Being unable to accomplish this or to put Ireland at {347} the bottom

of the sea, where Elizabeth's minister Walsingham often wished that it

were, the English had the alternatives of half governing or wholly

abandoning their neighbors. The latter course was felt to be too

dangerous, but had it been adopted, Ireland might have evolved an

adequate government and prosperity of her own. It is true that she was

more backward than England, but yet she had a considerable trade and

culture. [Sidenote: Irish misery] Certain points, like Dublin and

Waterford, had much commerce with the Continent. And yet, as to the

nation as a whole, the report of 1515 probably speaks true in saying:

"There is no common folk in all this world so little set by, so greatly

despised, so feeble, so poor, so greatly trodden under foot, as the

king's poor common folk of Ireland." There was no map of the whole of

Ireland; the roads were few and poor and the vaguest notions prevailed

as to the shape, size and population of the country. The most

civilized part was the English Pale around Dublin; the native Irish

lived "west of the Barrow and west of the law," and were governed by

more than sixty native chiefs. Intermarriage of colonists and natives

was forbidden by law. The only way the Tudor government knew of

asserting its suzerainty over these septs, correctly described as "the

king's Irish enemies," was to raid them at intervals, slaying, robbing

and raping as they went. It was after one of these raids in 1580 that

the poet Spencer wrote:

The people were brought to such wretchedness that any

strong heart would have rued the same. Out of every

corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth

upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them.

They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like

ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead

carrions, happy where they could find them; yea and one

{348}

another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they

spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they

found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they

thronged as to a feast for a time.

The Irish chiefs were not to be tamed by either kindness or force.

Henry and Elizabeth scattered titles of "earl" and "lord" among the O's

and Macs of her western island, only to find that the coronet made not

the slightest difference in either their affections or their manners.

They still lived as marauding chiefs, surrounded by wild kerns and

gallowglasses fighting each other and preying on their own poor

subjects. "Let a thousand of my people die," remarked one of them,

Neil Garv, "I pass not a pin. . . . I will punish, exact, cut and hang

where and whenever I list." Had they been able to make common cause

they might perhaps have shaken the English grasp from their necks, for

it was commonly corrupt and feeble. Sir Henry Sidney was the strongest

and best governor sent to the island during the century, but he was

able to do little. Though the others could be bribed and though one of

them, the Earl of Essex, conspired with the chiefs to rebel, and though

at the very end of Elizabeth's reign a capable Spanish army landed in

Ireland to help the natives, nothing ever enabled them to turn out the

hated "Sassenach."

[Sidenote: English colonization]

England had already tried to solve the Irish problem by colonization.

Leinster had long been a center of English settlement, and in 1573 the

first English colony was sent to Ulster. But as it consisted chiefly

of bankrupts, fugitives from justice and others "of so corrupt a

disposition as England rather refuseth," it did not help matters much

but rather "irrecuperably damnified the state." The Irish Parliament

continued to represent only the English of the Pale and of a few towns

outside of it. Though the inhabitants of the {349} Pale remained

nominally Catholic, the Parliament was so servile that in 1541 it

destroyed the monasteries and repudiated the pope, [Sidenote: Religion]

shortly after which the king took the title of Head of the Irish

Church. Not one penny of the confiscated wealth went to endow an Irish

university until 1591, when Trinity College was founded in the

interests of Protestantism. Though almost every other country of

Europe had its own printing presses before 1500, Ireland had none until

1551, and then the press was used so exclusively for propaganda that it

made the very name of reading hateful to the natives. There were,

however, no religious massacres and no martyrs of either cause. The

persecuting laws were left until the following century.

[Sidenote: Commercial exploitation]

The rise of the traders to political power was more ominous than the

inception of a new religion. The country was drained of treasure by

the exaction of enormous ransoms for captured chiefs. The Irish

cloth-trade and sea-borne commerce were suppressed. The country was

flooded with inferior coin, thus putting its merchants at a vast

disadvantage. Finally, there was little left that the Irish were able

to import save liquors, and those "much corrupted."

With every plea in mitigation of judgment that can be offered, it must

be recognized that England's government of Ireland proved a failure.

If she did not make the Irish savage she did her best to keep them so,

and then punished them for it. By exploiting Erin's resources she

impoverished herself. By trying to impose Protestantism she made

Ireland the very stronghold of papacy. By striving to destroy the

septs she created the nation.

{350}

CHAPTER VII

SCOTLAND

One of the most important effects of modern means of easy communication

between all parts of the world has been to obliterate or minimize

distinctions in national character and in degrees of civilization. The

manner of life of England and Australia differ less now than the manner

of life of England and Scotland differed in the sixteenth century. The

great stream of culture then flowed much more strongly in the central

than in the outlying parts of Western Europe. The Latin nations, Italy

and France, lay nearest the heart of civilization. But slightly less

advanced in culture and in the amenities of life, and superior in some

respects, were the Netherlands, Switzerland, England and the southern

and central parts of Germany. In partial shadow round about lay a belt

of lands: Spain, Portugal, Northern Germany, Prussia, Poland, Hungary,

Scandinavia, Scotland, and Ireland.

[Sidenote: Scotland]

Scotland, indeed, had her own universities, but her best scholars were

often found at Paris, or in German or Italian academies. Scotch

humanists on the continent, the Scotch guard of the French king, and

Scotch monasteries, such as those at Erfurt and Würzburg, raised the

reputation of the country abroad rather than advanced its native

culture. Printing was not introduced until 1507. Brantôme in the

sixteenth century, like Aeneas Silvius in the fifteenth, remarked the

uncouthness of the northern kingdom.

Most backward of all was Scotland's political development. No king

arose strong enough to be at once {351} the tyrant and the saviour of

his country; under the weak rule of a series of minors, regents and

wanton women a feudal baronage with a lush growth of intestine war and

crime, flourished mightily to curse the poor people. When Sir David

Lyndsay asked, [Sidenote: 1528] Why are the Scots so poor? he gave the

correct answer:

Wanting of justice, policy and peace,

Are cause of their unhappiness, alas!

Something may also be attributed to the poverty of the soil and the

lack of important commerce or industries.

[Sidenote: Relations with England]

The policy of any small nation situated in dangerous proximity to a

larger one is almost necessarily determined by this fact. In order to

assert her independence Scotland was forced to make common cause with

England's enemies. Guerrilla warfare was endemic on the borders,

breaking out, in each generation, into some fiercer crisis. England,

on the other hand, was driven to seek her own safety in the annexation

of her small enemy, or, failing that, by keeping her as impotent as

possible. True to the maxims of the immoral political science that has

commonly passed for statesmanship, the Tudors consistently sought by

every form of deliberate perfidy to foster factions in North Britain,

to purchase traitors, to hire stabbers, to subsidize rebels, to breed

mischief, and to waste the country, at opportune intervals, with armies

and fleets. Simply to protect the independence that England denied and

attacked, Scotch rulers became fast allies of France, to be counted on,

in every war between the great powers, to stir up trouble in England's

rear.

On neither side was the policy one of sheer hatred. North and south

the purpose increased throughout the century to unite the two countries

and thus put an end to the perennial and noxious war. If the early

Tudors {351} were mistaken in thinking they could assert a suzerainty

by force of arms, they also must be credited with laying the

foundations of the future dynastic union. Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's

sister, was married to James IV of Scotland. Somerset hoped to effect

the union more directly by the marriage of Edward VI and Mary Queen of

Scots. That a party of enlightened statesmen in England should

constantly keep the union in mind, is less remarkable under the

circumstances than that there should have been built up a considerable

body of Scotchmen aiming at the same goal. Notwithstanding the

vitality of patriotism and the tenacity with which small nations

usually refuse to merge their own identity in a larger whole, very

strong motives called forth the existence of an English party. One

favorable condition was the feudal disorganization of society. Faction

was so common and so bitter that it was able to call in the national

enemy without utterly discrediting itself. A second element was

jealousy of France. For a time, with the French marriages of James V

with Mary of Lorraine, a sister of the Duke of Guise, and of Mary Queen

of Scots with Francis II, there seemed more danger that the little

kingdom should become an appanage of France than a satellite of her

southern neighbor. The licentiousness of French officers and French

soldiers on Scotch soil made their nation least loved when it was most

seen. [Sidenote: Influence of religion] But the great influence

overcoming national sentiment was religion. The Reformation that

brought not peace but a sword to so much of Europe in this case united

instead of divided the nations.

It is sometimes said that national character reveals itself in the

national religion. This is true to some extent, but it is still more

important to say that a nation's history reveals itself in its forms of

faith. From religious statistics of the present day one could {353}

deduce with considerable accuracy much of the history of any people.

The contrast between the churches of England and Scotland is the more

remarkable when it is considered that the North of England was the

stronghold of Catholicism, and that the Lowland Scot, next door to the

counties of the Northern Earls who rose against Elizabeth, flew to the

opposite extreme and embraced Protestantism in its most pronounced

form. To say that Calvinism, uncompromising and bare of adornment,

appealed particularly to the dour, dry, rationalistic Scot, is at best

but a half truth and at worst a begging of the question. The reasons

why England became Anglican and Scotland Presbyterian are found

immediately not in the diversity of national character but in the

circumstances of their respective polities and history. England cast

loose from Rome at a time when the conservative influence of Luther was

predominant; Scotland was swept into the current of revolution under

the fiercer star of Calvin. The English reformation was started by the

crown and supported by the new noblesse of commerce. The Scotch

revolution was markedly baronial in tone. It began with the humanists,

continued and flourished in the junior branches of great families,

among the burgesses of the towns and among the more vigorous of the

clergy, both regular and secular. The crown was consistently against

the new movement, but the Scottish monarch was too weak to impose his

will, or even to have a will of his own. Neither James V nor his

daughter could afford to break with Rome and with France. James V,

especially, was thrown into the arms of his clergy by the hostility of

his nobles. Moreover, after the death of many nobles at the battle of

Flodden, the clergy became, for a time, [Sidenote: 1513] the strongest

estate in the kingdom.

{354} Like the other estates the clergy were still in the Middle Ages

when the Reformation [Sidenote: Reformation] came on them like a thief

in the night. In no country was the corruption greater. The bishops

and priests took concubines and ate and drank and were drunken and

buffeted their fellow men. They exacted their fees to the last

farthing, an especially odious one being the claim of the priest to the

best cow on the death of a parishioner. As a consequence the parsons

and monks were hated by the laity.

Humanism shed a few bright beams on the hyperborean regions of Dundee

and Glasgow. Some Erasmians, like Hector Boece, prepared others for

the Reformation without joining it themselves; some, like George

Buchanan, threw genius and learning into the scales of the new faith.

The unlearned, too, were touched with reforming zeal. Lollardy sowed a

few seeds of heresy. About 1520 Wyclif's version of the New Testament

was turned into Scots by one John Nesbit, but it remained in manuscript.

In the days before newspapers tidings were carried from place to place

by wandering merchants and itinerant scholars. Far more than today

propaganda was dependent on personal intercourse. One of the first

preachers of Lutheranism in Scotland was a Frenchman named La Tour, who

was martyred on his return to his own country. The noble Patrick

Hamilton made a pilgrimage to the newly founded University of Marburg,

and possibly to Wittenberg. Filled, as his Catholic countryman, Bishop

John Leslie put it, "with venom very poisonable and deadly . . . soaked

out of Luther and other archheretics," he returned to find the martyr's

crown in his native land. [Sidenote: February 29, 1528] "The reek of

Patrick Hamilton" infected all upon whom it blew. Other young men

visited Germany. Some, like Alexander Alesius and John MacAlpine,

found positions in {355} foreign universities. Others visited

Wittenberg for a short time to carry thence the new gospel. A Scotch

David[1] appears at Wittenberg in January 1528. Another Scot,

"honorably born and well seen in scholastic theology, exiled from his

land on account of the Word," made Luther's acquaintance in May, 1529.

Another of the Reformer's visitors was James Wedderburn whose brother,

John, [Sidenote: 1540-2] translated some of the German's hymns, and

published them as "Ane compendious Booke of Godly and spiritual Songs."

While men like these were bringing tidings of the new faith back to

their countrymen, others were busy importing and distributing Lutheran

books. The Parliament prohibited [Sidenote: July 17, 1525] all works

of "the heretic Luther and his disciples," but it could not enforce

this law. The English agent at Antwerp reported to Wolsey that New

Testaments and other English works were bought by Scottish merchants

[Sidenote: February 20, 1527] and sent to Edinburgh and St. Andrews.

The popularity and influence of Tyndale's and Coverdale's Bible is

proved by the rapid anglicizing, from this date onward, of the Scots

dialect. The circulation of the Scriptures in English is further

proved by the repetition of the injunctions against using them. But

the first Bible printed in Scotland was that of Alexander Arbuthnot in

1579, based on the Geneva Bible in 1561.

[Sidenote: March 14, 1531]

Another indication of the growth of Lutheranism is the request of King

James V to Consistory for permission to tax his clergy one-third of

their revenues in order to raise an army against the swarm of his

Lutheran subjects. As these Protestants met in private houses,

Parliament passed a law, [Sidenote: 1540] "That none hold nor let be

holden in their houses nor other ways, congregations or conventicles to

commune or dispute of {356} the Holy Scripture, without they be

theologians approved by famous universities."

As the new party grew the battle was joined. At least twelve martyrs

perished in the years 1539-40. [Sidenote: Pamphlets] The field was

taken on either side by an army of pamphlets, ballads and broadsides,

of which the best known, perhaps, is David Lyndsay's _Ane Satire of the

thrie Estatis_. In this the clergy are mercilessly attacked for greed

and wantonness. [Sidenote: 1540] The New Testament is highly praised

by some of the characters introduced into the poem, but a pardoner

complains that his credit has been entirely destroyed by it and wishes

the devil may take him who made that book. He further wishes that

"Martin Luther, that false loon, Black Bullinger and Melanchthon" had

been smothered in their chrisom-cloths and that St. Paul had never been

born.

[Sidenote: Mary Stuart, born Dec. 8, 1542]

When James V died, he left the crown to his infant daughter of six days

old, that Mary whose beauty, crimes and tragic end fixed the attention

of her contemporaries and of posterity alike. For the first three

years of her reign the most powerful man in the kingdom was David

Beaton, Cardinal Archbishop of St. Andrews. His policy, of course, was

to maintain the Catholic religion, and this implied the defence of

Scotch independence against England. Henry VIII, with characteristic

lack of scruple, plotted to kidnap the infant queen and either to

kidnap or to assassinate the cardinal. Failing in both, he sent an

army north with orders to put man, woman and child to the sword

wherever resistance was made. Edinburgh castle remained untaken, but

Holyrood was burned and the country devastated as far as Sterling.

[Sidenote: Cardinal Beaton]

Defeated by England, Beaton was destined to {357} perish in conflict

with his other enemy, Protestantism. During this time of transition

from Lutheranism to Calvinism, the demands of the Scotch reformers

would have been more moderate than they later became. They would

doubtless have been content with a free Bible, free preaching and the

sequestration of the goods of the religious orders. Under George

Wishart, who translated the First Helvetic Confession, [Sidenote: 1536

or 1537] the Kirk began to assume its Calvinistic garb and to take the

aspect of a party with a definite political program. The place of

newspapers, both as purveyors of information and as organs of public

opinion, was taken by the sermons of the ministers, most of them

political and all of them controversial. Of this party Beaton was the

scourge. He himself believed that in 1545 heresy was almost extinct,

and doubtless his belief was confirmed when he was able to put Wishart

to death. [Sidenote: March 1, 1546] In revenge for this a few

fanatics murdered him. [Sidenote: May 29]

[Sidenote: John Knox]

In the consummation of the religious revolution during the next quarter

of a century, one factor was the personality of John Knox. A born

partisan, a man of one idea who could see no evil on his own side and

no good on the other, as a good fighter and a good hater he has had few

equals. His supreme devotion to the cause he embraced made him

credulous of evil in his foes, and capable of using deceit and of

applauding political murder. Of his first preaching against Romanism

it was said, "Other have sned [snipped] the branches, but this man

strikes at the root," and well nigh the latest judgment passed upon

him, that of Lord Acton, is that he differed from all other Protestant

founders in his desire that the Catholics should be exterminated,

either by the state or by the self-help of all Christian men. His not

to speak the words of love and mercy from the gospel, but to curse and

{358} thunder against "those dumb dogs, the poisoned and pestilent

papists" in the style of the Old Testament prophet or psalmist. But

while the harshness of his character has repelled many, his fundamental

consistency and his courage have won admiration. As a great preacher,

"or he had done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous that he

was like to ding the pulpit in blads and fly out of it." His style was

direct, vigorous, plain, full of pungent wit and biting sarcasm.

Even the year of his birth is in dispute. The traditional date is

1505; but it has been shown with much reason that the more likely date

is 1513 or 1514. That he had a university education and that he was

ordained priest is all that is known of him until about 1540. During

the last months of Wishart's life Knox was his constant attendant. His

own preaching continued the work of the martyr until June, 1547, when

St. Andrews was captured by the French fleet and Knox was made a galley

slave for nineteen months. Under the lash and, what grieved him even

more, constantly plied with suggestions that he should "commit

idolatry" in praying to the image of Mary, his heart grew bitter

against the French and their religion.

Released, either through the influence of the English government,

[Sidenote: January 1549] or by an exchange of prisoners, Knox spent the

next five years in England. After filling positions as preacher at

Berwick and Newcastle, [Sidenote: 1551] he was appointed royal chaplain

and was offered the bishopric of Rochester, which he declined because

he foresaw the troubles under Mary. As the pioneer of Puritanism in

England he used his influence to make the Book of Common Prayer more

Protestant. Not long after Mary's accession Knox fled to the

Continent, spending a few years at Frankfort and Geneva. He was much

impressed by "that notable servant of {359} God, John Calvin" whose

system he adopted with political modifications of his own.

In the meantime things were not going well in Scotland. The country

had suffered another severe defeat [Sidenote: September 10, 1547] at

the hands of the English in the battle of Pinkie. The government was

largely in the hands of the Queen Dowager, Mary of Lorraine, who

naturally favored France, and who married her daughter, the Queen of

Scots, to the Dauphin Francis, [Sidenote: April 24, 1558] both of them

being fifteen years old. By treaty she conveyed Scotland to the king

of France, acting on the good old theory that her people were a

chattel. Though the pact, with its treason to the people, was secret,

its purport was guessed by all. Whereas the accession of Francis II

momentarily bound Scotland closer to France, his death in the following

year again cut her loose, and allowed her to go her own way.

All the while the Reformed party had been slowly growing in strength.

Somerset took care to send plenty of English Bibles across the Cheviot

Hill, rightly seeing in them the best emissaries of the English

interest. The Scotch were drawn towards England by the mildness of her

government as much as they were alienated from France by the ferocity

of hers. In Scotland the English party, when it had the chance, made

no Catholic martyrs, but the French party continued to put heretics to

death. The execution of the aged Walter Milne, [Sidenote: 1558] the

last of the victims of the Catholic persecution, excited especial

resentment.

Knox now returned to his own country for a short visit. [Sidenote:

Knox, August, 1555] He there preached passionately against the mass and

addressed a letter to the Regent Mary of Lorraine, begging her to favor

the gospel. This she treated as a joke, and, after Knox had departed,

she sentenced him to death and burnt him in effigy. From Geneva he

continued to be the chief adviser of the {360} Protestant party whose

leaders drew up a "Common Band," usually known as the First Scottish

Covenant. [Sidenote: December 3, 1557] The signers, including a large

number of nobles and gentlemen headed by the earls of Argyle, Glencairn

and Morton, promised to apply their whole power, substance and lives to

maintain, set forward and establish "the most blessed Word of God and

his congregation." Under the protection of this bond, reformed

churches were set up openly. The Lords of the Congregation, as they

were called, demanded that penal statutes against heretics be abrogated

and "that it be lawful to us to use ourselves in matters of religion

and conscience as we must answer to God." This scheme of toleration

was too advanced for the time.

[Sidenote: 1557]

As the assistance of Knox was felt to be desirable, the Lords of the

Congregation urgently requested his return. [Sidenote: 1558] Before

doing so he published his "Appellation" [Sidenote: May 2, 1559] to the

nobles, estates and commonalty against the sentence of death recently

passed on him. When he did arrive in Edinburgh, his preaching was like

a match set to kindling wood. Wherever he went burst forth the flame

of iconoclasm. Images were broken and monasteries stormed not, as he

himself wrote, by gentlemen or by "earnest professors of Christ," but

by "the rascal multitude." In reckoning the forces of revolution, the

joy of the mob in looting must not be forgotten. [Sidenote: May 11]

From Perth Knox wrote: "The places of idolatry were made equal with the

ground; all monuments of idolatry that could be apprehended, consumed

with fire; and priests commanded, under pain of death, to desist from

their blasphemous mass." Similar outbursts occurred at St. Andrews,

and when Knox returned to Edinburgh, civil war seemed imminent.

Pamphlets of the time, like _The Beggars' Warning_, [Sidenote: 1559]

distinctly made the threat of social revolution.

{361} But as a matter of fact the change came as the most bloodless in

Europe. The Reformers, popular with the middle and with part of the

upper classes, needed only to win English support to make themselves

perfectly secure. The difficulty in this course lay in Queen

Elizabeth's natural dislike of Knox on account of his _First Blast of

the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women_. In this

war-whoop, aimed against the Marys of England and Scotland, Knox had

argued that "to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or

empire above any realm is repugnant to nature, contrary to God, and,

finally, it is the subversion of good order and of all equity and

justice." The author felt not a little embarrassment when a Protestant

woman ascended the throne of England and he needed her help. But to

save his soul he "that never feared nor flattered any flesh" could not

admit that he was in the wrong, nor take back aught that he had said.

He seems to have acted on Barry Lyndon's maxim that "a gentleman fights

but never apologizes." When he wrote Elizabeth, [Sidenote: July 20,

1559] all he would say was that he was not her enemy and had never

offended her or her realm maliciously or of purpose. He seasoned this

attempt at reconciliation by adding a stinging rebuke to the proud

young queen for having "declined from God and bowed to idolatry,"

during her sister's reign, for fear of her life.

But the advantages of union outweighed such minor considerations as bad

manners, and early in 1560 a league was formed between England and the

Lords of the Congregation. Shortly after the death of Mary of Lorraine

[Sidenote: June 11, 1560] the Treaty of Edinburgh [Sidenote: Treaty of

Edinburgh, July 6] was signed between the queen of England and the

lords of Scotland. This provided: (1) that all English and French

troops be sent out of Scotland except 120 French; (2) that all warlike

preparations cease; (3) that the {362} Berwickshire citadel of the sea,

Eyemouth, be dismantled; (4) that Mary and Francis should disuse the

English title and arms; (5) that Philip of Spain should arbitrate

certain points, if necessary; (6) that Elizabeth had not acted

wrongfully in making a league with the Lords of the Congregation. Mary

and Francis refused to ratify this treaty.

A supplementary agreement was proposed between Mary Stuart and her

rebellious Protestant subjects. She promised to summon Parliament at

once, to make neither war nor peace without the consent of the estates,

and to govern according to the advice of a council of twelve chosen

jointly by herself and the estates. She promised to give no high

offices to strangers or to clergymen; and she extended to all a general

amnesty.

[Sidenote: Revolution]

The summons of Parliament immediately after these negotiations proved

as disastrous to the old régime as the assembly of the French Estates

General in 1789. Though bloodless, the Scotch revolution was as

thorough, in its own small way, as that of Robespierre. Religion was

changed and a new distribution of political power secured, transferring

the ascendency of the crown and of the old privileged orders to a class

of "new men," low-born ministers of the kirk, small "lairds" and

burgesses. The very constitution of the new Parliament was

revolutionary. In the old legislative assemblies between ten and

twenty greater barons were summoned; in the Parliament of 1560 no less

than 106 small barons assembled, and it was to them, together with the

burgesses of the cities, that the adoption of the new religion was due.

A Confession of Faith, [Sidenote: Scottish Confession] on extreme

Calvinistic lines, had been drawn up by Knox and his fellows; this was

presented to Parliament and adopted with only eight dissenting voices,

those of five laymen and three bishops. The minority was overawed, not

only by the majority in {363} Parliament but by the public opinion of

the capital and of the whole Lowlands.

[Sidenote: Laws of the estates]

Just a week after the adoption of the Confession, the estates passed

three laws: (1) Abolishing the pope's authority and all jurisdiction by

Catholic prelates; (2) repealing all previous statutes in favor of the

Roman church; (3) forbidding the celebration of mass. The law calls it

"wicked idolatry" and provides that "no manner of person nor persons

say mass, nor yet hear mass, nor be present thereat under pain of

confiscation of all their goods movable and immovable and punishing

their bodies at the discretion of the magistrate." The penalty for the

third offence was made death, and all officers were commanded to "take

diligent suit and inquisition" to prevent the celebration of the

Catholic rite. In reality, persecution was extremely mild, simply

because there was hardly any resistance. Scarcely three Catholic

martyrs can be named, and there was no Pilgrimage of Grace. This is

all the more remarkable in that probably three-fourths of the people

were still Catholic. The Reformation, like most other revolutions, was

the work not of the majority, but of that part of the people that had

the energy and intelligence to see most clearly and act most strongly.

For the first time in Scotch history a great issue was submitted to a

public opinion sufficiently developed to realize its importance. The

great choice was made not by counting heads but by weighing character.

The burgher class having seized the reins of government proceeded to

use them in the interests of their kirk. The prime duty of the state

was asserted to be the maintenance of the true religion. Ministers

were paid by the government. Almost any act of government might be

made the subject of interference by the church, for Knox's profession,

"with the policy, mind {364} us to meddle no further than it hath

religion mixed in it," was obviously an elastic and self-imposed

limitation.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

The character of the kirk was that of a democratic, puritanical

theocracy. The real rulers of it, and through it of the state, were

the ministers and elders elected by the people. The democracy of the

kirk consisted in the rise of most of these men from the lower ranks of

the people; its theocracy in the claim of these men, once established

in Moses' seat, to interpret the commands of God. "I see," said Queen

Mary, after a conversation with Knox, "that my subjects shall obey you

rather than me." "Madam," replied Knox, "my study is that both princes

and people shall obey God"--but, of course, the voice of the pulpit was

the voice of God. As a contemporary put it: "Knox is king; what he

wills obeyit is." Finally the kirk was a tyranny, as a democracy may

well be. In life, in manners, in thought, the citizen was obliged,

under severe social penalty, to conform exactly to a very narrow

standard.

[Sidenote: Queen Mary in Scotland, August 19, 1561]

When Queen Mary, a widow eighteen years old, landed in Scotland, she

must have been aware of the thorny path she was to tread. It is

impossible not to pity her, the spoiled darling of the gayest court of

Europe, exposed to the bleak skies and bleaker winds of doctrines at

Edinburgh. Endowed with high spirit, courage, no little cleverness and

much charm, she might have mastered the situation had her character or

discretion equaled her intellect and beauty. But, thwarted, nagged and

bullied by men whose religion she hated, whose power she feared and

whose low birth she despised, she became more and more reckless in the

pursuit of pleasure until she was tangled in a network of vice and

crime, and delivered helpless into the hands of her enemies.

{365} Her true policy, and the one which she began to follow, was

marked out for her by circumstances. Scotland was to her but the

stepping-stone to the throne of England. As Elizabeth's next heir she

might become queen either through the death of the reigning sovereign,

or as the head of a Catholic rebellion. At first she prudently decided

to wait for the natural course of events, selecting as her secretary of

state Maitland, "the Scottish Cecil," a staid politician bent on

keeping friends with England. But at last growing impatient, she

compromised herself in the Catholic plots and risings of the

disaffected southerners.

So, while aspiring to three crowns, Mary showed herself incapable of

keeping even the one she had. Not religion but her own crimes and

follies caused her downfall, but it was over religion that the first

clash with her subjects came. She would have liked to restore

Catholicism, though this was not her first object, for she would have

been content to be left in the private enjoyment of her own worship.

Even on this the stalwarts of the kirk looked askance. Knox preached

as Mary landed that one mass was more terrible to him than ten thousand

armed invaders. Mary sent for him, hoping to win the hard man by a

display of feminine and queenly graciousness. [Sidenote: August

1561-December 1563] In all he had five interviews with her,

picturesquely described by himself. On his side there were long, stern

sermons on the duties of princes and the wickedness of idolatry, all

richly illustrated with examples drawn from the sacred page. On her

side there was "howling together with womanly weeping," "more howling

and tears above that the matter did require," "so many tears that her

chamber-boy could scarce get napkins enough to dry her eyes." With

absurdly unconscious offensiveness and egotism Knox began acquaintance

with his sovereign by remarking that he was as well {366} content to

live under her as Paul under Nero. Previously he had maintained that

the government was set up to control religion; now he informed Mary

that "right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly

princes but from the Eternal God alone." "'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that

subjects, having power, may resist their princes?' 'If princes exceed

their bounds, madam, they may be resisted and even deposed,'" replied

Knox. Mary's marriage was the most urgent immediate question of

policy. When Knox took the liberty of discussing it with her she burst

out: "What have you to do with my marriage? Or what are you within

this commonwealth?" "A subject born within the same," superbly

retorted the East Lothian peasant, "and though neither earl, lord nor

baron, God has made me a profitable member."

[Sidenote: Marriage with Darnley, July 1565]

Determined, quite excusably, to please herself rather than her advisers

in the choice of a husband, Mary selected her cousin Henry Stuart Lord

Darnley; a "long lad" not yet twenty. The marriage was celebrated in

July, 1565; the necessary papal dispensation therefor was actually

drawn up on September 25 but was thoughtfully provided with a false

date as of four months earlier. Almost from the first the marriage was

wretchedly unhappy. The petulant boy insisted on being treated as

king, whereas Mary allowed him only "his due." Darnley was jealous,

probably with good cause, of his wife's Italian secretary, David

Riccio, and murdered him in Mary's presence; [Sidenote: March 9, 1566]

"an action worthy of all praise," pontificated Knox.

With this crime begins in earnest that sickening tale of court intrigue

and blackest villainy that has commonly passed as the then history of

Scotland. To revenge her beloved secretary Mary plotted with a new

paramour, the Earl of Bothwell, an able soldier, a {367} nominal

Protestant and an evil liver. On the night of February 9-10, 1567, the

house of Kirk o' Field near Edinburgh where Darnley was staying and

where his wife had but just left him, was blown up by gunpowder and

later his dead body was found near by. Public opinion at once laid the

crime at the right doors, and it did not need Mary's hasty marriage

with Bothwell [Sidenote: Marriage with Bothwell, May 15, 1567] to

confirm the suspicion of her complicity.

The path of those opposed to the queen was made easier by the fact that

she now had an heir, James, [Sidenote: James VI, June 19, 1566] of

Scotland the sixth and afterwards of England the first. The temper of

the people of Edinburgh was indicated by the posting up of numerous

placards accusing Bothwell and Mary. One of these was a banner on

which was painted a little boy kneeling and crowned, and thereon the

legend: "Avenge the death of my father!" Deeds followed words;

[Sidenote: July 16] Parliament compelled the queen under threat of

death to abdicate in favor of her son and to appoint her half-brother,

the Earl of Moray, regent. At the coronation of the infant king Knox

preached. [Sidenote: July 29] A still more drastic step was taken

when Parliament declared Mary guilty of murder [Sidenote: December 15]

and formally deposed her from the throne. That Mary really was guilty

in the fullest degree there can be no reasonable doubt. An element of

mystery has been added to the situation by a dispute over the

genuineness of a series of letters and poems purporting to have been

written by Mary to Bothwell and known collectively as the Casket

Letters. They were discovered in a suspiciously opportune way by her

enemies. The originals not being extant, some historians have regarded

them in whole or in part as forgeries, but Robertson, Ranke, Froude,

Andrew Lang and Pollard accept them as genuine. This is my opinion,

but it seems to me that the fascination of {368} mystery has lent the

documents undue importance. Had they never been found Mary's guilt

would have been established by circumstantial evidence.

Mary was confined for a short time in the castle of Lochleven, but

contrived to escape. As she approached Glasgow she risked a battle,

[Sidenote: May, 1568] but her troops were defeated and she fled to

England. Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and

finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held

concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not

suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary.

Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against

Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact

that she did everything possible to disgrace herself more deeply than

ever, such as pensioning the assassin of her brother Moray, her

sufferings made her the martyr of sentimentalists, and pieces of

embroidery or other possessions of the beautiful queen have been handed

down as the precious relics of a saint.[2]

All the murderous intrigues just narrated contributed thoroughly to

disgrace the Catholic and royalist party. The revolution had left

society dissolved, full of bloodthirsty and false men. But though the

Protestants had their share of such villains, they also had the one

consistent and public-spirited element in the kingdom, namely Knox and

his immediate followers. Moray was a man rather above the average

respectability and he confirmed the triumph of Protestantism in the

Lowlands in the few short years preceding his assassination in January,

1570. But by this time the revolution had been so firmly accomplished

that nothing could shake it. The deposition of a queen, though {369} a

defiance of all the Catholic powers and of all the royalist sentiment

of Europe, had succeeded. The young king was brought up a Protestant,

and his mind was so thoroughly turned against his mother that he

acquiesced without a murmur in her execution. At last peace and

security smiled upon North Britain. [Sidenote: Preparation for union

with England] The coming event of the union with England cast its

beneficent shadow over the reign of Elizabeth's successor.

[Sidenote: Absolution]

The Reformation ran the same course as in England earlier; one is

almost tempted to hypostatize it and say that it took the bit between

its teeth and ran away with its riders. Actually, the man cast for the

rôle of Henry VIII was James VI; the slobbering pedant without drawing

the sword did what his abler ancestors could not do after a life-time

of battle. He made himself all but absolute, and this, demonstrably,

as head of the kirk.

In 1584 Parliament passed a series of statutes known as the Black Acts,

putting the bodies and souls of the Scotch under the yoke of the king,

who was now pope as well. In 1587 the whole property of the

pre-Reformation church, with some trifling exceptions, was confiscated

and put at the king's disposition. As in England, so here, the lands

of abbeys and of prelates was thrown to new men of the pushing,

commercial type. Thus was founded a landed aristocracy with interests

distinct from the old barons and strong in supporting both king and

Reformation.

[Sidenote: Reaction in the kirk, 1592]

It is true that this condition was but temporary. Just as in England

later the Parliament and the Puritans called the crown to account, so

in Scotland the kirk continued to administer drastic advice to the

monarch and finally to put direct legal pressure upon him. The Black

Acts were abrogated by Parliament in 1592 and from that time forth

ensued a struggle between the {370} king and the presbyteries which, in

the opinion of the former, agreed as well together as God and the

devil. Still more after his accession to the English throne James came

to prefer the episcopal form of church government as more subservient,

and to act on the maxim, "no bishop, no king."

[1] Could he have been David Borthwick or David Lyndsay? See Luther's

letters and _Dictionary of National Biography_.

[2] Such a piece of embroidery has been kept in my mother's family from

that day to this.

{371}

CHAPTER VIII

THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

SECTION 1. ITALY

It is sometimes so easy to see, after the event, why things should have

taken just the course they did take, that it may seem remarkable that

political foresight is so rare. It is probable, however, that the

study of history not only illumines many things, and places them in

their true perspective, but also tends to simplify too much,

overemphasizing, to our minds, the elements that finally triumphed and

casting those that succumbed into the shadow.

[Sidenote: Italy]

However this may be, Italy of the sixteenth century appears to offer an

unusually clear case of a logical sequence of effects due to previously

ascertainable causes. That Italy should toy with the Reformation

without accepting it, that she should finally suppress it and along

with it much of her own spiritual life, seems to be entirely due to her

geographical, political and cultural condition at the time when she

felt the impact of the new ideas.

In all these respects, indeed, there was something that might at first

blush have seemed favorable to the Lutheran revolt. Few lands were

more open to German and Swiss influences than was their transalpine

neighbor. Commercially, Italy and Germany were united by a thousand

bonds, and a constant influx of northern travellers, students, artists,

officials and soldiers, might be supposed to carry with them the

contagion of the new ideas. Again, the lack of political unity might

be supposed, as in Germany, so in Italy, {372} to facilitate sectional

reformation. Finally, the Renaissance, with its unparalleled freedom

of thought and its strong anti-clerical bias, would at least insure a

fair hearing for innovations in doctrine and ecclesiastical ideals.

And yet, as even contemporaries saw, there were some things which

weighed far more heavily in the scale of Catholicism than did those

just mentioned in the scale of Protestantism. In the first place the

autonomy of the political divisions was more apparent than real. Too

weak and too disunited to offer resistance to any strong foreign power,

contended for by the three greatest, Italy became gradually more and

more a Spanish dependency. After Pavia [Sidenote: 1525] and the treaty

of Cateau-Cambrésis [Sidenote: 1529] French influence was reduced to a

threat rather than a reality. Naples had long been an appendage of the

Spanish crown; Milan was now wrested from the French, and one after

another most of the smaller states passed into Spain's "sphere of

influence." The strongest of all the states, the papal dominions,

became in reality, if not nominally, a dependency of the emperor after

the sack of Rome. [Sidenote: 1527] Tuscany, Savoy and Venetia

maintained a semblance of independence, but Savoy was at that time

hardly Italian. Venice had passed the zenith of her power, and

Florence, even under her brilliant Duke Cosimo de' Medici [Sidenote:

Cosimo de' Medici, 1537-1574] was amenable to the pressure of the

Spanish soldier and the Spanish priest.

Enormous odds were thrown against the Reformers because Italy was the

seat of the papacy. In spite of all hatred of Roman morals and in

spite of all distrust of Roman doctrine, this was a source of pride and

of advantage of the whole country. As long as tribute flowed from all

Western Europe, as long as kings and emperors kissed the pontiff's toe,

Rome was still in a sense the capital of Christendom. An example of

how {373} the papacy was both served and despised has been left us by

the Florentine statesman and historian [Sidenote: Guiccidardini,

1483-1540] Guiccidardini: "So much evil cannot be said of the Roman

curia," he wrote, "that more does not deserve to be said of it, for it

is an infamy, an example of all the shame and wickedness of the world."

He might have been supposed to be ready to support any enemy of such an

institution, but what does he say?

No man dislikes more than do I the ambition, avarice

and effeminacy of the priests, not only because these

vices are hateful in themselves but because they are

especially unbecoming to men who have vowed a life

dependent upon God. . . . Nevertheless, my employment

with several popes has forced me to desire their greatness

for my own advantage. But for this consideration I

should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself

from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly understood,

but to put this gang of criminals under restraint,

so that they might live either without vices or without power.

From this precious text we learn much of the inner history of

contemporary Italy. As far as the Italian mind was liberated in

religion it was atheistic, as far as it was reforming it went no

further than rejection of the hierarchy. The enemies to be dreaded by

Rome were, as the poet Luigi Alamanni wrote, [Sidenote: Alamanni,

1495-1556] not Luther and Germany, but her own sloth, drunkenness,

avarice, ambition, sensuality and gluttony.

The great spiritual factor that defeated Protestantism in Italy was not

Catholicism but the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Renaissance vs.

Reformation] Deeply imbued with the tincture of classical learning,

naturally speculative and tolerant, the Italian mind had already

advanced, in its best representatives, far beyond the intellectual

stage of the Reformers. The hostility of the Renaissance to the

Reformation was a deep and subtle antithesis of the interests of this

world {374} and of the next. It is notable that whereas some

philosophical minds, like that of the brilliant Olympia Morata, who had

once been completely skeptical, later came under the influence of

Luther, there was not one artist of the first rank, not one of the

greatest poets, that seems to have been in the least attracted by him.

A few minor poets, like Folengo, [Sidenote: Folengo, 1491-1544] showed

traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were bitterly hostile.

[Sidenote: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic

world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire

dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto

had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had

overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology,

"because when the mind soars up to see God it is no wonder that, it

falls down sometimes blind and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures

as a devastating monster.

{375} But there was a third reason why the Reformation could not

succeed in Italy, and that was that it could not catch the ear of the

common people. If for the churchman it was a heresy, and for the

free-thinker a superstition, for the "general public" of ordinarily

educated persons it was an aristocratic fad. Those who did embrace its

doctrines and read its books, and they were not a few of the

second-rate humanists, cherished it as their fathers had cherished the

neo-Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, as an esoteric philosophy. So

little inclined were they to bring their faith to the people that they

preferred to translate the Bible into better Greek or classical Latin

rather than into the vulgar Tuscan. And just at the moment when it

seemed as if a popular movement of some sort might result from the

efforts of the Reformers, or in spite of them, came the Roman

Inquisition and nipped the budding plant.

[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]

But between the levels of the greatest intellectual leaders and that of

the illiterate masses, there was a surprising number of groups of men

and women more or less tinctured with the doctrines of the north. And

yet, even here, one must add that their religion was seldom pure

Lutheranism or Calvinism; it was Christianized humanism. There was the

brilliant woman Vittoria Colonna, who read with rapture the doctrine of

justification by faith, but who remained a conforming Catholic all her

life. There was Ochino, the general of the Capuchins, whose defection

caused a panic at Rome but who remained, nevertheless, an independent

rather than an orthodox Protestant. Of like quality were Peter Martyr

Vermigli, an exile for his faith, and Jerome Bolsec, a native of France

but an inhabitant of Ferrara, whence he took to Geneva an eccentric

doctrine that caused much trouble to Calvin. Finally, it was perfectly

in accordance with the Italian genius that the most radical of

Protestant dissenters, the unitarians Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, should

have been born in Siena.

Among the little nests of Lutherans or Christian mystics the most

important were at Venice, Ferrara and Naples. As early as 1519

Luther's books found their way to Venice, and in 1525 one of the

leading canon lawyers in the city wrote an elaborate refutation of

them, together with a letter to the Reformer himself, informing him

that his act of burning the papal decretals was worse than that of

Judas in betraying, or of Pilate in crucifying, Christ. The first

sufferer for the new religion was Jerome Galateo. [Sidenote: 1530]

Nevertheless, the new church waxed strong, and many were executed for

their opinions. A correspondence of the brethren with Bucer and Luther

has been preserved. In one letter they deeply deplore the schisms on

the doctrine of the eucharist as hurtful to their cause. The {376}

famous artist Lorenzo Lotto [Sidenote: 1540] was employed to paint

pictures of Luther and his wife, probably copies of Cranach. The

appearance of the Socinians about 1550, and the mutual animosity of the

several sects, including the Anabaptist, was destructive. Probably

more fatal was the disaster of the Schmalkaldic war and the complete

triumph of the emperor. The Inquisition finished the work of crushing

out what remained of the new doctrines.

[Sidenote: Naples]

That Naples became a focus of Protestantism was due mainly to John de

Valdes, a deeply religious Spaniard. From his circle went out a

treatise on justification entitled _The Benefit of Christ's Death_, by

Benedict of Mantua, of which no less than 40,000 copies were sold, for

it was the one reforming work to enjoy popularity rivalling that of

Luther and Erasmus. Influenced by Valdes, also, Bartholomew Forzio

translated Luther's _Address to the German Nobility_ into Italian.

[Sidenote: Ferrara]

At the court of Ferrara the duchess, Renée de France, gathered a little

circle of Protestants. Calvin himself spent some time here, and his

influence, together with the high protection of his patroness, made the

place a fulcrum against Rome. Isabella d'Este, originally of Ferrara

and later Marchioness of Mantua, one of the brilliant women of the

Renaissance, for a while toyed with the fashionable theology. Cardinal

Bembo saw at her castle at Mantua paintings of Erasmus and Luther.

[Sidenote: 1537] One of the courtly poets of Northern Italy, Francis

Berni, bears witness to the good repute of the Protestants. In his

_Rifacimento_ of Boiardo's _Orlando Inamorato_, he wrote: "Some rascal

hypocrites snarl between their teeth, 'Freethinker! Lutheran!' but

Lutheran means, you know, good Christian."

[Sidenote: Roman prelates affected by Luther]

The most significant sign of the times, and the most ominous for the

papacy, was that among those affected by the leaven of Lutheranism were

many of the leading {377} luminaries in the bosom of the church. That

the Florentine chronicler Bartholomew Cerratani expressed his hope that

Luther's distinguished morals, piety and learning should reform the

curia was bad enough; that the papal nuncio Vergerio, after being sent

on a mission to Wittenberg, should go over to the enemy, was worse;

that cardinals like Contarini and Pole should preach justification by

faith and concede much that the Protestants asked, was worst of all.

"No one now passes at Rome," wrote Peter Anthony Bandini about 1540,

"as a cultivated man or a good courtier who does not harbor some

heretical opinions." Paul Sarpi, the eminent historian of Trent,

reports that Luther's arguments were held to be unanswerable at Rome,

but that he was resisted in order that authority might be uphold. For

this statement he appeals to a diary of Francis Chieregato, an eminent

ecclesiastic who died on December 6, 1539. As the diary has not been

found, Lord Acton rejects the assertion, believing that Sarpi's word

cannot be taken unsupported. But a curious confirmation of Sarpi's

assertion, [Sidenote: Sarpi's assertion] and one that renders it

acceptable, is found in Luther's table talk. Speaking on February 22,

1538, he says that he has heard from Rome that it was there believed to

be impossible to refute him until St. Paul had been deposed. Ho

regarded this as a signal testimony to the truth of his doctrines; to

us it is valuable only as an evidence of Roman opinion. It is not too

much to say that at about that time the most distinguished Italian

prelates were steering for Wittenberg and threatened to take Rome with

them. How they failed is the history of the Counter-reformation.

SECTION 2. THE PAPACY. 1522-1590

Nothing can better indicate the consternation caused at Rome by the

appearance of the Lutheran revolt than {378} the fact that for the

first time in 144 years and for the last time in history the cardinals

elected as supreme pontiff a man who was not an Italian, Adrian of

Utrecht. [Sidenote: Adrian VI, 1522-September 1523] After teaching

theology at Louvain he had been appointed tutor to Prince Charles and,

on the accession of his pupil to the Spanish throne was created Bishop

of Tortosa, and shortly thereafter cardinal and Inquisitor General of

Spain. While in this country he distinguished himself equally by the

justness of his administration and by his bitter hatred of Luther,

against whom he wrote several letters both to his imperial master and

to his old colleagues at Louvain.

[Sidenote: December 1521]

The death of Leo X was followed by an unusually long conclave, on

account of the even balance of parties. At last, despairing of

agreement, and feeling also that extraordinary measures were needed to

meet the exigencies of the situation, the cardinals, in January,

offered the tiara to Adrian, who, alone among modern popes, kept his

baptismal name while in office. The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish

much was due largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty

months, and still more to the invincible corruption he found at Rome.

His really high sense of duty awakened no response save fear and hatred

among the courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore the

ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he

made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly

confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole

evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was

assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest

crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere,

phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their tongue nor their

ways.

{379} Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank into his grave,

a good pope unwept and unhonored as few bad popes have ever been. On

his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme

misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like

judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a

monument to Adrian's physician and labeled it, "Liberatori Patriae."

[Sidenote: Clement VII, 1523-34]

The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly

marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century. In

almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a

contrast, to his predecessor. In no case was this more true than in

the election of 1523. Deciding that if Adrian's methods were necessary

to save the church the medicine was worse than the disease, the

cardinals lost no time in raising another Medici to the throne. Like

all of his race, Clement VII was a patron of art and literature, and

tolerant of abuses. Personally moral and temperate, he cared little

save for an easy life and the advancement of the Three Balls. He began

that policy, which nearly proved fatal to the church, of treating the

Protestants with alternate indulgence and severity. But for himself

the more immediate trouble came not from the enemy of the church but

from its protector. Though Adrian was an old officer of Charles V, it

was really in the reign of Clement that the process began by which

first Italy, then the papacy, then the whole church was put under the

Spanish yoke.

[Sidenote: Spanish influence, 1525-6]

After Pavia and the treaty of Madrid had eliminated French influence,

Charles naturally felt his power and naturally intended to have it

respected even by the pope. Irritated by Clement's perpetual deceit

and intrigue with France, Charles addressed to him, in 1526, a document

which Ranke calls the most {380} formidable ever used by any Catholic

prince to a pope during the century, containing passages "of which no

follower of Luther need be ashamed."

[Sidenote: Sack of Rome, May and September 1527]

Rather to threaten the pope than to make war on him, Charles gathered a

formidable army of German and Spanish soldiers in the north under the

command of his general Frundsberg. All the soldiers were restless and

mutinous for want of pay, and in addition to this a powerful motive

worked among the German landsknechts. Many of them were Lutheran and

looked to the conquest of Rome as the triumph of their cause. As they

loudly demanded to be lead against Antichrist, Frundsberg found that

his authority was powerless to stop them. [Sidenote: March 16, 1527]

When he died of rage and mortification the French traitor Charles,

Constable of Bourbon, was appointed by the emperor in his place, and,

finding there was nothing else to do, led the army against Rome and

promised the soldiers as much booty as they could take. Twice, in May

and September, the city was put to the horrors of a sack, with all the

atrocities of murder, theft and rapine almost inseparable from war. In

addition to plundering, the Lutherans took particular pleasure in

desecrating the objects of veneration to the Catholics. Many an image

and shrine was destroyed, while Luther was acclaimed pope by his

boisterous champions. But far away on the Elbe he heard of the sack

and expressed his sorrow for it.

The importance of the sack of Rome, like that of other dramatic events,

is apt to be exaggerated. It has been called the end of the

Renaissance and the beginning of the Catholic reaction. It was neither

the one nor the other, but only one incident in the long, stubborn

process of the Hispanization of Italy and the church. For centuries no

emperor had had so much power in Italy as had Charles. With Naples and

{381} Milan were now linked Siena and Genoa under his rule; the states

of the church were virtually at his disposal, and even Florence, under

its hereditary duke, Alexander de' Medici, was for a while under the

control of the pope and through him, of Charles.

Nor did the fall of the holy city put the fear of God into the hearts

of the prelates for more than a moment. The Medici, Clement, who never

sold his soul but only pawned it from time to time, without entirely

abandoning the idea of reform, indefinitely postponed it.

Procrastinating, timid, false, he was not the man to deal with serious

abuses. He toyed with the idea of a council but when, on the mere

rumor that a council was to be called the prices of all salable offices

dropped in a panic, he hesitated. Moreover he feared the council would

be used by the emperor to subordinate him even in spiritual matters.

Perhaps he meant well, but abuses were too lucrative to be lightly

affronted. As to Lutheranism, Clement was completely misinformed and

almost completely indifferent. While he and the emperor were at odds

it grew mightily. Here as elsewhere he was irresolute; his

pontificate, as a contemporary wrote, was "one of scruples,

considerations and discords, of buts and ifs and thens and moreovers,

and plenty of words without effect."

[Sidenote: Paul III, 1534-49]

The pontificate of Paul III marks the turning point in the Catholic

reaction. Under him the council of Trent was at last opened; the new

orders, especially the Jesuits, were formed, and such instrumentalities

as the Inquisition and Index of prohibited books put on a new footing.

Paul III, a Farnese from the States of the Church, owed his election

partly to his strength of character, partly to the weakness of his

health, for the cardinals liked frequent vacancies in the Holy See.

Cautious and choleric, prolix and stubborn, he had a real desire for

reform and an earnest wish to avoid {382} quarrels with either of the

great powers that menaced him, the emperor and France. The reforming

spirit of the pope showed itself in the appointment of several men of

the highest character to the cardinalate, among them Gaspar Contarini

and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. In other cases, however, the

exigencies of politics induced the nomination of bad men, such as Del

Monte and David Beaton. At the same time a commission was named to

recommend practical reforms. The draft for a bull they presented for

this purpose was rejected by the Consistory, but some of their

recommendations, such as the prohibition of the Roman clergy to visit

taverns, theaters and gambling dens, were adopted.

[Sidenote: May, 1535 _Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum

praelatorum_]

A second commission of nine ecclesiastics of high character, including

John Peter Caraffa, Contarini, Pole and Giberti, was created to make a

comprehensive report on reform. The important memorial they drew up

fully exposed the prevalent abuses. The root of all they found in the

exaggeration of the papal power of collation and the laxity with which

it was used. Not only were morally unworthy men often made bishops and

prelates, but dispensations for renunciation of benefices, for

absenteeism and for other hurtful practices were freely sold. The

commission demanded drastic reform of these abuses as well as of the

monastic orders, and called for the abolition of the venal exercise of

spiritual authority by legates and nuncios. But the reform memorial,

excellent and searching as it was, led to nothing. At most it was of

some use as a basis of reforms made by the Council of Trent later. But

for the moment it only rendered the position of the church more

difficult. The reform of the Dataria, for example, the office which

sold graces, privileges, indults, dispensations and benefices, was

{383} considered impossible because half of the papal revenue, or

110,000 ducats annually, came from it. Nor could the fees of the

Penitentiary be abolished for fear of bankruptcy, though in 1540 they

were partially reduced. [Sidenote: 1538] The most obvious results of

the Consilium was to put another weapon into the hands of the

Lutherans. Published by an unauthorized person, it was at once seized

upon by the Reformers as proof of the hopeless depravity of the Curia.

So dangerous did it prove to simple-minded Catholics that it was

presently put on the Index!

Paul's diplomacy tried to play off the Empire against France and to

divert the attention of both to a crusade against the Turk. Hoping to

advance the cause of the church by means of the war declared by Charles

V on the Schmalkaldic League, the pope, in return for a subsidy,

exacted a declaration in the treaty, that the reason of the war was

religious and the occasion for it the refusal of the Protestants to

recognize the Council of Trent's authority. But when Charles was

victor he used his advantage only to strengthen his own prerogative,

not effectively to suppress heresy. Paul now dreaded the emperor more

than he did the Protestants and his position was not made easier by the

threat of Charles to come to terms with the Lutherans did Paul succeed

in rousing France against him. In fact, with all his squirming, Paul

III only sank deeper into the Spanish vassalage, while the championship

of the church passed from his control into that of new agencies that he

had created.

[Sidenote: Julius III, 1550-55]

It was perhaps an effort to free the Holy See from the Spanish yoke

that led the cardinals to raise to the purple, as Julius III, Cardinal

John Mary Ciocchi del Monte who as one of the presidents of the

oecumenical council had distinguished himself by his opposition to

{384} the emperor. Nevertheless his pontificate marked a relaxation of

the church's effort, for policy or strength to pursue reform he had

none.

[Sidenote: Marcellus II, April 9-May 1, 1555]

Marcellus II, who was pope for twenty-two days, would hardly be

remembered save for the noble Mass of Pope Marcellus dedicated to him

by Palestrina.

With the elevation of Cardinal Caraffa to the tiara Peter's keys

[Sidenote: Paul IV, 1555-9] were once more restored to strong hands and

a reforming heart. The founder of the Theatines was a hot-blooded

Neapolitan still, in spite of his seventy-nine years, hale and hearty.

Among the reforms he accomplished were some regulations relating to the

residence of bishops and some rules for the bridling of Jews, usurers,

prostitutes, players and mountebanks. But he was unable to reform

himself. He advanced his young kinsmen shamelessly to political

office. His jealousy of the Jesuits, in whom he saw a rival to his own

order, not only caused him to neglect to use them but made him put them

in a very critical position. Nor did he dare to summon again the

council that had been prorogued, for fear that some stronger power

should use it against himself. He chafed under the Spanish yoke,

coming nearer to a conflict with Charles V and his son Philip II than

any pope had ventured to do. He even thought of threatening Philip

with the Inquisition, but was restrained by prudence. In his purpose

of freeing Italy from foreign domination he accomplished nothing

whatever.

[Sidenote: Pius IV, 1560-5]

Pius IV was a contrast to the predecessor whom he hated. John Angelo

Medici, of Milan, not connected with the Florentine family, was a

cheerful, well-wishing, beneficent man, genial and fond of life, a son

of the Renaissance, a patron of art and letters. The choice of a name

often expresses the ideals and tendencies of a pope; that of Pius was

chosen perhaps in imitation {385} of Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius

Piccolomini, the most famous humanist to sit on the fisherman's throne.

And yet the spirit of the times no longer allowed the gross

licentiousness of the earlier age, and the cause of reform progressed

not a little under the diplomatic guidance of the Milanese. In the

first place, doubtless from personal motives, he made a fearful example

of the kinsmen of his predecessor, four of whom he executed chiefly for

the reason that they had been advanced by papal influence. This

salutary example practically put an end to nepotism; at least the

unfortunate nephews of Paul IV were the last to aspire to independent

principalities solely on the strength of kinship to a pope.

[Sidenote: Reforms]

The demand for the continuation and completion of the general council,

which had become loud, was acceded to by Pius who thought, like the

American boss, that at times it was necessary to "pander to the public

conscience." The happy issue of the council, from his point of view,

in its complete submissiveness to the papal prerogative, led Pius to

emphasize the spiritual rather than the political claims of the

hierarchy. In this the church made a great gain, for, as the history

of the time shows plainly, in the game of politics the papacy could no

longer hold its own against the national states surrounding it. Pius

leaned heavily on Philip, for by this time Spain had become the

acknowledged champion of the church, but he was able to do so without

loss of prestige because of the gradual separation of the temporal from

the spiritual power.

Among his measures the most noteworthy was one regulating the powers of

the college of cardinals, while their exclusive right to elect the

pontiff was maintained against the pretensions of the council. The

best Catholic spirit of the time was represented in {386} Cardinal

Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, an excellent prelate who sought

to win back members of Christ to the fold by his good example, while he

did not disdain to use the harsher methods of persecution when

necessary. Among the amiable weaknesses of Pius was the belief,

inherited from a bygone age, that the Protestants might still be

reunited to the church by a few concessions, such as those of the

marriage of the clergy and the use of the cup by the laity.

[Sidenote: Pius V, 1566-72]

With Pius V a sterner spirit entered into the councils of the church.

The election of the Dominican and Chief Inquisitor Michael Ghislieri

was a triumph for the policy of Borromeo. His pitiless hatred of the

heretics hounded Catharine de' Medici against the Huguenots, and Philip

II against the Dutch. Contrary to the dictates of prudence and the

wishes of the greatest Catholic princes, he issued the bull deposing

Elizabeth. But he was severe to himself, an ascetic nicknamed for his

monkish narrowness "Friar Wooden-shoe" by the Roman populace. He

ruthlessly reformed the Italian clergy, meting out terrible punishments

to all sinners. Under his leadership Catholicism took the offensive in

earnest and accomplished much. His zeal won him the name of saint, for

he was the last of the Roman pontiffs to be canonized.

But the reign of sainthood coupled with absolutism is apt to grow

irksome, and it was with relief that the Romans hailed the election of

Hugo Buoncompagno as Gregory XIII. [Sidenote: Gregory XIII, 1572-85]

He did little but follow out, somewhat weakly, the paths indicated by

his predecessors. So heavily did he lean on Spain that he was called

the chaplain of Philip, but, as the obligations were mutual, and the

Catholic king came also to depend more and more upon the spiritual arms

wielded by the papacy, it might just as well have been said that Philip

was the executioner employed by Gregory. The {387} mediocrity of his

rule did not prevent notable achievement by the Jesuits in the cause of

the church. His reform of the calendar will be described more fully

elsewhere.

Gregory XIII offers an opportunity to measure the moral standard of the

papacy after half a century of reform. His policy was guided largely

by his ruling passion, love of a natural son, born before he had taken

priest's orders, whom he made Gonfaloniere of the church and would have

advanced to still further preferment had not his advisers objected.

Gregory was the pope who thanked God "for the grace vouchsafed unto

Christendom" in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was also the pope

who praised and encouraged the plan for the assassination of

Elizabeth.[1]

[Sidenote: Sixtus V, 1585-90]

In the person of Sixtus V the spirit of Pius V returned to power.

Felix Peretti was a Franciscan and an Inquisitor, an earnest man and a

hard one. Like his predecessors pursuing the goal of absolutism, he

had an advantage over them in the blessing disguised as the disaster of

the Spanish Armada. From this time forward the papacy was forced to

champion its cause with the spiritual weapons at its command, and the

gain to it as a moral and religious power was enormous. In some ways

it assumed the primacy of Catholic Europe, previously usurped by Spain,

and attained an influence that it had not had since the Great Schism of

the fourteenth century.

The reforms of Sixtus are important rather for their comprehensive than

for their drastic quality. The whole machinery of the Curia was made

over, the routine of business being delegated to a number of standing

committees known as Congregations, such as the Congregation of

Ceremonies to watch over matters of precedence at the papal court, and

the Congregation {388} of the Consistory to prepare the work of the

Consistory. The number of cardinals was fixed at seventy. New

editions of the breviary and of the Index were carefully prepared. At

the same time the moral reforms of Trent were laxly carried out, for

while decrees enforcing them were promulgated by Sixtus with one hand,

with the other he sold dispensations and privileges.

[1] _Ante_, p. 338.

SECTION 3. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

While the popes were enjoying their _jus incorrigibilitatis_--as Luther

wittily expressed it--the church was going to rack and ruin. Had the

safety of Peter's boat been left to its captains, it would apparently

have foundered in the waves of schism and heresy. No such dangerous

enemy has ever attacked the church as that then issuing from her own

bosom. Neither the medieval heretics nor the modern philosophers have

won from her in so short a time such masses of adherents. Where

Voltaire slew his thousands Luther slew his ten thousands, for Voltaire

appealed only to the intellect, Luther appealed to the conscience.

[Sidenote: Decline of Protestantism]

The extraordinary thing about the Protestant conquests was their sudden

end. Within less than fifty years the Scandinavian North, most of

Germany including Austria, parts of Hungary, Poland, most of

Switzerland, and Great Britain had declared for the "gospel." France

was divided and apparently going the same road; even in Italy there

were serious symptoms of disaffection. That within a single generation

the tide should be not only stopped but rolled back is one of the most

dramatic changes of fortune in history. The only country which

Protestantism gained after 1560 was the Dutch Republic. Large parts of

Germany and Poland were won back to the church, and Catholicism made

safe in all the Latin countries.

{389} [Sidenote: Spanish revival]

The spirit that accomplished this work was the spirit of Spain. More

extraordinary than the rapid growth of her empire was the conquest of

Europe by her ideals. The character of the Counter-reformation was

determined by her genius. It was not, as it started to be in Italy, a

more or less inwardly Christianized Renaissance. It was a distinct and

powerful religious revival, and one that showed itself, as many others

have done, by a mighty reaction. Medievalism was restored, largely by

medieval methods, the general council, the emphasis on tradition and

dogma, coercion of mind and body, and the ministrations of a monastic

order, new only in its discipline and effectiveness, a reduplication of

the old mendicant orders in spirit and ideal.

[Sidenote: Preparation for calling a council]

The Oecumenical Council was so double-edged a weapon that it is not

remarkable that the popes hesitated to grasp it in their war with the

heretic. They had uncomfortable memories of Constance and Basle, of

the election and deposition of popes and of decrees limiting their

prerogatives. And, moreover, the council was the first authority

invoked by the heretic himself. Adrian might have been willing to risk

such a synod, but before he had time to call one, his place was taken

by the vacillating and pusillanimous Clement. Perpetually toying with

the idea he yet allowed the pressure of his courtiers and the

difficulties of the political situation--for France was opposed to the

council as an imperial scheme--indefinitely to postpone the summons.

The more serious-minded Paul III found another lion in his path. He

for the first time really labored to summon the general synod, but he

found that the Protestants had now changed their position and would no

longer consent to recognize its authority under any conditions to which

he could possibly assent. Though {390} his nuncio Vergerio received in

Germany and even in Wittenberg a cordial welcome, it was soon

discovered that the ideas of the proper constitution of the council

entertained by the two parties were irreconciliable. Fundamentally

each wanted a council in which its own predominance should be assured.

The Schmalkaldic princes, on the advice of their theologians, asked for

a free German synod in which they should have a majority vote, and in

this they were supported by Francis I and Henry VIII. Naturally no

pope could consent to any such measures; under these discouraging

circumstances, the opening of the council was continually postponed,

and in place of it the emperor held a series of religious colloquies

that only served to make the differences of the two parties more

prominent.

[Sidenote: Summons of Council, November 19, 1544]

After several years of negotiation the path was made smooth and the

bull _Laetare Hierusalem_ summoned a general synod to meet at Trent on

March 15, 1545, and assigned it three tasks: (1) The pacification of

religious disputes by doctrinal decisions; (2) the reform of

ecclesiastical abuses; (3) the discussion of a crusade against the

infidel. Delay still interfered with the opening of the assembly,

which did not take place until December 15, 1545.

[Sidenote: First period, 1545-7]

The council was held at three separate periods with long intervals.

The first period was 1545-7, the second 1551-2, the third 1562-3. The

city of Trent was chosen in order to yield to the demand for a German

town while at the same time selecting that one nearest to Italy, for

the pope was determined to keep the action of the synod under control.

Two measures were adopted to insure this end, the initiative and

presidency of the papal legates and packing the membership. The

faculties to be granted the legates were already decided upon in 1544;

these lieutenants were to be, according to Father Paul Sarpi, angels of

peace to preside, make {391} all necessary regulations, and publish

them "according to custom." The phrase that the council should decide

on measures, "legatis proponentibus" was simply the constitutional

expression of the principal familiar in many governments, that the

legislative should act only on the initiative of the executive, thus

giving an immense advantage to the latter. The second means of

subordinating the council was the decision to vote by heads and not by

nations and to allow no proxies. This gave a constant majority to the

Italian prelates sent by the pope. So successful were these measures

that the French ambassador bitterly jested of the Holy Ghost coming to

Trent in the mailbags from Rome.

[Sidenote: Membership]

At the first session there were only thirty-four members entitled to

vote: four cardinals, four archbishops, twenty-one bishops and five

generals of orders. There were also present other personages,

including an ambassador from King Ferdinand, four Spanish secular

priests and a number of friars. The first question debated was the

precedence of dogma or reform. Regarding the council chiefly as an

instrument for condemning the heretics, the pope was in favor of taking

up dogma first. The emperor, on the other hand, wishing rather to

conciliate the Protestants and if possible to lure them back to the old

church, was in favor of starting with reform. The struggle, which was

carried on not so much on the floor of the synod as behind the members'

backs in the intrigues of courts, was decided by a compromise to the

effect that both dogma and reform should be taken up simultaneously.

But all enactments dealing with ecclesiastical irregularities were to

bear the proviso "under reservation of the papal authority."

[Sidenote: Dogmatic decrees]

The dogmatic decrees at Trent were almost wholly oriented by the

polemic against Protestantism. {392} Practically nothing was defined

save what had already been taken up in the Augsburg Confession or in

the writings of Calvin, of Zwingli and of the Anabaptists. Inevitably,

a spirit so purely defensive could not be animated by a primarily

philosophical interest. The guiding star was not a system but a

policy, and this policy was nothing more nor less than that of

re-establishing tradition. The practice of the church was the standard

applied; many an unhistorical assertion was made to justify it and many

a practice of comparatively recent growth was sanctioned by the

postulate that "it had descended from apostolic use." "By show of

antiquity they introduce novelty," was Bacon's correct judgment.

[Sidenote: Bible and tradition]

Quite naturally the first of the important dogmatic decrees was on the

basis of authority. The Protestants had acknowledged the Bible only;

over against them the Tridentine fathers declared for the Bible _and_

the tradition of the church. The canon of Scripture was different from

that recognized by the Protestants in that it included the Apocrypha.

[Sidenote: Justification]

After passing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical

instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took

up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for

some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might

irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope

that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How

deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of

the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions

of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a

fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation

they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted

one another with {393} plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's

beards. The decree as finally passed established the position that

faith and works together justify, and condemned the semi-Lutheran

doctrines of "duplicate justice" and imputed righteousness hitherto

held by such eminent theologians as Contarini and Cajetan.

Having accomplished this important work the council appeared to the

pope ready for dissolution. The protests of the emperor kept it

together for a few months longer, but an outbreak of the spotted fever

and the fear of a raid during the Schmalkaldic war, served as

sufficient excuses to translate the council to Bologna. [Sidenote:

March 1547] Though nothing was accomplished in this city the assembly

was not formally prorogued until September 13, 1549.

[Sidenote: Second period, 1551-2]

Under pressure from the emperor Pope Julius III convoked the synod for

a second time at Trent on May 1, 1551. The personnel was different.

The Jesuits Lainez and Salmeron were present working in the interests

of the papacy. No French clergy took part as Henry II was hostile.

The Protestants were required to send a delegation, which was received

on January 24, 1552. They presented a confession, but declined to

recognize the authority of a body in which they were not represented.

Several dogmatic decrees were passed on the sacraments, reasserting

transubstantiation and all the doctrines and usages of the church. A

few reform decrees were also passed, but before a great deal could be

accomplished the revolt of Maurice of Saxony put both emperor and

council in a precarious position and the latter was consequently

prorogued for a second time on April 28, 1552.

[Sidenote: Third period, 1562-3]

When, after ten long years, the council again convened at the command

of Pius IV, in January, 1562, it is extraordinary to see how little the

problems confronting it had changed. Not only was the struggle {394}

for power between pope and council and between pope and emperor still

going on, but hopes were still entertained in some quarters of

reconciling the schismatics. Pius invited all princes, whether

Catholic or heretical, to send delegates, but was rebuffed by some of

them. The argument was then taken up by the Emperor Ferdinand who sent

in an imposing demand for reforms, including the authorization of the

marriage of priests, communion in both kinds, the use of the vulgar

tongue in divine service, and drastic rules for the improvement of the

convents and of the papal courts.

[Sidenote: Jesuits present]

The contention over this bone among the fathers, now far more numerous

than in the earlier days, waxed so hot that for ten whole months no

session could be held. Mobs of the partisans of the various factions

fought in the streets and bitter taunts of "French diseases" and

"Spanish eruptions" were exchanged between them. For a time the

situation seemed inextricable and one cardinal prophesied the impending

downfall of the papacy. But in the nick of time to prevent such a

catastrophe the pope was able to send into the field the newly

recruited praetorian guards of the Society of Jesuits. Under the

command of Cardinal Morone these indefatigable zealots turned the flank

of the opposing forces partly by intrigue at the imperial court, partly

by skilful manipulation of debate. The emperor's mind was changed;

reforms demanded by him were dropped.

The questions actually taken up and settled were dogmatic ones, chiefly

concerning the sacrifice of the mass and the perpetuation of the

Catholic customs of communion in one kind, the celebration of masses in

honor of saints, the celebration of masses in which the priest only

communicates, the mixing of water with the wine, the prohibition of the

use of the vulgar tongue, and the sanction of masses for the dead.

Other {395} decrees amended the marriage laws, and enjoined the

preparation of an Index of prohibited books, of a catechism and of

standard editions of missal and breviary.

[Sidenote: Subjection to papacy]

How completely the council in its last estate was subdued to the will

of the pope is shown by its request that the decrees should all be

confirmed by him. This was done by Pius IV in the bull Benedictus

Deus. [Sidenote: January 26, 1564] Pius also caused to be prepared a

symbol known as the Tridentine Profession of Faith which was made

binding on all priests. Save that it was slightly enlarged in 1877 by

the pronouncement on Papal Infallibility, it stands to the present day.

[Sidenote: Reception of decrees]

The complete triumph of the papal claims was offset by the cool

reception which the decrees received in Catholic Europe. Only the

Italian states, Poland, Portugal and Savoy unreservedly recognized the

authority of all of them. Philip II, bigot as he was, preferred to

make his own rules for his clergy and recognized the laws of Trent with

the proviso "saving the royal rights." France sanctioned only the

dogmatic, not the practical decrees. The emperor never officially

recognized the work of the council at all. Nor were the governments

the only recalcitrants. According to Sarpi the body of German

Catholics paid no attention to the prescribed reforms and the council

was openly mocked in France as claiming an authority superior to that

of the apostles.

To Father Paul Sarpi, indeed, the most intelligent observer of the next

generation, the council seemed to have been a failure if not a fraud.

Its history he calls an Iliad of woes. The professed objects of the

council, healing the schism and asserting the episcopal power he thinks

frustrated, for the schism was made irreconciliable and the church

reduced to servitude.

But the judgment of posterity has reversed that of {396} the great

historian, [Sidenote: Constructive work] at least as far as the value

of the work done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is concerned. If

the church shut out the Protestants and recognized her limited domain,

she at least took appropriate measures to establish her rule over what

was left. Her power was now collected; her dogma was unified and made

consistent as opposed to the mutually diverse Protestant creeds. In

several points, indeed, where the opinion of the members was divided,

the words of the decrees were ambiguous, but as against the Protestants

they were distinct and so comprehensive as rather to supersede than to

supplement earlier standards.

Nor should the moral impulse of the council be underestimated,

ridiculed though it was by its opponents as if expressed in the maxim,

"si non caste, tamen caute." Sweeping decrees for urgent reforms were

passed, and above all a machinery set up to carry on the good work. In

providing for a catechism, for authoritative editions of the Vulgate,

breviary and other standard works, in regulating moot points, in

striking at lax discipline, the council did a lasting service to

Catholicism and perhaps to the world. Not the least of the practical

reforms was the provision for the opening of seminaries to train the

diocesan clergy. The first measure looking to this was passed in 1546;

Cardinal Pole at once began to act upon it, and a decree of the third

session [Sidenote: 1563] ordered that each diocese should have such a

school for the education of priests. The Roman seminary, opened two

years later, [Sidenote: 1565] was a model for subsequent foundations.

SECTION 4. THE COMPANY OF JESUS

If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reaction to medievalism it

was in part also a religious revival. If this was stimulated by the

Protestant {397} example, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of

Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more was it the answer

to a demand on the part of the church for an instrument with which to

combat the dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new worlds of

heathenism.

Great crises in the church have frequently produced new revivals of

monasticism. From Benedict to Bernard, from Bernard to Francis and

Dominic, from the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the

adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin Christianity.

Several new orders, [Sidenote: New monastic orders] all with more or less

in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth century. Under Leo

X there assembled at Rome a number of men united by the wish to renew

their spiritual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory of

Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration of Gaetano di Tiene

and John Peter Caraffa, arose the order of Theatines, [Sidenote: 1524] a

body of devoted priests, dressing not in a special garb but in ordinary

priest's robes, who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic

reformation. Their especial task was to educate the clergy.

The order of the Capuchins [Sidenote: c. 1526] was an offshoot of the

Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the early friars and

its members went about teaching the poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it

when its third vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flourished

and turned its energies especially against the heretics.

Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barnabites (1530), the

Somascians (1532), the Brothers of Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537),

only the common characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that

they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the salvation of the

individual soul but also the {398} amelioration of humanity was now their

purpose. Some of the orders devoted themselves to the education of

children, some to home missions or foreign missions, some to nursing the

sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. The evolution of monasticism

had already pointed the way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with

the organization of the Company of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Typical Jesuit]

The Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and

the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days

of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the

imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous,

obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the

blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the

advancement of his cause. The _Lettres Provinciales_ of Pascal first

stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily

immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has

brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand

they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order.

Let us neither praise nor blame, but seek to understand them.

[Sidenote: Loyola, c. 1493-1556]

In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever-lasting nay at Worms one

of his auditors was--or might have been for she was undoubtedly present

in the city--Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave John of

Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous young woman had been by a

former marriage the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his

court she had been known and worshipped by a young page of good family,

Iñigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as

he told later, for his lady "no duchess nor countess but one far higher"

and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that

this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to

other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of

a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors"

had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his

plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a

tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was

probably punished severely.

Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French

army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna.

Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May

23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was

badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it

broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off,

but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The

young man of about twenty-eight--the exact year of his birth is

unknown--found himself a cripple for life.

To while away the long hours of convalescence he asked for the romances

of chivalry but was unable to get them and read in their place legends of

the saints and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His imagination

took fire at the new possibilities of heroism and of fame. "What if you

should be a saint like Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what

if you should even surpass them in sanctity?" His choice was fixed. He

took Madonna for his lady and determined to become a soldier of Christ.

As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrimage to Seville and

Manresa and there dedicated his arms in a church in imitation of the

knights he had read about in _Amadis of Gaul_. Then, with a general

confession and much fasting and mortification of the flesh, began a

period of doubt and spiritual anguish {400} that has sometimes been

compared with that of Luther. Both were men of strong will and

intellect, both suffered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development

was somewhat quieter and more normal--if, indeed, in the psychology of

conversion so carefully studied by James, the quieter is the more normal.

At any rate where Luther had one vision on an exceptional occasion,

Loyola had hundreds and had them daily. Ignatius saw the Trinity as a

clavichord with three strings, the miracle of transubstantiation as light

in bread, Satan as a glistening serpent covered with bright, mysterious

eyes, Jesus as "a big round form shining as gold," and the Trinity again

as "a ball of fire."

But with all the visions he kept his will fixed on his purpose.

[Sidenote: 1523] At first this took the form of a vow to preach to the

infidels and he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only to be turned back by

the highest Christian authority in that region, the politically-minded

Franciscan vicar.

[Sidenote: 1524]

On returning to Spain he went to Barcelona and started to learn Latin

with boys, for his education as a gentleman had included nothing but

reading and writing his own tongue. Thence he went to the university of

Alcalá where he won disciples but was imprisoned for six weeks by the

Inquisition and forbidden to hold meetings with them. Practically the

same experience was repeated at Salamanca where he was detained by the

Holy Office for twenty-two days and again prohibited from holding

religious meetings. Thus he was chased out of Spain by the church he

sought to serve. Turning his steps to Paris he entered the College of

Montaigu, and, if he here was free from the Inquisition he was publicly

whipped by the college authorities as a dangerous fanatic. Nevertheless,

here he gathered his first permanent disciples, Peter Le Fèvre of Savoy,

Francis Xavier of Pampeluna and two Castilians, {401} James Laynez and

Alfonso Salmeron. The little man, hardly over five feet two inches high,

deformed and scarred, at the age of thirty-five, won men to him by his

smile, as of a conqueror in pain, by his enthusiasm, his mission and his

book.

[Sidenote: _The Spiritual Exercises_]

If one reckons the greatness of a piece of literature not by the beauty

of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has

exercised over men, the _Spiritual Exercises_ of Ignatius will rank high.

Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If

he took some things from Garcia de Cisneros, some from _The Imitation of

Christ_, some from the rules of Montaigu, where he studied, far more he

took from the course of discipline to which he had subjected himself at

Manresa. The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his

discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his

imagination. His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality

and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this

faculty in his followers were drastic in the extreme.

The purpose of the _Exercises_ is stated in the axiom that "Man was

created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord and thereby to save

his soul." To fit a man for this work the spiritual exercises were

divided into four periods called weeks, though each period might be

shortened or lengthened at the discretion of the director. The first

week was devoted to the consideration of sin; the second to that of

Christ's life as far as Palm Sunday; the third to his passion; and the

fourth to his resurrection and ascension. Knowing the tremendous power

of the stimulant to be administered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of

moderation in the application of it. But, subject only to the condition

that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he could bear, he was

directed in the first week of {402} solitary meditation to try to see the

length, breadth and depth of hell, to hear the lamentations and

blasphemies of the damned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to taste the

bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the

burnings of the unquenchable fire. In like manner in the other weeks he

was to try to picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all the

events brought before his mind, whether terrible or glorious. The end of

all this discipline was to be the complete subjection of the man to the

church. The Jesuit was directed ever "to praise all the precepts of the

church, holding the mind ready to find reasons for her defence and nowise

in her offence." There must be an unconditional surrender to her not

only of the will but of the intelligence. "To make sure of being right

in all things," says Loyola, "we ought always to hold by the principle

that the white I see I should believe to be black if the hierarchical

church were so to rule it."

Inspired by this ideal the small body of students, agreeing to be called

henceforth the Company of Jesus--a military term, the _socii_ being the

companions or followers of a chief in arms--took vows to live in poverty

and chastity [Sidenote: August 15, 1540] and to make a pilgrimage to

Jerusalem. With this object they set out to Venice and then turned

towards Rome for papal approbation of their enterprise. Their first

reception was chilling, but they gradually won a few new recruits and

Ignatius drafted the constitution [Sidenote: September 27, 1540] for a

new order which was handed to the pope by Contarini and approved in the

bull _Regimini militantis ecclesiae_, which quotes from the formula of

the Jesuits:

Whoever wishes to fight for God under the standard

of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on

earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a solemn vow of

perpetual chastity, consider that he is part of a society

instituted chiefly for these ends, for the profit of souls in

{403}

life and Christian doctrine, for the propagation of the

faith through public preaching, the ministry of God's

word, spiritual exercises and works of charity, and

especially for the education of children and ignorant persons

in Christianity, for the hearing of confession and for the

giving of spiritual consolation.

Moreover it is stated that the members of the new order should be bound

by a vow of special obedience to the pope and should hold themselves

ready at his behest to propagate the faith among Turks, infidels,

heretics or schismatics, or to minister to believers.

[Sidenote: April 1547]

Ignatius was chosen first general of the order. The pope then cancelled

the previous limitation of the number of Jesuits to 60 [Sidenote: 1544]

and later issued a large charter of privileges for them. [Sidenote:

1549] They were exempted from taxes and episcopal jurisdiction; no

member was to be allowed to accept any dignity without the general's

consent, nor could any member be assigned to the spiritual direction of

women. Among many other grants was one to the effect that the faithful

might confess to them and receive communion without permission of their

parish priests. A confirmation of all privileges and a grant of others

was made in a bull of July 21, 1550.

[Sidenote: Organization of the Society of Jesus, 1550]

The express end of the order being the world-domination of the church,

its constitution provided a marvellously apt organization for this

purpose. Everything was to be subordinate to efficiency. Detachment

from the world went only so far as necessary for the completer conquest

of the world. Asceticism, fasting, self-discipline were to be moderate

so as not to interfere with health. No special dress was prescribed, for

it might be a hindrance rather than a help. The purpose being to win

over the classes rather than the masses, the Jesuits were particular to

select as members only robust men of agreeable appearance, calm minds and

{404} eloquence. That an aspirant to the order should also be rich and

of good family was not requisite but was considered desirable. Men of

bad reputation, intractible, choleric, or men who had ever been tainted

with heresy, were excluded. No women were recruited.

After selection, the neophyte was put on a probation of two years. He

was then assigned to the class of scholars for further discipline. He

was later placed either as a temporal coadjutor, a sort of lay brother

charged with inferior duties, or as a spiritual coadjutor, who took the

three irrevocable vows. Finally, there was a class, to which admission

was gained after long experience, the Professed of Four Vows, the fourth

being one of special obedience to the pope. A small number of secret

Jesuits who might be considered as another class, were charged with

dangerous missions and with spying.

[Sidenote: General]

Over the order was placed a General who was practically, though not

theoretically, absolute. On paper he was limited by the possibility of

being deposed and by the election, independently of his influence, of an

"admonitor" and some assistants. In practice the only limitations of his

power were the physical ones inherent in the difficulties of

administering provinces thousands of miles away. From every province,

however, he received confidential reports from a multitude of spies.

The spirit of the order was that of absolute, unquestioning, blind

obedience. The member must obey his superior "like a corpse which can be

turned this way or that, or a rod that follows every impulse, or a ball

of wax that might be moulded in any form." The ideal was an old one; the

famous _perinde ac cadaver_ itself dates back to Francis of Assisi, but

nowhere had the ideal been so completely realized as by the companions of

Ignatius. In fact, in this as in other respects, the {405} Jesuits were

but a natural culmination of the evolution of monasticism. More and more

had the orders tended to become highly disciplined, unified bodies, apt

to be used for the service of the church and of the pope.

[Sidenote: Growth]

The growth of the society was extraordinarily rapid. By 1544 they had

nine establishments, two each in Italy, Spain and Portugal and one each

in France, Germany and the Netherlands. When Loyola [Sidenote: July 31,

1556] died Jesuits could be found in Japan and Brazil, in Abyssinia and

on the Congo; in Europe they were in almost every country and included

doctors at the largest universities and papal nuncios to Poland and

Ireland. There were in all twelve provinces, about 65 residences and

1500 members.

Their work was as broad as their field, but it was dedicated especially

to three several tasks: education, war against the heretic, and foreign

missions. Neither of the first two was particularly contemplated by the

founders of the order in their earliest period. At that time they were

rather like the friars, popular preachers, catechists, confessors and

charitable workers. But the exigencies of the time called them to supply

other needs. The education of the young was the natural result of their

desire to dominate the intellectual class. Their seminaries, at first

adapted only to their own uses, soon became famous.

[Sidenote: Combating heresy]

In the task of combating heresy they were also the most successful of the

papal cohorts. Though not the primary purpose of the order, it soon came

to be regarded as their special field. The bull canonizing Loyola

[Sidenote: 1623] speaks of him as an instrument raised up by divine

providence especially to combat that "foulest of monsters" Martin Luther.

Beginning in Italy the Jesuits revived the nearly extinct popular piety.

Going among the poor as missionaries they found many who knew no prayers,

many who had not confessed for {406} thirty or forty years, and a host of

priests as blind as their flocks.

In most other Catholic countries they had to fight for the right to

exist. In France the Parlement of Paris was against them, and even after

the king had granted them permission to settle in the country in 1553,

the Parlement accused them of jeoparding the faith, destroying the peace

of the church, supplanting the old orders and tearing down more than they

built up. Nevertheless they won their way to a place of great power,

until, sitting at the counsels of the monarch, they were able to crush

their Catholic opponents, the Jansenists, as completely as their

Protestant enemies were crushed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

In the Netherlands the Jesuits were welcomed as allies of the Spanish

power. The people were impressed by their zeal, piety, and

disinterestedness, and in the Southern provinces they were able to bear

away a victory after a fierce fight with Calvinism.

In England, where they showed the most devotion, they met with the least

success. The blood of their martyrs did not sow the ground with Catholic

seed, and they were expelled by statute under Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: Jesuit victories]

The most striking victories of the Jesuits were won in Central Europe.

When the first of their company, Peter Faber, entered Germany in 1540, he

found nearly the whole country Lutheran. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria

were almost the only reigning family that never compromised with the

Reformers and in them the Jesuits found their starting point and their

most constant ally. Called to the universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna

their success was great and from these foci they radiated in all

directions, to Poland, to Hungary, to the Rhine. One of their most

eminent missionaries was Peter Canisius, whose catechism, published in

1555 in three forms, short, long and middle, and in two {407} languages,

German and Latin, became the chief spiritual text-book of the Catholics.

The idea and selection of material was borrowed from Luther and he was

imitated also in the omission of all overt polemic material. This last

feature was, of course, one of the strongest.

[Sidenote: Missions to heathens]

But the conquests of the Company of Jesus were as notable in lands beyond

Europe as they were in the heart of civilization. They were not, indeed,

pioneers in the field of foreign missions. The Catholic church showed

itself from an early period solicitous for the salvation of the natives

of America and of the Far East. The bull of Alexander VI stated that his

motive in dividing the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal

was chiefly to assist in the propagation of the faith. That the

Protestants at first developed no activity in the conversion of the

heathen was partly because their energies were fully employed in securing

their own position, and still more, perhaps, because, in the sixteenth

century, Spain and Portugal had a practical monopoly of the transoceanic

trade and thus the only opportunities of coming into contact with the

natives.

Very early Dominican and Franciscan friars went to America. Though some

of them exemplified Christian virtues that might well have impressed the

natives, the greater number relied on the puissant support of the Toledo

sword. Though the natives, as heathen born in invincible ignorance, were

exempt from the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, they were driven by

terror if not by fire, into embracing the religion of their conquerors.

If some steadfast chiefs told the missionaries that they would rather go

to hell after death than live for ever with the cruel Christians, the

tribes as a whole, seeing their dreaded idols overthrown and their

temples uprooted, embraced the religion of the stronger God, as they

quailed before his {408} votaries. Little could they understand of the

mysteries of the faith, and in some places long continued to worship

Christ and Mary with the ritual and attributes of older deities. But

nominally a million of them were converted by 1532, and when the Jesuits

arrived a still more successful effort was made to win over the red man.

The important mission in Brazil, served by brave and devoted brothers of

Ignatius, achieved remarkable results, whereas in Paraguay the Jesuits

founded a state completely under their own tutelage.

In the Far East the path of the missionary was broken by the trader. At

Goa the first ambassadors of Christ were friars, and here they erected a

cathedral, a convent, and schools for training native priests. But the

greatest of the missionaries to this region was Francis Xavier,

[Sidenote: Xavier, 1506-52] the companion of Loyola. Not forgetting the

vow which he, together with all the first members of the society, had

taken, [Sidenote: April 1541] he sailed from Lisbon, clothed with

extraordinary powers. The pope made him his vicar for all the lands

bathed by the Indian Ocean, [Sidenote: May, 1542] and the king of

Portugal gave him official sanction and support. Arriving at Goa he put

himself in touch with the earlier missionaries and began an earnest fight

against the immorality of the port, both Christian and native. His motto

"Amplius" led him soon to virgin fields, among the natives of the coast

and of Ceylon. In 1545 he went to Cochin-China, thence to the Moluccas

and to Japan, preaching in every place and baptizing by the thousand and

ten thousand.

Though Xavier was a man of brilliant endowments and though he was

passionately devoted to the cause, to neither of his good qualities did

he owe the successes, whether solid or specious, with which he has been

credited. In the first place, judged by the standards of modern

missions, the superficiality of his work was {409} almost inconceivable.

He never mastered one of the languages of the countries which he visited.

He learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed and some phrases

on the horrors of hell, and repeated them to the crowds attracted to him

by the sound of a bell. He addressed himself to masses rather than to

individuals and he regarded the culmination of his work as being merely

the administration of baptism and not the conversion of heart or

understanding. Thus, he spent hours in baptizing, with all possible

speed, sick and dying children, believing that he was thus rescuing their

souls from limbo. Probably many of his adult converts never understood

the meaning of the application of water and oil, salt and spittle, that

make up the ritual of Catholic baptism.

[Sidenote: Use of force]

In the second place, what permanent success he achieved was due largely

to the invocation of the aid of the civil power. One of the most

illuminating of Xavier's letters is that written to King John of Portugal

on January 20, 1548, in which he not only makes the reasonable request

that native Christians be protected from persecution by their countrymen,

but adds that every governor should take such measures to convert them as

would insure success to his preaching, for without such support, he says,

the cause of the gospel in the Indies would be desperate, few would come

to baptism and those who did come would not profit much in religion.

Therefore he urges that every governor, under whose rule many natives

were not converted, should be mulcted of all his goods and imprisoned on

his return to Portugal. What the measures applied by the Portugese

officers must have been, under such pressure, can easily be inferred from

a slight knowledge of their savage rule.

It has been said that every organism carries in {410} itself the seeds of

its own decay. The premature corruption [Sidenote: Decay of Jesuits] of

the order was noticed by its more earnest members quite early in its

career. The future general Francis Borgia wrote: [Sidenote: 1560] "The

time will come when the Company will be completely absorbed in human

sciences without any application to virtue; ambition, pride and arrogance

will rule." The General Aquaviva said explicitly, [Sidenote: 1587] "Love

of the things of this world and the spirit of the courtier are dangerous

diseases in our Company. Almost in spite of us the evil creeps in little

by little under the fair pretext of gaining princes, prelates, and the

great ones of the world."

A principal cause of the ultimate odium in which the Jesuits were held as

well as of their temporary successes, was their desire for speedy

results. [Sidenote: Efficiency] Every one has noticed the immense

versatility of the Jesuits and their superficiality. They produced

excellent scholars of a certain rank, men who could decipher Latin

inscriptions, observe the planets, publish libraries of historical

sources, of casuistry and apologetic, or write catechisms or epigrams.

They turned with equal facility to preaching to naked savages and to the

production of art for the most cultivated peoples in the world. And yet

they have rarely, if ever, produced a great scholar, a great scientist, a

great thinker, or even a great ascetic. They were not founded for such

purposes; they were founded to fight for the church and they did that

with extraordinary success.

[Sidenote: Failure]

But their very efficiency became, as pursued for its own sake it must

always become, soulless. In terms suggested by the Great War, the

Jesuits were the incarnation of religious militarism. To set up an ideal

of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanatical enthusiasm for

that ideal and then to provide an organization and discipline

marvellously adapted to conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster

who {411} proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat back the

Reformation, have known how to do better than anyone else. Their methods

took account of everything except the conscience of mankind.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager pursuit of tangible

results they lowered the ethical standards of the church. Wishing to

open her doors as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they

could not make all men saints, they brought down the requirements for

admission to the average human level. One cannot take the denunciations

of Jesuitical "casuistry" and "probabilism" at their face value, but one

can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their early works,

very dangerous compromises with the world. [Sidenote: Jesuitical

compromises] One reads in their books how the bankrupt, without sinning

mortally, may defraud his creditors of his mortaged goods; how the

servant may be excused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man may

pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the adulteress may rightfully

deny her sin to her husband, even on oath.[1] Doubtless these are

extreme instances, but that they should have been possible at all is a

melancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, substitute

inferior imitations for genuine morality.

[1] Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of

moral theology, printed in C. Mirbt: _Quellen zur Geschichte des

Papst-tums_[3], 1911, pp. 447 ff.

SECTION 5. THE INQUISITION AND INDEX

Not only by propaganda appealing to the mind and heart did the Catholic

church roll back the tides of Reformation and Renaissance, but by

coercion also. In this the church was not alone; the Protestants also

persecuted and they also censored the press with the object of

preventing their adherents from reading the arguments of their

opponents. But the Catholic {412} church was not only more consistent

in the application of her intolerant theories but she almost always

assumed the direction of the coercive measures directly instead of

applying them through the agency of the state. Divided as they were,

dependent on the support of the civil government and hampered, at least

to some slight extent, by their more liberal tendencies, the

Protestants never had instrumentalities half as efficient or one-tenth

as terrible as the Inquisition and the Index.

The Inquisition was a child of the Middle Ages. For centuries before

Luther the Holy Office had cauterized the heretical growths on the body

of Mother Church. The old form was utilized but was given a new lease

of life by the work it was called upon to perform against the

Protestants. Outside of the Netherlands the two forms of the

Inquisition which played the largest part in the battles of the

sixteenth century were the Spanish and the Roman.

[Sidenote: Spanish Inquisition]

The Inquisition was licensed in Spain by a bull of Sixtus IV of 1478,

and actually established by Ferdinand and Isabella in Castile in 1480,

and soon afterwards in their other dominions. It has sometimes been

said that the Spanish Inquisition was really a political rather than an

ecclesiastical instrument, but the latest historian of the subject,

whose deep study makes his verdict final, has disposed of this theory.

Though occasionally called upon to interfere in political matters, this

was exceptional. Far more often it asserted an authority and an

independence that embarrassed not a little the royal government. On

the other hand it soon grew so great and powerful that it was able to

ignore the commands of the popes. On account of its irresponsible

power it was unpopular and was only tolerated because it was so

efficient in crushing out the heresy that the people hated.

{413} [Sidenote: Procedure]

The annals of its procedure and achievements are one long record of

diabolical cruelty, of protracted confinement in dungeons, of endless

delay and browbeating to break the spirit, of ingenious tortures and of

racked and crushed limbs and of burning flesh. In mitigation of

judgment, it must be remembered that the methods of the civil courts

were also cruel at that time, and the punishments severe.

As the guilt of the suspected person was always presumed, every effort

was made to secure confession, for in matters of belief there is no

other equally satisfactory proof. Without being told the nature of his

crime or who was the informant against him, the person on trial was

simply urged to confess. An advocate was given him only to take

advantage of his professional relations with his client by betraying

him. The enormous, almost incredible procrastination by which the

accused would be kept in prison awaiting trial sometimes for five or

ten or even twenty years, usually sufficed to break his spirit or to

unbalance his mind. Torture was first threatened and then applied.

All rules intended to limit its amount proved illusory, and it was

applied practically to any extent deemed necessary, and to all classes;

nobles and clergy were no less obnoxious to it than were commons. Nor

was there any privileged age, except that of the tenderest childhood.

Men and women of ninety and boys and girls of twelve or fourteen were

racked, as were young mothers and women with child. Insanity, however,

if recognized as genuine, was considered a bar to torture.

Acquittal was almost, though not quite, unknown. Sometimes sentence

was suspended and the accused discharged without formal exoneration.

Very rarely acquittal by compurgation, that is by oath of the accused

supported by the oaths of a number of persons that they believed he was

telling the truth, was allowed. {414} Practically the only plea open

to the suspect was that the informers against him were actuated by

malice. As he was not told who his accusers were this was difficult

for him to use.

[Sidenote: Penalties]

The penalties were various, including scourging, the galleys and

perpetual imprisonment. Capital punishment by fire was pronounced not

only on those who were impenitent but on those who, after having been

once discharged, had relapsed. In Spain, heretics who recanted before

execution were first strangled; the obstinately impenitent were burned

alive. Persons convicted of heresy who could not be reached were burnt

in effigy.

Acting on the maxim _ecclesia non sitit sanguinem_ the Inquisitors did

not put their victims to death by their own officers but handed them

over to the civil authorities for execution. With revolting hypocrisy

they even adjured the hangmen to be merciful, well knowing that the

latter had no option but to carry out the sentence of the church.

Magistrates who endeavored to exercise any discretion in favor of the

condemned were promptly threatened with excommunication.

If anything could be wanting to complete the horror it was supplied by

the festive spirit of the executions. The _Auto da Fe_, [Sidenote:

_Auto da Fe_] or act of faith, was a favorite spectacle of the

Spaniards; no holiday was quite complete without its holocaust of human

victims. The staging was elaborate, and the ceremony as impressive as

possible. Secular and spiritual authorities were ordered to be present

and vast crowds were edified by the horrible example of the untimely

end of the unbeliever. Sundays and feast days were chosen for these

spectacles and on gala occasions, such as royal weddings and

christenings, a special effort was made to celebrate one of these holy

butcheries.

The number of victims has been variously estimated. {415} An actual

count up to the year 1540, that is, before Protestantism became a

serious factor, shows that 20,226 were burned in person and 10,913 in

effigy, and these figures are incomplete. It must be remembered that

for every one who paid the extreme penalty there were a large number of

others punished in other ways, or imprisoned and tortured while on

trial. When Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards the pope, was Inquisitor

General 1516-22, 1,620 persons were burned alive, 560 in effigy and

21,845 were sentenced to penance or other lighter punishments.

Roughly, for one person sentenced to death ten suffered milder

penalties.

[Sidenote: Crimes punished]

Heresy was not the only crime punished by the Inquisition; it also took

charge of blasphemy, bigamy and some forms of vice. In its early years

it was chiefly directed against the Jews who, having been forced to the

baptismal font, had relapsed. Later the Moriscos or christened Moors

supplied the largest number of victims. As with the Jews, race hatred

was so deep an ingredient of the treatment meted out to them that the

nominal cause was sometimes forgotten, and baptism often failed to save

"the new Christian" who preserved any, even the most innocent, of the

national customs. Many a man and woman was tortured for not eating

pork or for bathing in the Moorish fashion.