Brotherhood, he had failed to obtain from the Moravian Estates that
assent to his wishes which the Bohemians had been willing to grant.
The consequence was that, while Ferdinand had been so successful in
expelling the Brotherhood from his western province, the members of
that society had still met undisturbed in the province of Moravia. A
special circumstance had induced Ferdinand, for the time, to overlook
this evasion of his commands. Wenceslaus of Ludanic, the Captain of
Moravia, had been a member of the Brotherhood; but he had strongly
opposed the revolt of 1547, had prevented the Moravians from joining in
it, and had even rebuked Augusta for not opposing it more actively.
Doubtless the loyalty of so influential a Brother had had for a short
time its effect on Ferdinand. But the growing opposition which he
encountered amongst the Utraquists, and his increasing fears of the
Brotherhood, now led him to abandon this policy of compromise. He
called together the Moravian Assembly at Brünn (Brno); and he ordered
them, and especially their Captain, to take steps for the immediate
suppression of the Brotherhood.
Ludanic answered by entreating Ferdinand not to put down those who had
attained to the knowledge of the purified Gospel; and he assured the
King that Moravia would sooner perish in fire and ashes than submit
to violence in this matter. He then appealed to the members of the
Assembly; and the main body of them confirmed his words in a loud
voice. Ferdinand then asked if any, there present, were ready to obey
him. Only seven members of the Assembly responded to this appeal--five
of them lords and two knights. Then Ludanic once more rose, and read to
Ferdinand the oath which the King had taken, as Margrave of Moravia, to
defend the liberties of that province. Ferdinand indignantly answered
that he had kept his oath, and intended to keep it; upon which Ludanic
explained that he had not accused the King of having _yet_ broken his
oath; but that he had read it to him as a reminder for future use.
Unable to accomplish his ends, Ferdinand was at last obliged to dismiss
the Assembly, and to retire to his house. But, when he looked from his
window a little later, he saw the members of the Assembly carrying
Ludanic home in triumph. Thus, while crushed out in the province of
Bohemia, the Bohemian Brotherhood grew and flourished in Moravia.
About this time, the Brothers were enabled to renew their
correspondence with Augusta, by the help of one of his gaolers whom
they had succeeded in bribing. Unfortunately, this correspondence did
not strengthen the friendly relations between the prisoner and the
Elders of the Society. Always of a rather imperious disposition, and
now embittered by his sufferings, Augusta attempted to assert his
authority in a way which the Elders often resented. Indeed, they had
begun to think that the exclusion of Augusta from the outer world
disqualified him for his office as Elder of the Brotherhood. They
consented indeed, in deference to his earnest appeals, to retain
him a little longer in his former dignity; and at one time there
seemed a hope that this painful dispute might end in the release
of the imprisoned Brother, and his return to his former life. The
second treachery of Moritz of Saxony had overthrown the hopes of the
Imperialists; the treaty of Passau had raised anew the Protestant
expectations of religious liberty; and in 1552 the Catholic and
Protestant leaders of the Moravian Assembly united in such an earnest
appeal for mercy to Ferdinand, that he consented to consider the
question of the release of his Protestant prisoners.
But once more the tide turned against the unfortunate Augusta. In
February, 1553, his correspondence with the Brotherhood was suddenly
discovered. Again Ferdinand was seized with an attack of his
conspiracy-mania; Augusta and Bilek were once more hurried off to
Prague, and chained together in the White Tower. When no treasonable
sense could by any means be extorted from their letters, they were
allowed to return to their prison in Kr̆ivoklát; but all further
correspondence with the outer world was forbidden; and the Elders of
the Brotherhood, having heard that Augusta had been put to death,
elected a new Elder in his place.
Nevertheless, the hopes which had been raised by the treaty of Passau
were considerably strengthened at this time, by the rumour, which was
rapidly gaining ground, that Maximilian, the future king of Bohemia,
was opposed to the policy of his father. Ernest of Krajek, a member of
that family which had already offered such opposition to Ladislaus and
Ferdinand, eagerly welcomed back the Brothers to their old quarters
at Mláda Boleslav; and at the same time he despatched a messenger to
Vienna, to make sure of the sympathies of Maximilian. This messenger
was John Blahoslav, a writer and artist, who was afterwards to attain
some celebrity as an historian of the Brotherhood. When he arrived at
Vienna he found Maximilian in active sympathy with the Lutherans; and
he received much encouragement for the Brotherhood from the preacher
who had most influence with the prince.
On the other hand, however, Blahoslav soon discovered that a new power
had sprung up in Europe, more dangerous to the hopes of the Protestants
than any kings or generals. This was the Order of the Jesuits, who
had recently settled in Vienna, and who had gained great influence
over the mind of Ferdinand. That powerful body had soon directed their
attention to Bohemia; and, a few years after Blahoslav’s visit to
Vienna, they secured a settlement in Prague. Even before that time, the
persecution of the Brotherhood had again been renewed. The death of
Ernest of Krajek gave Ferdinand an opportunity for venting his hatred
on the sons of his late opponent; and they were forced, after a vain
opposition, to close those meeting-houses of the Brotherhood which
their father had re-opened. Blahoslav and other influential Brothers
were once more forced to hide themselves; and many Protestants, who had
been favourable to them, were gradually persuaded to desert their cause.
Unfortunately, it was during this period of persecution that the
relations between Augusta and the Brotherhood became once more severely
strained. He had succeeded in finding another messenger, through whom
he re-opened the correspondence with his colleagues; and he sent the
Elders some Commentaries which he had just written upon the Gospels.
These he begged them to use as part of the teaching of the Brotherhood.
The Elders answered that they had no time properly to examine the
book; and the bitterness caused by this ungracious answer was further
increased by their subsequent publication of the book in a somewhat
altered form. In addition to these causes of disagreement, Augusta now
heard, for the first time, of his deposition from the office of Elder;
and, when he remonstrated with the Brotherhood on the subject, they
refused to reconsider their decision.
Whether Ferdinand heard of this controversy or not, something prompted
him at this time to renew his efforts for the conversion of Augusta;
and he offered to release him on condition of his joining either the
Catholics or the Utraquists. To the first of these proposals Augusta
returned an unhesitating refusal; to the suggestion of a reunion with
the Utraquists he gave at first a more evasive answer. When, indeed,
he was asked for a more definite statement, he drew up a declaration
of his firm adherence to the Brotherhood; but an unexpected event
prevented him from sending off this declaration, and brought about
a change in his position, which was ultimately to produce the most
painful results.
Phillippina, the beautiful wife of the Archduke Ferdinand, was anxious
to act as a moderating influence in the counsels of the family. She
visited Augusta in prison, and expressed a wish to serve him. He
eagerly asked that he and Bilek might be allowed to spend Easter with
their friends; and he mentioned that they had been now about twelve
years in prison, and that he had not seen Bilek for eight years.
Phillippina succeeded in persuading King Ferdinand to yield to this
proposal; and both she and her husband hoped that, by this means, they
might pave the way for Augusta’s conversion to the Catholic Faith.
With this view, after his Easter visit was over, he was sent to a
Jesuit convent in Prague. There, while well treated in other respects,
he was not allowed to see any one but the chiefs of the Order; and
they carried on daily theological arguments with him. Their first
propositions they managed to state in so colourless a form, that
he was forced to agree to them; but, when they raised the question
of the possibility of error in the Church, they found that they and
their intended disciple were hopelessly at variance. Finding that the
Catholics had failed, the Utraquists now summoned him before their
Consistory, and tried to persuade him to join their organisation. At
first he absolutely resisted their attempts; but he consented at last
to use expressions, which were afterwards strangely perverted by some
of his opponents. He admitted that “he belonged to the Utraquistic
Bohemian Church, and that he agreed with them in all those essential
doctrines which they had derived from Scripture.” These expressions
were, very likely, a greater concession to the Utraquists than he
would have made at a previous time; but it is abundantly clear, from
his subsequent action, that he did not intend his words to imply the
abandonment of any doctrine which he had formerly held. Nor did the
authorities so consider them; for, though Bilek was shortly afterwards
set free, Augusta was sent back to his prison at Kr̆ivoklát.
But the Elders of the Brotherhood chose to treat these utterances
as a complete abandonment of their cause; and they wrote a fierce
and taunting letter to Augusta, in which they accused him of first
attempting to exercise Papal power over the Brotherhood, and then
abandoning them in order to obtain his release. Even this injustice
did not drive Augusta to abandon his convictions. When, two years
later, he was again required to make submission to the Utraquists, he
refused to admit that he had held any heretical doctrines; nor would
he accept the Utraquistic view of the Sacraments; and, in 1563, he
explicitly declared that he believed the teaching of the Brotherhood to
be nearer to Holy Scripture than that of either the Lutherans or the
Utraquists. But the release, which he would not obtain by concession,
was shortly to be granted to him gratuitously. In the year following
this declaration, Ferdinand felt that his end was approaching; and, as
if seized with remorse for his injustice, he consented to set Augusta
free, without any further conditions. A few months later the king
died; and the accession of Maximilian produced a further change in the
fortunes of Bohemia.
XV.
FROM THE DEATH OF FERDINAND I. TO THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION UNDER
RUDOLF II.
(1564-1600.)
In describing a struggle between two rival powers in a State, it is
extremely difficult to give a correct impression of the exact balance
of success on either side at a particular crisis in the controversy;
and this difficulty is enormously increased when the struggle is
concerned partly with the question of spiritual (and therefore mainly
individual) liberty; and partly with the growth of those more material
forms of centralisation which check constitutional freedom and local
self-government. When we hear of Ferdinand yielding on his deathbed
to the prisoner whom he had been trying for so many years to crush
into obedience, we feel that the victory lies, in the main, with those
spiritual forces which were working against ecclesiastical uniformity.
Nor does the resistance of the Moravian Estates seem less important as
a victory of constitutional freedom, than the firmness of Augusta as a
security for spiritual independence.
But the real importance of such episodes as these lies in the contrast
which they offer to the main tendencies of Bohemian history during
the sixteenth century; and the proof which they consequently give of
the survival of forces which seem elsewhere to be crushed out. For
centralisation was, after all, steadily growing in the dominions of
Ferdinand; and national life, however it might struggle for existence,
was being sapped by arbitrary power.
Nor must we forget that there was one moral consideration which worked
on the side of Ferdinand. The terrible danger to which Europe was
exposed by the Turkish invader was not really removed until the latter
part of the seventeenth century; and even Vienna itself was to be once
more endangered, before the barbarian could be induced to settle down
peaceably beside his neighbours, and confine himself to the oppression
of his Christian subjects. When, therefore, Ferdinand found that the
local assemblies of the different provinces grudged him their help in
this important struggle, and that even at Prague he had difficulty
in obtaining both money and soldiers, it was not unnatural that he
should feel a growing indifference to liberties which seemed to him so
dangerous to the peace and order of Europe.
So when in 1555 he had summoned representatives from all his dominions
to meet at Vienna, to devise a common scheme of action against the
Turk, he must have bitterly resented the absence of the Bohemians, who
refused to attend an Assembly where they might be swamped by Germans
and Hungarians. An even more fatal point of opposition between the
National desire for peace and independence, and the Imperial scheme
for the defence of Europe, was found in the question of military
organisation. The old privilege of the Bohemians, to refuse their
services for foreign wars, was continually insisted on by them in
opposition to Ferdinand; and he was almost unavoidably compelled to
raise armies which should be independent of national sentiment, and to
garrison the frontier towns of Moravia with soldiers drawn from all
parts of his dominions.
Nor, while he was so successful in his schemes of State centralisation,
was Ferdinand wholly worsted in his struggle for ecclesiastical unity.
One victory at least he gained; and by a curious irony of fortune,
he won it by granting a concession which had once been most ardently
desired by the Bohemian leaders, but which had now, by change of
circumstances, become worse than useless. Just at the close of the
Council of Trent, he succeeded in obtaining from the Pope a formal
concession to the Bohemians of their right to grant the Cup to the
laity. Thus the old watchword of the Hussite wars, separated from
all that had given it life and force, now became a step towards
the absorption of the Utraquists by the Catholics. When once this
concession was granted, Ferdinand insisted that the Utraquists could no
longer refuse to accept the authority of the Roman Catholic Archbishop.
From this time forward, Utraquism ceases to be a force in Bohemian
history. Their separate Consistory was indeed revived by Maximilian;
and from time to time the members of it continued to assert themselves
in the religious controversies of the day; but every such effort
tended more and more plainly to show that the champions of the old
faith were but the impotent and unworthy representatives of traditions
of former greatness. With the death of Ferdinand, all these questions
enter on a new phase. The strength and weakness of the late king’s
ideals were to be put to new tests during the reign of his son.
Maximilian is one of those men who seem to the careful student of
history all the more pathetic, because their failures are not of that
striking and dramatic kind which at once excite the sympathy of the
observer; but are rather gathered from a careful comparison of the
objects aimed at with those actually accomplished. Hampered by the
continual distrust and the domineering influence of his father, half
inclined to the extremer doctrines of Protestantism, and yet never
able to shake off the recollection that he was the heir of a Catholic
tradition; angry with the Jesuits for their intriguing interference
with his affairs, and no less angry with the Protestants for those
divisions which prevented a completely artistic settlement of the
ecclesiastical question; anxious to recognise the local and other
liberties of his Bohemian subjects, but conscious of the difficulties
which those liberties placed in the way of the struggle against the
Turk, Maximilian was continually drifting backwards and forwards in a
way which tended to weaken the system of government which his father
had tried to establish, without substituting anything freer or more
national in its place.
Nor must we forget that Maximilian had to deal with the same
insoluble problem for which Charles IV. had only provided a temporary
solution. Ferdinand had reigned for nearly thirty years as King of
Bohemia, before he had been forced to assume the burden of the German
Empire. Maximilian had to take up both these responsibilities at
the same time; and, apart from the enormous intellectual and moral
difference between Maximilian of Austria and Charles of Luxemburg, the
problem with which the later Emperor had to deal was infinitely more
complicated than any which presented itself to the statesmen of the
fourteenth century. The difference between Protestant and Catholic
was in itself enough to introduce years of division and war into the
Empire; but that element of confusion was now trebly increased by the
new sects into which Lutheranism had been divided, and by the still
keener political divisions between the Lutherans and Calvinists. In
Bohemia, again, the same difficulties presented themselves in an even
more complicated form; for, while many of the Bohemian Reformers had
identified their cause with that of the Lutherans, the old feeling
of national distinction was driving many into opposition to the
aggressive character of the German movement, and compelling them to
seek for a new religious centre which should be neither Papal nor
German. As the Utraquists could no longer supply such a centre, the
championship of Bohemian feeling rapidly passed to the leaders of
the Bohemian Brotherhood. The great defender of the national and
distinctive position of the Brotherhood, against the encroachments of
the Lutherans, was that Blahoslav who had already become prominent
as a negotiator with foreign Protestants, and who was ultimately to
become the historian of the Brotherhood. He had already vindicated
the specially Bohemian character of the Brotherhood against a critic
who had tried to identify them with the Franco-Italian sect of the
Waldenses; and so keen had Blahoslav and his friends been in the
assertion of their national position, that they had been willing
sometimes to speak of themselves as “the remains of the Taborites,”
choosing rather to identify their cause with a Bohemian sect so
different from them both in spirit and doctrine, than with a French or
Italian community, however like them in every respect but race.
When, then, the Lutherans demanded that the Bohemian Brothers should
accept the Augsburg Confession, and practically consent to absorption
in the Lutheran body, Blahoslav and his friends resolved to offer a
steady resistance to this proposal. Unfortunately, Blahoslav was forced
to encounter, in this controversy, the most distinguished member of his
own community. John Augusta, after his release from prison, had been
welcomed back to his friends by the main body of the Brotherhood; but
he soon found that the power which he desired to exercise over them
was still resisted and resented. He proposed that, instead of the free
exercise of preaching in the Brotherhood, certain definite parts of the
gospel should be chosen for exposition each Sunday in the year; and he
himself drew up a plan on which these discourses should be founded.
Some of the Brothers objected that the doctrines suggested in his book
were not altogether those held by the Brothers; while, no doubt, a
still larger number resented the restrictions which such an arrangement
would impose on the preachers. Irritated at the general opposition
offered to his proposals, Augusta came to the conclusion that the
Brotherhood was in a radically unsatisfactory condition; and he threw
himself into the movement for union with the Lutherans, as a means of
reform. So bitter was the opposition which he roused by this conduct,
that he became entirely separated from the rest of the Brotherhood;
and, when he died in 1572, his death passed almost unnoticed by those
for whom he had done and suffered so much.
In the meantime Maximilian was endeavouring to take up a neutral
position in this controversy. Personally in sympathy with the Brothers,
but afraid of offending Catholics and Lutherans, he continually assured
all parties that he was unable to assent to any legal sanction for
religious liberty, since he had bound himself to oppose novelties; but
that, if they would only settle their differences between themselves,
nobody would interfere with the performance of their religion. Even
this statement was more definite and consistent than his actual
practice; for, when the Catholic or Utraquist priests applied to him
for powers to suppress novelties or heresies, he assented to their
proposals, though, when either Brothers or Lutherans complained to him,
he assured them of his personal sympathy for them, and his desire to
leave them untouched.
His great hope for the solution of these difficulties seems to have
lain in some scheme of union among Protestants. If only the Lutheran
sects, Bohemian Brothers, and Calvinists would give up their quarrels
with one another, religious toleration would become such an easy
affair. He therefore sympathised particularly with the new proposal,
which was gradually shaping itself in the discussions between the
Lutherans and the Brothers. This was a plan for a new Bohemian creed,
to be drawn up at a combined meeting of the various sects. The Brothers
looked upon this movement with great suspicion. They saw in it an
attempt of the Lutherans to secure the acceptance of the Augsburg
Confession by indirect means; and they noted their persistent attempts
to exclude the Brothers from those Assemblies where ecclesiastical
questions were discussed. Nevertheless, when Maximilian, on his return
to Bohemia in 1575, consented to preside at the Assembly in which this
new creed was to be proposed, the Brothers were willing to take part in
the discussion. Doctor Crato, Maximilian’s physician, secretly urged
the Brothers to stand firm, assuring them that the Emperor was really
in sympathy with them. Encouraged by this hint, they not only resisted
a motion for the acceptance of the Augsburg Confession, but they even
objected to the appointment of a committee for the preparation of
formulæ which were to unite all parties.
The committee was, nevertheless, appointed, and its actions soon
justified the fears of the Brothers. In the introduction to the
proposed creed, the committee pronounced an anathema against a number
of heretics, and, amongst others, against all Calvinists. Now many of
the Brothers had embraced Calvinistic doctrines; and their friendship
with the champions of those doctrines had been strengthened by motives,
both of personal resentment and of moral sympathy. The treatment of
the exiled Brothers by the Lutherans of Prussia had repelled the
Brotherhood generally from the creed of their unfriendly hosts; while
the strict moral discipline maintained in the Calvinistic University of
Heidelberg was more attractive to the followers of Peter of Chelc̆ic
than the growing laxity of Wittenberg. They therefore offered a
successful opposition to that sweeping condemnation of Calvinism to
which the Lutherans desired to commit them. But this was, after all,
but a minor point in the objections of the Brothers to the proposed
creed. Apart from every detail, the proposal to surrender their own
Confession in favour of any new form of words whatsoever, was wholly
inconsistent with the position which they desired to maintain. They
therefore offered such steady resistance to the proposed Confession,
that they at last induced the Lutherans to consent to a petition to
the King and the Assembly asking them to recognise each sect as a
separate organisation. This result, however, was not reached till the
controversy had become so fierce that the rival theologians came to
blows in the streets.