FOR NEARLY thirty years Charles V suffered the Reformation to run its
course in Germany, against his will, and without admitting the
principle of toleration. He did not resign the hope that unity would
be restored by a Council which should effectually reform the Church
and reconcile Protestants; and there was no prospect of such a
consummation unless by the necessity which they created. Therefore,
without ceasing to be intolerant in his other dominions, he was
content to wait. At length, in 1545, the Council assembled at Trent
and dealt with the chief dogmas at issue. Then, when the decrees did
not satisfy the Lutherans, the Emperor combined with the Pope to
coerce them. A large contingent of papal troops crossed the Alps in
1547, and were met by the Lutheran forces on the Danube. The
Protestant League was divided; some of its members, true to the
doctrine of non-resistance, remained away; and one of the Saxon
princes, Maurice, invaded Saxony, on a promise that he should succeed
to the electorate. The Elector hurried back to his own country, the
muster on the Danube was broken up, and the Italians gained a decisive
victory over the Germans at Muhlberg on the Elbe. Maurice obtained
the reward, and being then, by virtue of his new dignity, the chief of
the Protestants, turned against the law by which the Emperor, after
his victory, attempted to regulate the affairs of religion. He
secured the help of France by the surrender of a part of Lorraine,
which Moltke did not entirely recover, and, attacking the Emperor when
he was not prepared, brought him to terms.
At Augsburg, in 1555, peace was concluded between the religions, and
continued until the Thirty Years' War. It abolished the faggot and
the stake. The Catholics gained nothing by this, for no Lutherans had
thought that it could be lawful to put people of the old religion to
death. The Lutherans obtained security that they should not be
persecuted. On the other hand, it was agreed that if any territorial
prelate seceded, he should forfeit the temporal power which he enjoyed
by right of his ecclesiastical dignity. So that the ecclesiastical
territories, which composed a large part of Germany, from Salzburg to
the Black Forest, and then all down the valley of the Rhine to Liege
and Munster, were to be preserved intact. No security whatever was
obtained for Protestants outside the Confession of Augsburg. The
Lutherans negotiated only for themselves. And no real security was
given to the subject. He was not to be punished for his
nonconformity, but he might be banished and compelled to pass to the
nearest territory of his own persuasion. As these were very near,
generally, the suffering was less than it would have been in other
countries. Under that condition, the civil power could, if it chose,
enforce the unity of religion.
These enactments were an immense advance, practically, but they did
not involve the liberty of conscience. The absolute right of the
State to determine the religion it professed was not disputed, but it
was tempered by the right of emigration. No man could be compelled to
change, but he might be compelled to go. State absolutism was
unlimited over all who chose to keep their home within the precincts.
There was no progress in point of principle. The Christian might have
to depart, while the Jew remained. No Protestant could complain if he
was expelled from Cologne; no Catholic if he could not have his
domicile at Leipzig. The intolerance and fierceness of the Germans
found relief in the wholesale burning of witches.
Charles V would have nothing to do with these innovations. He left it
all to his brother Ferdinand, King of Bohemia and Hungary, who was
more elastic and pliable than himself. With the Turk over the border,
he could not exist without the goodwill of both parties; and he
desired the vote of Lutheran electors to make him emperor. He had no
Inquisition in one part of his dominions contradicting and condemning
toleration in the rest. He was an earnest promoter of reform in the
shape of concession. The embers of Hussitism were not extinct in the
region of which Bohemia was the centre. Ferdinand had that as well as
Lutheranism to contend with, and he desired to avert peril by allowing
priests to marry and laymen to receive the cup. That is to say, he
desired to surrender the two points for which the Church had struggled
successfully against the State in the eleventh century, against the
Bohemians in the fifteenth. His conciliatory policy was assisted by
the moderation of the Archbishop of Mentz. At Rome they said that the
empire was divided between Christ and the devil. But the Pope,
advised by Jesuits, made no protest.
Ferdinand had so regulated things in his brother's interest, that the
measure did not include the Netherlands. The laws which afterwards
produced the revolt were not invalid by the Peace of Religion, and the
victims of Alva had no right to appeal to it. Charles V did not
choose to surrender that which alone gave unity to his complicated
empire. The German princes were allowed to have subjects of one
religion only. That prerogative was denied to the Emperor. The
imperial dignity, in its ideal character as the appointed defender and
advocate of the universal Church, existed no longer. A monarch
reigning over Catholic and Protestant alike was an inferior
representative of unity and authority, and a poor copy of Charlemagne.
There was no obvious reason for his existence. It was an intolerable
hypocrisy to be the friend of Protestants where they were too strong,
and to burn them where they were weak. The work of his life was
undone. In more than thirty years of effort he had neither reconciled
the Protestants nor reformed the Church. The settlement of the
Reformation was an acknowledgment of defeat, and the result of his
career was that religious division had become the law of his empire.
Therefore, when the Peace of Religion was concluded, Charles V laid
down the sceptre. The new empire, based on religious equality, he
gave to his brother. It was only by detaching it from his hereditary
dominions that he could reconstruct what had crumbled to pieces in his
hands. Then he rebuilt the great conservative and Catholic monarchy
for his son, assigning to him Spain, Naples, Milan, the Netherlands,
the Indies, England, and the supreme protectorate of Rome. The mixed
possessions went to Ferdinand. The boundless empire, based on the
principle of unity, and the championship of the Catholic Church all
the world over, was for Philip II. All that was his, to keep or to
resign. All that he chose to resign. For with his prodigious good
fortune, his inheritance of greatness, his unexampled experience of
complex affairs, his opportunities for having at his elbow the best
talent in the world, his admirably prudent and moderate temper,
Charles V broke down over the problem of the Reformation, as we shall
see that the Counter-Reformation was fatal to his son. And it was in
this way that Philip found the lines of his policy laid down for him,
before he assumed the crown of Spain, by the conditions under which
his father abdicated. The ancient function of the empire passed to
him, and the purpose of his vast dominion, the intelligible reason of
its apparition among the nations, was to accomplish that in which,
under his more gifted father, imperial Germany had failed.
At the date we have reached, soon after the middle of the century,
Luther was dead, and the churches of the Confession of Augsburg had
reached their full measure of expansion. They predominated in
Germany, and still more in Scandinavia; but Luther had not endowed
them with institutions, or imparted to them the gift of
self-government. In religious ideas, he was inexhaustible; but he was
deficient in constructive capacity. The local governments, which were
effective, had defended the Reformation and assured its success
against the hostility of the central government, which was
intermittent and inoperative, and as they afforded the necessary
protection, they assumed the uncontested control. Lutheranism is
governed not by the spiritual, but by the temporal power, in agreement
with the high conception of the State which Luther derived from the
long conflict of the Middle Ages. It is the most conservative form of
religion, and less liable than any other to collision with the civil
authority on which it rests. By its lack of independence and
flexibility it was unfitted to succeed where governments were hostile,
or to make its way by voluntary effort through the world. Moreover,
Luther's vigorous personality has so much in it of the character of
his nation, that they are attracted even by his defects--a thing which
you can hardly expect to occur elsewhere. Therefore it was in other
forms, and under other names, that the Protestant religion spread over
Europe. They differed from the original less in their theology, which
Luther had completed, than in questions of Church government, which he
abandoned to others.
Apart from the sects, which are of the first importance, but whose
story belongs to the Puritan Revolution and to the following century,
two other systems arose at the time, one in Switzerland, the other in
England. The general result of what happened when the Reformation,
ceasing to be national, became European, was that it prevailed in the
north, that it miscarried in the south, that it divided and agitated
the centre. Switzerland was divided, the towns becoming Protestant on
the Zwinglian type, the country people remaining Catholic, especially
in the central cantons. The chief towns, Berne and Bale, imitated the
example of Zurich, where Zwingli committed the government of the
Church to the authorities that governed the State, differing from the
Lutherans in this, that Zwinglianism was republican and revolutionary.
In Germany, where the organisation was defective, there was little
discipline or control. In Switzerland there was a more perfect order,
at the price of subjection to the secular authority. Those were the
rocks ahead; that was the condition of the Protestant churches, when a
man arose amongst them with a genius for organisation, a strong sense
of social discipline, and a profound belief in ecclesiastical
authority.
At the time when persecution suddenly began to rage in France John
Calvin escaped to Strasburg, and there composed his Institute, the
finest work of Reformation literature. He wrote with a view to show
that there was nothing in the Protestant religion to alarm the
government, and that the change it demanded was in the Church, not in
the State. He dealt more largely with theology than with practical
religion, and did not disclose those ideas on the government of
religious society that have made him the equal of Luther in History.
Geneva, when he came there in 1536, was a small walled town of less
than 20,000 inhabitants, with so narrow a territory that France was
within cannon range on one side and Savoy on the other. It was secure
in the alliance and protection of Berne, which came almost to the
gates; for what is now the canton of Vaud was, until the French
Revolution, a Bernese dependency. It had been an episcopal city, but
the bishop had retired to Annecy, and the Genevese Reformation had
been at the same time a Genevese Revolution. Power over Church and
State passed to the commonwealth, to the municipality. The new
masters, rejoicing in their independence, did not at once settle down;
the place was disturbed by factions, and was not a scene of
edification.
Calvin set to work to reform the community, to introduce public order
and domestic virtue. He was a foreigner by birth, and not
conciliatory in disposition; and after a brief experiment, the
offended Genevese cast him out. He was not yet thirty. He returned
to Strasburg and rewrote his Institute, expounding his theocratic
theory of the government of the Church by the Church, and of the State
by the union of Church and State. He was present at the Diet of
Ratisbon, and saw the Lutherans in a yielding mood, when Melanchthon
and Contarini, with the urgent mediator Gropper of Cologne, were very
near understanding each other. That event, as everybody knows, did
not come off; but everybody does not know the consequences, for we
shall see that the Counter-Reformation sprang from those conferences
at Ratisbon. Calvin had no part in Irenics. He was persuaded that
the work before them was to create not a new church, but a new world,
to remodel not doctrine only, but society; that the chasm could never
be bridged, but must grow wider with time. That conviction was not
yet strongly held by the German Lutherans, and they do not all hold it
at the present day. During his absence Cardinal Sadolet wrote to the
Genevese, intreating them not to break up the unity of Latin
Christendom; for Geneva was the first town beyond the Teutonic
range that went over. Sadolet was not only reputed the finest
Latinist of the age, but he was the most gracious of the Roman
prelates, a friend of Erasmus, an admirer of Contarini, and the author
of a commentary on St. Paul in which Lutheran justification was
suspected. The Genevese were not then so rich in literature as they
afterwards became, and they were not prepared to answer the challenge,
when Calvin did it for them. In 1541, after a change of government,
he was recalled. He came back on condition that his plans for the
Church were accepted, and his position remained unshaken until his
death.
The Strasburg clergy, in losing him, wrote that he was unsurpassed
among men, and the Genevese felt his superiority and put him on the
commission which revised the Constitution. It was not changed in any
important way, and the influence of the Geneva Constitution upon
Calvin was greater than his influence on the government of Geneva.
The city was governed by a Lesser or Inner Council of twenty-five,
composed of the four syndics, the four of last year, and as many more
as made up the twenty-five. These belonged to the ruling families,
and were seldom renewed. Whilst the Lesser Council administered,
through the syndics, the Great Council of two hundred was the
legislature. Its members were appointed, not by popular election, but
by the Lesser Council. Between the twenty-five and the two hundred
were the sixty, who only appeared when the Lesser Council wanted to
prepare a majority in the Greater Council. Its function was to
mediate between the executive and the legislature. It was a system of
concentric circles; for the twenty-five became the sixty by adding the
necessary number of thirty-five, and the sixty became the two hundred
by the addition of one hundred and forty members. Beyond this was the
assembly of citizens, who only met twice a year to elect the syndics
and the judge, from names presented by the Lesser Council. The
popular element was excluded. Beyond the citizens were the burghers,
who did not enjoy the franchise. Between the two there was material
for friction and a constitutional struggle, the struggle from which
Rousseau proceeded, and which had some share in preparing the French
Revolution.
Upon this background Calvin designed his scheme of Church government
and discipline. His purpose was to reform society as well as
doctrine. He did not desire orthodoxy apart from virtue, but would
have the faith of the community manifested in its moral condition.
And as the mere repression of scandals would promote hypocrisy, it was
necessary that private life should be investigated by the same
authority that was obeyed in public. Teaching and preaching belong to
the clergy alone. But jurisdiction is exercised by the pastors in
conjunction with the elders. And the elders were the choice of the
civil power, two representing the Lesser Council, four the sixty, and
six the two hundred. That was all that he could obtain. His success
was incomplete, because the government worked with him. A hostile
government would be more adapted to his purpose, for then the elders
would be elected, not by the State, but by the congregation. With a
weak clergy the civil magistrate would predominate over the Church,
having a majority in the consistory. While Calvin lived no such thing
was likely to happen. The Church co-operated with the State to put
down sin, the one with spiritual weapons, the other with the material
sword. The moral force assisted the State, the physical force
assisted the Church. A scheme substantially the same was introduced
by Capito at Frankfort in 1535.
But the secret of Calvin's later influence is that, he claimed for the
Church more independence than he obtained. The surging theory of
State omnipotence did not affect his belief in the principle of
self-government. Through him an idea of mutual check was introduced
which became effective at a later time, though nothing more unlike
liberty could be found than the state of Geneva when he was the most
important man there. Every ascertainable breach of divine law was
punished with rigour. Political error was visited with the sword, and
religious error with the stake. In this spirit Calvin carried out his
scheme of a Christian society and crushed opposition. Already, before
he came, the Council had punished vice with imprisonment and exile,
and the idea was traceable back to the Middle Ages. It had never
found so energetic an advocate.
The crown was set upon the system by the trial and execution of
Servetus. The Germans, in their aversion for metaphysics, had avoided
the discussion of questions regarding the Trinity which in the south
of Europe excited more attention. As early as 1531, long before the
rise of the Socinians, the Spaniard Servetus taught anti-Trinitarianism,
and continued to do it for more than twenty years. He remained
isolated, and it was not until after his death that his opinions
attracted followers. Calvin, who thought him dangerous, both by
his doctrines and his talent, declared that if ever he came to
Geneva he would never leave it alive. He caused him to be denounced
to the Inquisition, and he was imprisoned at Vienne on the Rhone,
tried, and condemned to be burnt at a slow fire, on evidence supplied
by Calvin in seventeen letters. Servetus escaped, and on his way to
Italy stopped at Geneva, under a false name, for he knew who it was
that had set the machinery of the Holy Office in motion against him,
and who had said that he deserved to be burnt wherever he could be
found. He was recognised, and Calvin caused him to be arrested and
tried without a defender. The authorities at Vienne demanded his
extradition, and the Governor of Dauphiny requested that any money
Servetus had about him might be sent back to him, as he was to have
had it if the execution had occurred in his territory. Calvin
disputed with his prisoner, convicted him of heresy, and claimed to
have convicted him of Pantheism, and he threatened to leave Geneva if
Servetus was not condemned. The Council did not think that the errors
of a Spanish scholar who was on his way to Italy were any business of
theirs, and they consulted the Swiss churches, hoping to be relieved
of a very unpleasant responsibility. The Swiss divines pronounced
against Servetus, and he was sentenced to die by fire, although Calvin
wished to mitigate the penalty, but refused, at a last interview, the
Spaniard's appeal for mercy. The volume which cost Servetus his life
was burnt with him, but falling from his neck into the flames, it was
snatched from the burning, and may still be seen in its singed
condition, a ghastly memorial of Reformation ethics, in the National
Library at Paris.
The event at Geneva received the sanction of many leading divines,
both of Switzerland and Germany; and things had moved so far since
Luther was condemned for his toleration, that Melanchthon could not
imagine the possibility of a doubt. Hundreds of humble Anabaptists
had suffered a like fate and nobody minded. But the story of the
execution at Champel left an indelible and unforgotten scar. For
those who consistently admired persecution, it left the estimate of
Calvin unchanged. Not so with others, when they learnt how Calvin had
denounced Servetus long before to the Catholic Inquisitors in France;
how he had done so under the disguise of an intermediary, in a
prolonged correspondence; how he had then denied the fact, and had
done a man to death who was guilty of no wrong to Geneva, and over
whom he had no jurisdiction. It weakened the right of Protestants to
complain when they were in the hands of the executioner, and it
deprived the terrors of the Inquisition of their validity as an
argument in the controversy with Rome. Therefore, with the posting of
the Thesis at Wittenberg; with Worms, and Augsburg, and Ratisbon; with
the flight of Charles V before Maurice, and with the Peace of
Religion, it marks one of the great days in the Church history of the
century. But it obtained still greater significance in the times that
were to come. On the whole, though not without exceptions, the
patriarchs approved. Their conclusions were challenged by younger and
obscurer men, and a controversy began which has not ceased to cause
the widest diversion among men.
The party of Liberty--Castellio, Socinus, Coornhert in the sixteenth
century, like Williams and Penn, Locke and Bayle in the
seventeenth--were not Protestants on the original foundation. They
were Sectaries; and the charge of human freedom was transferred from
the churches to the sects, from the men in authority to the men in
opposition, to Socinians and Arminians and Independents, and the
Society of Friends. By the thoroughness and definiteness of system,
and its practical adaptability, Calvinism was the form in which
Protestant religion could be best transplanted; and it struck root and
flourished in awkward places where Lutheranism could obtain no
foothold, in the absence of a sufficient prop. Calvanism spread not
only abroad but at home, and robbed Luther of part of Germany, of the
Palatinate, of Anhalt, of the House of Brandenburg, and in great part
of Hungary. This internal division was a fact of importance later on.
It assisted the work of the Counter-Reformation, and became the key to
the Thirty Years' War. The same thing that strengthened the
Protestant cause abroad weakened it on its own soil. Apart, then,
from points of doctrine, the distinctive marks of Calvin's influence
are that it promoted expansion, and that it checked the reigning idea
that nothing limits the power of the State.
Exactly the reverse of this distinguishes the movement which took
place at the same time in England, proceeding from the government
before the wave of Reformation struck the shores. Here there were
local reminiscences of Lollardry, and a tradition, as old as the
Conquest, of resistance to the medieval claims of Rome; but the first
impulse did not arise on the domain of religion. From the beginning
there was a body of opinion hostile to the king's marriage. The
practice was new, it was discountenanced by earlier authorities, and
it belonged to the same series of innovations as the recent system of
indulgences which roused the resistance of Germany. Precedents were
hard to find. Alexander VI had granted the same dispensation to
Emmanuel of Portugal, but with misgivings; and had refused it until
the king undertook to make war in person against the Moors of Africa.
Julius II, coming immediately after, had exacted no such condition
from Henry VII, so that he had done what was never done before him.
Sixtus V afterwards declared that Clement had deserved the calamities
that befell him, because he had not dissolved so unholy a union.
Others thought so at the time. No protest could well be heard before
1523, when Adrian censured his predecessors for exceeding their
powers. After that it could be no offence to say that Julius was one
of those whose conduct was condemned by his next successor but one.
But it was still a dangerous point to raise, because any action taken
upon it implied a breach with the queen's nephew Charles V, and the
loss of the old alliance with the House of Burgundy.
After the triumph of Pavia, the captivity of Francis I, and his
defiance of the treaty by which he obtained his deliverance, Wolsey
accepted a pension of 10,000 ducats from France, England renounced
friendship with the Habsburgs, and the breach was already
accomplished. The position of Catharine became intolerable, and she
led the opposition to Wolsey, the author of the change. Therefore,
from 1526, both the religious and the political motive for silence
ceased to operate, and there were, just then, evident motives for
speech. There was no hope that Catharine would have a son, and the
secret that a queen may reign by her own right, that the nation may be
ruled by the distaff, had not been divulged in England. In foreign
policy and in home policy alike, there were interests which favoured a
new marriage, if its legitimacy could be assured.
Wolsey had an additional inducement to promote what we call the
divorce, though it was nothing of the kind, in the fact that the queen
was his enemy. He had reasons to hope for success. The armies of
Charles had invaded Italy and threatened Rome, and the papal minister,
Giberti, enchanted with the zeal of the great English cardinal, wished
that he had him at the Vatican in the place of the tremulous and
inconstant Clement. Spain was the enemy; England was the ally. It
was probable that the Pope would do what he could in the interest of
England, to keep up its enmity with Spain. The case was a difficult
one, not to be decided on evidence. Something would remain uncertain,
and some allowance must be made for good or ill will at Rome. If the
invading Imperialists were defeated, the prospects would be good. If
they held their ground and made the Pope their dependent, it would be
all over with the divorce. Wolsey admitted afterwards that he
prompted the attempt, and persuaded the king that he could carry it
through. But at first he shifted the responsibility on to the French
envoy, Grammont, afterwards a cardinal, who came over to arrange a
marriage with Mary Tudor. He said that when he raised some
preliminary objection, Grammont lost his temper, and told him that
they might be glad of such an offer for a princess who was not
legitimate. Another story put into circulation was that Henry had
married under protest, and by compulsion, having been warned that if
he refused he would be dethroned. Erasmus, who admired Henry, took
care to explain that a king of England who lost his throne was likely
to lose his life. Wolsey intended to cement the French alliance by a
marriage with Renee, daughter of Lewis XII, not believing that Anne
Boleyn would be an obstacle. But the friends of Anne, the cluster of
English nobles who were weary of being excluded from affairs by the
son of the butcher of Ipswich, soon made it clear that she was only to
be won by the promise of a crown.
From that moment Wolsey, with all his astuteness, was digging his own
pit. If he succeeded, he would fall to make way for the Boleyn
faction. If he failed, he involved the Catholic cause in his
downfall. The first step in the business was the demand for
permission to marry a lady not named, notwithstanding any impediment
arising from an intrigue with her sister. With that the secret was
out, and they knew at Rome what the king's scruples were worth. This
was done behind the cardinal's back. When he took the matter in hand,
he asked that the Pope should dissolve the first marriage, on the
ground that Julius II had issued a dispensation in terms which could
not be justified. That this might not be taken as denying the
plenitude of the prerogative, he further asked for a dispensation to
marry a second wife without repudiating the first. And he desired
that the cause might be judged in this country and not at Rome.
When these negotiations commenced, in the spring and summer of 1527,
Rome had been sacked by the Imperialists, and Clement was a prisoner
in St. Angelo, or a fugitive at Orvieto, with the strongest motive
for resentment against the author of his humiliation. By the summer
of 1528, when Lautrec was in Italy at the head of a French army,
Clement had conceded virtually the whole of the English demands. He
removed every impediment to the marriage with Anne other than the fact
that Henry was married already. He authorised the trial of the case
in England by Wolsey and Warham; or again, by Wolsey and Campeggio,
Archbishop of Bologna, the best jurist of the sacred college. He
pronounced on the question of law, leaving questions of fact to the
legates, and he pronounced against the terms of the dispensation,
intimating that Julius had done what no Pope has a right to do. He
promised that judgment as given in England would be final, and that he
would not remove the cause to Rome. He was willing that Richmond, the
king's son, should marry the king's daughter, Mary Tudor. He did not
turn a deaf ear even to the proposal of bigamy. For several years he
continued to suggest that Henry should marry Anne Boleyn and renounce
the quest of a divorce. In 1530, somebody informed him that this
would not do, and that brought him to the last of his resources. He
proposed to the Imperialists, in order to prevent a schism, that Henry
should live with Anne without marriage and without divorce. That he
might not be hopelessly wrong with the Emperor, he required that the
most compromising of these documents should be kept secret. His
friendliness rose with the French advance and fell with the French
disasters. If Lautrec would approach the vicinity of Rome, he said,
he would do more, because the Emperor would excuse him on the ground
of compulsion. When Campeggio reached England, Lautrec was dead and
his army defeated. The papal secretary wrote, "Decide nothing, for
the Emperor is victorious, and we cannot afford to provoke him." There
was nothing more to be done.
While the Court was sitting in London, the Pope made his peace with
Charles; Catharine appealed to him from his legates in England, and he
was obliged to call the case before him. The queen's friends demanded
the strongest measures, and Aleander wrote that if you resisted Henry
VIII he became as gentle as a lamb. Such persuasions did not
influence the Pope, who put off action as long as he could, knowing
that a breach would inevitably follow. The French Chancellor warned
him that he would be known to be acting under pressure of the Emperor,
that the censure of Henry would be resented as the victory of Charles.
The French defeat in Italy was the ruin of Wolsey, who had caused the
breach with Spain without any advantage. A year later, when Campeggio
prorogued the Legatine Court, and the divorce had to be given up, he
was dismissed.
One further step had to be taken before settling the matter in
England. By advice of a Cambridge Don the universities were
consulted. They gave various replies, but those that helped the king
were not convincing, for they cost him more than L100,000 and he
obliged the clergy to give him that sum. As it was obvious for what
purpose Henry was arming himself with these opinions, Charles V
conceived serious scruples, and thought for a moment that to give way
might be the lesser evil. At the same time he sent 450,000 ducats to
Rome to facilitate matters; for the divorce was the one pending
question which delayed the conclusion of that treaty of Barcelona
which laid Italy for centuries at the feet of Spain. The uncertainty
in the policy of Rome as the power of the Emperor rose and fell, the
open avowal that so much depended on political considerations, besides
the strange proposal in respect of two wives, led to a belief in
England that the cause was lost by the pressure of interest and fear,
not by principle. Therefore, the establishment of the Spanish
dominion over Italy was quickly followed by the rejection of papal
supremacy in favour of the English state. The bishops themselves were
impressed with the danger of allowing the spiritual power to be
influenced through the temporal power by an enemy of this country, so
that they made no resistance. England broke with the Papacy on these,
and not on strictly religious grounds.
Tunstall, coming up to attend Parliament, suffered himself to be
stopped by a letter from the king, dispensing with his presence.
Fisher alone offered opposition. He caused the royal supremacy to be
accepted with the proviso, "so far as the divine law permits." And as
this proved only a stepping-stone to the unconditional headship of the
Church, he regarded it as his own fault. He refused submission, and
put himself in communication with the Imperialists with a view to
effective intervention. Sir Thomas More, the most modern and original
mind among the men of his time, showed greater caution. He admitted
the right of Parliament to determine the succession, and made no
struggle for Mary Tudor, as he had made none for her mother. He did
not openly contest the royal supremacy until after sentence. Besides
these two, a large number of monks were executed during Cromwell's
ministry.
Having given up the Pope, the government had no ground for keeping the
religious orders. They did not belong to the primitive Church, and
some of them, Grey Friars and Black Friars, were an essential part of
the medieval system which was rejected with the papal authority. When
Rome was taken in 1527, and Clement a prisoner, Wolsey, with some
other cardinals, proposed that he should act as his vicar during
captivity, so that the Church should not be receiving orders from the
Emperor through the Pope. This proposal is a first glimpse of what
was now introduced. The idea of a middle course, between Rome and
Wittemberg, occurred easily to every constant reader of Erasmus; and
many divines of the fifteenth century suggested something similar.
What then prevailed was not a theological view, but a political view.
The sovereignty of the Modern State, uncontrolled by the opinions of
men, commanded the minds both of Cromwell and of Gardiner, rivals
though they were. Cromwell is the first public man known to have been
a student of Machiavelli's writings; and the first to denounce them
was his enemy, Reginald Pole. It is the advent of a new polity.
Gardiner believed in it, thinking that nothing else could save
Catholicism after the mismanagement of the Church in Germany. And it
is the dominant note of the following years, whichever party was
prevailing.
That is the broad distinction between the continental Reformation and
the contemporary event in England. The one was the strongest
religious movement in the history of Christendom; the other was borne
onward on the crest of a wave not less overwhelming, the state that
admits no division of power. Therefore, when the spirit of foreign
Protestantism caught the English people they moved on lines distinct
from those fixed by the Tudors; and the reply of the seventeenth
century to the sixteenth was not a development, but a reaction.
Whereas Henry could exclude, or impose, or change religion at will
with various aid from the gibbet, the block, or the stake, there were
some among the Puritans who enforced, though they did not discover,
the contrary principle, that a man's conscience is his castle, with
kings and parliaments at a respectful distance.