The influence of Luther went far beyond Germany. It was felt in England,
France, Scotland, Holland, Poland, and Scandinavia. England went her own
peculiar way; France, Holland, and Scotland, in the end, accepted the
leadership of Calvin; the Lutheran Reformation, outside Germany, was
really confined to Scandinavia alone.
In these Scandinavian lands the religious awakening was bound up with
political and social movements more than in any other countries. The
reformation in the Church was, indeed, begun by men who had studied under
Luther at Wittenberg, or who had received their first promptings from his
writings; but it was carried on and brought to a successful issue by
statesmen who saw in it the means to deliver their land from political
anarchy, caused by the overweening independence and turbulence of the
great ecclesiastical lords, and who were almost compelled to look to the
large possessions of the Church as a means to replenish their exhausted
treasuries without ruining the overburdened taxpayers.
When Eric was crowned King of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in 1397, the
assembled nobles, representative of the three kingdoms, agreed to the
celebrated Union of Kalmar, which declared that the three lands were to be
for ever united under one sovereign. The treaty was purely dynastic, its
terms were vague, and it was never very effective. Without going into
details, it may be said that the king lived in Denmark, and ruled in the
interests of that country; that he also may be said to have ruled in
Norway; but that in Sweden his authority was merely nominal, and sometimes
not even that. In Denmark itself, monarchical government was difficult.
The Scandinavian kingship was elective, and every election was an
opportunity for reducing the privileges, authority, and wealth of the
sovereign, and for increasing those of the nobles and of the great
ecclesiastics, who, being privileged classes, were freed from contributing
to the taxation.
In 1513, Christian II., the nephew of the Elector of Saxony, and the
brother-in-law of the Emperor Charles V. (1515), came to the throne, and
his accession marks the beginning of the new era which was to end with the
triumph of the Reformation in all three countries. Christian was a man of
great natural abilities, with a profound sense of the miserable condition
of the common people within his realms, caused by the petty tyrannies of
the nobles, ecclesiastical and secular. No reigning prince, save perhaps
George, Duke of Saxony, could compete with him in learning; but he was
cruel, partly from nature and partly from policy. He had determined to
establish his rule over the three kingdoms whose nominal king he was, and
to free the commonalty from their oppression by breaking the power of the
nobles and of the great Churchmen. The task was one of extreme difficulty,
and he was personally unsuccessful; but his efforts laid the foundation on
which successors were able to build securely.
He began by conquering rebellious Sweden, and disgraced his victory by a
treacherous massacre of Swedish notables at Stockholm (1520),—a deed
which, in the end, led to the complete separation of Sweden from Denmark.
After having thus, as he imagined, consolidated his power, he pressed
forward his schemes for reform. He took pains to encourage the trade and
agriculture of Denmark; he patronised learning. He wrote to his uncle
(1519), Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, to send him preachers trained by
Luther; and, in response to his appeal, received first Martin Reinhard,
and then Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. These foreigners, who could only
address the people through interpreters, did not make much impression; but
reformation was pushed forward by the king. He published, on his own
authority, two sets of laws dealing with the nobles and the Church, and
subjecting both to the sovereign. He enacted that all convents were to be
under episcopal inspection. Non-resident and unlettered clergy were
legally abolished. A species of kingly consistorial court was set up in
Copenhagen, and declared to be the supreme ecclesiastical judicature for
the country; and appeals to Rome were forbidden. It can scarcely be said
that these laws were ever in operation. A revolt by the Jutlanders gave a
rallying point to the disaffection caused by the proposed reforms.
Christian fled from Denmark (1523), and spent the rest of his life in
exile or in prison. His law-books were burnt.
The Jutlanders had called Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, Christian’s
uncle, to the throne, and he was recognised King of Denmark and of Norway
in 1523. He had come to the kingdom owing to the reaction against the
reforms of his nephew, but in his heart he knew that they were necessary.
He promised to protect the interests of the nobles, and to defend the
Church against the advance of Lutheran opinions; but he soon endeavoured
to find a means of evading his pledges. He found it when he pitted the
nobles against the higher clergy, and announced that he had never promised
to support the errors of the Church of Rome. At the National Assembly
(_Herredag_) at Odense he was able to get the marriage of priests
permitted, and a decree that bishops were in the future to apply to the
king and not to the Pope for their Pallium. The Reformation had now native
preachers to support it, especially Hans Tausen, who was called the Danish
Luther, and they were encouraged by the king. At the _Herredag_ at
Copenhagen in 1530, twenty-one of these Lutheran preachers were summoned,
at the instigation of the bishops, and formal accusations were made
against them for preaching heresy. Tausen and his fellows produced a
confession of faith in forty-three articles, all of which he and his
companions offered to defend. A public disputation was proposed, which did
not take place because the Romanist party refused to plead in the Danish
language. This refusal was interpreted by the people to mean that they
were afraid to discuss in a language which everyone understood.
Lutheranism made rapid progress among all classes of the population.
On Frederick’s death there was a disputed succession, which resulted in
civil war. In the end Frederick’s son ascended the throne as Christian
III., King of Denmark and Norway (1536). The king, who had been present at
the Diet of Worms, and who had learned there to esteem Luther highly, was
a strong Lutheran, and determined to end the authority of the Romish
bishops. He proposed to his council that bishops should no longer have any
share in the government, and that their possessions should be forfeited to
the Crown. This was approved of not merely by the council, but also at a
National Assembly which met at Copenhagen (Oct. 30th, 1536), where it was
further declared that the people desired the holy gospel to be preached,
and the whole episcopal authority done away with. The king asked Luther to
send him some one to guide his people in their ecclesiastical matters.
Bugenhagen was despatched, came to Copenhagen (1537), and took the chief
ecclesiastical part in crowning the king. Seven superintendents (who
afterwards took the title of bishops) were appointed and consecrated. The
Reformation was carried out on conservative Lutheran lines, and the old
ritual was largely preserved. Tausen’s Confession was set aside in favour
of the Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Small Catechism, and the Lutheran
Reformation was thoroughly and legally established.
The Reformation also became an accomplished fact in Norway and Iceland,
but its introduction into these lands was much more an act of kingly
authority.
After the massacre of Swedish notables in Stockholm (Nov. 1520), young
Gustaf Ericsson, commonly known as Gustaf Vasa, from the _vasa_ or sheaf
which was on his coat of arms, raised the standard of revolt against
Denmark. He was gradually able to rally the whole of the people around
him, and the Danes were expelled from the kingdom. In 1521, Gustaf had
been declared regent of Sweden, and in 1523 he was called by the voice of
the people to the throne. He found himself surrounded by almost
insuperable difficulties. There had been practically no settled government
in Sweden for nearly a century, and every great landholder was virtually
an independent sovereign. The country had been impoverished by long wars.
Two-thirds of the land was owned by the Church, and the remaining third
was almost entirely in the hands of the secular nobles. Both Church and
nobles claimed exemption from taxation. The trade of the country was in
the hands of foreigners—of the Danes or of the Hanse Towns. Gustaf had
borrowed money from the town of Lübeck for his work of liberation. The
city was pressing for repayment, and its commissioners followed the
embarrassed monarch wherever he went. It was hopeless to expect to raise
money by further taxation of the already depressed and impoverished
peasants.
In these circumstances the king turned to the Church. He compelled the
bishops to give him more than one subsidy (1522, 1523); but this was
inadequate for his needs. The Church property was large, and the king
planned to overthrow the ecclesiastical aristocracy by the help of the
Lutheran Reformation.
Lutheranism had been making progress in Sweden. Two brothers, Olaus and
Laurentius Petri, sons of a blacksmith at Orebro, had been sent by their
father to study in Germany. They had meant to attend the University of
Leipzig; but, attracted by the growing fame of Luther, they had gone to
Wittenberg, and had become enthusiastic disciples of the Reformer. On
their return to Sweden (1519) they had preached Lutheran doctrine, and had
made many converts—among others, Laurentius Andreæ, Archdeacon at
Strengnäs. In spite of protests from the bishops, these three men were
protected by the king. Olaus Petri was especially active, and made long
preaching tours, declaring that he taught the pure gospel which “Ansgar,
the apostle of the North, had preached seven hundred years before in
Sweden.”
Gustaf brought Olaus to Stockholm (1524), and made him town-clerk of the
city; his brother Laurentius was appointed professor of theology at
Upsala; Laurentius Andrew was made Archdeacon of Upsala and Chancellor of
Sweden. When the bishops demanded that the Reformers should be silenced,
Olaus challenged them to a public disputation. The challenge was refused;
but in 1524 a disputation was arranged in the king’s palace in Stockholm
between Olaus and Dr. Galle, who supported the old religion. The
conference, which included discussion of the doctrines of Justification by
Faith, Indulgences, the Mass, Purgatory, and the Temporal Power of the
Pope, had the effect of strengthening the cause of the Reformation. In
1525, Olaus defied the rules of the mediæval Church by publicly marrying a
wife. The same year the king called for a translation of the Scriptures
into Swedish, and in 1526 Laurentius Petri published his New Testament. A
translation of the whole Bible was edited by the same scholar, and
published 1540-1541. These translations, especially that of the New
Testament, became very popular, and the people with the Scripture in their
hands were able to see whether the teaching of the preachers or of the
bishops was most in accordance with the Holy Scriptures.
There is no reason to believe that the king did not take the side of the
Lutheran Reformation from genuine conviction. He had made the acquaintance
of the brothers Petri before he was called to be the deliverer of his
country. But it is unquestionable that his financial embarrassment whetted
his zeal for the reformation of the Church in Sweden. Matters were coming
to a crisis, which was reached in 1527. At the Diet in that year, the
Chancellor, in the name of the king, explained the need for an increased
revenue, and suggested that ecclesiastical property was the only source
from which it could be obtained. The bishops, Johan Brask, Bishop of
Linkoeping, at their head, replied that they had the Pope’s orders to
defend the property of the Church. The nobles supported them. Then Gustaf
presented his ultimatum. He told the Diet plainly that they must submit to
the proposals of the Chancellor or accept his resignation, pay him for his
property, return him the money he had spent in defence of the kingdom, and
permit him to leave the country never to return. The Diet spent three days
in wrangling, and then submitted to his wishes. The whole of the
ecclesiastical property—episcopal, capitular, and monastic—which was not
absolutely needed for the support of the Church was to be placed in the
hands of the king. Preachers were meanwhile to set forth the pure gospel,
until a conference held in presence of the Diet would enable that assembly
to come to a decision concerning matters of religion. The Diet went on,
without waiting for the conference, to pass the twenty-four regulations
which made the famous Ordinances of Vesteräs, and embodied the legal
Reformation. They contained provisions for secularising the ecclesiastical
property in accordance with the previous decision of the Diet; declared
that the king had the right of vetoing the decisions of the higher
ecclesiastics; that the appointment of the parish clergy was in the hands
of the bishops, but that the king could remove them for inefficiency; that
the pure gospel was to be taught in every school; and that auricular
confession was no longer compulsory.
While the Ordinances stripped the Swedish Church of a large amount of its
property and made it subject to the king, they did not destroy its
episcopal organisation, nor entirely impoverish it. Most of the
monasteries were deserted when their property was taken away. The king
knew that the peasantry scarcely understood the Reformed doctrines, and
had no wish to press them unduly on his people. For the same reason the
old ceremonies and usages which did not flagrantly contradict the new
doctrines were suffered to remain, and given an evangelical meaning. The
first evangelical Hymn-book was published in 1530, and the Swedish “Mass”
in 1531, both drafted on Lutheran models. Laurentius Andreæ was made
Archbishop of Upsala (1527), and a National Synod was held under his
presidency at Orebro (1528), which guided the Reformation according to
strictly conservative Lutheran ideals. Thus before the death of Gustaf
Vasa, Sweden had joined the circle of Lutheran Churches, and its people
were slowly coming to understand the principles of the Reformation. The
Reformation was a very peaceful one. No one suffered death for his
religious opinions.
The fortunes of the Swedish Church were somewhat varied under the
immediate successors of Gustavus. His ill-fated son showed signs of
preferring Calvinism, and insisted on the suppression of some of the
ecclesiastical festivals and some of the old rites which had been
retained; but these attempts ended with his reign. His brother and
successor, Johan III., took the opposite extreme, and coquetted long with
Rome, and with proposals for reunion,—proposals which had no serious
result. When Johan died in 1592, his son and successor, who had been
elected King of Poland, and had become a Roman Catholic, aroused the fears
of his Swedish subjects that he might go much further than his father. The
people resolved to make sure of their Protestantism before their new
sovereign arrived in the country. A Synod was convened at which both lay
and ecclesiastical deputies were present. The members first laid down the
general rule that the Holy Scriptures were their supreme doctrinal
standard, and then selected the Augsburg Confession as the Confession of
the Swedish Church. Luther’s Small Catechism, which had been removed from
the schools by King Johan III., was restored. This meeting at Upsala
settled for the future the ecclesiastical polity of Sweden. The country
showed its attachment to the stricter Lutheranism by adopting the Formula
of Concord in 1664.