upon a struggle with the Lutherans; but a few years more
sufficed to free his hands. The Treaty of Crespy, in 1544,
ended his last conflict with Francis I. In the same year, Pope
Paul III. summoned the long promised General Council of the
Church to meet at Trent the following spring--by which
appointment a term was put to the toleration conceded in the
Peace of Nuremberg. The Protestants, though greatly increased
in numbers, were now less united than at the time of the
formation of the Schmalkaldic League. There was much division
among the leading princes. They yielded no longer to the
influence of their wisest and ablest chief, Philip of Hesse.
Luther, whose counsels had always been for peace, approached
his end, and died in 1546. The circumstances were favorable to
the Emperor, when he determined to put a stop to the
Reformation by force. He secured an important ally in the very
heart of Protestant Germany, winning over to his side the
selfish schemer, Duke Maurice of Saxony--now the head of the
Albertine branch of the Saxon house. In 1546 he felt prepared
and war began. The successes were all on the imperial side.
There was no energy, no unity, no forethoughtfulness of plan,
among the Lutherans. The Elector, John Frederick, of Saxony,
and Philip of Hesse, both fell into the Emperor's hands and
were barbarously imprisoned. The former was compelled to
resign his Electorate, and it was conferred upon the renegade
Duke Maurice. Philip was kept in vile places of confinement
and inhumanly treated for years. The Protestants of Germany
were entirely beaten down, for the time being, and the Emperor
imposed upon them in 1548 a confession of faith called "the
Interim," the chief missionaries of which were the Spanish
soldiers whom he had brought into the country. But if the
Lutherans had suffered themselves to be overcome, they were
not ready to be trodden upon in so despotic a manner. Even
Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, recoiled from the tyranny
which Charles sought to establish, while he resented the
inhuman treatment of Philip of Hesse, who was his
father-in-law. He headed a new league, therefore, which was
formed against the Emperor, and which entered into a secret
alliance with Henry II. of France (Francis I. having died in
1547). Charles was taken by surprise when the revolt broke
out, in 1552, and barely escaped capture. The operations of
Maurice were vigorous and ably conducted, and in a few weeks
the Protestants had recovered all the ground lost in 1546-7;
while the French had improved the opportunity to seize the
three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The ultimate result
was the so-called "Religious Peace of Augsburg," concluded in
1555, which gave religious freedom to the ruling princes of
Germany, but none whatever to the people. It put the two
religions on the same footing, but it was simply a footing of
equal intolerance. Each ruler had the right to choose his own
creed, and to impose it arbitrarily upon his subjects if he
saw fit to do so. As a practical consequence, the final
division of Germany between Protestantism and Catholicism was
substantially determined by the princes and not by the people.
The humiliating failure of Charles V. to crush the Reformation
in Germany was no doubt prominent among the experiences which
sickened him of the imperial office and determined him to
abdicate the throne, which he did in the autumn of 1556.
Reformation in Switzerland.
A generation had now passed since the Lutheran movement of
Reformation was begun in Germany, and, within that time, not
only had the wave of influence from Wittenberg swept over all
western Europe, but other reformers had risen independently
and contemporaneously, or nearly so, in other countries, and
had co-operated powerfully in making the movement general. The
earliest of these was the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, who
began preaching against indulgences and other flagrant abuses
in the Church, at Zurich, in 1519, the same year in which
Luther opened his attack. The effect of his preaching was so
great that Zurich, four years later, had practically separated
itself from the Roman Church.
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From that beginning the Reformation spread so rapidly that in
half-a-dozen years it had mastered most of the Cantons of
Switzerland outside of the five Forest Cantons, where
Catholicism held its ground with stubbornness. The two
religions were then represented by two parties, which absorbed
in themselves all the political as well as the religious
questions of the day, and which speedily came to blows. The
Catholics allied themselves with Ferdinand of Austria, and the
Protestants with several of the imperial cities of Germany.
But such an union between the Swiss and the German Protestants
as seemed plainly desirable was prevented; mainly, by the
dictatorial obstinacy of Luther. Zwingli's reforming ideas
were broader, and at the same time more radical, than
Luther's, and the latter opposed them with irreconcilable
hostility. He still held with the Catholics to the doctrine of
transubstantiation, which the Swiss reformer rejected. Hence
Zwingli was no less a heretic in Luther's eyes than in the
eyes of the pope, and the anathemas launched against him from
Wittenberg were hardly less thunderous than those from Rome.
So the two contemporaneous reformation movements, German and
Swiss, were held apart from one another, and went on side by
side, with little help or sympathy from one another. In 1531
the Forest Cantons attacked and defeated the men of Zurich,
and Zwingli was slain in the battle. Peace was then concluded
on terms which left each canton free to establish its own
creed, and each congregation free to do the same in the common
territories of the confederation.
Reformation in France.
In France, the freer ideas of Christianity--the ideas less
servile to tradition and to Rome--that were in the upper air
of European culture when the sixteenth century began, had
found some expression even before Luther spoke. The influence
of the new classical learning, and of the "humanists" who
imbibed its spirit, tended to that liberation of the mind, and
was felt in the greatest center of the learning of the time,
the University of Paris. But not sufficiently to overcome the
conservatism of the Sorbonne--the theological faculty of the
University; for Luther's writings were solemnly condemned and
burned by it in 1521, and a persecution of those inclined
toward the new doctrines was early begun. Francis I., in whose
careless and coarse nature there was some taste for letters and
learning, as well as for art, and who patronized in an idle
way the Renaissance movements of his reign, seemed disposed at
the beginning to be friendly to the religious Reformers. But
he was too shallow a creature, and too profoundly unprincipled
and false, to stand firmly in any cause of righteousness, and
face such a power as that of Rome. His nobler sister, Margaret
of Angoulême, who embraced the reformed doctrines with
conviction, exerted a strong influence upon the king in their
favor while she was by his side; but after her marriage to
Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, and after Francis had
suffered defeat and shame in his war with Charles V., he was
ready to make himself the servant of the Papacy for whatever
it willed against his Protestant subjects, in order to have
its alliance and support. So the persecution grew steadily
more fierce, more systematic, and more determined, as the
spirit of the Reformation spread more widely through the
kingdom.
Calvin at Geneva.
One of the consequences of the persecution was the flight from
France, in 1534, of John Calvin, who subsequently became the
founder and the exponent of a system of Protestant theology
which obtained wider acceptance in Europe than that of Luther.
All minor differences were practically merged in the great
division between these two theologies--the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic--which split the Reformation in twain. After two
years of wandering, Calvin settled in the free city of Geneva,
where his influence very soon rose to so extraordinary a
height that he transformed the commonwealth and ruled it,
unselfishly, and in perfect piety, but with iron-handed
despotism, for a quarter of a century.
The French Court.
The reign of Francis I. has one other mark in history, besides
that of his persecution of the Reformers, his careless
patronage of arts and letters, and his unsuccessful wars with
the Emperor. He gave to the French Court--at least more than
his predecessors had done--the character which made it in
later French history so evil and mischievous a center of
dissoluteness, of base intrigue, of national demoralization.
It was invested in his time with the fascinations which drew
into it the nobles of France and its men of genius, to corrupt
them and to destroy their independence. It was in his time that
the Court began to seem to be, in its own eyes, a kind of
self-centered society, containing all of the French nation
which needed or deserved consideration, and holding its place
in the order of things quite apart from the kingdom which it
helped its royal master to rule. Not to be of the Court was to
be non-existent in its view; and thus every ambition in France
was invited to push at its fatal doors.
Catherine de' Medici and the Guises.
Francis I. died in 1547, and was followed on the throne by his
son Henry II., whose marriage to Catherine de' Medici, of the
renowned Florentine family, was the most important personal
act of his life. It was important in the malign fruits which
it bore; since Catherine, after his death, gave an evil
Italian bend-sinister to French politics, which had no lack of
crookedness before. Henry continued the war with Charles V.,
and was afterwards at war with Philip II., Charles' son, and
with England, the latter country losing Calais in the
contest,--its last French possession. Peace was made in 1559,
and celebrated with splendid tournaments, at one of which the
French king received a wound that caused his death.
He left three sons, all weaklings in body and character, who
reigned successively. The elder, Francis II., died the year
following his accession. Although aged but seventeen when he
died, he had been married some two years to Mary Stuart, the
young queen of Scots. This marriage had helped to raise to
great power in the kingdom a family known as the Guises. They
were a branch of the ducal House of Lorraine, whose duchy was
at that time independent of France, and, although the father
of the family, made Duke of Guise by Francis I., had become
naturalized in France in 1505, his sons were looked upon as
foreigners by the jealous Frenchmen whom they supplanted at
Court.
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Of the six sons, there were two of eminence, one (the second
duke of Guise) a famous general in his day, the other a
powerful cardinal. Five sisters completed the family in its
second generation. The elder of these, Mary, had married James
V. of Scotland (whose mother was the English princess,
Margaret, sister of Henry VIII.), and Mary Stuart, queen of
Scots, born of that marriage, was therefore a niece of the
Guises. They had brought about her marriage to Francis II.,
while he was dauphin, and they mounted with her to supreme
influence in the kingdom when she ascended the throne with her
husband. The queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, was as eager
as the Guises to control the government, in what appeared to
her eyes the interest of her children; but during the short
reign of Francis II. she was quite thrust aside, and the
queen's uncles ruled the state.
The death of Francis II. (1560) brought a change, and with the
accession of Charles IX., a boy of ten years, there began a
bitter contest for ascendancy between Catherine and the
Guises; and this struggle became mixed and strangely
complicated with a deadly conflict of religions, which the
steady advance of the Reformation in France had brought at
this time to a crisis.
The Huguenots.
Under the powerful leadership which Calvin assumed, at Geneva,
the reformed religion in France had acquired an organized
firmness and strength which not only resisted the most cruel
persecution, but made rapid headway against it. "Protestantism
had become a party which did not, like Lutheranism in Germany,
spring up from the depths." "It numbered its chief adherents
among the middle and upper grades of society, spread its roots
rather among the nobles than the citizens, and among learned
men and families of distinction rather than among the people."
"Some of the highest aristocracy, who were discontented, and
submitted unwillingly to the supremacy of the Guises, had
joined the Calvinistic opposition--some undoubtedly from
policy, others from conviction. The Turennes, the Rohans, and
Soubises, pure nobles, who addressed the king as 'mon cousin,'
especially the Bourbons, the agnates of the royal house, had
adopted the new faith" (Hausser). One branch of the Bourbons
had lately acquired the crown of Navarre. The Spanish part of
the old Navarrese kingdom had been subjugated and absorbed by
Ferdinand of Aragon; but its territory on the French side of
the Pyrenees--Béarn and other counties--still maintained a
half independent national existence, with the dignity of a
regal government. When Margaret of Angoulême, sister of
Francis I., married Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, as
mentioned before, she carried to that small court an earnest
inclination towards the doctrines of the Reform. Under her
protection Navarre became largely Protestant, and a place of
refuge for the persecuted of France. Margaret's daughter, the
famous Jeanne d'Albret, espoused the reformed faith fully, and
her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, as well as Antoine's brother,
Louis de Condé, found it politic to profess the same belief.
For the Protestants (who were now acquiring, in some unknown
way, the name of Huguenots) had become so numerous and so
compactly organized as to form a party capable of being
wielded with great effect, in the strife of court factions
which the rivalry of Catherine and the Guises produced. Hence
politics and religion were inextricably confused in the civil
wars which broke out shortly after the death of Francis II.
(1560), and the accession of the boy king, Charles IX. These
wars belong to a different movement in the general current of
European events, and we will return to them after a glance at
the religious Reformation, and at the political circumstances
connected with it, in England and elsewhere.
England.
Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, made king of England by his
victory at Bosworth, established himself so firmly in the seat
of power that three successive rebellions failed to disturb
him. In one of these (1487) a pretender, Lambert Simnel, was
put forward, who claimed to be the Earl of Warwick. In another
(1491-1497) a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck, personated one
of the young princes whom Richard III. had caused to be
murdered in the tower. Neither of the impostures had much
success in the kingdom. Henry VII. was not a popular king, but
he was able and strong, and he solidified all the bases of
monarchical independence which circumstances had enabled
Edward IV. to begin laying down.
It was in the reign of Henry that America was discovered, and
he might have been the patron of Columbus, the beneficiary of
the great voyage, and the proprietor and lord of the grand
realm which Isabella and Ferdinand secured. But he lacked the
funds or the faith--apparently both--and put aside his
unequaled opportunity. When the field of westward exploration
had been opened, however, he was early in entering it, and
sent the Cabots upon those voyages which gave England her
claim to the North American coasts.
During the reign of Henry VII. there were two quiet marriages
in his family which strangely influenced subsequent history.
One was the marriage, in 1501, of the king's eldest son,
Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Ferdinand
and Isabella. The other, in 1503, united the king's daughter,
Margaret, to James IV., King of Scotland. It was through this
latter marriage that the inheritance of the English crown
passed to the Scottish House of Stuart, exactly one hundred
years later, upon the failure of the direct line of descent in
the Tudor family. The first marriage, of Prince Arthur to
Catherine of Aragon, was soon dissolved by the death of the
prince, in 1502. Seven years afterwards the widowed Catherine
married her late husband's brother, just after he became Henry
VIII., King of England, upon the death of his father, in 1509.
Whence followed notable consequences which will presently
appear.
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Henry VIII. and his breach with Rome.
It was the ambition of Henry VIII. to play a conspicuous part
in European affairs; and as England was rich and strong, and
as the king had obtained nearly the absoluteness of the crown
in France, the parties to the great contests then going on
were all eagerly courting his alliance. His ambitions ran
parallel, too, with those of the able minister, Thomas Wolsey,
who rose to high influence at his side soon after his reign
began. Wolsey aspired to the Papal crown, with the cardinal's
cap as a preparatory adornment, and he drew England, as we
have seen, into the stormy politics of the sixteenth century
in Europe, with no gain, of glory or otherwise, to the nation,
and not much result of any kind. When the Emperor Maximilian
died, in 1519, Henry entered the lists against Maximilian's
grandson, Charles of Spain, and Francis I. of France, as a
candidate for the imperial crown. In the subsequent wars which
broke out between his two rivals, he took the side of the
successful Charles, now Emperor, and helped him to climb to
supremacy in Europe over the prostrate French king. He had
dreams of conquering France again, and casting the glories of
Henry V. in the shade; but he carried his enterprise little
beyond the dreaming. When it was too late to check the growth
of Charles' overshadowing power, he changed his side and took
Francis into alliance.
But Henry's motives were always selfish and personal--never
political; and the personal motives had now taken on a most
despicable character. He had tired of his wife, the Spanish
Catherine, who was six years older than himself. He had two
pretexts for discontent with his marriage: 1, that his queen
had borne him only a daughter, whereas England needed a male
heir to the throne; 2, that he was troubled with scruples as
to the lawfulness of wedlock with his brother's widow. On this
latter ground he began intrigues to win from the Pope, not a
divorce in the ordinary sense of the term, but a declaration
of the nullity of his marriage. This challenged the opposition
of the Emperor, Catherine's nephew, and Henry's alliances were
naturally changed.
The Pope, Clement VII., refused to annul the marriage, and
Henry turned his unreasoning wrath upon Cardinal Wolsey, who
had conducted negotiations with the Pope and failed in them.
Wolsey was driven from the Court in disgrace and died soon
afterwards. He was succeeded in the king's favor by a more
unscrupulous man, Thomas Cromwell. Henry had not yet despaired
of bringing the Pope to compliance with his wishes; and he
began attacks upon the Church and upon the papal revenues
which might shake, as he hoped, the firmness of the powers at
Rome. With the help of a pliant minister and a subservient
Parliament, he forced the clergy (1531-1532) in Convocation
to acknowledge him to be the Supreme Head of the English
Church, and to submit themselves entirely to his authority. At
the same time he grasped the "annates," or first year's income
of bishoprics, which had been the richest perquisite of the papal
treasury. In all these proceedings, the English king was
acting on a line parallel to that of the continental rising
against Rome; but it was not in friendliness toward it nor in
sympathy with it that he did so. He had been among the
bitterest enemies of the Reformation, and he never ceased to
be so. He had won from the Pope the empty title of "Defender
of the Faith," by a foolish book against Luther, and the faith
which he defended in 1521 was the faith in which he died. But
when he found that the influence of Charles V. at Rome was too
great to be overcome, and that the Pope could be neither
bribed, persuaded nor coerced to sanction the putting away of
his wife, he resolved to make the English Church sufficient in
authority to satisfy his demand, by establishing its
ecclesiastical independence, with a pontiff of its own, in
himself. He purposed nothing more than this. He contemplated
no change of doctrine, no cleansing of abuses. He permitted no
one whose services he commanded in the undertaking to bring
such changes into contemplation. So far as concerned Henry's
initiative, there was absolutely nothing of religious
Reformation in the movement which separated the Church of
England from the Church of Rome. It accomplished its sole
original end when it gave finality to the decree of an English
ecclesiastical court, on the question of the king's marriage,
and barred queen Catherine's appeal from it. It was the
intention of Henry VIII. that the Church under his papacy
should remain precisely what it had been under the Pope at
Rome, and he spared neither stake nor gibbet in his
persecuting zeal against impudent reformers.
But the spirit of Reformation which was in the atmosphere of
that time lent itself, nevertheless, to King Henry's project,
and made that practicable which could hardly have been so a
generation before. The influence of Wyclif had never wholly
died out; the new learning was making its way in England and
broadening men's minds; the voice of Luther and his fellow
workers on the continent had been heard, and not vainly.
England was ripe for the religious revolution, and her king
promoted it, without intention. But while his reign lasted,
and his despotism was heavy on the land, there was nothing
accomplished but the breaking of the old Church fetters, and
the binding of the nation anew with green withes, which,
presently, it would burst asunder.
The conspicuous events of Henry's reign are familiarly known.
Most of them bear the stamp of his monstrous egotism and
selfishness. He was the incomparable tyrant of English
history. The monarch who repudiated two wives, sent two to the
block, and shared his bed with yet two more; who made a whole
national church the servant of his lusts, and who took the
lives of the purest men of his kingdom when they would not
bend their consciences to say that he did well--has a pedestal
quite his own in the gallery of infamous kings.
Edward VI. and the Reformation.
Dying in 1547, Henry left three children: Mary, daughter of
Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, and
Edward, son of Jane Seymour. The latter, in his tenth year,
became King (Edward VI.), and his uncle, the Duke of Somerset,
acquired the control of the government, with the title of
Protector. Somerset headed a party which had begun before the
death of the king to press for more changes in the character
of the new Church of England and less adherence to the pattern
of Rome. There seems to be little reason to suppose that the
court leaders of this party were much moved in the matter by
any interest of a religious kind; but the growth of thinking
and feeling in England tended that way, and the side of
Reformation had become the stronger. They simply gave way to
it, and, abandoned the repression which Henry had persisted
in. At the same time, their new policy gave them more freedom
to grasp the spoils of the old Church, which Henry VIII. had
begun to lay hands on, by suppression of monasteries and
confiscation of their estates. The wealth thus sequestered
went largely into private hands.
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It was in the short reign of Edward VI. that the Church of
England really took on its organic form as one of the Churches
of the Reformation, by the composition of its first
prayer-books, and by the framing of a definite creed.
Lady Jane Grey.