THE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of religious
controversy.
If you will notice you will find that almost everybody around you is
forever "talking economics" and discussing wages and hours of labor and
strikes in their relation to the life of the community, for that is the
main topic of interest of our own time.
The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared worse. They
never heard anything but "religion." Their heads were filled with
"predestination," "transubstantition," "free will," and a hundred other
queer words, expressing obscure points of "the true faith," whether
Catholic or Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they
were baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians or
Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augsburg catechism,
composed by Luther, or from the "institutes of Christianity," written
by Calvin, or they mumbled the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were
printed in the English Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that
these alone represented the "True Faith."
They heard of the wholesale theft of church property perpetrated by King
Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of England, who made himself the
supreme head of the English church, and assumed the old papal rights of
appointing bishops and priests. They had a nightmare whenever some one
mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its many torture
chambers, and they were treated to equally horrible stories of how a mob
of outraged Dutch Protestants had got hold of a dozen defenceless old
priests and hanged them for the sheer pleasure of killing those who
professed a different faith. It was unfortunate that the two contending
parties were so equally matched. Otherwise the struggle would have come
to a quick solution. Now it dragged on for eight generations, and it
grew so complicated that I can only tell you the most important details,
and must ask you to get the rest from one of the many histories of the
Reformation.
The great reform movement of the Protestants had been followed by a
thoroughgoing reform within the bosom of the Church. Those popes who
had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman and Greek
antiquities, disappeared from the scene and their place was taken by
serious men who spent twenty hours a day administering those holy duties
which had been placed in their hands.
The long and rather disgraceful happiness of the monasteries came to an
end. Monks and nuns were forced to be up at sunrise, to study the Church
Fathers, to tend the sick and console the dying. The Holy Inquisition
watched day and night that no dangerous doctrines should be spread by
way of the printing press. Here it is customary to mention poor Galileo,
who was locked up because he had been a little too indiscreet in
explaining the heavens with his funny little telescope and had muttered
certain opinions about the behaviour of the planets which were entirely
opposed to the official views of the church. But in all fairness to the
Pope, the clergy and the Inquisition, it ought to be stated that the
Protestants were quite as much the enemies of science and medicine as
the Catholics and with equal manifestations of ignorance and intolerance
regarded the men who investigated things for themselves as the most
dangerous enemies of mankind.
And Calvin, the great French reformer and the tyrant (both political and
spiritual) of Geneva, not only assisted the French authorities when they
tried to hang Michael Servetus (the Spanish theologian and physician
who had become famous as the assistant of Vesalius, the first great
anatomist), but when Servetus had managed to escape from his French jail
and had fled to Geneva, Calvin threw this brilliant man into prison
and after a prolonged trial, allowed him to be burned at the stake on
account of his heresies, totally indifferent to his fame as a scientist.
And so it went. We have few reliable statistics upon the subject, but on
the whole, the Protestants tired of this game long before the Catholics,
and the greater part of honest men and women who were burned and hanged
and decapitated on account of their religious beliefs fell as victims of
the very energetic but also very drastic church of Rome.
For tolerance (and please remember this when you grow older), is of very
recent origin and even the people of our own so-called "modern world"
are apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them
very much. They are tolerant towards a native of Africa, and do not care
whether he becomes a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, because neither Buddhism
nor Mohammedanism means anything to them. But when they hear that their
neighbour who was a Republican and believed in a high protective tariff,
has joined the Socialist party and now wants to repeal all tariff laws,
their tolerance ceases and they use almost the same words as those
employed by a kindly Catholic (or Protestant) of the seventeenth
century, who was informed that his best friend whom he had always
respected and loved had fallen a victim to the terrible heresies of the
Protestant (or Catholic) church.
"Heresy" until a very short time ago was regarded as a disease. Nowadays
when we see a man neglecting the personal cleanliness of his body and
his home and exposing himself and his children to the dangers of typhoid
fever or another preventable disease, we send for the board-of-health
and the health officer calls upon the police to aid him in removing this
person who is a danger to the safety of the entire community. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man or a woman who
openly doubted the fundamental principles upon which his Protestant
or Catholic religion had been founded, was considered a more terrible
menace than a typhoid carrier. Typhoid fever might (very likely would)
destroy the body. But heresy, according to them, would positively
destroy the immortal soul. It was therefore the duty of all good
and logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of the
established order of things and those who failed to do so were as
culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the nearest doctor
when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are suffering from cholera or
small-pox.
In the years to come you will hear a great deal about preventive
medicine. Preventive medicine simply means that our doctors do not wait
until their patients are sick, then step forward and cure them. On the
contrary, they study the patient and the conditions under which he lives
when he (the patient) is perfectly well and they remove every possible
cause of illness by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching him what to eat and
what to avoid, and by giving him a few simple ideas of personal hygiene.
They go even further than that, and these good doctors enter the
schools and teach the children how to use tooth-brushes and how to avoid
catching colds.
The sixteenth century which regarded (as I have tried to show you)
bodily illness as much less important than sickness which threatened the
soul, organised a system of spiritual preventive medicine. As soon as
a child was old enough to spell his first words, he was educated in
the true (and the "only true") principles of the Faith. Indirectly this
proved to be a good thing for the general progress of the people of
Europe. The Protestant lands were soon dotted with schools. They used a
great deal of very valuable time to explain the Catechism, but they gave
instruction in other things besides theology. They encouraged reading
and they were responsible for the great prosperity of the printing
trade.
But the Catholics did not lag behind. They too devoted much time and
thought to education. The Church, in this matter, found an invaluable
friend and ally in the newly-founded order of the Society of Jesus. The
founder of this remarkable organisation was a Spanish soldier who
after a life of unholy adventures had been converted and thereupon felt
himself bound to serve the church just as many former sinners, who have
been shown the errors of their way by the Salvation Army, devote the
remaining years of their lives to the task of aiding and consoling those
who are less fortunate.
The name of this Spaniard was Ignatius de Loyola. He was born in the
year before the discovery of America. He had been wounded and lamed for
life and while he was in the hospital he had seen a vision of the Holy
Virgin and her Son, who bade him give up the wickedness of his former
life. He decided to go to the Holy Land and finish the task of the
Crusades. But a visit to Jerusalem had shown him the impossibility of
the task and he returned west to help in the warfare upon the heresies
of the Lutherans.
In the year 1534 he was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne. Together with
seven other students he founded a fraternity. The eight men promised
each other that they would lead holy lives, that they would not strive
after riches but after righteousness, and would devote themselves, body
and soul, to the service of the Church. A few years later this small
fraternity had grown into a regular organisation and was recognised by
Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus.
Loyola had been a military man. He believed in discipline, and absolute
obedience to the orders of the superior dignitaries became one of the
main causes for the enormous success of the Jesuits. They specialised
in education. They gave their teachers a most thorough-going education
before they allowed them to talk to a single pupil. They lived with
their students and they entered into their games. They watched them with
tender care. And as a result they raised a new generation of faithful
Catholics who took their religious duties as seriously as the people of
the early Middle Ages.
The shrewd Jesuits, however, did not waste all their efforts upon the
education of the poor. They entered the palaces of the mighty and became
the private tutors of future emperors and kings. And what this meant you
will see for yourself when I tell you about the Thirty Years War. But
before this terrible and final outbreak of religious fanaticism, a great
many other things had happened.
Charles V was dead. Germany and Austria had been left to his brother
Ferdinand. All his other possessions, Spain and the Netherlands and the
Indies and America had gone to his son Philip. Philip was the son of
Charles and a Portuguese princess who had been first cousin to her own
husband. The children that are born of such a union are apt to be
rather queer. The son of Philip, the unfortunate Don Carlos, (murdered
afterwards with his own father's consent,) was crazy. Philip was not
quite crazy, but his zeal for the Church bordered closely upon religious
insanity. He believed that Heaven had appointed him as one of the
saviours of mankind. Therefore, whosoever was obstinate and refused to
share his Majesty's views, proclaimed himself an enemy of the human race
and must be exterminated lest his example corrupt the souls of his pious
neighbours.
Spain, of course, was a very rich country. All the gold and silver of
the new world flowed into the Castilian and Aragonian treasuries. But
Spain suffered from a curious economic disease. Her peasants were
hard working men and even harder working women. But the better classes
maintained a supreme contempt for any form of labour, outside of
employment in the army or navy or the civil service. As for the Moors,
who had been very industrious artisans, they had been driven out of
the country long before. As a result, Spain, the treasure chest of the
world, remained a poor country because all her money had to be sent
abroad in exchange for the wheat and the other necessities of life which
the Spaniards neglected to raise for themselves.
Philip, ruler of the most powerful nation of the sixteenth century,
depended for his revenue upon the taxes which were gathered in the busy
commercial bee-hive of the Netherlands. But these Flemings and Dutchmen
were devoted followers of the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and they
had cleansed their churches of all images and holy paintings and they
had informed the Pope that they no longer regarded him as their shepherd
but intended to follow the dictates of their consciences and the
commands of their newly translated Bible.
This placed the king in a very difficult position. He could not possibly
tolerate the heresies of his Dutch subjects, but he needed their money.
If he allowed them to be Protestants and took no measures to save
their souls he was deficient in his duty toward God. If he sent the
Inquisition to the Netherlands and burned his subjects at the stake, he
would lose the greater part of his income.
Being a man of uncertain will-power he hesitated a long time. He tried
kindness and sternness and promises and threats. The Hollanders remained
obstinate, and continued to sing psalms and listen to the sermons of
their Lutheran and Calvinist preachers. Philip in his despair sent his
"man of iron," the Duke of Alba, to bring these hardened sinners to
terms. Alba began by decapitating those leaders who had not wisely left
the country before his arrival. In the year 1572 (the same year that the
French Protestant leaders were all killed during the terrible night of
Saint Bartholomew), he attacked a number of Dutch cities and massacred
the inhabitants as an example for the others. The next year he laid
siege to the town of Leyden, the manufacturing center of Holland.
Meanwhile, the seven small provinces of the northern Netherlands had
formed a defensive union, the so-called union of Utrecht, and had
recognised William of Orange, a German prince who had been the private
secretary of the Emperor Charles V, as the leader of their army and as
commander of their freebooting sailors, who were known as the Beggars
of the Sea. William, to save Leyden, cut the dykes, created a shallow
inland sea, and delivered the town with the help of a strangely equipped
navy consisting of scows and flat-bottomed barges which were rowed and
pushed and pulled through the mud until they reached the city walls.
It was the first time that an army of the invincible Spanish king had
suffered such a humiliating defeat. It surprised the world just as the
Japanese victory of Mukden, in the Russian-Japanese war, surprised our
own generation. The Protestant powers took fresh courage and Philip
devised new means for the purpose of conquering his rebellious subjects.
He hired a poor half-witted fanatic to go and murder William of Orange.
But the sight of their dead leader did not bring the Seven Provinces to
their knees. On the contrary it made them furiously angry. In the year
1581, the Estates General (the meeting of the representatives of the
Seven Provinces) came together at the Hague and most solemnly abjured
their "wicked king Philip" and themselves assumed the burden of
sovereignty which thus far had been invested in their "King by the Grace
of God."
This is a very important event in the history of the great struggle for
political liberty. It was a step which reached much further than the
uprising of the nobles which ended with the signing of the Magna Carta.
These good burghers said "Between a king and his subjects there is a
silent understanding that both sides shall perform certain services and
shall recognise certain definite duties. If either party fails to
live up to this contract, the other has the right to consider it
terminated." The American subjects of King George III in the year 1776
came to a similar conclusion. But they had three thousand miles of ocean
between themselves and their ruler and the Estates General took their
decision (which meant a slow death in case of defeat) within hearing of
the Spanish guns and although in constant fear of an avenging Spanish
fleet.
The stories about a mysterious Spanish fleet that was to conquer both
Holland and England, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth had succeeded
Catholic "Bloody Mary" was an old one. For years the sailors of the
waterfront had talked about it. In the eighties of the sixteenth
century, the rumour took a definite shape. According to pilots who had
been in Lisbon, all the Spanish and Portuguese wharves were building
ships. And in the southern Netherlands (in Belgium) the Duke of Parma
was collecting a large expeditionary force to be carried from Ostend to
London and Amsterdam as soon as the fleet should arrive.
In the year 1586 the Great Armada set sail for the north. But the
harbours of the Flemish coast were blockaded by a Dutch fleet and the
Channel was guarded by the English, and the Spaniards, accustomed to the
quieter seas of the south, did not know how to navigate in this squally
and bleak northern climate. What happened to the Armada once it was
attacked by ships and by storms I need not tell you. A few ships, by
sailing around Ireland, escaped to tell the terrible story of defeat.
The others perished and lie at the bottom of the North Sea.
Turn about is fair play. The British nod the Dutch Protestants now
carried the war into the territory of the enemy. Before the end of the
century, Houtman, with the help of a booklet written by Linschoten
(a Hollander who had been in the Portuguese service), had at last
discovered the route to the Indies. As a result the great Dutch East
India Company was founded and a systematic war upon the Portuguese and
Spanish colonies in Asia and Africa was begun in all seriousness.
It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a curious lawsuit
was fought out in the Dutch courts. Early in the seventeenth century a
Dutch Captain by the name of van Heemskerk, a man who had made himself
famous as the head of an expedition which had tried to discover the
North Eastern Passage to the Indies and who had spent a winter on the
frozen shores of the island of Nova Zembla, had captured a Portuguese
ship in the straits of Malacca. You will remember that the Pope had
divided the world into two equal shares, one of which had been given
to the Spaniards and the other to the Portuguese. The Portuguese quite
naturally regarded the water which surrounded their Indian islands as
part of their own property and since, for the moment, they were not at
war with the United Seven Netherlands, they claimed that the captain
of a private Dutch trading company had no right to enter their private
domain and steal their ships. And they brought suit. The directors of
the Dutch East India Company hired a bright young lawyer, by the name of
De Groot or Grotius, to defend their case. He made the astonishing plea
that the ocean is free to all comers. Once outside the distance which a
cannon ball fired from the land can reach, the sea is or (according to
Grotius) ought to be, a free and open highway to all the ships of all
nations. It was the first time that this startling doctrine had been
publicly pronounced in a court of law. It was opposed by all the other
seafaring people. To counteract the effect of Grotius' famous plea for
the "Mare Liberum," or "Open Sea," John Selden, the Englishman, wrote
his famous treatise upon the "Mare Clausum" or "Closed Sea" which
treated of the natural right of a sovereign to regard the seas which
surrounded his country as belonging to his territory. I mention this
here because the question had not yet been decided and during the last
war caused all sorts of difficulties and complications.
To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander and Englishman,
before twenty years were over the most valuable colonies of the Indies
and the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon and those along the coast of China
and even Japan were in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian Company
was founded which conquered Brazil and in North America built a fortress
called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river which Henry Hudson had
discovered in the year 1609
These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch Republic to such
an extent that they could hire foreign soldiers to do their fighting on
land while they devoted themselves to commerce and trade. To them the
Protestant revolt meant independence and prosperity. But in many other
parts of Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the
last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys.
The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618 and which ended
with the famous treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was the perfectly natural
result of a century of ever increasing religious hatred. It was, as
I have said, a terrible war. Everybody fought everybody else and the
struggle ended only when all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and
could fight no longer.
In less than a generation it turned many parts of central Europe into a
wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought for the carcass of a dead
horse with the even hungrier wolf. Five-sixths of all the German towns
and villages were destroyed. The Palatinate, in western Germany, was
plundered twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million
people was reduced to four million.
The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of
Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was the product of a most careful
Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church.
The vow which he had made as a young man, that he would eradicate all
sects and all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best
of his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent,
Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a son-in-law of
James I of England, had been made King of Bohemia, in direct violation
of Ferdinand's wishes.
At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia. The young king looked
in vain for assistance against this formidable enemy. The Dutch Republic
was willing to help, but, engaged in a desperate war of its own with
the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, it could do little. The Stuarts in
England were more interested in strengthening their own absolute power
at home than spending money and men upon a forlorn adventure in far away
Bohemia. After a struggle of a few months, the Elector of the Palatinate
was driven away and his domains were given to the Catholic house of
Bavaria. This was the beginning of the great war.
Then the Habsburg armies, under Tilly and Wallenstein, fought their way
through the Protestant part of Germany until they had reached the
shores of the Baltic. A Catholic neighbour meant serious danger to the
Protestant king of Denmark. Christian IV tried to defend himself by
attacking his enemies before they had become too strong for him. The
Danish armies marched into Germany but were defeated. Wallenstein
followed up his victory with such energy and violence that Denmark was
forced to sue for peace. Only one town of the Baltic then remained in
the hands of the Protestants. That was Stralsund.
There, in the early summer of the year 1630, landed King Gustavus
Adolphus of the house of Vasa, king of Sweden, and famous as the man who
had defended his country against the Russians. A Protestant prince of
unlimited ambition, desirous of making Sweden the centre of a great
Northern Empire, Gustavus Adolphus was welcomed by the Protestant
princes of Europe as the saviour of the Lutheran cause. He defeated
Tilly, who had just successfully butchered the Protestant inhabitants of
Magdeburg. Then his troops began their great march through the heart
of Germany in an attempt to reach the Habsburg possessions in Italy.
Threatened in the rear by the Catholics, Gustavus suddenly veered
around and defeated the main Habsburg army in the battle of Lutzen.
Unfortunately the Swedish king was killed when he strayed away from his
troops. But the Habsburg power had been broken.
Ferdinand, who was a suspicious sort of person, at once began to
distrust his own servants. Wallenstein, his commander-in-chief, was
murdered at his instigation. When the Catholic Bourbons, who ruled
France and hated their Habsburg rivals, heard of this, they joined the
Protestant Swedes. The armies of Louis XIII invaded the eastern part
of Germany, and Turenne and Conde added their fame to that of Baner
and Weimar, the Swedish generals, by murdering, pillaging and burning
Habsburg property. This brought great fame and riches to the Swedes
and caused the Danes to become envious. The Protestant Danes thereupon
declared war upon the Protestant Swedes who were the allies of the
Catholic French, whose political leader, the Cardinal de Richelieu, had
just deprived the Huguenots (or French Protestants) of those rights of
public worship which the Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 had guaranteed
them.
The war, after the habit of such encounters, did not decide anything,
when it came to an end with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The
Catholic powers remained Catholic and the Protestant powers stayed
faithful to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. The Swiss
and Dutch Protestants were recognised as independent republics. France
kept the cities of Metz and Toul and Verdun and a part of the Alsace.
The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist as a sort of scare-crow state,
without men, without money, without hope and without courage.
The only good the Thirty Years War accomplished was a negative one. It
discouraged both Catholics and Protestants from ever trying it again.
Henceforth they left each other in peace. This however did not mean
that religious feeling and theological hatred had been removed from this
earth. On the contrary. The quarrels between Catholic and Protestant
came to an end, but the disputes between the different Protestant sects
continued as bitterly as ever before. In Holland a difference of
opinion as to the true nature of predestination (a very obscure point of
theology, but exceedingly important the eyes of your great-grandfather)
caused a quarrel which ended with the decapitation of John of
Oldenbarneveldt, the Dutch statesman, who had been responsible for
the success of the Republic during the first twenty years of its
independence, and who was the great organising genius of her Indian
trading company. In England, the feud led to civil war.
But before I tell you of this outbreak which led to the first execution
by process-of-law of a European king, I ought to say something about the
previous history of England. In this book I am trying to give you only
those events of the past which can throw a light upon the conditions of
the present world. If I do not mention certain countries, the cause is
not to be found in any secret dislike on my part. I wish that I could
tell you what happened to Norway and Switzerland and Serbia and China.
But these lands exercised no great influence upon the development of
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I therefore pass
them by with a polite and very respectful bow. England however is in
a different position. What the people of that small island have done
during the last five hundred years has shaped the course of history in
every corner of the world. Without a proper knowledge of the background
of English history, you cannot understand what you read in the
newspapers. And it is therefore necessary that you know how England
happened to develop a parliamentary form of government while the rest of
the European continent was still ruled by absolute monarchs.