THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED
§ 1. THE GERMAN CONDITIONS
In a vague and general sense the ecclesiastical revolution known as
the Reformation was a phenomenon of freethought. To be so understood,
indeed, it must be regarded in contrast to the dominion of the Catholic
Church, not to the movement which we call the Renaissance. That
movement it was that made the Reformation possible; and if we have
regard to the reign of Bibliolatry which Protestantism set up, we seem
to be contemplating rather a superimposing of Semitic darkness upon
Hellenic light than an intellectual emancipation. Emancipation of
another kind the Reformation doubtless brought about. In particular
it involved, to an extent not generally realized, a secularization
of life, through the sheer curtailment, in most Protestant countries,
of the personnel and apparatus of clericalism, and the new disrepute
into which, for a time, these fell. Alike in Germany and in England
there was a breaking-up of habits of reverence and of self-prostration
before creed and dogma and ritual. But this liberation was rather
social than intellectual, and the product was rather licence and
irreverence than ordered freethought. On the other hand, when the
first unsettlement was over, the new growth of Bibliolatry tended
rather to deepen the religious way of feeling and make more definite
the religious attitude. Tolerance did not emerge until after a whole
era of embittered strife. The Reformation, in fact, was much more
akin to a revolt against a hereditary king than to the process of
self-examination and logical scrutiny by which men pass from belief
to disbelief in a theory of things, a dogma, or a document.
The beginning of such a process had indeed taken place in Germany
before Luther, insofar as the New Learning represented by such
humanists as Erasmus, such scholars as Reuchlin, [1871] and such
satirists as Ulrich von Hutten, set up a current of educated hostility
to the ignorance and the grosser superstitions of the churchmen. For
Germany, as for England, this movement was a contagion from the new
scholarship and Platonism of Italy; [1872] and the better minds in the
four universities founded in the pre-Lutheran generation (Tübingen,
1477; Mayence, 1482; Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 1506; Wittemberg, 1502)
necessarily owed much to Italian impulses, which they carried on,
though the universities as a whole were bitterly hostile to the
new learning. [1873] The Dutch freethinker Ryswyck, as we saw, was
fundamentally an Averroïst; and Italy was the stronghold of Averroïsm,
of which the monistic bias probably fostered the Unitarianism of
the sixteenth century. But it was not this literary and scholarly
movement that effected the Reformation so-called, which was rather
an economic and political than a mental revolution.
The persistence of Protestant writers in discussing the early
history of the Reformation without a glance at the economic
causation is one of the great hindrances to historic science. From
such popular works as those of D'Aubigné and Häusser it is
practically impossible to learn what socially took place in
Germany; and the general Protestant reader can learn it only--and
imperfectly--from the works on the Catholic side, as Audin's
Histoire de la vie de Luther (Eng. tr. 1853) and Döllinger's Die
Reformation, and the more scientific Protestant studies, such as
those of Ranke and Bezold (even there not at any great length),
to neither of which classes of history will he resort. In England
the facts are partially realized, in the light of an ecclesiastical
predilection, through High Church histories such as that of Blunt,
which proceed upon a Catholic leaning. Cobbett's intemperate
exposure of the economic causation has found an audience chiefly
among Catholics.
Bezold admits that "with perfect justice have recent historians
commented on the former underrating of an economic force which
certainly played its part in the spread and establishment of the
Reformation" (Gesch. der deutschen Reformation, 1890, p. 563). The
broad fact is that in not a single country could the Reformation
have been accomplished without enlisting the powerful classes
or corporations, or alternatively the de facto governments, by
proffering the plunder of the Church. Only in a few Swiss cantons,
and in Holland, does the confiscation seem to have been made to
the common good (cp. the present writer's Evolution of States,
pp. 311, 343). But even in Holland needy nobles had finally turned
Protestant in the hope of getting Church lands. (See Motley, Rise
of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 131.) Elsewhere appropriation
of Church lands by princes and nobles was the general rule.
Even as to Germany, it is impossible to accept Michelet's
indulgent statement that most of the confiscated Church property
"returned to its true destination, to the schools, the hospitals,
the communes; to its true proprietors, the aged, the child, the
toiling family" (Hist. de France, x, 333; see the same assertion
in Henderson, Short History of Germany, 1902, i, 344). Plans
to that effect were drawn up; but, as the princes were left to
carry out the arrangement, they took the lion's share. Ranke
(Hist. of the Ref. bk. iv, ch. v; Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. 1905,
pp. 466-67) admits much grabbing of Church lands as early as 1526;
merely contending, with Luther, that papist nobles had begun the
spoliation. (Cp. Bezold, pp. 564-65; Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen,
cap. 393.) In Saxony, when monks broke away from their monasteries,
the nobles at once appropriated the lands and buildings (Ranke,
p. 467). Luther made a warm appeal to the Elector against the
nobles in general (Ranke, p. 467; Luther's letter, Nov. 22, 1526,
in Werke, ed. De Wette, iii, 137; letter to Spalatin, Jan. 1, 1527,
id. p. 147; also p. 153). See too his indignant protests against
the rapine of the princes and nobles and the starvation of the
ministers in the Table Talk, chs. 22, 60. Even Philip of Hesse did
not adhere to his early and disinterested plans of appropriation
(Ranke, pp. 468-69, 711-12). All that Ranke can claim is that "some
great institutions were really founded"--to wit, two homes for
"young ladies of noble birth," four hospitals, and the theological
school of Marburg. And this was in the most hopeful region.
There is positive evidence, further, that not only ecclesiastical
but purely charitable foundations were plundered by the Protestants
(Witzel, cited by Döllinger, Die Reformation, ihre innere
Entwickelung und ihre Wirkungen, 1846, i, 46, 47, 51, 62); and,
as school foundations were confiscated equally with ecclesiastical
in England, there is no reason to doubt the statement. Practically
the same process took place in Scotland, where the share of Church
property proposed to be allotted to the Protestant ministers
was never given, and their protests were treated with contempt
(Burton, History of Scotland, iv, 37-41). Knox's comments were
similar to Luther's (Works, Laing's ed. ii, 310-12).
Dr. Gardiner, a fairly impartial historian, sums up that, after
the German settlement of 1552, "The princes claimed the right of
continuing to secularize Church lands within their territories as
inseparable from their general right of providing for the religion
of their subjects.... About a hundred monasteries are said to have
fallen victims in the Palatinate alone; and an almost equal number,
the gleanings of a richer harvest which had been reaped before the
Convention of Passau, were taken possession of in Northern Germany"
(The Thirty Years' War, 8th ed. p. 11).
The credit of bringing the various forces to a head, doubtless,
remains with Luther, though ground was further prepared by literary
predecessors such as John of Wesel and John Wessel, Erasmus, Reuchlin,
and Ulrich von Hutten. But even the signal courage of Luther could
not have availed to fire an effectual train of action unless a
certain number of nobles had been ready to support him for economic
reasons. Even the shameless sale of indulgences by Tetzel was resented
most keenly on the score that it was draining Germany of money; [1874]
and nothing is more certain than that Luther began his battle not as
a heretic but as an orthodox Catholic Reformer, desiring to propitiate
and not to defy the papacy. Economic forces were the determinants. This
becomes the more clear when we note that the Reformation was only the
culmination or explosion of certain intellectual, social, and political
forces seen at work throughout Christendom for centuries before. In
point of mere doctrine, the Protestants of the sixteenth century
had been preceded and even distanced by heretics of the eleventh,
and by teachers of the ninth. The absurdity of relic-worship, the
folly of pilgrimages and fastings, the falsehood of the doctrine
of transubstantiation, the heresy of prayers to the saints, the
unscripturalness of the hierarchy--these and a dozen other points of
protest had been raised by Paulicians, by Paterini, by Beghards, by
Apostolicals, by Lollards, long before the time of Luther. As regards
his nearer predecessors, indeed, this is now a matter of accepted
Protestant history. [1875] What is not properly realized is that the
conditions which wrought political success where before there had
been political failure were special political conditions; and that
to these, and not to supposed differences in national character,
is due the geographical course of the Reformation.
§ 2. THE PROBLEM IN ITALY, SPAIN, AND THE NETHERLANDS
We have seen that the spirit of reform was strong in Italy
three hundred years before Luther; and that some of the strongest
movements within the Church were strictly reformatory, and originally
disinterested in a high degree. In less religious forms the same
spirit abounded throughout the Renaissance; and at the end of
the fifteenth century Savonarola was preaching reform religiously
enough at Florence. His death, however, was substantially due to
the perception that ecclesiastical reform, as conducted by him,
was a socio-political process, [1876] whence the reformer was a
socio-political disturber. Intellectually he was no innovator; on
the contrary, he was a hater of literary enlightenment, and he was
as ready to burn astrologers as were his enemies to burn him. [1877]
His claim, in his Triumph of the Cross, to combat unbelievers by
means of sheer natural reason, indicates only his inability to
realize any rationalist position--a failure to be expected in his
age, when rationalism was denied argumentative utterance, and when
the problems of Christian evidences were only being broached. The
very form of the book is declamatory rather than ratiocinative,
and every question raised is begged. [1878] That he failed in his
crusade of Church reform, and that Luther succeeded in his, was due
to no difference between Italian and German character, but to the vast
difference in the political potentialities of the two cases. The fall
of public liberty in Florence, which must have been preceded as it
was accompanied by a relative decline in popular culture, [1879] and
which led to the failure of Savonarola, may be in a sense attributed
to Italian character; but that character was itself the product of
peculiar social and political conditions, and was not inferior to
that of any northern population. [1880]
The Savonarolan movement had all the main features of the
Puritanism of the northern "Reform." Savonarola sent organized
bodies of boys, latterly accompanied by bodies of adults, to
force their way into private houses and confiscate things thought
suitable for the reformatory bonfire. Burckhardt, p. 477; Perrens,
Jérome Savonarole, 2e édit. pp. 140-41. The things burned included
pictures and busts of inestimable artistic value, and manuscripts
of exquisite beauty. Perrens, p. 229. Compare Villari, as cited;
George Eliot's Romola, bk. iii, ch. xlix; and Merejkowski's The
Forerunner (Eng. tr.), bk. vii. Previous reformers had set up
"bonfires of false hair and books against the faith" (Armstrong, as
cited, p. 167); and Savonarola's bands of urchins were developments
from previous organizations, bent chiefly on blackmail. (Id.) But
he carried the tyranny furthest, and actually proposed to put
obstinate gamblers to the torture. Perrens, p. 132. Villari in
his sentimental commemoration lecture on Savonarola (Studies
Historical and Critical, Eng. tr. 1907) ignores these facts.
When, a generation later, the propaganda of the Lutheran movement
reached Italy, it was more eagerly welcomed than in any of the
Teutonic countries outside of the first Lutheran circle, though
a vigilant system was at once set on foot for the destruction of
the imported books. [1881] It had made much headway at Milan and
Florence in 1525; [1882] and we have the testimony of Pope Clement
VII himself that before 1530 the Lutheran heresy was widely spread
not only among the laity but among priests and friars, both mendicant
and non-mendicant, many of whom propagated it by their sermons. [1883]
The ruffianism and buffoonery of the German Lutheran soldiers in the
army of Charles V at the sack of Rome in 1529 was hardly likely to
win adherents to their sect; [1884] yet the number increased all over
Italy. In 1541-45 they were numerous and audacious at Bologna, [1885]
where in 1537 a commission of cardinals and prelates, appointed by
Pope Paul III, had reported strongly on the need for reformation in
the Church. In 1542 they were so strong at Venice as to contemplate
holding public assemblies; in the neighbouring towns of Vicentino,
Vicenza, and Trevisano they seem to have been still more numerous;
[1886] and Cardinal Caraffa reported to the Pope that all Italy was
infected with the heresy. [1887]
Now began the check. Among the Protestants themselves there had
gone on the inevitable strifes over the questions of the Trinity
and the Eucharist; the more rational views of Zwingli and Servetus
were in notable favour; [1888] and the Catholic reaction, fanned
by Caraffa, was the more facile. Measures were first taken against
heretical priests and monks; Ochino and Peter Martyr had to fly;
and many monks in the monastery of the latter were imprisoned. At
Rome was founded, in 1543, the Congregation of the Holy Office, a new
Inquisition, on the deadly model of that of Spain; and thenceforth
the history of Protestantism in Italy is but one of suppression. The
hostile force was all-pervading, organized, and usually armed with
the whole secular power; and though in Naples the old detestation
of the Inquisition broke out anew so strongly that even the Spanish
tyranny could not establish it, [1889] the papacy elsewhere carried
its point by explaining how much more lenient was the Italian than
the Spanish Inquisition. Such a pressure, kept up by the strongest
economic interest in Italy, no movement could resist; and it would
have suppressed the Reformation in any country or any race, as a
similar pressure did in Spain.
Prof. Gebhart (Orig. de la Renais. en Italie, p. 68) writes that
"Italy has known no great national heresies: one sees there no
uprising of minds which resembles the profound popular movements
provoked by Waldo, Wiclif, John Huss, or Luther." The decisive
answer to this is soon given by the author himself (p. 74): "If
the Order of Franciscans has had in the peninsula an astonishing
popularity; if it has, so to speak, formed a Church within the
Church, it is that it responded to the profound aspirations of
an entire people." (Cp. p. 77.) Yet again, after telling how
the Franciscan heresy of the Eternal Gospel so long prevailed,
M. Gebhart speaks (p. 78) of the Italians as a people whom
"formal heresy has never seduced." These inconsistencies derive
from the old fallacy of attributing the course of the Reformation
to national character. (See it discussed in the present writer's
Evolution of States, pp. 237-38, 302-307, 341-44.) Burckhardt,
while recognizing--as against the theory of "something lacking in
the Italian mind"--that the Italian movements of Church reformation
"failed to achieve success only because circumstances were
against them," goes on to object that the course of "mighty
events like the Reformation ... eludes the deductions of the
philosophers," and falls back on "mystery." (Renaissance in
Italy, Eng. tr. p. 457.) There is really much less "mystery"
about such movements than about small ones; and the causes of the
Reformation are in large part obvious and simple. Baur, even in
the act of claiming special credit for the personality of Luther
as the great factor in the Reformation, admits that only in the
peculiar political conditions in which he found himself could he
have succeeded. (Kirchengeschichte der neueren Zeit, 1863, p. 23.)
The broad explanation of the Italian failure is that in Italy
reform could not for a moment be dreamt of save as within the
Church, where there was no economic leverage such as effected the
Reformation from the outside elsewhere. It was a relatively easy
matter in Germany and England to renounce the Pope's control
and make the Churches national or autonomous. To attempt
that in Italy would have meant creating a state of universal
and insoluble strife. (Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, vol. i,
ed. 1897, p. 369. Symonds, however, omits to note the financial
dependence of Italian society on the papal system; and his verdict
that Luther and the nations of the north saw clearly "what the
Italians could not see" is simply the racial fallacy over again.)
Apart from that, the Italians, as we have seen, were as much
bent on reformation as any other people in mass; and the earlier
Franciscan movement was obviously more disinterested than either
the later German or the English, in both of which plunder was
the inducement to the leading adherents, as it was also in
Switzerland. There the wholesale bestowal of Church livings on
Italians was the strongest motive to ecclesiastical revolution;
and in Zürich, the first canton which adopted the Reformation,
the process was made easy by the State guaranteeing posts
and pensions for life to the whole twenty-four canons of the
chapter. (Vieusseux, History of Switzerland, 1840, pp. 120,
128; cp. Zschokke, Schweizerland's Geschichte, 9te Ausg. ch. 32,
and Jackson, Huldreich Zwingli, 1901, pp. 222-25, 295-96.) The
Protestants had further the support of the unbelieving soldiery,
made anti-religious in the Italian wars, who rejoiced in the
process of priest-baiting and plunder (Vieusseux, p. 130).
The process of suppression in Italy was prolonged through sixty
years. In 1543 numbers of Protestants began to fly; hundreds more
were cast into prison; and, save in a few places, public profession of
the heresy was suppressed. In 1546 the papacy persuaded the Venetian
senate to put down the Protestant communities in their dominions, and
in 1548 there began in Venice a persecution in which many were sent to
the galleys. To reach secret Protestantism, the papacy dispersed spies
throughout Italy, Ferrara being particularly attended to, as a known
hotbed. [1890] After the death of the comparatively merciful Paul III
(1550), Julius III authorized new severities. A Ferrarese preacher was
put to death; and the Duchess Renée, the daughter of Louis XII, who
had notoriously favoured the heretics, was made virtually a prisoner
in her own palace, secluded from her children. At Faenza, a nobleman
died under torture at the hands of the inquisitors, and a mob in turn
killed some of these; [1891] but the main process went on throughout
the country. An old Waldensian community in Calabria having reverted
to its former opinions under the new stimulus, it was warred upon by
the inquisitors, who employed for the purpose outlaws; and multitudes
of victims, including sixty women, were put to the torture. [1892] At
Montalto, in 1560, another Waldensian community were taken captive;
eighty-eight men were slaughtered, their throats being cut one by
one; many more were tortured; the majority of the men were sent
to the Spanish galleys; and the women and children were sold into
slavery. [1893] In Venice many were put to death by drowning. [1894]
Of individual executions there were many. In a documented list of
seventy-eight persons burned alive or hanged and burned at Rome from
1553 to 1600, [1895] only a minority are known to have been Lutherans,
the official records being kept on such varying principles that it is
impossible to tell how many of the victims were Catholic criminals;
[1896] while some heretics are represented--it would seem falsely--as
having died in the communion of the Church. But probably more than half
were Lutherans or Calvinists. The first in the list (1553) are Giovanni
Mollio, [1897] a Minorite friar of Montalcino, who had been a professor
at Brescia and Bologna, and Giovanni Teodori [1898] of Perugia; and
the former is stated in the official record to have recommended his
soul to God, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis, and St. Anthony of Padua,
though he had been condemned as an obstinate Lutheran. The next victims
(1556) are the Milanese friar Ambrogio de Cavoli, who dies "firm in his
false opinion," and Pomponio Angerio or Algieri of Nola, a student aged
twenty-four, who, "as being obstinate, was burned alive." [1899] These
were the first victims of Caraffa after his elevation to the papal
chair as Paul IV. Under Pius IV three were burned in 1560; under Pius
V two in 1566, six in 1567, six in 1568, and so on. Francesco Cellario,
an ex-Franciscan friar, living as a refugee and Protestant preacher in
the Grisons, was kidnapped, taken to Rome, and burned [1900] (1569). A
Neapolitan nobleman, Pompeo de Monti, caught in Rome, was officially
declared to have "renounced head by head all the errors he had held,"
and accordingly was benignantly beheaded. [1901] Quite a number,
including the learned protonotary Carnesecchi (1567), are alleged
to have died "in the bosom of the Church." [1902] On the other hand,
some of the inquisitors themselves came under the charge of heresy,
two cardinals and a bishop being actually prosecuted [1903]--whether
for Lutheranism or for other forms of private judgment does not appear.
Simple Lutheranism, however, seems to have been the usual limit of
heresy among those burned. Aonio Paleario (originally Antonio della
Paglia or de' Pagliaricci) of Veroli [1904]--poet and professor of
rhetoric at Milan, hanged in 1570 (in his seventieth year) either for
denouncing the Inquisition or for Lutheranism--was an extreme heretic
from the Catholic point of view. His Actio in Romanos Pontificos et
eorum asseclas is still denounced by the Church. [1905] If, however,
he was the author of the Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu
Crocifisso verso I Christiani, he was simply an evangelical of the
school of Luther, exalting faith and making light of works; and its
"remedies against the temptation of doubt" deal solely with theological
difficulties, not with critical unbelief. [1906] This treatise,
immensely popular in the sixteenth century, was so zealously destroyed
by the Church that when Ranke wrote no copy was known to exist. [1907]
The Trattato was placed on the first papal Index Expurgatorius in
1549; and the nearly complete extinction of the book is an important
illustration of the Church's faculty of suppressing literature.
The Index, anticipated by Charles V in the Netherlands several years
earlier, was established especially to resist the Reformation; and its
third class contained a prohibition of all anonymous books published
since 1519. The destruction of books in Italy in the first twenty years
of the work of the Congregation of the Index was enormous, nearly
every library being decimated, and many annihilated. All editions
of the classics, and even of the Fathers, annotated by Protestants,
or by Erasmus, were destroyed; the library of the Medicean College at
Florence, despite the appeals of Duke Cosmo, was denuded of many works
of past generations, now pronounced heretical; and many dead writers
who had passed for good Catholics were put on the Index. Booksellers,
plundered of their stocks, were fain to seek another calling; and
printers, seeing that any one of them who printed a condemned work
had every book printed by him put on the Index, were driven to refuse
all save works officially accredited. It was considered a merciful
relaxation of the procedure when, after the death of Paul IV (1555),
certain books, such as Erasmus's editions of the Fathers, were allowed
to be merely mutilated. [1908] The effect of the whole machinery
in making Italy in the seventeenth century relatively unlearned and
illiterate cannot easily be overstated.
In fine, the Reformation failed in Italy because of the economic and
political conditions, as it failed in Spain; as it failed in a large
part of Germany; as it would have failed in Holland had Philip II made
his capital there (in which case Spain might very well have become
Protestant); and as it would have failed in England had Elizabeth been
a Catholic, like her sister. During the sixty years from 1520 to 1580,
thousands of Italian Protestants left Italy, as thousands of Spanish
Protestants fled from Spain, and thousands of English Protestants from
England in the reign of Mary. [1909] To make the outcome in Italy and
Spain a basis for a theory of racial tendency in religion, or racial
defect of "public spirit," is to explain history in a fashion which, in
physical science, has long been discredited as an argument in a circle.
McCrie, at the old standpoint, says of the Inquisition that "this
iniquitous and bloody tribunal could never obtain a footing either
in France or in Germany"; that "the attempt to introduce it in
the Netherlands was resisted by the adherents of the old as well
as the disciples of the new religion; and it kindled a civil war
which ... issued in establishing civil and religious liberty";
and that "the ease with which it was introduced into Italy showed
that, whatever illumination there was among the Italians ... they
were destitute of that public spirit and energy of principle which
were requisite to shake off the degrading yoke by which they were
oppressed." The ethical attitude of the Christian historian is
noteworthy; but we are here concerned with his historiography. A
little reflection will make it clear that the non-establishment
of the Inquisition in France and Germany was due precisely to the
fact that the papacy was not in these countries as it was in Italy,
and that the native Governments resented external influence.
As to the Netherlands, the statement is misleading in the
extreme. The Inquisition set up by Charles V was long and fully
established in the Low Countries; and Motley recognizes that it
was there more severe even than in Spain. It was Charles V who,
in 1546, gave orders for the establishment of the Inquisition
in Naples, when the people so effectually resisted. The view,
finally, that the attempt to suppress heresy caused the Dutch
revolt is merely part of the mythology of the Reformation. Charles
V, at the outset of his reign, stood to Spain in the relation
of a foreign king who, with his Flemish courtiers, exploited
Spanish revenues. Only by making Madrid his capital and turning
semi-Spanish did he at all reverse that relation between the two
parts of his dominions. So late as 1550 he set up an exceptionally
merciless form of the Inquisition in the Low Countries, and this
without losing any of the loyalty of the middle and upper classes,
Protestantism having made its converts only among the poor. In
1546 too he had set up an Index Expurgatorius with the assistance
of the theological faculty at Louvain; and there was actually
a Flemish Index in print before the papal one (McCrie, Ref. in
Italy, p. 184; Ticknor, Hist. of Spanish Lit. 6th ed. i, 493).
What set up the breach between the Netherlands and Spain was
the failure of Philip II to adjust himself to Dutch interests
as his father had adjusted himself to Spanish. The sunderance
was on lines of economic interest and racial jealousy; and
Dutch Protestantism was not the cause but the effect. In the
war, indeed, multitudes of Dutch Catholics held persistently
with their Protestant fellow-countrymen against Spain, as many
English Catholics fought against the Armada. As late as 1600
the majority of the people of Groningen were still Catholics,
as the great majority are now in North Brabant and Limburg; and
in 1900 the Catholics in the Netherlands were nearly a third of
the whole. From first to last too the Dutch Protestant creed and
polity were those set up by Calvin, a Frenchman.
To those accustomed to the conventional view, the case may become
clearer on a survey of the course of anti-papalism in other countries
than those mentioned. The political determination of the process in
the sixteenth century, indeed, cannot be properly realized save in
the light of kindred movements of earlier date, when the "Teutonic
conscience" made, not for reform, but for fixation.
§ 3. THE HUSSITE FAILURE IN BOHEMIA
That the causal forces in the Reformation were neither racial religious
bias nor special gift on the part of any religious teachers is made
tolerably clear by the pre-Lutheran episode of the Hussites in Bohemia
a century before the German movement. In Bohemia as elsewhere clerical
avarice, worldliness, and misconduct had long kept up anti-clerical
feeling; and the adoption of Wiclif's teaching by Huss [1910] at
the end of the fourteenth century was the result, and not the cause,
of Bohemian anti-papalism. [1911] The Waldensians, whose doctrines
were closely akin to those of Huss, were represented in Bohemia as
early as the twelfth century; and so late as 1330 their community
was a teaching centre, able to send money help to the Waldensians of
Italy. So apparent was the heredity that Æneas Sylvius, afterwards
Pope Pius II, maintained that the Hussites were a branch of the
Waldenses. [1912]
Before Huss too a whole series of native reformers, beginning
with the Moravian Militz, Archdeacon of Prague, had set up a partly
anti-clerical propaganda. Militz, who gave up his emoluments (1363) to
become a wandering preacher, actually wrote a Libellus de Anti-christo,
affirming that the Church was already in Anti-christ's power, or nearly
so. [1913] It was written while he was imprisoned by the Inquisition
at Rome at the instance of the mendicant orders, whom he censured. As,
however, the later hostility he incurred, up to his death, was on the
score of his influence with the people, the treatise cannot well have
been current in his lifetime. A contemporary, Conrad of Waldhausen,
holding similar views, joined Militz in opposing the mendicant friars
as Wiclif was doing at the same period; and the King of Bohemia (the
emperor Charles IV) gave zealous countenance to both. A follower of
Militz, Matthias of Janow, a prebendary of Prague, holding the same
views as to Anti-christ, wrote a book on The Abomination of Desolation
of Priests and Monks, and yet another to similar effect.
There was thus a considerable movement in the direction of Church
reform before either Huss or Wiclif was heard in Bohemia; and a
Bohemian king had shown a reforming zeal, apparently not on financial
motives, before any other European potentate. And whereas racial
jealousy of the dominant Italians was a main factor in the movement of
Luther, the much more strongly motived jealousy of the Czechs against
the Germans who exploited Bohemia was a main element in the salient
movement of the Hussites. [1914] Called in to work the silver mines,
and led further by the increasing field for commerce and industry,
[1915] the more civilized Germans secured control of the Czech church
and monasteries, appropriating most of the best livings. As they
greatly predominated also at the University of Prague, Huss, whose
inspiration was largely racial patriotism, wrought with his colleague
Jerome to have the university made strictly national. [1916] When,
accordingly, the German heads of the university still (1403 and 1408)
condemned the doctrines of Wiclif as preached by Huss, the motives
of the censors were as much racial and economic as theological; that
is to say, the "Teutonic conscience" operated in its own interest to
the exaltation of papal rule against the Czech conscience.
The first crisis in the racial struggle ended in Huss's obtaining a
royal decree (1409) giving three votes in university affairs (wherein,
according to medieval custom, the voting was by nations) to the
Bohemians, and only one to the Germans, though the latter were the
majority. Thereupon a multitude of the German students marched back to
Germany, where there was founded for them the university of Leipzig;
[1917] and the racial quarrel was more envenomed than ever.
At the same time the ecclesiastical authorities, closely allied
with the German interest, took up the cause of the Church against
heresy; and Archbishop Sbinko of Prague, having procured a papal bull,
caused a number of Wiclifian and other manuscripts to be burned [1918]
(1410), soon after excommunicating Huss. The now nationalist university
protested, and the king sequestrated the estates of the archbishop
on his refusal to indemnify the owners of the manuscripts. In 1411,
further, Huss denounced the proposed papal crusade against Naples,
and in 1412 the sale of indulgences by permission of Pope John XXIII,
exactly as Luther denounced those of Leo X a century later, calling the
Pope Antichrist in the Lutheran manner, while his partizans burned the
papal bulls. [1919] For the rest, he preached against image-worship,
auricular confession, ceremonialism, and clerical endowments. [1920]
At the Council of Constance (1415), accordingly, there was arrayed
against him a solid mass of German churchmen, including the ex-rector
of Prague University, now bishop of Misnia. Further, the Germans
were scholastically, as a rule, Nominalists, and Huss a Realist;
and as Gerson, the most powerful of the French prelates, was zealous
for the former school, he threw his influence on the German side,
[1921] as did the Bishop of London on the part of England. [1922] The
forty-five Wiclifian heresies, therefore, were re-condemned; Huss was
sentenced to imprisonment, though he had gone to the Council under a
letter of safe-conduct from the emperor; [1923] and on his refusal to
retract he was burned alive (July 6, 1415). Jerome, taking flight,
was caught, and, being imprisoned, recanted; but later revoked the
recantation and was burned likewise (May 30, 1416).
The subsequent fortunes of the Hussite party were determined as usual
by the political and economic forces. The King of Bohemia had joyfully
accepted Huss's doctrine that the tithes were not the property of the
churchmen; and had locally protected him as his "fowl with the golden
eggs," proceeding to plunder the Church as did the German princes
in the next age. [1924] When, later, the revolutionary Hussites
began plundering churches and monasteries, the Bohemian nobles in
their turn profited, [1925] and became good Hussites accordingly;
while yet another aristocracy was formed in Prague by the citizens
who managed the confiscations there. [1926] As happened earlier in
Hungary and later in Germany, again, there followed a revolt of the
peasants against their extortionate masters; [1927] and there resulted
a period of ferocious civil war and exacerbated fanaticism. Ziska,
the Hussite leader, had been a strong anti-German; [1928] and when
the emperor entered into the struggle the racial hatred grew more
intense than ever. On the Hussite side the claim for "the cup" (that
is, the administration of the eucharist with wine as well as bread,
in the original manner, departed from by the Church in the eleventh
century) indicated the nature of the religious feeling involved. More
memorable was the communistic zeal of the advanced section of the
Taborites (so called from the town of Tabor, their headquarters),
who anticipated the German movement of the Anabaptists, [1929] a small
minority of them seeking to set up community of women. For the rest,
all the other main features of later Protestantism came up at the
same time--the zealous establishment of schools for the young; [1930]
the insistence on the Bible as the sole standard of knowledge and
practice; inflexible courage in warfare and good military organization,
with determined denial of sacerdotal claims. [1931]
The ideal collapsed as similar ideals did before and afterwards. First
the main body of the Hussites, led by Ziska, though at war with the
Catholics in general and the Germans in particular, warred murderously
also on the extremer communists, called the Adamites, and destroyed
them (1421). Then, as the country became more and more exhausted
by the civil war, the common people gradually fell away from the
Taborites, who were the prime fanatics of the period. The zeal of
the communist section, too, itself fell away; and at length, in 1434,
the Taborites, betrayed by one of their generals, were defeated with
great slaughter by the nobles in the battle of Lipan. Meanwhile, the
upper aristocracy had reaped the economic fruits of the revolution at
the expense of townsmen, small proprietors, and peasants; [1932] and,
just as the lot of the German peasants in Luther's day was worse after
their vain revolt than before, so the Bohemian peasantry at the close
of the fifteenth century had sunk back to the condition of serfdom
from which they had almost completely emerged at the beginning. It is
doubtful, indeed, whether the material lot of the poor was bettered
in any degree at any stage of the Protestant revolution, in any
country. So little efficacy for social betterment has a movement
guided by a light set above reason.
That there was in the period some Christian freethinking of a finer
sort than the general Taborite doctrine is proved by the recovery
of the unprinted work of the Czech Peter Helchitsky (Chelcicky),
The Net of Faith, which impeached the current orthodoxy and the
ecclesiastico-political system on the lines of the more exalted
of the Paulicians and the Lollards, very much to the same effect
as the modern gospel of Tolstoy. In the midst of a party of warlike
fanatics Helchitsky denounced war as mere wholesale murder, taught the
sinfulness of wealth, declaimed against cities as the great corrupters
of life, and preached a peaceful and non-resistant anarchism, ignoring
the State. But his party in turn developed into that of the Bohemian
Brethren, an intensely Puritan sect, opposed to learning, and ashamed
of the memory of the communism in which their order began. [1933]
Of permanent gain to culture there is hardly a trace in the entire
evolution.
§ 4. ANTI-PAPALISM IN HUNGARY
As in Bohemia, so in Hungary, there was a ready popular inclination
to religious independence of Rome before the Lutheran period. The
limited sway of the Hungarian monarchy left the nobles abnormally
powerful, and their normal jealousy of the wealth of the Church
made them in the thirteenth century favourable to the Waldenses and
recalcitrant to the Inquisition. [1934] In the period of the Hussite
wars a similar protection was long given to the thousands of refugees
led by Ziska from Bohemia into Hungary in 1424. [1935] The famous
king Matthias Corvinus, who put severe checks on clerical revenue,
had as his favourite court poet the anti-papal bishop of Wardein,
John, surnamed Pannonicus, who openly derided the Papal Jubilee as a
financial contrivance. [1936] Under Matthias's successor, the ill-fated
Uladislaus II, began a persecution, pushed on by his priest-ruled queen
(1440), which drove many Hussites into Wallachia; and at the date
of Luther's movement the superior clergy of Hungary were a powerful
body of feudal nobles, living mainly as such, wielding secular power,
and impoverishing the State. [1937] As the crusade got up by the
papacy against the Turks (1514) drew away many serfs, and ended in a
peasant war against the nobility, put down with immense slaughter, and
followed by oppression both of peasants and small landholders, there
was a ready hearing for the Lutheran doctrines in Hungary. Nowhere,
probably, did so many join the Reformation movement in so short
a time. [1938] As elsewhere, a number of the clergy came forward;
and the resistance of the rest was proportionally severe, though
Queen Mary, the wife of King Louis II, was pro-Lutheran. [1939] Books
were burned by cartloads; and the diet was induced to pass a general
decree for the burning of all Lutherans. [1940] The great Turkish
invasion under Soliman (1526) could not draw the priests from their
heresy-hunt; but the subsequent division of sovereignty between John
Zapoyla and Ferdinand I, and above all the disdainful tolerance of the
Turkish Sultan in the parts under his authority, [1941] permitted of a
continuous spread of the anti-papal doctrine. About 1546 four bishops
joined the Lutheran side, one getting married; and in Transylvania
in particular the whole Church property was ere long confiscated to
"the State"; so that in 1556, when only two monasteries remained,
the Bishop withdrew. Of the tithes, it is said, the Protestant clergy
held three-fourths, and retained them till 1848. [1942] In 1559,
according to the same authority, only three families of magnates still
adhered to the pope; the lesser nobility were nearly all Protestant;
and the Lutherans among the common people were as thirty to one. [1943]
As a matter of course, Church property had been confiscated on
all hands by the nobles, Ferdinand having been unable to hinder
them. Soon after the battle of Mohäcs (1526) the nobles in diet
decided not to fill up the places of deceased prelates, but to make
over the emoluments of the bishoprics to "such men as deserved well
of their country." Within a short time seven great territories were
so accorded to as many magnates and generals, "nearly all of whom
separated from the Church of Rome, and became steady supporters
of the Reformation." [1944] The Hungarian "Reformation" was thus
remarkably complete.
Its subsequent decadence is one of the proofs that, even as the
Reformation movement had succeeded by secular force, so it was only to
be maintained on the same footing by excluding Catholic propaganda. In
Hungary, as elsewhere, strife speedily arose among Reformers on
the two issues on which reason could play within the limits of
Scripturalism--the doctrine of the eucharist and the divinity of
Jesus. On the former question the majority took the semi-rationalist
view of Zwingli, making the eucharist a simple commemoration;
and a strong minority in Transylvania became Socinian. The Italian
Unitarian Giorgio Biandrata (or Blandrata [1945]), driven to Poland
from Switzerland for his anti-trinitarianism, and called from Poland to
be the physician of the Prince of Transylvania, organized a ten days'
debate between Trinitarians and Unitarians at Weissenberg in 1568;
and at the close the latter obtained from the nobles present all the
privileges enjoyed by the Lutherans, even securing control of the
cathedral and schools of Clausenburg. [1946] It is remarkable that
this, the most advanced movement of Protestantism, has practically
held its ground in Transylvania to modern times. [1947]
The advance, however, meant desperate schism, and disaster to the
main Protestant cause. The professors of Wittemberg appealed to the
orthodox authorities to suppress the heresy, with no better result
than a public repudiation of the doctrine of the Trinity at the Synod
of Wardein, [1948] and an organization of the Unitarian Churches. In
due course these in turn divided. In 1578 Biandrata's colleague,
Ferencz Davides, contended for a cessation of prayers to Christ,
whereupon Biandrata invited Fausto Sozzini from Basel to confute him;
and the confutation finally took the shape of a sentence of perpetual
imprisonment on Davides in 1579 by the Prince of Transylvania, to
whom Biandrata and Sozzini referred the dispute. The victim died
in a few days--by one account, in a state of frenzy. [1949] Between
the Helvetic and Augsburg confessionalists, meanwhile, the strife was
equally bitter; and it needed only free scope for the new organization
of the Jesuits to secure the reconquest of the greater part of Hungary
for the Catholic Church.
The course of events had shown that the Protestant principle of private
judgment led those who would loyally act on it further and further from
the historic faith; and there was no such general spirit of freethought
in existence as could support such an advance. In contrast with the
ever-dividing and mutually anathematizing parties of the dissenters,
the ostensible solidity of the Catholic Church had an attraction which
obscured all former perception of her corruptions; and the fixity of
her dogma reassured those who recoiled in horror from Zwinglianism and
Socinianism, as the adherents of these systems recoiled in turn from
that of Davides. Only the absolute suppression of the Jesuits, as in
Elizabethan England, could have saved the situation; and the political
circumstances which had facilitated the spread of Protestantism were
equally favourable to the advent of the reaction. As the Huguenot
nobles in France gradually withdrew from their sect in the seventeenth
century, so the Protestant nobles in Hungary began to withdraw from
theirs towards the end of the sixteenth. What the Jesuits could not
achieve by propaganda was compassed by imperial dragonnades; and
in 1601 only a few Protestant congregations remained in all Styria
and Carinthia. [1950] Admittedly, however, the Jesuits wrought much
by sheer polemic, the pungent writings of their Cardinal Pazmány
having the effect of converting a number of nobles; [1951] while the
Protestants, instead of answering the most effective of Pazmány's
attacks, The Guide to Truth, spent their energies in fighting each
other. [1952]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there ensued enough of
persecution by the Catholic rulers to have roused a new growth of
Protestantism, if that could longer avail; but the balance of forces
remained broadly unchanged. Orthodox Protestantism and orthodox
Unitarianism, having no new principle of criticism as against those
turned upon themselves by the Jesuits, and no new means of obtaining an
economic leverage, have made latterly no headway against Catholicism,
which is to-day professed by more than half the people of Hungary,
while among the remainder the Greek Catholics and Greek Orientals
respectively outnumber the Helvetic and Lutheran Churches. The future
is to some more searching principle of thought.
§ 5. PROTESTANTISM IN POLAND
The chief triumph of the Jesuit reaction was won in Poland; and
there, perhaps, is to be found the best illustration of the failure
of mere Protestantism, on the one hand, to develop a self-maintaining
intellectual principle, and the worse failure, on the other hand,
of an organized and unresisted Catholicism to secure either political
or intellectual vitality.
Opposition to the papacy on nationalist as well as on general grounds
is nearly as well marked in Polish history as in Bohemian, from the
pagan period onwards, the first Christian priesthood being chiefly
foreign, [1953] while, as in Bohemia, the people clung to vernacular
worship. In 1078 we find King Boleslav the Dauntless (otherwise
the Cruel) executing the Bishop of Cracow, taxing the lands of the
Church, and vetoing the bestowal of posts on foreigners. [1954] He in
turn was driven into exile by a combination of clergy and nobles. A
century later a Polish diet vetoes the confiscation of the property
of deceased bishops by the sovereign princes of the various provinces;
and a generation later still the veto is seen to be disregarded. [1955]
In the middle of the thirteenth century there are further violent
quarrels between dukes and clergy over tithes, the former successfully
ordering and the latter vainly resisting a money commutation; till in
1279 Duke Boleslav of Cracow is induced to grant the bishops almost
unlimited immunities and powers. [1956] Under Casimir the Great
(1333-1370) further strifes occur on similar grounds between the
equestrian order and the clergy, the king sometimes supporting the
latter against the former, as in the freeing of serfs, and sometimes
enforcing taxation of Church lands with violence. [1957] In the next
reign the immunities granted by Boleslav in 1279 are cancelled by the
equestrian order, acting in concert. And while these strifes had all
been on economic grounds, we meet in 1341 with a heretical movement,
set up by John Pirnensis, who denounced the pope as Antichrist in
the fashion of the Bohemian reformers of the next generation. The
people of Breslau seem to have gone over bodily to the heresy; and
when the Inquisition of Cracow attempted forcible repression the
Chief Inquisitor was murdered in a riot. [1958]
It was thus natural that in the fourteenth century the Hussite movement
should spread greatly in Poland, and the papacy be defied in matters
of nomination by the king. [1959] The Poles had long frequented
the university of Prague; and Huss's colleague Jerome was called
in to organize the university of Cracow in 1413. Against the Hussite
doctrines the Catholic clergy had to resort largely to written polemic,
[1960] their power being small; though the king confirmed their
synodical decree making heresy high treason. In 1450 Poland obtained
its law of Habeas Corpus, [1961] over two centuries before England;
and under that safeguard numbers of the nobility declared themselves
Hussites. In 1435 some of the chief of these formed a confederation
against Church and crown; and in 1439 they proclaimed an abolition of
tithes, and demanded, on the lines of the earlier English Lollards,
that the enormous estates of the clergy should be appropriated to
public purposes. In the diet of 1459, again, a learned noble, John
Ostrorog, who had studied at Padua, delivered an address, afterwards
expanded into a Latin book, denouncing the revenue exactions of the
papacy, and proposing to confiscate the annates, or first fruits of
ecclesiastical offices so exacted; proceeding further to bring against
the Polish clergy in general all the usual charges of simony, avarice,
and fraud, and indicting the mendicant orders as having demoralized
the common people. [1962]
The Poles having no such nationalist motive in their Hussitism as had
the Bohemians, who were fighting German domination, there took place
in Poland no such convulsions as followed the Bohemian movement; but,
when the Lutheran impulse came in the next century, the German element
which had been added to Poland by the incorporation of the order
and territory of the Teutonic knights in 1466 made an easy way for
the German heresy. In Dantzic the Lutheran inhabitants in 1524 took
the churches from the Catholics, and, terrorizing the town council,
shut up and secularized the monasteries and convents. [1963] In 1526,
with due bloodshed, the king effected a counter-revolution in the
Catholic interest; but still the heresy spread, the law of Habeas
Corpus thwarting all clerical attempts at persecution, and the king
being at heart something of an indifferentist in religion. [1964] In
the province of Great Poland was formed (1530-40) a Lutheran church,
protected by a powerful family; and in Cracow a group of scholars
formed a non-sectarian organization to evangelize the country. Among
them, about 1546, occurred the first expression of Polish Unitarianism,
the innovator being Adam Pastoris, a Dutch or Belgian priest, who
seems to have used at times the name of Spiritus. [1965]
On lines of simple Protestantism the movement was rapid, many
aristocrats and clergy declaring for it; [1966] and in the Diets of
1550 and 1552 was shown an increasingly strong anti-Catholic feeling,
which the Church was virtually powerless to punish. In 1549 a parish
priest publicly married a wife, and the bishop of Cracow abandoned the
attempt to displace him. The next bishop, Zebrzydowski, a favourite
pupil of Erasmus, was said by a Socinian writer of the period to have
openly expressed disbelief in immortality and other dogmas; [1967]
but when in 1552 a noble refused to pay tithes, he ecclesiastically
condemned him to death, and declared his property confiscated. The
sentence, however, could not be put in force; and when the other
heads of the Church, seeing their revenues menaced and their clergy in
large part tending to heresy, [1968] attempted a general and severe
prosecution of backsliding priests, the resistance of the magistracy
brought the effort to nothing. [1969] The Diet of 1552 practically
abrogated the ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and despite much intrigue
the economic interest of the landowners continued to maintain the
Protestant movement, which was rapidly organized on German and Swiss
models. It was by the play of its own elements of strife that its
ascendancy was undermined.
On the one hand, an influential cleric, Orzechowski, who had married
and turned Protestant, reconciled himself to Rome on the death of his
wife, having already begun a fierce polemic against the Unitarian
tendencies appearing on the Protestant side in the teaching of the
Italian Stancari (1550); on the other hand, those tendencies gained
head till they ruptured the party, of which the Trinitarian majority
further quarrelled violently among themselves till, as in Hungary,
many were driven back to the arms of Catholicism. In a Synod held in
1556, one Peter Goniondzki [1970] (Gonesius)--who as a Catholic had
violently opposed Stancari in 1550, but in the interim had studied in
Switzerland and turned Protestant--took up a more anti-Trinitarian
position than Stancari's, affirming three Gods, of whom the Son
and the Spirit were subordinate to the Father. A few years later
he declared against infant baptism--here giving forth opinions he
had met with in Moravia; and he rapidly drew to him a considerable
following alike of ministers and of wealthy laymen. [1971]
It was thus not the primary influence of Lelio Sozzini, who had visited
Poland in 1551 and did not return till 1558, that set up the remarkable
growth of Unitarianism in that country. It would seem rather that in
the country of Copernicus the relative weakness of the Church had
admitted of a more common approach to freedom of thought than was
seen elsewhere; [1972] and the impunity of the new movements brought
many heterodox fugitives (as it did Jews) from other lands. One of the
newcomers, the learned Italian, George Biandrata, whose Unitarianism
had been cautiously veiled, was made one of the superintendents of
the "Helvetic" Church of Little Poland, and aimed at avoidance of
dogmatic strifes; but after his withdrawal to Transylvania Gregorius
Pauli, a minister of Cracow, of Italian descent, went further than
Gonesius had done, and declared Jesus to be a mere man. [1973] He
further preached community of goods, promised a speedy millennium,
and condemned the bearing of arms. [1974] After various attempts
at suppression and compromise by the orthodox majority, a group of
Unitarian ministers and nobles formally renounced the doctrine of
the Trinity at the Conference of Petrikov in 1562; and, on a formal
condemnation being passed by an orthodox majority at Cracow in 1563,
there was formed a Unitarian Church, with forty-two subscribing
ministers, Zwinglian as to the eucharist, and opposed to infant
baptism. [1975] Ethically, its doctrine was humane and pacificatory,
its members being forbidden to go to law or to take oaths; and for
a time the community made great progress, the national Diet being,
by one account, "filled with Arians" for a time. [1976]
Meantime the Calvinist, Zwinglian, and Lutheran Protestant Churches
quarrelled as fiercely in Poland as elsewhere, every compromise
breaking down, till the abundant relapses of nobles and common people
to Catholicism began to rebuild the power of the old Church, which
found in "the Great Cardinal," Hosius, a statesman and controversialist
unequalled on the Protestant side. Backed by the Jesuits, he gained
by every Protestant dispute, the Jesuit order building itself up with
its usual skill. And the course of politics told conclusively in the
same direction. King Stephen Battory favoured the Jesuits; and King
Sigismund III, who had been educated as a Catholic by his mother,
systematically gave effect to his personal leanings by the use of his
peculiar feudal powers. Under the ancient constitution the king had
the bestowal of a number of life-tenures of great estates, called
starosties; and the granting of these Sigismund made conditional
on the acceptance of Catholicism. [1977] Thus the Protestantism of
the nobles, which had been in large part originally determined by
economic interests, was dissolved by a reversal of the same force,
very much in the fashion in which it was disintegrated in France by the
policy of Richelieu at the same period. At the close of Sigismund's
reign Protestantism was definitively broken up; and the Jesuit
ascendancy permitted even of frequent persecutions of heresy. From
these Unitarians could not escape; and at length, in 1658, they were
expelled from the country, now completely subject to Jesuitism. In
the country in which Protestantism and Unitarianism in turn had spread
most rapidly under favouring political and social conditions, the rise
of contrary conditions had most rapidly and decisively overthrown them.
The record of the heresy of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, in fine,
is very much a reduplication of that of early Christianity. Men
presented with an obscure and self-contradictory "revelation" set
themselves zealously to extract from it a body of certain truth,
and in that hopeless undertaking did but multiply strife, till the
majority, wearied with the fruitless quest, resigned themselves like
their ancient prototypes to a rule of dogma under which the reasoning
faculty became inert. Sane rationalism had to find another path,
in a more enlightened day.
§ 6. THE STRUGGLE IN FRANCE
The political and economic conditioning of the Reformation may perhaps
best be understood by following the fortunes of Protestantism in
France. When Luther began his schism, France might reasonably have been
held a much more likely field for its extension than England. While
King Henry was still to earn from the papacy the title of "Defender
of the Faith" as against Luther, King Francis had exacted from the
Pope (1516) a Concordat by which the appointment of all abbots and
bishops in France was vested in the crown, the papacy receiving only
the annates, or first year's revenue. For centuries too the French
throne and the papacy had been chronically at strife; for seventy
years a French pope, subservient to the king, had sat at Avignon;
and before the Concordat the "Pragmatic Sanction," first enacted in
1268 by the devout St. Louis, had since the reign of Charles VII, who
reinforced it (1438), kept the Gallican Church on a semi-independent
footing towards Rome. By the account of the chancellor Du Prat in
1517, the "Pragmatic," then superseded by the Concordat, had isolated
France among the Catholic peoples, causing her to be regarded as
inclined to heresy. [1978] In 1512 the Council of Pisa, convoked by
Louis XII, had denounced Pope Julius II as a dangerous schismatic,
and he had retaliated by placing France under interdict. In the
previous year the French king had given his protection to a famous
farce by Pierre Gringoire, in which, on Shrove Tuesday, the Pope was
openly ridiculed. [1979] Nowhere, in short, was the papacy as such
less respected.
The whole strife, however, between the French kings and the popes had
been for revenue, not on any question of doctrine. In the three years
(1461-64) during which Louis XI had for his own purposes suspended
the Pragmatic Sanction, it was found that 2,500,000 crowns had
gone from France to Rome for "expetatives" and "dispensations,"
besides 340,000 crowns for bulls for archbishoprics, bishoprics,
abbeys, priories, and deaneries. [1980] This drain was naturally
resisted by Church and Crown alike. Louis XI restored the Pragmatic
Sanction. Louis XII re-enacted it in 1499 with new severity; and the
effect of the Concordat of Francis I was merely to win over the Pope
by dividing between the king and him the power of plunder by the sale
of ecclesiastical offices. [1981] It was accordingly much resented by
the Parlement, the University, the clergy, and the people of Paris;
but the king overbore all opposition. Though, therefore, he had at
times some disposition to make a "reform" on the Lutheran lines, he
had no such motive thereto as had the kings and nobles of the other
northern countries; and he had further no such personal motive as had
Henry VIII of England. Under the existing arrangement he was as well
provided for as might be, since "the patronage of some six hundred
bishoprics and abbeys furnished him with a convenient and inexpensive
method of providing for his diplomatic service, and of rewarding
literary merit." [1982] The troubles in Germany, besides, were a
warning against letting loose a movement of popular fanaticism. [1983]
When, therefore, Protestantism and Lutheranism began to show head
in France, they had no friends at once powerful and zealous. Before
Luther, in 1512, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples laid down in the commentary
on his Latin translation of the Pauline Epistles the Lutheran
doctrine of grace, and in effect denied the received doctrine of
transubstantiation. [1984] In 1520 his former pupil, Guillaume
Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, invited him and some younger reformers,
among them Guillaume Farel, to join him in teaching in his diocese;
and in 1523 appeared Lefèvre's translation of and commentary on
the gospels, which effectually began the Protestant movement in
France. [1985]
Persecution soon began. The king's adoring sister, Margaret, Duchess
of Alençon (afterwards Queen of Navarre), was the friend of Briçonnet,
but was powerless to help at home even her own intimates. [1986] At
first the king and his mother encouraged the movement at Meaux while
sending out a dozen preachers through France to combat the Lutheran
teaching; [1987] but in 1524, setting out on his Italian campaign,
the king saw fit to conciliate his clergy, and his clerical chancellor
Du Prat began measures of repression, the queen-mother assenting, and
Briçonnet's own brother assisting. Already, in 1521, the Sorbonne had
condemned Luther's writings, and the Parlement of Paris had ordered
the surrender of all copies. In 1523 the works of Louis de Berquin,
the anti-clerical friend of Erasmus, were condemned, and himself
imprisoned; and Briçonnet consented to issue synodal decrees against
Luther's books and against certain Lutheran doctrines preached in
his own diocese. Only by the king's intervention was Berquin at this
time released.
The first man slain was Jean Chastellain, a shoemaker of Tournay,
burned at Vic in Lorraine on January 12, 1525. The next was a
wool-carder of Meaux, [1988] who was first whipped and branded
for a fanatical outrage, then burned to death, with slow tortures,
for a further outrage against an image of the Virgin at Metz (July,
1525). Later, an ecclesiastic of the Meaux group, Jacques Banvan
of Picardy, was prosecuted at Paris for anti-Lutheran heresy, and
publicly recanted; but repented, retracted his abjuration, and was
burned on the Place de Grève, in August, 1526; a nameless "hermit
of Livry" suffering the same death about the same time beside the
cathedral of Notre Dame. [1989] Meantime Lefèvre had taken refuge
in Strasburg, and, despite a letter of veto from the king, now in
captivity at Madrid, his works were condemned by the Sorbonne. When
released, the king not only recalled him but made him tutor to his
children. Ecclesiastical pressures, however, forced him finally to
take refuge under the Queen of Navarre at Nérac, in Gascony, where
he mourned his avoidance of martyrdom. [1990]
So determined had been the persecution that in 1526 Berquin was
a second time imprisoned, and with difficulty saved from death
by the written command of the captive king, sent on his sister's
appeal. [1991] And when the released king, to secure the deliverance
of his hostage sons, felt bound to conciliate the Pope, and to secure
funds had to conciliate the clergy, Marguerite, compelled to marry the
king of Navarre, could do nothing more for Protestantism, [1992] being
herself openly and furiously denounced by the Catholic clergy. [1993]
Bought by a clerical subsidy, the king, on the occasion of a new
outrage on a statue of the Virgin (1528), [1994] associated himself
with the popular indignation; and when the audacious Berquin, despite
the dissuasions of Erasmus, resumed his anti-Catholic polemic, and in
particular undertook to prove that Béda, the chief of the Sorbonne,
was not a Christian, [1995] he was re-arrested, tried, and condemned
to be publicly branded and imprisoned for life. On his announcing an
appeal to the absent king, and to the pope, a fresh sentence, this
time of death, was hurriedly passed; and he was strangled and burned
(1529) within two hours of the sentence, [1996] to the intense joy
of the ecclesiastical multitude.
After various vacillations, the king in 1534 had the fresh pretext
of Protestant outrage--the affixing of an anti-Catholic placard in
all of the principal thoroughfares of Paris, and to the door of the
king's own room [1997]--for permitting a fresh persecution after
he had refused the Pope's request that he should join in a general
extermination of heresy, [1998] and there began at Paris a series of
human sacrifices. It will have been observed that Protestant outrages
had provoked previous executions; and there is some ground for the view
that, but for the new and exasperating outrage of 1534, the efforts
which were being officially made for a modus vivendi might have met
with success. [1999] This hope was now frustrated. In November, 1534,
seven men were condemned to be burned alive, one of them for printing
Lutheran books. In December others followed; and in January, 1535,
on the occasion of a royal procession "to appease the wrath of God,"
six Lutherans (by one account, three by another) were burned alive
by slow fires, one of the victims being a school-mistress. [2000]
It was on this occasion that the king, in a public speech, declared:
"Were one of my arms infected with this poison, I would cut it
off. Were my own children tainted, I should immolate them." [2001]
Under such circumstances religious zeal naturally went far. In six
months there were passed 102 sentences of death, of which twenty-seven
were executed, the majority of the condemned having escaped by
flight. Thereafter the individual burnings are past counting. On an
old demand of the Sorbonne, the king actually sent to the Parlement
an edict abolishing the art of printing; [2002] which he duly recalled
when the Parlement declined to register it. But the French Government
was now committed to persecution. The Sorbonne's declaration against
Luther in 1521 had proclaimed as to the heretics that "their impious
and shameless arrogance must be restrained by chains, by censures--nay,
by fire and flame, rather than confuted by argument"; [2003] and in
that spirit the ruling clergy proceeded, the king abetting them. In
1543 he ordained that heresy should be punished as sedition; [2004] and
in 1545 occurred the massacres of the Vaudois, before described. The
result of this and further savageries was simply the wider diffusion of
heresy, and a whole era of civil war, devastation, and demoralization.
Meantime Calvin had been driven abroad, to found a Protestant polity at
Geneva and give a lead to those of England and Scotland. The balance
of political forces prevented a Protestant polity in France; but
nowhere else in the sixteenth century did Protestantism fight so long
and hard a battle. That the Reformation was a product of "Teutonic
conscience" is an inveterate fallacy. [2005] The country in which
Protestantism was intellectually most disinterested and morally most
active was France. "The main battle of erudition and doctrine against
the Catholic Church," justly contends Guizot, "was sustained by the
French reformers; it was in France and Holland, and always in French,
that most of the philosophic, historical, and polemic works on that
side were written; neither Germany nor England, certainly, employed
in the cause at that epoch more intelligence and science." [2006] Nor
was there in France--apart from the provocative insults to Catholics
above mentioned--any such licence on the Protestant side as arose in
Germany, though the French Protestants were as violently intolerant
as any. Their ultimate decline, after long and desperate wars ending
in a political compromise, was due to the play of socio-economic
causes under the wise and tolerant administration of Richelieu, who
opened the royal services to the Protestant nobles. [2007] The French
character had proved as unsubduable in Protestantism as any other; and
the generation which in large part gradually reverted to Catholicism
did but show that it had learned the lesson of the strifes which had
followed on the Reformation--that Protestantism was no solution of
either the moral or the intellectual problems of religion and politics.
§ 7. THE POLITICAL PROCESS IN BRITAIN
It was thus by no predilection or faculty of "race" that the
Reformation so-called came to be associated historically with the
northern or "Teutonic" nations. They simply succeeded in making
permanent, by reason of more propitious political circumstances,
a species of ecclesiastical revolution in which other races led the
way. As Hussitism failed in Bohemia, Lollardism came to nothing
in England in the same age, after a period of great vogue and
activity. [2008] The designs of Parliament on the revenues of the
Church at the beginning of the fifteenth century [2009] had failed by
reason of the alliance knit between Church and Crown in the times when
the latter needed backing; and at the accession of Henry VIII England
was more orthodox than any of the other leading States of Northern
Europe. [2010] Henry was himself passionately orthodox, and was much
less of a reformer in his mental attitude than was Wolsey, who had
far-reaching schemes for de-Romanizing the Church alike in England and
France, and who actually gave the king a handle against him by his
plans for turning Church endowments to educational purposes. [2011]
The personal need of the despotic king for a divorce which the pope
dared not give him was the first adequate lead to the rejection of the
papal authority. On this the plunder of the monasteries followed, as
a forced measure of royal finance, [2012] of precaution against papal
influence, and for the creation of a body of new interests vitally
hostile to a papal restoration. The king and the mass of the people
were alike Catholics in doctrine; the Protestant nobles who ruled
under Edward VI were for the most part mere cynical plunderers,
appropriating alike Church goods, lands, and school endowments
more shamelessly than even did the potentates of Germany; and on
the accession of Queen Mary the nation gladly reverted to Romish
usages, though the spoil-holders would not surrender a yard of Church
lands. [2013] Had there been a succession of Catholic sovereigns,
Catholicism would certainly have been restored. Protestantism was
only slowly built up by the new clerical and heretical propaganda,
and by the state of hostility set up between England and the Catholic
Powers. It was the episode of the Spanish Armada that, by identifying
Catholicism with the cause of the great national enemy, made the
people grow definitely anti-Catholic. Even in Shakespeare's dramas
the old state of things is seen not yet vitally changed.
In Scotland, though there the priesthood had fewer friends than almost
anywhere else, the act of Reformation was mainly one of pure and
simple plunder of Church property by the needy nobility, in conscious
imitation of the policy of Henry VIII, at a time when the throne
was vacant; and there too Protestant doctrine was only gradually
established by the new race of preachers, trained in the school of
Calvin. In Ireland, on the other hand, Protestantism became identified
with the cause of the oppressor, just as for England Romanism was
the cause of the enemy-in-chief. "Race" and "national character,"
whatever they may be understood to mean, had nothing whatever to do
with the course of events, and doctrinal enlightenment had just as
little. [2014] In the words of a distinguished clerical historian:
"No truth is more certain than this, that the real motives of
religious action do not work on men in masses; and that the enthusiasm
which creates Crusaders, Inquisitors, Hussites, Puritans, is not
the result of conviction, but of passion provoked by oppression or
resistance, maintained by self-will, or stimulated by the mere desire
of victory." [2015] To this it need only be added that the desire of
gain is also a factor, and that accordingly the anti-papal movement
succeeded where the balance of political forces could be turned against
the clerical interest, and failed where the latter predominated.