[156] Even recently, il Cavaliere Onofrio Boni, in his Eloge of Lanzi,
in naming the three Augustan periods of modern literature, fixes
them, for the Italians, under Leo the Tenth; for the French, under
Louis the Fourteenth, or the Great; and for the English, under
Charles the Second!
[157] Quadrio, vol. ii. p. 416.
"POLITICAL RELIGIONISM."
In Professor Dugald Stewart's first Dissertation on the Progress of
Philosophy, I find this singular and significant term. It has occasioned
me to reflect on those contests for religion, in which a particular
faith has been made the ostensible pretext, while the secret motive was
usually political. The historians, who view in religious wars only
religion itself, have written large volumes, in which we may never
discover that they have either been a struggle to obtain predominance,
or an expedient to secure it. The hatreds of ambitious men have
disguised their own purposes, while Christianity has borne the odium of
loosening a destroying spirit among mankind; which, had Christianity
never existed, would have equally prevailed in human affairs. Of a moral
malady, it is not only necessary to know the nature, but to designate it
by a right name, that we may not err in our mode of treatment. If we
call that _religious_ which we shall find for the greater part is
_political_, we are likely to be mistaken in the regimen and the cure.
Fox, in his "Acts and Monuments," writes the martyrology of the
_Protestants_ in three mighty folios; where, in the third, "the tender
mercies" of the Catholics are "cut in wood" for those who might not
otherwise be enabled to read or spell them. Such pictures are
abridgments of long narratives, but they leave in the mind a fulness of
horror. Fox made more than one generation shudder; and his volume,
particularly this third, chained to a reading-desk in the halls of the
great, and in the aisles of churches, often detained the loiterer, as it
furnished some new scene of papistical horrors to paint forth on
returning to his fireside. The protestants were then the martyrs,
because, under Mary, the protestants had been thrown out of power.
Dodd has opposed to Fox three curious folios, which he calls "The Church
History of England," exhibiting a most abundant martyrology of the
_catholics_, inflicted by the hands of the protestants; who in the
succeeding reign of Elizabeth, after long trepidations and balancings,
were confirmed into power. He grieves over the delusion and seduction of
the black-letter romance of honest John Fox, which he says, "has
obtained a place in protestant churches next to the Bible, while John
Fox himself is esteemed little less than an evangelist."[158] Dodd's
narratives are not less pathetic: for the situation of the catholic, who
had to secrete himself, as well as to suffer, was more adapted for
romantic adventures, than even the melancholy but monotonous story of
the protestants tortured in the cell, or bound to the stake. These
catholics, however, were attempting all sorts of intrigues; and the
saints and martyrs of Dodd, to the parliament of England, were only
traitors and conspirators!
Heylin, in his history of the _Puritans_ and the _Presbyterians_,
blackens them for political devils. He is the Spagnolet of history,
delighting himself with horrors at which the painter himself must have
started. He tells of their "oppositions" to monarchical and episcopal
government; their "innovations" in the church; and their "embroilments"
of the kingdoms. The sword rages in their hands; treason, sacrilege,
plunder; while "more of the blood of Englishmen had poured like water
within the space of four years, than had been shed in the civil wars of
York and Lancaster in four centuries!"
Neal opposes a more elaborate history; where these "great and good men,"
the puritans and the presbyterians, "are placed among the _reformers_;"
while their fame is blanched into angelic purity. Neal and his party
opined that the protestant had not sufficiently protested, and that the
reformation itself needed to be reformed. They wearied the impatient
Elizabeth and her ardent churchmen; and disputed with the learned James,
and his courtly bishops, about such ceremonial trifles, that the
historian may blush or smile who has to record them. And when the
_puritan_ was thrown out of preferment, and seceded into separation, he
turned into a _presbyter_. Nonconformity was their darling sin, and
their sullen triumph.
Calamy, in four painful volumes, chronicles the bloodless martyrology of
the two thousand silenced and ejected ministers. Their history is not
glorious, and their heroes are obscure; but it is a domestic tale. When
the second Charles was restored, the _presbyterians_, like every other
faction, were to be amused, if not courted. Some of the king's chaplains
were selected from among them, and preached once. Their hopes were
raised that they should, by some agreement, be enabled to share in that
ecclesiastical establishment which they had so often opposed; and the
bishops met the presbyters in a convocation at the Savoy. A conference
was held between the _high church_, resuming the seat of power, and the
_low church_, now prostrate; that is, between the _old clergy_ who had
recently been mercilessly ejected by the _new_, who in their turn were
awaiting their fate. The conference was closed with arguments by the
weaker, and votes by the stronger. Many curious anecdotes of this
conference have come down to us. The presbyterians, in their last
struggle, petitioned for _indulgence_; but oppressors who had become
petitioners, only showed that they possessed no longer the means of
resistance. This conference was followed up by the _Act of Uniformity_,
which took place on Bartholomew day, August 24, 1652: an act which
ejected Calamy's two thousand ministers from the bosom of the
established church. Bartholomew day with this party was long paralleled,
and perhaps is still, with the dreadful French massacre of that fatal
saint's day. The calamity was rather, however, of a private than of a
public nature. The two thousand ejected ministers were indeed deprived
of their livings; but this was, however, a happier fate than what has
often occurred in these contests for the security of political power.
This _ejection_ was not like the expulsion of the Moriscoes, the best
and most useful subjects of Spain, which was a human sacrifice of half a
million of men, and the proscription of many Jews from that land of
Catholicism; or the massacre of thousands of Huguenots, and the
expulsion of more than a hundred thousand by Louis the Fourteenth from
France. The presbyterian divines were not driven from their fatherland,
and compelled to learn another language than their mother-tongue.
Destitute as divines, they were suffered to remain as citizens; and the
result was remarkable. These divines could not disrobe themselves of
their learning and their piety, while several of them were compelled to
become tradesmen: among these the learned Samuel Chandler, whose
literary productions are numerous, kept a bookseller's shop in the
Poultry.
Hard as this event proved in its result, it was, however, pleaded, that
"It was but like for like." And that the history of "the like" might not
be curtailed in the telling, opposed to Calamy's chronicle of the two
thousand ejected ministers stands another, in folio magnitude, of the
same sort of chronicle of the clergy of the Church of England, with a
title by no means less pathetic.
This is Walker's "Attempt towards recovering an Account of the Clergy of
the Church of England who were sequestered, harassed, &c., in the late
Times." Walker is himself astonished at the size of his volume, the
number of his sufferers, and the variety of the sufferings. "Shall the
church," says he, "not have the liberty to preserve the history of her
sufferings, as well as the _separation_ to set forth an account of
theirs? Can Dr. Calamy be acquitted for publishing the history of the
_Bartholomew sufferers_, if I am condemned for writing that of the
_sequestered loyalists_?" He allows that "the number of the ejected
amounts to two thousand," and there were no less than "seven or eight
thousand of the episcopal clergy imprisoned, banished, and sent a
starving," &c. &c.
Whether the reformed were martyred by the catholics, or the catholics
executed by the reformed; whether the puritans expelled those of the
established church, or the established church ejected the puritans, all
seems reducible to two classes, conformists and non-conformists, or, in
the political style, the administration and the opposition. When we
discover that the heads of all parties are of the same hot temperament,
and observe the same evil conduct in similar situations; when we view
honest old Latimer with his own hands hanging a mendicant friar on a
tree, and, the government changing, the friars binding Latimer to the
stake; when we see the French catholics cutting out the tongues of the
protestants, that they might no longer protest; the haughty Luther
writing submissive apologies to Leo the Tenth and Henry the Eighth for
the scurrility with which he had treated them in his writings, and
finding that his apologies were received with contempt, then retracting
his retractations; when we find that haughtiest of the haughty, John
Knox, when Elizabeth first ascended the throne, crouching and repenting
of having written his famous excommunication against all female
sovereignty; or pulling down the monasteries, from the axiom that when
the rookery was destroyed, the rooks would never return; when we find
his recent apologist admiring, while he apologises for, some
extraordinary proofs of Machiavelian politics, an impenetrable mystery
seems to hang over the conduct of men who profess to be guided by the
bloodless code of Jesus. But try them by a human standard, and treat
them as _politicians_, and the motives once discovered, the actions are
understood!
Two edicts of Charles the Fifth, in 1555, condemned to death the
Reformed of the Low Countries, even should they return to the catholic
faith, with this exception, however, in favour of the latter, that they
shall not be burnt alive, but that the men shall be beheaded, and the
women buried alive! _Religion_ could not, then, be the real motive of
the Spanish cabinet, for in returning to the ancient faith that point
was obtained; but the truth is, that the Spanish government considered
the reformed as _rebels_, whom it was not safe to re-admit to the rights
of citizenship. The undisguised fact appears in the codicil to the will
of the emperor, when he solemnly declares that he had written to the
Inquisition "to burn and extirpate the heretics," _after trying to make
Christians of them_, because he is convinced that they never can become
sincere catholics; and he acknowledges that he had committed a great
fault in permitting Luther to return free on the faith of his
safe-conduct, as the emperor was not bound to keep a promise with a
heretic. "It is because that I destroyed him not, that heresy has now
become strong, which I am convinced might have been stifled with him in
its birth."[159] The whole conduct of Charles the Fifth in this mighty
revolution was, from its beginning, censured by contemporaries as purely
_political_. Francis the First observed that the emperor, under the
colour of religion, was placing himself at the head of a league to make
his way to a predominant monarchy. "The pretext of religion is no new
thing," writes the Duke of Nevers. "Charles the Fifth had never
undertaken a war against the Protestant princes but with the design of
rendering the Imperial crown hereditary in the house of Austria; and he
has only attacked the electoral princes to ruin them, and to abolish
their right of election. Had it been zeal for the catholic religion,
would he have delayed from 1519 to 1549 to arm? That he might have
extinguished the Lutheran heresy, which he could easily have done in
1526, but he considered that this novelty would serve to divide the
German princes, and he patiently waited till the effect was
realised."[160]
Good men of both parties, mistaking the nature of these religious wars,
have drawn horrid inferences! The "dragonnades" of Louis XIV. excited
the admiration of Bruyere; and Anquetil, in his "Esprit de la Ligue,"
compares the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to a salutary amputation.
The massacre of St. Bartholomew in its own day, and even recently, has
found advocates; a Greek professor at the time asserted that there were
_two classes_ of protestants in France--political and religious; and
that "the late ebullition of public vengeance was solely directed
against the former." Dr. M'Crie, cursing the catholic with a catholic's
curse, execrates "the stale sophistry of this calumniator." But should
we allow that the Greek professor who advocated their national crime was
the wretch the calvinistic doctor describes, yet the nature of things
cannot be altered by the equal violence of Peter Charpentier and Dr.
M'Crie.
This subject of "Political Religionism" is indeed as nice as it is
curious; _politics_ have been so cunningly worked into the cause of
_religion_, that the parties themselves will never be able to separate
them; and to this moment the most opposite opinions are formed
concerning the same events and the same persons. When public
disturbances broke out at Nismes on the first restoration of the
Bourbons, the protestants, who there are numerous, declared that they
were persecuted for religion, and their cry, echoed by their brethren
the dissenters, resounded in this country. We have not forgotten the
ferment it raised here; much was said, and something was done. Our
minister, however, persisted in declaring that it was a mere _political_
affair. It is clear that our government was right on the _cause_, and
those zealous complainants wrong, who only observed the _effect_; for as
soon as the Bourbonists had triumphed over the Bonapartists, we heard no
more of those sanguinary persecutions of the protestants of Nismes, of
which a dissenter has just published a large history. It is a curious
fact, that when two writers at the same time were occupied in a Life of
Cardinal Ximenes, Flechier converted the cardinal into a saint, and
every incident in his administration was made to connect itself with his
religious character; Marsollier, a writer very inferior to Flechier,
shows the cardinal merely as a politician. The elegances of Flechier
were soon neglected by the public, and the deep interests of truth soon
acquired, and still retain, for the less elegant writer the attention of
the statesman.
A modern historian has observed that "the affairs of religion were the
grand fomenters and promoters of the _Thirty Years' War_, which first
brought down the powers of the North to mix in the politics of the
Southern states." The fact is indisputable, but the cause is not so
apparent. Gustavus Adolphus, the vast military genius of his age, had
designed, and was successfully attempting, to oppose the overgrown power
of the imperial house of Austria, which had long aimed at an universal
monarchy in Europe; a circumstance which Philip IV. weakly hinted at to
the world when he placed this motto under his arms--"_Sine ipso factum
est nihil_;" an expression applied to Jesus Christ by St. John!