into sympathy with the Monk of Wittenberg. The Elector of
Saxony, Luther's immediate sovereign, had long been in
opposition to the Papacy on the subject of its enormous
collections of money from his subjects, and he was well
pleased to have the hawking of indulgences checked in his
dominions. Partly for this reason, partly because of the pride
and interest with which he cherished his new University,
partly from personal liking and admiration of Luther, and
partly, too, no doubt, in recognition of the need of Church
reforms, he gave Luther a quiet protection and a concealed
support. He was the strongest and most influential of the
princes of the Empire, and his obvious favor to the movement
advanced it powerfully and rapidly.
At first, there was no intention to break with the Papacy and
the Papal Church,--certainly none in Luther's mind. His
attitude towards both was conciliatory in every way, except as
concerned the falsities and iniquities which he had protested
against. It was not until the Pope, in June, 1520, launched
against him the famous Bull, "Exurge Domine," which left no
alternative between abject submission and open war, that
Luther and his followers cast off the authority of the Roman
Church and its head, and grounded their faith upon Holy
Scripture alone. By formally burning the Bull, Luther accepted
the papal challenge, and those who believed with him were
ready for the contest.
The Diet of Worms.
In 1521, the reformer was summoned before a Diet of the
Empire, at Worms, where a hearing was given him. The influence
of the Church, and of the young Austro-Spanish Emperor,
Charles V., who adhered to it, was still great enough to
procure his condemnation; but they did not dare to deal with
him as Huss had been dealt with. He was suffered to depart
safely, pursued by an imperial edict which placed the ban of
the Empire on all who should give him countenance or support.
His friends among the nobles spirited him away and concealed
him in a castle, the Wartburg, where he remained for several
months, employed in making his translation of the Bible.
Meantime, the Emperor had been called away from Germany by his
multifarious affairs, in the Netherlands and Spain, and had
little attention to give to Luther and the questions of
religion for half-a-dozen years. He was represented in Germany
by a Council of Regency, with the Elector of Saxony at the
head of, it; and the movement of reformation, if not
encouraged in his absence, was at least considerably
protected. It soon showed threatening signs of wildness and
fanaticism in many quarters; but Luther proved himself as
powerful in leadership as he had been in agitation, and the
religious passion of the time was controlled effectively, on
the whole.
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Organization of the Lutheran Church.
Before the close of the year 1521, Pope Leo X. died, and his
successor, Adrian, while insisting upon the enforcement of the
Edict of Worms against Luther and his supporters, yet
acknowledged the corruptions of the Church and promised a
reformation of them. His promises came too late; his
confessions only gave testimony to the independent reformers
which their opponents could not impeach. There was no longer
any thought of cleansing the Church of Rome, to abide in it. A
separated--a restored Church--was clearly determined on, and
Luther framed a system of faith and discipline which was
adopted in Saxony, and then accepted very generally by the
reformed Churches throughout Germany. In 1525, the Elector
Frederick of Saxony died. He had quietly befriended the
Lutherans and tolerated the reform, but never identified
himself with them. His brother, John, who succeeded him, made
public profession of his belief in the Lutheran doctrines, and
authoritatively established the church system which Luther had
introduced. The Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Margrave of
Brandenburg, and the Dukes of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Zell,
followed his example; while the imperial cities of Frankfort,
Nuremberg, Bremen, Strasburg, Brunswick, Nordhausen, and
others, formally ranged themselves on the same side. By the
year 1526, when a diet at Spires declared the freedom of each
state in the Empire to deal with the religious reform
according to its own will, the Reformation in Germany was a
solidly organized fact. But those of the reform had not yet
received their name, of "Protestants." That came to them three
years later, when the Roman party had rallied its forces in a
new diet at Spires, to undo the declaration of 1526, and the
leaders of the Lutheran party recorded their solemn protest.
The Austro-Burgundian Marriage.
To understand the situation politically, during the period of
struggle for and against the Reformation, it will be necessary
to turn back a little, for the noting of important occurrences
which have not been mentioned.
When Albert II., who was King of Hungary and Bohemia, as well
as King of the Romans (Emperor-elect, as the title came to be,
soon afterwards), died, in 1439, he was succeeded by his
second cousin Frederick III., Duke of Styria, and from that
time the Roman or imperial crown was held continuously in the
Austrian family, becoming practically hereditary. But
Frederick did not succeed to the duchy of Austria, and he
failed of election to the throne in Hungary and Bohemia. Hence
his position as Emperor was peculiarly weak and greatly
impoverished, through want of revenue from any considerable
possessions of his own. During his whole long reign, of nearly
fifty-four years, Frederick was humiliated and hampered by his
poverty; the imperial authority was brought very low, and
Germany was in a greatly disordered state. There were frequent
wars between its members, and between Austria and Bohemia, with
rebellions in Vienna and elsewhere; while the Hungarians were
left to contend with the aggressive Turks, almost unhelped.
But in 1477 a remarkable change in the circumstances and
prospects of the family of the Emperor Frederick III. was made
by the marriage of his son and heir, Maximilian, to Mary, the
daughter and heiress of the wealthy and powerful Duke of
Burgundy, Charles the Bold. The bridegroom was so poor that
the bride is said to have loaned him the money which enabled
him to make a fit appearance at the wedding. She had lost, as
we saw, the duchy of Burgundy, but the valiant arm of
Maximilian enabled her to hold the Burgundian county, Franche
Comté, and the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which formed
at that time, perhaps, the most valuable principality in
Europe. The Duchess Mary lived only five years after her
marriage; but she left a son, Philip, who inherited the
Netherlands and Franche Comté, and Maximilian ruled them as
his guardian.
In 1493, the Emperor Frederick died, and Maximilian, who had
been elected King of the Romans some years before, succeeded
him in the imperial office. He was never crowned at Rome, and
he took the title, not used before, of King of Germany and
Emperor-elect. He was Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria,
Carinthia and Carniola, and Count of Tyrol; and, with his
guardianship in the Low Countries, he rose greatly in
importance and power above his father. But he accomplished
less than might possibly have been done by a ruler of more
sureness of judgment and fixity in purpose. His plans were
generally beyond his means, and the failures in his
undertakings were numerous. He was eager to interfere with the
doings of Charles VIII. and Louis XIII. in Italy; but the
Germanic diet gave him so little support that he could do
nothing effective. He joined the League of Cambrai against
Venice, and the Holy League against France, but bore no
important part in either. His reign was signalized in Germany
by the division of the nation into six administrative
"Circles," afterwards increased to ten, and by the creation of
a supreme court of appeal, called the Imperial Chamber,--both
of which measures did something towards the diminution of
private wars and disorders.
The Austro-Spanish Marriage.--Charles V.
But Maximilian figures most conspicuously in history as the
immediate ancestor of the two great sovereign dynasties--the
Austrian and the Austro-Spanish--which sprang from his
marriage with Mary of Burgundy and which dominated Europe for
a century after his death. His son Philip, heir to the
Burgundian sovereignty of the Netherlands, married (1496)
Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Two
children, Charles and Ferdinand, were the fruit of this
marriage. Charles, the elder, inherited more crowns and
coronets than were ever gathered, in reality, by one
sovereign, before or since. Ferdinand and Isabella had united
by their marriage the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and, by
the conquest of Granada and the partial conquest of Navarre,
the entire peninsula, except Portugal, was subsequently added
to their joint dominion. Joanna inherited the whole, on the
death of Isabella, in 1504, and the death of Ferdinand, in
1516. She also inherited from her father, Ferdinand, the
kingdom of the Two Sicilies--which he had reunited--and the
island of Sardinia. Philip, on his side, already in possession
of the Netherlands and Franche Comté, was heir to the domain of
the House of Austria. Both of these great inheritances
descended in due course to Charles, and he had not long to
wait for them. His father, Philip, died in 1506, and his
mother, Joanna, lost her mind, through grief at that event.
The death of his Spanish grandfather, Ferdinand, occurred in
1516, and that of his Austrian grandfather, the Emperor
Maximilian, followed three years later.
{1056}
At the age of twenty years (representing his mother in her
incapacity) Charles found himself sovereign of Spain, and
America, of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Low Countries,
Franche Comté, Austria, and the duchies associated with it.
The same year (1519) he was chosen King of Germany and
Emperor-elect, after a keen contest over the imperial crown,
in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England were
his competitors. On attaining this dignity, he conferred the
Austrian possessions on his brother Ferdinand. But he remained
the most potent and imposing monarch that Europe had seen
since Charlemagne. He came upon the stage just as Luther had
marshalled, in Germany, the reforming forces of the new era,
against intolerable iniquities in the Papal Church.
Unfortunately, he came, with his vast armament of powers, to
resist the demands of his age, and to be the champion of old
falsities and wrongs, both in Church and State. There was
nothing in the nature of the man, nor in his education, nor in
the influences which bore upon him, from either the Spanish or
the Austrian side of his family, to put him in sympathy with
lifting movements or with liberal ideas. He never formed a
conception of the world in which it looked larger to his eyes,
or signified more to him, than the globe upon his scepter. So,
naturally enough, this Cæsar of the Renaissance (Charles V. in
Germany and Charles I. in Spain) did his utmost, from the day
he climbed the throne, to thrust Europe back into the murk of
the fourteenth century, which he found it pretty nearly
escaped from. He did not succeed; but he gave years of misery
to several countries by his exertions, and he resigned the
task to a successor whom the world is never likely to tire of
abhorring and despising.
The end of popular freedom in Spain.
The affairs which called Charles V. away from Germany, after
launching his ineffectual edict of Worms against Luther and
Luther's supporters, grew in part out of disturbances in his
kingdom of Spain. His election to the imperial office had not
been pleasing to the Spaniards, who anticipated the
complications they would be dragged into by it, the foreign
character which their sovereign (already foreign in mind by
his education in the Netherlands) would be confirmed in, and
the indifference with which their grievances would be
regarded. For their grievances against the monarchy had been
growing serious in the last years of Ferdinand, and since his
death. The crown had gained power in the process of political
centralization, and its aggrandizement from the possession of
America began to loom startlingly in the light of the conquest
of Mexico, just achieved. During the absence of Charles in
Germany, his former preceptor, Cardinal Adrian, of Utrecht,
being in charge of the government as regent, a revolt broke
out at Toledo which spread widely and became alarming. The
insurgents organized their movement under the name of the
Santa Junta, or Holy League, and having obtained possession of
the demented Queen, Joanna, they assumed to act for her and
with her authority. This rebellion was suppressed with
difficulty; but the suppression was accomplished (1521-1522),
and it proved to be the last struggle for popular freedom in
Spain. The government used its victory with an unsparing
determination to establish absolute powers, and it succeeded.
The conditions needed for absolutism were already created, in
fact, by the deadly blight which the Inquisition had been
casting upon Spain for forty years. Since the beginning of the
frightful work of Torquemada, in 1483, it had been diligently
searching out and destroying every germ of free thought and
manly character that gave the smallest sign of fruitfulness in
the kingdom; and the crushing of the Santa Junta may be said
to have left few in Spain who deserved a better fate than the
political, the religious and the intellectual servitude under
which the nation sank.
Persecution of the Spanish Moriscoes.
Charles, whose mind was dense in its bigotry, urged on the
Inquisition, and pointed its dreadful engines of destruction
against the unfortunate Moriscoes, or Moors, who had been
forced to submit to Christian baptism after their subjugation.
Many of these followers of Mahomet had afterwards taken up
again the prayers and practices of their own faith, either
secretly or in quiet ways, and their relapse appears to have
been winked at, more or less. For they were a most useful
people, far surpassing the Spaniards in industry, in thrift
and knowledge of agriculture, and in mechanical skill. Many of
the arts and manufactures of the kingdom were entirely in
their hands. It was ruinous to interfere with their peaceful
labors. But Charles, as heathenish as the Grand Turk when it
suited his ends to be so, could look on these well-behaved and
useful Moors with no eyes but the eyes of an orthodox piety, and
could take account of nothing but their infidel faith. He
began, therefore, in 1524, the heartless, senseless and
suicidal persecution of the Moriscoes which exterminated them
or drove them from the land, and which contributed signally to
the making of Spain an exemplary pauper among the nations.
Despotism of Charles V. in the Netherlands.
In his provinces of the Low Countries, Charles found more than
in Spain to provoke his despotic bigotry. The Flemings and the
Dutch had been tasting of freedom too much for his liking, in
recent years, and ideas, both political and religious, had
been spreading among them, which were not the ideas of his
august mind, and must therefore, of necessity, be false. They
had already become infected with the rebellious anti-papal
doctrines of Luther. Indeed, they had been even riper than
Luther's countrymen for a religious revolution, when he
sounded the signal note which echoed through all northern
Europe. In Germany, the elected emperor could fulminate an
edict against the audacious reformers, but he had small power
to give force to it. In the Netherlands, he possessed a
sovereignty more potent, and he took instant measures to
exercise the utmost arbitrariness of which he could make it
capable. The Duchess Margaret, his aunt, who had been
governess of the provinces, was confirmed by him in that
office, and he enlarged the powers in her commission. His
commands practically superseded the regular courts, and
subjected the whole administration of justice to his arbitrary
will and that of his representative. At the same time they
stripped the States of their legislative functions and reduced
them to insignificance.
{1057}
Having thus trampled on the civil liberties of the provinces,
he borrowed the infernal enginery of the Inquisition, and
introduced it for the destruction of religious freedom. Its
first victims were two Augustine monks, convicted of
Lutheranism, who were burned at Brussels, in July, 1523. The
first martyr in Holland was a priest who suffered impalement
as well as burning, at the Hague, in 1525. From these
beginnings the persecution grew crueler as the alienation of
the stubborn Netherlanders from the Church of Rome widened;
and Charles did not cease to fan its fires with successive
proclamations or "placards," which denounced and forbade every
reading of Scripture, every act of devotion, every
conversation of religion, in public or private, which the
priests of the Church did not conduct. "The number of
Netherlanders who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried
alive, in obedience to his edicts, ... have been placed as
high as 100,000 by distinguished authorities, and have never
been put at a lower mark than 50,000."
Charles V. and Francis I. in Italy.
These exercises of an autocratic piety in Spain and the Low
Countries may be counted, perhaps, among the pleasures of the
young Emperor during the earlier years of his reign. His more
serious affairs were connected mainly with his interests or
ambitions in Italy, which seemed to be threatened by the King
of France. The throne in that country was now occupied by
Francis I., a cousin of Louis XII., who had succeeded the
latter in 1515, and who had taken up anew the Italian projects
in which Louis failed. In the first year of his reign, he
crossed the Alps with an army, defeated the Swiss whom the
Duke of Milan employed against him, and won the whole duchy by
that single fight. This re-establishment of the French at
Milan was regarded with exceeding jealousy by the Austrian
interest, and by the Pope. Maximilian, shortly before his
death, had made a futile effort to dislodge them, and Charles
V., on coming to the throne, lost no time in organizing plans
to the same end. He entered into an alliance with Pope Leo X.,
by a treaty which bears the same date as the Edict of Worms
against Luther, and there can be little doubt that the two
instruments were part of one understanding. Both parties
courted the friendship of Henry VIII. of England, whose power
and importance had risen to a high mark, and Henry's able
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, figured notably in the diplomatic
intrigues which went on during many years.
War began in 1521, and in three months the French were
expelled from nearly every part of the Milanese territory.
Pope Leo X. lived just long enough to receive the news. His
successor was Adrian VI., former tutor of the Emperor, who
made vain attempts to arrange a peace. Wolsey had brought
Henry VIII. of England into the alliance against Francis,
expecting to win the papal tiara through the Emperor's
influence; but he was disappointed.
Francis made an effort in 1523 to recover Milan; but was
crippled at the moment of sending his expedition across the
Alps by the treason of the most powerful noble of France, the
Constable, Charles, Duke of Bourbon. The Constable had been
wronged and affronted by the King's mother, and by intriguers
at court, and he revenged himself basely by going over to the
enemies of his country. In the campaigns which followed
(1523-1524), the French had ill-success, and lost their
chivalrous and famous knight, Bayard, in one of the last
skirmishes of their retreat. Another change now occurred in
the occupancy of the papal throne, and Wolsey's ambitious
schemes were foiled again. The new Pope was Giulio de'Medici,
who took the name of Clement VII.
Once more the King of France, in October, 1524, led his forces
personally into Italy and laid siege to Pavia. It was a
ruinous undertaking. He was defeated overwhelmingly in a
battle fought before Pavia (February 24, 1525) and taken
prisoner. After a captivity in Spain of nearly a year, he
regained his freedom disgracefully, by signing and solemnly
swearing to a treaty which he never intended to observe. By
this treaty he not only renounced all claims to Milan, Naples,
Genoa, and other Italian territory, but he gave up the duchy
of Burgundy. Released in good faith on these terms, in the
early part of 1526, he perfidiously repudiated the treaty, and
began fresh preparations for war. He found the Italians now as
ready to oust the Spaniards from their peninsula with French
help, as they had been ready before to expel the French with
help from Spain. The papal interest was in great alarm at the
power acquired by the Emperor, and Venice and Milan shared the
feeling. A new "Holy Alliance" was accordingly formed, with
the Pope at its head, and with Henry VIII. of England for its
"Protector." But before this League took the field with its
forces, Rome and Italy were stricken and trampled, as though
by a fresh invasion of Goths.
Sack of Rome, by the army of the Constable.
The imperial army, quartered in the duchy of Milan, under the
command of the Constable Bourbon, was scantily paid and fed.
The soldiers were forced to plunder the city and country for
their subsistence, and, of course, under those circumstances,
there was little discipline among them. The region which they
terrorized was soon exhausted, by their robberies and by the
stoppage of industries and trade. It then became necessary for
the Constable to lead them to new fields, and he moved
southwards. His forces were made up in part of Spaniards and
in part of Germans--the latter under a Lutheran commander, and
enlisted for war with the Pope and for pillage in Italy. He
directed the march to Rome, constrained, perhaps, by the
demands of his soldiery, but expecting, likewise, to crush the
League by seizing its apostolic head. On the 5th of May, 1527,
his 40,000 brigands arrived before the city. At daybreak, the
next morning, they assaulted the walls irresistibly and
swarmed over them. Bourbon was killed in the assault, and his
men were left uncontrolled masters of the venerable capital of
the world. They held it for seven months, pillaging and
destroying, committing every possible excess and every
imaginable sacrilege. Rome is believed to have suffered at
their hands more lasting defacement and loss of the splendors
of its art than from the sacking of Vandals or Goths.
The Pope held out in Castle St. Angelo for a month and then
surrendered. The hypocritical Charles V., when he learned what
his imperially commissioned bandits had done, made haste to
express horror and grief, but did not hasten to check or
repair the outrage in the least. Pope Clement was not released
from captivity until a great money-payment had been extorted
from him, with the promise of a general council of the Church
to reform abuses and to eradicate Lutheranism.
{1058}
Spanish Domination in Italy.
Europe was shocked by the barbarity of the capture of Rome,
and the enemies leagued against Charles were stimulated to
more vigorous exertions. Assisted with money from England,
Francis sent another army into Italy, which took Genoa and
Pavia and marched to Naples, blockading the city by sea and
land. But the siege proved fatal to the French army. So many
perished of disease that the survivors were left at the mercy
of the enemy, and capitulated in September, 1528.
The great Genoese Admiral, Andrea Doria, had been offended,
meantime, by King Francis, and had excited his fellow citizens
to a revolution, which made Genoa, once more, an independent
republic, with Doria at its head. Shortly before this
occurred, Florence had expelled the Medici and reorganized her
government upon the old republican basis. But the defeat of
the French before Naples ended all hope of Italian liberty;
since the Pope resigned himself after that event to the will
of the Emperor, and the papal and imperial despotisms became
united as one, to exterminate freedom from the peninsula.
Florence was the first victim of the combination. The city was
besieged and taken by the Emperor's troops, in compliance with
the wishes of the Pope, and the Medici, his relatives, were
restored. Francis continued war feebly until 1529, when a
peace called the "Ladies Peace" was brought about, by
negotiations between the French King's mother and the
Emperor's aunt. This was practically the end of the long
French wars in Italy.
Germany.
Such were the events which, in different quarters of the
world, diverted the attention of the Emperor during several
years from Luther and the Reformation in Germany. The
religious movement in those years had been making a steady
advance. Yet its enemies gained control of another Diet held
at Spires in 1529 and reversed the ordinance of the Diet of
1526, by which each state had been left free to deal in its
own manner with the edict of Worms. Against this action of the
Diet, the Lutheran princes and the representatives of the
Lutheran towns entered their solemn protest, and so acquired
the name, "Protestants," which became in time the accepted and
adopted name of all, in most parts of the world, who withdrew
from the Roman communion.
The Peasants' War and the Anabaptists.
Before this time, the Reform had passed through serious
trials, coming from excesses in the very spirit out of which
itself had risen and to which it gave encouragement. The long
suffering, much oppressed peasantry of Germany, who had found
bishops as pitiless extortioners as lords, caught eagerly at a
hope of relief from the overthrow of the ancient Church.
Several times within the preceding half-century they had risen
in formidable revolts, with a peasants' clog, or bundschuh for
their banner. In 1525 fresh risings occurred in Swabia,
Franconia, Alsace, Lorraine, Bavaria, Thuringia and elsewhere,
and a great Peasants' War raged for months, with ferocity and
brutality on both sides. The number who perished in the war is
estimated at 100,000. The demands made by the peasants were for
measures of the simplest justice--for the poorest rights and
privileges in life. But their cause was taken up by
half-crazed religious fanatics, who became in some parts their
leaders, and such a character was given to it that reasonable
reformers were justified, perhaps, in setting themselves
sternly against it. The wildest prophet of the outbreak was
one Thomas Münzer, a precursor of the frenzied sect of the
Anabaptists. Münzer perished in the wreck of the peasants'
revolt; but some of his disciples, who fled into Westphalia
and the Netherlands, made converts so rapidly in the town of
Münster that in 1535 they controlled the city, expelled every
inhabitant who would not join their communion, elected and
crowned a king, and exhibited a madness in their proceedings
that is hardly equalled in history. The experience at Münster
may reasonably be thought to have proved the soundness of
Luther's judgment in refusing countenance to the cause of the
oppressed peasants when they rebelled.
At all events, his opposition to them was hard and bitter. And
it has been remarked that what may be called Luther's
political position in Germany had become by this time quite
changed. "Instead of the man of the people, Luther became the
man of the princes; the mutual confidence between him and the
masses, which had supported the first faltering steps of the
movement, was broken; the democratic element was supplanted by
the aristocratic; and the Reformation, which at first had
promised to lead to a great national democracy, ended in
establishing the territorial supremacy of the German princes.
... The Reformation was gradually assuming a more secular
character, and leading to great political combinations"
(Dyer).
Progress of Lutheranism in Germany.
By the year 1530, the Emperor Charles was prepared to give
more attention to affairs in Germany and to gratify his
animosity towards the movement of Reformation. He had
effectually beaten his rival, the King of France, had
established his supremacy in Italy, had humbled the Pope, and
was quite willing to be the zealous champion of a submissive
Church. His brother Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, had
secured, against much opposition, both the Hungarian and the
Bohemian crowns, and so firmly that neither was ever again
wrested from his family, though they continued for some time
to be nominally elective. The dominions of Ferdinand had
suffered a great Turkish invasion, in 1529, under the Sultan
Solyman, who penetrated even to Vienna and besieged the city,
but without success, losing heavily in his retreat.
In May, 1530, Charles re-entered Germany from Italy. The
following month he opened the sitting of the Diet, which had
been convened at Augsburg. His first act at Augsburg was to
summon the protesting princes, of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg,
and other states, before him and to signify to them his
imperial command that the toleration of Lutheranism in their
dominions must cease. He expected the mandate to suffice; when
he found it ineffectual, he required an abstract of the new
religions doctrines to be laid before him. This was prepared
by Melancthon, and, afterwards known as the Confession of
Augsburg, became the Lutheran standard of faith.
{1059}
The Catholic theologians prepared a reply to it, and both were
submitted to the Emperor. He made some attempt to bring about
a compromise of the differences, but he demanded of the
Protestants that they should submit themselves to the Pope,
pending the final decisions of a proposed general Council of
the Church. When this was refused, the Diet formally condemned
their doctrines and required them to reunite themselves with
the Catholic Church before the 15th of April following. The
Emperor, in November, issued a decree accordingly, renewing
the Edict of Worms and commanding its enforcement.
The Protestant princes, thus threatened, assembled in
conference at Schmalkald at Christmas, 1530, and there
organized their famous armed league. But fresh preparations
for war by the Turk now compelled Charles to make terms with
his Lutheran subjects. They refused to give any assistance to
Austria or Hungary against the Sultan, while threatened by the
Augsburg decree. The gravity of the danger forced a concession
to them, and by the Peace of Nuremberg (1532) it was agreed
that the Protestants should have freedom of worship until the
next Diet should meet, or a General Council should be held.
This peace was several times renewed, and there were ten years
of quiet under it, in Germany, during which time the cause of
Protestantism made rapid advances. By the year 1540, it had
established an ascendancy in Würtemberg, among the states of
the South, and in the imperial cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg,
Ulm, Constance, and Strasburg. Its doctrines had been adopted
by "the whole of central Germany, Thuringia, Saxony, Hesse,
part of Brunswick, and the territory of the Guelphs; in the
north by the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and
Naumburg ... ; by East Friesland, the Hanse Towns, Holstein
and Schleswig, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Anhalt, Silesia, the
Saxon states, Brandenburg, and Prussia. Of the larger states
that were closed against it there remained only Austria,
Bavaria, the Palatinate and the Rhenish Electorates"
(Hausser). In 1542, Duke Henry of Brunswick, the last of the
North German princes who adhered to the Papal Church, was
expelled from his duchy and Protestantism established. About
the same time the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne announced his
conviction of the truth of the Protestant doctrines.
The Schmalkaldic War.
Charles was still too much involved in foreign wars to venture
upon a struggle with the Lutherans; but a few years more
sufficed to free his hands. The Treaty of Crespy, in 1544,
ended his last conflict with Francis I. In the same year, Pope
Paul III. summoned the long promised General Council of the
Church to meet at Trent the following spring--by which
appointment a term was put to the toleration conceded in the
Peace of Nuremberg. The Protestants, though greatly increased
in numbers, were now less united than at the time of the
formation of the Schmalkaldic League. There was much division
among the leading princes. They yielded no longer to the
influence of their wisest and ablest chief, Philip of Hesse.
Luther, whose counsels had always been for peace, approached
his end, and died in 1546. The circumstances were favorable to
the Emperor, when he determined to put a stop to the
Reformation by force. He secured an important ally in the very
heart of Protestant Germany, winning over to his side the
selfish schemer, Duke Maurice of Saxony--now the head of the
Albertine branch of the Saxon house. In 1546 he felt prepared
and war began. The successes were all on the imperial side.
There was no energy, no unity, no forethoughtfulness of plan,
among the Lutherans. The Elector, John Frederick, of Saxony,
and Philip of Hesse, both fell into the Emperor's hands and
were barbarously imprisoned. The former was compelled to
resign his Electorate, and it was conferred upon the renegade
Duke Maurice. Philip was kept in vile places of confinement
and inhumanly treated for years. The Protestants of Germany
were entirely beaten down, for the time being, and the Emperor
imposed upon them in 1548 a confession of faith called "the
Interim," the chief missionaries of which were the Spanish
soldiers whom he had brought into the country. But if the
Lutherans had suffered themselves to be overcome, they were
not ready to be trodden upon in so despotic a manner. Even
Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, recoiled from the tyranny
which Charles sought to establish, while he resented the
inhuman treatment of Philip of Hesse, who was his
father-in-law. He headed a new league, therefore, which was
formed against the Emperor, and which entered into a secret
alliance with Henry II. of France (Francis I. having died in
1547). Charles was taken by surprise when the revolt broke
out, in 1552, and barely escaped capture. The operations of
Maurice were vigorous and ably conducted, and in a few weeks
the Protestants had recovered all the ground lost in 1546-7;
while the French had improved the opportunity to seize the
three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The ultimate result
was the so-called "Religious Peace of Augsburg," concluded in
1555, which gave religious freedom to the ruling princes of
Germany, but none whatever to the people. It put the two
religions on the same footing, but it was simply a footing of
equal intolerance. Each ruler had the right to choose his own
creed, and to impose it arbitrarily upon his subjects if he
saw fit to do so. As a practical consequence, the final
division of Germany between Protestantism and Catholicism was
substantially determined by the princes and not by the people.
The humiliating failure of Charles V. to crush the Reformation
in Germany was no doubt prominent among the experiences which
sickened him of the imperial office and determined him to
abdicate the throne, which he did in the autumn of 1556.
Reformation in Switzerland.
A generation had now passed since the Lutheran movement of
Reformation was begun in Germany, and, within that time, not
only had the wave of influence from Wittenberg swept over all
western Europe, but other reformers had risen independently
and contemporaneously, or nearly so, in other countries, and
had co-operated powerfully in making the movement general. The
earliest of these was the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, who
began preaching against indulgences and other flagrant abuses
in the Church, at Zurich, in 1519, the same year in which
Luther opened his attack. The effect of his preaching was so
great that Zurich, four years later, had practically separated
itself from the Roman Church.
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From that beginning the Reformation spread so rapidly that in
half-a-dozen years it had mastered most of the Cantons of
Switzerland outside of the five Forest Cantons, where
Catholicism held its ground with stubbornness. The two
religions were then represented by two parties, which absorbed
in themselves all the political as well as the religious
questions of the day, and which speedily came to blows. The
Catholics allied themselves with Ferdinand of Austria, and the
Protestants with several of the imperial cities of Germany.
But such an union between the Swiss and the German Protestants
as seemed plainly desirable was prevented; mainly, by the
dictatorial obstinacy of Luther. Zwingli's reforming ideas
were broader, and at the same time more radical, than
Luther's, and the latter opposed them with irreconcilable
hostility. He still held with the Catholics to the doctrine of
transubstantiation, which the Swiss reformer rejected. Hence
Zwingli was no less a heretic in Luther's eyes than in the
eyes of the pope, and the anathemas launched against him from
Wittenberg were hardly less thunderous than those from Rome.
So the two contemporaneous reformation movements, German and
Swiss, were held apart from one another, and went on side by
side, with little help or sympathy from one another. In 1531
the Forest Cantons attacked and defeated the men of Zurich,
and Zwingli was slain in the battle. Peace was then concluded
on terms which left each canton free to establish its own
creed, and each congregation free to do the same in the common
territories of the confederation.
Reformation in France.
In France, the freer ideas of Christianity--the ideas less
servile to tradition and to Rome--that were in the upper air
of European culture when the sixteenth century began, had
found some expression even before Luther spoke. The influence
of the new classical learning, and of the "humanists" who
imbibed its spirit, tended to that liberation of the mind, and
was felt in the greatest center of the learning of the time,
the University of Paris. But not sufficiently to overcome the
conservatism of the Sorbonne--the theological faculty of the
University; for Luther's writings were solemnly condemned and
burned by it in 1521, and a persecution of those inclined
toward the new doctrines was early begun. Francis I., in whose
careless and coarse nature there was some taste for letters and
learning, as well as for art, and who patronized in an idle
way the Renaissance movements of his reign, seemed disposed at
the beginning to be friendly to the religious Reformers. But
he was too shallow a creature, and too profoundly unprincipled
and false, to stand firmly in any cause of righteousness, and
face such a power as that of Rome. His nobler sister, Margaret
of Angoulême, who embraced the reformed doctrines with
conviction, exerted a strong influence upon the king in their
favor while she was by his side; but after her marriage to
Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, and after Francis had
suffered defeat and shame in his war with Charles V., he was
ready to make himself the servant of the Papacy for whatever
it willed against his Protestant subjects, in order to have
its alliance and support. So the persecution grew steadily
more fierce, more systematic, and more determined, as the
spirit of the Reformation spread more widely through the
kingdom.
Calvin at Geneva.
One of the consequences of the persecution was the flight from
France, in 1534, of John Calvin, who subsequently became the
founder and the exponent of a system of Protestant theology
which obtained wider acceptance in Europe than that of Luther.
All minor differences were practically merged in the great
division between these two theologies--the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic--which split the Reformation in twain. After two
years of wandering, Calvin settled in the free city of Geneva,
where his influence very soon rose to so extraordinary a
height that he transformed the commonwealth and ruled it,
unselfishly, and in perfect piety, but with iron-handed
despotism, for a quarter of a century.
The French Court.
The reign of Francis I. has one other mark in history, besides
that of his persecution of the Reformers, his careless
patronage of arts and letters, and his unsuccessful wars with
the Emperor. He gave to the French Court--at least more than
his predecessors had done--the character which made it in
later French history so evil and mischievous a center of
dissoluteness, of base intrigue, of national demoralization.
It was invested in his time with the fascinations which drew
into it the nobles of France and its men of genius, to corrupt
them and to destroy their independence. It was in his time that
the Court began to seem to be, in its own eyes, a kind of
self-centered society, containing all of the French nation
which needed or deserved consideration, and holding its place
in the order of things quite apart from the kingdom which it
helped its royal master to rule. Not to be of the Court was to
be non-existent in its view; and thus every ambition in France
was invited to push at its fatal doors.
Catherine de' Medici and the Guises.
Francis I. died in 1547, and was followed on the throne by his
son Henry II., whose marriage to Catherine de' Medici, of the
renowned Florentine family, was the most important personal
act of his life. It was important in the malign fruits which
it bore; since Catherine, after his death, gave an evil
Italian bend-sinister to French politics, which had no lack of
crookedness before. Henry continued the war with Charles V.,
and was afterwards at war with Philip II., Charles' son, and
with England, the latter country losing Calais in the
contest,--its last French possession. Peace was made in 1559,
and celebrated with splendid tournaments, at one of which the
French king received a wound that caused his death.
He left three sons, all weaklings in body and character, who
reigned successively. The elder, Francis II., died the year
following his accession. Although aged but seventeen when he
died, he had been married some two years to Mary Stuart, the
young queen of Scots. This marriage had helped to raise to
great power in the kingdom a family known as the Guises. They
were a branch of the ducal House of Lorraine, whose duchy was
at that time independent of France, and, although the father
of the family, made Duke of Guise by Francis I., had become
naturalized in France in 1505, his sons were looked upon as
foreigners by the jealous Frenchmen whom they supplanted at
Court.
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Of the six sons, there were two of eminence, one (the second
duke of Guise) a famous general in his day, the other a
powerful cardinal. Five sisters completed the family in its
second generation. The elder of these, Mary, had married James
V. of Scotland (whose mother was the English princess,
Margaret, sister of Henry VIII.), and Mary Stuart, queen of
Scots, born of that marriage, was therefore a niece of the
Guises. They had brought about her marriage to Francis II.,
while he was dauphin, and they mounted with her to supreme
influence in the kingdom when she ascended the throne with her
husband. The queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, was as eager
as the Guises to control the government, in what appeared to
her eyes the interest of her children; but during the short
reign of Francis II. she was quite thrust aside, and the
queen's uncles ruled the state.
The death of Francis II. (1560) brought a change, and with the
accession of Charles IX., a boy of ten years, there began a
bitter contest for ascendancy between Catherine and the
Guises; and this struggle became mixed and strangely
complicated with a deadly conflict of religions, which the
steady advance of the Reformation in France had brought at
this time to a crisis.
The Huguenots.
Under the powerful leadership which Calvin assumed, at Geneva,
the reformed religion in France had acquired an organized
firmness and strength which not only resisted the most cruel
persecution, but made rapid headway against it. "Protestantism
had become a party which did not, like Lutheranism in Germany,
spring up from the depths." "It numbered its chief adherents
among the middle and upper grades of society, spread its roots
rather among the nobles than the citizens, and among learned
men and families of distinction rather than among the people."
"Some of the highest aristocracy, who were discontented, and
submitted unwillingly to the supremacy of the Guises, had
joined the Calvinistic opposition--some undoubtedly from
policy, others from conviction. The Turennes, the Rohans, and
Soubises, pure nobles, who addressed the king as 'mon cousin,'
especially the Bourbons, the agnates of the royal house, had
adopted the new faith" (Hausser). One branch of the Bourbons
had lately acquired the crown of Navarre. The Spanish part of
the old Navarrese kingdom had been subjugated and absorbed by
Ferdinand of Aragon; but its territory on the French side of
the Pyrenees--Béarn and other counties--still maintained a
half independent national existence, with the dignity of a
regal government. When Margaret of Angoulême, sister of
Francis I., married Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, as
mentioned before, she carried to that small court an earnest
inclination towards the doctrines of the Reform. Under her
protection Navarre became largely Protestant, and a place of
refuge for the persecuted of France. Margaret's daughter, the
famous Jeanne d'Albret, espoused the reformed faith fully, and
her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, as well as Antoine's brother,
Louis de Condé, found it politic to profess the same belief.
For the Protestants (who were now acquiring, in some unknown
way, the name of Huguenots) had become so numerous and so
compactly organized as to form a party capable of being
wielded with great effect, in the strife of court factions
which the rivalry of Catherine and the Guises produced. Hence
politics and religion were inextricably confused in the civil
wars which broke out shortly after the death of Francis II.
(1560), and the accession of the boy king, Charles IX. These
wars belong to a different movement in the general current of
European events, and we will return to them after a glance at
the religious Reformation, and at the political circumstances
connected with it, in England and elsewhere.
England.
Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, made king of England by his
victory at Bosworth, established himself so firmly in the seat
of power that three successive rebellions failed to disturb
him. In one of these (1487) a pretender, Lambert Simnel, was
put forward, who claimed to be the Earl of Warwick. In another
(1491-1497) a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck, personated one
of the young princes whom Richard III. had caused to be
murdered in the tower. Neither of the impostures had much
success in the kingdom. Henry VII. was not a popular king, but
he was able and strong, and he solidified all the bases of
monarchical independence which circumstances had enabled
Edward IV. to begin laying down.
It was in the reign of Henry that America was discovered, and
he might have been the patron of Columbus, the beneficiary of
the great voyage, and the proprietor and lord of the grand
realm which Isabella and Ferdinand secured. But he lacked the
funds or the faith--apparently both--and put aside his
unequaled opportunity. When the field of westward exploration
had been opened, however, he was early in entering it, and
sent the Cabots upon those voyages which gave England her
claim to the North American coasts.
During the reign of Henry VII. there were two quiet marriages
in his family which strangely influenced subsequent history.
One was the marriage, in 1501, of the king's eldest son,
Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Ferdinand
and Isabella. The other, in 1503, united the king's daughter,
Margaret, to James IV., King of Scotland. It was through this
latter marriage that the inheritance of the English crown
passed to the Scottish House of Stuart, exactly one hundred
years later, upon the failure of the direct line of descent in
the Tudor family. The first marriage, of Prince Arthur to
Catherine of Aragon, was soon dissolved by the death of the
prince, in 1502. Seven years afterwards the widowed Catherine
married her late husband's brother, just after he became Henry
VIII., King of England, upon the death of his father, in 1509.
Whence followed notable consequences which will presently
appear.
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Henry VIII. and his breach with Rome.
It was the ambition of Henry VIII. to play a conspicuous part
in European affairs; and as England was rich and strong, and
as the king had obtained nearly the absoluteness of the crown
in France, the parties to the great contests then going on
were all eagerly courting his alliance. His ambitions ran
parallel, too, with those of the able minister, Thomas Wolsey,
who rose to high influence at his side soon after his reign
began. Wolsey aspired to the Papal crown, with the cardinal's
cap as a preparatory adornment, and he drew England, as we
have seen, into the stormy politics of the sixteenth century
in Europe, with no gain, of glory or otherwise, to the nation,
and not much result of any kind. When the Emperor Maximilian
died, in 1519, Henry entered the lists against Maximilian's
grandson, Charles of Spain, and Francis I. of France, as a
candidate for the imperial crown. In the subsequent wars which
broke out between his two rivals, he took the side of the
successful Charles, now Emperor, and helped him to climb to
supremacy in Europe over the prostrate French king. He had
dreams of conquering France again, and casting the glories of
Henry V. in the shade; but he carried his enterprise little
beyond the dreaming. When it was too late to check the growth
of Charles' overshadowing power, he changed his side and took
Francis into alliance.
But Henry's motives were always selfish and personal--never
political; and the personal motives had now taken on a most
despicable character. He had tired of his wife, the Spanish
Catherine, who was six years older than himself. He had two
pretexts for discontent with his marriage: 1, that his queen
had borne him only a daughter, whereas England needed a male
heir to the throne; 2, that he was troubled with scruples as
to the lawfulness of wedlock with his brother's widow. On this
latter ground he began intrigues to win from the Pope, not a
divorce in the ordinary sense of the term, but a declaration
of the nullity of his marriage. This challenged the opposition
of the Emperor, Catherine's nephew, and Henry's alliances were
naturally changed.
The Pope, Clement VII., refused to annul the marriage, and
Henry turned his unreasoning wrath upon Cardinal Wolsey, who
had conducted negotiations with the Pope and failed in them.
Wolsey was driven from the Court in disgrace and died soon
afterwards. He was succeeded in the king's favor by a more
unscrupulous man, Thomas Cromwell. Henry had not yet despaired
of bringing the Pope to compliance with his wishes; and he
began attacks upon the Church and upon the papal revenues
which might shake, as he hoped, the firmness of the powers at
Rome. With the help of a pliant minister and a subservient
Parliament, he forced the clergy (1531-1532) in Convocation
to acknowledge him to be the Supreme Head of the English
Church, and to submit themselves entirely to his authority. At
the same time he grasped the "annates," or first year's income
of bishoprics, which had been the richest perquisite of the papal
treasury. In all these proceedings, the English king was
acting on a line parallel to that of the continental rising
against Rome; but it was not in friendliness toward it nor in
sympathy with it that he did so. He had been among the
bitterest enemies of the Reformation, and he never ceased to
be so. He had won from the Pope the empty title of "Defender
of the Faith," by a foolish book against Luther, and the faith
which he defended in 1521 was the faith in which he died. But
when he found that the influence of Charles V. at Rome was too
great to be overcome, and that the Pope could be neither
bribed, persuaded nor coerced to sanction the putting away of
his wife, he resolved to make the English Church sufficient in
authority to satisfy his demand, by establishing its
ecclesiastical independence, with a pontiff of its own, in
himself. He purposed nothing more than this. He contemplated
no change of doctrine, no cleansing of abuses. He permitted no
one whose services he commanded in the undertaking to bring
such changes into contemplation. So far as concerned Henry's
initiative, there was absolutely nothing of religious
Reformation in the movement which separated the Church of
England from the Church of Rome. It accomplished its sole
original end when it gave finality to the decree of an English
ecclesiastical court, on the question of the king's marriage,
and barred queen Catherine's appeal from it. It was the
intention of Henry VIII. that the Church under his papacy
should remain precisely what it had been under the Pope at
Rome, and he spared neither stake nor gibbet in his
persecuting zeal against impudent reformers.
But the spirit of Reformation which was in the atmosphere of
that time lent itself, nevertheless, to King Henry's project,
and made that practicable which could hardly have been so a
generation before. The influence of Wyclif had never wholly
died out; the new learning was making its way in England and
broadening men's minds; the voice of Luther and his fellow
workers on the continent had been heard, and not vainly.
England was ripe for the religious revolution, and her king
promoted it, without intention. But while his reign lasted,
and his despotism was heavy on the land, there was nothing
accomplished but the breaking of the old Church fetters, and
the binding of the nation anew with green withes, which,
presently, it would burst asunder.
The conspicuous events of Henry's reign are familiarly known.
Most of them bear the stamp of his monstrous egotism and
selfishness. He was the incomparable tyrant of English
history. The monarch who repudiated two wives, sent two to the
block, and shared his bed with yet two more; who made a whole
national church the servant of his lusts, and who took the
lives of the purest men of his kingdom when they would not
bend their consciences to say that he did well--has a pedestal
quite his own in the gallery of infamous kings.
Edward VI. and the Reformation.
Dying in 1547, Henry left three children: Mary, daughter of
Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, and
Edward, son of Jane Seymour. The latter, in his tenth year,
became King (Edward VI.), and his uncle, the Duke of Somerset,
acquired the control of the government, with the title of
Protector. Somerset headed a party which had begun before the