented by politics from coming, but the noted Italian Protestant Peter Martyr Vermigli and Theodore Beza of Geneva were present. The debate turned on the usual points at issue, and was of course indecisive, {214} though the Huguenots did not hesitate to proclaim their own victory.
[Sidenote: January, 1562]
A fresh edict of toleration had hardly been issued when civil war was precipitated by a horrible crime. Some armed retainers of the Duke of Guise, coming upon a Huguenot congregation at Vassy in Champagne, [Sidenote: Massacre of Vassy, March 1, 1562] attacked them and murdered three hundred. A wild cry of fury rose from all the Calvinists; throughout the whole land there were riots. At Toulouse, for example, fighting in the streets lasted four days and four hundred persons perished. It was one of the worst years in the history of France. A veritable reign of terror prevailed everywhere, and while the crops were destroyed famine stalked throughout the land. Bands of robbers and ravishers, under the names of Christian parties but savages at heart, put the whole people to ransom and to sack. Indeed, the Wars of Religion were like hell; the tongue can describe them better than the imagination can conceive them. The whole sweet and pleasant land of France, from the Burgundian to the Spanish frontier, was widowed and desolated, her pride humbled by her own sons and her Golden Lilies trampled in the bloody mire. Foreign levy was called in to supply strength to fratricidal arms. The Protestants, headed by Condé and Coligny, raised an army and started negotiations with England. The Catholics, however, had the best of the fighting. They captured Rouen, defended by English troops, and, under Guise, defeated the Huguenots under Coligny at Dreux. [Sidenote: December 19, 1562]
[Sidenote: February 18, 1563]
Two months later, Francis of Guise was assassinated by a Protestant near Orleans. Coligny was accused of inciting the crime, which he denied, though he confessed that he was glad of it. [Sidenote: Edict of Amboise March 19, 1563] The immediate beneficiary of the death of the duke was not the Huguenot, {215} however, so much as Catharine de' Medici. Continuing to put into practise her policy of tolerance she issued an edict granting liberty of conscience to all and liberty of worship under certain restrictions. Great nobles were allowed to hold meetings for divine service according to the reformed manner in their own houses, and one village in each bailiwick was allowed to have a Protestant chapel.
How consistently secular was Catharine's policy became apparent at this time when she refused to publish the decrees of the Council of Trent, fearing that they might infringe on the liberties of the Gallican church. In this she had the full support of most French Catholics. She continued to work for religious peace. One of her methods was characteristic of her and of the time. She selected "a flying squadron" of twenty-four beautiful maids of honor of high rank and low principles to help her seduce the refractory nobles on both sides. In many cases she was successful. Condé, in love with one—or possibly with several—of these sirens, forgot everything else, his wife, his party, his religion. His death in 1569 threw the leadership of the Huguenots into the steadier and stronger grasp of Coligny.
But such means of dealing with a profoundly dangerous crisis were of course but the most wretched palliatives. The Catholic bigots would permit no dallying with the heretics. In 1567 they were strong enough to secure the disgrace of L'Hôpital and in the following year to extort a royal edict unconditionally forbidding the exercise of the reformed cult. The Huguenots again rebelled and in 1569 suffered two severe defeats [Sidenote: Huguenots defeated] at Jarnac and at Moncontour. The Catholics were jubilant, fully believing, as Sully says, that at last the Protestants would have to submit. But nothing is more remarkable than the apparently slight effect of military success or failure on the {216} strength and numbers of the two faiths. "We had beaten our enemies over and over again," cried the Catholic soldier Montluc in a rage, "we were winning by force of arms but they triumphed by means of their diabolical writings."
The Huguenots, however, did not rely entirely on the pen. Their stronghold was no longer in the north but was now in the south and west. The reason for this may be partly found in the preparation of the soil for their seed by the medieval heresies, but still more in the strong particularistic spirit of that region. The ancient provinces of Poitou and Guienne, Gascony and Languedoc, were almost as conscious of their southern and Provençal culture as they were of their French citizenship. The strength of the centralizing tendencies lay north of the Loire; in the south local privileges were more esteemed and more insisted upon. While Protestantism was persecuted by the government at Paris it was often protected by cities of the south. [Sidenote: La Rochelle] The most noteworthy of these was La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. Though coming late to the support of the Reformation, its conversion was thorough and lasting. To protect the new religion it successfully asserted its municipal freedom almost to the point of independence. Like the Dutch Beggars of the Sea its armed privateers preyed upon the commerce of Catholic powers, a mode of warfare from which the city derived immense booty.
The Huguenots tried but failed to get foreign allies. Neither England nor Germany sent them any help. [Sidenote: Battle of Mons, July 17, 1572] Their policy of supporting the revolt of the Low Countries against Spain turned out disastrously for themselves when the French under Coligny were defeated at Mons by the troops of Philip.
The Catholics now believed the time ripe for a decisive blow. Under the stimulus of the Jesuits they {217} had for a short time been conducting an offensive and effective propaganda. Leagues were formed to combat the organizations of the Huguenots, armed "Brotherhoods of the Holy Spirit" as they were called. The chief obstacle in their path seemed to be a small group of powerful nobles headed by Coligny. Catharine and the Guises resolved to cut away this obstacle with the assassin's knife. Charles, who was personally on good terms with Coligny, hesitated, but he was too weak a youth to hold out long. There seems to be good reason to believe that all the queen dowager and her advisers contemplated was the murder of a few leaders and that they did not foresee one of the most extensive massacres in history.
Her first attempt to have Coligny assassinated [Sidenote: August 22, 1572] aroused the anger of the Huguenot leaders and made them more dangerous than before. A better laid and more comprehensive plan was therefore carried out on the eve of St. Bartholomew's day. [Sidenote: Massacre of St. Bartholomew, August 24, to October 3] Early in the evening of August 23, Henry of Guise, a son of Duke Francis, and Coligny's bitterest personal enemy, went with armed men to the house of the admiral and murdered him. From thence they proceeded to the houses of other prominent Huguenots to slay them in the same manner. News of the man-hunt spread through the city with instant rapidity, the mob rose and massacred all the Huguenots they could find as well as a number of foreigners, principally Germans and Flemings. De Thou says that two thousand were slain in Paris before noon of August 24. A general pillage followed.
The king hesitated to assume responsibility for so serious a tumult. His letters of August 24 to various governors of provinces and to ambassadors spoke only of a fray between Guise and Coligny, and stated that he wished to preserve order. But with these very {218} letters he sent messengers to all quarters with verbal orders to kill all the leading Protestants. On August 27 he again wrote of it as "a great and lamentable sedition" originating in the desire of Guise to revenge his father on Coligny. The king said that the fury of the populace was such that he was unable to bring the remedy he wished, and he again issued directions for the preservation of order. But at the same time he declared that the Guises had acted at his command to punish those who had conspired against him and against the old religion. In fact, he gave out a rapid series of contradictory accounts and orders, and in the meantime, from August 25 to October 3 terrible series of massacres took place in almost all the provinces. [Sidenote: Other massacres] Two hundred Huguenots perished at Meaux, from 500 to 1000 at Orleans, a much larger number at Lyons. It is difficult to estimate the total number of victims. Sully, who narrowly escaped, says that 70,000 were slain. Hotman, another contemporary, says 50,000. Knowing how much figures are apt to be exaggerated even by judicious men, we must assume that this number is too large. On the other hand the lowest estimate given by modern Catholic investigators, 5000, is certainly too small. Probably between 10,000 and 20,000 is correct. Those who fell were the flower of the party.
Whatever may have been the precise degree of guilt of the French rulers, which in any case was very grave, they took no pains to conceal their exultation over an event that had at last, as they believed, ground their enemies to powder. In jubilant tone Catharine wrote to her son-in-law, Philip of Spain, that God had given her son the king of France the means "of wiping out those of his subjects who were rebellious to God and to himself." Philip sent his hearty congratulations and heard a Te Deum sung. The pope struck a medal {219} with a picture of an avenging angel and the legend, "Ugonotorum strages," and ordered an annual Te Deum which was, in fact, celebrated for a long time. But on the other hand a cry of horror arose from Germany and England. Elizabeth received the French ambassador dressed in mourning and declared to him that "the deed had been too bloody."
Though the triumph of the Catholics was loudly shouted, it was not as complete as they hoped. The Huguenots seemed cowed for a moment, but nothing is more remarkable than the constancy of the people. Recantations were extremely few. The Reformed pastors, nourished on the Old Testament, saw in the affliction that had befallen them nothing but the means of proving the faithful. Preparations for resistance were made at once in the principal cities of the south. [Sidenote: Siege of La Rochelle] La Rochelle, besieged by the royal troops, evinced a heroism worthy of the cause. While the men repulsed the furious assaults of the enemy the women built up the walls that crumbled under the powerful fire of the artillery. A faction of citizens who demanded surrender was sternly suppressed and the city held out until relief came from an unhoped quarter. The king's brother, Henry Duke of Anjou, was elected to the throne of Poland on condition that he would allow liberty of conscience to Polish Protestants. In order to appear consistent the French government therefore stopped for the moment the persecution of the Huguenots. The siege of La Rochelle was abandoned and a treaty made allowing liberty of worship in that city, in Nîmes and Montauban and in the houses of some of the great nobles.
In less than two years after the appalling massacre the Protestants were again strong and active. A chant of victory sounded from their dauntless ranks. More than ever before they became republican in principle. {220} Their pamphleteers, among them Hotman, fiercely attacked the government of Catharine, and asserted their rights.
Charles was a consumptive. The hemorrhages characteristic of his disease reminded him of the torrents of blood that he had caused to flow from his country. Broken in body and haunted by superstitious terrors the wretched man died on May 30, 1574. [Sidenote: Henry III, 1547-89] He was succeeded by his brother, Henry III, recently elected king of Poland, a man of good parts, interested in culture and in study, a natural orator, not destitute of intelligence. His mother's pet and spoiled child, brought up among the girls of the "flying squadron," he was in a continual state of nervous and sensual titillation that made him avid of excitement and yet unable to endure it. A thunderstorm drove him to hide in the cellar and to tears. He was at times overcome by fear of death and hell, and at times had crises of religious fervour. But his life was a perpetual debauch, ever seeking new forms of pleasure in strange ways. He would walk the streets at night accompanied by gay young rufflers in search of adventures. He had a passion for some handsome young men, commonly called "the darlings," whom he kept about him dressed as women.
His reign meant a new lease of power to his mother, who worshipped him and to whom he willingly left the arduous business of government. By this time she was bitterly hated by the Huguenots, who paid their compliments to her in a pamphlet entitled A wonderful Discourse on the Life, Deeds and Debauchery of Catharine de' Medici, perhaps written in part by the scholar Henry Estienne. She was accused not only of crimes of which she was really guilty, like the massacre of St. Bartholomew, but of having murdered {221} the dauphin Francis, her husband's elder brother, and others who had died natural deaths, and of having systematically depraved her children in order to keep the reins of authority in her own hands.
Frightened by the odium in which his mother was held, Henry III thought it wise to disavow all part or lot in St. Bartholomew and to concede to the Huguenots liberty of worship everywhere save in Paris and in whatever place the court might be for the moment.
So difficult was the position of the king that by this attempt to conciliate his enemies he only alienated his friends. The bigoted Catholics, finding the crown impotent, began to take energetic measures to help themselves. In 1576 they formed a League to secure the benefit of association. [Sidenote: The League] Henry Duke of Guise drew up the declaration that formed the constituent act of the League. It proposed "to establish the law of God in its entirety, to reinstate and maintain divine service according to the form and manner of the holy, Catholic and apostolic church," and also "to restore to the provinces and estates of this kingdom the rights, privileges, franchises, and ancient liberties such as they were in the time of King Clovis, the first Christian king." This last clause is highly significant as showing how the Catholics had now adopted the tactics of the Huguenots in appealing from the central government to the provincial privileges. It is exactly the same issue as that of Federalism versus States' Rights in American history; the party in power emphasizes the national authority, while the smaller divisions furnish a refuge for the minority.
The constituency of the League rapidly became large. The declaration of Guise was circulated throughout the country something like a monster petition, and those who wished bound themselves to support it. The {222} power of this association of Catholics among nobles and people soon made it so formidable that Henry III reversed his former policy, recognized the League and declared himself its head.
[Sidenote: Estates General of Blois]
The elections for the States General held at Blois in 1576 proved highly favorable to the League. The chief reason for their overwhelming success was the abstention of the Protestants from voting. In continental Europe it has always been and is now common for minorities to refuse to vote, the idea being that this refusal is in itself a protest more effective than a definite minority vote would be. To an American this seems strange, for it has been proved time and again that a strong minority can do a great deal to shape legislation. But the Huguenots reasoned differently, and so seated but one Protestant in the whole assembly, a deputy to the second, or noble, estate. The privileged orders pronounced immediately for the enforcement of religious unity, but in the Third Estate there was a warm debate. John Bodin, the famous publicist, though a Catholic, pleaded hard for tolerance. As finally passed, the law demanded a return to the old religion, but added the proviso that the means taken should be "gentle and pacific and without war." So impossible was this in practice that the government was again obliged to issue a decree granting liberty of conscience and restricted liberty of worship. [Sidenote: 1577]
Under the oppression of the ruinous civil wars the people began to grow more and more restless. The king was extremely unpopular. Perhaps the people might have winked even at such outrages against decency as were perpetrated by the king had not their critical faculties been sharpened by the growing misery of their condition. The wars had bankrupted both them and the government, and the desperate expedients of the latter to raise money only increased the poverty {223} of the masses. Every estate, every province, was urged to contribute as much as possible, and most of them replied, in humble and loyal tone, but firmly, begging for relief from the ruinous exactions. The sale of offices, of justice, of collectorships of taxes, of the administration, of the army, of the public domain, was only less onerous than the sale of monopolies and inspectorships of markets and ports. The only prosperous class seemed to be the government agents and contractors. In fact, for the first time in the history of France the people were becoming thoroughly disaffected and some of them semi-republican in feeling.
[Sidenote: 1584]
The king had no sons and when his only remaining brother died a new element of discord and perplexity was introduced in that the heir to the throne, Henry of Navarre, was a Protestant. Violent attacks on him were published in the pamphlet press. The League was revived in stronger form than before. Its head, Guise, selected as candidate for the throne the uncle of Henry of Navarre, Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, a stupid and violent man of sixty-four. The king hastened to make terms with the League and commanded all Protestants to leave the country in six months. At this point the pope intervened to strengthen his cause by issuing the "Bull of Deprivation" [Sidenote: 1585] declaring Henry of Navarre incapable, as a heretic, of succeeding to the throne. Navarre at once denounced the bull as contrary to French law and invalid, and he was supported both by the Parlement of Paris and by some able pamphleteers. Hotman published his attack on the "vain and blind fulmination" of the pontiff.
[Sidenote: Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587]
An appeal to arms was inevitable. At the battle of Coutras, the Huguenots, led by Henry of Navarre, won their first victory. While this increased {224} Navarre's power and his popularity with his followers, the majority of the people rallied to the League. In the "war of the three Henrys" as it was called, the king had more to fear from Henry of Guise than from the Huguenot. Cooped up at the Tuileries the monarch was under so irksome a restraint that he was finally obliged to regain freedom by flight, on May 12, 1588. The elections for the States General gave an enormous majority to the League. In an evil hour for himself the king resorted again to that much used weapon, assassination. By his order Guise was murdered. "Now I am king," he wrote with a sigh of relief. But he was mistaken. The League, more hostile than ever, swearing to avenge the death of its captain, was now frankly revolutionary.
It continued to exercise its authority under the leadership of a Committee of Sixteen. These gentlemen purged the still royalist Parlement of Paris. By the hostility of the League the king was forced to an alliance with Henry of Navarre. This is interesting as showing how completely the position of the two leading parties had become reversed. The throne, once the strongest ally of the church, was now supported chiefly by the Huguenots who had formerly been in rebellion. Indeed by this time "the wars of religion" had become to a very large extent dynastic and social.
On August 1, 1589, the king was assassinated by a Dominican fanatic.
His death was preceded shortly by that of Catharine de' Medici.
[Sidenote: Henry IV, 1589-1610]
Henry IV was a man of thirty-five, of middle stature, but very hardy and brave. He was one of the most intelligent of the French kings, vigorous of brain as of body. Few could resist his delicate compliments and the promises he knew how to lavish. The glamour of his personality has survived even until now. In a song still popular he is called "the gallant king who knew {225} how to fight, to make love and to drink." He is also remembered for his wish that every peasant might have a fowl in his pot. His supreme desire was to see France, bleeding and impoverished by civil war, again united, strong and happy. He consistently subordinated religion to political ends. To him almost alone is due the final adoption of tolerance, not indeed as a natural right, but as a political expedient.
The difficulties with which he had to contend were enormous. The Catholics, headed by the Duke of Mayenne, a brother of Guise, agreed to recognize him for six months in order that he might have the opportunity of becoming reconciled to the church. But Mayenne, who wished to be elected king by the States General, soon commenced hostilities. The skirmish at Arques between the forces of Henry and Mayenne, resulting favorably to the former, was followed by the battle of Ivry. [Sidenote: Battle of Ivry, March 14, 1590] Henry, with two thousand horse and eight thousand foot, against eight thousand horse and twelve thousand foot of the League, addressed his soldiers in a stirring oration: "God is with us. Behold his enemies and ours; behold your king. Charge! If your standards fail you, rally to my white plume; you will find it on the road to victory and honor." At first the fortune of war went against the Huguenots, but the personal courage of the king, who, with "a terrible white plume" in his helmet led his cavalry to the attack, wrested victory from the foe.
[Sidenote: Siege of Paris]
From Ivry Henry marched to Paris, the headquarters of the League. With thirteen thousand soldiers he besieged this town of 220,000 inhabitants, garrisoned by fifty thousand troops. With their usual self-sacrificing devotion, the people of Paris held out against the horrors of famine. The clergy aroused the fanaticism of the populace, promising heaven to those who died; women protested that they would eat {226} their children before they would surrender. With provisions for one month, Paris held out for four. Dogs, cats, rats, and grass were eaten; the bones of animals and even of dead people were ground up and used for flour; the skins of animals were devoured. Thirteen thousand persons died of hunger and twenty thousand of the fever brought on by lack of food. But even this miracle of fanaticism could not have saved the capital eventually, but for the timely invasion of France from the north by the Duke of Parma, who joined Mayenne on the Marne. Henry raised the siege to meet the new menace, but the campaign of 1591 was fruitless for both sides.
[Sidenote: Anarchy]
France seemed to be in a state of anarchy under the operation of many and various forces. Pope Gregory XIV tried to influence the Catholics to unite against Henry, but he was met by protests from the Parlements in the name of the Gallican Liberties. The "Politiques" were ready to support any strong de facto government, but could not find it. The cities hated the nobles, and the republicans resented the "courteous warfare" which either side was said to wage on the other, sparing each other's nobles and slaughtering the commons.
[Sidenote: 1593]
At this point the States General were convoked at Paris by the League. So many provinces refused to send deputies that there were only 128 members out of a normal 505. A serial publication by several authors, called the Satyre Menippée, poured ridicule on the pretentious of the national assembly. Various solutions of the deadlock were proposed. Philip II of Spain offered to support Mayenne as Lieutenant General of France if the League would make his daughter, as the heiress through her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, queen. This being refused, Philip next proposed that the young Duke of Guise should marry his daughter {227} and become king. But this proposal also won little support. The enemies of Henry IV were conscious of his legitimate rights and jealous of foreign interference; the only thing that stood in the way of their recognizing him was his heresy.
[Sidenote: Henry's conversion]
Henry, finding that there seemed no other issue to an intolerable situation, at last resolved, though with much reluctance, to change his religion. On July 25, 1593, he abjured the Protestant faith, kneeling to the Archbishop of Bourges, and was received into the bosom of the Roman church. That his conversion was due entirely to the belief that "Paris was worth a mass" is, of course, plain. Indeed, he frankly avowed that he still scrupled at some articles, such as purgatory, the worship of the saints, and the power of the pope. And it must be remembered that his motives were not purely selfish. The alternative seemed to be indefinite civil war with all its horrors, and Henry deliberately but regretfully sacrificed his confessional convictions on the altar of his country.
The step was not immediately successful. The Huguenots were naturally enraged. The Catholics doubted the king's sincerity. At Paris the preachers of the League ridiculed the conversion from the pulpit. "My dog," sneered one of them, "were you not at mass last Sunday? Come here and let us offer you the crown." But the "politiques" rallied to the throne and the League rapidly melted away. The Satyre Menippée, supporting the interests of Henry, did much to turn public opinion in his favor.
A further impression was made by his coronation at Chartres in 1594. When the surrender of Paris followed, the king entered his capital to receive the homage of the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris. The superstitious were convinced of Henry's sincerity when he touched some scrofulous persons and they {228} were said to be healed. Curing the "king's evil" was one of the oldest attributes of royalty, and it could not be imagined that it would descend to an impostor.
Henry showed the wisest statesmanship in consolidating his power. He bought up those who still held out against him at their own price, remarking that whatever it cost it would be cheaper than fighting them. He showed a wise clemency in dealing with his enemies, banishing only about 130 persons. Next came absolution by Pope Clement VIII, who, after driving as hard a bargain as he could, finally granted it on September 17, 1595.
But even yet all danger was not past. Enraged at seeing France escape from his clutches, Philip of Spain declared war, and he could still count on the support of Mayenne and the last remnant of the League. The daring action of Henry at Fontaine-Française on June 5, 1595, where with three hundred horse he routed twelve hundred Spaniards, so discouraged his enemies that Mayenne hastened to submit, and peace was signed with Spain in 1598. The finances of the realm, naturally in a chaotic state, were brought to order and solvency by a Huguenot noble, the Duke of Sully, Henry's ablest minister.
The legal status of the Protestants was still to be settled. It was not changed by Henry's abjuration, and the king was determined at all costs to avoid another civil war. [Sidenote: Edict of Nantes, April 13, 1598] He therefore published the Edict of Nantes, declared to be perpetual and irrevocable. By it liberty of conscience was granted to all "without being questioned, vexed or molested," and without being "forced to do anything contrary to their religion." Liberty of worship was conceded in all places in which it had been practised for the last two years; i.e. in two places in every bailiwick except large towns, where services were to be held outside the walls, and {229} in the houses of the great nobles. Protestant worship was forbidden at Paris and for five leagues (twelve and one-half miles) outside the walls. Protestants had all other legal rights of Catholics and were eligible to all offices. To secure them in these rights a separate court of justice was instituted, a division of the Parlement of Paris to be called the Edict Chamber and to consist of ten Catholic and six Protestant judges. But a still stronger guarantee was given in their recognition as a separately organized state within the state. The king agreed to leave two hundred towns in their hands, some of which, like Montpellier, Montauban, and La Rochelle, were fortresses in which they kept garrisons and paid the governors. As they could raise 25,000 soldiers at a time when the national army in time of peace was only 10,000, their position seemed absolutely impregnable. So favorable was the Edict to the Huguenots that it was bitterly opposed by the Catholic clergy and by the Parlement of Paris. Only the personal insistence of the king finally carried it.
[Sidenote: Reasons for failure of French Protestantism]
Protestantism was stronger in the sixteenth century in France than it ever was thereafter. During the eighty-seven years while the Edict of Nantes was in force it lost much ground, and when that Edict was revoked by a doting king and persecution began afresh, the Huguenots were in no condition to resist. [Sidenote: 1685] From a total constituency at its maximum of perhaps a fifth or a sixth of the whole population, the Protestants have now sunk to less than two per cent. (650,000 out of 39,000,000). The history of the rise and decline of the Huguenot movement is a melancholy record of persecution and of heroism. How great the number of martyrs was can never be known accurately. Apart from St. Bartholomew there were several lesser massacres, the wear and tear of a generation of war, and {230} the unremitting pressure of the law that claimed hundreds of victims a year.
[Sidenote: Hostility of government]
Three principal causes can be assigned for the failure of the Reformation to do more than fight a drawn battle in France. The first and least important of these was the steady hostility of the government. This hostility was assured by the mutually advantageous alliance between the throne and the church sealed in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516. But that the opposition of the government, heavily as it weighed, was not and could not be the decisive force in defeating Protestantism is proved, in my judgment, by the fact that even when the Huguenots had a king of their own persuasion they were unable to obtain the mastery. Had their faith won the support not only of a considerable minority, but of the actual majority of the people, they could surely at this time have secured the government and made France a Protestant state.
[Sidenote: Protestantism came too late]
The second cause of the final failure of the Reformation was the tardiness with which it came to France. It did not begin to make its really popular appeal until some years after 1536, when Calvin's writings attained a gradual publicity. This was twenty years later than the Reformation came forcibly home to the Germans, and in those twenty years it had made its greatest conquests north of the Rhine. Of causes as well as of men it is true that there is a tide in their affairs which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but which, once missed, ebbs to defeat. Every generation has a different interest; to every era the ideals of that immediately preceding become stale and old-fashioned. The writings of every age are a polemic against those of their fathers; every dogma has its day, and after every wave of enthusiam [Transcriber's note: enthusiasm?] a reaction sets in. Thus it was that the Reformation {231} missed, though it narrowly missed, the propitious moment for conquering France. Enough had been said of it during the reign of Francis to make the people tired of it, but not enough to make them embrace it. By the time that Calvin had become well known, the Catholics had awakened and had seized many of the weapons of their opponents, a fresh statement of belief, a new enthusiasm, a reformed ethical standard. The Council of Trent, the Jesuits, the other new orders, were only symptoms of a still more widely prevalent Catholic revival that came, in France, just in the nick of time to deprive the Protestants of many of their claims to popular favor.
[Sidenote: Beaten by the Renaissance]
But probably the heaviest weight in the scale against the Reformation was the Renaissance—far stronger in France than in Germany. The one marched from the north, while the other was wafted up from Italy. They met, not as hostile armies but rather—to use a humble, commercial illustration—as two competing merchants. The goods they offered were not the same, not even similar, but the appeal of each was of such a nature that few minds could be the whole-hearted devotees of both. The new learning and the beauties of Italian art and literature sapped away the interest of just those intelligent classes whose support was needed to make the triumph of the Reformation complete. Terrible as were the losses of the Huguenots by fire and sword, considerable as were the defections from their ranks of those who found in the reformed Catholic church a spiritual refuge, still greater was the loss of the Protestant cause in failing to secure the adherence of such minds as Dolet and Rabelais, Ronsard and Montaigne, and of the thousands influenced by them. And a study of just these men will show how the Italian influence worked and how it grew stronger in its rivalry with the religious interest. {232} Whereas Marot had found something to interest him in the new doctrines, Ronsard bitterly hated them. Passionately devoted, as he and the rest of the Pleiade were, to the sensuous beauties of Italian poetry, he had neither understanding of nor patience with dogmatic subtleties. In the Huguenots he saw nothing but mad fanatics and dangerous fomentors of rebellion. In his Discourses on the Evils of the Times, he laid all the woes of France at the door of the innovators. And powerfully his greater lyrics seduced the mind of the public from the contemplation of divinity to the enjoyment of earthly beauty.
The same intensification of the contrast between the two spirits is seen in comparing Montaigne with Rabelais. It is true that Rabelais ridiculed all positive religion, but nevertheless it fascinated him. His theological learning is remarkable. But Montaigne ignored religion as far as possible. [Sidenote: Montaigne's aloofness] Nourished from his earliest youth on the great classical writers, he had no interest apart from "the kingdom of man." He preferred to remain in the old faith because that course caused him the least trouble. He had no sympathy with the Protestants, but he did not hate them, as did Ronsard. During the wars of religion, he maintained friendly relations with the leaders of both parties. And he could not believe that creed was the real cause of the civil strife. "Take from the Catholic army," said he, "all those actuated by pure zeal for the church or for the king and country, and you will not have enough men left to form one company." It is strange that beneath the evil passions and self-seeking of the champions of each party he could not see the fierce flame of popular heroism and fanaticism; but that he, and thousands of men like him, could not do so, and could not enter, even by imagination, into the causes {233} which, but a half century earlier, had set the world on fire, largely explains how the religious issue had lost its savour and why Protestantism failed in France.
[1] "The king my son will never have entire obedience."
[2] "That no one may embroil us in the friendship in which I desire that these two kingdoms shall remain during my lifetime."
{234}
[Sidenote: The Netherlands]
The Netherlands have always been a favorite topic for the speculation of those philosophers who derive a large part of national character from geographical conditions. A land that needed reclaiming from the sea by hard labor, a country situated at those two great outlets of European commerce, the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt, a borderland between German and Latin culture, naturally moulded a brave, stubborn, practical and intelligent people, destined to play in history a part seemingly beyond their scope and resources.
The people of the Netherlands became, to all intents, a state before they became a nation. The Burgundian dukes of the fourteenth and fifteenth century added to their fiefs counties, dukedoms and bishoprics, around the nucleus of their first domain, until they had forged a compact and powerful realm. [Sidenote: Philip the Good, 1419-67] Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and lord, under various titles, of much of the Netherlands, deserved the title of Conditor Belgii by his successful wars on France and by his statesmanlike policy of centralization. To foster unity he created the States General—borrowing the name and function thereof from France—in which all of the seventeen provinces[1] of the Netherlands were represented on great occasions. Continually increasing {235} in power with reference to the various localities, it remained subordinate to the prince, who had the sole right of initiating legislation. At first it met now in one city, then in another, but after 1530 always convened at Brussels, and always used the French language officially.
[Sidenote: Charles the Bold, 1467-77]
Charles the Bold completed and yet endangered the work of Philip, for he was worsted in mortal strife with Louis XI of France and, dying in battle, left his dominions to his daughter, Mary. [Sidenote: Maximilian, 1477-93] Her husband, the Emperor Maximilian, and her son, Philip the Handsome, [Sidenote: Philip the Handsome, 1493-1506] added to her realms those vast dominions that made her grandson, Charles, the greatest potentate in Europe. Born in Ghent, reared in the Netherlands, and speaking only the French of the Walloons, Charles was always regarded by his subjects as one of themselves. He almost completed the unification of the Burgundian state by the conquest of Tournay from France (1521), and the annexation of the independent provinces of Friesland (1523), Overyssel and Utrecht (1528), Groningen (1536) and Guelders (1543). Liège still remained a separate entity under its prince-bishops. But even under Charles, notwithstanding a general feeling of loyalty to the house of Hapsburg, each province was more conscious of its own individuality than were the people as a whole of common patriotism. Some of the provinces lay within the Empire, others were vassals of France, a few were independent. Dutch was regarded as a dialect of German. The most illustrious Netherlander of the time, Erasmus, in discussing his race, does not even contemplate the possibility of there being a nation composed of Dutch and Flemish men. The only alternative that presents itself to him is whether he is French or German and, having been born at Rotterdam, he decides in favor of the latter.
{236}
[Sidenote: Classes]
The Burgundian princes found their chief support in the nobility, in a numerous class of officials, and in the municipal aristocracies. The nobles, transformed from a feudal caste to a court clique, even though they retained, as satellites of the monarch, much wealth and power, had relatively lost ground to the rising pretensions of the cities and of the commercial class. The clergy, too, were losing their old independence in subservience to a government which regulated their tithes and forbade their indulgence-trade. In 1515 Charles secured from Leo X and again in 1530 from Clement VII the right of nomination to vacant benefices. He was able to make of the bishops his tools and to curtail the freedom, jurisdiction, and financial privileges of the clergy considerably because the spiritual estate had lost favor with the people and received no support from them.
As the two privileged classes surrendered their powers to the monarch, the third estate was coming into its own. Not until the war of independence, however, was it able to withstand the combination of bureaucracy and plutocracy that made common cause with the central government against the local rights of the cities and the customary privileges of the gilds. Almost everywhere the prince was able, with the tacit support of the wealthier burghers, to substitute for the officers elected by the gilds his own commissioners. [Sidenote: Revolt of Ghent] But this usurpation, together with a variety of economic ills for which the commoners were inclined, quite wrongly, to blame the government, caused general discontent and in one case open rebellion. The gilds of Ghent, a proud and ancient city, suffering from the encroachments of capitalism and from the decline of the Flemish cloth industry, had long asserted among their rights that of each gild to refuse to pay one of the taxes, any one it chose, levied by the government. [Sidenote: 1539] The attempt {237} of the government to suppress this privilege caused a rising which took the characteristically modern form of a general strike. The regent of the Netherlands, Mary, yielded at first to the demands of the gilds, as she had no means of coercion convenient. Charles was in Spain at the time, but hurried northward, being granted free passage through France by the king who felt he had an interest in aiding his fellow monarch to put down rebellious subjects. Early in 1540 Charles entered Ghent at the head of a sufficient army. He soon meted out a sanguinary punishment to the "brawlers" as the strikers were called, humbled the city government, deprived it of all local privileges, suppressed all independent corporations, asserted the royal prerogative of nominating aldermen, and erected a fortress to overawe the burghers. Thus the only overt attempt to resist the authority of Charles V, apart from one or two insignificant Anabaptist riots, was crushed.
In matters of foreign policy the people of the Netherlands naturally wished to be guided in reference to their own interests and not to the larger interests of the emperor's other domains. Wielding immense wealth—during the middle decades of the sixteenth century Antwerp was both the first port and the first money-market of Europe—and cherishing the sentiment that Charles was a native of their land, they for some time sweetly flattered themselves that their interests were the center around which gravitated the desires and needs of the Empire and of Spain. Indeed, the balance of these two great states, and the regency of Margaret of Austria, [Sidenote: Margaret of Austria, Regent, 1522-31] a Hapsburg determined to give the Netherlands their due, for a time allowed them at least the semblance of getting their wishes. But when Charles's sister, Mary of Hungary, succeeded Margaret as regent, she was too entirely {238} dependent on her brother, and he too determined to consult larger than Burgundian interests, to allow the Netherlands more than the smallest weight in larger plans. The most that she could do was to unify, centralize and add to the provinces, and to get what commercial advantages treaties could secure. Thus, she redeemed Luxemburg from the Margrave of Baden to whom Maximilian had pawned it. Thus, also, she negotiated fresh commercial treaties with England and unified the coinage. But with all these achievements, distinctly advantageous to the people she governed, her efforts to increase the power of the crown and the necessity she was under of subordinating her policy to that of Germany and Spain, made her extremely unpopular.
The relationship of the Netherlands to the Empire was a delicate and important question. Though the Empire was the feudal suzerain of most of the Burgundian provinces, Charles felt far more keenly for his rights as an hereditary, local prince than for the aggrandizement of his Empire, and therefore tried, especially after he had left Austria to his brother Ferdinand, [Sidenote: September 7, 1522] to loosen rather than to strengthen the bond. Even as early as 1512, when the Imperial Diet demanded that the "common penny" be levied in the Netherlands, Charles's council aided and abetted his Burgundian subjects in refusing to pay it. In 1530 the Netherlands, in spite of urgent complaints from the Diet, completely freed itself from imperial jurisdiction in the administration of justice. Matters became still more complicated when Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen and Guelders, formerly belonging to the Westphalian district of the Empire, were annexed by Charles as Burgundian prince. Probably he would not have been able to vindicate these acts of power, had not his victory at Mühlberg [Sidenote: 1547] freed him from the {239} restraints of the imperial constitution. A convention was made at the next Diet of Augsburg, [Sidenote: Convention of June 26, 1548] providing that henceforth the Netherlands should form a separate district, the "Burgundian circle," of the Empire, and that their prince, as such, should be represented in the Diet and in the Imperial Supreme Court. Taxes were so apportioned that in time of peace the Netherlands should contribute to the imperial treasury as much as did two electors, and in time of war as much as three. This treaty nominally added to the Empire two new counties, Flanders and Artois, and it gave the whole Netherlands the benefit of imperial protection. But, though ratified by the States General promptly, the convention remained almost a dead letter, and left the Netherlands virtually autonomous. As long as they were unmolested the Netherlands forgot their union entirely, and when, under the pressure of Spanish rule, they later remembered and tried to profit by it, they found that the Empire had no wish to revive it.
[Sidenote: Reformation]
The general causes of the religious revolution were the same in the Low Countries as in other lands. The ground was prepared by the mystics of the earlier ages, by the corruption of and hatred for the clergy, and buy the Renaissance. The central situation of the country made it especially open to all currents of European thought. Printing was early introduced from Germany and expanded so rapidly in these years [Sidenote: 1525-55] that no less than fifty new publishing houses were erected. As Antwerp was the most cosmopolitan of cities, so Erasmus was the most nearly the citizen of the world in that era. The great humanist, who did so much to prepare for the Reformation, spent in his native land just those early years of its first appearance when he most favored Luther.
{240} A group to take up with the Wittenberg professor's doctrines were the Augustinians, many of whom had been in close relations with the Saxon friaries. One of them, James Probst, had been prior of Wittenberg where he learned to know Luther well [Sidenote: 1515] and when he became prior of the convent at Antwerp he started a rousing propaganda in favor of the reform. [Sidenote: 1518] Another Augustinian, Henry of Zütphen, made his friary at Dordrecht the center of a Lutheran movement. Hoen at the Hague, Hinne Rode at Utrecht, Gerard Lister at Zwolle, Melchior Miritzsch at Ghent, were soon in correspondence with Luther and became missionaries of his faith. His books, which circulated among the learned in Latin, were some of them translated into Dutch as early as 1520.
The German commercial colony at Antwerp was another channel for the infiltration of the Lutheran gospel. [Sidenote: 1520-1] The many travelers, among them Albert Dürer, brought with them tidings of the revolt and sowed its seeds in the soil of Flanders and Holland. Singularly enough, the colony of Portuguese Jews, the Marranos as they were called, became, if not converts, at least active agents in the dissemination of Lutheran works.
[Sidenote: Catholic answers]
A vigorous counter-propaganda was at once started by the partisans of the pope. This was directed against both Erasmus and Luther and consisted largely, according to the reports of the former, in the most violent invective. Nicholas of Egmont, "a man with a white pall but a black heart" stormed in the pulpit against the new heretics. Another man interspersed a sermon on charity with objurgations against those whom he called "geese, asses, stocks, and Antichrists." [Sidenote: 1533] One Dominican said he wished he could fasten his teeth in Luther's throat, for he would not fear to go to the Lord's supper with that blood on his {241} mouth. It was at Antwerp, a little later, that were first coined, or at least first printed, the so celebrated epigrams that Erasmus was Luther's father, that Erasmus had laid the eggs and Luther had hatched the chickens, and that Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Erasmus were the four soldiers who had crucified Christ.
The principal literary opposition to the new doctrines came from the University of Louvain. Luther's works were condemned by Cologne, and this sentence was ratified by Louvain. [Sidenote: August 30, 1519] A number of the leading professors wrote against him, [Sidenote: November 7] among them the ex-professor Adrian of Utrecht, recently created Bishop of Tortosa and cardinal, and soon to be pope.
The conservatives, however, could do little but scold until the arrival of Charles V in June 1520, and of the papal nuncio Aleander in September. The latter saw Charles immediately at Antwerp and found him already determined to resist heresy. Acting under the edict procured at that time, though not published until the following March 22, Aleander busied himself by going around and burning Lutheran works in various cities and preaching against the heresy. [Sidenote: October, 1520] He found far more opposition than one would think probable, and the burning of the books, as Erasmus said, removed them from the bookstores only, not from the hearts of the people. The nuncio even discovered, he said, at this early date, heretics who denied the real presence in the eucharist: evidently independent spirits like Hoen who anticipated the doctrine later taken up by Carlstadt and Zwingli.
The validity of the Edict of Worms was affirmed for the Burgundian provinces. The edict was read publicly at Antwerp [Sidenote: July 13, 1521] while four hundred of Luther's books were burnt, three hundred confiscated from the shops and one hundred brought by the people. {242} Whereas spiritual officers were at first employed, civil magistrates now began to act against the innovators. In the beginning, attention was paid to municipal privileges, but these soon came to be disregarded, and resistance on any pretext was treated as rebellion and treason. The first persons to be arrested were the Prior of Antwerp, Probst, [Sidenote: 1522] who recanted, but later escaped and relapsed, and two other intimate friends of Erasmus.
[Sidenote: The Inquisition]
Charles wished to introduce the Spanish inquisition, but his councillors were all against it. Under a different name, however, it was exactly imitated when Francis van der Hulst was appointed chief inquisitor by the state, [Sidenote: April 23, 1522] and was confirmed by a bull of Adrian VI. [Sidenote: June 1, 1523] The original inquisitorial powers of the bishops remained, and a supreme tribunal of three judges was appointed in 1524.
[Sidenote: Martyrs, July 1, 1523]
The first martyrs, Henry Voes and John Esch of Brussels, said Erasmus, made many Lutherans by their death. Luther wrote a hymn on the subject and published an open letter to the Christians of the Netherlands. [Sidenote: 1524] Censorship of the press was established in Holland in vain, for everything goes to show that Lutheranism rapidly increased. Popular interest in the subject seemed to be great. Every allusion to ecclesiastical corruption in speeches or in plays was applauded. Thirty-eight laborers were arrested at Antwerp for assembling to read and discuss the gospel. [Sidenote: 1525] Iconoclastic outbreaks occurred in which crucifixes were desecrated. In the same year an Italian in Antwerp wrote that though few people were openly Lutheran many were secretly so, and that he had been assured by leading citizens that if the revolting peasants of Germany approached Antwerp, twenty thousand armed men would rise in the city to assist them. [Sidenote: July 31] When a Lutheran was drowned in the Scheldt, {243} the act precipitated a riot. In 1527 the English ambassador wrote Wolsey from the Netherlands that two persons out of three "kept Luther's opinions," and that while the English New Testament was being printed in that city, repeated attempts on his part to induce the magistrates to interfere came to nothing. Protestant works also continued to pour from the presses. The Bible was soon translated into Dutch, and in the course of eight years four editions of the whole Bible and twenty-five editions of the New Testament were called for, though the complete Scriptures had never been printed in Dutch before.
[Sidenote: October 14, 1529]
Alarmed by the spread of heresy, attributed to too great mildness, the government now issued an edict that inaugurated a reign of terror. Death was decreed not only for all heretics but for all who, not being theologians, discussed articles of faith, or who caricatured God, Mary, or the saints, and for all who failed to denounce heretics known to them. While the government momentarily flattered itself that heresy had been stamped out, at most it had been driven under ground. One of the effects of the persecution was to isolate the Netherlands from the Empire culturally and to some small extent commercially.
But heresy proved to be a veritable hydra. From one head sprang many daughters, the Anabaptists, [Sidenote: Anabaptists] harder to deal with than their mother. For while Lutheranism stood essentially for passive obedience, and flourished nowhere save as a state church, Anabaptism was frankly revolutionary and often socialistic. Melchior Hoffmann, the most striking of their early leaders, a fervent and uneducated fanatic, driven from place to place, wandered from Sweden and Denmark to Italy and Spain [Sidenote: 1530-1533] preaching chiliastic and communistic ideas. Only for three years was he much in the Netherlands, but it was there that he won his greatest {244} successes. Appealing, as the Anabaptists always did, to the lower classes, he converted thousands and tens of thousands of the very poor—beggars, laborers and sailors—who passionately embraced the teaching that promised the end of kings and governments and the advent of the "rule of the righteous." Mary of Hungary was not far wrong when she wrote that they planned to plunder all churches, nobles, and wealthy merchants, in short, all who had property, and from the spoil to distribute to every individual according to his need. [Sidenote: October 7, 1531] A new and severer edict would have meant a general massacre, had it been strictly enforced, but another element entered into the situation. The city bourgeoisies that had previously resisted the government, now supported it in this one particular, persecution of the Anabaptists. When at Amsterdam [Sidenote: 1534] the sectaries rose and very nearly mastered the city, death by fire was decreed for the men, by water for the women. From Antwerp they were banished by a general edict especially aimed at them supplemented by massacres in the northern provinces. [Sidenote: June 24, 1535] After the crisis at Münster, though the Anabaptists continued to be a bugbear to the ruling classes, their propaganda lost its dangerously revolutionary character. Menno Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, became the leader of the movement and succeeded in gathering the smitten people into a large and harmless body. The Anabaptists furnished, however, more martyrs than did any other sect.
Lutheranism also continued to spread. The edict of 1540 confesses as much while providing new and sterner penalties against those who even interceded for heretics. The fact is that the inquisition as directed against Lutherans was thoroughly unpopular and was resisted in various provinces on the technical ground of local privileges. The Protestants managed {245} to keep unnoticed amidst a general intention to connive at them, and though they did not usually flinch from martyrdom they did not court it. The inquisitors were obliged to arrest their victims at the dead of night, raiding their houses and hauling them from bed, in order to avoid popular tumult. [Sidenote: 1543] When Enzinas printed his Spanish Bible at Antwerp the printer told him that in that city the Scriptures had been published in almost every European language, doubtless an exaggeration but a significant one. Arrested and imprisoned at Brussels for this cause, Enzinas received while under duress visits from four hundred citizens of that city who were Protestants. To control the book trade an oath was exacted of every bookseller [Sidenote: 1546] not to deal in heretical works and the first "Index of prohibited books," drawn up by the University of Louvain, was issued. A censorship of plays was also attempted. This was followed by an edict of 1550 requiring of every person entering the Netherlands a certificate of Catholic belief. As Brabant and Antwerp repudiated a law that would have ruined their trade, it remained, in fact, a dead letter.
Charles's policy of repression had been on the whole a failure, due partly to the cosmopolitan culture of the Netherlands and their commercial position making them open to the importation of ideas as of merchandise from all Europe. It was due in part to the local jealousies and privileges of the separate provinces, and in part to the strength of certain nobles and cities. The persecution, indeed, had a decidedly class character, for the emperor well knew Protestant nobles whom he did not molest, while the poor seldom failed to suffer. And yet Charles had accomplished something. Even the Protestants were loyal, strange to say, to him personally. The number of martyrs in his reign has been estimated at barely one thousand, {246} but it must be remembered that for every one put to death there were a number punished in other ways. And the body of the people was still Catholic, even in the North. It is noteworthy that the most popular writer of this period, as well as the first to use the Dutch tongue with precision and grace, was Anna Bijns, a lay nun, violently anti-Lutheran in sentiment. [Sidenote: Anna Bijns, 1494-1575]
[1] Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, Guelders, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, Holland, Zeeland, Malines, Namur, Lille, Tournay, Friesland, Utrecht, Overyssel and Groningen.
When Charles V, weary of the heaviest scepter ever wielded by any European monarch from Charlemagne to Napoleon, sought rest for his soul in a monk's cell, he left his great possessions divided between his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip. To the former went Austria and the Empire, to the latter the Burgundian provinces and Spain with its vast dependencies in the New World.
[Sidenote: Spain and the Netherlands]
The result of this was to make the Netherlands practically a satellite of Spain. Hitherto, partly because their interests had largely coincided with those of the Empire, partly because by balancing Germany against Spain they could manage to get their own rights, they had found prosperity and had acquired a good deal of national power. Indeed, with their wealth, their central position, and growing strength as province after province was annexed, and their consciousness that their ruler was a native of Flanders, their pride had been rather gratified than hurt by the knowledge that he possessed far larger dominions. [Sidenote: Abdication of Charles] But when Charles, weeping copiously and demanding his subjects' pardon, descended from the throne supported by the young Prince of Orange, [Sidenote: October 25, 1555] and when his son Philip II had replied to his father in Spanish, even those present had an uneasy feeling that the situation had changed for the worse, and that the Netherlands were being handed over from a Burgundian to a Spanish ruler. From {247} this time forth the interests and sentiments of the two countries became more and more sharply divergent, and, as the smaller was sacrificed to the larger, a conflict became inevitable. The revolt that followed within ten years after Philip had permanently abandoned the Netherlands to make his home in Spain [Sidenote: 1559] was first and foremost a nationalist revolt. Contrasted with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a national self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces.
[Sidenote: Religious issue]
But though the catastrophe was apparently inevitable from political grounds, it was greatly complicated and intensified by the religious issue. Philip was determined, as he himself said, either to bring the Netherlands back to the fold of Rome or "so to waste their land that neither the natives could live there nor should any thereafter desire the place for habitation." And yet the means he took were even for his purpose the worst possible, a continual vacillation between timid indulgence and savage cruelty. Though he insisted that his ministers should take no smallest step without his sanction, he could never make up his mind what to do, waited too long to make a decision and then, with fatal fatuity, made the wrong one.
[Sidenote: Calvinism]
At the same time the people were coming under the spell of a new and to the government more dangerous form of Protestantism. Whereas the Lutherans had stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent middle classes and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure martyrdom but also—what the others had lacked—the will and the power to resist tyranny by force. Calvin's polity, as worked out in Geneva, was a subordination of the state to the church. His reforms were thorough and consciously social and political. Calvinism in all lands aroused {248} republican passions and excited rebellion against the powers that be. This feature was the more prominent in the Netherlands [Sidenote: 1545] in that its first missionaries were French exiles who irrigated the receptive soil of the Low Countries with doctrines subversive of church and state alike. The intercourse with England, partly through the emigration from that land under Mary's reign, partly through the coming and going of Flemings and Walloons, also opened doors to Protestant doctrine.
At first the missionaries came secretly, preaching to a few specially invited to some private house or inn. People attended these meetings disguised and after dark. First mentioned in the edict of 1550, nine years later the Calvinists drew up a Confessio Belgica, as a sign and an aid to union. Calvin's French writings could be read in the southern provinces in the original. Though as early as 1560 some nobles had been converted, the new religion undoubtedly made its strongest appeal, as a contemporary put it, "to those who had grown rich by trade and were therefore ready for revolution." It was among the merchants of the great cities that it took strongest root and from the middle class spread to the laborers; influenced not only by the example of their masters, but sometimes also by the policy of Protestant employers to give work only to co-religionists. In a short time it had won a very considerable success, though perhaps not the actual majority of the population. Many of the poor, hitherto Anabaptists, thronged to it in hopes of social betterment. Many adventurers with no motive but to stir the waters in which they might fish joined the new party. But on the whole, as its appeal was primarily moral and religious, its constituency was the more substantial, progressive, and intelligent part of the community.
The greatest weakness of the Protestants was their {249} division. Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist continued to compete for the leadership and hated each other cordially. The Calvinists themselves were divided into two parties, the "Rekkelijken" or "Compromisers" and the "Preciesen" or "Stalwarts." Moreover there were various other shades of opinion, not amounting quite to new churches. The pure Erasmians, under Cassander, advocated tolerance. More pronounced was the movement of Dirck Volckertszoon Coornheert [Sidenote: Coornheert, 1522-90] a merchant of Amsterdam who, in addition to advising his followers to dissimulate their views rather than to court martyrdom, rejected the Calvinist dogma of predestination and tried to lay the emphasis in religion on the spirit of Jesus rather than on either dogma or ritual.
Though the undertow was slowly but surely carrying the Low Countries adrift from Spain, for the moment their new monarch, then at the age of twenty-eight, seemed to have the winds and waves of politics all in his favor. He was at peace with France; he had nothing to fear from Germany; his marriage with Mary of England made that country, always the best trader with the Netherlands, an ally. His first steps were to relieve Mary of Hungary of her regency and to give it to Emanuel Philibert, to issue a new edict against heresy and to give permission to the Jesuits to enter the Low Countries. [Sidenote: 1556]
The chief difficulties were financial. The increase in the yield of the taxes in the reign of Charles had been from 1,500,000 guilders[1] to 7,000,000 guilders. In addition to this, immense loans had exhausted the credit of the government. The royal domain was mortgaged. As the floating debt of the Provinces rose rapidly the {250} government was in need of a grant to keep up the army. The only way to meet the situation was to call the States General. [Sidenote: March, 1556] When they met, they complained that they were taxed more heavily than Spain and demanded the removal of the Spanish troops, a force already so unpopular that William of Orange refused to take command of it. In presenting their several grievances one province only, Holland, mentioned the religious question to demand that the powers of the inquisitors be curtailed. To obtain funds Philip was obliged to promise, against his will, to withdraw the soldiers. This was only done, under pressure, on January 10, 1561.
[Sidenote: 1559]
Philip had left the Netherlands professing his intention of returning, but hoping and resolving in his heart never to do so. His departure made easier the unavoidable breach, but the struggle had already begun. Wishing to leave a regent of royal blood Philip appointed Margaret of Parma, a natural daughter of Charles V. Born in 1522, she had been married at the age of fourteen to Alexander de' Medici, a nephew of Clement VII; becoming a widow in the following year she was in 1538 married to Ottavio Farnese, a nephew of Paul III, at that time only fourteen years old. Given as her dower the cities of Parma and Piacenza, she had become thoroughly Italian in feeling.
[Sidenote: Anthony Perrenot Cardinal Granvelle, 1517-86]
To guide her Philip left, besides the Council of State, a special "consulta" or "kitchen cabinet" of three members, the chief of whom was Granvelle. The real fatherland of this native of the Free County of Burgundy was the court. As a passionate servant of the crown and a clever and knowing diplomat, he was in constant correspondence with Philip, recommending measures over the head of Margaret. His acts made her intensely unpopular and her attempts to coax and cozen public opinion only aroused suspicion.
{251}
[Sidenote: Egmont, 1522-68]
Three members in the Council of State, Granvelle and two others, were partisans of the crown; three other members may be said to represent the people. One of them was Lamoral Count of Egmont, the most brilliant and popular of the high nobility. Though a favorite of Charles V on account of his proved ability as a soldier, his frankness and generosity, he was neither a sober nor a weighty statesman. The popular proverb, "Egmont for action and Orange for counsel," well characterized the difference between the two leading members of the Council of State. William, prince of Orange, lacking the brilliant qualities of Egmont, far surpassed him in acumen and in strength of character. From his father, William Count of Nassau-Dillenburg, [Sidenote: William the Silent, 1533-84] he inherited important estates in Germany near the Netherlands, and by the death of a cousin he became, at the age of eleven, Prince of Orange—a small, independent territory in southern France—and Lord of Breda and Gertruidenberg in Holland. With an income of 150,000 guilders per annum he was by far the richest man in the Netherlands, Egmont coming next with an income of 62,000. William was well educated. Though he spoke seven languages and was an eloquent orator, he was called "the Silent" because of the rare discretion that never revealed a secret nor spoke an imprudent word. In religion he was indifferent, being first a Catholic, then a Lutheran, then a Calvinist, and always a man of the world. His broad tolerance found its best, or only, support in the Erasmian tendencies of Coornheert. His second wife, Anne of Saxony, having proved unfaithful to him, he married, while she was yet alive, Charlotte of Bourbon. This act, like the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, was approved by Protestant divines. Behind them Egmont and Orange had the hearty support of the patriotic and well educated native nobility. {252} The rising generation of the aristocracy saw only the bad side of the reign of Charles; they had not shared in his earlier victories but had witnessed his failure to conquer either France or Protestantism.
[Sidenote: New bishoprics]
In order to deal more effectively with the religious situation Granvelle wished to bring the ecclesiastical territorial divisions into harmony with the political. Hitherto the Netherlands had been partly under the Archbishop of Cologne, partly under the Archbishop of Rheims. But as these were both foreigners Granvelle applied for and secured a bull creating fourteen new bishoprics and three archbishoprics, [Sidenote: March 12, 1559] Cambrai, Utrecht, and Malines, of which the last held the primacy. His object was doubtless in large part to facilitate the extirpation of heresy, but it was also significant as one more instance of the nationalization of the church, a tendency so strong that neither Catholic nor Protestant countries escaped from it. In this case all the appointments were to be made by the king with consent of the pope. The people resented the autocratic features of a plan they might otherwise have approved; a cry was raised throughout the provinces that their freedom was infringed upon, and that the plan furnished a new instrument to the hated inquisition.
[Sidenote: February, 1561]
Granvelle, more than ever detested when he received the cardinal's hat, was dubbed "the red devil," "the archrascal," "the red dragon," "the Spanish swine," "the pope's dung." In July Egmont and Orange sent their resignations from the Council of State to Philip, saying that they could no longer share the responsibility for Granvelle's policy, especially as everything was done behind their backs. Philip, however, was slow to take alarm. For the moment his attention was taken up with the growth of the Huguenot party in France and his efforts centered on helping the French Catholics against them. But the Netherlands were {253} importunate. In voicing the wishes of the people the province of Brabant, with the capital, Brussels, the metropolitan see, Malines, and the university, Louvain, took as decided a lead as the Parlement of Paris did in France. The estates of Brabant demanded that Orange be made their governor. The nobles began to remember that they were legally a part of the Empire. The marriage of Orange, on August 26, 1561, with the Lutheran Anne of Saxony, was but one sign of the rapprochment. Though the prince continued to profess Catholicism, he entertained many Lutherans and emphasized as far as possible his position as vassal of the Empire. Philip, indeed, believed that the whole trouble came from the wounded vanity of a few nobles.
But Granvelle saw deeper. [Sidenote: 1561] When the Estates of Brabant stopped the payment of the principal tax or "Bede," [2] and when the people of Brussels took as a party uniform a costume derived from the carnival, a black cloak covered with red fool's heads, the cardinal, whose red hat was caricatured thereby, stated that nothing less than a republic was aimed at. This was true, though in the anticipation of the nobles, at least, the republic should have a decidedly aristocratic character. But Granvelle had no policy to propose but repression. In order to prevent condemned heretics from preaching and singing on the scaffold a gag was put into their mouths. How futile a measure! The Calvinists no longer disguised, but armed—a new and significant fact—thronged to their conventicles. Emigration continued on a large scale. By 1556 it was estimated that thirty thousand Protestants from the Low Countries were settled in or near London. Elizabeth encouraged them to come, assigning them {254} Norwich as a place of refuge. [Sidenote: 1563] She also began to tax imports from the Netherlands, a blow to which Philip replied by forbidding all English imports.
[Sidenote: Revolt]
Hitherto the resistance to the government had been mostly passive and constitutional. But from 1565 may be dated the beginning of the revolt that did not cease until it had freed the northern provinces forever from Spanish tyranny. The rise of the Dutch Republic is one of the most inspiring pages in history. Superficially it has many points of resemblance with the American War of Independence. In both there was the absentee king, the national hero, the local jealousies of the several provinces, the economic grievances, the rising national feeling and even the religious issue, though this had become very small in America. But the difference was in the ferocity of the tyranny and the intensity of the struggle. The two pictures are like the same landscape as it might be painted by Millet and by Turner: the one is decent and familiar, the other lurid and ghastly. With true Anglo-Saxon moderation the American war was fought like a game or an election, with humanity and attention to rules; but in Holland and Belgium was enacted the most terrible frightfulness in the world; over the whole land, mingled with the reek of candles carried in procession and of incense burnt to celebrate a massacre, brooded the sultry miasma of human blood and tears. On the one side flashed the savage sword of Alva and the pitiless flame of the inquisitor Tapper; on the other were arrayed, behind their dykes and walls, men resolved to win that freedom which alone can give scope and nobility to life.
[Sidenote: The Intellectuals]
And in the melée those suffered most who would fain have been bystanders, the humanists. Persecuted by both sides, the intellectuals, who had once deserted the Reform now turned again to it as the lesser of the two {255} evils. They would have been glad to make terms with any church that would have left them in liberty, but they found the whips of Calvin lighter than the scorpions of Philip. Even those who, like Van Helmont, wished to defend the church and to reconcile the Tridentine decrees with philosophy, found that their labors brought them under suspicion and that what the church demanded was not harmony of thought but abnegation of it.
The first act of the revolt may be said to be a secret compact, known as the Compromise, [Sidenote: The Compromise, 1565] originally entered into by twenty nobles at Brussels and soon joined by three hundred other nobles elsewhere. The document signed by them denounced the Edicts as surpassing the greatest recorded barbarity of tyrants and as threatening the complete ruin of the country. To resist them the signers promised each other mutual support. In this as in subsequent developments the Calvinist minority took the lead, but was supported by strong Catholic forces. Among the latter was the Prince of Orange, not yet a Protestant. His conversion really made little difference in his program; both before and after it he wanted tolerance or reconciliation on Cassander's plan of compromise. He would have greatly liked to have seen the Peace of Augsburg, now the public law of the Empire, extended to the Low Countries, but this was made difficult even to advocate because the Peace of Augsburg provided liberty only for the Lutheran confession, whereas the majority of Protestants in the Netherlands were now Calvinists. For the same reason little help could be expected from the German princes, for the mutual animosity that was the curse of the Protestant churches prevented their making common cause against the same enemy.
As the Huguenots—for so they began to be called in Brabant as well as in France—were as yet too few {256} to rebel, the only course open was to appeal to the government once more. A petition to make the Edicts milder was presented to Margaret in 1566. One of her advisers bade her not to be afraid of "those beggars." Originating in the scorn of enemies, like so many party names, the epithet "Beggars" (Gueux) presently became the designation and a proud one, of the nobles who had signed the Compromise and later of all the rebels.
Encouraged by the regent's apparent lack of power to coerce them, the Calvinist preachers became daily bolder. Once again their religion showed its remarkable powers of organization. Lacking nothing in funds, derived from a constituency of wealthy merchants, the preachers of the Reformation were soon able to forge a machinery of propaganda and party action that stood them in good stead against the greater numbers of their enemies. Especially in critical times, discipline, unity, and enthusiasm make headway against the deadly hatred of enemies and the deadlier apathy and timidity of the mass of mankind. It is true that the methods of the preachers often aroused opposition.
[Sidenote: Iconoclasm]
The zeal of the Calvinists, inflamed by oppression and encouraged by the weakness of the government, burst into an iconoclastic riot, [Sidenote: August 11, 1566] first among the unemployed at Armentières, but spreading rapidly to Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and then to the northern provinces, Holland and Zeeland. The English agent at Brussels wrote: "Coming into Oure Lady Church, yt looked like hell wher were above 1000 torches brannyng and syche a noise as yf heven and erth had gone together with fallyng of images and fallyng down of costly works." Books and manuscripts as well as pictures were destroyed. The cry "Long live the Beggars" resounded from one end of the land to the {257} other. But withal there was no pillage and no robbery. The gold in the churches was left untouched. Margaret feared a jacquerie but, lacking troops, had to look on with folded hands at least for the moment. By chance there arrived just at this time an answer from Philip to the earlier petition of the Beggars. The king promised to abolish the Spanish inquisition and to soften the edicts. Freedom of conscience was tacitly granted, but the government made an exception, as soon as it dared, of those who had committed sacrilege in the recent riots. These men were outlawed.
[Sidenote: Civil war]
No longer fearing a religious war the Calvinists started it themselves. Louis of Nassau, a brother of Prince William, hired German mercenaries and invaded Flanders, where he won some slight successes. In Amsterdam the great Beggar Brederode entered into negotiations with Huguenots and English friends. The first battle between the Beggars and the government troops, [Sidenote: March 13, 1567] near Antwerp, ended in a rout for the former.
Philip now ordered ten thousand Spanish veterans, led by Alva, to march from Italy to the Netherlands. Making their way through the Free County of Burgundy and Lorraine they entered Brussels on August 9, 1567. [Sidenote: Alva 1508-83] Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, had won experience and reputation as a soldier in the German wars. Though self-controlled and courtly in manner, his passionate patriotism and bigotry made him a fit instrument to execute Philip's orders to make the Netherlands Spanish and Catholic. He began with no uncertain hand, building forts at Antwerp and quartering his troops at Brussels where their foreign manners and Roman piety gave offence to the citizens. On September 9 he arrested the counts of Egmont and Horn, next to Orange the chief leaders of the patriotic party. Setting up a tribunal, called the Council of {258} Troubles, to deal with cases of rebellion and heresy, he inaugurated a reign of terror. He himself spent seven hours a day in this court trying cases and signing death-warrants. Not only heretics were punished but also agitators and those who had advocated tolerance. Sincere Catholics, indeed, noted that the crime of heresy was generally the mere pretext for dealing with patriots and all those obnoxious to the government. [Sidenote: Executions] For the first time we have definite statistics of the numbers executed. For instance, on January 4, 1568, 48 persons were sentenced to death, on February 20, 37; on February 21, 71; on March 20, 55; and so on for day after day, week in and week out. On March 3 at the same hour throughout the whole land 1500 men were executed. The total number put to death during the six years of Alva's administration has been variously estimated at from 6,000 to 18,000. The lower number is probably nearer the truth, though not high enough. Emigration on a hitherto unknown scale within the next thirty or forty years carried 400,000 persons from the Netherlands. Thousands of others fled to the woods and became freebooters. The people as a whole were prostrated with terror. The prosperity of the land was ruined by the wholesale confiscations of goods. Alva boasted that by such means he had added to the revenues of his territories 500,000 ducats per annum.
William of Orange retired to his estates at Dillenburg not to yield to the tyrant but to find a point d'appui from which to fight. Wishing to avoid anything that might cause division among the people he kept the religious issue in the background and complained only of foreign tyranny. He tried to enlist the sympathies of the Emperor Maximilian II and to collect money and men. William's friend Villiers invaded the Burgundian State near Maastricht and Louis of Nassau marched with troops into Friesland. {259} [Sidenote: April, 1568] By this time Alva had increased his army by 10,000 German cavalry and both the rebel leaders were severely defeated.
This triumph was followed by an act of power and defiance on Alva's part sometimes compared to the execution of Louis XVI by the French Republicans. Hitherto the sufferers from his reign of blood had not in any case been men of the highest rank. The first execution of nobles took place at Brussels on June 1, that of the captured Villiers followed on June 2, and that of Egmont and Horn on June 5.
Orange himself now took the field with 25,000 troops, a motley aggregate of French, Flemish, and Walloon Huguenots and of German mercenaries. But he had no genius for war to oppose to the veterans of Alva. Continually harassed by the Spaniards he was kept in fear for his communications, dared not risk a general engagement and was humiliated by seeing his retreat, in November, turned into a rout.
[Sidenote: July 16, 1570]
Finding that severity did not pacify the provinces, Alva issued a proclamation that on the face of it was a general amnesty with pardon for all who submitted. But he excepted by name several hundred emigrants, all the Protestant clergy, all who had helped them, all iconoclasts, all who had signed petitions for religious liberty, and all who had rebelled. As these exceptions included the greater portion of those who stood in need of pardon the measure proved illusory as a means of reconciliation. Coupled with it were other measures, including the prohibition to subjects to attend foreign universities, intended to put a check on free trade in ideas.
[Sidenote: Taxation]
Alva's difficulties and the miseries of the unhappy land entrusted to his tender mercies were increased by want of money. Notwithstanding the privilege of {260} granting their own taxes the States General were summoned [Sidenote: March 21, 1569] and forced to accept new imposts of one per cent. on all property real and personal, ten per cent. on the sale of all movable goods and five per cent. on the sale of real estate. These were Spanish taxes, exorbitant in any case but absolutely ruinous to a commercial people. A terrible financial panic followed. Houses at Antwerp that had rented for 300 gulden could now be had for 50 gulden. Imports fell off to such an extent that at this port they yielded but 14,000 gulden per annum instead of 80,000 as formerly. The harbor was filled with empty boats; the market drugged with goods of all sorts that no one would buy.
[Sidenote: Beggars of the Sea]
The cause of the patriots looked hopeless. Orange, discredited by defeat, had retired to Germany. At one time, to avoid the clamors of his troops for pay, he was obliged to flee by night from Strassburg. But in this dark hour help came from the sea. Louis of Nassau, not primarily a statesman like his brother but a passionate crusader for Protestantism, had been at La Rochelle and had there seen the excellent work done by privateers. In emulation of his French brethren he granted letters of marque to the sailors of Holland and Zeeland. Recruits thronged to the ships, Huguenots, men from Liège, and the laborers of the Walloon provinces thrown out of work by the commercial crisis. These men promptly won striking successes in preying on Spanish commerce. Their many and rich prizes were taken to England or to Emden and sold. Often they landed on the coasts and attacked small Catholic forces, or murdered priests. On the night of March 31-April 1, 1572, these Beggars of the Sea seized the small town of Brielle on a large island at the mouth of the Meuse not far from the Hague. This success was immediately followed by the insurrection of Rotterdam and Flushing. The war was conducted with combined {261} heroism and frightfulness. Receiving no quarter the Beggars gave none, and to avenge themselves on the unspeakable wrongs committed by Alva they themselves at times massacred the innocent. But their success spread like wildfire. The coast towns "fell away like beads from a rosary when one is gone." Fortifications in all of them were strengthened and, where necessary, dykes were opened. Reinforcements also came from England.
[Sidenote: Revolution]
By this time the revolt had become a veritable revolution. It found its battle hymn in the Wilhelmuslied and its Washington in William of Orange. As all the towns of Holland save Amsterdam were in his hands, in June the provincial Estates met—albeit illegally, for there was no one authorized to convene them—assumed sovereign power and made William their Stat-holder. They voted large taxes and forced loans from rich citizens, and raised money from the sale of prizes taken at sea. All defect in prescriptive and legal power was made up by the popularity of the prince, deeply loved by all classes, not only on account of his affability to all, even the humblest, but still more because of confidence in his ability. Never did his versatility, patience and skill in management shine more brightly. Among the troops raised by the patriots he kept strict discipline, thus making by contrast more lurid the savage pillage by the Spaniards. He kept far from fanatics and swashbucklers of whom there were plenty attracted to the revolt. His master idea was to keep the Netherlands together and to free them from the foreigner. Complete independence of Spain was not at first planned, but it soon became inevitable.
For a moment there was a prospect of help from Coligny's policy of prosecuting a war with Spain, but these hopes were destroyed by the defeat of the French Huguenots near Mons [Sidenote: July 17, 1572] and by the massacre of Saint {262} Bartholomew. [Sidenote: August 24, 1572] Freed from menace in this quarter and encouraged by his brilliant victory, Alva turned north with an army now increased to 40,000 veterans. First he took Malines and delivered it to his soldiers for "the most dreadful and inhuman sack of the day" as a contemporary wrote. The army then marched to Guelders and stormed Zutphen under express orders from their general "not to leave one man alive or one building unburnt." "With the help of God," as Alva piously reported, the same punishment was meted out to Naarden. Then he marched to the still royalist Amsterdam from which base he proceeded to invest Haarlem. The siege was a long and hard one for the Spaniards, harassed by the winter weather and by epidemics. Alva wrote Philip that it was "the bloodiest war known for long years" and begged for reinforcements. [Sidenote: July 12, 1573] At last famine overcame the brave defenders of the city and it capitulated. Finding that his cruelty had only nerved the people to the most desperate resistance, and wishing to give an example of clemency to a city that would surrender rather than await storming, Alva contented himself with putting to death to the last man 2300 French, English, and Walloon soldiers of the garrison, and five or six citizens. He also demanded a ransom of 100,000 dollars[3] in lieu of plunder. Not content with this meager largess the Spanish troops mutinied, and only the promise of further cities to sack quieted them. The fortunes of the patriots were a little raised by the defeat of the Spanish fleet in the Zuiderzee by the Beggars on October 12, 1573.
[Sidenote: Requesens]
For some time Philip had begun to suspect that Alva's methods were not the proper ones to win back the affectionate loyalty of his people. Though he hesitated long he finally removed him late in 1573 and {263} appointed in his stead Don Louis Requesens. Had Philip come himself he might have been able to do something, for the majority professed personal loyalty to him, and in that age, as Shakespeare reminds us, divinity still hedged a king. But not having the decision to act in person Philip picked out a favorite, known from his constant attendance on his master as "the king's hour-glass," in whom he saw the slavishly obedient tool that he thought he wanted. The only difference between the new governor and the old was that Requesens lacked Alva's ability; he had all the other's narrowly Spanish views, his bigotry and absolutism.
Once arrived in the provinces committed to his charge, he had no choice but to continue the war. But on January 27, 1574, Orange conquered Middelburg and from that date the Spanish flag ceased to float over any portion of the soil of Holland or Zeeland. In open battle at Mook, however, [Sidenote: April 14, 1574] the Spanish veterans again achieved success, defeating the patriots under Louis of Nassau, who lost his life. The beginning of the year saw the investment of Leyden in great force. The heroism of the defence has become proverbial. When, in September, the dykes were cut to admit the sea, so that the vessels of the Beggars were able to sail to the relief of the city, the siege was raised. It was the first important military victory for the patriots and marks the turning-point of the revolt. Henceforth the Netherlands could not be wholly subdued.
Requesens summoned the States General and offered a pardon to all who would submit. But the people saw in this only a sign of weakness. A flood of pamphlets calling to arms replied to the advances of the government. Among the pamphleteers the ablest was Philip van Marnix, [Sidenote: Marnix, 1538-98] a Calvinist who turned his powers of satire against Spain and the Catholic {264} church. William of Orange, now a Protestant, living at Delft, inspired the whole movement. Requesens, believing that if he were out of the way the revolt would collapse, like Alva offered public rewards for his assassination. That there was really no common ground was proved at a conference between the two foes, broken off without result. In the campaign of 1575 the Spanish army again achieved great things, taking Oudewater, Schoonhoven and other places. But the rebels would not give up.
[Sidenote: March 5, 1576]
The situation was changed by the death of Requesens. Before his successor could be appointed events moved rapidly. After taking Zierikzee on June 29, the Spanish army turned to Aalst, quartered the soldiers on the inhabitants, and forced the loyal city to pay the full costs of their maintenance. If even the Catholics were alienated by this, the Protestants went so far as to preach that any Spaniard might be murdered without sin. In the concerted action against Spain the Estates of Brabant now took the leading part; meeting at Brussels they intimidated the Council of State and raised an army of 3000 men. By this time Holland and Zeeland were to all intents and purposes an independent state. The Calvinists, strong among the native population, were recruited by a vast influx of immigrants from other Provinces until theirs became the dominant religion. Holland and Zeeland pursued a separate military and financial policy. Alone among the provinces they were prosperous, for they had command of the rich sea-borne commerce.
The growth of republican theory kept pace with the progress of the revolt. Orange was surrounded by men holding the free principles of Duplessis-Mornay and corresponding with him. Dutchmen now openly voiced their belief that princes were made for the sake of their subjects and not subjects for the sake {265} of princes. Even though they denied the equal rights of the common people they asserted the sovereignty of the representative assembly. The Council of State, having assumed the authority of the viceroy during the interim, was deluged with letters petitioning them to shake off the Spanish yoke entirely. But, as the Council still remained loyal to Philip, on September 4 its members were arrested, a coup d'état planned in the interests of Orange and doubtless with his knowledge. It was, of course, tantamount to treason. The Estates General now seized sovereign powers. Still protesting their loyalty to the monarch's person and to the Catholic religion, they demanded virtual independence and the withdrawal of the Spanish troops. To enforce their demands they collected an army and took possession of several forts. But the Spanish veterans never once thought of giving way. Gathering at Antwerp where they were besieged by the soldiers of the States General, [Sidenote: November 4, 1576] they attacked and then scattered the bands sent against them and proceeded to sack Antwerp like a captured town. In one dreadful day 7000 of the patriots, in part soldiers, in part noncombatants, perished. The wealth of the city was looted. The army of occupation boasted as of a victory of this deed of blood, known to the Netherlanders as "the Spanish fury."
Naturally, such a blow only welded the provinces more firmly together and steeled their temper to an even harder resistance. Its immediate result was a treaty, known as the Pacification of Ghent, between the provinces represented in the States General on the one hand and Holland and Zeeland on the other, for the purposes of union and of driving out the foreigner. The religious question was left undecided, save that the northern provinces agreed to do nothing for the present against the Roman church. But, as {266} heretofore, the Calvinists, now inscribing "Pro fide et patria" on their banners, were the more active and patriotic party.
[Sidenote: Don John, 1547-78]
On May 1, 1577, the new Governor-General, Don John of Austria, entered Brussels. A natural son of Charles V, at the age of twenty-four he had made himself famous by the naval victory of Lepanto, and his name still more celebrated in popular legend on account of his innumerable amours. That he had some charm of manner must be assumed; that he had ability in certain directions cannot be denied; but his aristocratic hauteur, his contempt for a nation of merchants and his disgust at dealing with them, made him the worst possible person for the position of Governor. Philip's detailed instructions left nothing to the imagination: the gist of them was to assure the Catholic religion and obedience of his subjects "as far as possible," to speak French, and not to take his mistresses from the most influential families, nor to alienate them in any other way. After force had been tried and failed the effect of gentleness was to be essayed. Don John was to be a dove of peace and an angel of love.
But even if a far abler man had been sent to heal the troubles in the Netherlands, the breach was now past mending. In the States General, as in the nation at large, there were still two parties, one for Orange and one for Philip, but both were determined to get rid of the devilish incubus of the Spanish army. The division of the two parties was to some extent sectional, but still more that class division that seems inevitable between conservatives and liberals. The king still had for him the clergy, the majority of the nobles and higher bourgeoisie; with William were ranged the Calvinists, the middle and lower classes and most of the "intellectuals", lawyers, men of learning and those publicists known as the "monarchomachs." Many of {267} these were still Catholics who wished to distinguish sharply between the religious and the national issue. At the very moment of Don John's arrival the Estates passed a resolution to uphold the Catholic faith.
[Sidenote: February, 1577]
Even before he had entered his capital Don John issued the "Perpetual Edict" agreeing to withdraw the Spanish troops in return for a grant of 600,000 guilders for their pay. He promised to respect the privileges of the provinces and to free political prisoners, including the son of Orange. In April the troops really withdrew. The small effect of these measures of conciliation became apparent when the Estates General voted by a majority of one only to recognize Don John as their Statholder. [Sidenote: May 12] So little influence did he have that he felt more like a prisoner than a governor; he soon fled from his capital to the fortress of Namur whence he wrote urging his king to send back the troops at once and let him "bathe in the blood of the traitors."
William was as much pleased as John was enraged at the failure of the policy of reconciliation. While the majority of the states still hoped for peace William was determined on independence at all costs. In August he sent a demand to the representatives to do their duty by the people, for he did not doubt that they had the right to depose the tyrant. Never did his prospects look brighter. Help was offered by Elizabeth and the tide of republican feeling began to rise higher. In proportion as the laborers were drawn to the party of revolt did the doctrine of the monarchomachs become liberal. No longer satisfied with the democracy of corporations and castes of the Middle Ages, the people began to dream of the individualistic democracy of modern times.
The executive power, virtually abandoned by Don John, now became centered in a Committee of {268} Eighteen, nominally on fortifications, but in reality, like the French Committee of Public Safety, supreme in all matters. This body was first appointed by the citizens of Brussels, but the States General were helpless against it. It was supported by the armed force of the patriots and by the personal prestige of Orange. His power was growing, for, with the capitulation of the Spanish garrison at Utrecht he had been appointed Statholder of that province. When he entered Brussels on September 23, he was received with the wild acclamations of the populace. Opposition to him seemed impossible. And yet, even at this high-water mark of his power, his difficulties were considerable. Each province was jealous of its rights and, as in the American Revolution, each province wished to contribute as little as possible to the common fund. Moreover the religious question was still extremely delicate. Orange's permission to the Catholics to celebrate their rites on his estates alienated as many Protestant fanatics as it conciliated those of the old religion.
[Sidenote: Archduke Matthew]
The Netherlands were not yet strong enough to do without powerful foreign support, nor was public opinion yet ripe for the declaration of an independent republic. Feeling that a statholder of some sort was necessary, the States General petitioned Philip to remove Don John and to appoint a legitimate prince of the blood. This petition was perhaps intentionally impossible of fulfilment in a way agreeable to Philip, for he had no legitimate brother or son. But a prince of the House of Hapsburg offered himself in the person of the Archduke Matthew, a son of the Emperor Maximilian, recently deceased. [Sidenote: October 12, 1576] Though he had neither ability of his own nor support from his brother, the Emperor Rudolph II, and though but nineteen years old, he offered his services to the Netherlands and immediately went thither. With high statecraft William {269} drew Matthew into his policy, for he saw that the dangers to be feared were anarchy and disunion. In some cities, notably Ghent, where another Committee of Eighteen was appointed on the Brussels model, the lowest classes assumed a dictatorship analagous to that of the Bolsheviki in Russia. At the same time the Patriots' demand that Orange should be made Governor of Brabant was distasteful to the large loyalist element in the population. William at once saw the use that might be made of Matthew as a figure-head to rally those who still reverenced the house of Hapsburg and who saw in monarchy the only guarantee of order at home and consideration abroad. Promptly arresting the Duke of Aerschot, a powerful noble who tried to use Matthew's name to create a separate faction, Orange induced the States General first to decree Don John an enemy of the country [Sidenote: December 7, 1577] and then to offer the governorship of the Netherlands to the archduke, at the same time begging him, on account of his youth, to leave the administration in the hands of William. After Matthew's entry into Brussels [Sidenote: January 18, 1578] the States General swore allegiance to this puppet in the hands of their greatest statesman.
Almost immediately the war broke out again. Both sides had been busy raising troops. At Gembloux Don John with 20,000 men defeated about the same number of Patriot troops. [Sidenote: January 31] But this failed to clarify a situation that tended to become ever more complicated. Help from England and France came in tiny dribblets just sufficient to keep Philip's energies occupied in the cruel civil war. But the vacancy, so to speak, on the ducal throne of the Burgundian state, seemed to invite the candidacy of neighboring princes and a chance of seriously interesting France came when the ambition of Francis, Duke of Anjou, was stirred to become ruler of the Low Countries. William attempted also to make {270} use of him. In return for the promise to raise 12,000 troops, Anjou received from the States General the title of "Defender of the Freedom of the Netherlands against the tyranny of the Spaniards and their allies." The result was that the Catholic population was divided in its support between Matthew and Anjou, and that Orange retained the balance of influence.
[Sidenote: Protestant schism]
The insuperable difficulty in the way of success for the policy of this great man was still the religious one. Calvinism had been largely drawn off to Holland and Zeeland, and Catholicism remained the religion of the great majority of the population in the other provinces. At first sight the latter appeared far from being an intractable force. In contrast with the fiery zeal of the Calvinists on the one hand and of the Spaniards on the other, the faith of the Catholic Flemings and Walloons seemed lukewarm, an old custom rather than a living conviction. Most were shocked by the fanaticism of the Spaniards, who thus proved the worst enemies of their faith, and yet, within the Netherlands, they were very unwilling to see the old religion perish. When the lower classes at Ghent assumed the leadership they rather forced than converted that city to the Calvinist confession. Their acts were taken as a breach of the Pacification of Ghent and threatened the whole policy of Orange by creating fresh discord. To obviate this, William proposed to the States General a religious peace on the basis of the status quo with refusal to allow further proselyting. [Sidenote: July, 1578] But this measure, acceptable to the Catholics, was deeply resented by the Calvinists. It was said that one who changed his religion as often as his coat must prefer human to divine things and that he who would tolerate Romanists must himself be an atheist.
[Sidenote: Division of the Netherlands]
It was therefore, a primarily religious issue, and no difference of race, language or material interest, {271} that divided the Netherlands into two halves. For a time the common hatred of all the people for the foreigner welded them into a united whole; but no sooner was the pressure of the Spanish yoke even slightly relaxed than the mutual antipathy of Calvinist and Catholic showed itself. If we look closely into the causes why the North should become predominantly Protestant while the South gradually reverted to an entirely Catholic faith, we must see that the reasons were in part racial, in part geographical and in part social. Geographically and linguistically the Northern provinces looked for their culture to Germany, and the Southern provinces to France. Moreover the easy defensibility of Holland and Zeeland, behind their moats, made them the natural refuge of a hunted sect and, this tendency once having asserted itself, the polarization of the Netherlands naturally followed, Protestants being drawn and driven to their friends in the North and Catholics similarly finding it necessary or advisable to settle in the South. Moreover in the Southern provinces the two privileged classes, clergy and nobility, were relatively stronger than in the almost entirely bourgeois and commercial North. And the influence of both was thrown into the scale of the Roman church, the first promptly and as a matter of course, the second eventually as a reaction from the strongly democratic tendency of Calvinism. In some of the Southern cities there ensued at this time a desperate struggle between the Protestant democracy and the Catholic aristocracy. The few Protestants of gentle birth in the Walloon provinces felt ill at ease in company with their Dutch co-religionists and were called by them "Malcontents" because they looked askance at the political principles of the North.
[Sidenote: January 1579]
The separatist tendencies on both sides crystallized as some of the Southern provinces signed a league at {272} Arras on January 5 for the protection of the Catholic religion. On the 29th this was answered by the Union of Utrecht, signed by the representatives of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Guelders, Zutphen, and the city of Ghent, binding the said provinces to resist all foreign tyranny. Complete freedom of worship was granted, a matter of importance as the Catholic minority was, and has always remained, large. By this act a new state was born. Orange still continued to labor for union with the Southern provinces, but he failed. A bitter religious war broke out in the cities of the South. At Ghent the churches were plundered anew. [Sidenote: 1581] At Brussels and Antwerp the Protestant proletariat won a temporary ascendancy and Catholic worship was forbidden in both cities. A general emigration from them ensued. Under the stress of the religious war which was also a class war, the last vestiges of union perished. The States General ceased to have power to raise taxes or enforce decrees, and presently it was no more regarded.
Even William of Orange now abandoned his show of respect for the monarch and became wholly the champion of liberty and of the people. [Sidenote: 1580] The States General recognized Anjou as their prince, but at the same time drew up a very republican constitution. The representatives of the people were given not only the legislative but also the executive powers, including the direction of foreign affairs. The States of the Northern Provinces formally deposed Philip, [Sidenote: Deposition of Philip, 1581] who could do nothing in reply. A proclamation had already been issued offering 25,000 dollars and a patent of nobility to anyone who would assassinate Orange who was branded as "a traitor and rascal" and as "the enemy of the human race."
[Sidenote: October 1, 1578]
Don John, having died unlamented, was succeeded by Alexander Farnese, a son of the ex-regent Margaret {273} of Parma. [Sidenote: Farnese, 1545-92] Though an Italian in temperament he united a rare diplomatic pliability with energy as a soldier. Moreover, whereas his predecessors had despised the people they were sent to govern and had hated the task of dealing with them, he set his heart on making a success. By this time the eyes of all Europe were fixed on the struggle in the Low Countries and it seemed a worthy achievement to accomplish what so many famous soldiers and statesmen had failed in. It is doubtless due to the genius of Farnese that the Spanish yoke was again fixed on the neck of the southern of the two confederacies into which the Burgundian state had spontaneously separated. Welcomed by a large number of the signers of the Treaty of Arras, [Sidenote: 1579] he promptly raised an army of 31,000 men, mostly Germans, attacked and took Maastricht. A sickening pillage followed in which no less than 1700 women were slaughtered. Seeing his mistake, on capturing the next town, Tournai, he restrained his army and allowed even the garrison to march out with the honors of war. Not one citizen was executed, though an indemnity of 200,000 guilders was demanded. His clemency helped his cause more than his success in arms.
[Sidenote: Conquest of the South]
Slowly but surely his campaign of conquest progressed. It was a war of sieges only, without battles. Bruges was taken after a long investment, and was mildly treated. [Sidenote: 1584] Ghent surrendered and was also let off with an indemnity but without bloody punishment. After a hard siege Antwerp capitulated. [Sidenote: 1585] Practically the whole of the Southern confederacy had been reduced to obedience to the king of Spain. The Protestant religion was forbidden by law but in each case when a city was conquered the Protestants were given from two to four years either to become reconciled or to emigrate.
{274} But the land that was reconquered was not the land that had revolted. A ghastly ruin accompanied by a numbing blight on thought and energy settled on the once happy lands of Flanders and Brabant. The civil wars had so wasted the country that wolves prowled even at the gates of great cities. The coup de grace was given to the commerce of Antwerp by the barring of the Scheldt by Holland. Trade with the East and West Indies was forbidden by Spain until 1640.
[Sidenote: Freedom of the North]
But the North, after a desperate struggle and much suffering, vindicated its freedom. Anjou tried first to make himself their tyrant; [Sidenote: January 17, 1583] his soldiers at Antwerp attacked the citizens but were beaten off after frightful street fighting. The "French fury" as it was called, taught the Dutch once again to distrust foreign governors, though the death of Anjou relieved them of fear.
[Sidenote: June, 1584]
But a sterner foe was at hand. Having reduced what is now called Belgium, Farnese attacked the Reformation and the republicans in their last strongholds in Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The long war, of a high technical interest because of the peculiar military problems to be solved, was finally decided in favor of the Dutch. The result was due in part to the heroic courage of the people, in part to the highly defensible nature of their country, saved time and again by that great ally, the sea.
[Sidenote: July 10, 1584]
A cruel blow was the assassination of Orange whose last words were "God have pity on this poor people." His life had been devoted to them in no spirit of ambition or vulgar pride; his energy, his patience, his breadth had served the people well. And at his death they showed themselves worthy of him and of the cause. Around his body the Estates of Holland convened and resolved to bear themselves manfully {275} without abatement of zeal. Right nobly did they acquit themselves.
[Sidenote: 1586, Leicester]
The bad ending of a final attempt to get foreign help taught the Dutch Republic once and for all to rely only on itself. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's favorite, was inaugurated as Governor General. His assumption of independent power enraged his royal mistress, whereas the Dutch were alienated by the suspicion that he sacrificed their interests to those of England, and by his military failures. In less than two years he was forced to return home. [Sidenote: 1587]
[Sidenote: Oldenbarneveldt, 1547-1619]
Under the statesmanlike guidance of John van Oldenbarneveldt, since 1586 Pensionary of Holland, a Republic was set up founded on the supremacy of the Estates. Under his exact, prudent, and resolute leadership internal freedom and external power were alike developed. Though the war continued long after 1588 the defeat of the Armada in that year crippled Spain beyond hope of recovery and made the new nation practically safe.
[Sidenote: The Dutch Republic]
The North had suffered much in the war. The frequent inundation of the land destroyed crops. Amsterdam long held out against the rest of Holland in loyalty to the king, but she suffered so much by the blockade of the Beggars of the Sea and by the emigration of her merchants to nearby cities, that at last she gave in and cast her lot with her people. From that time she assumed the commercial hegemony once exercised by Antwerp. Recovering rapidly from the devastations of war, the Dutch Republic became, in the seventeenth century, the first sea-power and first money-power in the world. She gave a king to England and put a bridle in the mouth of France. She established colonies in America and in the East Indies. With her celebrated new university of Leyden, with {276} publicists like Grotius, theologians like Jansen, painters like Van Dyke and Rembrandt, philosophers like Spinoza, she took the lead in many of the fields of thought. Her material and spiritual power, her tolerance and freedom, became the envy of the world.
[1] The guilder, also called the "Dutch pound," at this time was worth 40 cents intrinsically. Money had many times the purchasing power that it has in 1920.
[2] The word, meaning "prayer," indicated, like the English "benevolence" and the French "don gratuit," that the tax had once been voluntarily granted.
[3] The dollar, or Thaler, is worth 75 cents, intrinsically.
{277}
[Sidenote: Henry VIII, 1509-47]
"The heavens laugh, the earth exults; all is full of milk and honey and nectar." With these words the accession of Henry VIII was announced to Erasmus by his pupil and the king's tutor, Lord Mountjoy. This lover of learning thought the new monarch would be not only Octavus but Octavius, fostering letters and cherishing the learned. There was a general feeling that a new era was beginning and a new day dawning after the long darkness of the Middle Age with its nightmares of Black Deaths and Peasants' Revolts and, worst of all, the civil war that had humbled England's power and racked her almost to pieces within.
It was commonly believed that the young prince was a paragon: handsome, athletic, learned, generous, wise, and merciful. That he was fond of sports, strong and in early life physically attractive, is well attested. The principal evidences of his learning are the fulsome testimony of Erasmus and his work against Luther. But it has been lately shown that Erasmus was capable of passing off, as the work of a powerful patron, compositions which he knew to be written by Latin secretaries; and the royal author of the Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which evinces but mediocre talent, received much unacknowledged assistance.
If judged by his foreign relations Henry's statesmanship was unsuccessful. His insincerity and perfidy often overreached themselves, and he was often {278} deceived. Moreover, he was inconstant, pursuing no worthy end whatever. England was by her insular location and by the nearly equal division of power on the Continent between France and the emperor, in a wonderfully safe and advantageous place. But, so far was Henry from using this gift of fortune, that he seems to have acted only on caprice.
[Sidenote: Domestic policy]
In domestic policy Henry achieved his greatest successes, in fact, very remarkable ones indeed. Doubtless here also he was favored by fortune, in that his own ends happened in the main to coincide with the deeper current of his people's purpose, for he was supported by just that wealthy and enterprising bourgeois class that was to call itself the people and to make public opinion for the next three centuries. In time this class would become sufficiently conscious of its own power to make Parliament supreme and to demand a reckoning even from the crown, but at first it needed the prestige of the royal name to conquer the two privileged classes, the clergy and the nobility. The merchants and the moneyed men only too willingly became the faithful followers of a chief who lavishly tossed to them the wealth of the church and the political privileges of the barons. And Henry had just one strong quality that enabled him to take full advantage of this position; he seemed to lead rather than to drive, and he never wantonly challenged Parliament. The atrocity of his acts was only equaled by their scrupulous legality.
On Henry's morals there should be less disagreement than on his mental gifts. Holbein's faithful portraits do not belie him. The broad-shouldered, heavy-jowled man, standing so firmly on his widely parted feet, has a certain strength of will, or rather of boundless egotism. Francis and Charles showed themselves persecuting, and were capable of having a {279} defaulting minister or a rebel put to death; but neither Charles nor Francis, nor any other king in modern times, has to answer for the lives of so many nobles and ministers, cardinals and queens, whose heads, as Thomas More put it, he kicked around like footballs.
[Sidenote: Empson and Dudley executed, April 25, 1509]
The reign began, as it ended, with political murder. The miserly Henry VII had made use of two tools, Empson and Dudley, who, by minute inquisition into technical offences and by nice adjustment of fines to the wealth of the offender, had made the law unpopular and the king rich. Four days after his succession, Henry VIII issued a proclamation asking all those who had sustained injury or loss of goods by these commissioners, to make supplication to the king. The floodgates of pent-up wrath were opened, and the two unhappy ministers swept away by an act of attainder.
[Sidenote: War with France and Scotland]
The pacific policy of the first years of the reign did not last long. The young king felt the need of martial glory, of emulating the fifth Henry, of making himself talked about and enrolling his name on the list of conquerors who, in return for plaguing mankind, have been deified by them. It is useless to look for any statesmanlike purpose in the war provoked with France and Scotland, but in the purpose for which he set out Henry was brilliantly successful: the French were so quickly routed near Guinegate [Sidenote: August 13, 1513] that the action has been known in history as the Battle of the Spurs. While the king was still absent in France and his queen regent in England, his lieutenants inflicted a decisive defeat on the Scots [Sidenote: September] and slew their king, James IV, at Flodden. England won nothing save military glory by these campaigns, for the invasion of France was at once abandoned and that of Scotland not even undertaken.
[Sidenote: Wolsey, c. 1475-1530]
The gratification of the national vanity redounded the profit not only of Henry but of his minister, {280} Thomas Wolsey. A poor man, like the other tools of the Tudor despot, he rose rapidly in church and state partly by solid gifts of statesmanship, partly by baser arts. By May, 1515, Erasmus described him as all-powerful with the king and as bearing the main burden of public affairs on his shoulders, and fifteen years later Luther spoke of him as "the demigod of England, or rather of Europe." His position at home he owed to his ability to curry favor with the king by shouldering the odium of unpopular acts. [Sidenote: May, 1521] When the Duke of Buckingham was executed for the crime of standing next in succession to the throne, Wolsey was blamed; many people thought, as it was put in a pun attributed to Charles V, that "it was a pity so noble a buck should have been slain by such a hound." Wolsey lost the support of the nobles by the pride that delighted to humble them, and of the commons by the avarice that accumulated a corrupt fortune. But, though the rich hated him for his law in regard to enclosures, and the poor for not having that law enforced, he recked little of aught, knowing himself secure under the royal shield.
To make his sovereign abroad as great as at home, he took advantage of the nice balance of power existing on the Continent. "Nothing pleases him more than to be called the arbiter of Christendom," wrote Giustiniani, and such, in fact, he very nearly was. His diplomatic gifts were displayed with immense show during the summer of 1520, when Henry met both Francis and Charles V, and promised each secretly to support him against his rival. The camp where the royalties of France and England met, near Guines, amid scenes of pageantry and chivalry so resplendent as to give it the name of The Field of Cloth of Gold, saw an alliance cemented by oath, only to be followed by a solemn engagement between Henry and Charles, {281} repugnant in every particular to that with France. When war actually broke out between the two, England preferred to throw her weight against France, thereby almost helping Charles to the throne of universal empire and raising up for herself an enemy to menace her safety in many a crisis to come. In the end, then, Wolsey's perfidious policy failed; and his personal ambition for the papacy was also frustrated.
But while "the congress of kings," as Erasmus called it, was disporting itself at Guines and Calais, the tide of a new movement was swiftly and steadily rising, no more obeying them than had the ocean obeyed Canute. More in England than in most countries the Reformation was an imported product. Its "dawn came up like thunder" from across the North Sea.
Luther's Theses on Indulgences were sent by Erasmus to his English friends Thomas More and John Colet little more than four months after their promulgation. [Sidenote: March 5, 1518] By February, 1519, Froben had exported to England a number of volumes of Luther's works. One of them fell into the hands of Henry VIII or his sister Mary, quondam Queen of France, as is shown by the royal arms stamped on it. Many others were sold by a bookseller at Oxford throughout 1520, in which year a government official in London wrote to his son in the country, [Sidenote: March 3, 1520] "there be heretics here which take Luther's opinions." The universities were both infected at the same time. At Cambridge, especially, a number of young men, many of them later prominent reformers, met at the White Horse Tavern regularly to discuss the new ideas. The tavern was nicknamed "Germany" [Sidenote: 1521] and the young enthusiasts "Germans" in consequence. But surprisingly numerous as are the evidences of the spread of Lutheranism in these early years, naturally it as yet had few prominent adherents. When Erasmus wrote Luther that he had well-wishers {282} [Sidenote: May, 1519] in England, and those of the greatest, he was exaggerating or misinformed. At most he may have been thinking of John Colet, whose death in September, 1519, came before he could take any part in the religious controversy.
At an early date the government took its stand against the heresy. Luther's books were examined by a committee of the University of Cambridge, [Sidenote: 1520] condemned and burnt by them, and soon afterwards by the government. At St. Paul's in London, [Sidenote: May 12, 1521] in the presence of many high dignitaries and a crowd of thirty thousand spectators Luther's books were burnt and his doctrine "reprobated" in addresses by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Cardinal Wolsey. A little later it was forbidden to read, import or keep such works, and measures were taken to enforce this law. Commissions searched for the said pamphlets; stationers and merchants were put under bond not to trade in them; and the German merchants of the Steelyard were examined. When it was discovered [Sidenote: 1526] that these foreigners had stopped "the mass of the body of Christ," commonly celebrated by them in All Hallows' Church the Great, at London, they were haled before Wolsey's legatine court, forced to acknowledge its jurisdiction, and dealt with.
With one accord the leading Englishmen declared against Luther. Cuthbert Tunstall, a mathematician and diplomatist, and later Bishop of London, wrote Wolsey from Worms of the devotion of the Germans to their leader, and sent to him The Babylonian Captivity with the comment, "there is much strange opinion in it near to the opinions of Boheme; I pray God keep that book out of England." [Sidenote: January 21, 1521] Wolsey himself, biassed perhaps by his ambition for the tiara, labored to suppress the heresy. Most important of all, Sir Thomas More was promptly and decisively alienated. {283} It was More, according to Henry VIII, who "by subtle, sinister slights unnaturally procured and provoked him" to write against the heretic. His Defence of the Seven Sacraments, in reply to the Babylonian Captivity, though an extremely poor work, was greeted, on its appearance, as a masterpiece. [Sidenote: July, 1521] The handsome copy bound in gold, sent to Leo X, was read to the pope and declared by him the best antidote to heresy yet produced. In recognition of so valuable an arm, or of so valiant a champion, the pope granted an indulgence of ten years and ten periods of forty days to the readers of the book, and to its author the long coveted title Defender of the Faith. Luther answered the king with ridicule and the controversy was continued by Henry's henchmen More, Fisher, and others. Stung to the quick, Henry, who had already urged the emperor to crush the heretic, now wrote with the same purpose to the elector and dukes of Saxony and to other German princes.
[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism]
But while the chief priests and rulers were not slow to reject the new "gospel," the common people heard it gladly. The rapid diffusion of Lutheranism is proved by many a side light and by the very proclamations issued from time to time to "resist the damnable heresies" or to suppress tainted books. John Heywood's The Four P's: a merry Interlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary and a Pedlar, written about 1528 though not published until some years later, is full of Lutheran doctrine, and so is another book very popular at the time, Simon Fish's Supplication of Beggars. John Skelton's Colyn Clout, [Sidenote: c. 1522] a scathing indictment of the clergy, mentions that
Some have smacke
Of Luther's sacke,
And a brennyng sparke
Of Luther's warke.
{284} [Sidenote: William Tyndale's Bible]
But the acceptance of the Reformation, as apart from mere grumbling at the church, could not come until a Protestant literature was built up. In England as elsewhere the most powerful Protestant tract was the vernacular Bible. Owing to the disfavor in which Wyclif's doctrines were held, no English versions had been printed until the Protestant divine William Tyndale highly resolved to make the holy book more familiar to the ploughboy than to the bishop.
Educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale imbibed the doctrines first of Erasmus, then of Luther, and finally of Zwingli. Applying for help in his project to the bishop of London and finding none, [Sidenote: 1524] he sailed for Germany where he completed a translation of the New Testament, and started printing it at Cologne. Driven hence by the intervention of Cochlaeus and the magistrates, he went to Worms and got another printer to finish the job. [Sidenote: 1526] Of the six thousand copies in the first edition many were smuggled to England, where Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, tried to buy them all up, "thinking," as the chronicler Hall phrased it, "that he had God by the toe when he indeed had the devil by the fist." The money went to Tyndale and was used to issue further editions, of which no less than seven appeared in the next ten years.
The government's attitude was that
Having respect to the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of the people to erroneous opinions, the translation of the New Testament should rather be the occasion of continuance or increase of errors among the said people than any benefit or commodity towards the weal of their souls.
But the magistrates were unable to quench the fiery zeal of Tyndale who continued to translate parts of the Old Testament and to print them and other tracts at Antwerp and at Cologne, until his martyrdom at {285} Vilvorde, near Brussels, on October 6, 1536. In 1913 a monument was erected on the place of his death.
Under the leadership of Tyndale on the one side and of More on the other the air became dark with a host of controversial tracts. [Sidenote: Controversial tracts] They are half filled with theological metaphysic, half with the bitterest invective. Luther called Henry VIII "a damnable and rotten worm, a snivelling, drivelling swine of a sophist"; More retorted by complaining of the violent language of "this apostate, this open incestuous lecher, this plain limb of the devil and manifest messenger of hell." Absurd but natural tactic, with a sure effect on the people, which relishes both morals and scandal! To prove that faith justifies, the Protestants pointed to the debauchery of the friars; to prove the mass a sacrifice their enemies mocked at "Friar Martin and Gate Callate his nun lusking together in lechery." But with all the invective there was much solid argument of the kind that appealed to an age of theological politics. In England as elsewhere the significance of the Reformation was that it was the first issue of supreme importance to be argued by means of the press before the bar of a public opinion sufficiently enlightened to appreciate its importance and sufficiently strong to make a choice and to enforce its decision.
The party of the Reformation in England at first consisted of two classes, London tradesmen and certain members of what Bismarck long afterward called "the learned proletariat." In 1532 the bishops were able to say:
In the crime of heresy, thanked be God, there hath no
notable person fallen in our time. Truth it is that
certain apostate friars and monks, lewd priests, bankrupt
merchants, vagabonds and lewd, idle fellows of corrupt
nature have embraced the abominable and erroneous
{286}
opinions lately sprung in Germany and by them have
been some seduced in simplicity and ignorance.
[Sidenote: Anti-clerical feeling]
But though both anti-clerical feeling and sympathy with the new doctrines waxed apace, it is probable that no change would have taken place for many years had it not been for the king's divorce. The importance of this episode, born of the most strangely mingled motives of conscience, policy, and lust, is not that, as sometimes said, it proved the English people ready to follow their government in religious matters as sheep follow their shepherd. Its importance is simply that it loosed England from its ancient moorings of papal supremacy, and thus established one, though only one, of the cardinal principles of the Protestant revolt. The Reformation consisted not only in a religions change but in an assertion of nationalism, in a class revolt, and in certain cultural revolutions. It was only the first that the government had any idea of sanctioning, but by so doing it enabled the people later to take matters into their own hands and add the social and cultural elements. Thus the Reformation in England ran a course quite different from that in Germany. In the former the cultural revolution came first, followed fast by the rising of the lower and the triumph of the middle classes. Last of all came the successful realization of a national state. But in England nationalism came first; then under Edward the economic revolution; and lastly, under the Puritans, the transmutation of spiritual values.
[Sidenote: Divorce of Catherine of Aragon]
The occasion of the breach with Rome was the divorce of Henry from Catharine of Aragon, who had previously married his brother Arthur when they were both fifteen, and had lived with him as his wife for five months until his death. As marriage with a brother's widow was forbidden by Canon Law, a {287} dispensation from the pope had been secured, to enable Catharine to marry Henry. The king's scruples about the legality of the act were aroused by the death of all the queen's children, save the Princess Mary, in which he saw the fulfilment of the curse denounced in Leviticus xx, 21: "If a man shall take his brother's wife . . . they shall be childless." Just at this time Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn, [Sidenote: Anne Boleyn] and this further increased his dissatisfaction with his present estate.
He therefore applied to the pope for annulment of marriage, but the unhappy Clement VII, now in the emperor's fist, felt unable to give it to him. He writhed and twisted, dallied with the proposals that Henry should take a second wife, or that his illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond should marry his half sister Mary; in short he was ready to grant a dispensation for anything save for the one horrible crime of divorce—as the annulment was then called. His difficulties in getting at the rights of the question were not made easier by the readiness of both parties to commit a little perjury or to forge a little bull to further their cause.
Seeing no help in sight from Rome Henry began to collect the opinions of universities and "strange doctors." The English, French, and Italian universities decided as the king wished that his marriage was null; Wittenberg and Marburg rendered contrary opinions. Many theologians, including Erasmus, Luther, and Melanchthon, expressed the opinion that bigamy would be the best way to meet the situation.
But more was needed to make the annulment legal than the verdict of universities. Repulsed by Rome Henry was forced to make an alliance, though it proved but a temporary one, with the Reforming and anti-clerical parties in his realm. At Easter, 1529, Lutheran books began to circulate at court, books {288} advocating the confiscation of ecclesiastical property and the reduction of the church to a state of primitive simplicity. To Chapuis, the imperial ambassador, Henry pointedly praised Luther, whom he had lately called "a wolf of hell and a limb of Satan," remarking that though he had mixed heresy in his books that was not sufficient reason for reproving and rejecting the many truths he had brought to light. To punish Wolsey for the failure to secure what was wanted from Rome, [Sidenote: November 4, 1530] the pampered minister was arrested for treason, but died of chagrin before he could be executed. "Had I served my God," said he, "as diligently as I have served my king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs."
[Sidenote: Reformation Parliament, November 3, 1529]
In the meantime there had already met that Parliament that was to pass, in the seven years of its existence, the most momentous and revolutionary laws as yet placed upon the statute-books. The elections were free, or nearly so; the franchise varied from a fairly democratic one in London to a highly oligarchical one in some boroughs. Notwithstanding the popular feeling that Catharine was an injured woman and that war with the Empire might ruin the valuable trade with Flanders, the "government," as would now be said, that is, the king, received hearty support by the majority of members. The only possible explanation for this, apart from the king's acknowledged skill as a parliamentary leader, is the strength of the anti-clerical feeling. The rebellion of the laity against the clergy, and of the patriots against the Italian yoke, needed but the example of Germany to burst all the dykes and barriers of medieval custom. The significance of the revolution was that it was a forcible reform of the church by the state. The wish of the people was to end ecclesiastical abuses without much regard to doctrine; the wish of the king was to make himself {289} "emperor and pope" in his own dominions. While Henry studied Wyclif's program, and the people read the English Testament, the lessons they derived from these sources were at first moral and political, not doctrinal or philosophic.
[Sidenote: Submission of the clergy, December 1530]
The first step in the reduction of the church was taken when the attorney-general filed in the court of King's Bench an information against the whole body of the clergy for violating the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire by having recognized Wolsey's legatine authority. Of course there was no justice in this; the king himself had recognized Wolsey's authority and anyone who had denied it would have been punished. But the suit was sufficient to accomplish the government's purposes, which were, first to wring money from the clergy and then to force them to declare the king "sole protector and supreme head of the church and clergy of England." Reluctantly the Convocation of Canterbury accepted this demand in the form that the king was, "their singular protector, only and supreme lord and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even Supreme Head." Henry further proposed that the oaths of the clergy to the pope be abolished and himself made supreme legislator. [Sidenote: May 15, 1532] Convocation accepted this demand also in a document known as "the submission of the clergy."
If such was the action of the spiritual estate, it was natural that the temporal peers and the Commons in parliament should go much further. [Sidenote: 1532] A petition of the Commons, really emanating from the government and probably from Thomas Cromwell, complained bitterly of the tyranny of the ordinaries in ecclesiastical jurisdiction, of excessive fees and vexations and frivolous charges of heresy made against unlearned laymen. [Sidenote: May 1532] Abuses of like nature were dealt with in statutes limiting the fees exacted by priests and regulating {290} pluralities and non-residence. Annates were abolished with the proviso that the king might negotiate with the pope,—the intention of the government being thus to bring pressure to bear on the curia. No wonder the clergy were thoroughly frightened. Bishop Fisher, their bravest champion, protested in the House of Lords: "For God's sake, see what a realm the kingdom of Boheme was, and when the church fell down, there fell the glory of the kingdom. Now with the Commons is nothing but 'Down with the church,' and all this meseemeth is for lack of faith only."
[Sidenote: Marriage with Anne Boleyn]
It had taken Henry several years to prepare the way for his chief object, the divorce. His hand was at last forced by the knowledge that Anne was pregnant; he married her on January 25, 1533, without waiting for final sentence of annulment of marriage with Catharine. In so doing he might seem, at first glance, to have followed the advice so freely tendered him to discharge his conscience by committing bigamy; but doubtless he regarded his first marriage as illegal all the time and merely waited for the opportunity to get a court that would so pronounce it. The vacancy of the archbishopric of Canterbury enabled him to appoint to it Thomas Cranmer, [Sidenote: Cranmer] the obsequious divine who had first suggested his present plan. Cranmer was a Lutheran, so far committed to the new faith that he had married; he was intelligent, learned, a wonderful master of language, and capable at last of dying for his belief. But that he showed himself pliable to his master's wishes beyond all bounds of decency is a fact made all the more glaring by the firm and honorable conduct of More and Fisher. His worst act was possibly on the occasion of his nomination to the province of Canterbury; wishing to be confirmed by the pope he concealed his real views and took an oath of obedience to the Holy See, having previously signed {291} a protest that he considered the oath a mere form and not a reality.
The first use he made of his position was to pronounce sentence that Henry and Catharine had never been legally married, though at the same time asserting that this did not affect the legitimacy of Mary because her parents had believed themselves married. Immediately afterwards it was declared that Anne was a lawful wife, and she was crowned queen, [Sidenote: 1533] amid the smothered execrations of the populace, on June 1. On September 7, the Princess Elizabeth was born. Catharine's cause was taken up at Rome; Clement's brief forbidding the king to remarry was followed by final sentence in Catharine's favor. Her last years were rendered miserable by humiliation and acts of petty spite. When she died her late husband, with characteristic indecency, [Sidenote: January 1536] celebrated the joyous event by giving a ball at which he and Anne appeared dressed in yellow.
[Sidenote: March 1534]
The feeling of the people showed itself in this case finer and more chivalrous than that prevalent at court. The treatment of Catharine was so unpopular that Chapuis wrote that the king was much hated by his subjects. [Sidenote: January, 1536] Resolved to make an example of the murmurers, the government selected Elizabeth Barton, the "Holy Maid of Kent." After her hysterical visions and a lucky prophecy had won her an audience, she fell under the influence of monks and prophesied that the king would not survive his marriage with Anne one month, and proclaimed that he was no longer king in the eyes of God. [Sidenote: April 1, 1534] She and her accomplices were arrested, attainted without trial, and executed. She may pass as an English Catholic martyr.
[Sidenote: Act in Restraint of Appeals, February 1533]
Continuing its course of making the king absolute master the Parliament passed an Act in Restraint of Appeals, the first constitutional break with Rome. {292} The theory of the government was set forth in the preamble:
Whereas by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king . . . unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms, and by names of spirituality and temporally, be bounden and ought to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience. . . .
therefore all jurisdiction of foreign powers was denied.
[Sidenote: January 15, 1534]
When, after a recess, Parliament met again there were forty vacancies to be filled in the Lower House, and this time care was taken that the new members should be well affected. Scarcely a third of the spiritual lords assembled, though whether their absence was commanded, or their presence not required, by the king, is uncertain. As, in earlier Parliaments, the spiritual peers had outnumbered the temporal, this was a matter of importance. Another sign of the secularization of the government was the change in the character of the chancellors. Wolsey was the last great ecclesiastical minister of the reign; More and Cromwell who followed him were laymen.
The severance with Rome was now completed by three laws. In the first place the definite abolition of the annates meant that henceforth the election of archbishops and bishops must be under licence by the king and that they must swear allegiance to him before consecration. A second act forbade the payment of Peter's pence and all other fees to Rome, and vested in the Archbishop of Canterbury the right to grant licences previously granted by the pope. A third act, for the subjection of the clergy, put convocation under the royal power and forbade all privileges inconsistent with this. The new pope, Paul III, struck back, though {293} with hesitation, excommunicating the king, [Sidenote: 1535-8] declaring all his children by Anne Boleyn illegitimate, and absolving his subjects from their oath of allegiance.
[Sidenote: 1534]
Two acts entrenched the king in his despotic pretensions. The Act of Succession, [Sidenote: Act of Succession] notable as the first assertion by crown and Parliament of the right to legislate in this constitutional matter, vested the inheritance of the crown in the issue of Henry and Anne, and made it high treason to question the marriage. The Act of Supremacy [Sidenote: Act of Supremacy] declared that the king's majesty "justly and rightfully is and ought to be supreme head of the church of England," pointedly omitting the qualification insisted on by Convocation,—"as far as the law of Christ allows." Exactly how far this supremacy went was at first puzzling. That it extended not only to the governance of the temporalities of the church, but to issuing injunctions on spiritual matters and defining articles of belief was soon made apparent; on the other hand the monarch never claimed in person the power to celebrate mass.
That the abrogation of the papal authority was accepted so easily is proof of the extent to which the national feeling of the English church had already gone. An oath to recognize the supremacy of the king was tendered to both convocations, to the universities, to the clergy and to prominent laymen, and was with few exceptions readily taken. Doubtless many swallowed the oath from mere cowardice; others took it with mental reservations; and yet that the majority complied shows that the substitution of a royal for a papal despotism was acceptable to the conscience of the country at large. Many believed that they were not departing from the Catholic faith; but that others welcomed the act as a step towards the Reformation cannot be doubted. How strong was the hold of Luther on the country will presently be shown, but here {294} only one instance of the exuberance of the will for a purely national religion need be quoted. "God hath showed himself the God of England, or rather an English God," wrote Hugh Latimer, [Sidenote: 1537] a leading Lutheran; not only the church but the Deity had become insular!
[Sidenote: Fisher]
But there were a few, and among them the greatest, who refused to become accomplices in the break with Roman Christendom. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a friend of Erasmus and a man of admirable steadfastness, had long been horrified by the tyranny of Henry. He had stoutly upheld the rightfulness of Catharine's marriage, and now ho refused to see in the monarch the fit ruler of the church. So strongly did he feel on these subjects that he invited Charles to invade England and depose the king. This was treason, though probably the government that sent him to the tower was ignorant of the act. When Paul III rewarded Fisher by creating him a cardinal [Sidenote: May 20, 1535] Henry furiously declared he would send his head to Rome to get the hat. [Sidenote: June 22] The old man of seventy-six was accordingly beheaded.
[Sidenote: Sir Thomas More executed, July 6]
This execution was followed by that of Sir Thomas More, the greatest ornament of his country. As More has been remembered almost entirely by his noble Utopia and his noble death, it is hard to estimate his character soberly. That his genius was polished to the highest perfection, that in a hard age he had an altogether lovely sympathy with the poor, and in a servile age the courage of his convictions, would seem enough to excuse any faults. But a deep vein of fanaticism ran through his whole nature and tinctured all his acts, political, ecclesiastical, and private. Not only was his language violent in the extreme, but his acts were equally merciless when his passions were aroused. Appointed chancellor after the fall of Wolsey, he did not scruple to hit the man who was down, describing {295} him, in a scathing speech in Parliament, as the scabby wether separated by the careful shepherd from the sound sheep. In his hatred of the new opinions he not only sent men to death and torture for holding them, but reviled them while doing it. "Heretics as they be," he wrote, "the clergy doth denounce them. And as they be well worthy, the temporality doth burn them. And after the fire of Smithfield, hell doth receive them, where the wretches burn for ever."
As chancellor he saw with growing disapproval the course of the tyrant. He opposed the marriage with Anne Boleyn. The day after the submission of the clergy he resigned the great seal. He could not long avoid further offence to his master, and his refusal to take the oath of supremacy was the crime for which he was condemned. His behaviour during his last days and on the scaffold was perfect. He spent his time in severe self-discipline; he uttered eloquent words of forgiveness of his enemies, messages of love to the daughter whom he tenderly loved, and brave jests.
[Sidenote: Anabaptist martyrs, 1536]
But while More's passion was one that any man might envy, his courage was shared by humbler martyrs. In the same year in which he was beheaded thirteen Dutch Anabaptists were burnt, as he would have approved, by the English government. Mute, inglorious Christs, they were led like sheep to the slaughter and as lambs dumb before their shearers. They had no eloquence, no high position, to make their words ring from side to side of Europe and echo down the centuries; but their meek endurance should not go unremembered.
To take More's place as chief minister Henry appointed the most obsequious tool he could find, Thomas Cromwell. [Sidenote: Thomas Cromwell, 1485?-1540] To good purpose this man had studied Machiavelli's Prince as a practical manual of tyranny. His most important service to the crown was the {296} next step in the reduction of the medieval church, the dissolution of the monasteries. [Sidenote: Dissolution of the monasteries] Like other acts tending towards the Reformation this was, on the whole, popular, and had been rehearsed on a small scale on several previous occasions in English history. The pope and the king of France taught Edward II to dissolve the preceptories, to the number of twenty-three, belonging to the Templars; in 1410 the Commons petitioned for the confiscation of all church property; in 1414 the alien priories in England fell under the animadversion of the government; their property was handed over to the crown and they escaped only by the payment of heavy fines, by incorporation into English orders, and by partial confiscation of their land. The idea prevailed that mortmain had failed of its object and that therefore the church might rightfully be relieved of her ill-gotten gains. These were grossly exaggerated, a pamphleteer believing that the wealth of the church amounted to half the property of the realm. In reality the total revenue of the spirituality amounted to only L320,000; that of the monasteries to only L140,000. There had been few endowments in the fifteenth century; only eight new ones, in fact, in the whole period 1399-1509. Colleges, schools, and hospitals now attracted the money that had previously gone to the monks.
Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days. The abbeys no longer were centers of learning and of the manufacture of books. The functions of hospitality and of charity that they still exercised were not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people for the "gross, carnal, and vicious living" with which they were commonly and quite rightly charged. Visitations undertaken not by hostile governments but by bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much immorality obtained within the cloister walls. By 1528 {297} they had become so intolerable that a popular pamphleteer, Simon Fish, in his Supplication of Beggars, proposed that the mendicant friars be entirely suppressed.
[Sidenote: January 21, 1535]
A commission was now issued to Thomas Cromwell, empowering him to hold a general visitation of all churches, monasteries, and collegiate bodies. The evidence gathered of the shocking disorders obtaining in the cloisters of both sexes is on the whole credible and well substantiated. Nevertheless these disorders furnished rather the pretext than the real reason for the dissolutions that followed. Cromwell boasted that he would make his king the richest in Christendom, and this was the shortest and most popular way to do it.
[Sidenote: 1536]
Accordingly an act was passed for the dissolution of all small religious houses with an income of less than L200 a year. The rights of the founders were safe-guarded, and pensions guaranteed to those inmates who did not find shelter in one of the larger establishments. By this act 376 houses were dissolved with an aggregate revenue of L32,000, not counting plate and jewels confiscated. Two thousand monks or nuns were affected in addition to about eight thousand retainers or servants. The immediate effect was a large amount of misery, but the result in the long run was good. Perhaps the principal political importance of this and the subsequent spoliations of the church was to make the Reformation profitable and therefore popular with an enterprising class. For the lion's share of the prey did not go to the lion, but to the jackals. From the king's favorites to whom he threw the spoils was founded a new aristocracy, a class with a strong vested interest in opposing the restoration of the papal church. To the Protestant citizens of London was now added a Protestant landed gentry.
{298} [Sidenote: Union with Wales, 1536]
Before the "Reformation Parliament" had ceased to exist, one more act of great importance was passed. Wales was a wild country, imperfectly governed by irregular means. By the first Act of Union in British history, Wales was now incorporated with England and the anomalies, or distinctions, in its legal and administrative system, wiped out. By severe measures, in the course of which 5000 men were sent to the gallows, the western mountaineers were reduced to order during the years 1534-40; and in 1543 their union with England was completed. The measure was statesmanlike and successful; it was undoubtedly aided by the loyalty of the Welsh to their own Tudor dynasty.
[Sidenote: April 14, 1536]
When Parliament dissolved after having accomplished, during its seven years, the greatest permanent revolution in the history of England, it had snapped the bands with Rome and determined articles of religious belief; it had given the king more power in the church than the pope ever had, and had exalted his prerogative in the state to a pitch never reached before or afterwards; it had dissolved the smaller monasteries, abridged the liberties of the subject, settled the succession to the throne, created new treasons and heresies; it had handled grave social problems, like enclosures and mendicancy; and had united Wales to England.
[Sidenote: Execution of Anne Boleyn]
And now the woman for whose sake, one is tempted to say, the king had done it all—though of course his share in the revolution does not represent the real forces that accomplished it—the woman he had won with "such a world of charge and hell of pain," was to be cast into the outer darkness of the most hideous tragedy in history. Anne Boleyn was not a good woman. And yet, when she was accused of adultery [Sidenote: May 19, 1536] with four men and of incest with her own brother, {299} though she was tried by a large panel of peers, condemned, and beheaded, it is impossible to be sure of her guilt.
[Sidenote: Jane Seymour]
On the day following Anne's execution or, as some say, on May 30, Henry married his third wife, Jane Seymour. On October 12, 1537, she bore him a son, Edward. Forced by her husband to take part in the christening, an exhausting ceremony too much for her strength, she sickened and died soon afterwards.
[Sidenote: Lutheran tracts]
In the meantime the Lutheran movement was growing apace in England. In the last two decades of Henry's reign seven of Luther's tracts and some of his hymns were translated into English. Five of the tracts proved popular enough to be reprinted. One of them was The Liberty of a Christian Man, turned into English by John Tewkesbury whom, having died for his faith, More called "a stinking martyr." The hymns and some of the other tracts were Englished by Miles Coverdale. In addition to this there was translated an account of Luther's death in 1546, the Augsburg Confession and four treatises of Melanchthon, and one each of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Bullinger,—this last reprinted. Of course these versions are not a full measure of Lutheran influence, but a mere barometer. The party now numbered powerful preachers like Latimer and Ridley; Thomas Cranmer the Archbishop of Canterbury and Thomas Cromwell, since May, 1534, the king's principal secretary. The adherence of the last named to the Reforming party is perhaps the most significant sign of the times. As his only object was to be on the winning side, and as he had not a bit of real religious interest, it makes it all the more impressive that, believing the cat was about to jump in the direction of Lutheranism, he should have tried to put himself in the line of its trajectory {300} by doing all he could to foster the Reformers at home and the Protestant alliance abroad.
[Sidenote: Coverdale, 1488?-1569]
One of the decisive factors in the Reformation again proved to be the English Bible, completed, after the end of Tyndale's labors by a man of less scholarship but equally happy mastery of language, Miles Coverdale. Of little original genius, he spent his life largely in the labor of translating tracts and treatises by the German Reformers into his native tongue. [Sidenote: The English Bible, 1535] His first great work was the completion of the English Bible which was published by Christopher Froschauer of Zurich in 1535, the title-page stating that it had been translated "out of Douche and Latyn"—the "Douche" being, of course, Luther's German version. For the New Testament and for the Old Testament as far as the end of Chronicles, Tyndale's version was used; the rest was by Coverdale. The work was dedicated to the king, and, as Cromwell had already been considering the advisability of authorizing the English Bible, this was not an unwelcome thing. But as the government was as yet unprepared to recognize work avowedly based on German Protestant versions, [Sidenote: 1537] they resorted to the device of re-issuing the Bible with the name of Thomas Matthew as translator, though in fact it consisted entirely of the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. [Sidenote: 1538-9] A light revision of this work was re-issued as the Great Bible, [Sidenote: October 11, 1538] and Injunctions were issued by Cromwell ordering a Bible of the largest size to be set up in every church, and the people to be encouraged to read it. They were also to be taught the Lord's prayer and creed in English, spiritual sermons were to be preached, and superstitions, such as going on pilgrimages, burning candles to saints, and kissing and licking relics, were to be discouraged.
At the same time Cromwell diligently sought a rapprochement with the German Protestants. The idea {301} was an obvious one that, having won the enmity of Charles, England should support his dangerous intestine enemies, the Schmalkaldic princes. In that day of theological politics it was natural to try to find cement for the alliance in a common confession. Embassy after embassy made pilgrimages to Wittenberg, where the envoys had long discussions with the Reformers [Sidenote: January, 1536] both about the divorce and about matters of faith. They took back with them to England, together with a personal letter from Luther to Cromwell, [Sidenote: April] a second opinion unfavorable to the divorce and a confession drawn up in Seventeen Articles. In this, though in the main it was, as it was called, "a repetition and exegesis of the Augsburg Confession," considerable concessions were made to the wishes of the English. Melanchthon was the draughtsman and Luther the originator of the articles.
This symbol now became the basis of the first definition of faith drawn up by the government. Some such statement was urgently needed, for, amid the bewildering acts of the Reformation Parliament, the people hardly knew what the king expected them to believe. The king therefore presented to Convocation a Book of Articles of Faith and Ceremonies, [Sidenote: July 11 The Book of Articles] commonly called the Ten Articles, drafted by Fox on the basis of the memorandum he had received at Wittenberg, in close substantial and frequently in verbal agreement with it. By this confession the Bible, the three creeds, and the acts of the first four councils were designated as authoritative; the three Lutheran sacraments of baptism, penance, and the altar were retained; justification by faith and good works jointly was proclaimed; the use of images was allowed and purgatory disallowed; the real presence in the sacrament was strongly affirmed. The significance of the articles, however, is not so much their Lutheran provenance, as in their promulgation {302} by the crown. It was the last step in the enslavement of religion. "This king," as Luther remarked, "wants to be God. He founds articles of faith, which even the pope never did."
[Sidenote: The Pilgrimage of Grace]
It only remained to see what the people would say to the new order. Within a few months after the dissolution of the Reformation Parliament and the publication of the Ten Articles, the people in the north spread upon the page of history an extremely emphatic protest. For this is really what the Pilgrimage of Grace was—not a rebellion against king, property, or any established institution, but a great demonstration against the policy for which Cromwell became the scapegoat. In those days of slow communication opinions travelled on the beaten roads of commerce. As late as Mary's reign there is proof that Protestantism was confined to the south, east, and midlands,—roughly speaking to a circle with London as its center and a radius of one hundred miles. In these earlier years, Protestant opinion was probably even more confined; London was both royalist and anti-Roman Catholic; the ports on the south-eastern coast, including Calais, at that time an English station in France, and the university towns had strong Lutheran and still stronger anti-clerical parties.
But in the wilds of the north and west it was different. There, hardly any bourgeois class of traders existed to adopt "the religion of merchants" as Protestantism has been called. Perhaps more important was the mere slowness of the diffusion of ideas. The good old ways were good enough for men who never knew anything else. The people were discontented with the high taxes, and the nobles, who in the north retained feudal affections if not feudal power, were outraged by the ascendency in the royal councils of low-born upstarts. Moreover, it seems that the clergy {303} were stronger in the north even before the inroads of the new doctrines. In the suppression of the lesser monasteries Yorkshire, the largest county in England, had lost the most foundations, 53 in all, and Lincolnshire the next most, 37. Irritation at the suppression itself was greatly increased among the clergy by the insolence and thoroughness of the visitation, in which not only monasteries but parish priests had been examined. In resisting the king in the name of the church the priests had before them the example of the most popular English saint, Thomas Becket. They were the real fomenters of the demonstration, and the gentlemen, not the people, its leaders.
Rioting began in Lincolnshire on October 1, 1536, and before the end of the month 40,000 men had joined the movement. A petition to the king was drawn up demanding that the church holidays be kept as before, that the church be relieved of the payment of first-fruits and tithes, that the suppressed houses be restored except those which the king "kept for his pleasure only," that taxes be reduced and some unpopular officials banished.
Henry thundered an answer in his most high and mighty style: "How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm, and of least experience to find fault with your prince in the electing of his councillors and prelates!" He at once dispatched an army with orders "to invade their countries, to burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and children." [Sidenote: March 1537] Repression of the rising in Lincolnshire was followed by the execution of forty-six leaders.
But the movement had promptly spread to Yorkshire, where men gathered as for a peaceable demonstration, [Sidenote: October 1536] and swore not to enter "this pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth, save only for the {304} maintenance of God's faith and church militant, preservation of the king's person, and purifying the nobility of all villein's blood and evil counsellors, to the restitution of Christ's church and the suppression of heretics' opinions." In Yorkshire it was feared that the money extorted from the abbeys was going to London; and that the new treason's acts would operate harshly. Cumberland and Westmoreland soon joined the rising, their special grievance being the economic one of the rise of rents, or rather of the heavy fines exacted by landlords on the renewal of leases. An army of 35,000 was raised by the insurgents but their leader, Robert Aske, did not wish to fight, though he was opposed by only 8,000 royal troops. He preferred a parley and demanded, in addition to a free pardon, the acceptance of the northern demands, the summons of a free Parliament, the restoration of the papal supremacy as touching the cure of souls, and the suppression of the books of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, and Melanchthon. The king invited Aske to a personal interview, and promised to accede to the demand for a Parliament if the petitioners would disperse. An act of violence on a part of a few of the northerners was held to absolve the government, and Henry, having gathered his forces, demanded, and secured, a "dreadful execution" of vengeance.
Though the Pilgrimage of Grace had some effect in warning Henry not to dabble in foreign heresies, the policy he had most at heart, that of making himself absolute in state and church, went on apace. The culmination of the growth of the royal power is commonly seen in the Statute of Proclamations [Sidenote: Statute of Proclamations, 1539] apparently giving the king's proclamations the same validity as law save when they touched the lives, liberty, or property of subjects or were repugnant to existing statutes. Probably, however, the intent of Parliament was not {305} to confer new powers on the crown but to regulate the enforcement of already existing prerogatives. As a matter of fact no proclamations were issued during the last years of Henry's reign that might not have been issued before.
But the reform of the church by the government, in morals and usages, not in doctrine, proceeded unchecked. The larger monasteries had been falling into the king's hands by voluntary surrender ever since 1536; a new visitation and a new Act for the dissolution [Sidenote: 1539] of the greater monasteries completed the process.
[Sidenote: War on relics]
An iconoclastic war was now begun not, as in other countries, by the mob, but by the government. Relics like the Blood of Hailes were destroyed, and the Rood of Boxley, a crucifix mechanically contrived so that the priests made it nod and smile or shake its head and frown according to the liberality of its worshipper, was taken down and the mechanism exposed in various places. At Walsingham in Norfolk was a nodding image of the Virgin, a bottle of her milk, still liquid, and a knuckle of St. Peter. The shrine, ranking though it did with Loretto and Compostella in popular veneration, was now destroyed. With much zest the government next attacked the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, thus revenging the humiliation of another Henry at the hands of the church. The martyr was now declared to be a rebel who had fled from the realm.
[Sidenote: 1536]
The definition of doctrine, coupled with negotiations with the Schmalkaldic princes, continued briskly. The project for an alliance came to nothing, for John Frederic of Saxony wrote that God would not allow them to have communication with Henry. Two embassies to England engaged in assiduous, but fruitless, theological discussion. Henry himself, with the aid of Cuthbert Tunstall, drew up a long statement "against {306} the opinions of the Germans on the sacrament in both kinds, private masses, and sacerdotal marriage." The reactionary tendency of the English is seen in the Institution of the Christian Man, [Sidenote: Definitions of Faith] published with royal authority, and still more in the Act of the Six Articles. [Sidenote: 1537] In the former the four sacraments previously discarded are again "found." [Sidenote: 1539] In the latter, transubstantiation is affirmed, the doctrine of communion in both kinds branded as heresy, the marriage of priests declared void, vows of chastity are made perpetually binding, private masses and auricular confessions are sanctioned. Denial of transubstantiation was made punishable by the stake and forfeiture of goods; those who spoke against the other articles were declared guilty of felony on the second offence. This act, officially entitled "for abolishing diversity in opinions" was really the first act of uniformity. It was carried by the influence of the king and the laity against the parties represented by Cromwell and Cranmer. It ended the plans for a Schmalkaldic alliance. [Sidenote: July 10, 1539] Luther thanked God that they were rid of that blasphemer who had tried to enter their league but failed.
By a desperate gamble Cromwell now tried to save what was left of his pro-German policy. Duke William of Cleves-Jülich-Berg had adopted an Erasmian compromise between Lutheranism and Romanism, in some respects resembling the course pursued by Henry. In this direction Cromwell accordingly next turned and induced his master to contract a marriage with Anne, [Sidenote: January 6, 1540] the duke's sister. As Henry had offered to the European audience three tragedies in his three former marriages, he now, in true Greek style, presented in his fourth a farce or "satyric drama." The monarch did not like his new wife in the least, and found means of ridding himself of her more speedily than was usual even with him. Having shared her bed for six months {307} he divorced her on the ground that the marriage had not been consummated. [Sidenote: July 28, 1540] The ex-queen continued to live as "the king's good sister" with a pension and establishment of her own, but Cromwell vicariously expiated her failure to please. He was attainted, without trial, for treason, and speedily executed.
[Sidenote: Bluebeard's wives]
On the same day Henry married Catharine Howard, a beautiful girl selected by the Catholics to play the same part for them that Anne Boleyn had played for the Lutherans, and who did so more exactly than her backers intended. Like her predecessor she was beheaded for adultery on February 13, 1542. On July 12, 1543, Bluebeard concluded his matrimonial adventures by taking Catharine Parr, a lady who, like Sieyès after the Terror, must have congratulated herself on her rare ability in surviving.
[Sidenote: Catholic reaction]
As a Catholic reaction marked the last eight years of Henry's reign, it may perhaps be well to say a few words about the state of opinion in England at that time. The belief that the whole people took their religion with sheepish meekness from their king is too simple and too dishonorable to the national character to be believed. That they appeared to do this is really a proof that parties were nearly divided. Just as in modern times great issues are often decided in general elections by narrow majorities, so in the sixteenth century public opinion veered now this way, now that, in part guided by the government, in part affecting it even when the channels by which it did so are not obvious. We must not imagine that the people took no interest in the course of affairs. On the contrary the burning issues of the day were discussed in public house and marketplace with the same vivacity with which politics are now debated in the New England country store. "The Word of God was disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and {308} tavern," says a contemporary state paper. In private, graver men argued with the high spirit reflected in More's dialogues.
Four parties may be plainly discerned. First and most numerous were the strict Anglicans, orthodox and royalist, comprising the greater part of the crown-loving, priest-hating and yet, in intellectual matters, conservative common people. Secondly, there were the pope's followers, still strong in numbers especially among the clergy and in the north. Their leaders were among the most high-minded of the nation, but were also the first to be smitten by the king's wrath which, as his satellites were always repeating in Latin proverb, meant death. Such men were More and Fisher and the London Carthusians executed in 1535 for refusing the oath of supremacy. Third, there were the Lutherans, an active and intelligent minority of city merchants and artisans, led by men of conspicuous talents and generally of high character, like Coverdale, Kidley, and Latimer. With these leaders were a few opportunists like Cranmer and a few Machiavellians like Cromwell. Lastly there was a very small contingent of extremists, Zwinglians and Anabaptists, all classed together as blasphemers and as social agitators. Their chief notes were the variety of their opinions and the unanimity of their persecution by all other parties. Some of them were men of intelligible social and religious tenets; others furnished the "lunatic fringe" of the reform movement. The proclamation banishing them from England [Sidenote: 1538] on pain of death merely continued the previous practice of the government.
The fall of the Cromwell ministry, if it may be so termed by modern analogy, was followed by a government in which Henry acted as his own prime minister. {309} He had made good his boast that if his shirt knew his counsel he would strip it off.[1] Two of his great ministers he had cast down for being too Catholic, one for being too Protestant. Having procured laws enabling him to burn Romanists as traitors and Lutherans as heretics, he established a régime of pure Anglicanism, the only genuine Anglican Catholicism, however much it may have been imitated in after centuries, that ever existed.
[Sidenote: Anti-protestant measures]
Measures were at once taken towards suppressing the Protestants and their Bible. One of the first martyrs was Robert Barnes, a personal friend of Luther. Much stir was created by the burning, some years later, of a gentlewoman named Anne Askewe and of three men, at Smithfield. The revulsion naturally caused by this cruelty prepared the people for the Protestant rule of Edward. The Bible was also attacked. The translation of 1539 was examined by Convocation in 1540 and criticized for not agreeing more closely with the Latin. In 1543 all marginal notes were obliterated and the lower classes forbidden to read the Bible at all.
Henry's reign ended as it began with war on France and Scotland, but with little success. The government was put to dire straits to raise money. A forced loan of 10 per cent. on property was exacted in 1542 and repudiated by law the next year. An income tax rising from four pence to two shillings in the pound on goods and from eight pence to three shillings on revenue from land, was imposed. Crown lands were sold or mortgaged. The last and most disastrous expedient was the debasement of the coinage, the old equivalent of the modern issue of irredeemable paper. As a consequence of this prices rose enormously.
[1] The metaphor came from Erasmus, De lingua, 1525, Opera, iv, 682, where the words are attributed to Caecilius Metellus.
{310}
[Sidenote: Accession of Edward VI, January 28, 1547]
The real test of the popularity of Henry's double revolution, constitutional and religious, came when England was no longer guided by his strong personality, but was ruled by a child and governed by a weak and shifting regency. It is significant that, whereas the prerogative of the crown was considerably relaxed, though substantially handed on to Edward's stronger successors, the Reformation proceeded at accelerated pace.
[Sidenote: Somerset Regent]
Henry himself, not so much to insure further change as to safeguard that already made, appointed Reformers as his son's tutors and made the majority of the Council of Regency Protestant. The young king's maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was chosen by the council as Protector and created Duke of Somerset. [Sidenote: 1547] Mildness was the characteristic of his rule. He ignored Henry's treason and heresy acts even before they had been repealed.
[Sidenote: Repeal of treason and heresy laws]
The first general election was held with little government interference. Parliament may be assumed to have expressed the will of the nation when it repealed Henry's treason and heresy laws, the ancient act De Haeretico comburendo, the Act of the Six Articles, and the Statute of Proclamations.
To ascertain exactly what, at a given time, is the "public opinion" of a political group, is one of the most difficult tasks of the historian.[1] Even nowadays it is certain that the will of the majority is frequently not reflected either in the acts of the legislature or in the newspaper press. It cannot even be said that the wishes of the majority are always public opinion. In expressing the voice of the people there is generally some section more vocal, more powerful on account {311} of wealth or intelligence, and more deeply in earnest than any other; and this minority, though sometimes a relatively small one, imposes its will in the name of the people and identifies its voice with the voice of God.
[Sidenote: Protestant public opinion]
Therefore, when we read the testimony of contemporaries that the majority of England was still Catholic by the middle of the sixteenth century, a further analysis of popular opinion must be made to account for the apparently spontaneous rush of the Reformation. Some of these estimates are doubtless exaggerations, as that of Paget who wrote in 1549 that eleven Englishmen out of twelve were Catholics. But conceding, as we must, that a considerable majority was still anti-Protestant, it must be remembered that this majority included most of the indifferent and listless and almost all those who held their opinions for no better reason than they had inherited them and refused the trouble of thinking about them. Nearly the solid north and west, the country districts and the unrepresented and mute proletariat of the cities, counted as Catholic but hardly counted for anything else. The commercial class of the towns and the intellectual class, which, though relatively small, then as now made public opinion as measured by all ordinary tests, was predominantly and enthusiastically Protestant.
If we analyse the expressed wishes of England, we shall find a mixture of real religious faith and of worldly, and sometimes discreditable, motives. A new party always numbers among its constituency not only those who love its principles but those who hate its opponents. With the Protestants were a host of allies varying from those who detested Rome to those who repudiated all religion. Moreover every successful party has a number of hangers-on for the sake of political spoils, and some who follow its fortunes {312} with no purpose save to fish in troubled waters.
But whatever their constituency or relative numbers, the Protestants now carried all before them. In the free religious debate that followed the death of Henry, the press teemed with satires and pamphlets, mostly Protestant. From foreign parts flocked allies, while the native stock of literary ammunition was reinforced by German and Swiss books. In the reign of Edward there were three new translations of Luther's books, five of Melanchthon's, two of Zwingli's, two of Oecolampadius's, three of Bullinger's and four of Calvin's. Many English religious leaders were in correspondence with Bullinger, many with Calvin, and some with Melanchthon. Among the prominent European Protestants called to England during this reign were Bucer and Fagius of Germany, Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochino of Italy, and the Pole John Laski.
The purification of the churches began promptly. [Sidenote: 1547] Images, roods and stained glass windows were destroyed, while the buildings were whitewashed on the inside, properly to express the austerity of the new cult. Evidence shows that these acts, countenanced by the government, were popular in the towns but not in the country districts.
[Sidenote: Book of Common Prayer, 1549]
Next came the preparation of an English liturgy. The first Book of Common Prayer was the work of Cranmer. Many things in it, including some of the most beautiful portions, were translations from the Roman Breviary; but the high and solemn music of its language must be credited to the genius of its translator. Just as the English Bible popularized the Reformation, so the English Prayer Book strengthened and broadened the hold of the Anglican church. Doctrinally, it was a compromise between Romanism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. Its use was enforced by the Act of Uniformity, [Sidenote: 1549] {313} the first and mildest of the statutes that bore that name. Though it might be celebrated in Greek, Latin or Hebrew as well as in English, priests using any other service were punished with loss of benefices and imprisonment.
At this time there must have been an unrecorded struggle in the Council of Regency between the two religious parties, followed by the victory of the innovators. [Sidenote: End of 1549] The pace of the Reformation was at once increased; between 1550 and 1553 England gave up most of what was left of distinctively medieval Catholicism. For one thing, the marriage of priests was now legalized. [Sidenote: Accelerated Reformation] That public opinion was hardly prepared for this as yet is shown by the act itself in which celibacy of the clergy is declared to be the better condition, and marriage only allowed to prevent vice. The people still regarded priests' wives much as concubines and the government spoke of clergymen as "sotted with their wives and children." There is one other bit of evidence, of a most singular character, showing that this and subsequent Acts of Uniformity were not thoroughly enforced. The test of orthodoxy came to be taking the communion occasionally according to the Anglican rite. This was at first expected of everyone and then demanded by law; but the law was evaded by permitting a conscientious objector to hire a substitute to take communion for him.
In 1552 the Prayer Book was revised in a Protestant sense. Bucer had something to do with this revision, and so did John Knox. Little was now left of the mass, nothing of private confession or anointing the sick. Further steps were the reform of the Canon Law and the publication of the Forty-two Articles of Religion. These were drawn up by Cranmer on the basis of thirteen articles agreed upon by a conference of three English Bishops, four English doctors, and two German missionaries, Boyneburg and Myconius, in {314} May, 1538. Cranmer hoped to make his statement irenic; and in fact it contained some Roman and Calvinistic elements, but in the main it was Lutheran. Justification by faith was asserted; only two sacraments were retained. Transubstantiation was denounced as repugnant to Scripture and private masses as "dangerous impostures." The real presence was maintained in a Lutheran sense: the bread was said to be the Body of Christ, and the wine the Blood of Christ, but only after a heavenly and spiritual manner. It was said that by Christ's ordinance the sacrament is not reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.
A reform of the clergy was also undertaken, and was much needed. In 1551 Bishop Hooper found in his diocese of 311 clergymen, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, ten could not say the Lord's Prayer in English, seven could not tell who was its author, and sixty-two were absentees, chiefly because of pluralities.
The notable characteristic of the Edwardian Reformation was its mildness. There were no Catholic martyrs. It is true that heretics coming under the category of blasphemers or deniers of Christianity could still be put to death by common law, and two men were actually executed for speculations about the divinity of Christ, but such cases were wholly exceptional.
[Sidenote: Social disorders]
The social disorders of the time, coming to a head, seemed to threaten England with a rising of the lower classes similar to the Peasants' War of 1525 in Germany. The events in England prove that, however much these ebullitions might be stimulated by the atmosphere of the religious change, they wore not the direct result of the new gospel. In the west of England and in Oxfordshire the lower classes rebelled {315} under the leadership of Catholic priests; in the east the rising, known as Kett's rebellion, took on an Anabaptist character. The real causes of discontent were the same in both cases. The growing wealth of the commercial classes had widened the gap between rich and poor. The inclosures continued to be a grievance, by the ejection of small tenants and the appropriation of common lands. But by far the greatest cause of hardship to the poor was the debasement of the coinage. Wheat, barley, oats and cattle rose in price to two or three times their previous cost, while wages, kept down by law, rose only 11 per cent. No wonder that the condition of the laborer had become impossible.
The demands of the eastern rising, centering at Norwich, bordered on communism. The first was for the enfranchisement of all bondsmen for the reason that Christ had made all men free. Inclosures of commons and private property in game and fish were denounced and further agrarian demands were voiced. The rebels committed no murder and little sacrilege, but vented their passions by slaughtering vast numbers of sheep. All the peasant risings were suppressed by the government, and the economic forces continued to operate against the wasteful agricultural system of the time and in favor of wool-growing and manufacture.
[Sidenote: Execution of Somerset, January 22, 1552]
After five years under Protector Somerset there was a change of government signalized, as usual under Henry VIII, by the execution of the resigning minister. Somerset suffered from the unpopularity of the new religious policy in some quarters and from that following the peasants' rebellion in others. As usual, the government was blamed for the economic evils of the time and for once, in having debased the coinage, justly. Moreover the Protector had been {316} involved by scheming rivals in the odium more than in the guilt of fratricide, for this least bloody of all English ministers in that century, had executed his brother, Thomas, Baron Seymour, a rash and ambitious man rightly supposed to be plotting his own advancement by a royal marriage.
Among the leaders of the Reformation belonging to the class of mere adventurers, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was the ablest and the worst. As the Protector held quasi-royal powers, he could only be deposed by using the person of the young king. Warwick ingratiated himself with Edward and brought the child of thirteen to the council. Of course he could only speak what was taught him, but the name of royalty had so dread a prestige that none dared disobey him. At his command Warwick was created Duke of Northumberland, [Sidenote: Northumberland and Suffolk] and his confederate, Henry Grey Marquis of Dorset, was created Duke of Suffolk. A little later these men, again using the person of the king, had Somerset tried and executed.
The conspirators did not long enjoy their triumph. While Edward lived and was a minor they were safe, but Edward was a consumptive visibly declining. They had no hope of perpetuating their power save to alter the succession, and this they tried to do. Another Earl of Warwick had been a king-maker, why not the present one? Henry VIII's will appointed to succeed him, in case of Edward's death without issue, (1) Mary, (2) Elizabeth, (3) the heirs of his younger sister Mary who had married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Of this marriage there had been born two daughters, the elder of whom, Frances, married Henry Grey, recently created Duke of Suffolk. The issue of this marriage were three daughters, and the eldest of them, Lady Jane Grey, was picked by the two dukes as the heir to the throne, and was married to {317} Northumberland's son, Guilford Dudley. The young king was now appealed to, on the ground of his religious feeling, to alter the succession so as to exclude not only his Catholic sister Mary but his lukewarm sister Elizabeth in favor of the strongly Protestant Lady Jane. Though his lawyers told him he could not alter the succession to the crown, he intimidated them into drawing up a "devise" purporting to do this.
[1] See A. L. Lowell: Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1914.
[Sidenote: Proclamation of Queen Jane, July 10, 1553]
When Edward died on July 6, 1553, Northumberland had taken such precautions as he could to ensure the success of his project. He had gathered his own men at London and tried to secure help from France, whose king would have been only too glad to involve England in civil war. The death of the king was concealed for four days while preparations were being made, and then Queen Jane was proclaimed. Mary's challenge arrived the next day and she (Mary) at once began raising an army. Had her person been secured the plot might have succeeded, but she avoided the set snares. Charles V wished to support her for religious reasons, but feared to excite patriotic feeling by dispatching an army and therefore confined his intervention to diplomatic representations to Northumberland.
[Sidenote: Accession of Mary]
There was no doubt as to the choice of the people. Even the strongest Protestants hated civil turmoil more than they did Catholicism, and the people as a whole felt instinctively that if the crown was put up as a prize for unscrupulous politicians there would be no end of strife. All therefore flocked to Mary, and almost without a struggle she overcame the conspirators and entered her capital amid great rejoicing. Northumberland, after a despicable and fruitless recantation, was executed and so were his son and his son's wife, Queen Jane. Sympathy was felt for her on {318} account of her youth, beauty and remarkable talents, but none for her backers.
The relief with which the settlement was regarded gave the new queen at least the good will of the nation to start with. This she gradually lost. Just as Elizabeth instinctively did the popular thing, so Mary seemed almost by fatality to choose the worst course possible. Her foreign policy, in the first place, was both un-English and unsuccessful. [Sidenote: Marriage of Mary and Philip, July 25, 1554] Almost at once Charles V proposed his son Philip as Mary's husband, and, after about a year of negotiation, the marriage took place. The tremendous unpopularity of this step was due not so much to hostility to Spain, though Spain was beginning to be regarded as the national foe rather than France, but to the fear of a foreign domination. England had never before been ruled by a queen, if we except the disastrous reign of Mathilda, and it was natural to suppose that Mary's husband should have the prerogative as well as the title of king. In vain Philip tried to disabuse the English of the idea that he was asserting any independent claims; in some way the people felt that they were being annexed to Spain, and they hated it.
The religious aim of the marriage, to aid in the restoration of Catholicism, was also disliked. Cardinal Pole frankly avowed this purpose, declaring that
as Christ, being heir of the world, was sent down by his Father from the royal throne, to be at once Spouse and Son of the Virgin Mary and to be made the Comforter and Saviour of mankind; so, in like manner, the greatest of all princes upon earth, the heir of his father's kingdom, departed from his own broad and happy realms that he, too, might come hither into this land of trouble, to be the spouse and son of this virgin Mary . . . to aid in the reconciliation of this people to Christ and the church.
For Mary herself the marriage was most unhappy. {319} She was a bride of thirty-eight, already worn and aged by grief and care; her bridegroom was only twenty-seven. She adored him, but he almost loathed her and made her miserable by neglect and unfaithfulness. Her passionate hopes for a child led her to believe and announce that she was to have one, and her disappointment was correspondingly bitter.
So unpopular was the marriage coupled with the queen's religious policy, that it led to a rebellion under Sir Thomas Wyatt. Though suppressed, it was a dangerous symptom, especially as Mary failed to profit by the warning. Her attempts to implicate her sister Elizabeth in the charge of treason failed.
Had Mary's foreign policy only been strong it might have conciliated the patriotic pride of the ever present jingo. But under her leadership England seemed to decline almost to its nadir. The command of the sea was lost and, as a consequence of this and of the military genius of the Duke of Guise, Calais, held for over two centuries, was conquered by the French. [Sidenote: 1558] With the subsequent loss of Guines the last English outpost on the continent was reft from her.
[Sidenote: Religious policy]
Notwithstanding Mary's saying that "Calais" would be found in her heart when she died, by far her deepest interest was the restoration of Catholicism. To assist her in this task she had Cardinal Reginald Pole, in whose veins flowed the royal blood of England and whom the pope appointed as legate to the kingdom. Though Mary's own impulse was to act strongly, she sensibly adopted the emperor's advice to go slowly and, as far as possible, in legal forms. Within a month of her succession she issued a proclamation stating her intention to remain Catholic and her hope that her subjects would embrace the same religion, but at the same time disclaiming the intention of forcing them and forbidding strife and the use of {320} "those new-found devilish terms of papist or heretic or such like."
Elections to the first Parliament were free; it passed two noteworthy Acts of Repeal, [Sidenote: Repeal of Reforming acts] the first restoring the status quo at the death of Henry VIII, the second restoring the status quo of 1529 on the eve of the Reformation Parliament. This second act abolished eighteen statutes of Henry VIII and one of Edward VI, but it refused to restore the church lands. The fate of the confiscated ecclesiastical property was one of the greatest obstacles, if not the greatest, in the path of reconciliation with Rome. The pope at first insisted upon it, and Pole was deeply grieved at being obliged to absolve sinners who kept the fruits of their sins. But the English, as the Spanish ambassador Renard wrote, "would rather get themselves massacred than let go" the abbey lands. The very Statute of Repeal, therefore, that in other respects met Mary's demands, carefully guarded the titles to the secularized lands, making all suits relating to them triable only in crown courts.
The second point on which Parliament, truly representing a large section of public opinion, was obstinate, was in the refusal to recognize the papal supremacy. The people as a whole cared not what dogma they were supposed to believe, but they for the most part cordially hated the pope. They therefore agreed to pass the acts of repeal only on condition that nothing was said about the royal supremacy. To Mary's insistence they returned a blank refusal to act and she was compelled to wait "while Parliament debated articles that might well puzzle a general council," as a contemporary wrote.
Lords and Commons were quite willing to pass acts to strengthen the crown and then to leave the responsibility {321} for further action to it. Thus the divorce of Henry and Catharine of Aragon was repealed and the Revival of treason laws were revived. [Sidenote: Revival of treason laws] Going even beyond the limit of Henry VIII it was made treason to "pray or desire" that God would shorten the queen's days. Worse than that, Parliament revived the heresy laws. It is a strange comment on the nature of legislatures that they have so often, as in this case, protected property better than life, and made money more sacred than conscience. However, it was not Parliament but the executive that carried out to its full extent the policy of persecution and religious reaction.
The country soon showed its opposition. A temporary disarray that might have been mistaken for disintegration had been produced in the Protestant ranks by the recantation of Northumberland. The restoration of the mass was accomplished in orderly manner in most places. The English formulas had been patient of a Catholic interpretation, and doubtless many persons regarded the change from one liturgy to the other as a matter of slight importance. Moreover the majority made a principle of conformity to the government, believing that an act of the law relieved the conscience of the individual of responsibility. But even so, there was a large minority of recusants. Of 8800 beneficed clergy in England, 2000 were ejected for refusal to comply. A very large number fled to the Continent, forming colonies at Frankfort-on-the-Main and at Geneva and scattering in other places. The opinion of the imperial ambassador Renard that English Protestants depended entirely on support from abroad was tolerably true for this reign, for their books continued to be printed abroad, and a few further translations from foreign reformers were made. It is noteworthy that these mostly treat of the {322} question, then so much in debate, whether Protestants might innocently attend the mass.
Other expressions of the temper of the people were the riots in London. On the last day of the first Parliament a dog with a tonsured crown, a rope around its neck and a writing signifying that priests and bishops should be hung, was thrown through a window into the queen's presence chamber. At another time a cat was found tonsured, surpliced, and with a wafer in its mouth in derision of the mass. The perpetrators of these outrages could not be found.
[Sidenote: Passive resistance]
A sterner, though passive, resistance to the government was gloriously evinced when stake and rack began to do their work. Mary was totally unprepared for the strength of Protestant feeling in the country. She hoped a few executions would strike terror into the hearts of all and render further persecution unnecessary. But from the execution of the first martyr, John Rogers, it was plain that the people sympathized with the victims rather than feared their fate. Not content with warring on the living, Mary even broke the sleep of the dead.[1] The bodies of Bucer and Fagius were dug up and burned. The body of Peter Martyr's wife was also exhumed, though, as no evidence of heresy could be procured, it was thrown on a dunghill to rot.
[Sidenote: Martyrs, October 16, 1555]
The most famous victims were Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer. The first two were burnt alive together, Latimer at the stake comforting his friend by assuring him, "This day we shall light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust, shall never be put out." A special procedure was reserved for Cranmer, as primate. Every effort was made to get him to recant. He at first signed four submissions recognizing the {323} power of the pope as and if restored by Parliament. He then signed two real recantations, and finally drew up a seventh document, repudiating his recantations, re-affirming his faith in the Protestant doctrine of the sacraments and denouncing the pope. By holding his right hand in the fire, when he was burned at the stake, he testified his bitter repentance for its act in signing the recantations. [Sidenote: March 21, 1556]
The total number of martyrs in Mary's reign fell very little, if at all, short of 300. The lists of them are precise and circumstantial. The geographical distribution is interesting, furnishing, as it does, the only statistical information available in the sixteenth century for the spread of Protestantism. It graphically illustrates the fact, so often noticed before, that the strongholds of the new opinions were the commercial towns of the south and east. If a straight line be drawn from the Wash to Portsmouth, passing about twenty miles west of London, it will roughly divide the Protestant from the Catholic portions of England. Out of 290 martyrdoms known, 247 took place east of this line, that is, in the city of London and the counties of Essex, Hertford, Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridge. Thirteen are recorded in the south center, at Winchester and Salisbury, eleven at the western ports of the Severn, Bristol and Gloucester. There were three in Wales, all on the coast at St. David's; one in the south-western peninsula at Exeter, a few in the midlands, and not one north of Lincolnshire and Cheshire.
When it is said that the English changed their religion easily, this record of heroic opposition must be remembered to the contrary. Mary's reign became more and more hateful to her people until at last it is possible that only the prospect of its speedy termination prevented a rebellion. The popular epithet of {324} "bloody" rightly distinguishes her place in the estimate of history. It is true that her persecution sinks into insignificance compared with the holocausts of victims to the inquisition in the Netherlands. But the English people naturally judged by their own history, and in all of that such a reign of terror was unexampled. The note of Mary's reign is sterility and its achievement was to create, in reaction to the policy then pursued, a ferocious and indelible hatred of Rome.
[1] The canon law forbade the burial of heretics in consecrated ground, but it is said that Charles V refused to dig up Luther's body when he took Wittenberg.
[Sidenote: Elizabeth, 1558-1603]
However numerous and thorny were the problems pressed for solution into the hands of the maiden of twenty-five now called upon to rule England, the greatest of all questions, that of religion, almost settled itself. It is extremely hard to divest ourselves of the wisdom that comes after the event and to put ourselves in the position of the men of that time and estimate fairly the apparent feasibility of various alternatives. But it is hard to believe that the considerations that seem so overwhelming to us should not have forced themselves upon the attention of the more thoughtful men of that generation.
In the first place, while the daughter of Anne Boleyn was predestined by heredity and breeding to oppose Rome, yet she was brought up in the Anglican Catholicism of Henry VIII. At the age of eleven she had translated Margaret of Navarre's Mirror of the Sinful Soul, a work expressing the spirit of devotion joined with liberalism in creed and outward conformity in cult. The rapid vicissitudes of faith in England taught her tolerance, and her own acute intellect and practical sense inclined her to indifference. She did not scruple to give all parties, Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist, the impression, when it suited her, that she was almost in agreement with each of them. The accusation {325} that she was "an atheist and a maintainer of atheism" [Sidenote: 1601] meant no more than that her interests were secular. She once said that she would rather hear a thousand masses than be guilty of the millions of crimes perpetrated by some of those who had suppressed the mass. She liked candles, crucifixes and ritual just as she inordinately loved personal display. And politically she learned very early to fear the republicanism of Knox.
[Sidenote: Most of people Catholic]
The conservatism of Elizabeth's policy was determined also by the consideration that, though the more intelligent and progressive classes were Protestant, the mass of the people still clung to the Roman faith, and, if they had no other power, had at least the vis inertiae. Accurate figures cannot be obtained, but a number of indications are significant. In 1559 Convocation asserted the adherence of the clergy to the ancient faith. Maurice Clenoch estimated in 1561 that the majority of the people would welcome foreign intervention in favor of Mary Stuart and the old faith. Nicholas Sanders, a contemporary Catholic apologist, said that the common people of that period were divided into three classes: husbandmen, shepherds and mechanics. The first two classes he considered entirely Catholic; the third class, he said, were not tainted with schism as a whole, but only in some parts, those, namely of sedentary occupation such as weavers, cobblers and some lazy "aulici," i.e. servants and humble retainers of the great. The remote parts of the kingdom, he added, were least tainted with heresy and, as the towns were few and small, he estimated that less than one per cent. of the population was Protestant. Though these figures are a tremendous exaggeration of the proportion of Catholics, some support may be found for them in the information sent to the Curia in 1567 that 32 English nobles were Catholic, 20 {326} well affected to the Catholics and 15 Protestants. Only slightly different is the report sent in 1571 that at that time 33 English peers were Catholic, 15 doubtful and 16 heretical. As a matter of fact, in religious questions we find that the House of Lords would have been Catholic but for the bishops, a solid phalanx of government nominees.
[Sidenote: But most powerful class Protestants]
But if the masses were Catholic, the strategically situated classes were Reformed. The first House of Commons of Elizabeth proved by its acts to be strongly Protestant. The assumption generally made that it was packed by the government has been recently exploded. Careful testing shows that there was hardly any government interference. Of the 390 members, 168 had sat in earlier Parliaments of Mary, and that was just the normal proportion of old members. It must be remembered that the parliamentary franchise approached the democratic only in the towns, the strongholds of Protestantism, and that in the small boroughs and in some of the counties the election was determined by just that middle class most progressive and at this time most Protestant.
Another test of the temper of the country is the number of clergy refusing the oath of supremacy. Out of a total number of about nine thousand only about two hundred lost their livings as recusants, and most of these were Mary's appointees.
The same impression of Protestantism is given by the literature of the time. The fifty-six volumes of Elizabethan divinity published by the Parker Society testify to the number of Reformation treaties, tracts, hymns and letters of this period. During the first thirty years of Elizabeth's reign there were fifteen new translations of Luther's works, not counting a number of reprints, two new translations from Melanchthon, thirteen from Bullinger and thirty-four from Calvin. {327} Notwithstanding this apparently large foreign influence, the English Reformation at this time resumed the national character temporarily lost during Mary's reign. John Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae [Sidenote: 1562] has been called by Creighton, "the first methodical statement of the position of the church of England against the church of Rome, and the groundwork of all subsequent controversy."
Finally, most of the prominent men of the time, and most of the rising young men, were Protestants. The English sea-captains, wolves of the sea as they were, found it advisable to disguise themselves in the sheep's clothing of zeal against the idolater. More creditable to the cause was the adherence of men like Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, a man of cool judgment and decent conversation. Coverdale, still active, was made a bishop. John Foxe published, all in the interests of his faith, the most popular and celebrated history of the time. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth's tutor, still looked to Lutheran Germany as "a place where Christ's doctrine, the fear of God, punishment of sin, and discipline of honesty were held in special regard." Edmund Spenser's great allegory, as well as some of his minor poems, were largely inspired by Anglican and Calvinistic purposes.
[Sidenote: Conversion of the masses]
It was during Elizabeth's reign that the Roman Catholics lost the majority they claimed in 1558 and became the tiny minority they have ever since remained. The time and to some extent the process through which this came to pass can be traced with fair accuracy. In 1563 the policy of the government, till then wavering, became more decided, indicating that the current had begun to set in favor of Protestantism. The failure of the Northern rising and of the papal bull in 1569-70, indicated the weakness of the ancient faith. In 1572 a careful estimate of the {328} religious state of England was made by a contemporary, [Sidenote: Carleton's estimate] who thought that of the three classes into which he divided the population, papist, Protestant and atheist (by which he probably meant, indifferent) the first was smaller than either of the other two. Ten years later (1580-85) the Jesuit mission in England claimed 120,000 converts. But in reality these adherents were not new converts, but the remnant of Romanism remaining faithful. If we assume, as a distinguished historian has done, that this number included nearly all the obstinately devoted, as the population of England and Wales was then about 4,000,000, the proportion of Catholics was only about 3 per cent. of the total, at which percentage it remained constant during the next century. But there were probably a considerable number of timid Roman Catholics not daring to make themselves known to the Jesuit mission. But even allowing liberally for these, it is safe to say that by 1585 the members of that church had sunk to a very small minority.
Those who see in the conversion of the English people the result merely of government pressure must explain two inconvenient facts. The first is that the Puritans, who were more strongly persecuted than the papists, waxed mightily notwithstanding. The second is that, during the period when the conversion of the masses took place, there were no martyrdoms and there was little persecution. The change was, in fact, but the inevitable completion and consequence of the conversion of the leaders of the people earlier. With the masses, doubtless, the full contrast between the old and the new faiths was not realized. Attending the same churches if not the same church, using a liturgy which some hoped would obtain papal sanction, and ignorant of the changes made in translation from the Latin ritual, the uneducated did not trouble themselves {329} about abstruse questions of dogma or even about more obvious matters such as the supremacy of the pope and the marriage of the clergy. Moreover, there were strong positive forces attracting them to the Anglican communion. They soon learned to love the English prayer-book, and the Bible became so necessary that the Catholics were obliged to produce a version of their own. English insularity and patriotism drew them powerfully to the bosom of their own peculiar communion.
[Sidenote: Elizabeth's policy]
Though we can now see that the forces drawing England to the Reformation were decisive, the policy of Elizabeth was at first cautious. The old services went on until Parliament had spoken. As with Henry VIII, so with this daughter of his, scrupulous legality of form marked the most revolutionary acts. Elizabeth had been proclaimed "Queen of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c," this "&c" being chosen to stand in place of the old title "Supreme Head of the Church," thus dodging the question of its assumption or omission. Parliament, however, very soon passed supremacy and uniformity acts to supply the needed sanction. The former repealed Philip and Mary's Heresy Act and Repealing Statute, revived ten acts of Henry VIII and one of Edward VI, but confirmed the repeal of six acts of Henry VIII. Next, Parliament proceeded to seize the episcopal lands. Its spirit was just as secular as that of Henry's Parliaments, only there was less ecclesiastical property left to grab.
The Book of Common Prayer was revised by introducing into the recension of 1552 a few passages from the first edition of 1549, previously rejected as too Catholic. Three of the Forty-two Articles of Religion of Edward were dropped, [Sidenote: The Thirty-nine Articles 1563] thus making the Thirty-nine Articles that have ever since been the authoritative {330} statement of Anglican doctrine. Thus it is true to some extent that the Elizabethan settlement was a compromise. It took special heed of various parties, and tried to avoid offence to Lutherans, Zwinglians, and even to Roman Catholics. But far more than a compromise, it was a case of special development. As it is usually compared with the English Dissenting sects, the church of England is often said to be the most conservative of the reformed bodies. It is often said that it is Protestant in doctrine and Catholic in ritual and hierarchy. But compared with the Lutheran church it is found to be if anything further from Rome. In fact the Anglicans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries abhorred the Lutherans as "semi-papists."
[Sidenote: The Church of England]
And yet the Anglican church was like the Lutheran not only in its conservatism as compared with Calvinism, but in its political aspects. Both became the strong allies of the throne; both had not only a markedly national but a markedly governmental quality. Just as the Reformation succeeded in England by becoming national in opposition to Spain, and remaining national in opposition to French culture, so the Anglican church naturally became a perfect expression of the English character. Moderate, decorous, detesting extremes of speculation and enthusiasm, she cares less for logic than for practical convenience.
Closely interwoven with the religious settlement were the questions of the heir to the throne [Sidenote: Succession] and of foreign policy. Elizabeth's life was the only breakwater that stood between the people and a Catholic, if not a disputed, succession. The nearest heir was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister. As a Catholic and a Frenchwoman, half by race and wholly by her first marriage to Francis II, she would have been most {331} distasteful to the ruling party in England. Elizabeth was therefore desired and finally urged by Parliament to marry. Her refusal to do this has been attributed to some hidden cause, as her love for Leicester or the knowledge that she was incapable of bearing a child. But though neither of these hypotheses can be disproved, neither is necessary to account for her policy. It is true that it would have strengthened her position to have had a child to succeed her; but it would have weakened her personal sway to have had a husband. She wanted to rule as well as to reign. Her many suitors were encouraged just sufficiently to flatter her vanity and to attain her diplomatic ends. First, her brother-in-law Philip sought her hand, and was promptly rejected as a Spanish Catholic. Then, there was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, apparently her favorite in spite of his worthless character, but his rank was not high enough. Then, there were princes of Sweden and Denmark, an Archduke of Austria and two sons of Catharine de' Medici's. The suit of one of the latter began when Elizabeth was thirty-nine years old and he was nineteen [Sidenote: 1566] and continued for ten years with apparent zest on both sides. Parliament put all the pressure it could upon the queen to make her flirtations end in matrimony, but it only made Elizabeth angry. Twice she forbade discussion of the matter, and, though she afterwards consented to hear the petition, she was careful not to call another Parliament for five years.
[Sidenote: Financial measures]
Vexatious financial difficulties had been left to Elizabeth. Largely owing to the debasement of the currency royal expenditure had risen from L56,000 per annum at the end of Henry's reign to L345,000 in the last year of Mary's reign. The government's credit was in a bad way, and the commerce of the kingdom deranged. [Sidenote: 1560] By the wise expedient of calling in the {332} debased coins issued since 1543, the hardest problems were solved.
[Sidenote: Underhand war]
Towards France and Spain Elizabeth's policy was one well described by herself as "underhand war." English volunteers, with government connivance, but nominally on their own responsibility, fought in the ranks of Huguenots and Netherlanders. Torrents of money poured from English churches to support their fellow-Protestants in France and Holland. English sailors seized Spanish galleons; if successful the queen secretly shared the spoil; but if they were caught they might be hanged as pirates by Philip or Alva. This condition, unthinkable now, was allowed by the inchoate state of international law; the very idea of neutrality was foreign to the time. States were always trying to harm and overreach each other in secret ways. In Elizabethan England the anti-papal and anti-Spanish ardor of the mariners made possible this buccaneering without government support, had not the rich prizes themselves been enough to attract the adventurous. Doubtless far more energy went into privateering than into legitimate commerce.
Peace was officially made with France, recognizing the surrender of Calais at first for a limited period of years. Though peace was still nominally kept with Spain for a long time, the shift of policy from one of hostility to France to one of enmity to Spain was soon manifest. As long, however, as the government relied chiefly on the commercial interests of the capital and other large towns, and as long as Spain controlled the Netherlands, open war was nearly impossible, for it would have been extremely unpopular with the merchants of both London and the Low Countries. In times of crisis, however, [Sidenote: 1569] an embargo was laid on all trade with Philip's dominions.
Elizabeth's position was made extremely delicate by {333} the fact that the heiress to her throne was the Scotch Queen Mary Stuart, who, since 1568, had been a refugee in England and had been kept in a sort of honorable captivity. On account of her religion she became the center of the hopes and of the actual machinations of all English malcontents. In these plots she participated as far as she dared.
[Sidenote: The Catholic Powers]
Elizabeth's crown would have been jeoparded had the Catholic powers, or any one of them, acted promptly. That they did not do so is proof, partly of their mutual jealousies, party of the excellence of Cecil's statesmanship. Convinced though he was that civil peace could only be secured by religious unity, for five years he played a hesitating game in order to hold off the Catholics until his power should be strong enough to crush them. By a system of espionage, by permitting only nobles and sailors to leave the kingdom without special licence, by welcoming Dutch Protestant refugees, he clandestinely fostered the strength of his party. His scheme was so far successful that the pope hesitated more than eleven years before issuing the bull of deprivation. For this Elizabeth had also to thank the Catholic Hapsburgs; in the first place Philip who then hoped to marry her, and in the second place the Emperor Ferdinand who said that if Elizabeth were excommunicated the German Catholics would suffer for it and that there were many German Protestant princes who deserved the ban as much as she did.
Matters were clarified by the calling of the Council of Trent. Asked to send an embassy to this council Elizabeth refused for three reasons: (1) because she had not been consulted about calling the council; (2) because she did not consider it free, pious and Christian; (3) because the pope sought to stir up sedition in her realms. The council replied to this snub by excommunicating her, but it is a significant sign of the {334} times that neither they nor the pope as yet dared to use spiritual weapons to depose her, as the pope endeavored to do a few years later.
[Sidenote: Anti-Catholic laws]
Whether as a reply to this measure or not, Parliament passed more stringent laws against Catholics. Cecil's policy, inherited from Thomas Cromwell, to centralize and unify the state, met with threefold opposition; first from the papists who disliked nationalizing the church, second from the holders of medieval franchises who objected to their absorption in a centripetal system, and third from the old nobles who resented their replacement in the royal council by upstarts. All these forces produced a serious crisis in the years 1569-70. The north, as the stronghold of both feudalism and Catholicism, led the reaction. The Duke of Norfolk, England's premier peer, plotted with the northern earls to advance Mary's cause, and thought of marrying her himself. Pope Pius V warmly praised their scheme which culminated in a rebellion. [Sidenote: Rebellion, 1561] The nobles and commons alike were filled with the spirit of crusaders, bearing banners with the cross and the five wounds of Christ. At the same time they voiced the grievance of the old-fashioned farmer against the new-fangled merchant. Their banners inscribed "God speed the plough" bear witness to the agrarian element common to so many revolts. Their demands were the restoration of Catholicism, intervention in Scotland to put Mary back on her throne, and her recognition as heiress of England, and the expulsion of foreign refugees. Had they been able to secure Mary's person or had the Scotch joined them, it is probable that they would have seceded from the south of England.
But the new Pilgrimage of Grace was destined to no more success than the old one. Moray, Regent of Scotland, forcibly prevented assistance going to the {335} rebels from North Britain. Elizabeth prepared an overwhelming army, but it was not needed. The rebels, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, dispersed and were pursued by an exemplary punishment, no less than eight hundred being executed. Three years later Norfolk trod the traitor's path to the scaffold. His death sealed the ruin of the old nobility whose privileges were incompatible with the new régime. In the same year a parliamentary agitation in favor of the execution of Mary witnessed how dead were medieval titles to respect.
[Sidenote: Papal Bull, February 25, 1570]
Too late to have much effect, Pius V issued the bull Regnans in excelsis, declaring that whereas the Roman pontiff has power over all nations and kingdoms to destroy and ruin or to plant and build up, and whereas Elizabeth, the slave of vice, has usurped the place of supreme head of the church, has sent her realm to perdition and has celebrated the impious mysteries of Calvin, therefore she is cut off from the body of Christ and deprived of her pretended right to rule England, while all her subjects are absolved from their oaths of allegiance. The bull also reasserted Elizabeth's illegitimacy, and echoed the complaint of the northern earls that she had expelled the old nobility from her council. The promulgation of the bull, without the requisite warning and allowance of a year for repentance, was contrary to the canon law.
The fulmination was sent to Alva to the Netherlands and a devotee was found to carry it to England. Forthwith Elizabeth issued a masterly proclamation vouchsafing that,
her majesty would have all her loving subjects to
understand that, as long as they shall openly continue in
the observation of her laws, and shall not wilfully and
manifestly break them by open actions, her majesty's means
is not to have any of them molested by any inquisition or
{336}
examination of their consciences in causes of religion, but
to accept and entreat them as her good and obedient subjects.
But to obviate the contamination of her people by political views expressed in the bull, [Sidenote: Anti-papal laws] and to guard against the danger of a further rising in the interests of Mary Stuart, the Parliament of 1571 passed several necessary laws. One of these forbade bringing the bull into England; another made it treasonable to declare that Elizabeth was not or ought not to be queen or that she was a heretic, usurper or schismatic.
The first seventeen years of Elizabeth's reign had been blessedly free from persecution. The increasing strain between England and the papacy was marked by a number of executions of Romanists. A recent Catholic estimate is that the total number of this faith who suffered under Elizabeth was 189, of whom 128 were priests, 58 laymen and three women; and to this should be added 32 Franciscans who died in prison of starvation. The contrast of 221 victims in Elizabeth's forty-five years as against 290 in Mary's five years, is less important than the different purpose of the government. Under Mary the executions were for heresy; under Elizabeth chiefly for treason. It is true that the whole age acted upon Sir Philip Sidney's maxim that it was the highest wisdom of statesmanship never to separate religion from politics. Church and state were practically one and the same body, and opinions repugnant to established religion naturally resulted in acts inimical to the civil order. But the broad distinction is plain. Cecil put men to death not because he detested their dogma but because he feared their politics.
Nothing proves more clearly the purposes of the English government than its long duel with the Jesuit mission. [Sidenote: Jesuit mission] It is unfair to say that the primary purpose {337} of the Curia was to get all the privileges of loyalty for English Catholics while secretly inciting them to rise and murder their sovereign. But the very fact that the Jesuits were instructed not to meddle in politics and yet were unable to keep clear of the law, proves how inextricably politics and religion were intertwined. Immediately drawing the suspicion of Burghley, they were put to the "bloody question" and illegally tortured, even while the government felt called upon to explain that they were not forced to the rack to answer "any question of their supposed conscience" but only as to their political opinions. But one of these opinions was whether the pope had the right to depose the queen.
[Sidenote: Character of Jesuits]
The history of these years is one more example of how much more accursed it is to persecute than to be persecuted. The Jesuits sent to England were men of the noblest character, daring and enduring all with fortitude, showing charity and loving-kindness even to their enemies. But the character of their enemies correspondingly deteriorated. That sense of fair play that is the finest English quality disappeared under the stress of fanaticism. Not only Jesuits, but Catholic women and children were attacked; one boy of thirteen was racked and executed as a traitor. The persecution by public opinion supplied what the activity of the government overlooked. In fact it was the government that was the moderating factor. The act passed in 1585 banishing the Jesuits was intended to obviate sterner measures. In dealing with the mass of the population Burghley made persecution pay its way by resorting to fines as the principal punishment. During the last twenty years of the reign no less than L6,000 per annum was thus collected.
The helpless rage of the popes against "the Jezebel of the north" waxed until one of them, Gregory XIII, {338} sanctioned an attempt at her assassination. [Sidenote: Conspiracies] In 1580 there appeared at the court of Madrid one Humphrey Ely, later a secular priest. He informed the papal nunciature that some English nobles, mentioned by name, had determined to murder Elizabeth but wished the pope's own assurance that, in case they lost their lives in the attempt, they should not have fallen into sin by the deed. After giving his own opinion that the bull of Pius V gave all men the right to take arms against the queen in any fashion, the nuncio wrote to Rome. From the papal secretary, speaking in the pope's name, he received the following reply:
As that guilty woman of England rules two so noble realms of Christendom, is the cause of so much harm to the Catholic faith, and is guilty of the loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that any one who puts her out of the world with the proper intention of serving God thereby, not only commits no sin but even wins merit, especially seeing that the sentence of the late Pius V is standing against her. If, therefore, these English nobles have really decided to do so fair a work, your honor may assure them that they commit no sin. Also we may trust in God that they will escape all danger. As to your own irregularity [caused to the nuncio as a priest by conspiracy to murder] the pope sends you his holy blessing.[1]
A conspiracy equally unsuccessful but more famous, because discovered at the time, was that of Anthony Babington. Burghley's excellent secret service apprised the government not only of the principals but also of aid and support given to them by Philip II and Mary Queen of Scots. Parliament petitioned for the execution of Mary. Though there was no doubt of her guilt, Elizabeth hesitated to give the dangerous example of sending a crowned head to the block. {339} With habitual indirection she did her best to get Mary's jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, to put her to death without a warrant. Failing in this, she finally signed the warrant, [Sidenote: Mary beheaded, February 8, 1587] but when her council acted upon it in secret haste lest she should change her mind, she flew into a rage and, to prove her innocence, heavily fined and imprisoned one of the privy council whom she selected as scapegoat.
[Sidenote: War with Spain]
The war with Spain is sometimes regarded as the inevitable consequence of the religious opposition of the chief Catholic and the chief Protestant power. But probably the war would never have gone beyond the stage of privateering and plots to assassinate in which it remained inchoate for so long, had it not been for the Netherlands. The corner-stone of English policy has been to keep friendly, or weak, the power controlling the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt. The war of liberation in the Netherlands had a twofold effect; in the first place it damaged England's best customer, and secondly, Spanish "frightfulness" shocked the English conscience. For a long time the policy of the queen herself was as cynically selfish as it could possibly be. She not only watched complacently the butcheries of Alva, but she plotted and counterplotted, now offering aid to the Prince of Orange, now betraying his cause in a way that may have been sport to her but was death to the men she played with. Her aim, as far as she had a consistent one, was to allow Spain and the Netherlands to exhaust each other.
Not only far nobler but, as it proved in the end, far wiser, was the action of the Puritan party that poured money and recruits into the cause of their oppressed fellow-Calvinists. But an equally great service to them, or at any rate a greater amount of damage to Spain, was done by the hardy buccaneers, Hawkins and Drake, who preyed upon the Spanish treasure {340} galleons and pillaged the Spanish settlements in the New World. These men and their fellows not only cut the sinews of Spain's power but likewise built the fleet.
[Sidenote: England's sea power]
The eventual naval victory of England was preceded by a long course of successful diplomacy. As the aggressor England forced the haughtiest power in Europe to endure a protracted series of outrages. Not only were rebels supported, not only were Spanish fleets taken forcibly into English harbors and there stripped of moneys belonging to their government, but refugees were protected and Spanish citizens put to death by the English queen. Philip and Alva could not effectively resent and hardly dared to protest against the treatment, because they felt themselves powerless. As so often, the island kingdom was protected by the ocean and by the proved superiority of her seamen. After a score of petty fights all the way from the Bay of Biscay to the Pacific Ocean, Spanish sailors had no desire for a trial of strength in force.
But in every respect save in sea power Spain felt herself immeasurably superior to her foe. Her wealth, her dominions, recently augmented by the annexation of Portugal, were enormous; her army had been tried in a hundred battles. England's force was doubtless underestimated. An Italian expert stated that an army of 10,000 to 12,000 foot and 2,000 horse would be sufficient to conquer her. Even to the last it was thought that an invader would be welcomed by a large part of the population, for English refugees never wearied of picturing the hatred of the people for their queen.
But the decision was long postponed for two reasons. First, Spain was fully employed in subduing the Netherlands. Secondly, the Catholic powers hoped for the accession of Mary. But after the assassination of Orange in 1584, and after the execution of the Queen {341} of Scots, these reasons for delay no longer existed. Drake carried the naval war [Sidenote: 1585] to the coasts of Spain and to her colonies. The consequent bankruptcy of the Bank of Seville and the wounded national pride brought home to Spaniards the humiliation of their position. All that Philip could do was to pray for help and to forbid the importation of English wares. [Sidenote: April 1587] In reply Drake fell upon the harbor of Cadiz and destroyed twenty-four or more warships and vast military stores.
So at last the decision was taken to crush the one power that seemed to maintain the Reformation, to uphold the Huguenots and the Dutch patriots and to harry with impunity the champions of Catholicism. Pope Sixtus V, not wishing to hazard anything, promised a subsidy of 1,000,000 crowns of gold, the first half payable on the landing of the Spanish army, the second half two months later. Save this, Philip had no promise of help from any Catholic power.
The huge scale of his preparations was only equaled by their vast lack of intelligence, insuring defeat from the first. The type of ship adopted was the old galley, intended to ram and grapple the enemy but totally unfitted for manoeuvring in the Atlantic gales. The 130 ships carried 2500 guns, but the artillery, though numerous, was small, intended rather to be used against the enemy crews than against the ships themselves. The necessary geographical information for the invasion of Britain in the year 1588 was procured from Caesar's De Bello Gallico. The admiral in chief, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, had never even commanded a ship before and most of the high officers were equally innocent of professional knowledge, for sailors were despised as inferior to soldiers. Three-fourths of the crews were soldiers, all but useless in naval warfare of the new type. Blind zeal did little to supply the lack {342} of foresight, though Philip spent hours on his knees before the host in intercession for the success of his venture. The very names of the ships, though quite in accordance with Spanish practice, seem symbolic of the holy character of the crusade: Santa Maria de Gracia, Neustra Señora del Rosario, San Juan Baptista, La Concepcion.
On the English side there was also plenty of fanatical fury, but it was accompanied by practical sense. The grandfathers of Cromwell's Ironsides had already learned, if they had not yet formulated, the maxim, "Fear God and keep your powder dry." Some of the ships in the English navy had religious names, but many were called by more secular appellations: The Bull, The Tiger, The Dreadnought, The Revenge. To meet the foe a very formidable and self-confident force of about forty-five ships of the best sort had gathered from the well-tried ranks of the buccaneers. It is true that patronage did some damage to the English service, but it was little compared to that of Spain. Lord Howard of Effingham was made admiral on account of his title, but the vice-admiral was Sir Francis Drake, to whom the chief credit of the action must fall.
[Sidenote: July, 1588]
The battle in the Channel was fought for nine days. There was no general strategy or tactics; the English simply sought to isolate and sink a ship wherever they could. Their heavier cannon were used against the enemy, and fire-ships were sent among his vessels. When six Spanish ships had foundered in the Channel, the fleet turned northward to the coasts of Holland. During their flight an uncertain number were destroyed by the English, and a few more fell a prey to the Sea Beggars of Holland. The rest, much battered, turned north to sail around Scotland. In the storms nineteen ships were wrecked on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland; of thirty-five ships the Spaniards themselves {343} could give no account. For two months Philip was in suspense as to the fate of his great Armada, of which at last only a riddled and battered remnant returned to home harbors.
The importance of the victory over the Armada, like that of most dramatic events, has been overestimated. To contemporaries, at least to the victors and their friends it appeared as the direct judgment of God: "Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt." The gorgeous rhetoric of Ranke and Froude has painted it as one of the turning points in world history. But in reality it rather marked than made an epoch. Had Philip's ships won, it is still inconceivable that he could have imposed his dominion on England any more than he could on the Netherlands. England was ripening and Spain was rotting for half a century before the collision made this fact plain to all. The Armada did not end the war nor did it give the death blow to Spanish power, much less to Catholicism. On the Continent of Europe things went on almost unchanged.
But in England the effect was considerable. The victory stimulated national pride; it strengthened the Protestants, and the left wing of that party. Though the Catholics had shown themselves loyal during the crisis they were subjected, immediately thereafter, to the severest persecution they had yet felt. This was due partly to nervous excitement of the whole population, partly to the advance towards power of the Puritans, always the war party.
[Sidenote: Puritans]
Even in the first years of the great queen there had been a number of Calvinists who looked askance at the Anglican settlement as too much of a compromise with Catholicism and Lutheranism. The Thirty-nine Articles passed Convocation by a single vote [Sidenote: 1563] as against a more Calvinistic confession. Low-churchmen (as they would now be called) attacked the "Aaronic" {344} vestments of the Anglican priests, and prelacy was detested as but one degree removed from papacy.
The Puritans were not dissenters but were a party in the Anglican communion thoroughly believing in a national church, but wishing to make the breach with Rome as wide as possible. They found fault with all that had been retained in the Prayer Book for which there was no direct warrant in Scripture, and many of them began to use, in secret conventicles, the Genevan instead of the English liturgy. Their leader, Thomas Cartwright, [Sidenote: Cartwright, 1535-1603] a professor of divinity at Cambridge until deprived of his chair by the government, had brought back from the Netherlands ideals of a presbyterian form of ecclesiastical polity. In his view many "Popish Abuses" remained in the church of England, among them the keeping of saints' days, kneeling at communion, "the childish and superstitious toys" connected with the baptismal service, the words then used in the marriage service by the man, "with my body I thee worship" by which the husband "made an idol of his wife," the use of such titles as archbishop, arch-deacon, lord bishop.
It was because of their excessively scrupulous conscience in these matters, that the name "Puritan" was given to the Calvinist by his enemy, at first a mocking designation analogous to "Catharus" in the Middle Ages. But the tide set strongly in the Puritan direction. Time and again the Commons tried to initiate legislation to relieve the consciences of the stricter party, but their efforts were blocked by the crown. From this time forth the church of England made an alliance with the throne that has never been broken. As Jewel had been compelled, at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, [Sidenote: 1562] to defend the Anglican church against Rome, so Richard Hooker, in his famous {345} Ecclesiastical Polity [Sidenote: 1594] was now forced to defend it from the extreme Protestants. In the very year in which this finely tempered work was written, a Jesuit reported that the Puritans were the strongest body in the kingdom and particularly that they had the most officers and soldiers on their side. The coming Commonwealth was already casting its shadow on the age of Shakespeare.
As a moral and religious influence Puritanism was of the utmost importance in moulding the English—and American—character and it was, take it all in all, a noble thing. If it has been justly blamed for a certain narrowness in its hostility, or indifference, to art and refinement, it more than compensated for this by the moral earnestness that it impressed on the people. To bring the genius of the Bible into English life and literature, to impress each man with the idea of living for duty, to reduce politics and the whole life of the state to ethical standards, are undoubted services of Puritanism. Politically, it favored the growth of self-reliance, self-control and a sense of personal worth that made democracy possible and necessary.
[Sidenote: Browne, 1550?-1633?]
To the left of the Puritans were the Independents or Brownists as they were called from their leader Robert Browne, the advocate of Reformation without Tarrying for Any. He had been a refugee in the Netherlands, where he may have come under Anabaptist influence. His disciples differed from the followers of Cartwright in separating themselves from the state church, in which they found many "filthy traditions and inventions of men." Beginning to organize hi separate congregations about 1567, they were said by Sir Walter Raleigh to have as many as 20,000 adherents in 1593. Though heartily disliked by re-actionaries and by the beati possidentes in both church {346} and state, they were, nevertheless, the party of the future.
[1] A. O. Meyer: England und die katholische Kirche unter Elizabeth, p. 231.
If the union of England and Wales has been a marriage—after a courtship of the primitive type; if the union with Scotland has been a successful partnership—following a long period of cut-throat competition; the position of Ireland has been that of a captive and a slave. To her unwilling mind the English domination has always been a foreign one, and this fact makes more difference with her than whether her master has been cruel, as formerly, or kind, as of late.
[Sidenote: English rule]
The saddest period in all Erin's sad life was that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when to the old antagonism of race was added a new hatred of creed and a new commercial competition. The policy of Henry was "to reduce that realm to the knowledge of God and obedience of Us." The policy of Elizabeth was to pray that God might "call them to the knowledge of his truth and to a civil polity," and to assist the Almighty by the most fiendish means to accomplish these ends. The government of the island was a crime, and yet for this crime some considerations must be urged in extenuation. England then regarded the Irish much as the Americans have seemed to regard the Indians, as savages to be killed and driven off to make room for a higher civilization. Had England been able to apply the method of extermination she would doubtless have done so and there would then be no Irish question today. But in 1540 it was recognized that "to enterprise the whole extirpation and total destruction of all the Irishmen in the land would be a marvellous gumptious charge and great difficulty."
Being unable to accomplish this or to put Ireland at {347} the bottom of the sea, where Elizabeth's minister Walsingham often wished that it were, the English had the alternatives of half governing or wholly abandoning their neighbors. The latter course was felt to be too dangerous, but had it been adopted, Ireland might have evolved an adequate government and prosperity of her own. It is true that she was more backward than England, but yet she had a considerable trade and culture. [Sidenote: Irish misery] Certain points, like Dublin and Waterford, had much commerce with the Continent. And yet, as to the nation as a whole, the report of 1515 probably speaks true in saying: "There is no common folk in all this world so little set by, so greatly despised, so feeble, so poor, so greatly trodden under foot, as the king's poor common folk of Ireland." There was no map of the whole of Ireland; the roads were few and poor and the vaguest notions prevailed as to the shape, size and population of the country. The most civilized part was the English Pale around Dublin; the native Irish lived "west of the Barrow and west of the law," and were governed by more than sixty native chiefs. Intermarriage of colonists and natives was forbidden by law. The only way the Tudor government knew of asserting its suzerainty over these septs, correctly described as "the king's Irish enemies," was to raid them at intervals, slaying, robbing and raping as they went. It was after one of these raids in 1580 that the poet Spencer wrote:
The people were brought to such wretchedness that any
strong heart would have rued the same. Out of every
corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth
upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them.
They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like
ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead
carrions, happy where they could find them; yea and one
{348}
another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they
spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they
found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they
thronged as to a feast for a time.
The Irish chiefs were not to be tamed by either kindness or force. Henry and Elizabeth scattered titles of "earl" and "lord" among the O's and Macs of her western island, only to find that the coronet made not the slightest difference in either their affections or their manners. They still lived as marauding chiefs, surrounded by wild kerns and gallowglasses fighting each other and preying on their own poor subjects. "Let a thousand of my people die," remarked one of them, Neil Garv, "I pass not a pin. . . . I will punish, exact, cut and hang where and whenever I list." Had they been able to make common cause they might perhaps have shaken the English grasp from their necks, for it was commonly corrupt and feeble. Sir Henry Sidney was the strongest and best governor sent to the island during the century, but he was able to do little. Though the others could be bribed and though one of them, the Earl of Essex, conspired with the chiefs to rebel, and though at the very end of Elizabeth's reign a capable Spanish army landed in Ireland to help the natives, nothing ever enabled them to turn out the hated "Sassenach."
[Sidenote: English colonization]
England had already tried to solve the Irish problem by colonization. Leinster had long been a center of English settlement, and in 1573 the first English colony was sent to Ulster. But as it consisted chiefly of bankrupts, fugitives from justice and others "of so corrupt a disposition as England rather refuseth," it did not help matters much but rather "irrecuperably damnified the state." The Irish Parliament continued to represent only the English of the Pale and of a few towns outside of it. Though the inhabitants of the {349} Pale remained nominally Catholic, the Parliament was so servile that in 1541 it destroyed the monasteries and repudiated the pope, [Sidenote: Religion] shortly after which the king took the title of Head of the Irish Church. Not one penny of the confiscated wealth went to endow an Irish university until 1591, when Trinity College was founded in the interests of Protestantism. Though almost every other country of Europe had its own printing presses before 1500, Ireland had none until 1551, and then the press was used so exclusively for propaganda that it made the very name of reading hateful to the natives. There were, however, no religious massacres and no martyrs of either cause. The persecuting laws were left until the following century.
[Sidenote: Commercial exploitation]
The rise of the traders to political power was more ominous than the inception of a new religion. The country was drained of treasure by the exaction of enormous ransoms for captured chiefs. The Irish cloth-trade and sea-borne commerce were suppressed. The country was flooded with inferior coin, thus putting its merchants at a vast disadvantage. Finally, there was little left that the Irish were able to import save liquors, and those "much corrupted."
With every plea in mitigation of judgment that can be offered, it must be recognized that England's government of Ireland proved a failure. If she did not make the Irish savage she did her best to keep them so, and then punished them for it. By exploiting Erin's resources she impoverished herself. By trying to impose Protestantism she made Ireland the very stronghold of papacy. By striving to destroy the septs she created the nation.
{350}
One of the most important effects of modern means of easy communication between all parts of the world has been to obliterate or minimize distinctions in national character and in degrees of civilization. The manner of life of England and Australia differ less now than the manner of life of England and Scotland differed in the sixteenth century. The great stream of culture then flowed much more strongly in the central than in the outlying parts of Western Europe. The Latin nations, Italy and France, lay nearest the heart of civilization. But slightly less advanced in culture and in the amenities of life, and superior in some respects, were the Netherlands, Switzerland, England and the southern and central parts of Germany. In partial shadow round about lay a belt of lands: Spain, Portugal, Northern Germany, Prussia, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, Scotland, and Ireland.
[Sidenote: Scotland]
Scotland, indeed, had her own universities, but her best scholars were often found at Paris, or in German or Italian academies. Scotch humanists on the continent, the Scotch guard of the French king, and Scotch monasteries, such as those at Erfurt and Würzburg, raised the reputation of the country abroad rather than advanced its native culture. Printing was not introduced until 1507. Brantôme in the sixteenth century, like Aeneas Silvius in the fifteenth, remarked the uncouthness of the northern kingdom.
Most backward of all was Scotland's political development. No king arose strong enough to be at once {351} the tyrant and the saviour of his country; under the weak rule of a series of minors, regents and wanton women a feudal baronage with a lush growth of intestine war and crime, flourished mightily to curse the poor people. When Sir David Lyndsay asked, [Sidenote: 1528] Why are the Scots so poor? he gave the correct answer:
Wanting of justice, policy and peace,
Are cause of their unhappiness, alas!
Something may also be attributed to the poverty of the soil and the lack of important commerce or industries.
[Sidenote: Relations with England]
The policy of any small nation situated in dangerous proximity to a larger one is almost necessarily determined by this fact. In order to assert her independence Scotland was forced to make common cause with England's enemies. Guerrilla warfare was endemic on the borders, breaking out, in each generation, into some fiercer crisis. England, on the other hand, was driven to seek her own safety in the annexation of her small enemy, or, failing that, by keeping her as impotent as possible. True to the maxims of the immoral political science that has commonly passed for statesmanship, the Tudors consistently sought by every form of deliberate perfidy to foster factions in North Britain, to purchase traitors, to hire stabbers, to subsidize rebels, to breed mischief, and to waste the country, at opportune intervals, with armies and fleets. Simply to protect the independence that England denied and attacked, Scotch rulers became fast allies of France, to be counted on, in every war between the great powers, to stir up trouble in England's rear.
On neither side was the policy one of sheer hatred. North and south the purpose increased throughout the century to unite the two countries and thus put an end to the perennial and noxious war. If the early Tudors {351} were mistaken in thinking they could assert a suzerainty by force of arms, they also must be credited with laying the foundations of the future dynastic union. Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, was married to James IV of Scotland. Somerset hoped to effect the union more directly by the marriage of Edward VI and Mary Queen of Scots. That a party of enlightened statesmen in England should constantly keep the union in mind, is less remarkable under the circumstances than that there should have been built up a considerable body of Scotchmen aiming at the same goal. Notwithstanding the vitality of patriotism and the tenacity with which small nations usually refuse to merge their own identity in a larger whole, very strong motives called forth the existence of an English party. One favorable condition was the feudal disorganization of society. Faction was so common and so bitter that it was able to call in the national enemy without utterly discrediting itself. A second element was jealousy of France. For a time, with the French marriages of James V with Mary of Lorraine, a sister of the Duke of Guise, and of Mary Queen of Scots with Francis II, there seemed more danger that the little kingdom should become an appanage of France than a satellite of her southern neighbor. The licentiousness of French officers and French soldiers on Scotch soil made their nation least loved when it was most seen. [Sidenote: Influence of religion] But the great influence overcoming national sentiment was religion. The Reformation that brought not peace but a sword to so much of Europe in this case united instead of divided the nations.
It is sometimes said that national character reveals itself in the national religion. This is true to some extent, but it is still more important to say that a nation's history reveals itself in its forms of faith. From religious statistics of the present day one could {353} deduce with considerable accuracy much of the history of any people.
The contrast between the churches of England and Scotland is the more remarkable when it is considered that the North of England was the stronghold of Catholicism, and that the Lowland Scot, next door to the counties of the Northern Earls who rose against Elizabeth, flew to the opposite extreme and embraced Protestantism in its most pronounced form. To say that Calvinism, uncompromising and bare of adornment, appealed particularly to the dour, dry, rationalistic Scot, is at best but a half truth and at worst a begging of the question. The reasons why England became Anglican and Scotland Presbyterian are found immediately not in the diversity of national character but in the circumstances of their respective polities and history. England cast loose from Rome at a time when the conservative influence of Luther was predominant; Scotland was swept into the current of revolution under the fiercer star of Calvin. The English reformation was started by the crown and supported by the new noblesse of commerce. The Scotch revolution was markedly baronial in tone. It began with the humanists, continued and flourished in the junior branches of great families, among the burgesses of the towns and among the more vigorous of the clergy, both regular and secular. The crown was consistently against the new movement, but the Scottish monarch was too weak to impose his will, or even to have a will of his own. Neither James V nor his daughter could afford to break with Rome and with France. James V, especially, was thrown into the arms of his clergy by the hostility of his nobles. Moreover, after the death of many nobles at the battle of Flodden, the clergy became, for a time, [Sidenote: 1513] the strongest estate in the kingdom.
{354} Like the other estates the clergy were still in the Middle Ages when the Reformation [Sidenote: Reformation] came on them like a thief in the night. In no country was the corruption greater. The bishops and priests took concubines and ate and drank and were drunken and buffeted their fellow men. They exacted their fees to the last farthing, an especially odious one being the claim of the priest to the best cow on the death of a parishioner. As a consequence the parsons and monks were hated by the laity.
Humanism shed a few bright beams on the hyperborean regions of Dundee and Glasgow. Some Erasmians, like Hector Boece, prepared others for the Reformation without joining it themselves; some, like George Buchanan, threw genius and learning into the scales of the new faith. The unlearned, too, were touched with reforming zeal. Lollardy sowed a few seeds of heresy. About 1520 Wyclif's version of the New Testament was turned into Scots by one John Nesbit, but it remained in manuscript.
In the days before newspapers tidings were carried from place to place by wandering merchants and itinerant scholars. Far more than today propaganda was dependent on personal intercourse. One of the first preachers of Lutheranism in Scotland was a Frenchman named La Tour, who was martyred on his return to his own country. The noble Patrick Hamilton made a pilgrimage to the newly founded University of Marburg, and possibly to Wittenberg. Filled, as his Catholic countryman, Bishop John Leslie put it, "with venom very poisonable and deadly . . . soaked out of Luther and other archheretics," he returned to find the martyr's crown in his native land. [Sidenote: February 29, 1528] "The reek of Patrick Hamilton" infected all upon whom it blew. Other young men visited Germany. Some, like Alexander Alesius and John MacAlpine, found positions in {355} foreign universities. Others visited Wittenberg for a short time to carry thence the new gospel. A Scotch David[1] appears at Wittenberg in January 1528. Another Scot, "honorably born and well seen in scholastic theology, exiled from his land on account of the Word," made Luther's acquaintance in May, 1529. Another of the Reformer's visitors was James Wedderburn whose brother, John, [Sidenote: 1540-2] translated some of the German's hymns, and published them as "Ane compendious Booke of Godly and spiritual Songs."
While men like these were bringing tidings of the new faith back to their countrymen, others were busy importing and distributing Lutheran books. The Parliament prohibited [Sidenote: July 17, 1525] all works of "the heretic Luther and his disciples," but it could not enforce this law. The English agent at Antwerp reported to Wolsey that New Testaments and other English works were bought by Scottish merchants [Sidenote: February 20, 1527] and sent to Edinburgh and St. Andrews. The popularity and influence of Tyndale's and Coverdale's Bible is proved by the rapid anglicizing, from this date onward, of the Scots dialect. The circulation of the Scriptures in English is further proved by the repetition of the injunctions against using them. But the first Bible printed in Scotland was that of Alexander Arbuthnot in 1579, based on the Geneva Bible in 1561.
[Sidenote: March 14, 1531]
Another indication of the growth of Lutheranism is the request of King James V to Consistory for permission to tax his clergy one-third of their revenues in order to raise an army against the swarm of his Lutheran subjects. As these Protestants met in private houses, Parliament passed a law, [Sidenote: 1540] "That none hold nor let be holden in their houses nor other ways, congregations or conventicles to commune or dispute of {356} the Holy Scripture, without they be theologians approved by famous universities."
As the new party grew the battle was joined. At least twelve martyrs perished in the years 1539-40. [Sidenote: Pamphlets] The field was taken on either side by an army of pamphlets, ballads and broadsides, of which the best known, perhaps, is David Lyndsay's Ane Satire of the thrie Estatis. In this the clergy are mercilessly attacked for greed and wantonness. [Sidenote: 1540] The New Testament is highly praised by some of the characters introduced into the poem, but a pardoner complains that his credit has been entirely destroyed by it and wishes the devil may take him who made that book. He further wishes that "Martin Luther, that false loon, Black Bullinger and Melanchthon" had been smothered in their chrisom-cloths and that St. Paul had never been born.
[Sidenote: Mary Stuart, born Dec. 8, 1542]
When James V died, he left the crown to his infant daughter of six days old, that Mary whose beauty, crimes and tragic end fixed the attention of her contemporaries and of posterity alike. For the first three years of her reign the most powerful man in the kingdom was David Beaton, Cardinal Archbishop of St. Andrews. His policy, of course, was to maintain the Catholic religion, and this implied the defence of Scotch independence against England. Henry VIII, with characteristic lack of scruple, plotted to kidnap the infant queen and either to kidnap or to assassinate the cardinal. Failing in both, he sent an army north with orders to put man, woman and child to the sword wherever resistance was made. Edinburgh castle remained untaken, but Holyrood was burned and the country devastated as far as Sterling.
[Sidenote: Cardinal Beaton]
Defeated by England, Beaton was destined to {357} perish in conflict with his other enemy, Protestantism. During this time of transition from Lutheranism to Calvinism, the demands of the Scotch reformers would have been more moderate than they later became. They would doubtless have been content with a free Bible, free preaching and the sequestration of the goods of the religious orders. Under George Wishart, who translated the First Helvetic Confession, [Sidenote: 1536 or 1537] the Kirk began to assume its Calvinistic garb and to take the aspect of a party with a definite political program. The place of newspapers, both as purveyors of information and as organs of public opinion, was taken by the sermons of the ministers, most of them political and all of them controversial. Of this party Beaton was the scourge. He himself believed that in 1545 heresy was almost extinct, and doubtless his belief was confirmed when he was able to put Wishart to death. [Sidenote: March 1, 1546] In revenge for this a few fanatics murdered him. [Sidenote: May 29]
[Sidenote: John Knox]
In the consummation of the religious revolution during the next quarter of a century, one factor was the personality of John Knox. A born partisan, a man of one idea who could see no evil on his own side and no good on the other, as a good fighter and a good hater he has had few equals. His supreme devotion to the cause he embraced made him credulous of evil in his foes, and capable of using deceit and of applauding political murder. Of his first preaching against Romanism it was said, "Other have sned [snipped] the branches, but this man strikes at the root," and well nigh the latest judgment passed upon him, that of Lord Acton, is that he differed from all other Protestant founders in his desire that the Catholics should be exterminated, either by the state or by the self-help of all Christian men. His not to speak the words of love and mercy from the gospel, but to curse and {358} thunder against "those dumb dogs, the poisoned and pestilent papists" in the style of the Old Testament prophet or psalmist. But while the harshness of his character has repelled many, his fundamental consistency and his courage have won admiration. As a great preacher, "or he had done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit in blads and fly out of it." His style was direct, vigorous, plain, full of pungent wit and biting sarcasm.
Even the year of his birth is in dispute. The traditional date is 1505; but it has been shown with much reason that the more likely date is 1513 or 1514. That he had a university education and that he was ordained priest is all that is known of him until about 1540. During the last months of Wishart's life Knox was his constant attendant. His own preaching continued the work of the martyr until June, 1547, when St. Andrews was captured by the French fleet and Knox was made a galley slave for nineteen months. Under the lash and, what grieved him even more, constantly plied with suggestions that he should "commit idolatry" in praying to the image of Mary, his heart grew bitter against the French and their religion.
Released, either through the influence of the English government, [Sidenote: January 1549] or by an exchange of prisoners, Knox spent the next five years in England. After filling positions as preacher at Berwick and Newcastle, [Sidenote: 1551] he was appointed royal chaplain and was offered the bishopric of Rochester, which he declined because he foresaw the troubles under Mary. As the pioneer of Puritanism in England he used his influence to make the Book of Common Prayer more Protestant. Not long after Mary's accession Knox fled to the Continent, spending a few years at Frankfort and Geneva. He was much impressed by "that notable servant of {359} God, John Calvin" whose system he adopted with political modifications of his own.
In the meantime things were not going well in Scotland. The country had suffered another severe defeat [Sidenote: September 10, 1547] at the hands of the English in the battle of Pinkie. The government was largely in the hands of the Queen Dowager, Mary of Lorraine, who naturally favored France, and who married her daughter, the Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin Francis, [Sidenote: April 24, 1558] both of them being fifteen years old. By treaty she conveyed Scotland to the king of France, acting on the good old theory that her people were a chattel. Though the pact, with its treason to the people, was secret, its purport was guessed by all. Whereas the accession of Francis II momentarily bound Scotland closer to France, his death in the following year again cut her loose, and allowed her to go her own way.
All the while the Reformed party had been slowly growing in strength. Somerset took care to send plenty of English Bibles across the Cheviot Hill, rightly seeing in them the best emissaries of the English interest. The Scotch were drawn towards England by the mildness of her government as much as they were alienated from France by the ferocity of hers. In Scotland the English party, when it had the chance, made no Catholic martyrs, but the French party continued to put heretics to death. The execution of the aged Walter Milne, [Sidenote: 1558] the last of the victims of the Catholic persecution, excited especial resentment.
Knox now returned to his own country for a short visit. [Sidenote: Knox, August, 1555] He there preached passionately against the mass and addressed a letter to the Regent Mary of Lorraine, begging her to favor the gospel. This she treated as a joke, and, after Knox had departed, she sentenced him to death and burnt him in effigy. From Geneva he continued to be the chief adviser of the {360} Protestant party whose leaders drew up a "Common Band," usually known as the First Scottish Covenant. [Sidenote: December 3, 1557] The signers, including a large number of nobles and gentlemen headed by the earls of Argyle, Glencairn and Morton, promised to apply their whole power, substance and lives to maintain, set forward and establish "the most blessed Word of God and his congregation." Under the protection of this bond, reformed churches were set up openly. The Lords of the Congregation, as they were called, demanded that penal statutes against heretics be abrogated and "that it be lawful to us to use ourselves in matters of religion and conscience as we must answer to God." This scheme of toleration was too advanced for the time.
[Sidenote: 1557]
As the assistance of Knox was felt to be desirable, the Lords of the Congregation urgently requested his return. [Sidenote: 1558] Before doing so he published his "Appellation" [Sidenote: May 2, 1559] to the nobles, estates and commonalty against the sentence of death recently passed on him. When he did arrive in Edinburgh, his preaching was like a match set to kindling wood. Wherever he went burst forth the flame of iconoclasm. Images were broken and monasteries stormed not, as he himself wrote, by gentlemen or by "earnest professors of Christ," but by "the rascal multitude." In reckoning the forces of revolution, the joy of the mob in looting must not be forgotten. [Sidenote: May 11] From Perth Knox wrote: "The places of idolatry were made equal with the ground; all monuments of idolatry that could be apprehended, consumed with fire; and priests commanded, under pain of death, to desist from their blasphemous mass." Similar outbursts occurred at St. Andrews, and when Knox returned to Edinburgh, civil war seemed imminent. Pamphlets of the time, like The Beggars' Warning, [Sidenote: 1559] distinctly made the threat of social revolution.
{361} But as a matter of fact the change came as the most bloodless in Europe. The Reformers, popular with the middle and with part of the upper classes, needed only to win English support to make themselves perfectly secure. The difficulty in this course lay in Queen Elizabeth's natural dislike of Knox on account of his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. In this war-whoop, aimed against the Marys of England and Scotland, Knox had argued that "to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm is repugnant to nature, contrary to God, and, finally, it is the subversion of good order and of all equity and justice." The author felt not a little embarrassment when a Protestant woman ascended the throne of England and he needed her help. But to save his soul he "that never feared nor flattered any flesh" could not admit that he was in the wrong, nor take back aught that he had said. He seems to have acted on Barry Lyndon's maxim that "a gentleman fights but never apologizes." When he wrote Elizabeth, [Sidenote: July 20, 1559] all he would say was that he was not her enemy and had never offended her or her realm maliciously or of purpose. He seasoned this attempt at reconciliation by adding a stinging rebuke to the proud young queen for having "declined from God and bowed to idolatry," during her sister's reign, for fear of her life.
But the advantages of union outweighed such minor considerations as bad manners, and early in 1560 a league was formed between England and the Lords of the Congregation. Shortly after the death of Mary of Lorraine [Sidenote: June 11, 1560] the Treaty of Edinburgh [Sidenote: Treaty of Edinburgh, July 6] was signed between the queen of England and the lords of Scotland. This provided: (1) that all English and French troops be sent out of Scotland except 120 French; (2) that all warlike preparations cease; (3) that the {362} Berwickshire citadel of the sea, Eyemouth, be dismantled; (4) that Mary and Francis should disuse the English title and arms; (5) that Philip of Spain should arbitrate certain points, if necessary; (6) that Elizabeth had not acted wrongfully in making a league with the Lords of the Congregation. Mary and Francis refused to ratify this treaty.
A supplementary agreement was proposed between Mary Stuart and her rebellious Protestant subjects. She promised to summon Parliament at once, to make neither war nor peace without the consent of the estates, and to govern according to the advice of a council of twelve chosen jointly by herself and the estates. She promised to give no high offices to strangers or to clergymen; and she extended to all a general amnesty.
[Sidenote: Revolution]
The summons of Parliament immediately after these negotiations proved as disastrous to the old régime as the assembly of the French Estates General in 1789. Though bloodless, the Scotch revolution was as thorough, in its own small way, as that of Robespierre. Religion was changed and a new distribution of political power secured, transferring the ascendency of the crown and of the old privileged orders to a class of "new men," low-born ministers of the kirk, small "lairds" and burgesses. The very constitution of the new Parliament was revolutionary. In the old legislative assemblies between ten and twenty greater barons were summoned; in the Parliament of 1560 no less than 106 small barons assembled, and it was to them, together with the burgesses of the cities, that the adoption of the new religion was due. A Confession of Faith, [Sidenote: Scottish Confession] on extreme Calvinistic lines, had been drawn up by Knox and his fellows; this was presented to Parliament and adopted with only eight dissenting voices, those of five laymen and three bishops. The minority was overawed, not only by the majority in {363} Parliament but by the public opinion of the capital and of the whole Lowlands.
[Sidenote: Laws of the estates]
Just a week after the adoption of the Confession, the estates passed three laws: (1) Abolishing the pope's authority and all jurisdiction by Catholic prelates; (2) repealing all previous statutes in favor of the Roman church; (3) forbidding the celebration of mass. The law calls it "wicked idolatry" and provides that "no manner of person nor persons say mass, nor yet hear mass, nor be present thereat under pain of confiscation of all their goods movable and immovable and punishing their bodies at the discretion of the magistrate." The penalty for the third offence was made death, and all officers were commanded to "take diligent suit and inquisition" to prevent the celebration of the Catholic rite. In reality, persecution was extremely mild, simply because there was hardly any resistance. Scarcely three Catholic martyrs can be named, and there was no Pilgrimage of Grace. This is all the more remarkable in that probably three-fourths of the people were still Catholic. The Reformation, like most other revolutions, was the work not of the majority, but of that part of the people that had the energy and intelligence to see most clearly and act most strongly. For the first time in Scotch history a great issue was submitted to a public opinion sufficiently developed to realize its importance. The great choice was made not by counting heads but by weighing character.
The burgher class having seized the reins of government proceeded to use them in the interests of their kirk. The prime duty of the state was asserted to be the maintenance of the true religion. Ministers were paid by the government. Almost any act of government might be made the subject of interference by the church, for Knox's profession, "with the policy, mind {364} us to meddle no further than it hath religion mixed in it," was obviously an elastic and self-imposed limitation.
[Sidenote: Theocracy]
The character of the kirk was that of a democratic, puritanical theocracy. The real rulers of it, and through it of the state, were the ministers and elders elected by the people. The democracy of the kirk consisted in the rise of most of these men from the lower ranks of the people; its theocracy in the claim of these men, once established in Moses' seat, to interpret the commands of God. "I see," said Queen Mary, after a conversation with Knox, "that my subjects shall obey you rather than me." "Madam," replied Knox, "my study is that both princes and people shall obey God"—but, of course, the voice of the pulpit was the voice of God. As a contemporary put it: "Knox is king; what he wills obeyit is." Finally the kirk was a tyranny, as a democracy may well be. In life, in manners, in thought, the citizen was obliged, under severe social penalty, to conform exactly to a very narrow standard.
[Sidenote: Queen Mary in Scotland, August 19, 1561]
When Queen Mary, a widow eighteen years old, landed in Scotland, she must have been aware of the thorny path she was to tread. It is impossible not to pity her, the spoiled darling of the gayest court of Europe, exposed to the bleak skies and bleaker winds of doctrines at Edinburgh. Endowed with high spirit, courage, no little cleverness and much charm, she might have mastered the situation had her character or discretion equaled her intellect and beauty. But, thwarted, nagged and bullied by men whose religion she hated, whose power she feared and whose low birth she despised, she became more and more reckless in the pursuit of pleasure until she was tangled in a network of vice and crime, and delivered helpless into the hands of her enemies.
{365} Her true policy, and the one which she began to follow, was marked out for her by circumstances. Scotland was to her but the stepping-stone to the throne of England. As Elizabeth's next heir she might become queen either through the death of the reigning sovereign, or as the head of a Catholic rebellion. At first she prudently decided to wait for the natural course of events, selecting as her secretary of state Maitland, "the Scottish Cecil," a staid politician bent on keeping friends with England. But at last growing impatient, she compromised herself in the Catholic plots and risings of the disaffected southerners.
So, while aspiring to three crowns, Mary showed herself incapable of keeping even the one she had. Not religion but her own crimes and follies caused her downfall, but it was over religion that the first clash with her subjects came. She would have liked to restore Catholicism, though this was not her first object, for she would have been content to be left in the private enjoyment of her own worship. Even on this the stalwarts of the kirk looked askance. Knox preached as Mary landed that one mass was more terrible to him than ten thousand armed invaders. Mary sent for him, hoping to win the hard man by a display of feminine and queenly graciousness. [Sidenote: August 1561-December 1563] In all he had five interviews with her, picturesquely described by himself. On his side there were long, stern sermons on the duties of princes and the wickedness of idolatry, all richly illustrated with examples drawn from the sacred page. On her side there was "howling together with womanly weeping," "more howling and tears above that the matter did require," "so many tears that her chamber-boy could scarce get napkins enough to dry her eyes." With absurdly unconscious offensiveness and egotism Knox began acquaintance with his sovereign by remarking that he was as well {366} content to live under her as Paul under Nero. Previously he had maintained that the government was set up to control religion; now he informed Mary that "right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly princes but from the Eternal God alone." "'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that subjects, having power, may resist their princes?' 'If princes exceed their bounds, madam, they may be resisted and even deposed,'" replied Knox. Mary's marriage was the most urgent immediate question of policy. When Knox took the liberty of discussing it with her she burst out: "What have you to do with my marriage? Or what are you within this commonwealth?" "A subject born within the same," superbly retorted the East Lothian peasant, "and though neither earl, lord nor baron, God has made me a profitable member."
[Sidenote: Marriage with Darnley, July 1565]
Determined, quite excusably, to please herself rather than her advisers in the choice of a husband, Mary selected her cousin Henry Stuart Lord Darnley; a "long lad" not yet twenty. The marriage was celebrated in July, 1565; the necessary papal dispensation therefor was actually drawn up on September 25 but was thoughtfully provided with a false date as of four months earlier. Almost from the first the marriage was wretchedly unhappy. The petulant boy insisted on being treated as king, whereas Mary allowed him only "his due." Darnley was jealous, probably with good cause, of his wife's Italian secretary, David Riccio, and murdered him in Mary's presence; [Sidenote: March 9, 1566] "an action worthy of all praise," pontificated Knox.
With this crime begins in earnest that sickening tale of court intrigue and blackest villainy that has commonly passed as the then history of Scotland. To revenge her beloved secretary Mary plotted with a new paramour, the Earl of Bothwell, an able soldier, a {367} nominal Protestant and an evil liver. On the night of February 9-10, 1567, the house of Kirk o' Field near Edinburgh where Darnley was staying and where his wife had but just left him, was blown up by gunpowder and later his dead body was found near by. Public opinion at once laid the crime at the right doors, and it did not need Mary's hasty marriage with Bothwell [Sidenote: Marriage with Bothwell, May 15, 1567] to confirm the suspicion of her complicity.
The path of those opposed to the queen was made easier by the fact that she now had an heir, James, [Sidenote: James VI, June 19, 1566] of Scotland the sixth and afterwards of England the first. The temper of the people of Edinburgh was indicated by the posting up of numerous placards accusing Bothwell and Mary. One of these was a banner on which was painted a little boy kneeling and crowned, and thereon the legend: "Avenge the death of my father!" Deeds followed words; [Sidenote: July 16] Parliament compelled the queen under threat of death to abdicate in favor of her son and to appoint her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, regent. At the coronation of the infant king Knox preached. [Sidenote: July 29] A still more drastic step was taken when Parliament declared Mary guilty of murder [Sidenote: December 15] and formally deposed her from the throne. That Mary really was guilty in the fullest degree there can be no reasonable doubt. An element of mystery has been added to the situation by a dispute over the genuineness of a series of letters and poems purporting to have been written by Mary to Bothwell and known collectively as the Casket Letters. They were discovered in a suspiciously opportune way by her enemies. The originals not being extant, some historians have regarded them in whole or in part as forgeries, but Robertson, Ranke, Froude, Andrew Lang and Pollard accept them as genuine. This is my opinion, but it seems to me that the fascination of {368} mystery has lent the documents undue importance. Had they never been found Mary's guilt would have been established by circumstantial evidence.
Mary was confined for a short time in the castle of Lochleven, but contrived to escape. As she approached Glasgow she risked a battle, [Sidenote: May, 1568] but her troops were defeated and she fled to England. Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary. Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact that she did everything possible to disgrace herself more deeply than ever, such as pensioning the assassin of her brother Moray, her sufferings made her the martyr of sentimentalists, and pieces of embroidery or other possessions of the beautiful queen have been handed down as the precious relics of a saint.[2]
All the murderous intrigues just narrated contributed thoroughly to disgrace the Catholic and royalist party. The revolution had left society dissolved, full of bloodthirsty and false men. But though the Protestants had their share of such villains, they also had the one consistent and public-spirited element in the kingdom, namely Knox and his immediate followers. Moray was a man rather above the average respectability and he confirmed the triumph of Protestantism in the Lowlands in the few short years preceding his assassination in January, 1570. But by this time the revolution had been so firmly accomplished that nothing could shake it. The deposition of a queen, though {369} a defiance of all the Catholic powers and of all the royalist sentiment of Europe, had succeeded. The young king was brought up a Protestant, and his mind was so thoroughly turned against his mother that he acquiesced without a murmur in her execution. At last peace and security smiled upon North Britain. [Sidenote: Preparation for union with England] The coming event of the union with England cast its beneficent shadow over the reign of Elizabeth's successor.
[Sidenote: Absolution]
The Reformation ran the same course as in England earlier; one is almost tempted to hypostatize it and say that it took the bit between its teeth and ran away with its riders. Actually, the man cast for the rôle of Henry VIII was James VI; the slobbering pedant without drawing the sword did what his abler ancestors could not do after a life-time of battle. He made himself all but absolute, and this, demonstrably, as head of the kirk.
In 1584 Parliament passed a series of statutes known as the Black Acts, putting the bodies and souls of the Scotch under the yoke of the king, who was now pope as well. In 1587 the whole property of the pre-Reformation church, with some trifling exceptions, was confiscated and put at the king's disposition. As in England, so here, the lands of abbeys and of prelates was thrown to new men of the pushing, commercial type. Thus was founded a landed aristocracy with interests distinct from the old barons and strong in supporting both king and Reformation.
[Sidenote: Reaction in the kirk, 1592]
It is true that this condition was but temporary. Just as in England later the Parliament and the Puritans called the crown to account, so in Scotland the kirk continued to administer drastic advice to the monarch and finally to put direct legal pressure upon him. The Black Acts were abrogated by Parliament in 1592 and from that time forth ensued a struggle between the {370} king and the presbyteries which, in the opinion of the former, agreed as well together as God and the devil. Still more after his accession to the English throne James came to prefer the episcopal form of church government as more subservient, and to act on the maxim, "no bishop, no king."
[1] Could he have been David Borthwick or David Lyndsay? See Luther's letters and Dictionary of National Biography.
[2] Such a piece of embroidery has been kept in my mother's family from that day to this.
{371}
It is sometimes so easy to see, after the event, why things should have taken just the course they did take, that it may seem remarkable that political foresight is so rare. It is probable, however, that the study of history not only illumines many things, and places them in their true perspective, but also tends to simplify too much, overemphasizing, to our minds, the elements that finally triumphed and casting those that succumbed into the shadow.
[Sidenote: Italy]
However this may be, Italy of the sixteenth century appears to offer an unusually clear case of a logical sequence of effects due to previously ascertainable causes. That Italy should toy with the Reformation without accepting it, that she should finally suppress it and along with it much of her own spiritual life, seems to be entirely due to her geographical, political and cultural condition at the time when she felt the impact of the new ideas.
In all these respects, indeed, there was something that might at first blush have seemed favorable to the Lutheran revolt. Few lands were more open to German and Swiss influences than was their transalpine neighbor. Commercially, Italy and Germany were united by a thousand bonds, and a constant influx of northern travellers, students, artists, officials and soldiers, might be supposed to carry with them the contagion of the new ideas. Again, the lack of political unity might be supposed, as in Germany, so in Italy, {372} to facilitate sectional reformation. Finally, the Renaissance, with its unparalleled freedom of thought and its strong anti-clerical bias, would at least insure a fair hearing for innovations in doctrine and ecclesiastical ideals.
And yet, as even contemporaries saw, there were some things which weighed far more heavily in the scale of Catholicism than did those just mentioned in the scale of Protestantism. In the first place the autonomy of the political divisions was more apparent than real. Too weak and too disunited to offer resistance to any strong foreign power, contended for by the three greatest, Italy became gradually more and more a Spanish dependency. After Pavia [Sidenote: 1525] and the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis [Sidenote: 1529] French influence was reduced to a threat rather than a reality. Naples had long been an appendage of the Spanish crown; Milan was now wrested from the French, and one after another most of the smaller states passed into Spain's "sphere of influence." The strongest of all the states, the papal dominions, became in reality, if not nominally, a dependency of the emperor after the sack of Rome. [Sidenote: 1527] Tuscany, Savoy and Venetia maintained a semblance of independence, but Savoy was at that time hardly Italian. Venice had passed the zenith of her power, and Florence, even under her brilliant Duke Cosimo de' Medici [Sidenote: Cosimo de' Medici, 1537-1574] was amenable to the pressure of the Spanish soldier and the Spanish priest.
Enormous odds were thrown against the Reformers because Italy was the seat of the papacy. In spite of all hatred of Roman morals and in spite of all distrust of Roman doctrine, this was a source of pride and of advantage of the whole country. As long as tribute flowed from all Western Europe, as long as kings and emperors kissed the pontiff's toe, Rome was still in a sense the capital of Christendom. An example of how {373} the papacy was both served and despised has been left us by the Florentine statesman and historian [Sidenote: Guiccidardini, 1483-1540] Guiccidardini: "So much evil cannot be said of the Roman curia," he wrote, "that more does not deserve to be said of it, for it is an infamy, an example of all the shame and wickedness of the world." He might have been supposed to be ready to support any enemy of such an institution, but what does he say?
No man dislikes more than do I the ambition, avarice and effeminacy of the priests, not only because these vices are hateful in themselves but because they are especially unbecoming to men who have vowed a life dependent upon God. . . . Nevertheless, my employment with several popes has forced me to desire their greatness for my own advantage. But for this consideration I should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly understood, but to put this gang of criminals under restraint, so that they might live either without vices or without power.
From this precious text we learn much of the inner history of contemporary Italy. As far as the Italian mind was liberated in religion it was atheistic, as far as it was reforming it went no further than rejection of the hierarchy. The enemies to be dreaded by Rome were, as the poet Luigi Alamanni wrote, [Sidenote: Alamanni, 1495-1556] not Luther and Germany, but her own sloth, drunkenness, avarice, ambition, sensuality and gluttony.
The great spiritual factor that defeated Protestantism in Italy was not Catholicism but the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] Deeply imbued with the tincture of classical learning, naturally speculative and tolerant, the Italian mind had already advanced, in its best representatives, far beyond the intellectual stage of the Reformers. The hostility of the Renaissance to the Reformation was a deep and subtle antithesis of the interests of this world {374} and of the next. It is notable that whereas some philosophical minds, like that of the brilliant Olympia Morata, who had once been completely skeptical, later came under the influence of Luther, there was not one artist of the first rank, not one of the greatest poets, that seems to have been in the least attracted by him. A few minor poets, like Folengo, [Sidenote: Folengo, 1491-1544] showed traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were bitterly hostile. [Sidenote: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology, "because when the mind soars up to see God it is no wonder that, it falls down sometimes blind and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures as a devastating monster.
{375} But there was a third reason why the Reformation could not succeed in Italy, and that was that it could not catch the ear of the common people. If for the churchman it was a heresy, and for the free-thinker a superstition, for the "general public" of ordinarily educated persons it was an aristocratic fad. Those who did embrace its doctrines and read its books, and they were not a few of the second-rate humanists, cherished it as their fathers had cherished the neo-Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, as an esoteric philosophy. So little inclined were they to bring their faith to the people that they preferred to translate the Bible into better Greek or classical Latin rather than into the vulgar Tuscan. And just at the moment when it seemed as if a popular movement of some sort might result from the efforts of the Reformers, or in spite of them, came the Roman Inquisition and nipped the budding plant.
[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]
But between the levels of the greatest intellectual leaders and that of the illiterate masses, there was a surprising number of groups of men and women more or less tinctured with the doctrines of the north. And yet, even here, one must add that their religion was seldom pure Lutheranism or Calvinism; it was Christianized humanism. There was the brilliant woman Vittoria Colonna, who read with rapture the doctrine of justification by faith, but who remained a conforming Catholic all her life. There was Ochino, the general of the Capuchins, whose defection caused a panic at Rome but who remained, nevertheless, an independent rather than an orthodox Protestant. Of like quality were Peter Martyr Vermigli, an exile for his faith, and Jerome Bolsec, a native of France but an inhabitant of Ferrara, whence he took to Geneva an eccentric doctrine that caused much trouble to Calvin. Finally, it was perfectly in accordance with the Italian genius that the most radical of Protestant dissenters, the unitarians Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, should have been born in Siena.
Among the little nests of Lutherans or Christian mystics the most important were at Venice, Ferrara and Naples. As early as 1519 Luther's books found their way to Venice, and in 1525 one of the leading canon lawyers in the city wrote an elaborate refutation of them, together with a letter to the Reformer himself, informing him that his act of burning the papal decretals was worse than that of Judas in betraying, or of Pilate in crucifying, Christ. The first sufferer for the new religion was Jerome Galateo. [Sidenote: 1530] Nevertheless, the new church waxed strong, and many were executed for their opinions. A correspondence of the brethren with Bucer and Luther has been preserved. In one letter they deeply deplore the schisms on the doctrine of the eucharist as hurtful to their cause. The {376} famous artist Lorenzo Lotto [Sidenote: 1540] was employed to paint pictures of Luther and his wife, probably copies of Cranach. The appearance of the Socinians about 1550, and the mutual animosity of the several sects, including the Anabaptist, was destructive. Probably more fatal was the disaster of the Schmalkaldic war and the complete triumph of the emperor. The Inquisition finished the work of crushing out what remained of the new doctrines.
[Sidenote: Naples]
That Naples became a focus of Protestantism was due mainly to John de Valdes, a deeply religious Spaniard. From his circle went out a treatise on justification entitled The Benefit of Christ's Death, by Benedict of Mantua, of which no less than 40,000 copies were sold, for it was the one reforming work to enjoy popularity rivalling that of Luther and Erasmus. Influenced by Valdes, also, Bartholomew Forzio translated Luther's Address to the German Nobility into Italian.
[Sidenote: Ferrara]
At the court of Ferrara the duchess, Renée de France, gathered a little circle of Protestants. Calvin himself spent some time here, and his influence, together with the high protection of his patroness, made the place a fulcrum against Rome. Isabella d'Este, originally of Ferrara and later Marchioness of Mantua, one of the brilliant women of the Renaissance, for a while toyed with the fashionable theology. Cardinal Bembo saw at her castle at Mantua paintings of Erasmus and Luther. [Sidenote: 1537] One of the courtly poets of Northern Italy, Francis Berni, bears witness to the good repute of the Protestants. In his Rifacimento of Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato, he wrote: "Some rascal hypocrites snarl between their teeth, 'Freethinker! Lutheran!' but Lutheran means, you know, good Christian."
[Sidenote: Roman prelates affected by Luther]
The most significant sign of the times, and the most ominous for the papacy, was that among those affected by the leaven of Lutheranism were many of the leading {377} luminaries in the bosom of the church. That the Florentine chronicler Bartholomew Cerratani expressed his hope that Luther's distinguished morals, piety and learning should reform the curia was bad enough; that the papal nuncio Vergerio, after being sent on a mission to Wittenberg, should go over to the enemy, was worse; that cardinals like Contarini and Pole should preach justification by faith and concede much that the Protestants asked, was worst of all. "No one now passes at Rome," wrote Peter Anthony Bandini about 1540, "as a cultivated man or a good courtier who does not harbor some heretical opinions." Paul Sarpi, the eminent historian of Trent, reports that Luther's arguments were held to be unanswerable at Rome, but that he was resisted in order that authority might be uphold. For this statement he appeals to a diary of Francis Chieregato, an eminent ecclesiastic who died on December 6, 1539. As the diary has not been found, Lord Acton rejects the assertion, believing that Sarpi's word cannot be taken unsupported. But a curious confirmation of Sarpi's assertion, [Sidenote: Sarpi's assertion] and one that renders it acceptable, is found in Luther's table talk. Speaking on February 22, 1538, he says that he has heard from Rome that it was there believed to be impossible to refute him until St. Paul had been deposed. Ho regarded this as a signal testimony to the truth of his doctrines; to us it is valuable only as an evidence of Roman opinion. It is not too much to say that at about that time the most distinguished Italian prelates were steering for Wittenberg and threatened to take Rome with them. How they failed is the history of the Counter-reformation.
Nothing can better indicate the consternation caused at Rome by the appearance of the Lutheran revolt than {378} the fact that for the first time in 144 years and for the last time in history the cardinals elected as supreme pontiff a man who was not an Italian, Adrian of Utrecht. [Sidenote: Adrian VI, 1522-September 1523] After teaching theology at Louvain he had been appointed tutor to Prince Charles and, on the accession of his pupil to the Spanish throne was created Bishop of Tortosa, and shortly thereafter cardinal and Inquisitor General of Spain. While in this country he distinguished himself equally by the justness of his administration and by his bitter hatred of Luther, against whom he wrote several letters both to his imperial master and to his old colleagues at Louvain.
[Sidenote: December 1521]
The death of Leo X was followed by an unusually long conclave, on account of the even balance of parties. At last, despairing of agreement, and feeling also that extraordinary measures were needed to meet the exigencies of the situation, the cardinals, in January, offered the tiara to Adrian, who, alone among modern popes, kept his baptismal name while in office. The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish much was due largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty months, and still more to the invincible corruption he found at Rome. His really high sense of duty awakened no response save fear and hatred among the courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore the ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their tongue nor their ways.
{379} Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank into his grave, a good pope unwept and unhonored as few bad popes have ever been. On his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a monument to Adrian's physician and labeled it, "Liberatori Patriae."
[Sidenote: Clement VII, 1523-34]
The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century. In almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a contrast, to his predecessor. In no case was this more true than in the election of 1523. Deciding that if Adrian's methods were necessary to save the church the medicine was worse than the disease, the cardinals lost no time in raising another Medici to the throne. Like all of his race, Clement VII was a patron of art and literature, and tolerant of abuses. Personally moral and temperate, he cared little save for an easy life and the advancement of the Three Balls. He began that policy, which nearly proved fatal to the church, of treating the Protestants with alternate indulgence and severity. But for himself the more immediate trouble came not from the enemy of the church but from its protector. Though Adrian was an old officer of Charles V, it was really in the reign of Clement that the process began by which first Italy, then the papacy, then the whole church was put under the Spanish yoke.
[Sidenote: Spanish influence, 1525-6]
After Pavia and the treaty of Madrid had eliminated French influence, Charles naturally felt his power and naturally intended to have it respected even by the pope. Irritated by Clement's perpetual deceit and intrigue with France, Charles addressed to him, in 1526, a document which Ranke calls the most {380} formidable ever used by any Catholic prince to a pope during the century, containing passages "of which no follower of Luther need be ashamed."
[Sidenote: Sack of Rome, May and September 1527]
Rather to threaten the pope than to make war on him, Charles gathered a formidable army of German and Spanish soldiers in the north under the command of his general Frundsberg. All the soldiers were restless and mutinous for want of pay, and in addition to this a powerful motive worked among the German landsknechts. Many of them were Lutheran and looked to the conquest of Rome as the triumph of their cause. As they loudly demanded to be lead against Antichrist, Frundsberg found that his authority was powerless to stop them. [Sidenote: March 16, 1527] When he died of rage and mortification the French traitor Charles, Constable of Bourbon, was appointed by the emperor in his place, and, finding there was nothing else to do, led the army against Rome and promised the soldiers as much booty as they could take. Twice, in May and September, the city was put to the horrors of a sack, with all the atrocities of murder, theft and rapine almost inseparable from war. In addition to plundering, the Lutherans took particular pleasure in desecrating the objects of veneration to the Catholics. Many an image and shrine was destroyed, while Luther was acclaimed pope by his boisterous champions. But far away on the Elbe he heard of the sack and expressed his sorrow for it.
The importance of the sack of Rome, like that of other dramatic events, is apt to be exaggerated. It has been called the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Catholic reaction. It was neither the one nor the other, but only one incident in the long, stubborn process of the Hispanization of Italy and the church. For centuries no emperor had had so much power in Italy as had Charles. With Naples and {381} Milan were now linked Siena and Genoa under his rule; the states of the church were virtually at his disposal, and even Florence, under its hereditary duke, Alexander de' Medici, was for a while under the control of the pope and through him, of Charles.
Nor did the fall of the holy city put the fear of God into the hearts of the prelates for more than a moment. The Medici, Clement, who never sold his soul but only pawned it from time to time, without entirely abandoning the idea of reform, indefinitely postponed it. Procrastinating, timid, false, he was not the man to deal with serious abuses. He toyed with the idea of a council but when, on the mere rumor that a council was to be called the prices of all salable offices dropped in a panic, he hesitated. Moreover he feared the council would be used by the emperor to subordinate him even in spiritual matters. Perhaps he meant well, but abuses were too lucrative to be lightly affronted. As to Lutheranism, Clement was completely misinformed and almost completely indifferent. While he and the emperor were at odds it grew mightily. Here as elsewhere he was irresolute; his pontificate, as a contemporary wrote, was "one of scruples, considerations and discords, of buts and ifs and thens and moreovers, and plenty of words without effect."
[Sidenote: Paul III, 1534-49]
The pontificate of Paul III marks the turning point in the Catholic reaction. Under him the council of Trent was at last opened; the new orders, especially the Jesuits, were formed, and such instrumentalities as the Inquisition and Index of prohibited books put on a new footing. Paul III, a Farnese from the States of the Church, owed his election partly to his strength of character, partly to the weakness of his health, for the cardinals liked frequent vacancies in the Holy See. Cautious and choleric, prolix and stubborn, he had a real desire for reform and an earnest wish to avoid {382} quarrels with either of the great powers that menaced him, the emperor and France. The reforming spirit of the pope showed itself in the appointment of several men of the highest character to the cardinalate, among them Gaspar Contarini and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. In other cases, however, the exigencies of politics induced the nomination of bad men, such as Del Monte and David Beaton. At the same time a commission was named to recommend practical reforms. The draft for a bull they presented for this purpose was rejected by the Consistory, but some of their recommendations, such as the prohibition of the Roman clergy to visit taverns, theaters and gambling dens, were adopted.
[Sidenote: May, 1535 Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum praelatorum]
A second commission of nine ecclesiastics of high character, including John Peter Caraffa, Contarini, Pole and Giberti, was created to make a comprehensive report on reform. The important memorial they drew up fully exposed the prevalent abuses. The root of all they found in the exaggeration of the papal power of collation and the laxity with which it was used. Not only were morally unworthy men often made bishops and prelates, but dispensations for renunciation of benefices, for absenteeism and for other hurtful practices were freely sold. The commission demanded drastic reform of these abuses as well as of the monastic orders, and called for the abolition of the venal exercise of spiritual authority by legates and nuncios. But the reform memorial, excellent and searching as it was, led to nothing. At most it was of some use as a basis of reforms made by the Council of Trent later. But for the moment it only rendered the position of the church more difficult. The reform of the Dataria, for example, the office which sold graces, privileges, indults, dispensations and benefices, was {383} considered impossible because half of the papal revenue, or 110,000 ducats annually, came from it. Nor could the fees of the Penitentiary be abolished for fear of bankruptcy, though in 1540 they were partially reduced. [Sidenote: 1538] The most obvious results of the Consilium was to put another weapon into the hands of the Lutherans. Published by an unauthorized person, it was at once seized upon by the Reformers as proof of the hopeless depravity of the Curia. So dangerous did it prove to simple-minded Catholics that it was presently put on the Index!
Paul's diplomacy tried to play off the Empire against France and to divert the attention of both to a crusade against the Turk. Hoping to advance the cause of the church by means of the war declared by Charles V on the Schmalkaldic League, the pope, in return for a subsidy, exacted a declaration in the treaty, that the reason of the war was religious and the occasion for it the refusal of the Protestants to recognize the Council of Trent's authority. But when Charles was victor he used his advantage only to strengthen his own prerogative, not effectively to suppress heresy. Paul now dreaded the emperor more than he did the Protestants and his position was not made easier by the threat of Charles to come to terms with the Lutherans did Paul succeed in rousing France against him. In fact, with all his squirming, Paul III only sank deeper into the Spanish vassalage, while the championship of the church passed from his control into that of new agencies that he had created.
[Sidenote: Julius III, 1550-55]
It was perhaps an effort to free the Holy See from the Spanish yoke that led the cardinals to raise to the purple, as Julius III, Cardinal John Mary Ciocchi del Monte who as one of the presidents of the oecumenical council had distinguished himself by his opposition to {384} the emperor. Nevertheless his pontificate marked a relaxation of the church's effort, for policy or strength to pursue reform he had none.
[Sidenote: Marcellus II, April 9-May 1, 1555]
Marcellus II, who was pope for twenty-two days, would hardly be remembered save for the noble Mass of Pope Marcellus dedicated to him by Palestrina.
With the elevation of Cardinal Caraffa to the tiara Peter's keys [Sidenote: Paul IV, 1555-9] were once more restored to strong hands and a reforming heart. The founder of the Theatines was a hot-blooded Neapolitan still, in spite of his seventy-nine years, hale and hearty. Among the reforms he accomplished were some regulations relating to the residence of bishops and some rules for the bridling of Jews, usurers, prostitutes, players and mountebanks. But he was unable to reform himself. He advanced his young kinsmen shamelessly to political office. His jealousy of the Jesuits, in whom he saw a rival to his own order, not only caused him to neglect to use them but made him put them in a very critical position. Nor did he dare to summon again the council that had been prorogued, for fear that some stronger power should use it against himself. He chafed under the Spanish yoke, coming nearer to a conflict with Charles V and his son Philip II than any pope had ventured to do. He even thought of threatening Philip with the Inquisition, but was restrained by prudence. In his purpose of freeing Italy from foreign domination he accomplished nothing whatever.
[Sidenote: Pius IV, 1560-5]
Pius IV was a contrast to the predecessor whom he hated. John Angelo Medici, of Milan, not connected with the Florentine family, was a cheerful, well-wishing, beneficent man, genial and fond of life, a son of the Renaissance, a patron of art and letters. The choice of a name often expresses the ideals and tendencies of a pope; that of Pius was chosen perhaps in imitation {385} of Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the most famous humanist to sit on the fisherman's throne. And yet the spirit of the times no longer allowed the gross licentiousness of the earlier age, and the cause of reform progressed not a little under the diplomatic guidance of the Milanese. In the first place, doubtless from personal motives, he made a fearful example of the kinsmen of his predecessor, four of whom he executed chiefly for the reason that they had been advanced by papal influence. This salutary example practically put an end to nepotism; at least the unfortunate nephews of Paul IV were the last to aspire to independent principalities solely on the strength of kinship to a pope.
[Sidenote: Reforms]
The demand for the continuation and completion of the general council, which had become loud, was acceded to by Pius who thought, like the American boss, that at times it was necessary to "pander to the public conscience." The happy issue of the council, from his point of view, in its complete submissiveness to the papal prerogative, led Pius to emphasize the spiritual rather than the political claims of the hierarchy. In this the church made a great gain, for, as the history of the time shows plainly, in the game of politics the papacy could no longer hold its own against the national states surrounding it. Pius leaned heavily on Philip, for by this time Spain had become the acknowledged champion of the church, but he was able to do so without loss of prestige because of the gradual separation of the temporal from the spiritual power.
Among his measures the most noteworthy was one regulating the powers of the college of cardinals, while their exclusive right to elect the pontiff was maintained against the pretensions of the council. The best Catholic spirit of the time was represented in {386} Cardinal Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, an excellent prelate who sought to win back members of Christ to the fold by his good example, while he did not disdain to use the harsher methods of persecution when necessary. Among the amiable weaknesses of Pius was the belief, inherited from a bygone age, that the Protestants might still be reunited to the church by a few concessions, such as those of the marriage of the clergy and the use of the cup by the laity.
[Sidenote: Pius V, 1566-72]
With Pius V a sterner spirit entered into the councils of the church. The election of the Dominican and Chief Inquisitor Michael Ghislieri was a triumph for the policy of Borromeo. His pitiless hatred of the heretics hounded Catharine de' Medici against the Huguenots, and Philip II against the Dutch. Contrary to the dictates of prudence and the wishes of the greatest Catholic princes, he issued the bull deposing Elizabeth. But he was severe to himself, an ascetic nicknamed for his monkish narrowness "Friar Wooden-shoe" by the Roman populace. He ruthlessly reformed the Italian clergy, meting out terrible punishments to all sinners. Under his leadership Catholicism took the offensive in earnest and accomplished much. His zeal won him the name of saint, for he was the last of the Roman pontiffs to be canonized.
But the reign of sainthood coupled with absolutism is apt to grow irksome, and it was with relief that the Romans hailed the election of Hugo Buoncompagno as Gregory XIII. [Sidenote: Gregory XIII, 1572-85] He did little but follow out, somewhat weakly, the paths indicated by his predecessors. So heavily did he lean on Spain that he was called the chaplain of Philip, but, as the obligations were mutual, and the Catholic king came also to depend more and more upon the spiritual arms wielded by the papacy, it might just as well have been said that Philip was the executioner employed by Gregory. The {387} mediocrity of his rule did not prevent notable achievement by the Jesuits in the cause of the church. His reform of the calendar will be described more fully elsewhere.
Gregory XIII offers an opportunity to measure the moral standard of the papacy after half a century of reform. His policy was guided largely by his ruling passion, love of a natural son, born before he had taken priest's orders, whom he made Gonfaloniere of the church and would have advanced to still further preferment had not his advisers objected. Gregory was the pope who thanked God "for the grace vouchsafed unto Christendom" in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was also the pope who praised and encouraged the plan for the assassination of Elizabeth.[1]
[Sidenote: Sixtus V, 1585-90]
In the person of Sixtus V the spirit of Pius V returned to power. Felix Peretti was a Franciscan and an Inquisitor, an earnest man and a hard one. Like his predecessors pursuing the goal of absolutism, he had an advantage over them in the blessing disguised as the disaster of the Spanish Armada. From this time forward the papacy was forced to champion its cause with the spiritual weapons at its command, and the gain to it as a moral and religious power was enormous. In some ways it assumed the primacy of Catholic Europe, previously usurped by Spain, and attained an influence that it had not had since the Great Schism of the fourteenth century.
The reforms of Sixtus are important rather for their comprehensive than for their drastic quality. The whole machinery of the Curia was made over, the routine of business being delegated to a number of standing committees known as Congregations, such as the Congregation of Ceremonies to watch over matters of precedence at the papal court, and the Congregation {388} of the Consistory to prepare the work of the Consistory. The number of cardinals was fixed at seventy. New editions of the breviary and of the Index were carefully prepared. At the same time the moral reforms of Trent were laxly carried out, for while decrees enforcing them were promulgated by Sixtus with one hand, with the other he sold dispensations and privileges.
[1] Ante, p. 338.
While the popes were enjoying their jus incorrigibilitatis—as Luther wittily expressed it—the church was going to rack and ruin. Had the safety of Peter's boat been left to its captains, it would apparently have foundered in the waves of schism and heresy. No such dangerous enemy has ever attacked the church as that then issuing from her own bosom. Neither the medieval heretics nor the modern philosophers have won from her in so short a time such masses of adherents. Where Voltaire slew his thousands Luther slew his ten thousands, for Voltaire appealed only to the intellect, Luther appealed to the conscience.
[Sidenote: Decline of Protestantism]
The extraordinary thing about the Protestant conquests was their sudden end. Within less than fifty years the Scandinavian North, most of Germany including Austria, parts of Hungary, Poland, most of Switzerland, and Great Britain had declared for the "gospel." France was divided and apparently going the same road; even in Italy there were serious symptoms of disaffection. That within a single generation the tide should be not only stopped but rolled back is one of the most dramatic changes of fortune in history. The only country which Protestantism gained after 1560 was the Dutch Republic. Large parts of Germany and Poland were won back to the church, and Catholicism made safe in all the Latin countries.
{389} [Sidenote: Spanish revival]
The spirit that accomplished this work was the spirit of Spain. More extraordinary than the rapid growth of her empire was the conquest of Europe by her ideals. The character of the Counter-reformation was determined by her genius. It was not, as it started to be in Italy, a more or less inwardly Christianized Renaissance. It was a distinct and powerful religious revival, and one that showed itself, as many others have done, by a mighty reaction. Medievalism was restored, largely by medieval methods, the general council, the emphasis on tradition and dogma, coercion of mind and body, and the ministrations of a monastic order, new only in its discipline and effectiveness, a reduplication of the old mendicant orders in spirit and ideal.
[Sidenote: Preparation for calling a council]
The Oecumenical Council was so double-edged a weapon that it is not remarkable that the popes hesitated to grasp it in their war with the heretic. They had uncomfortable memories of Constance and Basle, of the election and deposition of popes and of decrees limiting their prerogatives. And, moreover, the council was the first authority invoked by the heretic himself. Adrian might have been willing to risk such a synod, but before he had time to call one, his place was taken by the vacillating and pusillanimous Clement. Perpetually toying with the idea he yet allowed the pressure of his courtiers and the difficulties of the political situation—for France was opposed to the council as an imperial scheme—indefinitely to postpone the summons.
The more serious-minded Paul III found another lion in his path. He for the first time really labored to summon the general synod, but he found that the Protestants had now changed their position and would no longer consent to recognize its authority under any conditions to which he could possibly assent. Though {390} his nuncio Vergerio received in Germany and even in Wittenberg a cordial welcome, it was soon discovered that the ideas of the proper constitution of the council entertained by the two parties were irreconciliable. Fundamentally each wanted a council in which its own predominance should be assured. The Schmalkaldic princes, on the advice of their theologians, asked for a free German synod in which they should have a majority vote, and in this they were supported by Francis I and Henry VIII. Naturally no pope could consent to any such measures; under these discouraging circumstances, the opening of the council was continually postponed, and in place of it the emperor held a series of religious colloquies that only served to make the differences of the two parties more prominent.
[Sidenote: Summons of Council, November 19, 1544]
After several years of negotiation the path was made smooth and the bull Laetare Hierusalem summoned a general synod to meet at Trent on March 15, 1545, and assigned it three tasks: (1) The pacification of religious disputes by doctrinal decisions; (2) the reform of ecclesiastical abuses; (3) the discussion of a crusade against the infidel. Delay still interfered with the opening of the assembly, which did not take place until December 15, 1545.
[Sidenote: First period, 1545-7]
The council was held at three separate periods with long intervals. The first period was 1545-7, the second 1551-2, the third 1562-3. The city of Trent was chosen in order to yield to the demand for a German town while at the same time selecting that one nearest to Italy, for the pope was determined to keep the action of the synod under control. Two measures were adopted to insure this end, the initiative and presidency of the papal legates and packing the membership. The faculties to be granted the legates were already decided upon in 1544; these lieutenants were to be, according to Father Paul Sarpi, angels of peace to preside, make {391} all necessary regulations, and publish them "according to custom." The phrase that the council should decide on measures, "legatis proponentibus" was simply the constitutional expression of the principal familiar in many governments, that the legislative should act only on the initiative of the executive, thus giving an immense advantage to the latter. The second means of subordinating the council was the decision to vote by heads and not by nations and to allow no proxies. This gave a constant majority to the Italian prelates sent by the pope. So successful were these measures that the French ambassador bitterly jested of the Holy Ghost coming to Trent in the mailbags from Rome.
[Sidenote: Membership]
At the first session there were only thirty-four members entitled to vote: four cardinals, four archbishops, twenty-one bishops and five generals of orders. There were also present other personages, including an ambassador from King Ferdinand, four Spanish secular priests and a number of friars. The first question debated was the precedence of dogma or reform. Regarding the council chiefly as an instrument for condemning the heretics, the pope was in favor of taking up dogma first. The emperor, on the other hand, wishing rather to conciliate the Protestants and if possible to lure them back to the old church, was in favor of starting with reform. The struggle, which was carried on not so much on the floor of the synod as behind the members' backs in the intrigues of courts, was decided by a compromise to the effect that both dogma and reform should be taken up simultaneously. But all enactments dealing with ecclesiastical irregularities were to bear the proviso "under reservation of the papal authority."
[Sidenote: Dogmatic decrees]
The dogmatic decrees at Trent were almost wholly oriented by the polemic against Protestantism. {392} Practically nothing was defined save what had already been taken up in the Augsburg Confession or in the writings of Calvin, of Zwingli and of the Anabaptists. Inevitably, a spirit so purely defensive could not be animated by a primarily philosophical interest. The guiding star was not a system but a policy, and this policy was nothing more nor less than that of re-establishing tradition. The practice of the church was the standard applied; many an unhistorical assertion was made to justify it and many a practice of comparatively recent growth was sanctioned by the postulate that "it had descended from apostolic use." "By show of antiquity they introduce novelty," was Bacon's correct judgment.
[Sidenote: Bible and tradition]
Quite naturally the first of the important dogmatic decrees was on the basis of authority. The Protestants had acknowledged the Bible only; over against them the Tridentine fathers declared for the Bible and the tradition of the church. The canon of Scripture was different from that recognized by the Protestants in that it included the Apocrypha.
[Sidenote: Justification]
After passing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with {393} plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards. The decree as finally passed established the position that faith and works together justify, and condemned the semi-Lutheran doctrines of "duplicate justice" and imputed righteousness hitherto held by such eminent theologians as Contarini and Cajetan.
Having accomplished this important work the council appeared to the pope ready for dissolution. The protests of the emperor kept it together for a few months longer, but an outbreak of the spotted fever and the fear of a raid during the Schmalkaldic war, served as sufficient excuses to translate the council to Bologna. [Sidenote: March 1547] Though nothing was accomplished in this city the assembly was not formally prorogued until September 13, 1549.
[Sidenote: Second period, 1551-2]
Under pressure from the emperor Pope Julius III convoked the synod for a second time at Trent on May 1, 1551. The personnel was different. The Jesuits Lainez and Salmeron were present working in the interests of the papacy. No French clergy took part as Henry II was hostile. The Protestants were required to send a delegation, which was received on January 24, 1552. They presented a confession, but declined to recognize the authority of a body in which they were not represented. Several dogmatic decrees were passed on the sacraments, reasserting transubstantiation and all the doctrines and usages of the church. A few reform decrees were also passed, but before a great deal could be accomplished the revolt of Maurice of Saxony put both emperor and council in a precarious position and the latter was consequently prorogued for a second time on April 28, 1552.
[Sidenote: Third period, 1562-3]
When, after ten long years, the council again convened at the command of Pius IV, in January, 1562, it is extraordinary to see how little the problems confronting it had changed. Not only was the struggle {394} for power between pope and council and between pope and emperor still going on, but hopes were still entertained in some quarters of reconciling the schismatics. Pius invited all princes, whether Catholic or heretical, to send delegates, but was rebuffed by some of them. The argument was then taken up by the Emperor Ferdinand who sent in an imposing demand for reforms, including the authorization of the marriage of priests, communion in both kinds, the use of the vulgar tongue in divine service, and drastic rules for the improvement of the convents and of the papal courts.
[Sidenote: Jesuits present]
The contention over this bone among the fathers, now far more numerous than in the earlier days, waxed so hot that for ten whole months no session could be held. Mobs of the partisans of the various factions fought in the streets and bitter taunts of "French diseases" and "Spanish eruptions" were exchanged between them. For a time the situation seemed inextricable and one cardinal prophesied the impending downfall of the papacy. But in the nick of time to prevent such a catastrophe the pope was able to send into the field the newly recruited praetorian guards of the Society of Jesuits. Under the command of Cardinal Morone these indefatigable zealots turned the flank of the opposing forces partly by intrigue at the imperial court, partly by skilful manipulation of debate. The emperor's mind was changed; reforms demanded by him were dropped.
The questions actually taken up and settled were dogmatic ones, chiefly concerning the sacrifice of the mass and the perpetuation of the Catholic customs of communion in one kind, the celebration of masses in honor of saints, the celebration of masses in which the priest only communicates, the mixing of water with the wine, the prohibition of the use of the vulgar tongue, and the sanction of masses for the dead. Other {395} decrees amended the marriage laws, and enjoined the preparation of an Index of prohibited books, of a catechism and of standard editions of missal and breviary.
[Sidenote: Subjection to papacy]
How completely the council in its last estate was subdued to the will of the pope is shown by its request that the decrees should all be confirmed by him. This was done by Pius IV in the bull Benedictus Deus. [Sidenote: January 26, 1564] Pius also caused to be prepared a symbol known as the Tridentine Profession of Faith which was made binding on all priests. Save that it was slightly enlarged in 1877 by the pronouncement on Papal Infallibility, it stands to the present day.
[Sidenote: Reception of decrees]
The complete triumph of the papal claims was offset by the cool reception which the decrees received in Catholic Europe. Only the Italian states, Poland, Portugal and Savoy unreservedly recognized the authority of all of them. Philip II, bigot as he was, preferred to make his own rules for his clergy and recognized the laws of Trent with the proviso "saving the royal rights." France sanctioned only the dogmatic, not the practical decrees. The emperor never officially recognized the work of the council at all. Nor were the governments the only recalcitrants. According to Sarpi the body of German Catholics paid no attention to the prescribed reforms and the council was openly mocked in France as claiming an authority superior to that of the apostles.
To Father Paul Sarpi, indeed, the most intelligent observer of the next generation, the council seemed to have been a failure if not a fraud. Its history he calls an Iliad of woes. The professed objects of the council, healing the schism and asserting the episcopal power he thinks frustrated, for the schism was made irreconciliable and the church reduced to servitude.
But the judgment of posterity has reversed that of {396} the great historian, [Sidenote: Constructive work] at least as far as the value of the work done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is concerned. If the church shut out the Protestants and recognized her limited domain, she at least took appropriate measures to establish her rule over what was left. Her power was now collected; her dogma was unified and made consistent as opposed to the mutually diverse Protestant creeds. In several points, indeed, where the opinion of the members was divided, the words of the decrees were ambiguous, but as against the Protestants they were distinct and so comprehensive as rather to supersede than to supplement earlier standards.
Nor should the moral impulse of the council be underestimated, ridiculed though it was by its opponents as if expressed in the maxim, "si non caste, tamen caute." Sweeping decrees for urgent reforms were passed, and above all a machinery set up to carry on the good work. In providing for a catechism, for authoritative editions of the Vulgate, breviary and other standard works, in regulating moot points, in striking at lax discipline, the council did a lasting service to Catholicism and perhaps to the world. Not the least of the practical reforms was the provision for the opening of seminaries to train the diocesan clergy. The first measure looking to this was passed in 1546; Cardinal Pole at once began to act upon it, and a decree of the third session [Sidenote: 1563] ordered that each diocese should have such a school for the education of priests. The Roman seminary, opened two years later, [Sidenote: 1565] was a model for subsequent foundations.
If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reaction to medievalism it was in part also a religious revival. If this was stimulated by the Protestant {397} example, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more was it the answer to a demand on the part of the church for an instrument with which to combat the dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new worlds of heathenism.
Great crises in the church have frequently produced new revivals of monasticism. From Benedict to Bernard, from Bernard to Francis and Dominic, from the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin Christianity. Several new orders, [Sidenote: New monastic orders] all with more or less in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth century. Under Leo X there assembled at Rome a number of men united by the wish to renew their spiritual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory of Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration of Gaetano di Tiene and John Peter Caraffa, arose the order of Theatines, [Sidenote: 1524] a body of devoted priests, dressing not in a special garb but in ordinary priest's robes, who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic reformation. Their especial task was to educate the clergy.
The order of the Capuchins [Sidenote: c. 1526] was an offshoot of the Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the early friars and its members went about teaching the poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it when its third vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flourished and turned its energies especially against the heretics.
Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barnabites (1530), the Somascians (1532), the Brothers of Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537), only the common characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the salvation of the individual soul but also the {398} amelioration of humanity was now their purpose. Some of the orders devoted themselves to the education of children, some to home missions or foreign missions, some to nursing the sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. The evolution of monasticism had already pointed the way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with the organization of the Company of Jesus.
[Sidenote: Typical Jesuit]
The Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order. Let us neither praise nor blame, but seek to understand them.
[Sidenote: Loyola, c. 1493-1556]
In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever-lasting nay at Worms one of his auditors was—or might have been for she was undoubtedly present in the city—Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave John of Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous young woman had been by a former marriage the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his court she had been known and worshipped by a young page of good family, Iñigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as he told later, for his lady "no duchess nor countess but one far higher" and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors" had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was probably punished severely.
Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna. Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May 23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off, but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The young man of about twenty-eight—the exact year of his birth is unknown—found himself a cripple for life.
To while away the long hours of convalescence he asked for the romances of chivalry but was unable to get them and read in their place legends of the saints and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His imagination took fire at the new possibilities of heroism and of fame. "What if you should be a saint like Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what if you should even surpass them in sanctity?" His choice was fixed. He took Madonna for his lady and determined to become a soldier of Christ.
As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrimage to Seville and Manresa and there dedicated his arms in a church in imitation of the knights he had read about in Amadis of Gaul. Then, with a general confession and much fasting and mortification of the flesh, began a period of doubt and spiritual anguish {400} that has sometimes been compared with that of Luther. Both were men of strong will and intellect, both suffered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development was somewhat quieter and more normal—if, indeed, in the psychology of conversion so carefully studied by James, the quieter is the more normal. At any rate where Luther had one vision on an exceptional occasion, Loyola had hundreds and had them daily. Ignatius saw the Trinity as a clavichord with three strings, the miracle of transubstantiation as light in bread, Satan as a glistening serpent covered with bright, mysterious eyes, Jesus as "a big round form shining as gold," and the Trinity again as "a ball of fire."
But with all the visions he kept his will fixed on his purpose. [Sidenote: 1523] At first this took the form of a vow to preach to the infidels and he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only to be turned back by the highest Christian authority in that region, the politically-minded Franciscan vicar.
[Sidenote: 1524]
On returning to Spain he went to Barcelona and started to learn Latin with boys, for his education as a gentleman had included nothing but reading and writing his own tongue. Thence he went to the university of Alcalá where he won disciples but was imprisoned for six weeks by the Inquisition and forbidden to hold meetings with them. Practically the same experience was repeated at Salamanca where he was detained by the Holy Office for twenty-two days and again prohibited from holding religious meetings. Thus he was chased out of Spain by the church he sought to serve. Turning his steps to Paris he entered the College of Montaigu, and, if he here was free from the Inquisition he was publicly whipped by the college authorities as a dangerous fanatic. Nevertheless, here he gathered his first permanent disciples, Peter Le Fèvre of Savoy, Francis Xavier of Pampeluna and two Castilians, {401} James Laynez and Alfonso Salmeron. The little man, hardly over five feet two inches high, deformed and scarred, at the age of thirty-five, won men to him by his smile, as of a conqueror in pain, by his enthusiasm, his mission and his book.
[Sidenote: The Spiritual Exercises]
If one reckons the greatness of a piece of literature not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius will rank high. Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If he took some things from Garcia de Cisneros, some from The Imitation of Christ, some from the rules of Montaigu, where he studied, far more he took from the course of discipline to which he had subjected himself at Manresa. The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his imagination. His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in his followers were drastic in the extreme.
The purpose of the Exercises is stated in the axiom that "Man was created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord and thereby to save his soul." To fit a man for this work the spiritual exercises were divided into four periods called weeks, though each period might be shortened or lengthened at the discretion of the director. The first week was devoted to the consideration of sin; the second to that of Christ's life as far as Palm Sunday; the third to his passion; and the fourth to his resurrection and ascension. Knowing the tremendous power of the stimulant to be administered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of moderation in the application of it. But, subject only to the condition that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he could bear, he was directed in the first week of {402} solitary meditation to try to see the length, breadth and depth of hell, to hear the lamentations and blasphemies of the damned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable fire. In like manner in the other weeks he was to try to picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all the events brought before his mind, whether terrible or glorious. The end of all this discipline was to be the complete subjection of the man to the church. The Jesuit was directed ever "to praise all the precepts of the church, holding the mind ready to find reasons for her defence and nowise in her offence." There must be an unconditional surrender to her not only of the will but of the intelligence. "To make sure of being right in all things," says Loyola, "we ought always to hold by the principle that the white I see I should believe to be black if the hierarchical church were so to rule it."
Inspired by this ideal the small body of students, agreeing to be called henceforth the Company of Jesus—a military term, the socii being the companions or followers of a chief in arms—took vows to live in poverty and chastity [Sidenote: August 15, 1540] and to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. With this object they set out to Venice and then turned towards Rome for papal approbation of their enterprise. Their first reception was chilling, but they gradually won a few new recruits and Ignatius drafted the constitution [Sidenote: September 27, 1540] for a new order which was handed to the pope by Contarini and approved in the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, which quotes from the formula of the Jesuits:
Whoever wishes to fight for God under the standard
of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on
earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a solemn vow of
perpetual chastity, consider that he is part of a society
instituted chiefly for these ends, for the profit of souls in
{403}
life and Christian doctrine, for the propagation of the
faith through public preaching, the ministry of God's
word, spiritual exercises and works of charity, and
especially for the education of children and ignorant persons
in Christianity, for the hearing of confession and for the
giving of spiritual consolation.
Moreover it is stated that the members of the new order should be bound by a vow of special obedience to the pope and should hold themselves ready at his behest to propagate the faith among Turks, infidels, heretics or schismatics, or to minister to believers.
[Sidenote: April 1547]
Ignatius was chosen first general of the order. The pope then cancelled the previous limitation of the number of Jesuits to 60 [Sidenote: 1544] and later issued a large charter of privileges for them. [Sidenote: 1549] They were exempted from taxes and episcopal jurisdiction; no member was to be allowed to accept any dignity without the general's consent, nor could any member be assigned to the spiritual direction of women. Among many other grants was one to the effect that the faithful might confess to them and receive communion without permission of their parish priests. A confirmation of all privileges and a grant of others was made in a bull of July 21, 1550.
[Sidenote: Organization of the Society of Jesus, 1550]
The express end of the order being the world-domination of the church, its constitution provided a marvellously apt organization for this purpose. Everything was to be subordinate to efficiency. Detachment from the world went only so far as necessary for the completer conquest of the world. Asceticism, fasting, self-discipline were to be moderate so as not to interfere with health. No special dress was prescribed, for it might be a hindrance rather than a help. The purpose being to win over the classes rather than the masses, the Jesuits were particular to select as members only robust men of agreeable appearance, calm minds and {404} eloquence. That an aspirant to the order should also be rich and of good family was not requisite but was considered desirable. Men of bad reputation, intractible, choleric, or men who had ever been tainted with heresy, were excluded. No women were recruited.
After selection, the neophyte was put on a probation of two years. He was then assigned to the class of scholars for further discipline. He was later placed either as a temporal coadjutor, a sort of lay brother charged with inferior duties, or as a spiritual coadjutor, who took the three irrevocable vows. Finally, there was a class, to which admission was gained after long experience, the Professed of Four Vows, the fourth being one of special obedience to the pope. A small number of secret Jesuits who might be considered as another class, were charged with dangerous missions and with spying.
[Sidenote: General]
Over the order was placed a General who was practically, though not theoretically, absolute. On paper he was limited by the possibility of being deposed and by the election, independently of his influence, of an "admonitor" and some assistants. In practice the only limitations of his power were the physical ones inherent in the difficulties of administering provinces thousands of miles away. From every province, however, he received confidential reports from a multitude of spies.
The spirit of the order was that of absolute, unquestioning, blind obedience. The member must obey his superior "like a corpse which can be turned this way or that, or a rod that follows every impulse, or a ball of wax that might be moulded in any form." The ideal was an old one; the famous perinde ac cadaver itself dates back to Francis of Assisi, but nowhere had the ideal been so completely realized as by the companions of Ignatius. In fact, in this as in other respects, the {405} Jesuits were but a natural culmination of the evolution of monasticism. More and more had the orders tended to become highly disciplined, unified bodies, apt to be used for the service of the church and of the pope.
[Sidenote: Growth]
The growth of the society was extraordinarily rapid. By 1544 they had nine establishments, two each in Italy, Spain and Portugal and one each in France, Germany and the Netherlands. When Loyola [Sidenote: July 31, 1556] died Jesuits could be found in Japan and Brazil, in Abyssinia and on the Congo; in Europe they were in almost every country and included doctors at the largest universities and papal nuncios to Poland and Ireland. There were in all twelve provinces, about 65 residences and 1500 members.
Their work was as broad as their field, but it was dedicated especially to three several tasks: education, war against the heretic, and foreign missions. Neither of the first two was particularly contemplated by the founders of the order in their earliest period. At that time they were rather like the friars, popular preachers, catechists, confessors and charitable workers. But the exigencies of the time called them to supply other needs. The education of the young was the natural result of their desire to dominate the intellectual class. Their seminaries, at first adapted only to their own uses, soon became famous.
[Sidenote: Combating heresy]
In the task of combating heresy they were also the most successful of the papal cohorts. Though not the primary purpose of the order, it soon came to be regarded as their special field. The bull canonizing Loyola [Sidenote: 1623] speaks of him as an instrument raised up by divine providence especially to combat that "foulest of monsters" Martin Luther. Beginning in Italy the Jesuits revived the nearly extinct popular piety. Going among the poor as missionaries they found many who knew no prayers, many who had not confessed for {406} thirty or forty years, and a host of priests as blind as their flocks.
In most other Catholic countries they had to fight for the right to exist. In France the Parlement of Paris was against them, and even after the king had granted them permission to settle in the country in 1553, the Parlement accused them of jeoparding the faith, destroying the peace of the church, supplanting the old orders and tearing down more than they built up. Nevertheless they won their way to a place of great power, until, sitting at the counsels of the monarch, they were able to crush their Catholic opponents, the Jansenists, as completely as their Protestant enemies were crushed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
In the Netherlands the Jesuits were welcomed as allies of the Spanish power. The people were impressed by their zeal, piety, and disinterestedness, and in the Southern provinces they were able to bear away a victory after a fierce fight with Calvinism.
In England, where they showed the most devotion, they met with the least success. The blood of their martyrs did not sow the ground with Catholic seed, and they were expelled by statute under Elizabeth.
[Sidenote: Jesuit victories]
The most striking victories of the Jesuits were won in Central Europe. When the first of their company, Peter Faber, entered Germany in 1540, he found nearly the whole country Lutheran. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria were almost the only reigning family that never compromised with the Reformers and in them the Jesuits found their starting point and their most constant ally. Called to the universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna their success was great and from these foci they radiated in all directions, to Poland, to Hungary, to the Rhine. One of their most eminent missionaries was Peter Canisius, whose catechism, published in 1555 in three forms, short, long and middle, and in two {407} languages, German and Latin, became the chief spiritual text-book of the Catholics. The idea and selection of material was borrowed from Luther and he was imitated also in the omission of all overt polemic material. This last feature was, of course, one of the strongest.
[Sidenote: Missions to heathens]
But the conquests of the Company of Jesus were as notable in lands beyond Europe as they were in the heart of civilization. They were not, indeed, pioneers in the field of foreign missions. The Catholic church showed itself from an early period solicitous for the salvation of the natives of America and of the Far East. The bull of Alexander VI stated that his motive in dividing the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal was chiefly to assist in the propagation of the faith. That the Protestants at first developed no activity in the conversion of the heathen was partly because their energies were fully employed in securing their own position, and still more, perhaps, because, in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had a practical monopoly of the transoceanic trade and thus the only opportunities of coming into contact with the natives.
Very early Dominican and Franciscan friars went to America. Though some of them exemplified Christian virtues that might well have impressed the natives, the greater number relied on the puissant support of the Toledo sword. Though the natives, as heathen born in invincible ignorance, were exempt from the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, they were driven by terror if not by fire, into embracing the religion of their conquerors. If some steadfast chiefs told the missionaries that they would rather go to hell after death than live for ever with the cruel Christians, the tribes as a whole, seeing their dreaded idols overthrown and their temples uprooted, embraced the religion of the stronger God, as they quailed before his {408} votaries. Little could they understand of the mysteries of the faith, and in some places long continued to worship Christ and Mary with the ritual and attributes of older deities. But nominally a million of them were converted by 1532, and when the Jesuits arrived a still more successful effort was made to win over the red man. The important mission in Brazil, served by brave and devoted brothers of Ignatius, achieved remarkable results, whereas in Paraguay the Jesuits founded a state completely under their own tutelage.
In the Far East the path of the missionary was broken by the trader. At Goa the first ambassadors of Christ were friars, and here they erected a cathedral, a convent, and schools for training native priests. But the greatest of the missionaries to this region was Francis Xavier, [Sidenote: Xavier, 1506-52] the companion of Loyola. Not forgetting the vow which he, together with all the first members of the society, had taken, [Sidenote: April 1541] he sailed from Lisbon, clothed with extraordinary powers. The pope made him his vicar for all the lands bathed by the Indian Ocean, [Sidenote: May, 1542] and the king of Portugal gave him official sanction and support. Arriving at Goa he put himself in touch with the earlier missionaries and began an earnest fight against the immorality of the port, both Christian and native. His motto "Amplius" led him soon to virgin fields, among the natives of the coast and of Ceylon. In 1545 he went to Cochin-China, thence to the Moluccas and to Japan, preaching in every place and baptizing by the thousand and ten thousand.
Though Xavier was a man of brilliant endowments and though he was passionately devoted to the cause, to neither of his good qualities did he owe the successes, whether solid or specious, with which he has been credited. In the first place, judged by the standards of modern missions, the superficiality of his work was {409} almost inconceivable. He never mastered one of the languages of the countries which he visited. He learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed and some phrases on the horrors of hell, and repeated them to the crowds attracted to him by the sound of a bell. He addressed himself to masses rather than to individuals and he regarded the culmination of his work as being merely the administration of baptism and not the conversion of heart or understanding. Thus, he spent hours in baptizing, with all possible speed, sick and dying children, believing that he was thus rescuing their souls from limbo. Probably many of his adult converts never understood the meaning of the application of water and oil, salt and spittle, that make up the ritual of Catholic baptism.
[Sidenote: Use of force]
In the second place, what permanent success he achieved was due largely to the invocation of the aid of the civil power. One of the most illuminating of Xavier's letters is that written to King John of Portugal on January 20, 1548, in which he not only makes the reasonable request that native Christians be protected from persecution by their countrymen, but adds that every governor should take such measures to convert them as would insure success to his preaching, for without such support, he says, the cause of the gospel in the Indies would be desperate, few would come to baptism and those who did come would not profit much in religion. Therefore he urges that every governor, under whose rule many natives were not converted, should be mulcted of all his goods and imprisoned on his return to Portugal. What the measures applied by the Portugese officers must have been, under such pressure, can easily be inferred from a slight knowledge of their savage rule.
It has been said that every organism carries in {410} itself the seeds of its own decay. The premature corruption [Sidenote: Decay of Jesuits] of the order was noticed by its more earnest members quite early in its career. The future general Francis Borgia wrote: [Sidenote: 1560] "The time will come when the Company will be completely absorbed in human sciences without any application to virtue; ambition, pride and arrogance will rule." The General Aquaviva said explicitly, [Sidenote: 1587] "Love of the things of this world and the spirit of the courtier are dangerous diseases in our Company. Almost in spite of us the evil creeps in little by little under the fair pretext of gaining princes, prelates, and the great ones of the world."
A principal cause of the ultimate odium in which the Jesuits were held as well as of their temporary successes, was their desire for speedy results. [Sidenote: Efficiency] Every one has noticed the immense versatility of the Jesuits and their superficiality. They produced excellent scholars of a certain rank, men who could decipher Latin inscriptions, observe the planets, publish libraries of historical sources, of casuistry and apologetic, or write catechisms or epigrams. They turned with equal facility to preaching to naked savages and to the production of art for the most cultivated peoples in the world. And yet they have rarely, if ever, produced a great scholar, a great scientist, a great thinker, or even a great ascetic. They were not founded for such purposes; they were founded to fight for the church and they did that with extraordinary success.
[Sidenote: Failure]
But their very efficiency became, as pursued for its own sake it must always become, soulless. In terms suggested by the Great War, the Jesuits were the incarnation of religious militarism. To set up an ideal of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanatical enthusiasm for that ideal and then to provide an organization and discipline marvellously adapted to conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster who {411} proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat back the Reformation, have known how to do better than anyone else. Their methods took account of everything except the conscience of mankind.
Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager pursuit of tangible results they lowered the ethical standards of the church. Wishing to open her doors as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they could not make all men saints, they brought down the requirements for admission to the average human level. One cannot take the denunciations of Jesuitical "casuistry" and "probabilism" at their face value, but one can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their early works, very dangerous compromises with the world. [Sidenote: Jesuitical compromises] One reads in their books how the bankrupt, without sinning mortally, may defraud his creditors of his mortaged goods; how the servant may be excused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man may pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the adulteress may rightfully deny her sin to her husband, even on oath.[1] Doubtless these are extreme instances, but that they should have been possible at all is a melancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, substitute inferior imitations for genuine morality.
[1] Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of moral theology, printed in C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papst-tums[3], 1911, pp. 447 ff.
Not only by propaganda appealing to the mind and heart did the Catholic church roll back the tides of Reformation and Renaissance, but by coercion also. In this the church was not alone; the Protestants also persecuted and they also censored the press with the object of preventing their adherents from reading the arguments of their opponents. But the Catholic {412} church was not only more consistent in the application of her intolerant theories but she almost always assumed the direction of the coercive measures directly instead of applying them through the agency of the state. Divided as they were, dependent on the support of the civil government and hampered, at least to some slight extent, by their more liberal tendencies, the Protestants never had instrumentalities half as efficient or one-tenth as terrible as the Inquisition and the Index.
The Inquisition was a child of the Middle Ages. For centuries before Luther the Holy Office had cauterized the heretical growths on the body of Mother Church. The old form was utilized but was given a new lease of life by the work it was called upon to perform against the Protestants. Outside of the Netherlands the two forms of the Inquisition which played the largest part in the battles of the sixteenth century were the Spanish and the Roman.
[Sidenote: Spanish Inquisition]
The Inquisition was licensed in Spain by a bull of Sixtus IV of 1478, and actually established by Ferdinand and Isabella in Castile in 1480, and soon afterwards in their other dominions. It has sometimes been said that the Spanish Inquisition was really a political rather than an ecclesiastical instrument, but the latest historian of the subject, whose deep study makes his verdict final, has disposed of this theory. Though occasionally called upon to interfere in political matters, this was exceptional. Far more often it asserted an authority and an independence that embarrassed not a little the royal government. On the other hand it soon grew so great and powerful that it was able to ignore the commands of the popes. On account of its irresponsible power it was unpopular and was only tolerated because it was so efficient in crushing out the heresy that the people hated.
{413} [Sidenote: Procedure]
The annals of its procedure and achievements are one long record of diabolical cruelty, of protracted confinement in dungeons, of endless delay and browbeating to break the spirit, of ingenious tortures and of racked and crushed limbs and of burning flesh. In mitigation of judgment, it must be remembered that the methods of the civil courts were also cruel at that time, and the punishments severe.
As the guilt of the suspected person was always presumed, every effort was made to secure confession, for in matters of belief there is no other equally satisfactory proof. Without being told the nature of his crime or who was the informant against him, the person on trial was simply urged to confess. An advocate was given him only to take advantage of his professional relations with his client by betraying him. The enormous, almost incredible procrastination by which the accused would be kept in prison awaiting trial sometimes for five or ten or even twenty years, usually sufficed to break his spirit or to unbalance his mind. Torture was first threatened and then applied. All rules intended to limit its amount proved illusory, and it was applied practically to any extent deemed necessary, and to all classes; nobles and clergy were no less obnoxious to it than were commons. Nor was there any privileged age, except that of the tenderest childhood. Men and women of ninety and boys and girls of twelve or fourteen were racked, as were young mothers and women with child. Insanity, however, if recognized as genuine, was considered a bar to torture.
Acquittal was almost, though not quite, unknown. Sometimes sentence was suspended and the accused discharged without formal exoneration. Very rarely acquittal by compurgation, that is by oath of the accused supported by the oaths of a number of persons that they believed he was telling the truth, was allowed. {414} Practically the only plea open to the suspect was that the informers against him were actuated by malice. As he was not told who his accusers were this was difficult for him to use.
[Sidenote: Penalties]
The penalties were various, including scourging, the galleys and perpetual imprisonment. Capital punishment by fire was pronounced not only on those who were impenitent but on those who, after having been once discharged, had relapsed. In Spain, heretics who recanted before execution were first strangled; the obstinately impenitent were burned alive. Persons convicted of heresy who could not be reached were burnt in effigy.
Acting on the maxim ecclesia non sitit sanguinem the Inquisitors did not put their victims to death by their own officers but handed them over to the civil authorities for execution. With revolting hypocrisy they even adjured the hangmen to be merciful, well knowing that the latter had no option but to carry out the sentence of the church. Magistrates who endeavored to exercise any discretion in favor of the condemned were promptly threatened with excommunication.
If anything could be wanting to complete the horror it was supplied by the festive spirit of the executions. The Auto da Fe, [Sidenote: Auto da Fe] or act of faith, was a favorite spectacle of the Spaniards; no holiday was quite complete without its holocaust of human victims. The staging was elaborate, and the ceremony as impressive as possible. Secular and spiritual authorities were ordered to be present and vast crowds were edified by the horrible example of the untimely end of the unbeliever. Sundays and feast days were chosen for these spectacles and on gala occasions, such as royal weddings and christenings, a special effort was made to celebrate one of these holy butcheries.
The number of victims has been variously estimated. {415} An actual count up to the year 1540, that is, before Protestantism became a serious factor, shows that 20,226 were burned in person and 10,913 in effigy, and these figures are incomplete. It must be remembered that for every one who paid the extreme penalty there were a large number of others punished in other ways, or imprisoned and tortured while on trial. When Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards the pope, was Inquisitor General 1516-22, 1,620 persons were burned alive, 560 in effigy and 21,845 were sentenced to penance or other lighter punishments. Roughly, for one person sentenced to death ten suffered milder penalties.
[Sidenote: Crimes punished]
Heresy was not the only crime punished by the Inquisition; it also took charge of blasphemy, bigamy and some forms of vice. In its early years it was chiefly directed against the Jews who, having been forced to the baptismal font, had relapsed. Later the Moriscos or christened Moors supplied the largest number of victims. As with the Jews, race hatred was so deep an ingredient of the treatment meted out to them that the nominal cause was sometimes forgotten, and baptism often failed to save "the new Christian" who preserved any, even the most innocent, of the national customs. Many a man and woman was tortured for not eating pork or for bathing in the Moorish fashion.
As Protestantism never obtained any hold in Spain, the Inquisition had comparatively little trouble on that account. During the sixteenth century a total number of 1995 persons were punished as Protestants of whom 1640 were foreigners and only 355 were Spaniards. Even these figures exaggerate the hold that the Reformation had in Spain, for any error remotely resembling the tenets of Wittenberg immediately classed its maintainer as Lutheran. The first case known was found in Majorca in 1523, but it was not until 1559 {416} that any considerable number suffered for this faith. In that year 24 Lutherans were burnt at Rodrigo and Seville, 32 in 1562, and 19 Calvinists in 1569.
The dread of the Spanish Inquisition was such that only in those dependencies early and completely subdued could it be introduced. Established in Sicily in 1487 its temporal jurisdiction was suspended during the years 1535-46, when it was revived by the fear of Protestantism. Even during its dark quarter, however, it was able to punish heretics. In an auto celebrated at Palermo, [Sidenote: May 30, 1541] of the twenty-two culprits three were Lutherans and nineteen Jews. The capitulation of Naples in 1503 expressly excluded the Spanish Inquisition, nor could it be established in Milan. The Portuguese Inquisition was set up in 1536.
[Sidenote: New World]
The New World was capable of offering less resistance. Nevertheless, for many years the inquisitorial powers were vested in the bishops sent over to Mexico and Peru, and when the Inquisition was established in both countries in 1570 it probably meant no increase of severity. The natives were exempt from its jurisdiction and it found little combustible material save in captured Protestant Europeans. A Fleming was burned at Lima in 1548, and at the first auto held at Mexico in 1574 thirty-six Lutherans were punished, all English captives, two by burning and the rest by scourging or the galleys.
[Sidenote: Roman Inquisition]
The same need of repelling Protestantism that had helped to give a new lease of life to the Spanish Inquisition called into being her sister the Roman Inquisition. By the bull Licet ab initio, [Sidenote: July 21, 1542] Paul IV reconstituted the Holy Office at Rome, directing and empowering it to smite all who persisted in condemned opinions lest others should be seduced by their example, not only in the papal states but in all the nations of Christendom. It was authorized to pronounce {417} sentence on culprits and to invoke the aid of the secular arm to punish them with prison, confiscation of goods and death. Its authority was directed particularly against persons of high estate, even against heretical princes whose subjects were loosed from their obligation of obedience and whose neighbors were invited to take away their heritage.
[Sidenote: Procedure]
The procedure of the Holy Office at Rome was characterized by the Augustinian Cardinal Seripando as at first lenient, but later, he continues, "when the superhuman rigor of Caraffa [one of the first Inquisitors General] held sway, the Inquisition acquired such a reputation that from no other judgment-seat on earth were more horrible and fearful sentences to be expected." Besides the attention it paid to Protestants it instituted very severe processes against Judaizing Christians and took cognizance also of seduction, of pimping, of sodomy, and of infringment of the ecclesiastical rules for fasting.
[Sidenote: Italy]
The Roman Inquisition was introduced into Milan by Michael Ghislieri, afterwards pope, and flourished mightily under the protecting care of Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of the city. It was established by Charles V, notwithstanding opposition, in Naples. [Sidenote: 1547] Venice also fought against its introduction but nevertheless finally permitted it. [Sidenote: 1544] During the sixteenth century in that city there were no less than 803 processes for Lutheranism, 5 for Calvinism, 35 against Anabaptists, 43 for Judaism and 199 for sorcery. In countries outside of Italy the Roman Inquisition did not take root. Bishop Magrath endeavored in 1567 to give Ireland the benefit of the institution, but naturally the English Government allowed no such thing.
[Sidenote: Censorship of the press]
A method of suppressing given opinions and propagating others probably far more effective than the {418} mauling of men's bodies is the guidance of their minds through direction of their reading and instruction. Naturally, before the invention of printing, and in an illiterate society, the censorship of books would have slight importance. Plato was perhaps the first to propose that the reading of immoral and impious books be forbidden, but I am not aware that his suggestion was acted upon either in the states of Greece or in pagan Rome. Examples of the rejection of certain books by the early church are not wanting. Paul induced the Ephesian sorcerers to burn their books; certain fathers of the church advised against the reading of heathen authors; [Sidenote: c. 496] Pope Gelasius made a decree on the books received and those not received by the church, and Manichaean books were publicly burnt.
[Sidenote: Fourth century]
The invention of printing brought to the attention of the church the danger of allowing her children to choose their own reading matter. [Sidenote: Printing] The first to animadvert upon it was Berthold, Archbishop of Mayence, the city of Gutenberg. On the 22d of March, 1485, he promulgated a decree to the effect that, whereas the divine art of printing had been abused for the sake of lucre and whereas by this means even Christ's books, missals and other works on religion, were thumbed by the vulgar, and whereas the German idiom was too poor to express such mysteries, and common persons too ignorant to understand them, therefore every work translated into German must be approved by the doctors of the university of Mayence before being published.
[Sidenote: June 1, 1501]
The example of the prelate was soon followed by popes and councils. Alexander VI forbade as a detestable evil the printing of books injurious to the Catholic faith, and made all archbishops official censors for their dioceses. This was enforced by a decree of the Fifth Lateran Council setting forth that {419} although printing has brought much advantage to the church [Sidenote: May 4, 1515] it has also disseminated errors and pernicious dogmas contrary to the Christian religion. The decree forbids the printing of any book in any city or diocese of Christendom without license from the local bishop or other ecclesiastical authority.
This sweeping edict was supplemented by others directed against certain books or authors, but for a whole generation the church left the censorship chiefly to the discretion of the several national governments. This was the policy followed also by the Protestants, both at this time and later. [Sidenote: Protestant censorship] Neither Luther, nor any other reformer for a long time attempted to draw up regular indices of prohibited books. Examples of something approaching this may be found in the later history of Protestantism, but they are so unimportant as to be negligible.
[Sidenote: National censorship, 1502]
The national governments, however, laid great stress on licensing. The first law in Spain was followed by an ever increasing strictness under the inquisitor who drew up several indices of prohibited books, completely independent of the official Roman lists. The German Diets and the French kings were careful to give their subjects the benefit of their selection of reading matter. In England, too, lists of prohibited books were drawn up under all the Tudors. Mary restricted the right to print to licensed members of the Stationers' Company; Elizabeth put the matter in the hands of Star Chamber. [Sidenote: 1559] A special license was required by the Injunctions, and a later law was aimed at "seditious, schismatic or libellous books and other fantastic writings." [Sidenote: 1588]
[Sidenote: Catalogues of dangerous books]
The idea of a complete catalogue of heretical and dangerous writings under ecclesiastical censure took its rise in the Netherlands. After the works of various authors had been severally prohibited in distinct {420} proclamations, the University of Louvain, at the emperor's command, drew up a fairly extensive list in 1546 and again, somewhat enlarged, in 1550. It mentions a number of Bibles in Greek, Latin and the vernaculars, the works of Luther, Carlstadt, Osiander, Ochino, Bullinger, Calvin, Oecolampadius, Jonas, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Huss and John Pupper of Goch, a Dutch author of the fifteenth century revived by the Protestants. It is remarkable that the works of Erasmus are not included in this list. Furthermore it is stated that certain approved works, even when edited or translated by heretics, might be allowed to students. Among the various scientific works condemned are an Anatomy printed at Marburg by Eucharius Harzhorn, H. C. Agrippa's De vanitate scientiarum, and Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis, a geography printed in 1544. The Koran is prohibited, and also a work called "Het paradijs van Venus," this latter presumably as indecent. Finally, all books printed since 1525 without name of author, printer, time, and place, are prohibited.
[Sidenote: Roman Index]
Partly in imitation of this work of Louvain, partly in consequence of the foundation of the Inquisition, the Roman Index of Prohibited Books was promulgated. Though the bull founding the Roman Inquisition said nothing about books, their censure was included in practice. Under the influence of the Holy Office at Lucca a list of forbidden works was drawn up by the Senate at Lucca, [Sidenote: 1545] including chiefly the tracts of Italian heretics and satires on the church. The fourth session Council of Trent [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] prohibited the printing of all anonymous books whatever and of all others on religion until licensed. A further indication of increasing severity may be found in a bull issued by Julius III [Sidenote: 1550] who complained that authors licensed to read heretical {421} books for the purpose of refuting them were more likely to be seduced by them, and who therefore revoked all licenses given up to that time.
[Sidenote: September, 1557]
When the Roman Inquisition issued a long list of volumes to be burnt publicly, including works of Erasmus, Machiavelli and Poggio, this might be considered the first Roman Index of Prohibited Books; but the first document to bear that name was issued by Paul IV. [Sidenote: 1559] It divided writings into three classes: (1) Authors who had erred ex professo and whose whole works were forbidden; (2) Authors who had erred occasionally and some of whose books only were mentioned; (3) Anonymous books. In addition to these classes 61 printers were named, all works published by whom were banned. The Index strove to be as complete as possible. Its chief though not its only source was the catalogue of Louvain. Many editions and versions of the Bible were listed and the printing of any translation without permission of the Inquisition was prohibited. Particular attention was paid to Erasmus, who was not only put in the first class by name but was signalized as having "all his commentaries, notes, annotations, dialogues, epistles, refutations, translations, books and writings" forbidden.
[Sidenote: Tridentine censorship, February 26, 1562]
The Council of Trent again took up the matter, passing a decree to the effect that inasmuch as heresy had not been cured by the censorship this should be made much stricter, and appointing a commission in order, as, regardless of the parable,[1] it was phrased, to separate the tares from the wheat. The persons appointed for this delicate work comprised four archbishops, nine bishops, two generals of orders and some "minor theologians." After much sweat they brought forth a report on most of the doubtful authors though {422} the most difficult of all, Erasmus, they relinquished to the theological faculties of Louvain and Paris for expurgation.
[Sidenote: 1564]
The results of their labors were published by Paul IV under the name of the Tridentine Index. It was more sweeping, and at the same time more discriminating than the former Index. Erasmus was changed to the second class, only a portion of his works being now condemned. Among the non-ecclesiastical authors banned were Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Boccaccio. It is noteworthy that the Decameron was expurgated not chiefly for its indecency but for its satire of ecclesiastics. Thus, a tale of the seduction of an abbess is rendered acceptable by changing the abbess into a countess; the story of how a priest led a woman astray by impersonating the angel Gabriel is merely changed by making the priest a layman masquerading as a fairy king.
The principles upon which the prohibition of books rested were set forth in ten rules. The most interesting are the following: (1) Books printed before 1515 condemned by popes or council; (2) Versions of the Bible; (3) books of heretics; (4) obscene books; (5) works on witchcraft and necromancy.
In order to keep the Index up to date continual revision was necessary. To insure this Pius V appointed a special Congregation of the Index, which has lasted until the present day. From his time to ours more than forty Indices have been issued. Those of the sixteenth century were concerned mainly with Protestant books, those of later centuries chiefly deal, for the purposes of internal discipline, with books written by Catholics. One of the functions of the Congregation was to expurgate books, taking out the offensive passages. A separate Index expurgatorius, pointing out the passages to be deleted or corrected was {423} published, and this name has sometimes incorrectly been applied to the Index of prohibited books.
[Sidenote: Effect of the censorship]
The effect of the censorship of the press has been variously estimated. The Index was early dubbed sica destricta in omnes scriptores and Sarpi called it "the finest secret ever discovered for applying religion to the purpose of making men idiotic." Milton thundered against the censorship in England as "the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning and learned men." The evil of the system of Rome was, in his opinion, double, for, as he wrote in his immortal Areopagitica, "The Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth and perfected those catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author with a violation worse than any that could be offered to his tomb." When we remember that the greatest works of literature, such as the Divine Comedy, were tampered with, and that, in the Spanish Expurgatorial Index of 1640 the list of passages to be deleted or to be altered in Erasmus's works takes 59 double-columned, closely printed folio pages, we can easily see the point of Milton's indignant protest. But, to his mind, it was still worse to subject a book to the examination of unfit men before it could secure its imprimatur. Not without reason has liberty of the press been made one of the cornerstones of the temple of freedom.
Various writers have labored to demonstrate the blighting effect that the censorship was supposed to have on literature. But it is surprising how few examples they can bring. Lea, who ought to know the Spanish field exhaustively, can only point to a few professors of theology who were persecuted and silenced for expressing unconventional views on biblical criticism. He conjectures that others must have {424} remained mute through fear. But, as the golden age of Spanish literature came after the law made the printing of unlicensed books punishable by death, [Sidenote: 1558] it is hard to see wherein literature can have suffered. The Roman Inquisition did not prevent the appearance of Galileo's work, though it made him recant afterwards. The strict English law that playwrights should not "meddle with matters of divinity or state" made Shakespeare careful not to express his religious and political views, but it is hard to see in what way it hampered his genius.
And yet the influence of the various press laws was incalculably great and was just what it was intended to be. It affected science less than one would think, and literature hardly at all, but it moulded the opinions of the masses like putty in their rulers' hands. That the rank and file of Spaniards and Italians remained Catholic, and the vast majority of Britons Protestant, was due more to the bondage of the press than to any other one cause. Originality was discouraged, the people to some degree unfitted for the free debate that is at the bottom of self-government, the hope of tolerance blighted, and the path opened that led to religious wars.
[1] Matthew xiii, 28-30.
{425}
[Sidenote: Reformation, Renaissance and Exploration]
If, through the prism of history, we analyse the white light of sixteenth-century civilization into its component parts, three colors particularly emerge: the azure "light of the Gospel" as the Reformers fondly called it in Germany, the golden beam of the Renaissance in Italy, and the blood-red flame of exploration and conquest irradiating the Iberian peninsula. Which of the three contributed most to modern culture it is hard to decide. Each of the movements started separately, gradually spreading until it came into contact, and thus into competition and final blending with the other movements. It was the middle lands, France, England and the Netherlands that, feeling the impulses from all sides, evolved the sanest and strongest synthesis. While Germany almost committed suicide with the sword of the spirit, while Italy sank into a voluptuous torpor of decadent art, while Spain reeled under the load of unearned Western wealth, France, England and Holland, taking a little from each of their neighbors, and not too much from any, became strong, well-balanced, brilliant states. But if eventually Germany, Italy and Spain all suffered from over-specialization, for the moment the stimulus of new ideas and new possibilities gave to each a sort of leadership in its own sphere. While Germany and Italy were busy winning the realms of the spirit and of the mind, Spain very nearly conquered the empire of the land and of the sea.
{426} [Sidenote: Ferdinand, 1479-1516 and Isabella, 1474-1504]
The foundation of her national greatness, like that of the greatness of so many other powers, was laid in the union of the various states into which she was at one time divided. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile was followed by a series of measures that put Spain into the leading position in Europe, expelled the alien racial and religious elements of her population, and secured to her a vast colonial empire. The conquest of Granada from the Moors, the acquisition of Cerdagne and Roussillon from the French, and the annexation of Naples, doubled the dominions of the Lions and Castles, and started the proud land on the road to empire. It is true that eventually Spain exhausted herself by trying to do more than even her young powers could accomplish, but for a while she retained the hegemony of Christendom. The same year that saw the discovery of America [Sidenote: 1492] and the occupation of the Alhambra, was also marked by the expulsion or forced conversion of the Jews, of whom 165,000 left the kingdom, 50,000 were baptized, and 20,000 perished in race riots. The statesmanship of Ferdinand showed itself in a more favorable light in the measures taken to reduce the nobles, feudal anarchs as they were, to fear of the law. To take their place in the government of the country he developed a new bureaucracy, which also, to some extent, usurped the powers of the Cortes of Aragon and of the Cortes of Castile. [Sidenote: Francis Ximénez de Cisneros, 1436-1517] In the meantime a notable reform of the church, in morals and in learning if not in doctrine, was carried through by the great Cardinal Ximénez.
[Sidenote: Charles V, 1516-1556]
When Charles, the grandson of the Catholic Kings, succeeded Ferdinand he was already, through his father, the Archduke Philip, the lord of Burgundy and of the Netherlands, and the heir of Austria. His election as emperor made him, at the age of nineteen, the {427} greatest prince of Christendom. To his gigantic task he brought all the redeeming qualities of dullness, for his mediocrity and moderation served his peoples and his dynasty better than brilliant gifts and boundless ambition would have done. "Never," he is reported to have said in 1556, "did I aspire to universal monarchy, although it seemed well within my power to attain it." Though the long war with France turned ever, until the very last, in his favor, he never pressed his advantage to the point of crushing his enemy to earth. But in Germany and Italy, no less than in Spain and the Netherlands, he finally attained something more than hegemony and something less than absolute power.
[Sidenote: Revolt of the Communes]
Though Spain benefited by his world power and became the capital state of his far flung empire, "Charles of Ghent," as he was called, did not at first find Spaniards docile subjects. Within a very few years of his accession a great revolt, or rather two great synchronous revolts, one in Castile and one in Aragon, flared up. The grievances in Castile were partly economic, the servicio (a tax) and the removal of money from the realm, and partly national as against a strange king and his foreign officers. Not only the regent, Adrian of Utrecht, but many important officials were northerners, and when Charles left Spain to be crowned emperor, [Sidenote: 1520] the national pride could no longer bear the humiliation of playing a subordinate part. The revolt of the Castilian Communes began with the gentry and spread from them to the lower classes. Even the grandees joined forces with the rebels, though more from fear than from sympathy. The various revolting communes formed a central council, the Santa Junta, and put forth a program re-asserting the rights of the Cortes to redress grievances. Meeting for a time with no resistance, the rebellion disintegrated {428} through the operation of its own centrifugal forces, disunion and lack of leadership. So at length when the government, supplied with a small force of German mercenaries, struck on the field of Villalar, the rebels suffered a severe defeat. [Sidenote: April, 1521] A few cities held out longer, Toledo last of all; but one by one they yielded, partly to force, partly to the wise policy of concession and redress followed by the government.
In our own time Barcelona and the east coast of Spain has been the hotbed of revolutionary democracy and radical socialism. Even so, the rising in Aragon known as the Hermandad (Brotherhood) [Sidenote: The Hermandad] contemporary with that in Castile, not only began earlier and lasted longer, but was of a far more radical stamp. Here were no nobles airing their slights at the hands of a foreign king, but here the trade-gilds rose in the name of equality against monarch and nobles alike. Two special causes fanned the fury of the populace to a white heat. The first was the decline of the Mediterranean trade due to the rise of the Atlantic commerce; the other was the racial element. Valencia was largely inhabited by Moors, the most industrious, sober and thrifty, and consequently the most profitable of Spanish laborers. The race hatred so deeply rooted in human nature added to the ferocity of the class conflict. Both sides were ruined by the war which, beginning in 1519, dragged along for several years until the proletariat was completely crushed.
[The Cortes]
The armed triumph of the government hardly damaged popular liberties as embodied in the constitution of the Cortes of Castile. When Charles became king this body was not, like other parliaments, ordinarily a representative assembly of the three estates, but consisted merely of deputies of eighteen Castilian cities. Only on special occasions, such as a coronation, were nobles and clergy summoned to participate. Its great {429} power was that of granting taxes, though somehow it never succeeded, as did the English House of Commons, in making the redress of grievances conditional upon a subsidy. But yet the power amounted to something and it was one that neither Charles nor Philip commonly ventured to violate. Under both of them meetings of the Cortes were frequent.
Though never directly attacked, the powers of the Cortes declined through the growth of vast interests outside their competence. The direction of foreign policy, so absorbing under Charles, and the charge of the enormous and growing commercial interests, was confided not to the representatives of the people, but to the Royal Council of Castile, an appointative body of nine lawyers, three nobles, and one bishop. Though not absolutely, yet relatively, the functions of the Cortes diminished until they amounted to no more than those of a provincial council.
What reconciled the people to the concentration of new powers in the hands of an irresponsible council was the apparently dazzling success of Spanish policy throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century. No banner was served like that of the Lions and Castles; no troops in the world could stand against her famous regiments; no generals were equal to Cortez and Alva; no statesmen abler than Parma, no admirals, until the Armada, more daring than Magellan[1] and Don John, no champions of the church against heretic and infidel like Loyola and Xavier.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Empire]
That such an empire as the world had not seen since Rome should within a single life-time rise to its zenith and, within a much shorter time, decline to the verge of ruin, is one of the melodramas of history. Perhaps, in reality, Spain was never quite so great as she looked, nor was her fall quite so complete as it seemed. But {430} the phenomena, such as they are, sufficiently call for explanation.
First of all one is struck by the fortuitous, one might almost say, unnatural, character of the Hapsburg empire. While the union of Castile and Aragon, bringing together neighboring peoples and filling a political need, was the source of real strength, the subsequent accretions of Italian and Burgundian territories rather detracted from than added to the effective power of the Spanish state. Philip would have been far stronger had his father separated from his crown not only Austria and the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, but the Netherlands as well. The revolt of the Dutch Republic was in itself almost enough to ruin Spain. Nor can it be said that the Italian states, won by the sword of Ferdinand or of Charles, were valuable accessions to Spanish power.
[Sidenote: Colonies]
Quite different in its nature was the colonial empire, but in this it resembled the other windfalls to the house of Hapsburg in that it was an almost accidental, unsought-for acquisition. The Genoese sailor who went to the various courts of Europe begging for a few ships in which to break the watery path to Asia, had in his beggar's wallet all the kingdoms of a new world and the glory of them. For a few years Spain drank until she was drunken of conquest and the gold of America. That the draught acted momentarily as a stimulant, clearing her brain and nerving her arm to deeds of valor, but that she suffered in the end from the riotous debauch, cannot be doubted. She soon learned that all that glittered was not wealth, and that industries surfeited with metal and starved of raw materials must perish. The unearned coin proved to be fairy gold in her coffers, turning to brown leaves and dust when she wanted to use it. It became a drug in her markets; it could not lawfully be exported, and no {431} amount of it would purchase much honest labor from an indolent population fed on fantasies of wealth. The modern King Midas, on whose dominions the sun never set, was cursed with a singular and to him inexplicable need of everything that money was supposed to buy. His armies mutinied, his ships rotted, and never could his increasing income catch up with the far more rapidly increasing expenses of his budget.
The poverty of the people was in large part the fault of the government which pursued a fiscal policy ideally calculated to strike at the very sources of wealth. While, under the oppression of an ignorant paternalism, unhappy Spain suffered from inanition, she was tended by a physician who tried to cure her malady by phlebotomy. There have been worse men than Philip II, [Sidenote: Philip II, 1556-98] but there have been hardly any who have caused more blood to flow from the veins of their own people. His life is proof that a well-meaning bigot can do more harm than the most abandoned debauchee. "I would rather lose all my kingdoms," he averred, "than allow freedom of religion." And again, to a man condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, "If my own son were as perverse as you, I myself would carry the faggot to burn him." Consistently, laboriously, undeterred by any suffering or any horror, he pursued his aim. He was not afraid of hard work, scribbling reams of minute directions daily to his officers. His stubborn calm was imperturbable; he took his pleasures—women, autos-da-fe and victories—sadly, and he suffered such chagrins as the death of four wives, having a monstrosity for a son, and the loss of the Armada and of the Netherlands, without turning a hair.
Spain's foreign policy came to be more and more polarized by the rise of English sea-power. Even under Charles, when France had been the chief enemy, {432} [Sidenote: Spain vs. England] the Hapsburgs saw the desirability of winning England as a strategic point for their universal empire. This policy was pursued by alternating alliance with hostility. For six years of his boyhood Charles had been betrothed to Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, to whom he sent a ring inscribed, "Mary hath chosen the better part which shall not be taken away from her." His own precious person, however, was taken from her to be bestowed on Isabella of Portugal, by whom he begot Philip. When this son succeeded him, notwithstanding the little unpleasantness of Henry VIII's divorce, he advised him to turn again to an English marriage, and Philip soon became the husband of Queen Mary. After her death without issue, he vainly wooed her sister, until he was gradually forced by her Protestant buccaneers into an undesired war.
Notwithstanding all that he could do to lose fortune's favors, she continued for many years to smile on her darling Hapsburg. After a naval disaster inflicted by the Turks on the Spaniard off the coast of Tripoli, the defeated power recovered and revenged herself in the great naval victory of Lepanto, in October 1571. The lustre added to the Lions and Castles by this important success was far outshone by the acquisition of Portugal and all her colonies, in 1581. Though not the nearest heir, Philip was the strongest, and by bribery and menaces won the homage of the Portuguese nobles after the death of the aged king Henry on January 31, 1580. For sixty years Spain held the lesser country and, what was more important to her, the colonies in the East Indies and in Africa. So vast an empire had not yet been heard of, or imagined possible, in the history of the world. No wonder that its shimmer dazzled the eyes not only of contemporaries, but of posterity. According to Macaulay, {433} Philip's power was equal to that of Napoleon, and its ruin is the most instructive lesson in history of how not to govern.
How hollow was this semblance of might was demonstrated by the first stalwart peoples that dared to test it, first by the Dutch and then by England. The story of the Armada has already been told. Its preparation marked the height of Philip's effort and the height of his incompetence. Its annihilation was a cruel blow to his pride. But in Spain, barring a temporary financial panic, things went much the same after 1588 as before it. The full bloom of Spanish culture, gorgeous with Velasquez and fragrant with Cervantes and Calderon, followed hard upon the defeat of the Armada.
[Sidenote: War with the Moors]
The fact is that Spain suffered much more from internal disorders than from foreign levy. The chief occasion of her troubles was the presence among her people of a large body of Moors, hated both for their race and for their religion. With the capitulation of Granada, the enjoyment of Mohammedanism was guaranteed to the Moors, but this tolerance only lasted for six years, when a decree went out that all must be baptized or must emigrate from Andalusia. In Aragon, however, always independent of Castile, they continued to enjoy religious freedom. Charles at his coronation took a solemn oath to respect the faith of Islam in these lands, but soon afterwards, frightened by the rise of heresy in Germany, he applied to Clement to absolve him from his oath. This sanction of bad faith, at first creditably withheld, [Sidenote: 1524] was finally granted and was promptly followed by a general order for expulsion or conversion. Throughout the whole of Spain the poor Moriscos now began to be systematically pillaged and persecuted by whoever chose to do it. All manner of taxes, tithes, servitudes and fines {434} were demanded of them. The last straw that broke the endurance of a people tried by every manner of tyranny and extortion, was an edict ordering all Moors to learn Castilian within three years, after which the use of Arabic was to be forbidden, prohibiting all Moorish customs and costumes, and strictly enjoining attendance at church.
As the Moors had been previously disarmed and as they had no military discipline, rebellion seemed a counsel of despair, but it ensued. The populace rose in helpless fury, and for three years defied the might of the Spanish empire. But the result could not be doubtful. A naked peasantry could not withstand the disciplined battalions that had proved their valor on every field from Mexico to the Levant and from Saxony to Algiers. It was not a war but a massacre and pillage. The whole of Andalusia, the most flourishing province in Spain, beautiful with its snowy mountains, fertile with its tilled valleys, and sweet with the peaceful toil of human habitation, was swept by a universal storm of carnage and of flame. The young men either perished in fighting against fearful odds, or were slaughtered after yielding as prisoners. Those who sought to fly to Africa found the avenues of escape blocked by the pitiless Toledo blades. The aged were hunted down like wild beasts; the women and young children were sold into slavery, to toil under the lash or to share the hated bed of the conqueror. The massacre cost Spain 60,000 lives and three million ducats, not to speak of the harm that it did to her spirit.
[1] A Portuguese in Spanish service.
[Sidenote: Division of the New World between Spain and Portugal]
When Columbus returned with glowing accounts of the "India" he had found, the value of his work was at once appreciated. Forthwith began that struggle for colonial power which has absorbed so much of the {435} energies of the European nations. In view of the Portuguese discoveries in Africa, it was felt necessary to mark out the "spheres of influence" of the two powers at once, and, with an instinctive appeal to the one authority claiming to be international, the Spanish government immediately applied to Pope Alexander VI for confirmation in the new-found territories. Acting on the suggestion of Columbus that the line of Spanish influence be drawn one hundred leagues west of any of the Cape Verde Islands or of the Azores, the pope, with magnificent self-assurance, issued a bull, Inter caetera divinae, [Sidenote: May 4, 1493] of his own mere liberality and in virtue of the authority of Peter, conferring on Castile forever "all dominions, camps, posts, and villages, with all the rights and jurisdictions pertaining to them," west of the parallel, and leaving to Portugal all that fell to the east of it. Portugal promptly protested that the line was too far east, and by the treaty of Tordesillas; [Sidenote: 1494] it was moved to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, thus falling between the 48th and 49th parallel of longitude. The intention was doubtless to confer on Spain all land immediately west of the Atlantic, but, as a matter of fact, South America thrusts so far to the eastward, that a portion of her territory, later claimed as Brazil, fell to the lot of Portugal.
[Sidenote: Spanish adventurers]
Spain lost no time in exploiting her new dominions, during the next century hundreds of ships carried tens thousands of adventurers to seek their fortune in the west. For it was not as colonists that most of them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the crusader, the knight-errant, and the pirate. If there is anything in the paradox that artists have created natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that the Spanish romances created the Spanish colonial empire. The men who sailed on the great adventure had feasted {436} on tales of paladins and hippogrifs, of enchanted palaces and fountains of youth, and miraculously fair women to be rescued and then claimed by knights. They read in books of travel purporting to tell the sober truth of satyrs and of purple unicorns and of men who spread their feet over their heads for umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between their shoulders. No wonder that when they went to a strange country they found the River of Life in the Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the jungle, and El Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of Europe, as well as to the power of the pen, that the whole continent came to be called, not after its discoverer, but after the man who wrote the best romances—mostly fictions—about his travels in it.
[Sidenote: Exploitation of natives]
In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first colonies, her rule showed at its worst. The soft native race, the Caribs, almost completely disappeared within half a century. The best modern authority estimates that whereas the native population of Española (Haiti) was between 200,000 and 300,000 in 1493, by 1548 hardly 5000 Indians were left. In part the extinction of the natives was due to new diseases and to the vices of civilization, but far more to the heartless exploitation of them by the conquerors. Bartholomew de las Casas, the first priest to come to this unfortunate island, tells stories of Spanish cruelty that would be incredible were they not so well supported. With his own eyes he saw 3000 inoffensive Indians slaughtered at a single time; of another batch of 300 he observed that within a few months more than half perished at hard labor. Again, he saw 6000 Indian children condemned to work in the mines, of whom few or none long survived. In vain a bull of Paul III declared the Indians capable of becoming {437} Christians and forbade their enslavement. In vain the Spanish government tried to mitigate at least some of the hardships of the natives' lot, [Sidenote: 1537] ordering that they should be well fed and paid. The temptation to exploit them was too strong; and when they perished the Spaniards supplied their place by importing negroes from Africa, a people of tougher fibre.
Spanish exploration, followed by sparse settlement, soon opened up the greater part of the Americas south of the latitude of the present city of San Francisco. Of many expeditions into the trackless wilderness, only a few were financially repaying; the majority were a drain on the resources of the mother country. In every place where the Spaniard set foot the native quailed and, after at most one desperate struggle, went down, never again to loose the conqueror's grip from his throat or to move the conqueror's knee from his chest. Even the bravest were as helpless as children before warriors armed with thunder and riding upon unknown monsters.
But in no place, save in the islands, did the native races wholly disappear as they did in the English settlements. The Spaniards came not like the Puritans, as artisans and tillers of the soil intent on founding new homes, but as military conquerors, requiring a race of helots to toil for them. For a period anarchy reigned; the captains not only plundered the Indians but fought one another fiercely for more room—more room in the endless wilderness! Eventually, however, conditions became more stable; Spain imposed her effective control, her language, religion and institutions on a vast region, doing for South America what Rome had once done for her.
The lover of adventure will find rich reward in tracing the discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, of Florida by Ponce de Leon, and of the whole course of {438} the Amazon by Orellana who sailed down it from Peru, or in reading of Balboa, "when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific." A resolute man could hardly set out exploring without stumbling upon some mighty river, some vast continent, or some unmeasured ocean. But among all these fairly-tales [Transcriber's note: fairy-tales?] there are some that are so marvellous that they would be thought too extravagant by the most daring writers of romance. That one captain with four hundred men, and another with two hundred, should each march against an extensive and populous empire, cut down their armies at odds of a hundred to one, put their kings to the sword and their temples to the torch, and after it all reap a harvest of gold and precious stones such as for quantity had never been heard of before—all this meets us not in the tales of Ariosto or of Dumas, but in the pages of authentic history.
[Conquest of Mexico]
In the tableland of Mexico dwelt the Aztecs, the most civilized and warlike of North American aborigines. Their polity was that of a Spartan military despotism, their religion the most grewsome known to man. Before their temples were piled pyramids of human skulls; the deities were placated by human sacrifice, and at times, according to the deicidal and theophagous rites common to many primitive superstitions, themselves sacrificed in effigy or in the person of a beautiful captive and their flesh eaten in sacramental cannibalism. Though the civilization of the Aztecs, derived from the earlier and perhaps more advanced Mayans, was scarcely so high as that of the ancient Egyptians, they had cultivated the arts sufficiently to work the mines of gold and silver and to hammer the precious metals into elaborate and massive ornaments.
When rumors of their wealth reached Cuba it seemed at last as if the dream of El Dorado had come true. Hernando Cortez, a cultured, resolute, brave and {439} politic leader, gathered a force of four hundred white men, with a small outfit of artillery and cavalry, and, on Good Friday, 1519, landed at the place now called Vera Cruz and marched on the capital. The race of warriors who delighted in nothing but slaughter, was stupefied, partly by an old prophecy of the coming of a god to subdue the land, partly by the strange and terrible arms of the invaders. Moreover their neighbors and subjects were ready to rise against them and become allies of the Spaniards. In a few months of crowded battle and massacre they lay broken and helpless at the feet of the audacious conqueror, who promptly sent to Spain a glowing account of his new empire and a tribute of gold and silver. Albert Dürer in August, 1520, saw at Brussels the "things brought the king from the new golden land," and describes them in his diary as including "a whole golden sun, a fathom in breadth, and a whole silver moon of the same size, and two rooms full of the same sort of armour, and also all kinds of weapons, accoutrements and bows, wonderful shields . . . altogether valued at a hundred thousand guidon. And all my life," he adds, "I have never seen anything that so rejoiced my heart as did these things."
[Conquest of Peru]
If an artist, familiar with kings and courts and the greatest marts of Europe could write thus, what wonder that the imagination of the world took fire? The golden sun and the silver moon were, to all men who saw them, like Helen's breasts, the sun and moon of heart's desire, to lure them over the western waves. Twelve years after Cortez, came Pizarro who, with a still smaller force conquered an even wealthier and more civilized empire. The Incas, unlike the Mexicans, were a mild race, living in a sort of theocratic socialism, in which the emperor, as god, exercised absolute power over his subjects and in return cared {440} for at least their common wants. The Spaniards outdid themselves in acts of treachery and blood. In vain the emperor, Atahualpa, after voluntarily placing himself in the hands of Pizarro, filled the room used as his prison nine feet high with gold as ransom; when he could give no more he was tried on the preposterous charges of treason to Charles V and of heresy, and suffered death at the stake. Pizarro coolly pocketed the till then undreamed of sum of 4,500,000 ducats,[1] worth in our standards more than one hundred million dollars.
[Sidenote: Circumnavigation of the globe, 1519-22]
But the crowning act of the age of discovery was the circumnavigation of the globe. The leader of the great enterprise that put the seal of man's dominion on the earth, was Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in Spanish service. With a fleet of five vessels, only one of which put a ring around the world, and with a crew of about 275 men of whom only 18 returned successful, he sailed from Europe. [Sidenote: September 20, 1519] Coasting down the east of South America, [October 21, 1519] exploring the inlets and rivers, he entered the straits that bear his name and covered their 360 miles in thirty-eight days. After following the coast up some distance north, he struck across the Pacific, the breadth of which he much underestimated. For ninety-eight days he was driven by the east trade-wind without once sighting land save two desert islands, while his crew endured extremities of hunger, thirst and scurvy. At last he came to the islands he called, after the thievish propensities of their inhabitants, the Ladrones, making his first landing at Guam. Spending but three days here to refit and provision, he sailed again on March 9, [Sidenote: 1521] and a week later discovered the islands known, since 1542, as the Philippines. {441} In an expedition against a savage chief the great leader met his death on April 27, 1521. As other sailors and as he, too, had previously been as far to the east as he now found himself, he had practically completed the circumnavigation of the globe. The most splendid triumph of the age of discovery coincided almost to a day with the time that Luther was achieving the most glorious deed of the Reformation at Worms.
[Sidenote: September 1522]
Magellan's ship, the Vittoria, proceeded under Sebastian del Cano, and finally, with thirty-one men, of whom only eighteen had started out in her, came back to Portugal. The men who had burst asunder one of the bonds of the older world, were, nevertheless, deeply troubled by a strange, medieval scruple. Having mysteriously lost a day by following the sun in his westward course, they did penance for having celebrated the fasts and feasts of the church on the wrong dates.
[Sidenote: Portuguese Exploration]
While Spain was extending her dominions westward, little Portugal was building up an even greater empire in both hemispheres. In the fifteenth century, this hardy people, confined to their coast and without possibility of expanding inwards, had seen that their future lay upon the water. To the possessor of sea power the ocean makes of every land bordering on it a frontier, vulnerable to them and impervious to the enemy. The first ventures of the Portuguese were naturally in the lands near by, the North African coast and the islands known as the Madeiras and the Azores. Feeling their way southward along the African coast they reached the Cape of Good Hope but did not at once go much further. [Sidenote: 1486 or 1488] This path to India was not broken until eleven years later, when Vasco da Gama, after a voyage of great daring [Sidenote: 1497-8]—he was ninety-three days at sea on a course of 4500 miles from the Cape Verde Islands to South Africa—reached Calicut on May 20, 1498. This city, now sunken in the sea, was {442} then the most flourishing port on the Malabar Coast, exploited entirely by Mohammedan traders. Spices had long been the staple of Venetian trade with the Orient, and when he returned with rich cargo of them the immediate effect upon Europe was greater than that of the voyage of Columbus. Trade seeks to follow the line of least resistance, and the establishment of a water way between Europe and the East was like connecting two electrically charged bodies in a Leyden jar by a copper wire. The current was no longer forced through a poor medium, but ran easily through the better conductor. With more rapidity than one would think possible in that age, the commercial consequences of the discovery were appreciated. The trade of the Levant died away, and the center of gravity was transferred from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. While Venice decayed Lisbon rose with mushroom speed to the position of the great emporium of European ocean-borne trade, until she in her turn was supplanted by Antwerp.
Da Gama was soon imitated by others. [Sidenote: 1500] Cabral made commercial settlements at Calicut and the neighboring town of Cochin, and came home with unheard-of riches in spice, pearls and gems. [Sidenote: 1503] Da Gama returned and bombarded Calicut, and Francis d'Almeida was made Governor of India [Sidenote: 1505] and tried to consolidate the Portuguese power there on the correct principle that who was lord of the sea was lord of the peninsula. The rough methods of the Portuguese and their competition with the Arab traders made war inevitable between the two rivals. To the other causes of enmity that of religion was added, for, like the Spaniards, the Portuguese tried to combine the characters of merchants and missionaries, of pirates and crusaders. When the first of Da Gama's sailors to land at Calicut was asked what he sought, his laconic answer, "Christians {443} and spices," had in it as much of truth as of epigrammatic neatness.
[Sidenote: Portuguese cruelty to Indians]
Had the Portuguese but treated the Hindoos humanely they would have found in them allies against the Mohammedan traders, but all of them, not excepting their greatest statesman, Alphonso d'Albuquerque, pursued a policy of frightfulness. When Da Gama met an Arab ship, after sacking it, he blew it up with gunpowder and left it to sink in flames while the women on board held up their babies with piteous cries to touch the heart of this knight of Christ and of mammon. Without the least compunction Albuquerque tells in his commentaries how he burned the Indian villages, put part of their inhabitants to death and ordered the noses and ears of the survivors cut off.
[Sidenote: Trade]
Nevertheless, the Portuguese got what they wanted, the wealthy trade of the East. Albuquerque, failing to storm Calicut, seized Goa farther north and made it the chief emporium. But they soon felt the need of stations farther east, for, as long as the Arabs held Malacca, where spices were cheaper, the intruders did not have the monopoly they desired. Accordingly Albuquerque seized this city on the Malay Straits, [Sidenote: 1511] which, though now it has sunk into insignificance, was then the Singapore or Hong-Kong of the Far East. Sumatra, Java and the northern coast of Australia were explored, the Moluccas were bought from Spain for 350,000 ducats, and even Japan and China were reached by the daring traders. In the meantime posts were established along the whole western and eastern coasts of Africa and in Madagascar. But wherever they went the Portuguese sought commercial advantage not permanent settlement. Aptly compared by a Chinese observer to fishes who died if taken from the sea, they founded an empire of vast length out of incredible thinness.
{444} [Sidenote: Brazil]
The one exception to this rule, and an important one, was Brazil. The least showy of the colonies and the one that brought in the least quick profit eventually became a second and a greater Portugal, outstripping the mother country in population and dividing South America almost equally with the Spanish. In many ways the settlement of this colony resembled that of North America by the English more than it did the violent and superficial conquests of Spain. Settlers came to it less as adventurers than as home-seekers and some of them fled from religious persecution. The great source of wealth, the sugar-cane, was introduced from Madeira in 1548 and in the following year the mother country sent a royal governor and some troops.
[Sidenote: Decadence of Portugal]
But even more than Spain Portugal overtaxed her strength in her grasp for sudden riches. The cup that her mariners took from the gorgeous Eastern enchantress had a subtle, transforming drug mingled with its spices, whereby they were metamorphosed, if not into animals, at least into orientals, or Africans. While Lisbon grew by leaps and bounds the country-side was denuded, and the landowners, to fill the places of the peasants who had become sailors, imported quantities of negro slaves. Thus not only the Portuguese abroad, but those at home, undeterred by racial antipathy, adulterated their blood with that of the dark peoples. Add to this that the trade, immensely lucrative as it seemed, was an enormous drain on the population of the little state; and the causes of Portugal's decline, almost as sudden as its rise, are in large part explained. So rapid was it, indeed, that it was noticed not only by foreign travellers but by the natives. Camoens, though he dedicated his life to composing an epic in honor of Vasco da Gama, lamented his country's decay in these terms:
{445}
O pride of empire! O vain covetise
Of that vain glory that we men call fame . . .
What punishment and what just penalties
Thou dost inflict on those thou dost inflame . . .
Thou dost depopulate our ancient state
Till dissipation brings debility.
Nor were artificial causes wanting to make the colonies expensive and the home treasury insolvent. The governors as royal favorites regarded their appointments as easy roads to quick wealth, and they plundered not only the inhabitants but their royal master. The inefficient and extravagant management of trade, which was a government monopoly, furnished a lamentable example of the effects of public ownership. And when possible the church interfered to add the burden of bigotry to that of corruption. An amusing example of this occurred when a supposed tooth of Buddha was brought to Goa, to redeem which the Rajah of Pegu offered a sum equal to half a million dollars. While the government was inclined to sell, the archbishop forbade the acceptance of such tainted money and ordered the relic destroyed.
[Sidenote: 1521-80]
Within Portugal itself other factors aided the decline. From the accession of John III to the amalgamation with Spain sixty years later, the Cortes was rarely summoned. The expulsion of many Jews in 1497, the massacre and subsequent exile of the New Christians or Marranos, [Sidenote: 1506-7] most of whom went to Holland, commenced an era of destructive bigotry completed by the Inquisition. [Sidenote: The Inquisition established, 1536] Strict censorship of the press and the education of the people by the Jesuits each added their bit to the forces of spiritual decadence.
For the fury of religious zeal ill supplied the exhausted powers of a state fainting with loss of blood and from the intoxication of corruption. Gradually her grasp relaxed on North Africa until only three {446} small posts in Morocco were left her, those of Ceuta, Arzila and Tangier. A last frantic effort to recover them and to punish the infidel, undertaken by the young King Sebastian, ended in disaster and in his death in 1578. After a short reign of two years by his uncle Henry, who as a cardinal had no legitimate heirs, Portugal feebly yielded to her strongest suitor, Philip II, [Sidenote: 1580-1640] and for sixty years remained a captive of Spain.
[Sidenote: Other nations explore]
Other nations eagerly crowded in to seize the trident that was falling from the hands of the Iberian peoples. There were James Cartier of France, and Sebastian Cabot and Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Francis Drake of England, and others. They explored the coast of North America and sought a Northwest Passage to Asia. Drake, after a voyage of two years and a half, [Sidenote: 1577-80] duplicated the feat of Magellan, though he took quite a different course, following the American western coast up to the Golden Gate. He, too, returned "very richly fraught with gold, silver, silk and precious stones," the best incentive to further endeavor. But no colonies of permanence and consequence were as yet planted by the northern nations. Until the seventeenth century their voyages were either actuated by commercial motives or were purely adventurous. The age did not lack daring explorers by land as well as by sea. Lewis di Varthema rivalled his countryman Marco Polo by an extensive journey in the first decade of the century. Like Burckhardt and Burton in the nineteenth century he visited Mecca and Medina as a Mohammedan pilgrim, and also journeyed to Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo and Damascus and then to the distant lands of India and the Malay peninsula.
[Sidenote: Russia]
It may seem strange to speak of Russia in connection with the age of discovery, and yet it was precisely in the light of a new and strange land that our English ancestors regarded it. Cabot's voyage to the {447} White Sea in the middle of the century was every whit as new an adventure as was the voyage to India. Richard Chancellor and others followed him and established a regular trade with Muscovy, [Sidenote: 1553] and through it and the Caspian with Asia. The rest of Europe, west of Poland and the Turks, hardly heard of Russia or felt its impact more than they now do of the Tartars of the Steppes.
But it was just at this time that Russia was taking the first strides on the road to become a great power. How broadly operative were some of the influences at work in Europe lies patent in the singular parallel that her development offers to that of her more civilized contemporaries. Just as despotism, consolidation, and conquest were the order of the day elsewhere, so they were in the eastern plains of Europe. Basil III [Sidenote: Basil III, 1505-33] struck down the rights of cities, nobles and princes to bring the whole country under his own autocracy. Ivan the Terrible, [Sidenote: Ivan IV, 1533-84] called Czar of all the Russias, added to this policy one of extensive territorial aggrandizement. Having humbled the Tartars he acquired much land to the south and east, and then turned his attention to the west, where, however, Poland barred his way to the Baltic. Just as in its subsequent history, so then, one of the great needs of Russia was for a good port. Another of her needs was for better technical processes. Anticipating Peter the Great, Ivan endeavored to get German workmen to initiate good methods, but he failed to accomplish much, partly because Charles V forbade his subjects to go to add strength to a rival state.
[Sidenote: Europe vs. Asia]
While Europe found most of the other continents as soft as butter to her trenchant blade, she met her match in Asia. The theory of Herodotus that the course of history is marked by alternate movements east and west has been strikingly confirmed by {449} subsequent events. In a secular grapple the two continents have heaved back and forth, neither being able to conquer the other completely. If the empires of Macedon and Rome carried the line of victory far to the orient, they were avenged by the successive inroads of the Huns, the Saracens, the Mongols and the Turks. If for the last four centuries the line has again been pushed steadily back, until Europe dominates Asia, it is far from certain that this condition will be permanent.
In spiritual matters Europe owes a balance of indebtedness to Asia, and by far the greater part of it to the Semites. The Phoenician alphabet and Arabian numerals are capital borrowed and yielding how enormous a usufruct! Above all, Asiatic religions—albeit the greatest of them was the child of Hellas as well as of Judaea—have conquered the whole world save a few savage tribes. Ever since the cry of "There is no God but Allah and Mahomet is his prophet" had aroused the Arabian nomads from their age-long slumber, it was as a religious warfare that the contest of the continents revealed itself. After the scimitar had swept the Greek Empire out of Asia Minor and had cut Spain from Christendom, the crusades and the rise of the Spanish kingdoms had gradually beaten it back. But while the Saracen was being slowly but surely driven from the western peninsula, the banner of the Crescent in the east was seized by a race with a genius for war inversely proportional to its other gifts. [Sidenote: The Turks] The Turks, who have never added to the arts of peace anything more important than the fabrication of luxurious carpets and the invention of a sensuous bath, were able to found cannon and to drill battalions that drove the armies of nobler races before them. From the sack of Constantinople in 1453 to the siege of Vienna in 1529 and even to some extent long after that, the {449} majestic and terrible advance of the janizaries threatened the whole fabric of Europe.
[Sidenote: Selim I, 1512-20]
Under Sultan Selim I the Turkish arms were turned to the east and south. Persia, Kurdistan, Syria and Egypt were crushed, while the title of Caliph, and with it the spiritual leadership of the Mahommetan world, was wrested from the last of the Abassid dynasty. But it was under his successor, Suleiman the Magnificent, [Sidenote: Suleiman 1520-6] that the banner of the prophet, "fanned by conquest's crimson wing," was borne to the heart of Europe. Belgrade and Rhodes were captured, Hungary completely overrun, and Vienna besieged. The naval exploits of Khair-ed-din, called Barbarossa, carried the terror of the Turkish arms into the whole Mediterranean, subdued Algiers and defeated the Christian fleets under Andrew Doria.
On the death of Suleiman the Crescent Moon had attained the zenith of its glory. The vast empire was not badly administered; some authorities hold that justice was better served under the Sultan than under any contemporary Christian king. A hierarchy of officials, administrative, ecclesiastical, secretarial and military, held office directly under the Sultan, being wisely granted by him sufficient liberty to allow initiative, and yet kept under control direct enough to prevent the secession of distant provinces.
The international position of the infidel power was an anomalous one. Almost every pope tried to revive the crusading spirit against the arch-enemy of Christ, and the greatest epic poet of the sixteenth century chose for his subject the Delivery of Jerusalem in a holy war. On the other hand the Most Christian King found no difficulty in making alliances with the Sublime Porte, and the same course was advocated, though not adopted, by some of the Protestant states of Germany. Finally, that champion of the church, Philip {450} II, for the first time in the history of his country, [Sidenote: 1580] made a peace with the infidel Sultan recognizing his right to exist in the society of nations.
The sixteenth century, which in so much else marked a transition from medieval to modern times, in this also saw the turning-point of events, inasmuch as the tide drawn by the Half Moon to its flood about 1529, from that time onwards has steadily, if very slowly, ebbed.
[1] Allowing $2.40 to a ducat this would be $10,800,000 intrinsically at a time when money had ten times the purchasing power that it has today.
{451}
[Sidenote: Unity of civilized world]
Political history is that of the state; economic and intellectual history that of a different group. In modern times this group includes all civilized nations. Even in political history there are many striking parallels, but in social development and in culture the recent evolution of civilized peoples has been nearly identical. This fundamental unity of the nations has grown stronger with the centuries on account of improving methods of transport and communication. Formally it might seem that in the Middle Ages the white nations were more closely bound together than they are now. They had one church, a nearly identical jurisprudence, one great literature and one language for the educated classes; they even inherited from Rome the ideal of a single world-state. But if the growth of national pride, the division of the church and the rise of modern languages and literatures have been centrifugal forces, they have been outweighed by the advent of new influences tending to bind all peoples together. The place of a single church is taken by a common point of view, the scientific; the place of Latin as a medium of learning has been taken by English, French, and German, each one more widely known to those to whom it is not native now than ever was Latin in the earlier centuries. The fruits of discovery are common to all nations, who now live under similar conditions, reading the same books and (under different names) the same newspapers, doing the same {452} business and enjoying the same luxuries in the same manner. Even in matters of government we are visibly approaching the perhaps distant but apparently certain goal of a single world-state.
[Sidenote: Changes in population]
In estimating the economic and cultural conditions of the sixteenth century it is therefore desirable to treat Western Europe as a whole. One of the marked differences between all countries then and now is in population. No simple law has been discovered as to the causes of the fluctuations in the numbers of the people within a given territory. This varies with the wealth of the territory, but not in direct ratio to it; for it can be shown that the wealth of Europe in the last four hundred years has increased vastly more than its population. Nor can it be discovered to vary directly in proportion to the combined amount and distribution of wealth, for in sixteenth-century England while the number of the people was increasing wealth was being concentrated in fewer hands almost as fast as it was being created. It is obvious that sanitation and transportation have a good deal to do with the population of certain areas. The largest cities of our own times could not have existed in the Middle Ages, for they could not have been provisioned, nor have been kept endurably healthy without elaborate aqueducts and drains.
Other more obscure factors enter in to complicate the problems of population. Some nations, like Spain in the sixteenth and Ireland in the nineteenth century, have lost immensely through emigration. The cause of this was doubtless not that the nation in question was growing absolutely poorer, but that the increase of wealth or in accessibility to richer lands made it relatively poorer. It is obvious again that great visitations like pestilence or war diminish population directly, though the effect of such factors is usually {453} temporary. How much voluntary sterility operates is problematical. Aegidius Albertinus, writing in 1602, attributed the growth in population of Protestant countries since the Reformation to the abolition of sacerdotal celibacy, and this has also been mentioned as a cause by a recent writer. Probably the last named forces have a very slight influence; the primary one being, as Malthus stated, the increase of means of subsistence.
As censuses were almost unknown to sixteenth-century Europe outside of a few Italian cities, the student is forced to rely for his data on various other calculations, in some cases tolerably reliable, in others deplorably deficient. The best of these are the enumerations of hearths made for purposes of taxation in several countries. Other counts were sometimes made for fiscal or military, and occasionally for religious, purposes. Estimates by contemporary observers supplement our knowledge, which may be taken as at least approximately correct.
[Sidenote: England and Wales]
The religious census of 1603 gave the number of communicants in England and Wales as 2,275,000, to which must be added 8475 recusants. Adding 50 per cent. for non-communicants, we arrive at the figure of 3,425,000, which is doubtless too low. Another calculation based on a record of births and deaths yields the figure 4,812,000 for the year 1600. The average, 4,100,000, is probably nearly correct, of which about a tenth in Wales. England had grown considerably during the century, this increase being especially remarkable in the large towns. Whereas, in 1534, 150,000 quarters of wheat were consumed in London annually, the figure for 1605 is 500,000. The population in the same time had probably increased from 60,000 to 225,000. No figures worth anything can be given for Ireland, and for Scotland it is only safe to say {454} that in 1500 the population was about 500,000 and in 1600 about 700,000.
[Sidenote: The Netherlands]
Enumerations of hearths and of communicants give good bases for reckoning the population of the Netherlands. Holland, the largest of the Northern provinces, had about 200,000 people in 1514; Brabant the greatest of the Southern, in 1526 had 500,000. The population of the largest town, Antwerp, in 1526 was 88,000, in 1550 about 110,000. At the same time it is remarkable that in 1521 Ghent impressed Dürer as the greatest city he had seen in the Low Countries. For the whole territory of the Netherlands, including Holland and Belgium, and a little more on the borders, the population was in 1560 about 3,000,000. This is the same figure as that given for 1567 by Lewis Guicciardini. Later in the century the country suffered by war and emigration.
[Sidenote: Germany]
The lack of a unified government, and the great diversity of conditions, makes the population of Germany more difficult to estimate. Brandenburg, having in 1535 an area of 10,000 square miles, and a population between 300,000 and 400,000, has been aptly compared for size and numbers to the present state of Vermont. Bavaria had in 1554 a population of 434,000; in 1596 of 468,000. Würzburg had in 1538 only 12,000; Hamburg in 1521 12,000 and in 1594 19,000. Danzig had in 1550 about 21,000. The largest city in central Germany, if not in the whole country—as a chronicler stated in 1572—was Erfurt, with a population of 32,000 in 1505. It was the center of the rising Saxon industries, mining and dying, and of commerce. Lübeck, Cologne, Nuremberg and Augsburg equalled or perhaps surpassed it in size, and certainly in wealth. The total population of German Switzerland was over 200,000. The whole German-speaking population of Central Europe amounted to perhaps twenty millions {455} in 1600, though it had been reckoned by the imperial government in 1500 as twelve millions.
[Sidenote: France]
The number of Frenchmen did not greatly increase in France in the 16th century. Though the borders of the state were extended, she suffered terribly by religious wars, and somewhat by emigration. Not only did many Huguenots flee from her to Switzerland, the Netherlands and England, but economic reasons led to large movements from the south and perhaps from the north. To fill up the gap caused by emigration from Spain a considerable number of French peasants moved to that land; and it is also possible that the same class of people sought new homes in Burgundy and Savoy to escape the pressure of taxes and dues. Various estimates concur in giving France a population of 15,000,000 to 16,000,000. The Paris of Henry II was by far the largest city in the world, numbering perhaps 300,000; but when Henry IV besieged it it had been reduced by war to 220,000. After that it waxed mightily again.
[Sidenote: Italy]
Italy, leader in many ways, was the first to take accurate statistics of population, births and deaths. These begin by the middle of the fifteenth century, but are rare until the middle of the sixteenth, when they become frequent. Notwithstanding war and pestilence the numbers of inhabitants seemed to grow steadily, the apparent result in the statistics being perhaps in part due to the increasing rigor of the census. Herewith follow specimens of the extant figures: The city of Brescia had 65,000 in 1505, and 43,000 in 1548. During the same period, however, the people in her whole territory of 2200 square miles had increased from 303,000 to 342,000. The city of Verona had 27,000 in 1473 and 52,000 in 1548; her land of 1200 square miles had in the first named year 99,000, in the last 159,000. The kingdom of Sicily grew from 600,000 in 1501 to {456} 800,000 in 1548, and 1,180,000 in 1615. The kingdom of Naples, without the capital, had about 1,270,000 people in 1501; 2,110,000 in 1545; the total including the capital amounted in 1600 to 3,000,000. The republic of Venice increased from 1,650,000 in 1550 to 1,850,000 in 1620. Florence with her territory had 586,000 in 1551 and 649,000 in 1622. In the year 1600 Milan with Lombardy had 1,350,000 inhabitants; Savoy in Italy 800,000; continental Genoa 500,000; Parma, Piacenza and Modena together 500,000; Sardinia 300,000; Corsica 150,000; Malta 41,000; Lucca 110,000. The population of Rome fluctuated violently. In 1521 it is supposed to have been about 55,000, but was reduced by the sack to 32,000. After this it rapidly recovered, reaching 45,000 under Paul IV (1558), and 100,000 under Sixtus V (1590). The total population of the States of the Church when the first census was taken in 1656 was 1,880,000.
[Sidenote: Spain]
The final impression one gets after reading the extremely divergent estimates of the population of Spain is that it increased during the first half of the century and decreased during the latter half. The highest figure for the increase of population during the reign of Charles V is the untrustworthy one of Habler, who believes the number of inhabitants to have doubled. This belief is founded on the conviction that the wealth of the kingdom doubled in that time. But though population tends to increase with wealth, it certainly does not increase in the same proportion as wealth, so that, considering this fact and also that the increase in wealth as shown by the doubling of income from royal domains was in part merely apparent, due to the falling value of money, we may dismiss Habler's figure as too high. And yet there is good evidence for the belief that there was a considerable increment. The cities especially gained with the new stimulus to {457} commerce and industry. In 1525 Toledo employed 10,000 workers in silk, who had increased fivefold by 1550. Unfortunately for accuracy these figures are merely contemporary guesses, but they certainly indicate a large growth in the population of Toledo, and similar figures are given for Seville, Burgos and other manufacturing and trading centers. From such estimates, however, combined with the censuses of hearths, peculiarly unsatisfactory in Spain as they excluded the privileged classes and were, as their violent fluctuations show, carelessly made, we may arrive at the conclusion that in 1557 the population of Spain was barely 9,000,000.
More difficult, if possible, is it to measure the amount of the decline in the latter half of the century. [Sidenote: Decline] It was widely noticed and commented on by contemporaries, who attributed it in part to the increase in sheep-farming (as in England) and in part to emigration to America. There were doubtless other more important and more obscure causes, namely the increasing rivalry in both commerce and industry of the north of Europe and the consequent decay of Spain's means of livelihood. The emigration amounted on the average to perhaps 4000 per annum throughout the century. The total Spanish population of America was reckoned by Velasco in 1574 at 30,500 households, or 152,500 souls. This would, however, imply a much larger emigration, probably double the last number, to account for the many Spaniards lost by the perils of the sea or in the depths of the wilderness. It is known, for example, that whereas the Spanish population of Venezuela was reckoned at 200 households at least 2000 Spaniards had gone to settle there. An emigration of 300,000 before 1574, or say 400,000 for the whole century, would have left a considerable gap at home. Add to this the industrial decline by which {458} Altamira reckons that the cities of the center and north, which suffered most, lost from one-half to one-third of their total population, and it is evident that a very considerable shrinkage took place. The census of 1594 reported a population of 8,200,000.
[Sidenote: Portugal]
The same tendency to depopulation was noticed to a much greater degree by contemporary observers of Portugal. Unfortunately, no even approximately accurate figures can be given. Two million is almost certainly too large for 1600.
[Sidenote: General table]
The following statistical table will enable the reader to form some estimate of the movements of population. Admitting that the margin of error is fairly large in some of the earlier estimates, it is believed that they are sufficiently near the truth to be of real service.
Country 1500 1600 England and Wales . . . . . . . . 3,000,000 4,100,000
Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000 700,000
The Netherlands (Holland and
Belgium) (1550) . . . . . . . . 3,000,000
Germany (including Austria, German
Switzerland, Franche Comté and
Savoy north of the Alps, but
excluding Hungary, the Netherlands,
East and West Prussia) . . . . . 12,000,000 20,000,000
France (1550) . . . . . . . . . . 16,000,000
Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000,000 13,000,000
Spain (1557 and 1594) . . . . . . 9,000,000[1] 8,200,000
Poland with East and West Prussia 3,000,000
Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600,000
Sweden, Norway and Finland . . . . 1,400,000
[1] For a higher estimate—ten to twelve millions in 1500—see note in bibliography.
[Sidenote: Gigantic increase in wealth since 16th century]
If the number of Europe's inhabitants has increased fourfold since Luther's time, the amount of her wealth has increased in a vastly greater ratio. The difference {459} between the twentieth and the sixteenth centuries is greater than anyone would at first blush believe possible. Moreover it is a difference that is, during times of peace, continually increasing. During the century from the close of the Napoleonic to the opening of the Great War, the wealth of the white races probably doubled every twenty-five years. The new factors that made this possible were the exploited resources of America, and the steam-engine. Prior to 1815 the increase of the world's wealth was much slower, but if it doubled once a century,—as would seem not improbable—we should have to allow that the world of 1914 was one hundred and twenty-eight times as rich as it was in 1514.
[Sidenote: Change from poverty to affluence emphasized]
Of course such a statement cannot pretend to anything like exactitude; the mathematical figure is a mere figure of speech; it is intended only to emphasize the fact that one of the most momentous changes during the last four centuries has been that from poverty to affluence. That the statement, surprising as it may seem, is no exaggeration, may be borne out by a few comparisons.
[Sidenote: War a test of a nation's financial strength]
One of the tests of a nation's financial strength is that of war. Francis I in time of war mustered at most an army of 100,000, and he reached this figure, or perhaps slightly exceeded it, only once during his reign, in the years 1536-7. This is only half the number of soldiers, proportionately to the population, that France maintained in time of peace at the opening of the twentieth century. And for more than four years, at a time when war was infinitely more expensive than it was when Pavia was fought, France kept in the field about an even five millions of men, more than an eighth of her population instead of about one one-hundred-and-fiftieth. Similar figures could be given for Germany and England. It is true that the power of {460} modern states is multiplied by their greater facilities for borrowing, but with all allowances the contrast suggests an enormous difference of wealth.
[Sidenote: Labor power of the world]
Take, as a standard of comparison, the labor power of the world. In 1918 the United States alone produced 685,000,000 tons of coal. Each ton burned gives almost as much power as is expended by two laborers working for a whole year. Thus the United States from its coal only had command of the equivalent of the labor of 1,370,000,000 men, or more than thrice the adult male labor power of the whole world; more than fifty times the whole labor power of sixteenth-century Europe. This does not take account of the fact that labor is far more productive now than then, even without steam. The comparison is instructive because the population of the United States in 1910 was about equal to that of the whole of Europe in 1600.
The same impression would be given by a comparison of the production of any other standard product. More gold was produced in the year 1915 than the whole stock of gold in the world in 1550, perhaps in 1600. More wheat is produced annually in Minnesota than the granaries of the cities of the world would hold four centuries ago.
[Sidenote: Poverty of the Middle Ages]
In fact, there was hardly wealth at all in the Middle Ages, only degrees of poverty, and the sixteenth century first began to see the accumulation of fortunes worthy of the name. In 1909 there were 1100 persons in France with an income of more than $40,000 per annum; among them were 150 with an income of more than $200,000. In England in 1916 seventy-nine persons paid income taxes on estates of more than $125,000,000. On the other hand the richest man in France, Jacques Coeur, whose fortune was proverbial like that of Rockefeller today, had in 1503 a capital of only {461} $5,400,000. The total wealth of the house of Fugger about 1550 has been estimated at $32,000,000, though the capital of their bank was never anything like that. The contrast was greatest among the very richest class, but it was sufficiently striking in the middle classes. Such a condition as comfort hardly existed.
The same impression will be given to the student of public finance. As more will be said in another paragraph on the revenues of the principal states, only one example need be given here for the sake of contrast. The total revenue of Francis I was $256,000 per annum, that of Henry II even less, $228,000. The revenue of France in 1905 was $750,000,000. Henry VIII often had more difficulty in raising a loan of L50,000 than the English government had recently in borrowing six billions.
[Sidenote: Value of money]
It is impossible to say which is the harder task, to compare the total wealth of the world at two given periods, or to compare the value of money at different times. Even the mechanical difficulties in the comparison of prices are enormous. When we read that wheat at Wittenberg sold at one gulden the scheffel, it is necessary to determine in the first place how much a gulden and how much a scheffel represented in terms of dollars and bushels. When we discover that there were half a dozen different guldens, and half a dozen separate measures known as scheffels, varying from province to province and from time to time, and varying widely, it is evident that great caution is necessary in ascertaining exactly which gulden and exactly which scheffel is meant.
When coin and measure have been reduced to known quantities, there remains the problem of fixing the quality. Cloth is quoted in the sixteenth century as of standard sizes and grades, but neither of these important factors is accurately known to any modern {462} economist. One would think that in quoting prices of animals an invariable standard would be secured. Quite the contrary. So much has the breed of cattle improved that a fat ox now weighs two or three times what a good ox weighed four centuries ago. Horses are larger, stronger and faster; hens lay many more eggs, cows give much more milk now than formerly. Shoes, clothes, lumber, candles, are not of the same quality in different centuries, and of course there is an ever increasing list of new articles in which no comparison can be made.
[Sidenote: Fluctuation in coinage]
Nevertheless, some allowance can be made for all factors involved, as far as they are mechanical; some comparisons can be given that bear a sufficiently close relation to exactitude to form the basis from which certain valid deductions can be drawn. Now first as to the intrinsic value, in amounts of gold and silver in the several coins. The vast fluctuation in the value of the English shilling, due to the successive debasements and final restitution of the coinage, is thus expressed:
Year Troy grains Year Troy grains 1461 . . . . . . 133 1551 . . . . . . 20 1527 . . . . . . 118 1552 . . . . . . 88 1543 . . . . . . 100 1560 . . . . . . 89 1545 . . . . . . 60 1601 . . . . . . 86 1546 . . . . . . 40 1919 . . . . . . 87.27
A similar depreciation, more gradual but never rectified, is seen in the value of French money. The standard of reckoning was the livre tournois, which varied intrinsically in value of the silver put into it as follows:
Years Intrinsic value of silver
1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 cents
1512-40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 cents
1541-60 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 cents
1561-72 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 cents
{463}
1573-79 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 cents
1580-1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 cents
[Sidenote: Value of Spanish coins]
The standard Spanish gold coin after 1497 was the ducat, which had 3.485 grammes of gold (value in our money $2.40). This was divided into 375 maravedis, which therefore had a value of about two-thirds of a cent each. A Castilian marc of gold had 230 grammes or a value of about $16. After 1537 a handsome silver coin, known as the peso fuerte or "piece of eight" because each contained eight reals, was minted in America. Its value was about $1.06 of our money, it being the predecessor of our dollar.
The great difficulty with the coinage of Germany and Italy is not so much in its fluctuation as in the number of mints. The name gulden [Sidenote: Gulden a general term] was given to almost any coin, originally, as its etymology signifies, a gold piece, but later also to a silver piece. Among gold guldens there was the Rhenish gulden intrinsically worth $1.34; the Philip's gulden in the Netherlands of 96 cents and the Carolus gulden coined after 1520 and worth $1.14. But the coin commonly used in reckoning was the silver gulden, worth intrinsically 56 cents. This was divided into 20 groschen. Other coins quite ordinarily met with in the literature of the times are pounds (7.5 cents), pfennigs (various values), stivers, crowns, nobles, angels ($2), and Hungarians ducats ($1.75). Since 1518 the chief silver coin was the thaler, at first considered the equal of a silver gulden. The law of 1559, however, made them two different coins, restoring the thaler to what had probably been its former value of 72 cents, and leaving the imperial gulden in law, what it had commonly become in fact, a lesser amount of silver.
The coinage of Italy was dominated by the gold gulden or florin of Florence and the ducat of Venice, {464} each worth not far from $2.25 of our money. Both these coins, partly on account of their beauty, partly because of the simple honesty with which they were kept at the nominal standard, attained just fame throughout the Middle Ages and thereafter, and became widely used in other lands.
[Sidenote: Wheat]
The standard of value determined, it is now possible to compare the prices of some staple articles. First in importance comes wheat, which fluctuated enormously within short periods at the same place and in terms of the same amounts of silver. From Luther's letters we learn that wheat sold at Wittenberg for one gulden a scheffel in 1539 and for three groschen a scheffel in 1542, the latter price being considered "so cheap as never before," the former reached in a time almost of famine and calling for intervention on the part of the government. However we interpret these figures (and I believe them to mean that wheat sold at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they certainly indicate a tremendous instability in prices, due to the poor communications and backward methods of agriculture, making years of plenty alternate with years of hunger. In the case of Wittenberg, the lower level was nearer the normal, for in 1527 wheat was there sold at twenty cents a bushel. In other parts of Germany it was dearer; at Strassburg from 1526-50 it averaged 30 cents a bushel; from 1551-75 it went up to an average of 58 cents, and from 1576-1600 the average again rose to 80 cents a bushel.
Prices also rose in England throughout the century even in terms of silver. Of course part of the rise in the middle years was due to the debasement of the coinage. Reduced to bushels and dollars, the following table shows the tendency of prices:
1530 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 cents a bushel
1537 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 cents
{465}
1544 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 cents
1546 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 cents
1547 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 cents
1548 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 cents
1549 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 cents
1550 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 cents
1572 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 cents
1595 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.14
Wheat in France averaged 23 cents a bushel prior to 1540, after which it rose markedly in price, touching $1.50 in 1600, under exceptional conditions. In order to compare with prices nowadays we must remember that $1 a bushel was a remarkably good price before the late war, during which it was fixed at $2.20 by the American government. Barley in England rose from 6 cents a bushel in 1530 to 10 cents in 1547 and 33 cents in 1549. It was in 1913 70 cents a bushel. Oats rose from 5 cents a bushel in England in 1530 to 18 cents in 1549; in 1913 38 cents.
[Sidenote: Animals]
Animals sold much lower in the sixteenth century than they do now, though it must be remembered that they are worth more after several centuries of careful breeding. Horses then sold at $2.50 in England and at $4 to $11 in France; the average price in 1913 was $244 for working animals. Cows were worth $2 in England in 1530; from $4 to $6.40 in France; oxen apparently came considerably higher, averaging in England $10 a head in 1547 and in France from $9 to $16 a yoke. At present they are sold by weight, averaging in 1913 9 cents per lb., or $90 for one weighing a thousand pounds. Beef then cost about 2/3 of a cent a pound instead of 40 cents as in 1914. A sheep was sold in 1585 at $1.60, a large swine at $5, and pigs at 26 cents apiece. Pork cost 2 cents a pound; hens sold in England at 12 cents a piece and geese and ducks for the same; at Wittenberg geese fetched only 6 cents in 1527. Eggs might have been bought at 2 cents a dozen.
{466} [Sidenote: Groceries]
Wholesale prices of groceries, taken mostly from an English table drawn up about 1580, were as follows: Oil was $140 the ton, or 55 cents a gallon; train-oil was just half that price; Newfoundland fish cost then $2.50 the quintal dry, as against $7.81 in 1913. Gascon wines (claret) varied according to quality, from 16 cents to 24 cents a quart. Salt fetched $7.50 a ton, which is very close to the price that it was in 1913 ($1.02 per bbl. of 280 lbs.). Soap was $13 the hundredweight. Pepper and sugar cost nearly the same, about $70 the hundredweight, or far higher than they were in 1919, when each cost $11 the hundredweight. Spices also cost more in the sixteenth century than they do now, and rose throughout the century. By 1580 the wholesale price per hundredweight was $224 for cloves, the same for nutmegs, $150 for cinnamon, $300 for mace. Ginger was $90 the hundredweight, and candles 6.6 cents the lb. as against 7.25 cents now.
[Sidenote: Drygoods]
Drygoods varied immensely in cost. Raw wool sold in England in 1510 for 4 cents per lb., as against 26 cents just four hundred years later. Fine cloth sold at $65 "the piece," the length and breadth of which it is unfortunately impossible to determine accurately. Different grades came in different sizes, averaging a yard in width, but from 18 yards to 47 yards in length, the finer coming in longer rolls. Sorting cloths were $45 the piece. Linen cost 20 cents a yard in 1580; Mary, Queen of Scots, five years later paid $6.50 the yard for purple velvet and 28 cents the yard for buckram to line the same. The coarse clothes of the poor were cheaper, a workman's suit in France costing $1.80 in 1600, a child's whole wardrobe $3.40, and a soldier's uniform $4.20. The prices of the poorest women's dresses ranged from $3 to $6 each. In 1520 Albert Dürer paid in the Netherlands 17 cents for one pair of shoes, 33 cents for another and 20 cents for a {467} pair of woman's gloves. A pair of spectacles cost him 22 cents, a pair of gloves for himself 38 cents.
[Sidenote: Metals]
Metals were dearer in the sixteenth century than they are now. Iron cost $60 a ton in 1580 against $22 a ton in 1913. Lead fetched $42 the ton and tin $15 the cwt. The ratio of gold to silver was about 1 to 11. The only fuel much used was wood, which was fairly cheap but of course not nearly as efficient as our coal.
[Sidenote: Interest]
Interest, as the price of money, varied then as it does now in inverse ratio to the security offered by the debtor, and on the whole within much the same range that it does now. The best security was believed to be that of the German Free Cities, governed as they were by the commercial class that appreciated the virtue of prompt and honest payment. Accordingly, we find that they had no trouble in borrowing at 5 per cent., their bonds taking the form of perpetual annuities, like the English consols. So eagerly were these investments sought that they were apportioned on petition as special favors to the creditors. The cities of Paris and London also enjoyed high credit. The national governments had to pay far higher, owing to their poverty and dishonesty. Francis I borrowed at 10 per cent.; Charles V paid higher in the market of Antwerp, the extreme instance being that of 50 per cent. per annum. In 1550 he regularly paid 20 per cent., a ruinous rate that foreshadowed his bankruptcy and was partly caused by its forecast. Until the recent war we were accustomed to think of the great nations borrowing at 2-4 per cent., but during the war the rate immensely rose. Anglo-French bonds, backed by the joint and several credit of the two nations, sold on the New York Stock Exchange in 1918 at a price that would yield the investor more than 12 per cent., and City of Paris bonds at a rate of more than 16 per cent.
{468} Commercial paper, or loans advanced by banks to merchants on good security, of course varied. The lowest was reached at Genoa where from time to time merchants secured accommodation at 3 per cent. The average in Germany was 6 per cent. and this was made the legal rate by Brandenburg in 1565. But usurers, able to take advantage of the necessities of poor debtors, habitually exacted more, as they do now, and loans on small mortgages or on pawned articles often ran at 30 per cent. On the whole, the rate of interest fell slightly during the century.
[Sidenote: Real estate]
The price of real estate is more difficult to compare than almost anything, owing to the individual circumstances of each purchase. Land in France sold at rates ranging from $8 to $240 the acre. Luther bought a little farm in the country for $340, and a piece of property in Wittenberg for $500. After his death, in 1564, the house he lived in, a large and handsome building formerly the Augustinian Cloister, fetched $2072. The house can be seen today[1] and would certainly, one would think, now bring fifteen times as much.
[Sidenote: Books]
Books were comparatively cheap. The Greek Testament sold for 48 cents, a Latin Testament for half that amount, a Latin folio Bible published in 1532 for $4, Luther's first New Testament at 84 cents. One might get a copy of the Pandects for $1.60, of Vergil for 10 cents, a Greek grammar for 8 cents, Demosthenes and Aeschines in one volume at 20 cents, one of Luther's more important tracts for 30 cents and the condemnation of him by the universities in a small pamphlet at 6 cents. One of the things that has gone down most in price since that day is postage. Dürer while in the Netherlands paid a messenger 17 cents to deliver a {469} letter (or several letters?), presumably sent to his home in Nuremberg.
[Sidenote: Wages]
In accordance with the general rule that wages follow the trend of prices sluggishly, whether upwards or downwards, there is less change to be observed in them throughout the sixteenth century than there is in the prices of commodities. Subject to government regulation, the remuneration of all kinds of labor remained nearly stationary while the cost of living was rising. Startling is the difference in the rewards of the various classes, that of the manual laborers being cruelly low, that of professional men somewhat less in proportion to the cost of living than it is today, and that of government officers being very high. No one except court officials got a salary over $5000 a year, and some of them got much more. In 1553 a French chamberlain was paid $51,000 per annum.
A French navvy received 8 cents a day in 1550, a carpenter as much as 26 cents. A male domestic was given $7 to $12 a year in addition to his keep and a woman $5 to $6. As the number of working days in Catholic countries was only about 250 a year, workmen made from $65 to as low as $20. If anything, labor was worse paid in Germany than it was in France. Agricultural labor in England was paid in two scales, one for summer and one for winter. It varied from 3 cents to 7 cents a day, the smaller sum being paid only to men who were also boarded. In summer freemasons and master carpenters got from 8 cents to 11 cents for a terribly long day, in winter 6 cents to 9 cents for a shorter day. The following scale was fixed by law in England in 1563: A hired farmer was to have $10 a year and $2 for livery; a common farm hand was allowed $8.25 and $1.25 extra for livery; a "mean servant" $6 and $1.25 respectively, a man child {470} $4 and $1; a chief woman cook $5 and $1.60, a mean or simple woman $3 and $1; a woman child $2.50 and $1. All were of course boarded and lodged.
The pay of French soldiers under Francis I was for privates $28 a year in time of war; this fell to $1 a year in time of peace; for captains $33 a month in time of peace and $66 in time of war. Captains in the English navy received $36 a month; common seamen $1.25 a month for wages and the same allowance for food.
[Sidenote: Pay of clergymen]
The church fared little better than the army. In Scotland, a poor country but one in which the clergy were respected, by the law of 1562, a parson if a single man was given $26 a year, if a married man a maximum of $78 a year; probably a parsonage was added. Doubtless many Protestant ministers eked out their subsistence by fees, as the Catholic priests certainly did. Dürer gave 44 cents to a friar who confessed his wife. Every baptism, marriage and burial was taxed a certain amount. In France one could hire a priest to say a mass at from 60 cents to $7 in 1500, and at from 30 to 40 cents in 1600. At this price it has remained since, a striking instance of religious conservatism working to the detriment of the priest, for the same money represents much less in real wages now than it did then.
[Sidenote: Physicians]
Fees for physicians ranged from 33 to 44 cents a visit in Germany about 1520. Treatment and medicine were far higher. At Antwerp Dürer paid $2.20 for a small quantity of medicine for his wife. Fees were sometimes given for a whole course of attendance. In England we hear of such "cures" paid for at from $3.30 to $5. Very little, if any, advice was given free to the poor. The physicians for the French king received a salary of $200 a year and other favors. William Butts, physician to Henry VIII, had $500 per {471} annum, in addition to a knighthood; and his salary was increased to over $600 for attending the Duke of Richmond.
[Sidenote: Teachers]
Teachers in the lower schools were regarded as lackeys and paid accordingly. Nicholas Udal, head master of Eton, received $50 per annum and various small allowances. University professors were treated more liberally. Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg got a maximum of $224 per annum, which was about the same as the stipend of leading professors in other German universities and at Oxford and Cambridge. The teacher also got a small honorarium from each student. When Paul III restored the Sapienza at Rome he paid a minimum of $17 per annum to some friars who taught theology and who were cared for by their order, but he gave high salaries to the professors of rhetoric and medicine. Ordinarily these received $476 a year, but one professor of the classics reached the highwater-mark with nearly $800.
[Sidenote: Royalties]
The rewards of literary men were more consistently small in the sixteenth century than they are now, owing to the absence of effective copyright. An author usually received a small sum from the printer to whom he first offered his manuscript, but his subsequent royalties, if any, depended solely on the goodwill of the publisher. A Wittenberg printer offered Luther $224 per annum for his manuscripts, but the Reformer declined it, wishing to make his books as cheap as possible. In 1512 Erasmus got $8.40 from Badius the Parisian printer for a new edition of his Adages. In fact, the rewards of letters, such as they were, were indirect, in the form of pensions, gifts and benefices from the great. Erasmus got so many of these favors that he lived more than comfortably. Luther died almost a rich man, so many honoraria did he collect from noble admirers. Rabelais was given a benefice, though {472} he only lived two years afterwards to enjoy its fruits. Henry VIII gave $500 to Thomas Murner for writing against Luther. But the lot of the average writer was hard. Fulsome flattery was the most lucrative production of the muse.
[Sidenote: Artists]
Artists fared better. Dürer sold one picture for $375 and another for $200, not counting the "tip" which his wife asked and received on each occasion from the patron. Probably his woodcuts brought him more from the printers than any single painting, and when he died he left the then respectable sum of $32,000. He had been offered a pension of $300 per annum and a house at Antwerp by that city if he would settle there, but he preferred to return to Nuremberg, where he was pensioned $600 a year by the emperor. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both received $129 a month for work done for a prince, and the latter was given a pension of $5200 a year by Paul III. Raphael in 1520 left an estate of $140,000.
[Sidenote: Value of money]
If a comparison of the value of money is made, the final impression that one gets is that an ounce of gold was in 1563, let us say, expected to do about ten times as much work as the same weight of precious metal performed in 1913.[2] If a few articles were then actually dearer, they were comparatively unimportant and were balanced by other articles even more than ten times as cheap. But a dollar will buy so many articles now which did not exist in former ages that a plausible case can be made out for the paradox that money is now worth more than it ever was before. If an ounce of gold would in Luther's time exchange for a much larger quantity of simple necessaries than it will purchase now, on the other hand a man with an income of $5000 a year is far better off than a man with the {473} same income, or indeed with any income, was then.
[Sidenote: Trend of prices]
Notwithstanding the great difficulties of making out any fair index number representing the cost of living and applicable to long periods, owing to the fact that articles vary from time to time, as when candles are replaced by gas and gas by electricity, yet the general trend of prices can be pretty plainly ascertained. Generally speaking, prices—measured in weight of gold and not in coin—sank slowly from 1390 till 1520 under the influence of better technical methods of production and possibly of the draining of gold and silver to the Orient. From 1520 till 1560 prices rose quite slowly on account of the increased production of gold and silver and its more rapid circulation by means of better banking. From 1560 to 1600 prices rose with enormous rapidity, partly because of the destruction of wealth and increase in the cost of production following in the wake of the French and Dutch wars of religion, and still more, perhaps, on account of the torrent of American silver suddenly poured into the lap of Europe. Taking the century as a whole, we find that wheat rose the most, as much as 150 per cent. in England, 200 per cent. in France and 300 per cent. in Germany. Other articles rose less, and in some cases remained stationary, or sank in price. Money wages rose slowly, far less than the cost of living.
[Sidenote: Increase in volume of precious metals]
Apart from special circumstances affecting the production of particular classes of goods, the main cause of the general trend of prices upwards was probably the increase in the volume of the precious metals. Just how great this was, it is impossible to determine, and yet a calculation can be made, yielding figures near enough the actual to be of service. From the middle of the fifteenth century there had been a considerable increase in the production of silver from German, Bohemian and Hungarian mines. Although this {474} increase was much more than is usually allowed for—equalling, in the opinion of one scholar, the produce of American mines until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century—it was only enough to meet the expanding demands of commerce. Before America entered the market, there was also a considerable import of gold from Asia and Africa. The tide of Mexican treasure began to flood Spain about 1520, but did not reach the other countries in large quantities until about 1560. When we consider the general impression concerning the increase of the currency immediately following the pillage of the Aztecs and Incas, the following statistics of the English mint are instructive, if they are not enigmatical. During the first fourteen years of Henry VIII (1509-23) the average amount of gold minted in England was 24,666 troy pounds per annum, and of silver 31,225 troy pounds. But in the years 1537-40, before the great debasement of the currency had taken place, the amount of gold coined fell to 3,297 Troy pounds per annum, and that of silver rose only to 52,974 troy pounds. As each pound of gold was at that time worth as much as eleven pounds of silver, this means that the actual amount of new money put into circulation each year in the latter period was less than a third of that minted in the earlier years. The figures also indicate the growing cheapness of silver, stimulating its import, while the import of gold was greatly restricted, according to Gresham's law that cheap money drives out dear.
[Sidenote: Estimates of gold and silver products]
The spoil of Mexico and Peru has frequently been over-estimated, by none more extravagantly than by the Conquistadores and their contemporaries. But the estimates of modern scholars vary enormously. Lexis believes that the total amount of gold produced by Europe and America from 1501 to 1550 (the greater part, of course, by America) amounted to $134,000,000. {475} F. de Laiglesio, on the other hand, thinks that not more than $4,320,000 was mined in America before 1555. The most careful estimate, that made by Professor Haring, arrives at the following results, [Sidenote: Haring's estimate] the amounts being given in pesos each worth very nearly the same as our dollar. Mexican production:
1521-44 1345-60 Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,348,900 343,670 Silver . . . . . . . . . . . 4,130,170 22,467,111
For Peru the proportions of gold and silver cannot be separated, but the totals taken together from 1531-1560 amounted to probably 84,350,600 pesos. Other small sums came from other parts of the New World, and the final total for production of gold and silver in America until 1560 is given at 139,720,000 pesos. This is a reduction to 70 per cent. of the estimate of Lexis. Assuming that the same correction must be made on all of the estimates given by Lexis we have the following figures for the world's production of precious metals in kilogrammes and in dollars:[3]
Gold Silver
Average per annum Average per annum
in
pesos or
dollars
of 25
in kilos in dollars kilos grammes 1493-1520 . . . 4270 3,269,000 31,570 1,262,800 1521-44 . . . 4893 3,425,000 52,010 2,080,400 1545-60 . . . 4718 3,302,600 184,730 7,389,200 1561-80 . . . 4718 3,302,600 185,430 7,417,200 1581-1600 . . . 4641 3,268,700 230,480 9,219,200
{476} Combining these figures we see that the production of gold was pretty steady throughout the century, making a total output of about $330,000,000. The production of silver, however, greatly increased after 1544. From the beginning of the century to that year it amounted to $75,285,600; from 1545 to 1600 inclusive it increased to $450,955,200, making a total output for the century of $526,240,800. Of course these figures only roughly approximate the truth; nevertheless they give a correct idea of the general processes at work. Even for the first half of the century the production of the precious metals was far in excess of anything that had preceded, and this output, large as it was, was nearly tripled in the last half of the century. These figures, however, are extremely modest compared with those of recent times, when more gold is mined in a year than was then mined in a century. The total amount mined in 1915 was $470,000,000; in 1917 $428,000,000; for the period 1850 to 1916 inclusive the total amount mined was $13,678,000,000.
[1] See the photograph in my Life and Letters of Luther, p. 364.
[2] No valid comparison can be made for the years after 1913, for in most nations paper currencies have ousted gold.
[3] These figures are based on those of Sommerlad in the Handwörter-buch der Staatswissenschaften, s.v. "Preis," taken from Wiebe, who based on Lexis. Figures quite similar to those of Sommerlad are given by C. F. Bastable in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Money." I have incorporated Haring's corrections.
[Sidenote: The monarchies]
For a variety of reasons the sixteenth century was as monarchical in mind as the twentieth century is democratic. Immemorial prescription then had a vigor since lost, and monarchy descended from classical and biblical antiquity when kings were hedged with a genuine divinity. The study of Roman law, with its absolutist maxims, aided in the formation of royalist sentiment. The court as the center of fashion attracted a brilliant society, while the small man satisfied his cravings for gentility by devouring the court gossip that even then clogged the presses. It is probable that one reason why the throne became so popular was that it was, next to the church, the best advertised {477} article in the world. But underlying these sentimental reasons for loyalty there was a basis of solid utility, predisposing men to support the scepter as the one power strong enough to overawe the nobles. One tyrant was better than many; one lion could do less harm than a pack of wolves and hyaenas. In the greater states men felt perfectly helpless without a king to rule the anarchical chaos into which society would have dissolved without him. When the Spanish Communes rebelled against Charles V they triumphed in the field, but their attempt simply collapsed in face of their utter inability to solve the problem of government without a royal governor. They were as helpless as bees without a queen. Indeed, so strong was their instinct to get a royal head that they tried to preserve themselves by kidnapping Charles's mother, poor, mad Joanna, to fill the political vacuum that they had made. So in the civil wars in France; notwithstanding the more promising materials for the formation of a republic in that country, all parties were, in fact, headed by claimants to the throne.
[Sidenote: Councils of State]
Next to the king came the Council of State, composed of princes of the blood, cardinals, nobles and some officers and secretaries of state, not always of noble blood but frequently, especially in the cases of the most powerful of them, scions of the middle class. What proportion of the executive power was wielded by the Council depended on the personal character of the monarch. Henry VIII was always master; Elizabeth was more guided than guiding; the Councils of the Valois and Hapsburgs profited by the preoccupation or the stupidity of their masters to usurp the royal power for themselves. In public opinion the Council occupied a great place, similar to that of an English Cabinet today. The first Anglican prayerbook {478} contains petitions for the Council, though it did not occur to the people to pray for Parliament until the next century.
The countries were governed no longer by the nobles as such but by officials appointed by the crown. It is an indication of the growing nationalization of policy that the sixteenth century saw the first establishment of permanent diplomatic agents. The first ambassadors, selected largely from a panel of bishops, magistrates, judges and scholars, were expected to function not only as envoys but also as spies. Under them was a host of secret agents expected to do underhand work and to take the responsibility for it themselves so that, if found out, they could be repudiated.
[Sidenote: Parliaments]
Very powerful was the national popular assembly: the Parliament, the Diet, the States General, or the Cortes. Its functions, prescriptive and undefined, were commonly understood to include the granting of taxes. The assent of the body was also required, to a varying degree, for the sanction of other laws. But the real power of the people's representatives lay in the fact that they were the chief organ for the expression of that public opinion which in all countries and at all times it is unsafe for governments to disregard. Sitting in two or more chambers to represent the several estates or sometimes—as in the German Diet—subdivisions of these estates, the representatives were composed of members of the privileged orders, the clergy and nobility, and of the elected representatives of the city aristocracies. The majority of the population, the poor, were unrepresented. That this class had as great a stake in the commonwealth as any other, and that they had a class consciousness capable of demanding reforms and of taking energetic measures to secure them, is shown by a number of rebellions of the proletariat, and yet it is not unfair to them, or {479} disdainful, to say that on most matters they were too uninstructed, too powerless and too mute to contribute much to that body of sentiment called public opinion, one condition of which seems to be that to exist it must find expression.
[Sidenote: Influence of the Estates General]
The Estates General, by whatever name they were called, supplemented in France by provincial bodies called Parlements partaking of the nature of high courts of justice, and in Germany by the local Diets (Landtag) of the larger states, exercised a very real and in some cases a decisive influence on public policy. The monarch of half the world dared not openly defy the Cortes of Aragon or of Castile; the imperious Tudors diligently labored to get parliamentary sanction for their tyrannical acts, and, on the few occasions when they could not do so, hastened to abandon as gracefully as possible their previous intentions. In Germany the power of the Diet was not limited by the emperor, but by the local governments, though even so it was considerable. When a Diet, under skilful manipulation or by unscrupulous trickery, was induced by the executive to pass an unpopular measure, like the Edict of Worms, the law became a dead letter. In some other instances, notably in its long campaign against monopolies, even when it expressed the popular voice the Diet failed because the emperor was supported by the wealthy capitalists. Only recently it has been revealed how the Fuggers of Augsburg and their allies endeavored to manipulate or to frustrate its work in the matter of government regulation of industry and commerce.
[Sidenote: Public finance]
The finances of most countries were managed corruptly and unwisely. The taxes were numerous and complicated and bore most heavily on the poor. From ordinary taxes in most countries the privileged orders were exempt, though they were forced to contribute {480} special sums levied by themselves. The general property tax (taille) in France yielded 2,400,000 livres tournois in 1517 and 4,600,000 in 1543. The taxes were farmed; that is, the right of collecting them was sold at auction, with the natural result that they were put into the hands of extortioners who made vast fortunes by oppressing the people. Revenues of the royal domain, excises on salt and other articles, import and export duties, and the sale of offices and monopolies, supplemented the direct taxes. The system of taxation varied in each country. Thus in Spain the 10 per cent. tax on the price of an article every time it was sold and the royalty on precious metals—20 per cent. after 1504—proved important sources of revenue. Rome drove a lucrative trade in spiritual wares. Everywhere, fines for transgressions of the law figured more largely as a source of revenue than they do nowadays.
[Sidenote: Wasteful expenditures]
Expenditures were both more wasteful and more niggardly than they are today. Though the service of the public debt was trifling compared with modern standards, and though the administration of justice was not expensive because of the fee system, the army and navy cost a good deal, partly because they were composed largely of well paid mercenaries. The personal extravagances of the court were among the heaviest burdens borne by the people. The kings built palaces: they wallowed in cloth of gold; they collected objects of art; they squandered fortunes on mistresses and minions; they made constant progresses with a retinue of thousands of servants and horses. The two greatest states, France and Spain, both went into bankruptcy in 1557.
[Sidenote: Public order]
The great task of government, that of keeping public order, protecting life and property and punishing the criminal, was approached by our forbears with more gusto than success. The laws were terrible, but they {481} were unequally executed. In England among capital crimes were the following: murder, arson, escape from prison, hunting by night with painted faces or visors, embezzling property worth more than 40 shillings, carrying horses or mares into Scotland, conjuring, practising witchcraft, removing landmarks, desertion from the army, counterfeiting or mutilating coins, cattle-lifting, house-breaking, picking of pockets. All these were punished by hanging, but crimes of special heinousness, such as poisoning, were visited with burning or boiling to death. The numerous laws against treason and heresy have already been described. Lesser punishments included flogging, pillory, branding, the stocks, clipping ears, piercing tongues, and imprisonment in dungeons made purposely as horrible as possible, dark, noisome dens without furniture or conveniences, often too small for a man to stand upright or to lie at full length.
[Sidenote: Number of executions]
With such laws it is not surprising that 72,000 men were hanged under Henry VIII, an average of nearly 2,000 a year. The number at present, when the population of England and Wales has swollen to tenfold of what it was then, is negligible. Only nine men were hanged in the United Kingdom in the years 1901-3; about 5,000 are now on the average annually convicted of felony. If anything, the punishments were harsher on the Continent than in Britain. The only refuge of the criminal was the greed of his judges. At Rome it was easy and regular to pay a price for every crime, and at other places bribery was more or less prevalent.
[Sidenote: Cruel trial methods]
The methods of trying criminals were as cruel as their punishments. On the Continent the presumption was held to be against the accused, and the rack and its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that when men felt the pain they spoke the truth merely {482} expressed the current delusion, for legislators and judges, their hearts hardened in part by the example of the church, concurred in his opinion. The exceptional protest of Montaigne deserves to be quoted for its humanity: "All that exceeds simple death is absolute cruelty, nor can our laws expect that he whom the fear of decapitation or hanging will not restrain should be awed by imagining the horrors of a slow fire, burning pincers or breaking on the wheel."
The spirit of the English law was against the use of torture, which, however, made progress, especially in state trials, under the Tudors. A man who refused to plead in an English court was subjected to the peine forte et dure, which consisted in piling weights on his chest until he either spoke or was crushed to death. To enforce the laws there was a constabulary in the country, supplemented by the regular army, and a police force in the cities. That of Paris consisted of 240 archers, among them twenty-four mounted men. The inefficiency of some of the English officers is amusingly caricatured in the persons of Dogberry and Verges who, when they saw a thief, concluded that he was no honest man and the less they had to meddle or make with him the more for their honesty.
[Sidenote: Blue laws]
If, in all that has just been said, it is evident that the legislation of that period and of our own had the same conception of the function of government and only differed in method and efficiency, there was one very large class of laws spread upon the statute-books of medieval Europe that has almost vanished now. A paternal statesmanship sought to regulate the private lives of a citizen in every respect: the fashion of his clothes, the number of courses at his meals, how many guests he might have at wedding, dinner or dance, how long he should be permitted to haunt the tavern, and how much he should drink, how he {483} should spend Sunday, how he should become engaged, how dance, how part his hair and with how thick a stick he should be indulged in the luxury of beating his wife.
The "blue laws," as such regulations on their moral side came to be called, were no Protestant innovation. The Lutherans hardly made any change whatever in this respect, but Calvin did give a new and biting intensity to the medieval spirit. His followers, the Puritans, in the next century, almost succeeded in reducing the staple of a Christian man's legitimate recreation to "seasonable meditation and prayer." But the idea originated long before the evolution of "the non-conformist conscience."
The fundamental cause of all this legislation was sheer conservatism. [Sidenote: Spirit of conservatism] Primitive men and savages have so strong a feeling of the sanction of custom that they have, as Bagehot expresses it, fairly screwed themselves down by their unreasoning demands for conformity. A good deal of this spirit has survived throughout history and far more of it, naturally, was found four centuries ago than at present, when reason has proved a solvent for so many social institutions. There are a good many laws of the period under survey—such as that of Nuremberg against citizens parting their hair—for which no discoverable basis can be found save the idea that new-fangled fashions should not be allowed.
Economic reasons also played their part in the regulation of the habits of the people. Thus a law of Edward VI, after a preamble setting forth that divers kinds of food are indifferent before God, nevertheless commands all men to eat fish as heretofore on fast days, not as a religious duty but to encourage fishermen, give them a livelihood and thus train men for the navy.
A third very strong motive in the mind of the {484} sixteenth-century statesmen, was that of differentiating the classes of citizens. The blue laws, if they may be so called in this case, were secretions of the blue blood. To make the vulgar know their places it was essential to make them dress according to their rank. The intention of An Act for the Reformation of excess in Apparel, [Sidenote: Apparel according to rank] passed by the English Parliament in 1532, was stated to be,
the necessary repressing and avoiding and expelling of the excess daily more used in the sumptuous and costly apparel and array accustomably worn in this Realm, whereof hath ensued and daily do chance such sundry high and notorious detriments of the common weal, the subversion of good and politic order in knowledge and distinction of people according to their estates, pre-eminences, dignities and degrees to the utter impoverishment and undoing of many inexpert and light persons inclined to pride, mother of all vices.
The tenor of the act prescribes the garb appropriate to the royal family, to nobles of different degree, to citizens according to their income, to servants and husbandmen, to the clergy, doctors of divinity, soldiers, lawyers and players. Such laws were common in all countries. A Scotch act provides "that it be lauchful to na wemen to weir [clothes] abone [above] their estait except howries." This law was not only "apprevit" by King James VI, but endorsed with his own royal hand, "This acte is verray gude."
Excessive fare at feasts was provided against for similar reasons and with almost equal frequency. By an English proclamation [Sidenote: 1517] the number of dishes served was to be regulated according to the rank of the highest person present. Thus, if a cardinal was guest or host, there might be nine courses, if a lord of Parliament six, for a citizen with an income of five hundred pounds a year, three. Elsewhere the number of guests at all {485} ordinary functions as well as the number and price of gifts at weddings, christenings and like occasions, was prescribed.
[Sidenote: 1526]
Games of chance were frequently forbidden. Francis I ordered a lieutenant with twenty archers to visit taverns and gaming houses and arrest all players of cards, dice and other unlawful games. This did not prevent the establishment of a public lottery, [Sidenote: 1539] a practice justified by alleging the examples of Italian cities in raising revenue by this means. Henry III forbade all games of chance "to minors and other debauched persons," [Sidenote: 1577] and this was followed six years later by a crushing impost on cards and dice, interesting as one of the first attempts to suppress the instruments of vice through the taxing power. Merry England also had many laws forbidding "tennis, bowles, dicing and cards," the object being to encourage the practice of archery.
Tippling was the subject of occasional animadversion by the various governments, though there seemed to be little sentiment against it until the opening of the following century. The regulation of the number of taverns and of the amount of wine that might be kept in a gentleman's cellar, as prescribed in an English law, [Sidenote: 1553] mentions not the moral but the economic aspect of drinking. The purchase of French wines was said to drain England of money.
Though the theater also did not suffer much until the time of Cromwell, plays were forbidden in the precincts of the city of London. The Book of Discipline in Scotland forbade attendance at theaters. [Sidenote: 1574] Calvin thoroughly disapproved of them, and even Luther considered them "fools' work" and at times dangerous.
Commendable efforts to suppress the practice of duelling were led by the Catholic church. Clement {486} VII forbade it in a bull, [Sidenote: 1524] confirmed by a decree of Council of Trent. [Sidenote: 1563] An extraordinarily worded French proclamation of 1566 forbade "all gentlemen and others to give each other the lie and, if they do give each other the lie, to fight a duel about it." Other governments took the matter up very sluggishly. Scotland forbade "the great liberty that sundry persons take in provoking each other to singular combats upon sudden and frivol occasions," without license from his majesty.
Two matters on which the Puritans felt very keenly, [Sidenote: 1551] blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking, were but scantily looked after in the century of the Reformation. Scotland forbade "grievous and abominable oaths, swearing, execrations and blasphemation," and somewhat similar laws can be found in other countries. Scotland was also a pioneer in forbidding on the Sabbath all work, "gaming, playing, passing to taverns and ale-houses and wilful remaining away from the parish kirk in time of sermon."
[Sidenote: Mail]
Government has other functions than the enforcement of the civil and criminal law. Almost contemporary with the opening of the century was the establishment of post offices for the forwarding of letters. After Maximilian had made a start in the Netherlands other countries were not slow to follow his example. Though under special government supervision at first these letter-carriers were private men.
[Sidenote: Sanitation]
In the Middle Ages there had been efforts to safeguard public sanitation. The sixteenth century did not greatly improve on them. Thus, Geneva passed a law that garbage and other refuse should not be allowed to lie in the streets for more than three days in summer or eight days in winter. In extreme cases quarantine was adopted as a precaution against epidemics.
{487} [Sidenote: War]
It is the most heart-breaking or the most absurd fact in human history, according as the elements involved are focused in a humane or in a cynical light, that the chief energies of government as well as the most zealous forces of peoples, have been dedicated since civilization began to the practice of wholesale homicide. As we look back from the experience of the Great War to the conflicts of other times, they seem to our jaded imaginations almost as childish as they were vicious. In the sixteenth century, far more than in the nineteenth, the nations boiled and bubbled with spleen and jealousy, hurled Thrasonical threats and hyperbolic boasts in each other's teeth, breathing out mutual extermination with no compunctious visitings of nature to stay their hungry swords—but when they came to blows they had not the power of boys. The great nations were always fighting but never fought to a finish. In the whole century no national capital west of Hungary, save Rome and Edinburgh, was captured by an enemy. The real harm was not done on the battlefield, where the carnage was incredibly small, but in the raids and looting of town and country by the professional assassins who filled the ranks of the hireling troops. Then, indeed, cities were burned, wealth was plundered and destroyed, men were subjected to nameless tortures and women to indescribable outrages, and children were tossed on pikes. Nor did war seem then to shock the public conscience, as it has at last succeeded in doing. The people saw nothing but dazzling glory in the slaughter of foemen on the stricken field, in the fanfare of the trumpets and the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Soldiers, said Luther, founding his opinion on the canon law, might be in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war. Elsewhere he admitted that wars of self-defence were necessary.
[Sidenote: Arms]
Fire-arms had not fully established their ascendancy in the period of Frundsberg, or even of Alva. As late as 1596 an English soldier lamented that his countrymen neglected the bow for the gun. Halberdiers with pikes were the core of the army. Artillery sometimes inflicted very little damage, as at Flodden, sometimes considerable, as at Marignano, where, with the French cavalry, it struck down the till then almost invincible Swiss infantry. In battle arquebusiers and musketeers were interspersed with cross-bowmen. Cannon of a large type gave way to smaller field-guns; even the idea of the machine-gun emerged in the fifteenth century. The name of them, "organs," was taken from their appearance with numerous barrels from which as many as fifty bullets could be discharged at a time. Cannon were transported to the field on carts. Rifles were invented by a German in 1520, but not much used. Pistols were first manufactured at Pistoia—whence the name—about 1540. Bombs were first used in 1588.
The arts of fortification and of siege were improved together, many ingenious devices being called into being by the technically difficult war of the Spaniards against the Dutch. Tactics were not so perfect as they afterwards became and of strategy there was no consistent theory. Machiavelli, who wrote on the subject, based his ideas on the practice of Rome and therefore despised fire-arms and preferred infantry to cavalry. Discipline was severe, and needed to be, notwithstanding which there were sporadic and often very annoying {489} mutinies. Punishments were terrible, as in civil life. Blasphemy, cards, dicing, duelling and women were forbidden in most regular armies, but in time of war the soldiers were allowed an incredible license in pillaging and in foraging. Rings and other decorations were given as rewards of valor. Uniforms began first to be introduced in England by Henry VIII.
[Sidenote: Personnel of the armies]
The personnel of the armies was extremely bad. Not counting the small number of criminals who were allowed to expiate their misdeeds by military service, the rank and file consisted of mercenaries who only too rapidly became criminals under the tutelage of Mars. There were a few conscripts, but no universal training such as Machiavelli recommended. The officers were nobles or gentlemen who served for the prestige and glory of the profession of arms, as well as for the good pay.
[Sidenote: Size of armies compared]
But the most striking difference between armies then and now is not in their armament nor in their quality but in the size. Great battles were fought and whole campaigns decided with twenty or thirty thousand troops. The French standing army was fixed by the ordinance of 1534 at seven legions of six thousand men each, besides which were the mercenaries, the whole amounting to a maximum, under Francis I, of about 100,000 men. The English official figures about 1588 gave the army 90,000 foot soldiers and 9000 horse, but these figures were grossly exaggerated. In fact only 22,000 men were serviceable at the crisis of England's war with Spain. Other armies were proportionately small. The janizaries, whose intervention often decided battles, numbered in 1520 only 12,000. They were perhaps the best troops in Europe, as the Turkish artillery was the most powerful known. What all these figures show, in short, is that the phenomenon of nations with every man physically fit in {490} the army, engaging in a death grapple until one goes down in complete exhaustion, is a modern development.
[Sidenote: Sea power]
The influence of sea power upon history has become proverbial, if, indeed, it has not been overestimated since Admiral Mahan first wrote. It may be pointed out that this influence is far from a constant factor. Sea power had a considerable importance in the wars of Greece and of Rome, but in the Middle Ages it became negligible. Only with the opening of the seven seas to navigation was the command of the waves found to secure the avenues to wealth and colonial expansion. In Portugal, Spain, and England, "the blue water school" of mariners speedily created navies whose strife was apparently more decisive for the future of history than were the battles of armies on land.
When the trade routes of the Atlantic superseded those of the Mediterranean in importance, naturally methods of navigation changed, and this involved a revolution in naval warfare greater than that caused by steam or by the submarine. From the time that Helen's beauty launched a thousand ships until the battle of Lepanto, the oar had been the chief instrument of locomotion, though supplemented, even from Homeric times, by the sail. Naval battles were like those on land; the enemy keels approached and the soldiers on each strove to board and master the other's crew. The only distinctly naval tactic was that of "ramming," as it was called in a once vivid metaphor.
But the wild winds and boisterous waves of the Atlantic broke the oar in the galley-slave's hand and the muscles in his back. Once again man harnessed the hostile forces of nature; the free breezes were broken to the yoke and new types of sailing ships were driven at racing speed across the broad back of the sea. Swift, yare vessels were built, at first smaller than the {491} old galleons but infinitely more manageable. And the new boats, armed with thunder as they were clad with wings, no longer sought to sink or capture enemies at close quarters, but hurled destruction from afar. Heavy guns took the place of small weapons and of armed prow.
It was England's genius for the sea that enabled her to master the new conditions first and most completely and that placed the trident in her hands so firmly that no enemy has ever been able to wrest it from her. Henry VIII paid great attention to the navy. He had fifty-three vessels with an aggregate of 11,268 tons, an average of 200 tons each, carrying 1750 soldiers, 1250 sailors and 2085 guns. Under Elizabeth the number of vessels had sunk to 42, but the tonnage had risen to 17,055, and the crews numbered 5534 seamen, 804 gunners and 2008 soldiers. The largest ships of the Tudor navy were of 1000 tons; the flagship of the Spanish Armada was 1150 tons, carrying 46 guns and 422 men. How tiny are these figures! A single cruiser of today has a larger tonnage than the whole of Elizabeth's fleet; a large submarine is greater than the monsters of Philip.
Of all the forces making for equality among men probably the education of the masses by means of cheap books and papers has been the strongest. But this force has been slow to ripen; at the close of the Middle Ages the common man was still helpless. The old privileged orders were indeed weakened and despoiled of part of their prerogatives, but it was chiefly by the rise of a new aristocracy, that of wealth.
[Sidenote: Nobility]
The decay of feudalism and of ecclesiastical privilege took the form of a changed and not of an abolished position for peer and priest. They were not cashiered, {492} but they were retained on cheaper terms. The feudal baron had been a petty king; his descendant had the option of becoming either a highwayman or a courtier. As the former alternative became less and less rewarding, the greater part of the old nobles abandoned their pretensions to independence and found a congenial sphere as satellities of a monarch, "le roi soleil," as a typical king was aptly called, whose beams they reflected and around whom they circled.
As titles of nobility began now to be quite commonly given to men of wealth and also to politicians, the old blood was renewed at the expense of the ancient pride. Not, indeed, that the latter showed any signs of diminishing. The arrogance of the noble was past all toleration. Men of rank treated the common citizens like dirt beneath their feet, and even regarded artists and other geniuses as menials. Alphonso, duke of Ferrara, wrote to Raphael in terms that no king would now use to a photographer, calling him a liar and chiding him for disrespect to his superior. The same duke required Ariosto to prostitute his genius by writing an apology for a fratricide committed by his grace. The duke of Mayenne poniarded one of his most devoted followers for having aspired to the hand of the duke's widowed daughter-in-law. So difficult was it to conceive of a "gentleman" without gentle blood that Castiglione, the arbiter of manners, lays down as the first prerequisite to a perfect courtier that he shall be of high birth. And of course those who had not this advantage pretended to it. An Italian in London noticed in 1557 that all gentlemen without other title insisted on being called "mister."
[Sidenote: Professions]
One sign of the break-up of the old medieval castes was the new classification of men by calling, or profession. It is true that two of the professions, the {493} higher offices in army and church, became apanages of the nobility, and the other liberal vocations were almost as completely monopolized by the children of the moneyed middle class; nevertheless it is significant that there were new roads by which men might rise. No class has profited more by the evolution of ideas than has the intelligentsia. From a subordinate, semi-menial position, lawyers, physicians, educators and journalists, not to mention artists and writers, have become the leading, almost the ruling, body of our western democracies.
[Sidenote: Clergy]
Half way between a medieval estate and a modern calling stood the clergy. In Catholic countries they remained very numerous; there were 136 episcopal or archiepiscopal sees in France; there were 40,000 parish priests, with an equal number of secular clergy in subordinate positions, 24,000 canons, 34,000 friars, 2500 Jesuits (in 1600), 12,000 monks and 80,000 nuns. Though there were doubtless many worthy men among them, it cannot honestly be said that the average were fitted either morally or intellectually for their positions. Grossly ignorant of the meaning of the Latin in which they recited their masses and of the main articles of their faith, many priests made up for these defects by proficiency in a variety of superstitious charms. The public was accustomed to see nuns dancing at bridals and priests haunting taverns and worse resorts. Some attempts, serious and partially successful, at reform, have been already described. Profane and amatory plays were forbidden in nunneries, bullfights were banished from the Vatican and the dangers of the confessional were diminished by the invention of the closed box in which the priest should sit and hear his penitent through a small aperture instead of having her kneeling at his knees. So depraved was public opinion on the subject of the confession that a {494} prolonged controversy took place in Spain as to whether minor acts of impurity perpetrated by the priest while confessing women were permissible or not.
[Sidenote: Conditions of the Protestant clergy]
Neither was the average Protestant clergyman a shining and a burning light. So little was the calling regarded that it was hard to fill it. At one time a third of the parishes of England were said to lack incumbents. The stipends were wretched; the social position obscure. The wives of the new clergy had an especially hard lot, being regarded by the people as little better than concubines, and by Parliament called "necessary evils." The English government had to issue injunctions in 1559 stating that because of the offence that has come from the type of women commonly selected as helpmates by parsons, no manner of priest or deacon should presume to marry without consent of the bishop, of the girl's parents, "or of her master or mistress where she serveth." Many clergymen, nevertheless, afterwards married domestics.
Very little was done to secure a properly trained ministry. Less than half of the 2000 clergymen ordained at Wittenberg from 1537-60 were university men; the majority were drapers, tailors and cobblers, "common idiots and laymen" as they were called—though the word "idiot" did not have quite the same disparaging sense that it has now. Nor were the reverend gentlemen of unusually high character. As nothing was demanded of them but purity of doctrine, purity of life sank into the background. It is really amazing to see how an acquaintance of Luther's succeeded in getting one church after he had been dismissed from another on well-founded charges of seduction, and how he was thereafter convicted of rape. This was perhaps an extreme case, but that the majority of clergymen were morally unworthy is the {495} melancholy conviction borne in by contemporary records.
[Sidenote: Character of sermons]
Sermons were long, doctrinal and political. Cranmer advised Latimer not to preach more than an hour and a half lest the king grow weary. How the popular preacher—in this case a Catholic—appealed to his audience, is worth quoting from a sermon delivered at Landau in 1550.
The Lutherans [began the reverend gentleman] are opposed to the worship of Mary and the saints. Now, my friends, be good enough to listen to me. The soul of a man who had died got to the door of heaven and Peter shut it in his face. Luckily, the Mother of God was taking a stroll outside with her sweet Son. The deceased addresses her and reminds her of the Paters and Aves he has recited in her glory and the candles he has burnt before her images. Thereupon Mary says to Jesus: "It's the honest truth, my Son." The Lord, however, objected and addressed the suppliant: "Hast thou never heard that I am the way and the door to life everlasting?" he asks. "If thou art the door, I am the window," retorted Mary, taking the "soul" by the hair and flinging it through the open casement. And now I ask you whether it is not the same whether you enter Paradise by the door or by the window?
There was a naïve familiarity with sacred things in our ancestors that cannot be imitated. Who would now name a ship "Jesus," as Hawkins's buccaneering slaver was named? What serious clergyman would now compare three of his friends to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as did Luther? The Reformer also wrote a satire on the calling of a council, in the form of a letter from the Holy Ghost signed by Gabriel as notary and witnessed by Michael the Provost of Paradise and Raphael, God's Court Physician. At another time he made a lampoon on the collection of {496} relics made by his enemy the Archbishop of Mayence, stating that they contained such things as "a fair piece of Moses' left horn, a whole pound of the wind that blew for Elijah in the cave on Mount Horeb and two feathers and an egg of the Holy Ghost" as a dove. All this, of course, not in ribald profanity, but in works intended for edification. . . .
[Sidenote: The city]
Though beautiful, the city of our ancestors was far from admirable in other ways. Filth was hidden under its comely garments, so that it resembled a Cossack prince—all ermine and vermin. Its narrow streets, huddled between strong walls, were over-run with pigs and chickens and filled with refuse. They were often ill-paved, flooded with mud and slush in winter. Moreover they were dark and dangerous at night, infested with princes and young nobles on a spree and with other criminals.
[Sidenote: The house]
Like the exterior, the interior of the house of a substantial citizen was more pretty than clean or sweet smelling. The high wainscoting and the furniture, in various styles, but frequently resembling what is now known as "mission," was lovely, as were the ornaments—tapestries, clocks, pictures and flowers. But the place of carpets was supplied by rushes renewed from time to time without disturbing the underlying mass of rubbish beneath. Windows were fewer than they are now, and fires still fewer. Sometimes there was an open hearth, sometimes a huge tile stove. Most houses had only one or two rooms heated, sometimes, as in the case of the Augustinian friary at Wittenberg, only the bathroom, but usually also the living room.
[Sidenote: Dress]
The dress of the people was far more various and picturesque than nowadays. Both sexes dressed in gaudy colors and delighted in strange fashions, so that, {497} is Roger Ascham said, "he thought himself most brave that was most monstrous in misorder." For women the fashion of decolleté was just coming in, as so many fashions do, from the demi-monde. To Catharine de' Medici is attributed the invention of the corset, an atrocity to be excused only by her own urgent need of one.
[Sidenote: Food]
The day began at five in summer and at seven in winter. A heavy breakfast was followed by a heavier dinner at ten, and supper at five, and there were between times two or three other tiffins or "drinkings." The staple food was meat and cereal; very few of our vegetables were known, though some were just beginning to be cultivated. [Sidenote: 1585-6] The most valuable article of food introduced from the new world was the potato. Another importation that did not become thoroughly acclimatized in Europe was the turkey. Even now they are rare, but there are several interesting allusions to them in the literature of that time, one of the year 1533 in Luther's table talk. Poultry of other sorts was common, as were eggs, game and fish. The cooking relied for its highest effects on sugar and spices. The ordinary fruits—apples, cherries and oranges—furnished a wholesome and pleasing variety to the table. Knives and spoons were used in eating, but forks were unknown, at least in northern Europe.
[Sidenote: Drink]
All the victuals were washed down with copious potations. A water-drinker, like Sir Thomas More, was the rarest of exceptions. The poor drank chiefly beer and ale; the mildest sort, known as "small beer," was recommended to the man suffering from too strong drink of the night before. Wine was more prized, and there were a number of varieties. There being no champagne, Burgundy was held in high esteem, as were some of the strong, sweet, Spanish and Portuguese {498} wines. The most harmless drinks were claret and Rhine wine. There were some "mixed drinks," such as sack or hippocras, in which beer or wine was sophisticated with eggs, spices and sugar. The quantities habitually drunk were large. Roger Ascham records that Charles V drank the best he ever saw, never less than a quart at a draft. The breakfast table of an English nobleman was set out with a quart of wine and a quart of beer, liquor then taking the place of tea, coffee, chocolate and all the "soft" beverages that now furnish stimulation and sociability.
[Sidenote: Tobacco, 1573]
"In these times," wrote Harrison, "the taking-in of the smoke of an Indian herb called 'Tobaco' by an instrument formed like a little ladle . . . is greatly taken up and used in England against rewmes [colds] and some other diseases." Like other drugs, tobacco soon came to be used as a narcotic for its own sake, and was presently celebrated as "divine tobacco" and "our holy herb nicotian" by the poets. What, indeed, are smoking, drinking, and other wooings of pure sensation at the sacrifice of power and reason, but a sort of pragmatized poetry? Some ages, and those the most poetical, like that of Pericles and that of Rabelais, have deified intoxication and sensuality; others, markedly our own, have preferred the accumulation of wealth and knowledge to sensual indulgence. It is a psychological contrast of importance.
Could we be suddenly transported on Mr. Wells's time machine four hundred years back we should be less struck by what our ancestors had than by what they lacked. Quills took the place of fountain pens, pencils, typewriters and dictaphones. Not only was postage dearer but there were no telephones or telegrams to supplement it. The world's news of yesterday, which we imbibe with our morning cup, then sifted down slowly through various media of {499} communication, mostly oral. It was two months after the battle before Philip of Spain knew the fate of his own Armada. The houses had no steam heat, no elevators; the busy housewife was aided by no vacuum cleaner, sewing machine and gas ranges; the business man could not ride to his office, nor the farmer to his market, in automobiles. There were neither railways nor steamships to make travel rapid and luxurious.
[Sidenote: Travel]
Nevertheless, journeys for purposes of piety, pleasure and business were common. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostella, Loretto, Walsingham and many other shrines were frequent in Catholic countries. Students were perpetually wandering from one university to another: merchants were on the road, and gentlemen felt the attractions of sight-seeing. The cheap and common mode of locomotion was on foot. Boats on the rivers and horses on land furnished the alternatives. The roads were so poor that the horses were sometimes "almost shipwrecked." The trip from Worms to Rome commonly took twelve days, but could be made in seven. Xavier's voyage from Lisbon to Goa took thirteen months. Inns were good in France and England; less pleasant elsewhere. Erasmus particularly abominated the German inns, where a large living and dining room would be heated to a high temperature by a stove around which travelers would dry their steaming garments. The smells caused by those operations, together with the fleas and mice with which the poorer inns were infested, made the stay anything but luxurious. Any complaint was met by the retort, "If you don't like it, go somewhere else," a usually impracticable alternative. When the traveller was escorted to his bedroom, he found it very cold in winter, though the featherbeds kept him warm enough. He would see his chamber filled with other beds occupied by his travelling companions of both {500} sexes, and he himself was often forced to share his bed with a stranger. The custom of the time was to take one bath a week. For this there were public bath-houses, [Sidenote: Baths] frequented by both sexes. A common form of entertainment was the "bath-party."
[Sidenote: Sports]
With the same insatiable gusto that they displayed in other matters the contemporaries of Luther and Shakespeare went in for amusements. Never has the theater been more popular. Many sports, like bear-baiting and bull-baiting, were cruel. Hunting was also much relished, though humane men like Luther and More protested against the "silly and woeful beastes' slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that there were 250 courts in Paris alone. The game was different from the modern in that the courts were 121 feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden balls and "bats"—as racquets are still called in England—were much harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called "triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess was played nearly as now.
Young people loved dances and some older people shook their heads over them, then as now. Melanchthon danced, at the age of forty-four, and Luther approved of such parties, properly chaperoned, as a means of bringing young people together. On the other hand dances were regulated in many states and prohibited in others, like Zurich and Geneva. Some of the dances were quite stately, like the minuet, others were boisterous romps, in which the girls were kissed, embraced and whirled around giddily by their partners. The Scotch ambassador's comment that Queen Elizabeth "danced very high" gives an impression of agility that would hardly now be considered in the best taste.
[Sidenote: Manners]
The veneer of courtesy was thin. True, humanists, {501} publicists and authors composed for each other eulogies that would have been hyperboles if addressed to the morning stars singing at the dawn of creation, but once a quarrel had been started among the touchy race of writers and a spouting geyser of inconceivable scurrility burst forth. No imagery was too nasty, no epithet too strong, no charge too base to bring against an opponent. The heroic examples of Greek and Roman invective paled before the inexhaustible resources of learned billingsgate stored in the minds of the humanists and theologians. To accuse an enemy of atheism and heresy was a matter of course; to add charges of unnatural vice or, if he were dead, stories of suicide and of the devils hovering greedily over his deathbed, was extremely common. Even crowned heads exchanged similar amenities.
Withal, there was growing up a strong appreciation of the merits of courtesy. Was not Bayard, the captain in the army of Francis I a "knight without fear and without reproach"? Did not Sir Philip Sidney do one of the perfect deeds of gentleness when, dying on the battle field and tortured with thirst, he passed his cup of water to a common soldier with the simple words, "Thy need is greater than mine"? One of the most justly famous and most popular books of the sixteenth century was Baldessare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, called by Dr. Johnson the best treatise on good breeding ever written. Published in Italian in 1528, it was translated into Spanish in 1534, into French in 1537, into English and Latin in 1561, and finally into German in 1566. There have been of it more than 140 editions. It sets forth an ideal of a Prince Charming, a man of noble birth, expert in games and in war, brave, modest, unaffected, witty, an elegant speaker, a good dancer, familiar with literature and accomplished in music, as well as a man of honor {502} and courtesy. It is significant that this ideal appealed to the time, though it must be confessed it was rarely reached. Ariosto, to whom the first book was dedicated by the author, depicts, as his ideals, knights in whom the sense of honor has completely replaced all Christian virtues. They were always fighting each other about their loves, much like the bulls, lions, rams and dogs to whom the poet continually compares them. Even the women were hardly safe in their company.
Sometimes a brief anecdote will stamp a character as no long description will do. The following are typical of the manners of our forbears:
One winter morning a stately matron was ascending the steps of the church of St. Gudule at Brussels. They were covered with ice; she slipped and took a precipitate and involuntary seat. In the anguish of the moment, a single word, of mere obscenity, escaped her lips. When the laughing bystanders, among whom was Erasmus, helped her to her feet, she beat a hasty retreat, crimson with shame. Nowadays ladies do not have such a vocabulary at their tongue's end.
The Spanish ambassador Enriquez de Toledo was at Rome calling on Imperia de Cugnatis, a lady who, though of the demi-monde, lived like a princess, cultivated letters and art, and had many poets as well as many nobles among her friends. Her floors were carpeted with velvet rugs, her walls hung with golden cloth, and her tables loaded with costly bric-a-brac. The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat copiously in the face of his lackey and then explained to the slightly startled company that he chose this objective rather than soil the splendor he saw around him. The disgusting act passed for a delicate and successful flattery.
[Sidenote: 1538]
Among the students at Wittenberg was a certain Simon Lemchen, or Lemnius, a lewd fellow of the baser {503} sort who published two volumes of scurrilous epigrams bringing unfounded and nasty charges against Luther, Melanchthon and the other Reformers and their wives. When he fled the city before he could be arrested, Luther revenged himself partly by a Catilinarian sermon, partly by composing, for circulation among his friends, some verses about Lemnius in which the scurrility and obscenity of the offending youth were well over-trumped. One would be surprised at similar measures taken by a professor of divinity today.
[Sidenote: Morals]
In measuring the morals of a given epoch statistics are not applicable; or, at any rate, it is probably true that the general impression one gets of the moral tone of any period is more trustworthy than would be got from carefully compiled figures. And that one does get such an impression, and a very strong one, is undeniable. Everyone has in his mind a more or less distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient Athens, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Puritan Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Victorian Age.
The sixteenth century was a time when morals were perhaps not much worse than they are now, but when vice and crime were more flaunted and talked about. Puritanism and prudery have nowadays done their best to conceal the corruption and indecency beneath the surface. But our ancestors had no such delicacy. The naïve frankness of the age, both when it gloried in the flesh and when it reproved sin, gives a full-blooded complexion to that time that is lacking now. The large average consumption of alcohol—a certain irritant to moral maladies—and the unequal administration of justice, with laws at once savage and corruptly dispensed, must have had bad consequences.
The Reformation had no permanent discernible {504} effect on moral standards. Accompanied as it often was with a temporary zeal for righteousness, it was too often followed by a breaking up of conventional standards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of character, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the English Reformation had been followed by a wave of wickedness. Luther said that when the devil of the papacy had been driven out, seven other devils entered to take its place, and that at Wittenberg a man was considered quite a saint who could say that he had not broken the first commandment, but only the other nine. Much of this complaint must be set down to disappointment at not reaching perfection, and over against it may be set many testimonies to the moral benefits assured by the reform.
[Sidenote: Violence]
It was an age of violence. Murder was common everywhere. On the slightest provocation a man of spirit was expected to whip out a rapier or dagger and plunge it into his insulter. The murder of unfaithful wives was an especial point of honor. Benvenuto Cellini boasts of several assassinations and numerous assaults, and he himself got off without a scratch from the law, Pope Paul III graciously protesting that "men unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, were not subject to the laws." The number of unique men must have been large in the Holy City, for in 1497 a citizen testified that he had seen more than a hundred bodies of persons foully done to death thrown into the Tiber, and no one bothered about it.
[Sidenote: Brigandage]
Brigandage stalked unabashed through the whole of Europe. By 1585 the number of bandits in the papal states alone had risen to 27,000. Sixtus V took energetic means to repress them. One of his stratagems is too characteristic to omit mentioning. He had a train of mules loaded with poisoned food and then {505} drove them along a road he knew to be infested by highwaymen, who, as he had calculated, actually took them and ate of the food, of which many died.
Other countries were perhaps less scourged by robbers, but none was free. Erasmus's praise of Henry VIII, in 1519, for having cleared his realm of free-booters, was premature. In the wilder parts, especially on the Scotch border, they were still rife. In 1529 the Armstrongs of Lidderdale, just over the border, could boast that they had burned 52 churches, besides making heavy depredations on private property. When James V took stern measures to suppress them, [Sidenote: 1532] and instituted a College of Justice for that purpose, the good law was unpopular.
Bands of old soldiers and new recruits wandered through France, Spain and the Netherlands. The worst robbers in Germany were the free knights. From their picturesque castles they emerged to pillage peaceful villages and trains of merchandise going from one walled city to another. In doing so they inflicted wanton mutilations on the unfortunate merchants whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even the greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not ashamed to "let their horses bite off travellers' purses" now and then. But it was not only the nobles who became gentlemen of the road. A well-to-do merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, was robbed of a couple of horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing to get redress in the corrupt courts, threw down the gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a proclamation that he would rob, burn and take reprisals until he was given compensation for his loss. For six years [Sidenote: 1534-40] he maintained himself as a highwayman, but was finally taken and executed in Brandenburg.
[Sidenote: Fraud]
Fraud of all descriptions was not less rampant than force. When Machiavelli reduced to a reasoned {506} theory the practice of all hypocrisy and guile, the courts of Europe were only too ready to listen to his advice. In fact, they carried their mutual attempts at deception to a point that was not only harmful to themselves, but ridiculous, making it a principle to violate oaths and to debase the currency of good faith in every possible way. There was also much untruth in private life. Unfortunately, lying in the interests of piety was justified by Luther, while the Jesuits made a soul-rotting art of equivocation.
[Sidenote: Unchastity]
The standard of sexual purity was disturbed by a reaction against the asceticism of the Middle Ages. Luther proclaimed that chastity was impossible, while the humanists gloried in the flesh. Public opinion was not scandalized by prostitution; learned men occasionally debated whether fornication was a sin, and the Italians now began to call a harlot a "courteous woman" [Sidenote: c. 1500] (courtesan) as they called an assassin a "brave man" (bravo). Augustine had said that harlots were remedies against worse things, and the church had not only winked at brothels, but frequently licensed them herself. Bastardy was no bar to hereditary right in Italy.
The Reformers tried to make a clean sweep of the "social evil." Under Luther's direction brothels were closed in the reformed cities. When this was done at Strassburg the women drew up a petition, stating that they had pursued their profession not from liking but only to earn bread, and asked for honest work. Serious attempts were made to give it to them, or to get them husbands. At Zurich and some other cities the brothels were left open, but were put under the supervision of an officer who was to see that no married men frequented them. The reformers had a strange ally in the growing fear of venereal diseases. Other countries followed Germany in their war on the prostitute. In London the public houses of ill fame {507} were closed in 1546, in Paris in 1560. An edict of July 23, 1566 commanded all prostitutes to leave Rome, but when 25,000 persons, including the women and their dependents, left the city, the loss of public revenue induced the pope to allow them to return on August 17 of the same year.
[Sidenote: Polygamy]
One of the striking aberrations of the sixteenth century, as it seems to us, was the persistent advocacy of polygamy as, if not desirable in itself, at least preferable to divorce. Divorce or annulment of marriage was not hard to obtain by people of influence, whether Catholic or Protestant, but it was a more difficult matter than it is in America now. In Scotland there was indeed a sort of trial marriage, known as "handfasting," by which the parties might live together for a year and a day and then continue as married or separate. But, beginning with Luther, many of the Reformers thought polygamy less wrong than divorce, on the biblical ground that whereas the former had been practised in the Old Testament times and was not clearly forbidden by the New Testament, divorce was prohibited save for adultery. Luther advanced this thesis as early as 1520, when it was purely theoretical, but he did not shrink from applying it on occasion. It is extraordinary what a large body of reputable opinion was prepared to tolerate polygamy, at least in exceptional cases. Popes, theologians, humanists like Erasmus, and philosophers like Bruno, all thought a plurality of wives a natural condition.
[Sidenote: Marriage]
But all the while the instincts of the masses were sounder in this respect than the precepts of their guides. While polygamy remained a freakish and exceptional practice, the passions of the age were absorbed to a high degree by monogamous marriage. Matrimony having been just restored to its proper dignity as the best estate for man, its praises were {508} sounded highly. The church, indeed, remained true to her preference for celibacy, but the Inquisition found much business in suppressing the then common opinion that marriage was better than virginity. To the Reformers marriage was not only the necessary condition of happiness to mankind, but the typically holy estate in which God's service could best be done. From all sides paeans arose celebrating matrimony as the true remedy for sin and also as the happiest estate. The delights of wedded love are celebrated equally in Luther's table talk and letters and in the poems of the Italian humanist Pontano. "I have always been of the opinion," writes Ariosto, "that without a wife at his side no man can attain perfect goodness or live without sin." "In marriage there is one mind in two bodies," says Henry Cornelius Agrippa, "one harmony, the same sorrows, the same joys, an identical will, common riches, poverty and honors, the same bed and the same table. . . . Only a husband and wife can love each other infinitely and serve each other as long as both do live, for no love is either so vehement or so holy as theirs."
The passion for marriage in itself is witnessed by the practice of widows and widowers of remarrying as soon and as often as possible. [Sidenote: Remarriage common] Luther's friend, Justus Jonas, married thrice, each time with a remark to the effect that it was better to marry than to burn. The English Bishop Richard Cox excused his second marriage, at an advanced age, by an absurd letter lamenting that he had not the gift of chastity. Willibrandis Rosenblatt married in succession Louis Keller, Oecolampadius, Capito and Bucer, the ecclesiastical eminence of her last three husbands giving her, one would think, an almost official position. Sir Thomas More married a second wife just one month after his first wife's death.
{509} [Sidenote: Treatment of wives]
Sad to relate, the wives so necessary to men's happiness were frequently ill treated after they were won. In the sixteenth century women were still treated as minors; if married they could make no will; their husbands could beat them with impunity, for cruelty was no cause for divorce. Sir Thomas More's home-life is lauded by Erasmus as a very paragon, because "he got more compliance from his wife by jokes and blandishments than most husbands by imperious harshness." One of these jokes, a customary one, was that his wife was neither pretty nor young; one of the "blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram by Sir Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy burden she might be useful if she would die and leave her husband money. In Utopia, he assures us, husbands chastise their wives.
[Sidenote: Position of woman]
In the position of women various currents crossed each other. The old horror of the temptress, inherited from the early church, the lofty scorn exhibited by the Greek philosophers, mingled with strands of chivalry and a still newer appreciation of the real dignity of woman and of her equal powers. Ariosto treated women like spoiled children; the humanists delighted to rake up the old jibes at them in musty authors; the divines were hardest of all in their judgment. "Nature doth paint them forth," says John Knox of women, "to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and void of the spirit of council and regimen." "If women bear children until they become sick and eventually die," preaches Luther, "that does no harm. Let them bear children till they die of it; that is what they are for." In 1595 the question was debated at Wittenberg as to whether women were human beings. The general tone was one of disparagement. An anthology might be made of the {510} proverbs recommending (à la Nietzsche) the whip as the best treatment for the sex.
But withal there was a certain chivalry that revolted against all this brutality. Castiglione champions courtesy and kindness to women on the highest and most beautiful ground, the spiritual value of woman's love. Ariosto sings:
No doubt they are accurst and past all grace
That dare to strike a damsel in the face,
Or of her head to minish but a hair.
Certain works like T. Elyot's Defence of Good Women and like Cornelius Agrippa's Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex, witness a genuine appreciation of woman's worth. Some critics have seen in the last named work a paradox, like the Praise of Folly, such as was dear to the humanists. To me it seems absolutely sincere, even when it goes so far as to proclaim that woman is as superior to man as man is to beast and to celebrate her as the last and supreme work of the creation.
[Sidenote: Children]
The family was far larger, on the average, in the sixteenth century than it is now. One can hardly think of any man in this generation with as many as a dozen children; it is possible to mention several of that time with over twenty. Anthony Koberger, the famous Nuremberg printer had twenty-five children, eight by his first and seventeen by his second wife. Albert Dürer was the third of eighteen children of the same couple, of whom apparently only three reached maturity. John Colet, born in 1467, was the eldest of twenty-two brothers and sisters of whom by 1499 he was the only survivor. Of course these families were exceptional, but not glaringly so. A brood of six to twelve was a very common occurrence.
Children were brought up harshly in many families, {511} strictly in almost all. They were not expected to sit in the presence of their parents, unless asked, or to speak unless spoken to. They must needs bow and crave a blessing twice a day. Lady Jane Grey complained that if she did not do everything as perfectly as God made the world, she was bitterly taunted and presently so nipped and pinched by her noble parents that she thought herself in hell. The rod was much resorted to. And yet there was a good deal of natural affection. Few fathers have even been better to their babies than was Luther, and he humanely advised others to rely as much on reward as on punishment—on the apple as on the switch—and above all not to chastise the little ones so harshly as to make them fear or hate their parents.
The patria potestas was supposed to extend, as it did in Rome, during the adult as during the callow years. Especially did public opinion insist on children marrying according to the wishes of their parents. Among the nobility child-marriage was common, a mere form, of course, not at once followed by cohabitation. A betrothal was a very solemn thing, amounting to a definite contract. Perfect liberty was allowed the engaged couple, by law in Sweden and by custom in many other countries. All the more necessary, in the opinion of the time, to prevent youths and maidens betrothing themselves without their parents' consent.
[Sidenote: Health]
Probably the standard of health is now higher than it was then, and the average longevity greater. It is true that few epidemics have ever been more fatal than the recent influenza; and on the other hand one can point to plenty of examples of sixteenth-century men who reached a crude and green old age. Statistics were then few and unreliable. In 1905 the death-rate in London was 15.6 per thousand; in the years 1861-1880 it averaged 23 per thousand. It has been {512} calculated that this is just what the death-rate was in London in a healthy year under Elizabeth, but it must be remembered that a year without some sort of epidemic was almost exceptional.
[Sidenote: Epidemics]
Bubonic plague was pandemic at that time, and horribly fatal. Many of the figures given—as that 200,000 people perished in Moscow in 1570, 50,000 at Lyons in 1572, and 50,000 at Venice during the years 1575-7, must be gross exaggerations, but they give a vivid idea of the popular idea of the prevalent mortality. Another scourge was the sweating sickness, first noticed as epidemic in 1485 and returning in 1507, 1517, 1528 and 1551. Tuberculosis was probably as wide-spread in the sixteenth as it is in the twentieth century, but it figured less prominently on account of worse diseases and because it was seldom recognized until the last stages. Smallpox was common, unchecked as it was by vaccination, and with it were confounded a variety of zymotic diseases, such as measles, which only began to be recognized as different in the course of the sixteenth century. One disease almost characteristic of former ages, so much more prevalent was it in them, due to the more unwholesome food and drink, was the stone.
Venereal diseases became so prominent in the sixteenth century that it has often been thought that the syphilis was imported from America. This, however, has been denied by authorities who believe that it came down from classical antiquity, but that it was not differentiated from other scourges. The Latin name variola, like the English pox, was applied indiscriminately to syphilis, small-pox, chicken-pox, etc. Gonorrhea was also common. The spread of these diseases was assisted by many causes besides the prevalent moral looseness; by lack of cleanliness in public baths, for example.
{513} Useless to go through the whole roster of the plagues. Suffice it to say that whatever now torments poor mortals, from tooth-ache to cold in the head, and from rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our ancestors in aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, the evils of which were so little understood that it was actually prescribed for many disorders of which it is a certain irritant. Add to this the lack of sanitary measures, not only of disinfection but of common cleanliness, and the etiology of the phenomena is satisfactorily accounted for.
[Sidenote: Medicine]
If even now medicine as a science and an art seems backward compared with surgery, it has nevertheless made considerable advances since it began to be empirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely dogmatic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was the nature of the human body and the effect of this or that drug on it, they asked Aristotle, or Hippocrates, or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries, and they were bitter, were between the Greek and the Arabian schools. [Sidenote: c. 1550] Galenism finally triumphed just before the beginnings of experiment and research were made. The greatest name in the first half of the century was that of Theophrastus Paracelsus, [Sidenote: Paracelsus, 1493-1541] as arrant a quack as ever lived, but one who did something to break up the strangle-hold of tradition. He worked out his system a priori from a fantastic postulate of the parallelism between man and the universe, the microcosm and the macrocosm. He held that the Bible gave valuable prescriptions, as in the treatment of wounds by oil and wine.
[Sidenote: Surgery]
Under the leadership of Ambroise Paré [Sidenote: Paré, 1510-90] surgery improved rather more than medicine. Without anaesthetics, indeed, operations were difficult, but a good deal was accomplished. Paré first made amputation on a large scale possible by inventing a ligature for {514} large arteries that effectively controlled hemorrhage. This barber's apprentice, who despised the schools and wrote in the vernacular, made other important improvements in the surgeon's technique. It is noteworthy that each discovery was treated as a trade secret to be exploited for the benefit of a few practitioners and not given freely to the good of mankind.
In obstetrics Paré also made discoveries that need not be detailed here. Until his time it was almost universal for women to be attended in childbirth only by midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was the prejudice on this point that women were known to die of abdominal tumors rather than allow male physicians to examine them. The admission of men to the profession of midwife marked a considerable improvement in method.
[Sidenote: Lunacy]
The treatment of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings before whom the plays were first produced.
[Sidenote: Hospitals]
As early as 1510 Luther saw one of the hospitals at Florence. He tells how beautiful they were, how clean and well served by honorable matrons tending the poor freely all day without making known their names and at night returning home. Such institutions were the glory of Italy, for they were sadly to seek in other lands. When they were finally established elsewhere, they were too often left to the care of ignorant and evil menials. The stories one may read of the Hôtel-Dieu, at Paris, are fairly hair-raising.
{515}
[Sidenote: Reformation and economic revolution]
Parallel with the Reformation was taking place an economic revolution even deeper and more enduring in its consequences. Both Reformation and Revolution were manifestations of the individualistic spirit of the age; the substitution, in the latter case, of private enterprise and competition for common effort as a method of producing wealth and of distributing it. Both were prepared for long before they actually upset the existing order; both have taken several centuries to unfold their full consequences, and in each the truly decisive steps were taken in the sixteenth century.
It is doubtless incorrect to see either in the Reformation or in the economic revolution a direct and simple cause of the other. They interacted and to a certain extent joined forces; but to a greater degree each sought to use the other, and each has at times been credited, or blamed, with the results of the other's operations. Contemporaries noticed the effects, mostly the bad effects, of the rise of capitalism, and often mistakenly attributed them to the Reformation; and the new kings of commerce were only too ready to hide behind the mask of Protestantism while despoiling the church. Like other historical forces, while easily separable in thought, the two movements were usually inextricably interwoven in action.
[Sidenote: Rise of capitalism]
Capitalism supplanted gild-production because of its fitness as a social instrument for the production and {516} storing of wealth. In competition with capital the medieval communism succumbed in one line of business after another—in banking, in trade, in mining, in industry and finally in agriculture—because it was unable to produce the results that capital produced. By the vast reward that the newer system gave to individual enterprise, to technical improvement and to investment, capitalism proved the aptest tool for the creation and preservation of wealth ever devised. It is true that the manifold multiplication of riches in the last four centuries is due primarily to inventions for the exploitation of natural resources, but the capitalistic method is ideally fitted for the utilization of these new discoveries and for laying up of their increment for ultimate social use. And this is an inestimable service to any society. Only a fairly rich people can afford the luxuries of beauty, knowledge, and power, that enhance the value of life and allow it to climb to ever greater heights. To balance this service, it must be taken into account that capitalism has lamentably failed justly to distribute rewards. Its tendency is to intercept the greater part of the wealth it creates for the benefit of a single class, and thereby to rob the rest of the community of their due dividend.
[Sidenote: Primary cause of the capitalistic revolution]
So delicate is the adjustment of society that an apparently trivial new factor will often upset the whole equilibrium and produce the most incalculable results. Thus, the primary cause of the capitalistic revolution appears to have been a purely mechanical one, the increase in the production of the precious metals. Wealth could not be stored at all in the Middle Ages save in the form of specie; nor without it could large commerce be developed, nor large industry financed, nor was investment possible. Moreover the rise of prices consequent on the increase of the precious metals gave a powerful stimulus to manufacture and a {517} fillip to the merchant and to the entrepreneur such as they have rarely received before or since. It was, in short, the development of the power of money that gave rise to the money power.
In the earlier Middle Ages there prevailed a "natural economy," or system in which payments were made chiefly in the form of services and by barter; this gave place very gradually to our modern "money economy" in which gold and silver are both the normal standards of value and the sole instruments of exchange. Already in the twelfth century money was being used in the towns of Western Europe; not until the late fourteenth or fifteenth did it become a dominant factor in rural life. This change was not the great revolution itself, but was the indispensable prerequisite of it, and in large part its direct cause.
[Sidenote: Money-making kings]
Gold and silver could now be hoarded in the form of money, and so the first step was taken in the formation of large fortunes, known to the ancient world, b