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Title: The Age of the Reformation


Author: Preserved Smith



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THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION

by

PRESERVED SMITH, Ph.D.







New York
Henry Holt and Company

American Historical Series
General Editor
Charles H. Haskins
Professor of History in Harvard University

Copyright, 1920
by
Henry Holt and Company




  VITA
  CARIORI
  FILIOLAE
  PRISCILLAE
  SACRUM




PREFACE

The excuse for writing another history of the Reformation is the need
for putting that movement in its proper relations to the economic and
intellectual revolutions of the sixteenth century.  The labor of love
necessary for the accomplishment of this task has employed most of my
leisure for the last six years and has been my companion through
vicissitudes of sorrow and of joy.  A large part of the pleasure
derived from the task has come from association with friends who have
generously put their time and thought at my disposal.  First of all,
Professor Charles H. Haskins, of Harvard, having read the whole in
manuscript and in proof with care, has thus given me the unstinted
benefit of his deep learning, and of his ripe and sane judgment.  Next
to him the book owes most to my kind friend, the Rev. Professor William
Walker Rockwell, of Union Seminary, who has added to the many other
favors he has done me a careful revision of Chapters I to VIII, Chapter
XIV, and a part of Chapter IX.  Though unknown to me personally, the
Rev. Dr. Peter Guilday, of the Catholic University of Washington,
consented, with gracious, characteristic urbanity, to read Chapters VI
and VIII and a part of Chapter I.  I am grateful to Professor N. S. B.
Gras, of the University of Minnesota, for reading that part of the book
directly concerned with economics (Chapter XI and a part of Chapter X);
and to Professor Frederick A. Saunders, of Harvard, for a like service
in technical revision of the section on science in Chapter XII.  While
acknowledging with hearty thanks the priceless services of these
eminent scholars, it is only fair to relieve them of all responsibility
for any rash statements that may have escaped their scrutiny, as well
as for any conclusions from which they might dissent.

For information about manuscripts and rare books in Europe my thanks
are due to my kind friends: Mr. P. S. Allen, Librarian of Merton
College, Oxford, the so successful editor of Erasmus's Epistles; and
Professor Carrington Lancaster, of Johns Hopkins University.  To
several libraries I owe much for the use of books.  My friend,
Professor Robert S. Fletcher, Librarian of Amherst College, has often
sent me volumes from that excellent store of books.  My sister,
Professor Winifred Smith, of Vassar College, has added to many loving
services, this: that during my four years at Poughkeepsie, I was
enabled to use the Vassar library.  For her good offices, as well as
for the kindness of the librarian, Miss Amy Reed, my thanks.  My
father, the Rev. Dr. Henry Preserved Smith, professor and librarian at
Union Theological Seminary, has often sent me rare books from that
library; nor can I mention this, the least of his favors, without
adding that I owe to him much both of the inspiration to follow and of
the means to pursue a scholar's career.  My thanks are also due to the
libraries of Columbia and Cornell for the use of books.  But the work
could not easily have been done at all without the facilities offered
by the Harvard Library.  When I came to Cambridge to enjoy the riches
of this storehouse, I found the great university not less hospitable to
the stranger within her gates than she is prolific in great sons.
After I was already deep in debt to the librarian, Mr. W. C. Lane, and
to many of the professors, a short period in the service of Harvard, as
lecturer in history, has made me feel that I am no longer a stranger,
but that I can count myself, in some sort, one of her citizens and
foster sons, at least a dimidiatus alumnus.

This book owes more to my wife than even she perhaps quite realizes.
Not only has it been her study, since our marriage, to give me freedom
for my work, but her literary advice, founded on her own experience as
writer and critic, has been of the highest value, and she has carefully
read the proofs.

PRESERVED SMITH.

Cambridge,
  Massachusetts,
    May 16, 1920.




CONTENTS

                                                            PAGE

CHAPTER I.  THE OLD AND THE NEW  . . . . . . . . . . . . .     3

1. The World.  Economic changes in the later Middle Ages.  Rise of the
bourgeoisie.  Nationalism.  Individualism.  Inventions.  Printing.
Exploration.  Universities.

2. The Church.  The papacy.  The Councils of Constance and Basle.
Savonarola.

3. Causes of the Reformation.  Corruption of the church not a main
cause.  Condition of the church.  Indulgences.  Growth of a new type of
lay piety.  Clash of the new spirit with old ideals.

4. The Mystics.  _The German Theology_.  Tauler.  _The Imitation of
Christ_.

5. The Pre-reformers.  Waldenses.  Occam.  Wyclif.  Huss.

6. Nationalizing the churches.  The Ecclesia Anglicana.  The Gallican
Church.  German church.  The Gravamina.

7. The Humanists.  Valla.  Pico della Mirandola.  Lefevre d'Etaples.
Colet.  Reuchlin.  _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_.  Hutten.  Erasmus.


CHAPTER II.  GERMANY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    62

1. The Leader.  Luther's early life.  Justification by faith only.
_The Ninety-five Theses_.  The Leipzig Debate.  Revolutionary Pamphlets
of 1520.

2. The Revolution.  Condition of Germany.  Maximilian I.  Charles V.
The bull _Exsurge Domine_ burned by Luther.  Luther at Worms and in the
Wartburg.  Turmoil of the radicals.  The Revolt of the Knights.
Efforts at Reform at the Diets of Nuremberg 1522-4.  The Peasants'
Revolt: economic causes, propaganda, course of the war, suppression.

3. Formation of the Protestant Party.  Defection of the radicals: the
Anabaptists.  Defection of the intellectuals: Erasmus.  The
Sacramentarian Schism: Zwingli.  Growth of the Lutheran party among the
upper and middle classes.  Luther's ecclesiastical polity.  Accession
of many Free Cities, of Ernestine Saxony, Hesse, Prussia.  Balance of
Power.  The Recess of Spires 1529; the Protest.

4. Growth of Protestantism until the death of Luther.  Diet of Augsburg
1530: the Confession.  Accessions to the Protestant cause.  Religious
negotiations.  Luther's last years, death and character.

5. Religious War and Religious Peace.  The Schmalkaldic War.  The
Interim.  The Peace of Augsburg 1555.  Catholic reaction and Protestant
schisms.

6. Note on Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary.


CHAPTER III.  SWITZERLAND  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    146

1. Zwingli.  The Swiss Confederacy.  Preparation for the Reformation.
Zwingli's early life.  Reformation at Zurich.  Defeat of Cappel.

2. Calvin.  Farel.  Calvin's early life.  _The Institutes of the
Christian Religion_.  Reformation at Geneva.  Theocracy.  The
Libertines.  Servetus.  Character and influence of Calvin.


CHAPTER IV.  FRANCE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   182

1. Renaissance and Reformation.  Condition of France.  Francis I.  War
with Charles.  The Christian Renaissance.  Lutheranism.  Defection of
the humanists.

2. The Calvinist Party.  Henry II.  Expansion of France.  Growth and
persecution of Calvinism.

3. The Wars of Religion.  Catharine de' Medicis.  Massacre of Vassy.
The Huguenot rebellion.  Massacre of St. Bartholomew.  The League.
Henry IV.  Edict of Nantes.  Failure of Protestantism to conquer France.


CHAPTER V.  THE NETHERLANDS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    234

1. The Lutheran Reform.  The Burgundian State.  Origins of the
Reformation.  Persecution.  The Anabaptists.

2. The Calvinist Revolt.  National feeling against Spain.  Financial
difficulties of Philip II.  Egmont and William of Orange.  The new
bishoprics.  The Compromise.  The "Beggars."  Alva's reign of terror.
Requesens.  Siege of Leyden.  The Revolt of the North.  Division of the
Netherlands.  Farnese.  The Dutch Republic.


CHAPTER VI.  ENGLAND   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   277

1. Henry VIII and the National Church.  Character of Henry VIII.
Foreign  policy.  Wolsey.  Early  Lutheranism.  Tyndale's New
Testament.  Tracts.  Anticlerical feeling.  Divorce of Catharine of
Aragon.  The Submission of the Clergy.  The Reformation Parliament
1520-30.  Act in Restraint of Appeals.  Act of Succession.  Act of
Supremacy.  Cranmer.  Execution of More.  Thomas Cromwell.  Dissolution
of the monasteries.  Union of England and Wales.  Alliance with the
Schmalkaldic League.  Articles of Faith.  The Pilgrimage of Grace.
Catholic reaction.  War.  Bankruptcy.

2. The Reformation under Edward VI.  Somerset Regent.  Repeal of the
treason and heresy laws.  Rapid growth of Protestant opinion.  The Book
of Common Prayer.  Social disorders.  Conspiracy of Northumberland and
Suffolk.

3. The Catholic reaction under Mary.  Proclamation of Queen Jane.
Accession and policy of Mary.  Repeal of Reforming Acts.  Revival of
Treason Laws.  The Protestant Martyrs.

4. The Elizabethan Settlement 1558-88.  Policy of Elizabeth.
Respective numbers of Catholics and Protestants.  Conversion of the
masses.  _The Thirty-nine Articles_.  The Church of England.  Underhand
war with Spain.  Rebellion of the Northern Earls.  Execution of Mary
Stuart.  The Armada.  The Puritans.

5. Ireland.


CHAPTER VII.  SCOTLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   350

Backward condition of Scotland.  Relations with England.  Cardinal
Beaton.  John Knox.  Battle of Pinkie.  Knox in Scotland.  The Common
Band.  Iconoclasm.  Treaty of Edinburgh.  The Religious Revolution.
Confession of Faith.  Queen Mary's crimes and deposition.  Results of
the Reformation.


CHAPTER VIII.  THE COUNTER-REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . .   371

1. Italy.  The pagan Renaissance; the Christian Renaissance.  Sporadic
Lutheranism.

2. The Papacy 1521-90.  The Sack of Rome.  Reforms.

3. The Council of Trent.  First Period (1545-7).  Second Period
(1551-2).  Third Period (1562-3).  Results.

4. The Company of Jesus.  New monastic orders.  Loyola.  _The Spiritual
Exercises_.  Rapid growth and successes of the Jesuits.  Their final
failure.

5. The Inquisition and the Index.  The medieval Inquisition.  The
Spanish Inquisition.  The Roman Inquisition.  Censorship of the press.
_The Index of Prohibited Books_.


CHAPTER IX.  THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THE EXPANSION
             OF EUROPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   425

1. Spain.  Unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella.  Charles
V.  Revolts of the Communes and of the Hermandad.  Constitution of
Spain.  The Spanish empire.  Philip II.  The war with the Moriscos.
The Armada.

2. Exploration.  Columbus.  Conquest of Mexico and of Peru.
Circumnavigation of the globe.  Portuguese exploration to the East.
Brazil.  Decadence of Portugal.  Russia.  The Turks.


CHAPTER X.  SOCIAL CONDITIONS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   451

1. Population.

2. Wealth and Prices.  Increase of wealth in modern times.  Prices and
wages in the Sixteenth Century.  Value of money.  Trend of prices.

3. Social Institutions.  The monarchy, the Council of state, the
Parliament.  Public finance.  Maintenance of Order.  Sumptuary laws and
"blue laws."  The army.  The navy.

4. Private life and manners.  The nobility; the professions; the
clergy.  The city, the house, dress, food, drink.  Sports.  Manners.
Morals.  Position of Women.  Health.


CHAPTER XI.  THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION . . . . . . . . .   515

1. The Rise of the Power of Money.  Rise of capitalism.  Banking.
Mining.  Commerce.  Manufacture.  Agriculture.

2. The Rise of the Money Power.  Ascendancy of the bourgeoisie over the
nobility, clergy, and proletariat.  Class wars.  Regulation of Labor.
Pauperism.


CHAPTER XII.  MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT . . . . . . . . .    563

1. Biblical and classical scholarship.  Greek and Hebrew Bibles.
Translations.  The classics.  The vernaculars.

2. History.  Humanistic history and church history.

3. Political theory.  The state as power: Machiavelli.  Constitutional
liberty: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hotman, Mornay, Bodin, Buchanan.
Radicals: the _Utopia_.

4. Science.  Inductive method.  Mathematics.  Zooelogy.  Anatomy.
Physics.  Geography.  Astronomy; Copernicus.  Reform of the calendar.

5. Philosophy.  The Catholic and Protestant thinkers.  Skeptics.
Effect of the Copernican theory: Bruno.


CHAPTER XIII.  THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES . . . . . . . . .    641

1. Tolerance and Intolerance.  Effect of the Renaissance and
Reformation.

2. Witchcraft.  Causes of the mania.  Protests against it.

3. Education.  Schools.  Effect of the Reformation.  Universities.

4. Art.  The ideals expressed.  Painting.  Architecture.  Music.
Effect of the Reformation and Counter-reformation.

5. Reading.  Number of books.  Typical themes.  Greatness of the
Sixteenth Century.


CHAPTER XIV.  THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED  . . . . . . .    699

1. The Religious and Political Interpretations.  Burnet, Bossuet,
Sleidan, Sarpi.

2. The Rationalist Critique.  Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robertson, Hume,
Gibbon, Goethe, Lessing.

3. The Liberal-Romantic Appreciation.  Heine, Michelet, Froude, Hegel,
Ranke, Buckle.

4. The Economic and Evolutionary Interpretations.  Marx, Lamprecht,
Berger, Weber, Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Santayana, Harnack, Beard,
Janssen, Pastor, Acton.

5. Concluding Estimate.


BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    751

INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    819




{3}

THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION


CHAPTER I

THE OLD AND THE NEW

SECTION 1.  THE WORLD.

Though in some sense every age is one of transition and every
generation sees the world remodelled, there sometimes comes a change so
startling and profound that it seems like the beginning of a new season
in the world's great year.  The snows of winter melt for weeks, the
cold winds blow and the cool rains fall, and we see no change until,
almost within a few days, the leaves and blossoms put forth their
verdure, and the spring has come.

Such a change in man's environment and habits as the world has rarely
seen, took place in the generation that reached early manhood in the
year 1500.  [Sidenote: 1483-1546]  In the span of a single life--for
convenience let us take that of Luther for our measure--men discovered,
not in metaphor but in sober fact, a new heaven and a new earth.  In
those days masses of men began to read many books, multiplied by the
new art of printing.  In those days immortal artists shot the world
through with a matchless radiance of color and of meaning.  In those
days Vasco da Gama and Columbus and Magellan opened the watery ways to
new lands beyond the seven seas.  In those days Copernicus established
the momentous truth that the earth was but a tiny planet spinning
around a vastly greater sun.  In those days was in large part
accomplished the economic shift from medieval gild to modern production
by capital and wages.  In those days wealth was piled up in the coffers
of the merchants, and a new power was {4} given to the life of the
individual, of the nation, and of the third estate.  In those days the
monarchy of the Roman church was broken, and large portions of her
dominions seceded to form new organizations, governed by other powers
and animated by a different spirit.

[Sidenote: Antecedents of the Reformation]

Other generations have seen one revolution take place at a time, the
sixteenth century saw three, the Rise of Capitalism, the end of the
Renaissance, and the beginning of the Reformation.  All three,
interacting, modifying each other, conflicting as they sometimes did,
were equally the consequences, in different fields, of antecedent
changes in man's circumstances.  All life is an adaptation to
environment; and thus from every alteration in the conditions in which
man lives, usually made by his discovery of new resources or of
hitherto unknown natural laws, a change in his habits of life must
flow.  Every revolution is but an adjustment to a fresh situation,
intellectual or material, or both.

[Sidenote: Economic]

Certainly, economic and psychological factors were alike operative in
producing the three revolutions.  The most general economic force was
the change from "natural economy" to "money economy," _i.e._ from a
society in which payments were made chiefly by exchange of goods, and
by services, to one in which money was both the agent of exchange and
standard of value.  In the Middle Ages production had been largely
co-operative; the land belonged to the village and was apportioned out
to each husbandman to till, or to all in common for pasture.
Manufacture and commerce were organized by the gild--a society of
equals, with the same course of labor and the same reward for each, and
with no distinction save that founded on seniority--apprentice,
workman, master-workman.  But {5} in the later Middle Ages, and more
rapidly at their close, this system broke down under the necessity for
larger capital in production and the possibility of supplying it by the
increase of wealth and of banking technique that made possible
investment, rapid turn-over of capital, and corporate partnership.  The
increase of wealth and the changed mode of its production has been in
large part the cause of three developments which in their turn became
causes of revolution: the rise of the bourgeoisie, of nationalism, and
of individualism.

[Sidenote: The bourgeoisie]

Just as the nobles were wearing away in civil strife and were seeing
their castles shot to pieces by cannon, just as the clergy were wasting
in supine indolence and were riddled by the mockery of humanists, there
arose a new class, eager and able to take the helm of civilization, the
moneyed men of city and of trade.  _Nouveaux riches_ as they were, they
had an appetite for pleasure and for ostentation unsurpassed by any, a
love for the world and an impatience of the meek and lowly church, with
her ideal of poverty and of chastity.  In their luxurious and leisured
homes they sheltered the arts that made life richer and the philosophy,
or religion, that gave them a good conscience in the work they loved.
Both Renaissance and Reformation were dwellers in the cities and in the
marts of commerce.

[Sidenote: National states]

It was partly the rise of the third estate, but partly also cultural
factors, such as the perfecting of the modern tongues, that made the
national state one of the characteristic products of modern times.
Commerce needs order and strong government; the men who paid the piper
called the tune; police and professional soldiery made the state, once
so racked by feudal wars, peaceful at home and dreaded abroad.  If the
consequence of this was an increase in royal power, the kings were
among those who had greatness thrust upon them, rather than achieving
it for themselves.  {6} They were but the symbols of the new, proudly
conscious nation, and the police commissioners of the large bankers and
traders.

[Sidenote: Individualism]

The reaction of nascent capitalism on the individual was no less marked
than on state and society, though it was not the only cause of the new
sense of personal worth.  Just as the problems of science and of art
became most alluring, the man with sufficient leisure and resource to
solve them was developed by economic forces.  In the Middle Ages men
had been less enterprising and less self-conscious.  Their thought was
not of themselves as individuals so much as of their membership in
groups.  The peoples were divided into well-marked estates, or classes;
industry was co-operative; even the great art of the cathedrals was
rather gild-craft than the expression of a single genius; even learning
was the joint property of universities, not the private accumulation of
the lone scholar.  But with every expansion of the ego either through
the acquisition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great exploits,
came a rising self-consciousness and self-confidence, and this was the
essence of the individualism so often noted as one of the contrasts
between modern and medieval times.  The child, the savage, and to a
large extent the undisciplined mind in all periods of life and of
history, is conscious only of object; the trained and leisured
intellect discovers, literally by "reflection," the subjective.  He is
then no longer content to be anything less than himself, or to be lost
in anything greater.

Just as men were beginning again to glory in their own powers came a
series of discoveries that totally transformed the world they lived in.
So vast a change is made in human thought and habit by some apparently
trivial technical inventions that it sometimes {7} seems as if the race
were like a child that had boarded a locomotive and half accidentally
started it, but could neither guide nor stop it.  Civilization was born
with the great inventions of fire, tools, the domestication of
[Sidenote: Inventions] animals, writing, and navigation, all of them,
together with important astronomical discoveries, made prior to the
beginnings of recorded history.  On this capital mankind traded for
some millenniums, for neither classic times nor the Dark Ages added
much to the practical sciences.  But, beginning with the thirteenth
century, discovery followed discovery, each more important in its
consequences than its last.  One of the first steps was perhaps the
recovery of lost ground by the restoration of the classics.  Gothic art
and the vernacular literatures testify to the intellectual activity of
the time, but they did not create the new elements of life that were
brought into being by the inventors.

What a difference in private life was made by the introduction of
chimneys and glass windows, for glass, though known to antiquity, was
not commonly applied to the openings that, as the etymology of the
English word implies, let in the wind!  By the fifteenth century the
power of lenses to magnify and refract had been utilized, as mirrors,
then as spectacles, to be followed two centuries later by telescopes
and microscopes.  Useful chemicals were now first applied to various
manufacturing processes, such as the tinning of iron.  The compass,
with its weird power of pointing north, guided the mariner on uncharted
seas.  The obscure inventor of gunpowder revolutionized the art of war
more than all the famous conquerors had done, and the polity of states
more than any of the renowned legislators of antiquity.  The equally
obscure inventor of mechanical clocks--a great improvement on the {8}
older sand-glasses, water-glasses, and candles--made possible a new
precision and regularity of daily life, an untold economy of time and
effort.

[Sidenote: Printing]

But all other inventions yield to that of printing, the glory of John
Gutenberg of Mayence, one of those poor and in their own times obscure
geniuses who carry out to fulfilment a great idea at much sacrifice to
themselves.  The demand for books had been on the increase for a long
time, and every effort was made to reproduce them as rapidly and
cheaply as possible by the hand of expert copyists, but the
applications of this method produced slight result.  The introduction
of paper, in place of the older vellum or parchment, furnished one of
the indispensable pre-requisites to the multiplication of cheap
volumes.  In the early fifteenth century, the art of the wood-cutter
and engraver had advanced sufficiently to allow some books to be
printed in this manner, _i.e._ from carved blocks.  This was usually,
or at first, done only with books in which a small amount of text went
with a large amount of illustration.  There are extant, for example,
six editions of the _Biblia Pauperum_, stamped by this method.  It was
afterwards applied, chiefly in Holland, to a few other books for which
there was a large demand, the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example,
and a guide-book to Rome known as the _Mirabilia Urbis Romae_.  But at
best this method was extremely unsatisfactory; the blocks soon wore
out, the text was blurred and difficult to read, the initial expense
was large.

The essential feature of Gutenberg's invention was therefore not, as
the name implies, printing, or impression, but typography, or the use
of type.  The printer first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was
called the punch; with it he stamped a mould known as the {9} matrix in
which he was able to found a large number of exactly identical types of
metal, usually of lead.

These, set side by side in a case, for the first time made it possible
satisfactorily to print at reasonable cost a large number of copies of
the same text, and, when that was done, the types could be taken apart
and used for another work.

The earliest surviving specimen of printing--not counting a few undated
letters of indulgence--is a fragment on the last judgment completed at
Mayence before 1447.  In 1450 Gutenberg made a partnership with the
rich goldsmith John Fust, and from their press issued, within the next
five years, the famous Bible with 42 lines to a page, and a Donatus
(Latin grammar) of 32 lines.  The printer of the Bible with 36 lines to
a page, that is the next oldest surviving monument, was apparently a
helper of Gutenberg, who set up an independent press in 1454.  Legible,
clean-cut, comparatively cheap, these books demonstrated once for all
the success of the new art, even though, for illuminated initials, they
were still dependent on the hand of the scribe.

[Sidenote: Books and Reading]

In those days before patents the new invention spread with wonderful
rapidity, reaching Italy in 1465, Paris in 1470, London in 1480,
Stockholm in 1482, Constantinople in 1487, Lisbon in 1490, and Madrid
in 1499.  Only a few backward countries of Europe remained without a
press.  By the year 1500 the names of more than one thousand printers
are known, and the titles of about 30,000 printed works.  Assuming that
the editions were small, averaging 300 copies, there would have been in
Europe by 1500 about 9,000,000 books, as against the few score thousand
manuscripts that lately had held all the precious lore of time.  In a
few years the price of books sank to one-eighth of what it had been
before.  "The gentle reader" had started on his career.

{10} The importance of printing cannot be over-estimated.  There are
few events like it in the history of the world.  The whole gigantic
swing of modern democracy and of the scientific spirit was released by
it.  The veil of the temple of religion and of knowledge was rent in
twain, and the arcana of the priest and clerk exposed to the gaze of
the people.  The reading public became the supreme court before whom,
from this time, all cases must be argued.  The conflict of opinions and
parties, of privilege and freedom, of science and obscurantism, was
transferred from the secret chamber of a small, privileged,
professional, and sacerdotal coterie to the arena of the reading public.

[Sidenote: Exploration]

It is amazing, but true, that within fifty years after this exploit,
mankind should have achieved another like unto it in a widely different
sphere.  The horror of the sea was on the ancient world; a heart of oak
and triple bronze was needed to venture on the ocean, and its
annihilation was one of the blessings of the new earth promised by the
Apocalypse.  All through the centuries Europe remained sea-locked,
until the bold Portuguese mariners venturing ever further and further
south along the coast of Africa, finally doubled the Cape of Good
Hope--a feat first performed by Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, though it was
not until 1498 that Vasco da Gama reached India by this method.

Still unconquered lay the stormy and terrible Atlantic,

  "Where, beyond the extreme sea-wall,
      and between the remote sea-gates,
  Waste water washes, and tall ships founder,
      and deep death waits."

But the ark of Europe found her dove--as the name Columbus
signifies--to fly over the wild, western {11} waves, and bring her news
of strange countries.  The effect of these discoveries, enormously and
increasingly important from the material standpoint, was first felt in
the widening of the imagination.  Camoens wrote the epic of Da Gama,
More placed his Utopia in America, and Montaigne speculated on the
curious customs of the redskins.  Ariosto wrote of the wonders of the
new world in his poem, and Luther occasionally alluded to them in his
sermons.

[Sidenote: Universities]

If printing opened the broad road to popular education, other and more
formal means to the same end were not neglected.  One of the great
innovations of the Middle Ages was the university.  These permanent
corporations, dedicated to the advancement of learning and the
instruction of youth, first arose, early in the twelfth century, at
Salerno, at Bologna and at Paris.  As off-shoots of these, or in
imitation of them, many similar institutions sprang up in every land of
western Europe.  The last half of the fifteenth century was especially
rich in such foundations.  In Germany, from 1450 to 1517, no less than
nine new academies were started: Greifswald 1456, Freiburg in the
Breisgau 1460, Basle 1460, Ingolstadt 1472, Treves 1473, Mayence 1477,
Tuebingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502, and Frankfort on the Oder 1506.  Though
generally founded by papal charter, and maintaining a strong
ecclesiastical flavor, these institutions were under the direction of
the civil government.

In France three new universities opened their doors during the same
period: Valence 1459, Nantes 1460, Bourges 1464.  These were all placed
under the general supervision of the local bishops.  The great
university of Paris was gradually changing its character.  From the
most cosmopolitan and international of bodies it was fast becoming
strongly nationalist, and was the chief center of an Erastian
Gallicanism.  Its {12} tremendous weight cast against the Reformation
was doubtless a chief reason for the failure of that movement in France.

Spain instituted seven new universities at this time: Barcelona 1450,
Saragossa 1474, Palma 1483, Sigueenza 1489, Alcala 1499, Valencia 1500,
and Seville 1504.  Italy and England remained content with the
academies they already had, but many of the smaller countries now
started native universities.  Thus Pressburg was founded in Hungary in
1465, Upsala in Sweden in 1477, Copenhagen in 1478, Glasgow in 1450,
and Aberdeen in 1494.  The number of students in each foundation
fluctuated, but the total was steadily on the increase.

Naturally, the expansion of the higher education brought with it an
increase in the number and excellence of the schools.  Particularly
notable is the work of the Brethren of the Common Life, who devoted
themselves almost exclusively to teaching boys.  Some of their schools,
as Deventer, attained a reputation like that of Eton or Rugby today.

The spread of education was not only notable in itself, but had a more
direct result in furnishing a shelter to new movements until they were
strong enough to do without such support.  It is significant that the
Reformations of Wyclif, Huss, and Luther, all started in universities.

[Sidenote: Growth of intelligence]

As the tide rolls in, the waves impress one more than the flood beneath
them.  Behind, and far transcending, the particular causes of this and
that development lies the operation of great biological laws, selecting
a type for survival, transforming the mind and body of men slowly but
surely.  Whether due to the natural selection of circumstance, or to
the inward urge of vital force, there seems to be no doubt that the
average intellect, not of leading thinkers or of select groups, {13}
but of the European races as a whole, has been steadily growing greater
at every period during which it can be measured.  Moreover, the
monastic vow of chastity tended to sterilize and thus to eliminate the
religiously-minded sort.  Operating over a long period, and on both
sexes, this cause of the growing secularization of the world, though it
must not be exaggerated, cannot be overlooked.


SECTION 2. THE CHURCH

Over against "the world," "the church." . . .  As the Reformation was
primarily a religious movement, some account of the church in the later
Middle Ages must be given.  How Christianity was immaculately conceived
in the heart of the Galilean carpenter and born with words of beauty
and power such as no other man ever spoke; how it inherited from him
its background of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture; how it was
enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who assimilated it to the current
mysteries with their myth of a dying and rising god and of salvation by
sacramental rite; how it decked itself in the white robes of Greek
philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony and custom snatched from
the flamen's vestry; how it created a pantheon of saints to take the
place of the old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and then
the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church on the immovable rock
of the Eternal City, asserting like her a dominion without bounds of
space or time; how it conquered and tamed the barbarians;--all this
lies outside the scope of the present work to describe.  But of its
later fortunes some brief account must be given.

[Sidenote: Innocent III 1198-1216]

By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged triumphant from their long
strife with the German emperors, successfully asserted their claim to
the {14} suzerainty of all Western Europe.  Innocent III took realms in
fief and dictated to kings.  The pope, asserting that the spiritual
power was as much superior to the civil as the sun was brighter than
the moon, acted as the vicegerent of God on earth.  But this supremacy
did not last long unquestioned.  Just a century after Innocent III,
Boniface VIII [Sidenote: Boniface VIII 1294-1303] was worsted in a
quarrel with Philip IV of France, and his successor, Clement V, a
Frenchman, by transferring the papal capital to Avignon, virtually made
the supreme pontiffs subordinate to the French government and thus
weakened their influence in the rest of Europe.  This "Babylonian
Captivity" [Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity 1309-76] was followed by
a greater misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, [Sidenote:
The Great Schism 1378-1417] for the effort to transfer the papacy back
to Rome led to the election of two popes, who, with their successors,
respectively ruled and mutually anathematized each other from the two
rival cities.  The difficulty of deciding which was the true successor
of Peter was so great that not only were the kingdoms of Europe divided
in their allegiance, but doctors of the church and canonized saints
could be found among the supporters of either line.  There can be no
doubt that respect for the pontificate greatly suffered by the schism,
which was in some respects a direct preparation for the greater
division brought about by the Protestant secession.

[Sidenote: Councils--Pisa, 1409, Constance, 1414-18]

The attempt to end the schism at the Council of Pisa resulted only in
the election of a third pope.  The situation was finally dealt with by
the Council of Constance which deposed two of the popes and secured the
voluntary abdication of the third.  The synod further strengthened the
church by executing the heretics Huss and Jerome of Prague, and by
passing decrees intended to put the government of the church in the
hands of representative assemblies.  It asserted that it {15} had power
directly from Christ, that it was supreme in matters of faith, and in
matters of discipline so far as they affected the schism, and that the
pope could not dissolve it without its own consent.  By the decree
_Frequens_ it provided for the regular summoning of councils at short
intervals.  Beyond this, other efforts to reform the morals of the
clergy proved abortive, for after long discussion nothing of importance
was done.

For the next century the policy of the popes was determined by the wish
to assert their superiority over the councils.  The Synod of Basle
[Sidenote: Basle 1431-43] reiterated all the claims of Constance, and
passed a number of laws intended to diminish the papal authority and to
deprive the pontiff of much of his ill-gotten revenues--annates, fees
for investiture, and some other taxes.  It was successful for a time
because protected by the governments of France and Germany, for, though
dissolved by Pope Eugene IV in 1433, it refused to listen to his
command and finally extorted from him a bull ratifying the conciliar
claims to supremacy.

In the end, however, the popes triumphed.  The bull _Execrabilis_
[Sidenote: 1458] denounced as a damnable abuse the appeal to a future
council, and the _Pastor Aeternus_ [Sidenote: 1516] reasserted in
sweeping terms the supremacy of the pope, repealing all decrees of
Constance and Basle to the contrary, as well as other papal bulls.

[Sidenote: The secularization of the papacy]

At Rome the popes came to occupy the position of princes of one of the
Italian states, and were elected, like the doges of Venice, by a small
oligarchy.  Within seventy years the families of Borgia, Piccolomini,
Rovere, and Medici were each represented by more than one pontiff, and
a majority of the others were nearly related by blood or marriage to
one of these great stocks.  The cardinals were appointed from the
pontiff's sons or nephews, and the numerous other {16} offices in their
patronage, save as they were sold, were distributed to personal or
political friends.

Like other Italian princes the popes became, in the fifteenth century,
distinguished patrons of arts and letters.  The golden age of the
humanists at Rome began under Nicholas V [Sidenote: Nicholas V 1447-55]
who employed a number of them to make translations from Greek.  It is
characteristic of the complete secularization of the States of the
Church that a number of the literati pensioned by him were skeptics and
scoffers.  Valla, who mocked the papacy, ridiculed the monastic orders,
and attacked the Bible and Christian ethics, was given a prebend;
Savonarola, the most earnest Christian of his age, was put to death.

[Sidenote: 1453]

The fall of Constantinople gave a certain European character to the
policy of the pontiffs after that date, for the menace of the Turk
seemed so imminent that the heads of Christendom did all that was
possible to unite the nations in a crusade.  This was the keynote of
the statesmanship of Calixtus III [Sidenote: Calixtus III 1455-8] and
of his successor, Pius II.  [Sidenote: Pius II 1458-64]  Before his
elevation to the see of Peter this talented writer, known to literature
as Aeneas Sylvius, had, at the Council of Basle, published a strong
argument against the extreme papal claims, which he afterwards, as
pope, retracted.  His zeal against the Turk and against his old friends
the humanists lent a moral tone to his pontificate, but his feeble
attempts to reform abuses were futile.

[Sidenote: Paul II 1464-71]

The colorless reign of Paul II was followed by that of Sixtus IV,
[Sidenote: Sixtus IV 1471-84] a man whose chief passion was the
aggrandizement of his family.  He carried nepotism to an extreme and by
a policy of judicial murder very nearly exterminated his rivals, the
Colonnas.

[Sidenote: Innocent VIII 1484-92]

The enormous bribes paid by Innocent VIII for his election were
recouped by his sale of offices and spiritual graces, and by taking a
tribute from the Sultan, {17} in return for which he refused to
proclaim a crusade.  The most important act of his pontificate was the
publication of the bull against witchcraft.

[Sidenote: Alexander VI 1492-1503]

The name of Alexander VI has attained an evil eminence of infamy on
account of his own crimes and vices and those of his children, Caesar
Borgia and Lucretia.  One proof that the public conscience of Italy,
instead of being stupified by the orgy of wickedness at Rome was rather
becoming aroused by it, is found in the appearance, just at this time,
of a number of preachers of repentance.  These men, usually friars,
started "revivals" marked by the customary phenomena of sudden
conversion, hysteria, and extreme austerity.  The greatest of them all
was the Dominican Jerome Savonarola [Sidenote: Savonarola] who, though
of mediocre intellectual gifts, by the passionate fervor of his
convictions, attained the position of a prophet at Florence.  He began
preaching here in 1482, and so stirred his audiences that many wept and
some were petrified with horror.  His credit was greatly raised by his
prediction of the invasion of Charles VIII of France in 1494.  He
succeeded in driving out the Medici and in introducing a new
constitution of a democratic nature, which he believed was directly
sanctioned by God.  He attacked the morals of the clergy and of the
people and, besides renovating his own order, suppressed not only
public immorality but all forms of frivolity.  The people burned their
cards, false hair, indecent pictures, and the like; many women left
their husbands and entered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and
blasphemers had their tongues pierced.  A police was instituted with
power of searching houses.

It was only the pope's fear of Charles VIII that prevented his dealing
with this dangerous reformer, who now began to attack the vices of the
curia.  In 1495, however, the friar was summoned to Rome, and {18}
refused to go; he was then forbidden to preach, and disobeyed.  In Lent
1496 he proclaimed the duty of resisting the pope when in error.  In
November a new brief proposed changes in the constitution of his order
which would bring him more directly under the power of Rome.
Savonarola replied that he did not fear the excommunication of the
sinful church, which, when launched against him May 12, 1497, only made
him more defiant.  Claiming to be commissioned directly from God, he
appealed to the powers to summon a general council against the pope.

At this juncture one of his opponents, a Franciscan, Francis da Puglia,
proposed to him the ordeal by fire, stating that though he expected to
be burnt he was willing to take the risk for the sake of the faith.
The challenge refused by Savonarola was taken up by his friend Fra
Domenico da Peseta, and although forbidden by Alexander, the ordeal was
sanctioned by the Signory and a day set.  A dispute as to whether
Domenico should be allowed to take the host or the crucifix into the
flames prevented the experiment from taking place, and the mob, furious
at the loss of its promised spectacle, refused further support to the
discredited leader.  For some years, members of his own order, who
resented the severity of his reform, had cherished a grievance against
him, and now they had their chance.  Seized by the Signory, he was
tortured and forced to confess that he was not a prophet, and on May
22, 1498, was condemned, with two companions, to be hung.  After the
speedy execution of the sentence, which the sufferers met calmly, their
bodies were burnt.  All effects of Savonarola's career, political,
moral, and religious, shortly disappeared.

Alexander was followed by a Rovere who took the name of Julius II.
[Sidenote: Julius II 1503-13]  Notwithstanding his advanced age this
pontiff proved one of the most vigorous and able {19} statesman of the
time and devoted himself to the aggrandizement, by war and diplomacy,
of the Papal States.  He did not scruple to use his spiritual thunders
against his political enemies, as when he excommunicated the Venetians.
[Sidenote: 1509]  He found himself at odds with both the Emperor
Maximilian and Louis XII of France, who summoned a schismatic council
at Pisa.  [Sidenote: 1511]  Supported by some of the cardinals this
body revived the legislation of Constance and Basle, but fell into
disrepute when, by a master stroke of policy, Julius convoked a council
at Rome.  [Sidenote: 1512-16]  This synod, the Fifth Lateran, lasted
for four years, and endeavored to deal with a crusade and with reform.
All its efforts at reform proved abortive because they were either
choked, while in course of discussion, by the Curia, or, when passed,
were rendered ineffective by the dispensing power.

[Sidenote: Leo X 1513-21]

While the synod was still sitting Julius died and a new pope was
chosen.  This was the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici Leo X.
Having taken the tonsure at the age of seven, and received the red hat
six years later, he donned the tiara at the early age of thirty-eight.
His words, as reported by the Venetian ambassador at Rome, "Let us
enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us," exactly express his
program.  To make life one long carnival, to hunt game and to witness
comedies and the antics of buffoons, to hear marvellous tales of the
new world and voluptuous verses of the humanists and of the great
Ariosto, to enjoy music and to consume the most delicate viands and the
most delicious wines--this was what he lived for.  Free and generous
with money, he prodigally wasted the revenues of three pontificates.
Spending no less than 6000 ducats a month on cards and gratuities, he
was soon forced to borrow to the limit of his credit.  Little recked he
that Germany was being {20} reft from the church by a poor friar.  His
irresolute policy was incapable of pursuing any public end
consistently, save that he employed the best Latinists of the time to
give elegance to his state papers.  His method of governing was the
purely personal one, to pay his friends and flatterers at the expense
of the common good.  One of his most characteristic letters expresses
his intention of rewarding with high office a certain gentleman who had
given him a dinner of lampreys.


SECTION 3.  CAUSES OF THE REFORMATION

[Sidenote: Corruption of the church not a main cause of the Reformation]

In the eyes of the early Protestants the Reformation was a return to
primitive Christianity and its principal cause was the corruption of the
church.  That there was great depravity in the church as elsewhere cannot
be doubted, but there are several reasons for thinking that it could not
have been an important cause for the loss of so many of her sons.  In the
first place there is no good ground for believing that the moral
condition of the priesthood was worse in 1500 than it had been for a long
time; indeed, there is good evidence to the contrary, that things were
tending to improve, if not at Rome yet in many parts of Christendom.  If
objectionable practices of the priests had been a sufficient cause for
the secession of whole nations, the Reformation would have come long
before it actually did.  Again, there is good reason to doubt that the
mere abuse of an institution has ever led to its complete overthrow; as
long as the institution is regarded as necessary, it is rather mended
than ended.  Thirdly, many of the acts that seem corrupt to us, gave
little offence to contemporaries, for they were universal.  If the church
sold offices and justice, so did the civil governments.  If the clergy
lived impure lives, so did the laity.  Probably the standard of the {21}
church (save in special circumstances) was no worse than that of civil
life, and in some respects it was rather more decent.  Finally, there is
some reason to suspect of exaggeration the charges preferred by the
innovators.  Like all reformers they made the most of their enemy's
faults.  Invective like theirs is common to every generation and to all
spheres of life.  It is true that the denunciation of the priesthood
comes not only from Protestants and satirists, but from popes and
councils and canonized saints, and that it bulks large in medieval
literature.  Nevertheless, it is both _a priori_ probable and to some
extent historically verifiable that the evil was more noisy, not more
potent, than the good.  But though the corruptions of the church were not
a main cause of the Protestant secession, they furnished good excuses for
attack; the Reformers were scandalized by the divergence of the practice
and the pretensions of the official representatives of Christianity, and
their attack was envenomed and the break made easier thereby.  It is
therefore necessary to say a few words about those abuses at which public
opinion then took most offence.

[Sidenote: Abuses: Financial]

Many of these were connected with money.  The common man's conscience was
wounded by the smart in his purse.  The wealth of the church was
enormous, though exaggerated by those contemporaries who estimated it at
one-third of the total real estate of Western Europe.  In addition to
revenues from her own land the church collected tithes and taxes,
including "Peter's pence" in England, Scandinavia and Poland.  The clergy
paid dues to the curia, among them the _servitia_ charged on the bishops
and the annates levied on the income of the first year for each appointee
to high ecclesiastical office, and the price for the archbishop's pall.
The priests recouped themselves by charging high fees for their
ministrations.  At a time {22} when the Christian ideal was one of
"apostolic poverty" the riches of the clergy were often felt as a scandal
to the pious.

[Sidenote: Simony]

Though the normal method of appointment to civil office was sale, it was
felt as a special abuse in the church and was branded by the name of
simony.  Leo X made no less than 500,000 ducats[1] annually from the sale
of more than 2000 offices, most of which, being sinecures, eventually
came to be regarded as annuities, with a salary amounting to about 10 per
cent. of the purchase price.

Justice was also venal, in the church no less than in the state.  Pardon
was obtainable for all crimes for, as a papal vice-chamberlain phrased
it, "The Lord wishes not the death of a sinner but that he should pay and
live."  Dispensations from the laws against marriage within the
prohibited degrees were sold.  Thus an ordinary man had to pay 16
grossi[2] for dispensation to marry a woman who stood in "spiritual
relationship" [3] to him; a noble had to pay 20 grossi for the same
privilege, and a prince or duke 30 grossi.  First cousins might marry for
the payment of 27 grossi; an uncle and niece for from three to four
ducats, though this was later raised to as much as sixty ducats, at least
for nobles.  Marriage within the first degree of affinity (a deceased
wife's mother or daughter by another husband) was at one time sold for
about ten ducats; marriage within the second degree[4] was {23} permitted
for from 300 to 600 grossi.  Hardly necessary to add, as was done: "Note
well, that dispensations or graces of this sort are not given to poor
people." [5]  Dispensations from vows and from the requirements of
ecclesiastical law, as for example those relating to fasting, were also
to be obtained at a price.

[Sidenote: Indulgences]

One of the richest sources of ecclesiastical revenue was the sale of
indulgences, or the remission by the pope of the temporal penalties of
sin, both penance in this life and the pains of purgatory.  The practice
of giving these pardons first arose as a means of assuring heaven to
those warriors who fell fighting the infidel.  In 1300 Boniface VIII
granted a plenary indulgence to all who made the pilgrimage to the
jubilee at Rome, and the golden harvest reaped on this occasion induced
his successors to take the same means of imparting spiritual graces to
the faithful at frequent intervals.  In the fourteenth century the
pardons were extended to all who contributed a sum of money to a pious
purpose, whether they came to Rome or not, and, as the agents who were
sent out to distribute these pardons were also given power to confess and
absolve, the papal letters were naturally regarded as no less than
tickets of admission to heaven.  In the thirteenth century the
theologians had discovered that there was at the disposal of the church
and her head an abundant "treasury of the merits of Christ and the
saints," which might be applied vicariously to anyone by the pope.  In
the fifteenth century the claimed power to free living men from purgatory
was extended to the {24} dead, and this soon became one of the most
profitable branches of the "holy trade."

The means of obtaining indulgences varied.  Sometimes they were granted
to those who made a pilgrimage or who would read a pious book.  Sometimes
they were used to raise money for some public work, a hospital or a
bridge.  But more and more they became an ordinary means for raising
revenue for the curia.  How thoroughly commercialized the business of
selling grace and remission of the penalties of sin had become is shown
by the fact that the agents of the pope were often bankers who organized
the sales on purely business lines in return for a percentage of the net
receipts plus the indirect profits accruing to those who handle large
sums.  Of the net receipts the financiers usually got about ten per
cent.; an equal amount was given to the emperor or other civil ruler for
permitting the pardoners to enter his territory, commissions were also
paid to the local bishop and clergy, and of course the pedlars of the
pardons received a proportion of the profits in order to stimulate their
zeal.  On the average from thirty to forty-five per cent. of the gross
receipts were turned into the Roman treasury.

It is natural that public opinion should have come to regard indulgences
with aversion.  Their bad moral effect was too obvious to be disregarded,
the compounding with sin for a payment destined to satisfy the greed of
unscrupulous prelates.  Their economic effects were also noticed, the
draining of the country of money with which further to enrich a corrupt
Italian city.  Many rulers forbade their sale in their territories,
because, as Duke George of Saxony, a good Catholic, expressed it, before
Luther was heard of, "they cheated the simple layman of his soul."
Hutten mocked at Pope Julius II for selling to others the heaven he could
not win himself.  Pius II [Sidenote 1458-64] was obliged {25} to confess:
"If we send ambassadors to ask aid of the princes, they are mocked; if we
impose a tithe on the clergy, appeal is made to a future council; if we
publish an indulgence and invite contributions in return for spiritual
favors, we are charged with greed.  People think all is done merely for
the sake of extorting money.  No one trusts us.  We have no more credit
than a bankrupt merchant."

[Sidenote: Immorality of clergy]

Much is said in the literature of the latter Middle Ages about the
immorality of the clergy.  This class has always been severely judged
because of its high pretensions.  Moreover the vow of celibacy was too
hard to keep for most men and for some women; that many priests, monks
and nuns broke it cannot be doubted.  And yet there was a sprinkling of
saintly parsons like him of whom Chancer [Transcriber's note: Chaucer?]
said

  "Who Christes lore and his apostles twelve
  He taught, but first he folwed it himselve,"

and there were many others who kept up at least the appearance of
decency.  But here, as always, the bad attracted more attention than the
good.

The most reliable data on the subject are found in the records of church
visitations, both those undertaken by the Reformers and those
occasionally attempted by the Catholic prelates of the earlier period.
Everywhere it was proved that a large proportion of the clergy were both
wofully ignorant and morally unworthy.  Besides the priests who had
concubines, there were many given to drink and some who kept taverns,
gaming rooms and worse places.  Plunged in gross ignorance and
superstition, those blind leaders of the blind, who won great reputations
as exorcists or as wizards, were unable to understand the Latin service,
and sometimes to repeat even the Lord's prayer or creed in any language.

{26}

[Sidenote: Piety]

The Reformation, like most other revolutions, came not at the lowest ebb
of abuse, but at a time when the tide had already begun to run, and to
run strongly, in the direction of improvement.  One can hardly find a
sweeter, more spiritual religion anywhere than that set forth in
Erasmus's _Enchiridion_, or in More's _Utopia_, or than that lived by
Vitrier and Colet.  Many men, who had not attained to this conception of
the true beauty of the gospel, were yet thoroughly disgusted with things
as they were and quite ready to substitute a new and purer conception and
practice for the old, mechanical one.

Evidence for this is the popularity of the Bible and other devotional
books.  Before 1500 there were nearly a hundred editions of the Latin
Vulgate, and a number of translations into German and French.  There were
also nearly a hundred editions, in Latin and various vernaculars, of _The
Imitation of Christ_.  There was so flourishing a crop of devotional
handbooks that no others could compete with them in popularity.  For
those who could not read there were the _Biblia Pauperum_, picture-books
with a minimum of text, and there were sermons by popular preachers.  If
some of these tracts and homilies were crude and superstitious, others
were filled with a spirit of love and honesty.  Whereas the passion for
pilgrimages and relics seemed to increase, there were men of clear vision
to denounce the attendant evils.  A new feature was the foundation of lay
brotherhoods, like that of the Common Life, with the purpose of
cultivating a good character in the world, and of rendering social
service.  The number of these brotherhoods was great and their popularity
general.

[Sidenote: Clash of new spirit with old institutions]

Had the forces already at work within the church been allowed to operate,
probably much of the moral reform desired by the best Catholics would
have been {27} accomplished quietly without the violent rending of
Christian unity that actually took place.  But the fact is, that such
reforms never would or could have satisfied the spirit of the age.  Men
were not only shocked by the abuses in the church, but they had outgrown
some of her ideals.  Not all of her teaching, nor most of it, had become
repugnant to them, for it has often been pointed out that the Reformers
kept more of the doctrines of Catholicism than they threw away, but in
certain respects they repudiated, not the abuse but the very principle on
which the church acted.  In four respects, particularly the ideals of the
new age were incompatible with those of the Roman communion.

[Sidenote: Sacramental theory of the church]

The first of these was the sacramental theory of salvation and its
corollary, the sacerdotal power.  According to Catholic doctrine grace is
imparted to the believer by means of certain rites: baptism,
confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and
matrimony.  Baptism is the necessary prerequisite to the enjoyment of the
others, for without it the unwashed soul, whether heathen or child of
Christian parents, would go to eternal fire; but the "most excellent of
the sacraments" is the eucharist, in which Christ is mysteriously
sacrificed by the priest to the Father and his body and blood eaten and
drunk by the worshippers.  Without these rites there was no salvation,
and they acted automatically (_ex opere operato_) on the soul of the
faithful who put no active hindrance in their way.  Save baptism, they
could be administered only by priests, a special caste with "an indelible
character" marking them off from the laity.  Needless to remark the
immense power that this doctrine gave the clergy in a believing age.
They were made the arbiters of each man's eternal destiny, and their
moral character had no more to do with their binding and loosing sentence
than does the moral {28} character of a secular officer affect his
official acts.  Add to this that the priests were unbound by ties of
family, that by confession they entered into everyone's private life,
that they were not amenable to civil justice--and their position as a
privileged order was secure.  The growing self-assurance and
enlightenment of a nascent individualism found this distinction
intolerable.

[Sidenote: Other-worldliness]

Another element of medieval Catholicism to clash with the developing
powers of the new age was its pessimistic and ascetic other-worldliness.
The ideal of the church was monastic; all the pleasures of this world,
all its pomps and learning and art were but snares to seduce men from
salvation.  Reason was called a barren tree but faith was held to blossom
like the rose.  Wealth was shunned as dangerous, marriage deprecated as a
necessary evil.  Fasting, scourging, celibacy, solitude, were cultivated
as the surest roads to heaven.  If a good layman might barely shoulder
his way through the strait and narrow gate, the highest graces and
heavenly rewards were vouchsafed to the faithful monk.  All this grated
harshly on the minds of the generations that began to find life glorious
and happy, not evil but good.

[Sidenote: Worship of saints]

Third, the worship of the saints, which had once been a stepping-stone to
higher things, was now widely regarded as a stumbling-block.  Though far
from a scientific conception of natural law, many men had become
sufficiently monistic in their philosophy to see in the current
hagiolatry a sort of polytheism.  Erasmus freely drew the parallel
between the saints and the heathen deities, and he and others scourged
the grossly materialistic form which this worship often took.  If we may
believe him, fugitive nuns prayed for help in hiding their sin; merchants
for a rich haul; gamblers for luck; and prostitutes for generous {29}
patrons.  Margaret of Navarre tells as an actual fact of a man who prayed
for help in seducing his neighbor's wife, and similar instances of
perverted piety are not wanting.  The passion for the relics of the
saints led to an enormous traffic in spurious articles.  There appeared
to be enough of the wood of the true cross, said Erasmus, to make a ship;
there were exhibited five shin-bones of the ass on which Christ rode,
whole bottles of the Virgin's milk, and several complete bits of skin
saved from the circumcision of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Temporal power of the church]

Finally, patriots were no longer inclined to tolerate the claims of the
popes to temporal power.  The church had become, in fact, an
international state, with its monarch, its representative legislative
assemblies, its laws and its code.  It was not a voluntary society, for
if citizens were not born into it they were baptized into it before they
could exercise any choice.  It kept prisons and passed sentence
(virtually if not nominally) of death; it treated with other governments
as one power with another; it took principalities and kingdoms in fief.
It was supported by involuntary contributions.[6]

The expanding world had burst the bands of the old church.  It needed a
new spiritual frame, and this frame was largely supplied by the
Reformation.  Prior to that revolution there had been several distinct
efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limitations imposed by the
Catholic faith; this was done by the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by
the patriots and by the humanists.



[1] A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine shillings, at a time
when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has.

[2] The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which varied
considerably in value.  It may here be taken as intrinsically worth about
8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many times the purchasing
power that it now has.

[3] A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were
sponsors to the same child at baptism.

[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing
to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one
time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of
Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.

[5] "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non
conceduntur pauperibus."  _Taxa cancellariae apostolicae_, in E.
Friedberg: _Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts_,
1903, pp. 389 ff.

[6] Maitland: _Canon Law in the Church of England_, p. 100.


SECTION 4. THE MYSTICS

One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy of salvation
offered by the church was made by a school of mystics in the fourteenth
and fifteenth {30} century.  In this, however, there was protest
neither against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldliness, for
in these respects the mystics were extreme conservatives, more
religious than the church herself.  They were like soldiers who
disregarded the orders of their superiors because they thought these
orders interfered with their supreme duty of harassing the enemy.  With
the humanists and other deserters they had no part nor lot; they sought
to make the church more spiritual, not more reasonable.  They bowed to
her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly joy and glory;
they accepted her guidance without question; they rejoiced in her
sacraments as aids to the life of holiness.  But they sorrowed to see
what they considered merely the means of grace substituted for the end
sought; they were insensibly repelled by finding a mechanical instead
of a personal scheme of salvation, an almost commercial debit and
credit of good works instead of a life of spontaneous and devoted
service.  Feeling as few men have ever felt that the purpose and heart
of religion is a union of the soul with God, they were shocked to see
the interposition of mediators between him and his creature, to find
that instead of hungering for him men were trying to make the best
bargain they could for their own eternal happiness.  While rejecting
nothing in the church they tried to transfigure everything.  Accepting
priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they declined to regard
them as necessary intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Eckhart, 1260-1327]

The first of the great German mystics was Master Eckhart, a Dominican
who lived at Erfurt, in Bohemia, at Paris, and at Cologne.  The
inquisitors of this last place summoned him before their court on the
charge of heresy, but while his trial was pending he died.  He was a
Christian pantheist, teaching that God was the only true being, and
that man was capable of reaching {31} the absolute.  Of all the mystics
he was the most speculative and philosophical.  Both Henry Suso and
John Tauler were his disciples.  [Sidenote: Suso, 1300-66]  Suso's
ecstatic piety was of the ultra-medieval type, romantic, poetic, and
bent on winning personal salvation by the old means of severe
self-torture and the constant practice of good works.  Tauler, a
Dominican of Strassburg, belonged to a society known as The Friends of
God.  [Sidenote: Tauler c. 1300-61]  Of all his contemporaries he in
religion was the most social and practical.  His life was that of an
evangelist, preaching to laymen in their own vernacular the gospel of a
pure life and direct communion with God through the Bible and prayer.
Like many other popular preachers he placed great emphasis on
conversion, the turning (_Kehr_) from a bad to a good life.  Simple
faith is held to be better than knowledge or than the usual works of
ecclesiastical piety.  Tauler esteemed the holiest man he had ever seen
one who had never heard five sermons in his life.  All honest labor is
called God's service, spinning and shoe-making the gifts of the Holy
Spirit.  Pure religion is to be "drowned in God," "intoxicated with
God," "melted in the fire of his love."  Transcending the common view
of the average Christian that religion's one end was his own salvation,
Tauler taught him that the love of God was greater than this.  He tells
of a woman ready to be damned for the glory of God--"and if such a
person were dragged into the bottom of hell, there would be the kingdom
of God and eternal bliss in hell."

One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a book written
anonymously--"spoken by the Almighty, Eternal God, through a wise,
understanding, truly just man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic
Order at Frankfort."  _The German Theology_, [Sidenote: _The German
Theology_] as it was named by Luther, teaches in its purest form entire
abandonment to God, simple passivity in his hands, utter {32}
self-denial and self-surrender, until, without the interposition of any
external power, and equally without effort of her own, the soul shall
find herself at one with the bridegroom.  The immanence of God is
taught; man's helpless and sinful condition is emphasized; and the
reconciliation of the two is found only in the unconditional surrender
of man's will to God.  "Put off thine own will and there will be no
hell."

Tauler's sermons, first published 1498, had an immense influence on
Luther.  They were later taken up by the Jesuit Canisius who sought by
them to purify his church.  [Sidenote: 1543]  _The German Theology_ was
first published by Luther in 1516, with the statement that save the
Bible and St. Augustine's works, he had never met with a book from
which he had learned so much of the nature of "God, Christ, man, and
all things."  But other theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, did
not agree with him.  Calvin detected secret and deadly poison in the
author's pantheism, and in 1621 the Catholic Church placed his work on
the Index.

The Netherlands also produced a school of mystics, later in blooming
than that of the Germans and greater in its direct influence.  The
earliest of them was John of Ruysbroeck, a man of visions and
ecstasies.  [Sidenote: Ruysbroeck, 1293-1381]  He strove to make his
life one long contemplation of the light and love of God.  Two younger
men, Gerard Groote and Florence Radewyn, socialized his gospel by
founding the fellowship of the Brethren of the Common Life.  [Sidenote:
Groote, 1340-84]  [Sidenote: Radewyn, 1350-1400]  Though never an order
sanctioned by the church, they taught celibacy and poverty, and devoted
themselves to service of their fellows, chiefly in the capacity of
teachers of boys.

The fifteenth century's rising tide of devotion brought forth the most
influential of the products of all the mystics, the _Imitation of
Christ_ by Thomas a Kempis.  [Sidenote: Thomas a Kempis, c. 1380-1471]
Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it
sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's
personal life approach that of Christ.  Humility, self-restraint,
asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and a diligent
use of the sacramental grace of the eucharist are the means recommended
to form the character of the perfect Christian.  It was doubtless
because all this was so perfect an expression of the medieval ideal
that it found such wide and instant favor.  There is no questioning of
dogma, nor any speculation on the positions of the church; all this is
postulated with child-like simplicity.  Moreover, the ideal of the
church for the salvation of the individual, and the means supposed to
secure that end, are adopted by a Kempis.  He tacitly assumes that the
imitator of Christ will be a monk, poor and celibate.  His whole
endeavor was to stimulate an enthusiasm for privation and a taste for
things spiritual, and it was because in his earnestness and
single-mindedness he so largely succeeded that his book was eagerly
seized by the hands of thousands who desired and needed such
stimulation and help.  The Dutch canon was not capable of rising to the
heights of Tauler and the Frankfort priest, who saw in the love of God
a good in itself transcending the happiness of one's own soul.  He just
wanted to be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with all his
might.  But this careful self-cultivation made his religion
self-centered; it was, compared even with the professions of the
Protestants and of the Jesuits, personal and unsocial.

Notwithstanding the profound differences between the Mystics and the
Reformers, it is possible to see that at least in one respect the two
movements were similar.  It was exactly the same desire to get away
from the mechanical and formal in the church's scheme of salvation,
that animated both.  Tauler and Luther {34} both deprecated good works
and sought justification in faith only.  Important as this is, it is
possible to see why the mystics failed to produce a real revolt from
the church, and it is certain that they were far more than the
Reformers fundamentally, even typically Catholic.  [Sidenote:
Mysticism]  It is true that mysticism is at heart always one, neither
national nor confessional.  But Catholicism offered so favorable a
field for this development that mysticism may be considered as the
efflorescence of Catholic piety _par excellence_.  Hardly any other
expression of godliness as an individual, vital thing, was possible in
medieval Christendom.  There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and
fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in
Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus.  It could never be
anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely
individual.  While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could
never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or
intellectual.  As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to
solipsism as to a complete abnegation of the reason.  Moreover it was
slightly morbid, liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and
emotion for a moment of vision and of union with God.  How much more
truly than he knew did Ruysbroeck speak when he said that the soul,
turned inward, could see the divine light, just as the eyeball,
sufficiently pressed, could see the flashes of fire in the mind!


SECTION 5.  PRE-REFORMERS

The men who, in later ages, claimed for their ancestors a Protestantism
older than the Augsburg Confession, referred its origins not to the
mystics nor to the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the church
as heretics.  Though from the earliest age Christendom never lacked
minds independent enough {35} to differ from authority and characters
strong enough to attempt to cut away what they considered rotten in
ecclesiastical doctrine and practice, the first heretics that can
really be considered as harbingers of the Reformation were two sects
dwelling in Southern France, the Albigenses and the Waldenses.
[Sidenote: Albigenses]  The former, first met with in the eleventh
century, derived part of their doctrines from oriental Manichaeism,
part from primitive gnosticism.  The latter were the followers of Peter
Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, about 1170, sold his goods and
went among the poor preaching the gospel.  [Sidenote: Waldenses]
Though quite distinct in origin both sects owed their success with the
people to their attacks on the corrupt lives of the clergy, to their
use of the vernacular New Testament, to their repudiation of part of
the sacramental system, and to their own earnest and ascetic morality.
The story of their savage suppression, at the instigation of Pope
Innocent III, [Sidenote: 1209-29] in the Albigensian crusade, is one of
the darkest blots on the pages of history.  A few remnants of them
survived in the mountains of Savoy and Piedmont, harried from time to
time by blood-thirsty pontiffs.  In obedience to a summons of Innocent
VIII King Charles VIII of France massacred many of them.  [Sidenote:
1437]

The spiritual ancestors of Luther, however, were not so much the French
heretics as two Englishmen, Occam and Wyclif.  [Sidenote: Occam, d. c.
1349]  William of Occam, a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, was the
most powerful scholastic critic of the existing church.  Untouched by
the classic air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could be
said against the church from her own medieval standpoint.  He taught
determinism; he maintained that the final seat of authority was the
Scripture; he showed that such fundamental dogmas as the existence of
God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot be deduced by logic from
the given premises; he {36} proposed a modification of the doctrine of
transubstantiation in the interests of reason, approaching closely in
his ideas to the "consubstantiation" of Luther.  Defining the church as
the congregation of the faithful, he undermined her governmental
powers.  This, in fact, is just what he wished to do, for he went ahead
of almost all his contemporaries in proposing that the judicial powers
of the clergy be transferred to the civil government.  Not only, in his
opinion, should the civil ruler be totally independent of the pope, but
even such matters as the regulation of marriage should be left to the
common law.

[Sidenote: Wyclif, 1324-84]

A far stronger impression on his age was made by John Wyclif, the most
significant of the Reformers before Luther.  He, too, was an Oxford
professor, a schoolman, and a patriot, but he was animated by a deeper
religious feeling than was Occam.  In 1361 he was master of Balliol
College, where he lectured for many years on divinity.  At the same
time he held various benefices in turn, the last, the pastorate of
Lutterworth in Leicestershire, from 1374 till his death.  He became a
reformer somewhat late in life owing to study of the Bible and of the
bad condition of the English church.  [Sidenote: 1374]  At the peace
congress at Bruges as a commissioner to negotiate with papal
ambassadors for the relief of crying abuses, he became disillusioned in
his hope for help from that quarter.  He then turned to the civil
government, urging it to regain the usurped authority of the church.
This plan, set forth in voluminous writings, in lectures at Oxford and
in popular sermons in London, soon brought him before the tribunal
[Sidenote: 1377] of William Courtenay, Bishop of London, and, had he
not been protected by the powerful prince, John of Lancaster, it might
have gone hard with him.  Five bulls launched against him by Gregory XI
from Rome only confirmed him in his course, for he {37} appealed from
them to Parliament.  Tried at Lambeth he was forbidden to preach or
teach, and he therefore retired for the rest of his life to
Lutterworth.  [Sidenote: 1378]  He continued his literary labors,
resulting in a vast host of pamphlets.

Examining his writings we are struck by the fact that his program was
far more religious and practical than rational and speculative.  Save
transubstantiation, he scrupled at none of the mysteries of
Catholicism.  It is also noticeable that social reform left him cold.
When the laborers rose under Wat Tyler, [Sidenote: 1381] Wyclif sided
against them, as he also proposed that confiscated church property be
given rather to the upper classes than to the poor.  The real
principles of Wyclif's reforms were but two: to abolish the temporal
power of the church, and to purge her of immoral ministers.  It was for
this reason that he set up the authority of Scripture against that of
tradition; it was for this that he doubted the efficacy of sacraments
administered by priests living in mortal sin; it was for this that he
denied the necessity of auricular confession; it was for this that he
would have placed the temporal power over the spiritual.  The bulk of
his writings, in both Latin and English, is fierce, measureless abuse
of the clergy, particularly of prelates and of the pope.  The head of
Christendom is called Antichrist over and over again; the bishops,
priests and friars are said to have their lips full of lies and their
hands of blood; to lead women astray; to live in idleness, luxury,
simony and deceit; and to devour the English church.  Marriage of the
clergy is recommended.  Indulgences are called a cursed robbery.

To combat the enemies of true piety Wyclif relied on two agencies.  The
first was the Bible, which, with the assistance of friends, he
Englished from the {38} Vulgate.  None of the later Reformers was more
bent upon giving the Scriptures to the laity, and none attributed to it
a higher degree of inspiration.  As a second measure Wyclif trained
"poor priests" to be wandering evangelists spreading abroad the message
of salvation among the populace.  For a time they attained considerable
success, notwithstanding the fact that the severe persecution to which
they were subjected caused all of Wyclif's personal followers to
recant.  [Sidenote: 1401]  The passage of the act _De Haeretico
Comburendo_ was not, however, in vain, for in the fifteenth century a
number of common men were found with sufficient resolution to die for
their faith.  It is probable that, as Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of
London wrote in 1523, the Lollards, as they were called, were the first
to welcome Lutheranism into Britain.

But if the seed produced but a moderate harvest in England it brought
forth a hundred-fold in Bohemia.  Wyclif's writings, carried by Czech
students from Oxford to Prague, were eagerly studied by some of the
attendants at that university, the greatest of whom was John Huss.
[Sidenote: Huss, 1369-1415]  Having taken his bachelor's degree there
in 1393, he had given instruction since 1398 and became the head of the
university (Rector) for the year 1402.  Almost the whole content of his
lectures, as of his writings, was borrowed from Wyclif, from whom he
copied not only his main ideas but long passages verbatim and without
specific acknowledgment.  Professors and students of his own race
supported him, but the Germans at the university took offence and a
long struggle ensued, culminating in the secession of the Germans in a
body in 1409 to found a new university at Leipsic.  The quarrel, having
started over a philosophic question,--Wyclif and Huss being realists
and the Germans nominalists,--took a more serious turn when it came to
a definition of the church {39} and of the respective spheres of the
civil and ecclesiastical authorities.  Defining the church as the body
of the predestinate, and starting a campaign against indulgences, Huss
soon fell under the ban of his superiors.  After burning the bulls of
John XXIII Huss withdrew from Prague.  Summoned to the Council of
Constance, he went thither, under safe-conduct from the Emperor
Sigismund, and was immediately cast into a noisome dungeon.  [Sidenote:
1411, 1412]

[Sidenote: 1414]

The council proceeded to consider the opinions of Wyclif, condemning
260 of his errors and ordering his bones to be dug up and burnt, as was
done twelve years later.  Every effort was then made to get Huss to
recant a list of propositions drawn up by the council and attributed to
him.  Some of these charges were absurd, as that he was accused of
calling himself the fourth person of the Trinity.  Other opinions, like
the denial of transubstantiation, he declared, and doubtless with
truth, that he had never held.  Much was made of his saying that he
hoped his soul would be with the soul of Wyclif after death, and the
emperor was alarmed by his argument that neither priest nor king living
in mortal sin had a right to exercise his office.  He was therefore
condemned to the stake.

His death was perfect.  His last letters are full of calm resolution,
love to his friends, and forgiveness to his enemies.  Haled to the
cathedral where the council sat on July 6, 1415, he was given one last
chance to recant and save his life.  Refusing, he was stripped of his
vestments, and a paper crown with three demons painted on it put on his
head with the words, "We commit thy soul to the devil"; he was then led
to the public square and burnt alive.  Sigismund, threatened by the
council, made no effort to redeem his safe-conduct, and in September
the reverend fathers passed a decree that no safe-conduct to a heretic,
and {40} no pledge prejudicial to the Catholic faith, could be
considered binding.  Among the large concourse of divines not one voice
was raised against this treacherous murder.

Huss's most prominent follower, Jerome of Prague, after recantation,
returned to his former position and was burnt at Constance on May 30,
1416.  A bull of 1418 ordered the similar punishment of all heretics
who maintained the positions of Wyclif, Huss, or Jerome of Prague.

As early as September a loud remonstrance against the treatment of
their master was voiced by the Bohemian Diet.  The more radical party,
known as Taborites, rejected transubstantiation, worship of the saints,
prayers for the dead, indulgences, auricular confession, and oaths.
They allowed women to preach, demanded the use of the vernacular in
divine service and the giving of the cup to the laity.  A crusade was
started against them, but they knew how to defend themselves.  The
Council of Basle [Sidenote: 1431-6] was driven to negotiate with them
and ended by a compromise allowing the cup to the laity and some other
reforms.  Subsequent efforts to reduce them proved futile.  Under King
Podiebrad the Ultraquists maintained their rights.

Some Hussites, however, continued as a separate body, calling
themselves Bohemian Brethren.  First met with in 1457 they continue to
the present day as Moravians.  They were subject to constant
persecution.  In 1505 the Catholic official James Lilienstayn drew up
an interesting list of their errors.  It seems that their cardinal
tenet was the supremacy of Scripture, without gloss, tradition, or
interpretation by the Fathers of the church.  They rejected the primacy
of the pope, and all ceremonies for which authority could not be found
in the Bible, and they denied the efficacy of masses for the dead and
the validity of indulgences.

{41} With much reason Wyclif and Huss have been called "Reformers
before the Reformation."  Luther himself, not knowing the Englishman,
recognized his deep indebtedness to the Bohemian.  All of their
program, and more, he carried through.  His doctrine of justification
by faith only, with its radical transformation of the sacramental
system, cannot be found in these his predecessors, and this was a
difference of vast importance.


SECTION 6.  NATIONALIZING THE CHURCHES

Inevitably, the growth of national sentiment spoken of above reacted on
the religious institutions of Europe.  Indeed, it was here that the
conflict of the international, ecclesiastical state, and of the secular
governments became keenest.  Both kings and people wished to control
their own spiritual affairs as well as their temporalities.

[Sidenote: The ecclesia Anglicana]

England traveled farthest on the road towards a national church.  For
three centuries she had been asserting the rights of her government to
direct spiritual as well as temporal matters.  The Statute of Mortmain
[Sidenote: 1279] forbade the alienation of land from the jurisdiction
of the civil power by appropriating it to religious persons.  The
withdrawing of land from the obligation to pay taxes and feudal dues
was thus checked.  The encroachment of the civil power, both in England
and France, was bitterly felt by the popes.  Boniface VIII endeavored
to stem the flood by the bull _Clericis laicos_ [Sidenote: 1296]
forbidding the taxation of clergy by any secular government, and the
bull _Unam Sanctam_ [Sidenote: 1302] asserting the universal monarchy
of the Roman pontiff in the strongest possible terms.  But these
exorbitant claims were without effect.  The Statute of Provisors
[Sidenote: 1351 and 1390] forbade the appointment to English benefices
by the pope, and the Statute of Praemunire [Sidenote: 1353 and 1393]
took away the right of {42} English subjects to appeal from the courts
of their own country to Rome.  The success of Wyclif's movement was
largely due to his patriotism.  Though the signs of strife with the
pope were fewer in the fifteenth century, there is no doubt that the
national feeling persisted.

[Sidenote: The Gallican Church]

France manifested a spirit of liberty hardly less fierce than that of
England.  It was the French King Philip the Fair who humiliated
Boniface VIII so severely that he died of chagrin.  During almost the
whole of the fourteenth century the residence of a pope subservient to
France at Avignon prevented any difficulties, but no sooner had the
Council of Constance restored the head of the unified church to Rome
than the old conflict again burst forth.  [Sidenote: 1438]  The extreme
claims of the Gallican church were asserted in the law known as the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, by which the pope was left hardly any
right of appointment, of jurisdiction, or of raising revenue in France.
The supremacy of a council over the pope was explicitly asserted, as
was the right of the civil magistrate to order ecclesiastical affairs
in his dominions.  When the pontiffs refused to recognize this almost
schismatical position taken by France, the Pragmatic Sanction was
further fortified by a law sentencing to death any person who should
bring into the country a bull repugnant to it.  Strenuous efforts of
the papacy were directed to secure the repeal of this document, and in
1461 Pius II induced Louis XI to revoke it in return for political
concessions in Naples.  This action, opposed by the University and
Parlement of Paris, proved so unpopular that two years later the
Gallican liberties were reasserted in their full extent.

Harmony was established between the interests of the curia and of the
French government by the compromise known as the Concordat of Bologna.
[Sidenote: 1516]  The {43} concessions to the king were so heavy that
it was difficult for Leo X to get his cardinals to consent to them.
Almost the whole power of appointment, of jurisdiction, and of taxation
was put into the royal hands, some stipulations being made against the
conferring of benefices on immoral priests and against the frivolous
imposition of ecclesiastical punishments.  What the pope gained was the
abandonment of the assertion made at Bourges of the supremacy of a
general council.  The Concordat was greeted by a storm of protest in
France.  The Sorbonne refused to recognize it and appealed at once to a
general council.  The king, however, had the refractory members
arrested and decreed the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction in 1518.

In Italy and Germany the growth of a national state [Sidenote: Italy]
was retarded by the fact that one was the seat of the pope, the other
of the emperor, each of them claiming a universal authority.  Moreover,
these two powers were continually at odds.  The long investiture
strife, culminating in the triumph of Gregory VII at Canossa [Sidenote:
1077] and ending in the Concordat of Worms, [Sidenote: 1122] could not
permanently settle the relations of the two.  Whereas Aquinas and the
Canon Law maintained the superiority of the pope, there were not
lacking asserters of the imperial preeminence.  William of Occam's
argument to prove that the emperor might depose an heretical pope was
taken up by Marsiglio of Padua, whose _Defender of the Peace_
[Sidenote: c. 1324] ranks among the ablest of political pamphlets.  In
order to reduce the power of the pope, whom he called "the great dragon
and old serpent," he advanced the civil government to a complete
supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs.  He stated that the only authority
in matters of faith was the Bible, with the necessary interpretation
given it by a general council composed of both clergy and laymen; that
the emperor had the right to convoke and {44} direct this council and
to punish all priests, prelates and the supreme pontiff; that the Canon
Law had no validity; that no temporal punishment should be visited on
heresy save by the state, and no spiritual punishment be valid without
the consent of the state.

[Sidenote: Germany]

With such a weapon in their hands the emperors might have taken an even
stronger stand than did the kings of England and France but for the
lack of unity in their dominions.  Germany was divided into a large
number of practically independent states.  It was in these and not in
the empire as a whole that an approach was made to a form of national
church, such as was realized after Luther had broken the bondage of
Rome.  When Duke Rudolph IV of Austria in the fourteenth century stated
that he intended to be pope, archbishop, archdeacon and dean in his own
land, when the dukes of Bavaria, Saxony and Cleves made similar boasts,
they but put in a strong form the program that they in part realized.
The princes gradually acquired the right of patronage to church
benefices, and they permitted no bulls to be published, no indulgences
sold, without their permission.  The Free Cities acted in much the same
way.  The authority of the German states over their own spiritualities
was no innovation of the heresy of Wittenberg.

For all Germany's internal division there was a certain national
consciousness, due to the common language.  In no point were the people
more agreed than in their opposition to the rule of the Italian Curia.
[Sidenote: 1382]  At one time the monasteries of Cologne signed a
compact to resist Gregory XI in a proposed levy of tithes, stating
that, "in consequence of the exactions by which the Papal Court burdens
the clergy the Apostolic See has fallen into contempt and the Catholic
faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled."  Again, {45} a
Knight of the Teutonic Order in Prussia [Sidenote: 1430] wrote: "Greed
reigns supreme in the Roman Court, and day by day finds new devices and
artifices for extorting money from Germany under pretext of
ecclesiastical fees.  Hence arise much outcry, complaint and
heart-burning. . . .  Many questions about the papacy will be answered,
or else obedience will ultimately be entirely renounced to escape from
these outrageous exactions of the Italians."

The relief expected from the Council of Basle failed, and abuses were
only made worse by a compact between Frederick III and Nicholas V,
known as the Concordat of Vienna.  [Sidenote: 1448]  This treaty was by
no means comparable with the English and French legislation, but was
merely a division of the spoils between the two supreme rulers at the
expense of the people.  The power of appointment to high ecclesiastical
positions was divided, annates were confirmed, and in general a
considerable increase of the authority of the Curia was established.

Protests began at once in the form of "Gravamina" or lists of
grievances drawn up at each Diet as a petition, and in part enacted
into laws.  In 1452 the Spiritual Electors demanded that the emperor
proceed with reform on the basis of the decrees of Constance.  In 1457
the clergy refused to be taxed for a crusade.  In 1461 the princes
appealed against the sale of indulgences.  The Gravamina of this year
were very bitter, complaining of the practice of usury by priests, of
the pomp of the cardinals and of the pope's habit of giving promises of
preferment to certain sees and then declaring the places vacant on the
plea of having made a "mental reservation" in favor of some one else.
The Roman clergy were called in this bill of grievances "public
fornicators, keepers of concubines, ruffians, pimps and sinners in
various other {46} respects."  Drastic proposals of reform were
defeated by the pope.

[Sidenote: Gravamina]

The Gravamina continued.  Those of 1479 appealed against the Mendicant
Orders and against the appointment of foreigners.  They clamored for a
new council and for reform on the basis of the decrees of Basle; they
protested against judicial appeals to Rome, against the annates and
against the crusade tax.  It was stated that the papal appointees were
rather fitted to be drivers of mules than pastors of souls.  Such words
found a reverberating echo among the people.  The powerful pen of
Gregory of Heimburg, sometimes called "the lay Luther," roused his
countrymen to a patriotic stand against the Italian usurpation.

The Diet of 1502 resolved not to let money raised by indulgences leave
Germany, but to use it against the Turks.  Another long list of
grievances relating to the tyranny and extortion of Rome was presented
in 1510.  The acts of the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1518 are
eloquent testimony to the state of popular feeling when Luther had just
begun his career.  To this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal
Cajetan, requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk.  It was
proposed that an impost of ten per cent. be laid on the incomes of the
clergy and one of five per cent. on the rich laity.  This was refused
on account of the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and
refused in language of the utmost violence.  It was stated that the
real enemy of Christianity was not the Turk but "the hound of hell" in
Rome.  Indulgences were branded as blood-letting.

When such was the public opinion it is clear that Luther only touched a
match to a heap of inflammable material.  The whole nationalist
movement redounded to the benefit of Protestantism.  The state-churches
of {47} northern Europe are but the logical development of previous
separatist tendencies.


SECTION 7.  THE HUMANISTS

But the preparation for the great revolt was no less thorough on the
intellectual than it was on the religious and political sides.  The
revival of interest in classical antiquity, aptly known as the
Renaissance, brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval
standards and, most of all, of medieval religion.  The Renaissance
stands in the same relationship to the Reformation that the so-called
"Enlightenment" stands to the French Revolution.  The humanists of the
fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the eighteenth.

The new spirit was born in Italy.  If we go back as far as Dante
[Sidenote: Dante, 1265-1321] we find, along with many modern elements,
such as the use of the vernacular, a completely medieval conception of
the universe.  His immortal poem is in one respect but a commentary on
the _Summa theologiae_ of Aquinas; it is all about the other world.
The younger contemporaries of the great Florentine [Sidenote: Petrarch,
1304-1374] began to be restless as the implications of the new spirit
dawned on them.  Petrarch lamented that literary culture was deemed
incompatible with faith.  Boccaccio was as much a child of this world
as Dante was a prophet of the next.  [Sidenote: Boccaccio, 1313-1375]
Too simple-minded deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was
instinctively opposed to ecclesiastical professions.  Devoting himself
to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial
delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, representing them as the
quintessence of all impurity and hypocrisy.  The first story in his
famous Decameron is of a scoundrel who comes to be reputed as a saint,
invoked as such and performing miracles {48} after death.  The second
story is of a Jew who was converted to Christianity by the wickedness
of Rome, for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could
survive such desperate depravity as he saw there.  The third tale, of
the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what
religion is the true one.  The fourth narrative, like many others,
turns upon the sensuality of the monks.  Elsewhere the author describes
the most absurd relics, and tells how a priest deceived a woman by
pretending that he was the angel Gabriel.  The trend of such a work was
naturally the reverse of edifying.  The irreligion is too spontaneous
to be called philosophic doubt; it is merely impiety.

[Sidenote: Valla, 1406-56]

But such a sentiment could not long remain content with scoffing.  The
banner of pure rationalism, or rather of conscious classical
skepticism, was raised by a circle of enthusiasts.  The most brilliant
of them, and one of the keenest critics that Europe has ever produced,
was Lorenzo Valla, a native of Naples, and for some years holder of a
benefice at Rome.  Such was the trenchancy and temper of his weapons
that much of what he advanced has stood the test of time.

[Sidenote: The Donation of Constantine]

The papal claim to temporal supremacy in the Western world rested
largely on a spurious document known as the Donation of Constantine.
In this the emperor is represented as withdrawing from Rome in order to
leave it to the pope, to whom, in return for being cured of leprosy, he
gives the whole Occident.  An uncritical age had received this forgery
for five or six centuries without question.  Doubt had been cast on it
by Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Peacock, but Valla demolished it.  He
showed that no historian had spoken of it; that there was no time at
which it could have occurred; that it is contradicted by other
contemporary acts; that the barbarous style contains {49} expressions
of Greek, Hebrew, and German origin; that the testimony of numismatics
is against it; and that the author knew nothing of the antiquities of
Rome, into whose council he introduced satraps.  Valla's work was so
thoroughly done that the document, embodied as were its conclusions in
the Canon Law, has never found a reputable defender since.  In time the
critique had an immense effect.  Ulrich von Hutten published it in
1517, and in the same year an English translation was made.  In 1537
Luther turned it into German.

[Sidenote: Valla attacks the Pope]

And if the legality of the pope's rule was so slight, what was its
practical effect?  According to Valla, it was a "barbarous,
overbearing, tyrannical, priestly domination."  "What is it to you," he
apostrophizes the pontiff, "if our republic is crushed?  You have
crushed it.  If our temples have been pillaged?  You have pillaged
them.  If our virgins and matrons have been violated?  You have done
it.  If the city is innundated with the blood of citizens?  You are
guilty of it all."

[Sidenote: Annotations on the New Testament]

Valla's critical genius next attacked the schoolman's idol Aristotle
and the humanist's demigod Cicero.  More important were his
_Annotations on the New Testament_, first published by Erasmus in 1505.
The Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent defined to
be, the authentic or official form of the Scriptures.  Taking in hand
three Latin and three Greek manuscripts, Valla had no difficulty in
showing that they differed from one another and that in some cases the
Latin had no authority whatever in the Greek.  He pointed out a number
of mistranslations, some of them in passages vitally affecting the
faith.  In short he left no support standing for any theory of verbal
inspiration.  He further questioned, and successfully, the authorship
of the Creed attributed {50} to the Apostles, the authenticity of the
writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and of the letter of Christ to
King Abgarus, preserved and credited by Eusebius.

[Sidenote: Attack on Christian ethics]

His attack on Christian ethics was still more fundamental.  In his
_Dialogue on Free Will_ he tried with ingenuity to reconcile the
freedom of the will, denied by Augustine, with the foreknowledge of
God, which he did not feel strong enough to dispute.  In his work on
_The Monastic Life_ he denied all value to asceticism.  Others had
mocked the monks for not living up to their professions; he asserted
that the ideal itself was mistaken.  But it is the treatise _On
Pleasure_ that goes the farthest.  In form it is a dialogue on ethics;
one interlocutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the Stoical, and
the third the Christian standard.  The sympathies of the author are
plainly with the champion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is
the supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the prostitute
is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is
dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against
adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should
go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any
other ideal. . . .  It is noteworthy that the representative of the
Christian standpoint accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness is
the supreme good, only he places that happiness in the next life.

Valla's ideas obtained throughout a large circle in the half-century
following his death.  Masuccio indulged in the most obscene mockery of
Catholic rites.  Poggio wrote a book against hypocrites, attacking the
monks, and a joke-book largely at the expense of the faithful.
Machiavelli assailed the papacy with great ferocity, attributing to it
the corruption of Italian morals and the political disunion and
weakness of {51} Italy, and advocating its annihilation.  [Sidenote:
Machiavelli, 1469-1530]  In place of Christianity, habitually spoken of
as an exploded superstition, dangerous to the state, he would put the
patriotic cults of antiquity.

It is not strange, knowing the character of the popes, that pagan
expressions should color the writings of their courtiers.  Poggio was a
papal secretary, and so was Bembo, a cardinal who refused to read
Paul's epistles for fear of corrupting his Latinity.  In his exquisite
search for classical equivalents for the rude phrases of the gospel, he
referred, in a papal breve, to Christ as "Minerva sprung from the head
of Jove," and to the Holy Ghost as "the breath of the celestial
Zephyr."  Conceived in the same spirit was a sermon of Inghirami heard
by Erasmus at Rome on Good Friday 1509.  Couched in the purest
Ciceronian terms, while comparing the Saviour to Gurtius, Cecrops,
Aristides, Epaminondas and Iphigenia, it was mainly devoted to an
extravagant eulogy of the reigning pontiff, Julius II.

But all the Italian humanists were not pagans.  There arose at
Florence, partly under the influence of the revival of Greek, partly
under that of Savonarola, a group of earnest young men who sought to
invigorate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of Plato.
The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola
[Sidenote: Pico della Mirandola, 1462-94] and Marsiglio Ficino, sought
to show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the Galilean were the
same.  Approaching the Bible in the simple literary way indicated by
classical study, Pico really rediscovered some of the teachings of the
New Testament, while in dealing with the Old he was forced to adopt an
ingenious but unsound allegorical interpretation.  "Philosophy seeks
the truth," he wrote, "theology finds it, religion possesses it."  His
extraordinary personal influence extended through {52} lands beyond the
Alps, even though it failed in accomplishing the rehabilitation of
Italian faith.

[Sidenote: Faber Stapulensis, c. 1455-1536]

The leader of the French Christian Renaissance, James Lefevre
d'Etaples, was one of his disciples.  Traveling in Italy in 1492, after
visiting Padua, Venice and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know
Pico, and received from him a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics
made by Cardinal Bessarion.  Returning to Paris he taught, at the
College of Cardinal Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy.  He did
not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists,
for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was
due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to
himself.  He therefore labored to restore the true text, on which he
wrote a number of treatises.  It was with the same purpose that he
turned next to the early Fathers and to the writer called Dionysius the
Areopagite.  But he did not find himself until he found the Bible.  In
1509 he published the _Quintuplex Psalterium_, the first treatise on
the Psalms in which the philological and personal interest was
uppermost.  Hitherto it had not been the Bible that had been studied so
much as the commentaries on it, a dry wilderness of arid and futile
subtlety.  Lefevre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it
became more human it became, for him, more divine.  His preface is a
real cry of joy at his great discovery.  He did, indeed, interpret
everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the
emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine
effort to read the words as they were written.  Three years later he
published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary.
Though he spoke of the apostle as a simple instrument of God, he yet
did more to uncover his personality than any of the previous {53}
commentators.  Half mystic as he was, Lefevre discovered in Paul the
doctrine of justification by faith only.  To I Corinthians viii, he
wrote: "It is almost profane to speak of the merit of works, especially
towards God. . . .  The opinion that we can be justified by works is an
error for which the Jews are especially condemned. . . .  Our only hope
is in God's grace."  Lefevre's works opened up a new world to the
theologians of the time.  Erasmus's friend Beatus Rhenanus wrote that
the richness of the _Quintuplex Psalter_ made him poor.  Thomas More
said that English students owed him much.  Luther used the two works of
the Frenchman as the texts for his early lectures.  From them he drew
very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefevre who first suggested to
him the formula of his famous "sola fide."

The religious renaissance in England was led by a disciple of Pico
della Mirandola, John Colet, [Sidenote: Colet, d. 1519] a man of
remarkably pure life, and Dean of St. Paul's.  He wrote, though he did
not publish, some commentaries on the Pauline epistles and on the
Mosaic account of creation.  Though he knew no Greek, and was not an
easy or elegant writer of Latin, he was allied to the humanists by his
desire to return to the real sources of Christianity, and by his search
for the historical sense of his texts.  Though in some respects he was
under the fantastic notions of the Areopagite, in others his
interpretation was rational, free and undogmatic.  He exercised a
considerable influence on Erasmus and on a few choice spirits of the
time.

The humanism of Germany centered in the universities.  At the close of
the fifteenth century new courses in the Latin classics, in Greek and
in Hebrew, began to supplement the medieval curriculum of logic and
philosophy.  At every academy there sprang up a circle of "poets," as
they called themselves, often of {54} lax morals and indifferent to
religion, but earnest in their championship of culture.  Nor were these
circles confined entirely to the seats of learning.  Many a city had
its own literary society, one of the most famous being that of
Nuremberg.  Conrad Mutianus Rufus drew to Gotha, [Sidenote: Mutian,
1471-1526] where he held a canonry, a group of disciples, to whom he
imparted the Neo-Platonism he had imbibed in Italy.  Disregarding
revelation, he taught that all religions were essentially the same.  "I
esteem the decrees of philosophers more than those of priests," he
wrote.

[Sidenote: Reuchlin, 1455-1522]

What Lefevre and Colet had done for the New Testament, John Reuchlin
did for the Old.  After studying in France and Italy, where he learned
to know Pico della Mirandola, he settled at Stuttgart and devoted his
life to the study of Hebrew.  His _De Rudimentis Hebraicis_, [Sidenote:
1506] a grammar and dictionary of this language, performed a great
service for scholarship.  In the late Jewish work, the _Cabbala_, he
believed he had discovered a source of mystic wisdom.  The extravagance
of his interpretations of Scriptual passages, based on this, not only
rendered much of his work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of
trouble.  The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, in a series of
pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, should be
compelled to hear sermons and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to
be burnt, except the Old Testament.  When Reuchlin's aid in this pious
project was requested it was refused in a memorial dated October 6,
1510, pointing out the great value of much Hebrew literature.  The
Dominicans of Cologne, headed by their inquisitor, James Hochstraten,
made this the ground for a charge of heresy.  The case was appealed to
Rome, and the trial, lasting six years, excited the interest of all
Europe.  In Germany it was argued with much heat in a host of {55}
pamphlets, all the monks and obscurantists taking the side of the
inquisitors and all the humanists, save one, Ortuin Gratius of Cologne,
taking the part of the scholar.  The latter received many warm
expressions of admiration and support from the leading writers of the
time, and published them in two volumes, the first in 1514, under the
title _Letters of Eminent Men_.  It was this that suggested to the
humanist, Crotus Bubeanus, the title of his satire published
anonymously, _The Letters of Obscure Men_.  In form it is a series of
epistles from monks and hedge-priests to Ortuin Gratius.  [Sidenote:
_Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_]

Writing in the most barbarous Latin, they express their admiration for
his attack on Reuchlin and the cause of learning, gossip about their
drinking-bouts and pot-house amours, expose their ignorance and
gullibility, and ask absurd questions, as, whether it is a mortal sin
to salute a Jew, and whether the worms eaten with beans and cheese
should be considered meat or fish, lawful or not in Lent, and at what
stage of development a chick in the egg becomes meat and therefore
prohibited on Fridays.  The satire, coarse as it was biting, failed to
win the applause of the finer spirits, but raised a shout of laughter
from the students, and was no insignificant factor in adding to
contempt for the church.  The first book of these _Letters_, published
in 1515, was followed two years later by a second, even more caustic
than the first.  This supplement, also published without the writer's
name, was from the pen of Ulrich von Hutten.

[Sidenote: Hutten, 1488-1523]

This brilliant and passionate writer devoted the greater part of his
life to war with Rome.  His motive was not religious, but patriotic.
He longed to see his country strong and united, and free from the
galling oppression of the ultramontane yoke.  He published Valla's
_Donation of Constantine_, and wrote epigrams on the popes.  His
dialogue _Fever the First_ is a {56} vitriolic attack on the priests.
His _Vadiscus or the Roman Trinity_ [Sidenote: 1520] scourges the vices
of the curia where three things are sold: Christ, places and women.
When he first heard of Luther's cause he called it a quarrel of monks,
and only hoped they would all destroy one another.  But by 1519 he saw
in the Reformer the most powerful of allies against the common foe, and
he accordingly embraced his cause with habitual zeal.  His letters at
this time breathe out fire and slaughter against the Romanists if
anything should happen to Luther.  In 1523, he supported his friend
Francis von Sickingen, in the attempt to assert by force of arms the
rights of the patriotic and evangelic order of knights.  When this was
defeated, Hutten, suffering from a terrible disease, wandered to
Switzerland, where he died, a lonely and broken exile.  His epitaph
shall be his own lofty poem:

  I have fought my fight with courage,
  Nor have I aught to rue,
  For, though I lost the battle,
  The world knows, I was true!


[Sidenote: Erasmus, 1466-1536]

The most cosmopolitan, as well as the greatest, of all the Christian
humanists, was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam.  Though an illegitimate
child, he was well educated and thoroughly grounded in the classics at
the famous school of Deventer.  At the age of twenty he was persuaded,
somewhat against his will, to enter the order of Augustinian Canons at
Steyn.  Under the patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai he was enabled to
continue his studies at Paris.  [Sidenote: 1499-1509]  For the next ten
years he wandered to England, to various places in Northern France and
Flanders, and Italy, learning to know many of the intellectual leaders
of the time.  From 1509-14 he was in England, part of the time
lecturing at Cambridge.  He then spent some {57} years at Louvain,
seven years at Basle and six years at Freiburg in the Breisgau,
returning to Basle for the last year of his life.

Until he was over thirty Erasmus's dominant interest was classical
literature.  Under the influence of Colet and of a French Franciscan,
John Vitrier, he turned his attention to liberalizing religion.  His
first devotional work, _The Handbook of the Christian Knight_,
perfectly sets forth his program of spiritual, as opposed to formal,
Christianity.  [Sidenote: _Enchiridion Militis Christiani_, 1503]  It
all turns upon the distinction between the inner and the outer man, the
moral and the sensual.  True service of Christ is purity of heart and
love, not the invocation of saints, fasting and indulgences.

In _The Praise of Folly_ Erasmus mildly rebukes the foibles of men.
[Sidenote: 1511]  There never was kindlier satire, free from the savage
scorn of Crotus and Hutten, and from the didactic scolding of Sebastian
Brant, whose _Ship of Fools_ [Sidenote: 1494] was one of the author's
models.  Folly is made quite amiable, the source not only of some
things that are amiss but also of much harmless enjoyment.  The
besetting silliness of every class is exposed: of the man of pleasure,
of the man of business, of women and of husbands, of the writer and of
the pedant.  Though not unduly emphasized, the folly of current
superstitions is held up to ridicule.  Some there are who have turned
the saints into pagan gods; some who have measured purgatory into years
and days and cheat themselves with indulgences against it; some
theologians who spend all their time discussing such absurdities as
whether God could have redeemed men in the form of a woman, a devil, an
ass, a squash or a stone, others who explain the mystery of the Trinity.

In following up his plan for the restoration of a simpler Christianity,
Erasmus rightly thought that a return from the barren subtleties of the
schoolmen to {58} the primitive sources was essential.  He wished to
reduce Christianity to a moral, humanitarian, undogmatic philosophy of
life.  His attitude towards dogma was to admit it and to ignore it.
Scientific enlightenment he welcomed more than did either the Catholics
or the Reformers, sure that if the Sermon on the Mount survived,
Christianity had nothing to fear.  In like manner, while he did not
attack the cult and ritual of the church, he never laid any stress on
it.  "If some dogmas are incomprehensible and some rites
superstitious," he seemed to say, "what does it matter?  Let us
emphasize the ethical and spiritual content of Christ's message, for if
we seek his kingdom, all else needful shall be added unto us."  His
favorite name for his religion was the "philosophy of Christ,"
[Sidenote: Philosophy of Christ] and it is thus that he persuasively
expounds it in a note, in his Greek Testament, to Matthew xi, 30:

  Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden
  light, if petty human institutions added nothing to what
  he himself imposed.  He commanded us nothing save
  love one for another, and there is nothing so bitter that
  charity does not soften and sweeten it.  Everything
  according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords
  better with the nature of man than the philosophy of
  Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to
  fallen nature its innocence and integrity. . . .  How pure,
  how simple is the faith that Christ delivered to us!  How
  close to it is the creed transmitted to us by the apostles,
  or apostolic men.  The church, divided and tormented by
  discussions and by heresy, added to it many things, of
  which some can be omitted without prejudice to the
  faith. . . .  There are many opinions from which impiety
  may be begotten, as for example, all those philosophic
  doctrines on the reason of the nature and the distinction
  of the persons of the Godhead. . . .  The sacraments
  themselves were instituted for the salvation of men, but
  we abuse them for lucre, for vain glory or for the oppression
  of the humble. . . .  What rules, what superstitions
  we have about vestments!  How many are judged as to
  {59}
  their Christianity by such trifles, which are indifferent
  in themselves, which change with the fashion and of which
  Christ never spoke! . . .  How many fasts are instituted!
  And we are not merely invited to fast, but obliged to, on
  pain of damnation. . . .  What shall we say about
  vows . . . about the authority of the pope, the abuse of
  absolutions, dispensations, remissions of penalty, law-suits,
  in which there is much that a truly good man cannot see
  without a groan?  The priests themselves prefer to
  study Aristotle than to ply their ministry.  The gospel
  is hardly mentioned from the pulpit.  Sermons are
  monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often
  the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for
  their profit. . . .  Would that men were content to let
  Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they
  would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant
  tyranny by human decrees!


[Sidenote: Colloquies]

In the _Familiar Colloquies_, first published in 1518 and often
enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious
ideas most sharply.  Enormous as were the sales and influence of his
other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work,
intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style.  The first
conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but
the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art.  Erasmus
is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in
writing a really exquisite Latin.  But his supreme gift was his dry
wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple
matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule.  Thus, in the
_Colloquies_, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine at
Canterbury, the bloody bones and the handkerchief covered with the
saint's rheum offered to be kissed--all without a disapproving word and
yet in such a way that when the reader has finished it he wonders how
anything so silly could ever have existed.  Thus again he strips the
worship of Mary, and all the {60} stupid and wrong projects she is
asked to abet.  In the conversation called _The Shipwreck_, the people
pray to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan times, only it
is Mary, not Venus that is meant.  They offer mountains of wax candles
to the saints to preserve them, although one man confides to his
neighbor in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not pay one
penny taper on his vow.  Again, in the _Colloquy on the New Testament_,
a young man is asked what he has done for Christ.  He replies:

  A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testament
  of Erasmus in his sermons.  Well, one day I called
  on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left
  hand and punished him with my right.  I gave him so
  sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a
  mere jelly.  What do you say to that?  Isn't that
  maintaining the gospel?  And then, by way of absolution for
  his sins I took this book [Erasmus's New Testament, a
  folio bound with brass] and gave him three resounding
  whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the
  Son and of the Holy Ghost.


"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel
by the gospel.  But really it is time you were turning from a brute
beast into a man."

So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the
leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions
without seeming to attack anything.  Where Luther battered down, he
undermined.  [Sidenote: Methods of argument]  Even when he argued
against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"--for that is
the true meaning of the word Diatribe.  With choice of soft vocabulary,
of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his
Latin.  Did he doubt anything?  Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt"
(_subdubito_).  Did he think he wrote well?  Not at all, but he
confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average"
(_paulo latinius_).  Did he {61} like anything?  If so, he only
admitted--except when he was addressing his patrons--"that he was not
altogether averse to it."  But all at once from these feather-light
touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made
his stylus a dagger.  Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been
quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be
quoted as often again.

[Sidenote: His wit]

But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he
was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of
its vulgar pretense.  When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing
him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one
should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his
coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with
but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a
religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to
its requirements.  The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected
something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so
delicately conveyed.

Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a
letter dated September 9, 1517--though he sometimes retouched his
letters on publishing them--he foresaw.  "In this part of the world,"
he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending."  It was
already knocking at the door!




{62}

CHAPTER II

GERMANY

SECTION 1.  THE LEADER

It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical
movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single
individual.  The men who take the helm at crises are those who but
express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel.  The
need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at
hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men
with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for
which they strive.  But a really strong personality to some extent
guides the course of events by which he is carried along.  Such a man
was Luther.  [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546]  Few have ever alike
represented and dominated an age as did he.  His heart was the most
passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most
capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to
stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen.  If we may borrow a
figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution
supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a
pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful
reagent possible.

On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a
boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at
Mansfeld.  Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin
primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was
flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for
faltering in a declension.  When he returned home he found his mother
bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest.  Both she
and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight
faults until the blood came.  Nevertheless, as the son himself
recognized, they meant heartily well by it.  But for the self-sacrifice
and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened
mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of
the son would have been impossible.

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy
by spiritual terrors.  Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued
his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to
death.  God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready
to thrust sinners into hell.  "They painted Christ," says Luther--and
such pictures can still be seen in old churches--"sitting on a rainbow
with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors
against his frightful wrath."

At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and
the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study.  He
contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and
was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta.  In 1501 he
matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt.  [Sidenote:
Erfurt]  The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar,
and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics.  There
was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but
wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and
there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics
and in their later imitators.  Ranking among the better {64} scholars
Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in
1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence.  While his
diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he
mingled with his comrades as a man with men.  He was generous, even
prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made
"an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers.  "Fair fortune and
good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am
settled at college as pleasantly as possible."

For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one
no adequate explanation has been offered.  Pious and serious as he was,
his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a
boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well
substantiated.  As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was
overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination
saw a devine warning to forsake the "world."  In a fright he vowed to
St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash
promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian
friary at Erfurt.  After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  In 1507 he was ordained
priest.  In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the
order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of
the capital of Christendom.  Having started, in 1508, to teach
Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year
later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to
lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life.  [Sidenote: 1511]

During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound
experience.  He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he
was doomed to hell.  {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a
gracious God?"  The answer given him by his teachers was that a man
must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own
efforts.  The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the
recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism
and privation of the monastic life.  Luther took this all in and strove
frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for
redemption.  But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not
free himself from the desires of the flesh.  He was helpless; he could
do nothing.  Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but
a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to
man's work.  He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true
salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be
damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell.  He read in
Lefevre d'Etaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith,
like the thief on the cross.

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and
pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith."
[Sidenote: Justification by faith only]  All at once, so forcibly that
he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon
him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely
to make him so.  Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to
his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in
the Redeemer was man sanctified.  The thought, though by no means new
in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the
religious revolution.  In it was contained the total repudiation of the
medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the
good works of the cloister.  To us nowadays the thought seems remote;
the question which called it forth outworn.  But to the {66} sixteenth
century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the
church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and
over their souls.  All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims,
and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of
justification by faith only.

The thought made Luther a reformer at once.  He started to purge his
order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle.
Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of
the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of
indulgences.  Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political
influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg
and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy
of Germany.  For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical
occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of
several hundred thousand dollars today.  Mayence was already in debt
and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money.  To help
him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence.  In
order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief
agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel.  [Sidenote: Tetzel]
This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money
clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from
purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured
plenary remission of sins and the grace of God.

The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came
very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy
heaven at a bargain.  Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to
be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these
wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith.  He accordingly
called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads
for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle
Church on October 31, 1517.  [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517]
He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain,
especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that
contrition was the only gate to God's pardon; that works of charity
were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the
indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment
heresy among the simple.  In all this he did not directly deny the
whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.

The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other
cities.  They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo
by the whole nation.  Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of
greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy.  All welcomed
the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it.  Tetzel
was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste.  The pardons no longer had any
sale.  The authorities took alarm at once.  Leo X directed the general
of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant.
[Sidenote: February 3, 1518]  The matter was accordingly brought up at
the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May.  Luther was
present, was asked to retract, and refused.  On the contrary he
published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses
stating his points more strongly than before.

The whole of Germany was now in commotion.  The Diet which met at
Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to
his legate, Cardinal Cajetan.  At the instance of this theologian, who
had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in
the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried.  On
August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and
in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to
a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the
legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant.  At this juncture
Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the
Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was
procured.  Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before
Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on
indulgences, and refused.  [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518]  A few days
later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the
pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again
from the pope to a future oecumenical council.  In the meantime Leo X,
in the bull _Cum postquam_, authoritatively defined the doctrine of
indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.

The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to Germany a special
agent, the Saxon Charles von Miltitz, with instructions either to
cajole the heretic into retraction or the Elector into surrendering
him.  In neither of these attempts was he successful.  [Sidenote:
January 1519]  At an interview with Luther the utmost he could do was
to secure a general statement that the accused man would abide by the
decision of the Holy See, and a promise to keep quiet as long as his
opponents did the same.

Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the champions of the
church could not let the heretic rest for a moment.  The whole affair
was given a wider publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the
same time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position than he had yet
reached, by the attack of a theologian of Ingolstadt, John Eck.  When
he assailed the Theses on the ground that they seriously impaired the
authority of the Roman see, Luther retorted:

  {69} The assertion that the Roman Church is superior to all
  other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal
  decrees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to
  the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred
  years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all
  councils, the Nicene.


[Sidenote: The Leipzig Debate, 1519]

A debate on this and other propositions between Eck on the one side and
Luther and his colleague Carlstadt on the other took place at Leipzig
in the days from June 27 to July 16, 1519.  The climax of the argument
on the power of popes and councils came when Eck, skilfully manoeuvring
to show that Luther's opinions were identical with those of Huss,
forced from his opponent the bold declaration that "among the opinions
of John Huss and the Bohemians many are certainly most Christian and
evangelic, and cannot be condemned by the universal church."  The words
sent a thrill through the audience and throughout Christendom.  Eck
could only reply: "If you believe that a general council, legitimately
convoked, can err, you are to me a heathen and a publican."
Reconciliation was indeed no longer possible.  When Luther had
protested against the abuse of indulgences he did so as a loyal son of
the church.  Now at last he was forced to raise the standard of revolt,
at least against Rome, the recognized head of the church.  He had begun
by appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, then from the pope to a
universal council; now he declared that a great council had erred, and
that he would not abide by its decision.  The issue was a clear one,
though hardly recognized as such by himself, between the religion of
authority and the right of private judgment.

His opposition to the papacy developed with extraordinary rapidity.
His study of the Canon Law made him, as early as March, 1519, brand the
pope as either Antichrist or Antichrist's apostle.  He {70} applauded
Melancthon, a brilliant young man called to teach at Wittenberg in
1518, for denying transubstantiation.  He declared that the cup should
never have been withheld from the laity, and that the mass considered
as a good work and a sacrifice was an abomination.  His eyes were
opened to the iniquities of Rome by Valla's exposure of the Donation of
Constantine, published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1519.  After reading it
he wrote:

  Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at
  Rome!  You wonder at the judgment of God that such
  unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but
  prevailed for many centuries, that they were incorporated
  into the Canon Law, and (that no degree of horror might
  be wanting) that they became as articles of faith.


Like German troops Luther was best in taking the offensive.  These
early years when he was standing almost alone and attacking one abuse
after another, were the finest of his whole career.  Later, when he
came to reconstruct a church, he modified or withdrew much of what he
had at first put forward, and re-introduced a large portion of the
medieval religiosity which he had once so successfully and fiercely
attacked.  The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he ever
attained.  It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a
series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in
the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the
popular force of their language.

[Sidenote: _To the Christian Nobility_, 1520]

His greatest appeal to his countrymen was made in his _Address to the
Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of the
Christian Estate_.  In this he asserts the right of the civil power to
reform the spiritual, and urges the government to exercise this right.
The priests, says he, defend themselves against all outside
interference by three "walls," of {71} which the first is the claim
that the church is superior to the state, in case the civil authority
presses them; the second, the assertion, if one would correct them by
the Bible, that no one can interpret it but the pope; the third, if
they are threatened with a general council, the contention that no one
can convoke such a council save the pope.  Luther demolishes these
walls with words of vast import.  First, he denies any distinction
between the spiritual and temporal estates.  Every baptized Christian,
he asserts, is a priest, and in this saying he struck a mortal blow at
the great hierarchy of privilege and theocratic tyranny built up by the
Middle Ages.  The second wall is still frailer than the first, says the
writer, for anyone can see that in spite of the priests' claims to be
masters of the Bible they never learn one word of it their whole life
long.  The third wall falls of itself, for the Bible plainly commands
everyone to punish and correct any wrong-doer, no matter what his
station.

[Sidenote: Reform measures]

After this introduction Luther proposes measures of reform equally
drastic and comprehensive.  The first twelve articles are devoted to
the pope, the annates, the appointment of foreigners to German
benefices, the appeal of cases to Rome, the asserted authority of the
papacy over bishops, the emperor, and other rulers.  All these abuses,
as well as jubilees and pilgrimages to Rome should be simply forbidden
by the civil government.  The next three articles deal with sacerdotal
celibacy, recommending that priests be allowed to marry, and calling
for the suppression of many of the cloisters.  It is further urged that
foundations for masses and for the support of idle priests be
abolished, that various vexatious provisions of the Canon Law be
repealed, and that begging on any pretext be prohibited.  The
twenty-fourth article deals with the Bohemian schism, saying that Huss
was wrongly {72} burned, and calling for union with the Hussites who
deny transubstantiation and demand the cup for the laity.  Next, the
writer takes up the reform of education in the interests of a more
biblical religion.  Finally, he urges that sumptuary laws be passed,
that a bridle be put in the mouth of the great monopolists and usurers,
and that brothels be no longer tolerated.

Of all the writer's works this probably had the greatest and most
immediate influence.  Some, indeed, were offended by the violence of
the language, defended by Luther from the example of the Bible and by
the necessity of rousing people to the enormities he attacked.  But
most hailed it as a "trumpet-blast" calling the nation to arms.  Four
thousand copies were sold in a few days, and a second edition was
called for within a month.  Voicing ideas that had been long, though
vaguely, current, it convinced almost all of the need of a reformation.
According to their sympathies men declared that the devil or the Holy
Ghost spoke through Luther.

[Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity, 1520]

Though less popular both in form and subject, _The Babylonian Captivity
of the Church_ was not less important than the _Address to the German
Nobility_.  It was a mortal blow at the sacramental system of the
church.  In judging it we must again summon the aid of our historical
imagination.  In the sixteenth century dogmas not only seemed but were
matters of supreme importance.  It was just by her sacramental system,
by her claim to give the believer eternal life and salvation through
her rites, that the church had imposed her yoke on men.  As long as
that belief remained intact progress in thought, in freedom of
conscience, in reform, remained difficult.  And here, as is frequently
the case, the most effective arguments were not those which seem to us
logically the strongest.  Luther made no appeal to reason as such.  He
{73} appealed to the Bible, recognized by all Christians as an
authority, and showed how far the practice of the church had
degenerated from her standard.  [Sidenote: Sacraments]  In the first
place he reduced the number of sacraments, denying that name to
matrimony, orders, extreme unction and confirmation.  In attacking
orders he demolished the priestly ideal and authority.  In reducing
marriage to a civil contract he took a long step towards the
secularization of life.  Penance he considered a sacrament in a certain
sense, though not in the strict one, and he showed that it had been
turned by the church from its original significance of "repentance" [1]
to that of sacramental penance, in which no faith was required but
merely an automatic act.  Baptism and the eucharist he considered the
only true sacraments, and he seriously criticized the prevalent
doctrine of the latter.  He denied that the mass is a sacrifice or a
"good work" pleasing to God and therefore beneficial to the soul either
of living or of dead.  He denied that the bread and wine are
transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus, though he held that
the body and blood are really present with the elements.  He demanded
that the cup be given to the laity.

The whole trend of Luther's thought at this time was to oppose the
Catholic theory of a mechanical distribution of grace and salvation
(the so-called _opus operatum_) by means of the sacraments, and to
substitute for it an individual conception of religion in which faith
only should be necessary.  How far he carried this idea may be seen in
his _Sermon on the New Testament, that is on the Holy Mass_,[2]
published in the same year as the pamphlets just analysed.  In it he
makes the essence of the sacrament forgiveness, and the vehicle of this
forgiveness the word of God apprehended by {74} faith, _not_ the actual
participation in the sacred bread and wine.  Had he always been true to
this conception he would have left no place for sacrament or priest at
all.  But in later years he grew more conservative, until, under
slightly different names, almost the old medieval ideas of church and
religion were again established, and, as Milton later expressed it,
"New presbyter was but old priest writ large."


[1] In Latin _penitentia_ means both penance and repentance.

[2] _Cf_. Matthew, xxvi, 28.


SECTION 2.  THE REVOLUTION

[Sidenote: Germany]

Although the Germans had arrived, by the end of the fifteenth century,
at a high degree of national self-consciousness, they had not, like the
French and English, succeeded in forming a corresponding political
unity.  The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, though continuing
to assert the vast claims of the Roman world-state, was in fact but a
loose confederacy of many and very diverse territories.  On a map drawn
to the scale 1:6,000,000 nearly a hundred separate political entities
can be counted within the limits of the Empire and there were many
others too small to appear.  The rulers of seven of these territories
elected the emperor; they were the three spiritual princes, the
Archbishops of Mayence, Treves and Cologne, the three German temporal
princes, the Electors of the Rhenish Palatinate, Saxony, and
Brandenburg, and in addition the King of Bohemia, who, save for
purposes of the imperial choice, did not count as a member of the
Germanic body.  Besides these there were some powerful dukedoms, like
Austria and Bavaria, and numerous smaller bishoprics and counties.
There were also many free cities, like Augsburg and Nuremberg, small
aristocratic republics.  Finally there was a large body of "free
knights" or barons, whose tiny fiefs amounted often to no more than a
castle and a few acres, but who owned no feudal superior save {75} the
emperor.  The unity of the Empire was expressed not only in the person
of the emperor, but in the Diet which met at different places at
frequent intervals.  Its authority, though on the whole increasing, was
small.

With no imperial system of taxation, no professional army and no
centralized administration, the real power of the emperor dwindled.
Such as it was he derived it from the fact that he was always elected
from one of the great houses.  Since 1438 the Hapsburgs, Archdukes of
Austria, had held the imperial office.  Since 1495 there was also an
imperial supreme court of arbitration.  [Sidenote: 1495]  The first
imperial tax was levied in 1422 to equip a force against the Hussites.
In the fifteenth century also the rudiments of a central administration
were laid in the division of the realm into ten "circles," and the levy
of a small number of soldiers.  And yet, at the time of the
Reformation, the Empire was little better than a state in dissolution
through the centrifugal forces of feudalism.

So little was the Empire an individual unit that the policy of her
rulers themselves was not imperial.  The statesmanship of Maximilian
was something smaller than national; it was that of his Archduchy of
Austria.  The policy of his successor, on the other hand, was
determined by something larger than Germany, the consideration of the
Spanish and Burgundian states that he also ruled.  Maximilian tried in
every way to aggrandize his personal power, not that of the German
Nation.  [Sidenote: Maximilian I, 1493-1519]  The Diet of Worms of 1495
tried to remodel the constitution.  It proclaimed a perpetual public
peace, provided that those who broke it should be outlawed, and placed
the duty of executing the ban upon all territories within ninety miles
of the offender.  It also passed a bill for taxation, called the
"common penny," which combined features of a poll tax, an {76} income
tax and a property tax.  The difficulty of collecting it was great;
Maximilian himself as a territorial prince tried to evade it instead of
setting his subjects the good example of paying it.  He probably
derived no more than the trifling sum of 50,000-100,000 gulden from it
annually.  The Diet also revived the Supreme Court and gave it a
permanent home at Frankfort-on-the-Main.  Feeble efforts to follow up
this beginning of reform were made in subsequent Diets, but they failed
owing to the insuperable jealousies of the princes and because the
party of national unity lost the sympathy of the common people, to whom
alone they could look for support.

Maximilian's external policy, though adventurous and unstable, was
somewhat more successful.  His only principle was to grasp whatever
opportunity seemed to offer.  Thus at one time he seriously proposed to
have himself elected pope.  His marriage with Mary, the daughter of
Charles the Bold, added to the estates of his house Burgundy--the land
comprising what is now Belgium, Luxemburg, most of Holland and large
portions of north-eastern France.  On the death of Mary, in 1482,
Maximilian had much trouble in getting himself acknowledged as regent
of her lands for their son Philip the Handsome.  A part of the domain
he also lost in a war with France.  This was more than made up,
however, by the brilliant match he made for Philip in securing for him
the hand of Mad Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand and
Isabella of Spain.  This marriage produced two sons, Charles and
Ferdinand.  The deaths of Isabella (1504), of Philip (1506) and of
Ferdinand of Aragon (1516) left Charles at the age of sixteen the ruler
of Burgundy and of Spain with its immense dependencies in Italy and in
America.  [Sidenote: Charles V, 1500-1558]  From this time forth the
policy of Maximilian concentrated in the effort to {77} secure the
succession of his eldest grandson to the imperial throne.

When Maximilian died on January 12, 1519, there were several candidates
for election.  So little was the office considered national that the
kings of France and England entered the lists, and the former, Francis
I, actually at one time secured the promise of votes from the majority
of electors.  Pope Leo made explicit engagements to both Charles and
Francis to support their claims, and at the same time instructed his
legate to labor for the choice of a German prince, either Frederic of
Saxony, if he would in return give up Luther, or else Joachim of
Brandenburg.  But at no time was the election seriously in doubt.  The
electors followed the only possible course in choosing Charles on June
28.  They profited, however, by the rivalry of the rich king of France
to extort enormous bribes and concessions from Charles.  The banking
house of Fugger supplied the necessary funds, and in addition the
agents of the emperor-elect were obliged to sign a "capitulation"
making all sorts of concessions to the princes.  One of these, exacted
by Frederic of Saxony in the interest of Luther, was that no subject
should be outlawed without being heard.

The settlement of the imperial election enabled the pope once more to
turn his attention to the suppression of the rapidly growing heresy.
After the Leipzig debate the universities of Cologne and Louvain had
condemned Luther's positions.  Eck went to Rome in March, 1520, and
impressed the curia, which was already planning a bull condemning the
heretic, with the danger of delay.  After long discussions the bull
_Exsurge Domine_ was ratified by the College of Cardinals and
promulgated by Leo on June 15.  [Sidenote: Bull against Luther, 1520]
In this, forty-one of Luther's sayings, relating to the sacraments of
penance and the eucharist, to indulgences and {78} the power of the
pope, to free will and purgatory, and to a few other matters, were
anathematized as heretical or scandalous or false or offensive to pious
ears.  His books were condemned and ordered to be burnt, and unless he
should recant within sixty days of the posting of the bull in Germany
he was to be considered a heretic and dealt with accordingly.  Eck was
entrusted with the duty of publishing this fulmination in Germany, and
performed the task in the last days of September.

The time given Luther in which to recant therefore expired two months
later.  Instead of doing so he published several answers to "the
execrable bull of Anti-christ," and on December 10 publicly and
solemnly burnt it, together with the whole Canon Law.  This he had come
to detest, partly as containing the "forged decretals," partly as the
sanction for a vast mechanism of ecclesiastical use and abuse,
repugnant to his more personal theology.  The dramatic act, which sent
a thrill throughout Europe, symbolized the passing of some medieval
accretions on primitive Christianity.  There was nothing left for the
pope but to excommunicate the heretic, as was done in the bull _Decet
Pontificem Romanum_ drawn up at Rome in January, [Sidenote: 1521] and
published at Worms on May 6.

In the meantime Charles had come to Germany.  For more than a year
after his election he remained in Spain, where his position was very
insecure on account of the revolt against his Burgundian officers.
Arriving in the Netherlands in the summer of 1520 Charles was met by
the special nuncios of the pope, Caracciolo and Aleander.  After he was
crowned emperor at Aix-la-Chapelle, he opened his first Diet, at Worms.
[Sidenote: October 23, 1520 January 27, 1521 The Diet of Worms]

Before this august assembly came three questions of highest import.
The first related to the dynastic {79} policy of the Hapsburgs.  For
the chronic war with France an army of 24,000 men and a tax of 128,000
gulden was voted.  The disposition of Wuerttemberg caused some trouble.
Duke Ulrich had been deposed for rebellion in 1518, and his land taken
from him by the Swabian League and sold to the emperor in 1520.
Together with the Austrian lands, which Charles secretly handed over to
his young brother Ferdinand, this territory made the nucleus of
Hapsburg power in Germany.

The Diet then took up the question of constitutional reform.  In order
to have a permanent administrative body, necessary during the long
absences of the emperor, an Imperial Council of Regency was established
and given a seat at Nuremberg.  [Sidenote: Council of Regency]  The
emperor nominated the president and four of the twenty-two other
members; each of the six German electors nominated one member; six were
chosen by the circles into which the Empire was divided and six were
elected by the other estates.  The powers of the council were limited
to the times when the emperor was away.

The third question treated by the Diet was the religious one.  As
usual, they drew up a long list of grievances against the pope, to
which many good Catholics in the assembly subscribed.  Next they
considered what to do with Luther.  Charles himself, who could speak no
language but French, and had no sympathy whatever with a rebel from any
authority spiritual or temporal, would much have preferred to outlaw
the Wittenberg professor at once, but he was bound by his promise to
Frederic of Saxony.  Of the six electors, who sat apart from the other
estates, Frederic was strongly for Luther, the Elector Palatine was
favorably inclined towards him, and the Archbishop of Mayence
represented a mediating policy.  The other three electors were opposed.
Among the {80} lesser princes a considerable minority was for Luther,
whereas among the representatives of the free cities and of the
knights, probably a majority were his followers.  The common people,
though unrepresented, applauded Luther, and their clamors could not
pass unheeded even by the aristocratic members of the Diet.  [Sidenote:
February 13]  The debate was opened by Aleander in a speech dwelling on
the sacramental errors of the heretic and the similarity of his
movement to that of the detested Bohemians.  After a stormy session the
estates decided to summon the bold Saxon before them and accordingly a
citation, together with a safe-conduct, was sent him.

Though there was some danger in obeying the summons, Luther's journey
to Worms, was a triumphal progress.  Brought before the Diet in the
late afternoon of April 17, he was asked if a certain number of books,
the titles of which were read, were his and if he would recant the
heresy contained in them.  The form of the questions took him by
surprise, for he had expected to be confronted with definite charges
and to be allowed to defend his positions.  He accordingly asked for
time, and was granted one more day.  [Sidenote: April 18, 1521]  On his
second appearance he made a great oration admitting that the books were
his and closing with the words:

  Unless I am convicted by Scripture or by right reason
  (for I trust neither popes nor councils since they have
  often erred and contradicted themselves) . . .  I neither
  can nor will recant anything since it is neither safe nor
  right to act against conscience.  God help me.  Amen.

There he stood, braving the world, for he could do no other. . . .  He
left the hall the hero of his nation.

Hoping still to convince him of error, Catholic theologians held
protracted but fruitless conferences with him before his departure from
Worms on the 26th of {81} April.  The sympathy of the people with him
was shown by the posting at Worms of placards threatening his enemies.
Charles was sincerely shocked and immediately drew up a statement that
he would hazard life and lands on the maintenance of the Catholic faith
of his fathers.  An edict was drafted by Aleander on the model of one
promulgated in September in the Netherlands.  [Sidenote: Luther banned]
The Edict of Worms put Luther under the ban of the Empire, commanded
his surrender to the government at the expiration of his safe-conduct,
and forbade all to shelter him or to read his writings.  Though dated
on May 8, to make it synchronize with a treaty between Charles and Leo,
the Edict was not passed by the Diet until May 26.  At this time many
of the members had gone home, and the law was forced on the remaining
ones, contrary to the wishes of the majority, by intrigue and imperial
pressure.

After leaving Worms Luther was taken by his prince, Frederic the Wise,
and placed for safe-keeping in the Wartburg, a fine old castle near
Eisenach.  [Sidenote: The Wartburg]  Here he remained in hiding for
nearly a year, while doing some of his most important work.  Here he
wrote his treatise _On Monastic Vows_, declaring that they are wrong
and invalid and urging all priests, nuns and monks to leave the
cloister and to marry.  In thus freeing thousands of men and women from
a life often unproductive and sterile Luther achieved one of the
greatest of his practical reforms.  At the Wartburg also Luther began
his translation of the Bible.  The New Testament appeared in September
1522, and the Old Testament followed in four parts, the last published
in 1532.

[Sidenote: The radicals]

While Luther was in retirement at the Wartburg, his colleagues
Carlstadt and Melanchthon, and the Augustinian friar Gabriel Zwilling,
took up the movement at Wittenberg and carried out reforms more radical
{82} than those of their leader.  The endowments of masses were
confiscated and applied to the relief of the poor on new and better
principles.  Prostitution was suppressed.  A new order of divine
service was introduced, in which the words purporting that the mass was
a sacrifice were omitted, and communion was given to the laity in both
kinds.  Priests were urged to marry, and monks were almost forced to
leave the cloister.  An element of mob violence early manifested itself
both at Wittenberg and elsewhere.  An outbreak at Erfurt against the
clergy occurred in June, 1521, and by the end of the year riots took
place at Wittenberg.

Even now, at the dawn of the revolution, appeared the beginnings of
those sects, more radical than the Lutheran, commonly known as
Anabaptist.  The small industrial town of Zwickau had long been a
hotbed of Waldensian heresy.  Under the guidance of Thomas Muenzer the
clothweavers of this place formed a religious society animated by the
desire to renovate both church and state by the readiest and roughest
means.  Suppression of the movement at Zwickau by the government
resulted only in the banishment, or escape, of some of the leaders.
[Sidenote: December 27, 1521]  Three of them found their way to
Wittenberg, where they proclaimed themselves prophets divinely
inspired, and conducted a revival marked with considerable, though
harmless, extravagance.

[Sidenote: January 20, 1522]

As the radicals at Wittenberg made the whole of Northern Germany
uneasy, the Imperial Council of Regency issued a mandate forbidding all
the innovations and commanding the Elector of Saxony to stop them.  It
is remarkable that Luther in this felt exactly as did the Catholics.
Early in March he returned to Wittenberg with the express purpose of
checking the reforms which had already gone too far {83} for him.  His
personal ascendency was so great that he found no trouble in doing so.
Not only the Zwickau prophets, but Carlstadt and Zwilling were
discredited.  Almost all their measures were repealed, including those
on divine service which was again restored almost to the Catholic form.
Not until 1525 were a simple communion service and the use of German
again introduced.

[Sidenote: Rebellion of the knights, 1522-3]

It soon became apparent that all orders and all parts of Germany were
in a state of ferment.  The next manifestation of the revolutionary
spirit was the rebellion of the knights.  This class, now in a state of
moral and economic decay, had long survived any usefulness it had ever
had.  The rise of the cities, the aggrandizement of the princes, and
the change to a commercial from a feudal society all worked to the
disadvantage of the smaller nobility and gentry.  About the only means
of livelihood left them was freebooting, and that was adopted without
scruple and without shame.  Envious of the wealthy cities, jealous of
the greater princes and proud of their tenure immediately from the
emperor, the knights longed for a new Germany, more centralized, more
national, and, of course, under their special direction.  In the
Lutheran movement they thought they saw their opportunity; in Ulrich
von Hutten they found their trumpet, in Francis von Sickingen their
sword.  A knight himself, but with possessions equal to those of many
princes, a born warrior, but one who knew how to use the new weapons,
gold and cannon, Sickingen had for years before he heard of Luther kept
aggrandizing his power by predatory feuds.  So little honor had he,
that though appointed to high military command in the campaign against
France, he tried to win personal advantage by treason, playing off the
emperor against King Francis, with whom, for a long time, he almost
{84} openly sided.  In 1520 he fell under the influence of Hutten, who
urged him to espouse the cause of the "gospel" as that of German
liberty.  By August 1522 he became convinced that the time was ripe for
action, and issued a manifesto proclaiming that the feudal dues had
become unbearable, and giving the impression that he was acting as an
ally of Luther, although the latter knew nothing of his intentions and
would have heartily disapproved of his methods.

Sickingen's first march was against Treves.  The archbishop's
"unchristian cannon" forced him to retire from this city.  On October
10 the Council of Regency declared him an outlaw.  A league formed by
Treves, the Palatinate and Hesse, defeated him and captured his castle
at Landstuhl in May, 1523.  Mortally wounded he died on May 7.

Alike unhurt and unhelped by such incidents as the revolt of the
knights, the main current of religious revolution swept onwards.  Leo X
died on December 1, 1521, and in his place was elected Adrian of
Utrecht, a man of very different character.  [Sidenote: Adrian VI,
1522-33]  Though he had already taken a strong stand against Luther, he
was deeply resolved to reform the corruption of the church.  To the
Diet called at Nuremberg [Sidenote: Diet of Nuremberg, 1522] in the
latter part of 1522 he sent as legate Chieregato with a brief demanding
the suppression of the schism.  It was monstrous, said he, that one
little brother should seduce a whole nation from the path trodden by so
many martyrs and learned doctors.  Do you suppose, he asked, that the
people will longer respect civil government if they are taught to
despise the canons and decrees of the spiritual power?  At the same
time Adrian wrote to Chieregato:

  Say that we frankly confess that God permits this
  persecution of his church on account of the sins of men,
  especially those of the priests and prelates. . . .  We
  {85}
  know that in this Holy See now for some years there have
  been many abominations, abuses in spiritual things,
  excesses in things commanded, in short, that all has become
  perverted. . . .  We have all turned aside in our ways,
  nor was there, for a long time, any who did right,--no,
  not one.


This confession rather strengthened the reform party, than otherwise,
making its demands seem justified; and all that the Diet did towards
the settlement of the religious question was to demand that a council,
with representation of the laity, should be called in a German city.  A
long list of grievances against the church was again drawn up and laid
before the emperor.

The same Diet took up other matters.  The need for reform and the
impotence of the Council of Regency had both been demonstrated by the
Sickingen affair.  A law against monopolies was passed, limiting the
capital of any single company to fifty thousand gulden.  In order to
provide money for the central government a customs duty of 4 per cent.
ad valorem was ordered.  Both these measures weighed on the cities,
which accordingly sent an embassy to Charles.  They succeeded in
inducing him to disallow both laws.

[Sidenote: Diet of Nuremberg, 1524]

The next Diet, which assembled at Nuremberg early in 1524, naturally
refrained from passing more futile laws for the emperor to veto, but on
the other hand it took a stronger stand than ever on the religious
question.  The Edict of Worms was still nominally in force and was
still to all intents and purposes flouted.  Luther was at large and his
followers were gaining.  In reply to a demand from the government that
the Edict should be strictly carried out, the Diet passed a resolution
that it should be observed by each state as far as its prince deemed it
possible.  Despairing of an oecumenical council the estates demanded
that a {86} German national synod be called at Spires before the close
of the year with power to decide on what was to be done for the time
being.

There is no doubt that by this time the public opinion of North
Germany, at least, was thoroughly Lutheran.  Ferdinand hardly
exaggerated when he wrote his brother that throughout the Empire there
was scarce one person in a thousand not infected with the new
doctrines.  [Sidenote: 1523]  The place now occupied by newspapers and
weekly reviews was taken by a vast swarm of pamphlets, most of which
have survived.  [Sidenote: Popular pamphlets]  Those of the years
immediately following the Diet of Worms reveal the first enthusiasm of
the people for the "gospel."  The greater part of the broadsides
produced are concerned with the leader and his doctrines.  The
comparison of him to Huss was a favorite one.  One pamphleteer, at
least, drew the parallel between his trial at Worms and that of Christ
before Pilate.  The whole bent of men's minds was theological.
Doctrines which now seem a little quaint and trite were argued with new
fervor by each writer.  The destruction of images, the question of the
real presence in the sacrament, justification by faith, and free will
were disputed.  Above all the Bible was lauded in the new translation,
and the priests continued, as before, to be the favorite butt of
sarcasm.

Among the very many writers of these tracts the playwright of
Nuremberg, Hans Sachs, took a prominent place.  In 1523 he published
his poem on "the Nightingale of Wittenberg, whose voice sounds in the
glorious dawn over hill and dale."  This bird is, of course, Luther,
and the fierce lion who has sought his life is Leo.  [Sidenote: Hans
Sachs]  The next year Hans Sachs published no less than three pamphlets
favoring the reform.  They were: 1. A Disputation between a Canon and a
Shoemaker, defending the Word of God and the Christian {87} Estate.  2.
Conversation on the Hypocritical Works of the Clergy and their Vows, by
which they hope to be saved to the disparagement of Christ's Blood.  3.
A Dialogue against the Roman Avarice.  Multiply these pamphlets, the
contents of which is indicated by their titles, by one hundred, and we
arrive at some conception of the pabulum on which the people grew to
Protestantism.  Of course there were many pamphlets on the other side,
but here, as in a thousand other cases, the important thing proved to
be to have the cause ventilated.  So long as discussion was forced in
the channels selected by the reformers, even the interest excited by
their adversaries redounded ultimately to their advantage.

[Sidenote: The Peasants' War, 1524-5]

The denunciation of authority, together with the message of the
excellence of the humblest Christian and the brotherhood of man,
powerfully contributed to the great rising of the lower classes, known
as the Peasants' War, in 1524-5.  It was not, as the name implied,
confined to the rustics, for probably as large a proportion of the
populace of cities as of the tillers of the soil joined it.  Nor was
there in it anything entirely new.  The cry for justice was of long
standing, and every single element of the revolt, including the hatred
of the clergy and demand for ecclesiastical reform, is to be found also
in previous risings.  Thus, the rebellion of peasants under Hans Boehm,
commonly called the Piper of Niklashausen, in 1476, was brought about
by a religious appeal.  The leader asserted that he had special
revelations from the Virgin Mary that serfdom was to be abolished, and
the kingdom of God to be introduced by the levelling of all social
ranks; and he produced miracles to certify his divine calling.  There
had also been two risings, closely connected, the first, in 1513,
deriving its name of "Bundschuh" from the peasant's tied shoe, a class
emblem, and the {88} second, in 1514, called "Poor Conrad" after the
peasant's nickname.  If the memory of the suppression of all these
revolts might dampen the hopes of the poor, on the other hand the
successful rise of the Swiss democracy was a perpetual example and
encouragement to them.

[Sidenote: Causes]

The most fundamental cause of all these risings alike was, of course,
the cry of the oppressed for justice.  This is eternal, as is also one
of the main alignments into which society usually divides itself, the
opposition of the poor and the rich.  It is therefore not very
important to inquire whether the lot of the third estate was getting
better or worse during the first quarter of the sixteenth century.  In
either case there was a great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown
off.  But the question is not uninteresting in itself.  As there are
diametrically opposite answers to it, both in the testimony of
contemporaries and in the opinion of modern scholars, it is perhaps
incapable of being answered.  In some districts, and in some respects,
the lot of the poor was becoming a little easier; in other lands and in
different ways it was becoming harder.  The time was one of general
prosperity, in which the peasant often shared.  The newer methods of
agriculture, manufacture and commerce benefited him who knew how to
take advantage of them.  That some did so may be inferred from the
statement of Sebastian Brant that the rustics dress like nobles, in
satin and gold chains.  On the other hand the rising prices would bear
hard on those laborers dependent on fixed wages, though relieving the
burden of fixed rents.  The whole people, except the merchants,
disliked the increasing cost of living and legislated against it to the
best of their ability.  Complaints against monopoly were common, and
the Diets sometimes enacted laws against them.  Foreign trade was
looked on with {89} suspicion as draining the country of silver and
gold.  Again, although the peasants benefited by the growing stability
of government, they felt as a grievance the introduction of the new
Roman law with its emphasis upon the rights of property and of the
state.  Burdens directly imposed by the territorial governments were
probably increasing.  If the exactions from the landlords were not
becoming greater, it was simply because they were always at a maximum.
At no time was the rich gentleman at a loss to find law and precedent
for wringing from his serfs and tenants all that they could possibly
pay.  [Sidenote: Peasant classes]  The peasants were of three classes:
the serfs, the tenants who paid a quit-rent, and hired laborers.  The
former, more than the others, perhaps, had now arrived at the
determination to assert their rights.  For them the Peasants' War was
the inevitable break with a long economic past, now intolerable and
hopeless.  There is some evidence to show that the number of serfs was
increasing.  This process, by menacing the freedom of the others,
united all in the resolve to stop the gradual enslavement of their
class, to reckon with those who benefited by it.

How little now there was in the ideals of the last and most terrible of
the peasant risings may be seen by a study of the programs of reform
put forward from time to time during the preceding century.  There is
nothing in the manifestos of 1525 that may not be found in the
pamphlets of the fifteenth century.  The grievances are the same, and
the hope of a completely renovated and communized society is the same.
One of the most influential of these socialistic pamphlets was the
so-called _Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund_, written by an
Augsburg clergyman about 1438, first printed in 1476, and reprinted a
number of times before the end of the century.  Its title bears witness
to the Messianic belief of the people that one of their {90} great, old
emperors should sometime return and restore the world to a condition of
justice and happiness.  The present tract preached that "obedience was
dead and justice sick"; it attacked serfdom as wicked, denounced the
ecclesiastical law and demanded the freedom given by Christ.

The same doctrine, adapted to the needs of the time, is preached in the
_Reformation of the Emperor Frederic III_, published anonymously in
1523.  Though more radical than Luther it reflects some of his ideas.
Still more, however, does it embody the reforms proposed at Nuremberg
in 1523.  It may probably have been written by George Ruexner, called
Jerusalem, an Imperial Herald prominent in these circles.  It advocated
the abolition of all taxes and tithes, the repeal of all imperial civil
laws, the reform of the clergy, the confiscation of ecclesiastical
property, and the limitation of the amount of capital allowed any one
merchant to 10,000 gulden.

Though there was nothing new in either the manner of oppression or in
the demands of the third estate during the last decade preceding the
great rebellion, there does seem to be a new atmosphere, or tone, in
the literature addressed to the lower classes.  While on the one hand
the poor were still mocked and insulted as they always had been by
foolish and heartless possessors of inherited wealth and position, from
other quarters they now began to be also flattered and courted.  The
peasant became in the large pamphlet literature of the time an ideal
figure, the type of the plain, honest, God-fearing man.  [Sidenote: The
peasant idealized]  Nobles like Duke Ulrich of Wuerttemberg affected to
be called by popular nicknames.  Carlstadt and other learned men
proclaimed that the peasant knew better the Word of God and the way of
salvation than did the learned.  Many radical preachers, especially the
Anabaptist {91} Muenzer, carried the message of human brotherhood to the
point of communism.  There were a number of lay preachers, the most
celebrated being the physician Hans Maurer, who took the sobriquet
"Karsthans."  This name, "the man with the hoe," soon became one of the
catch-words of the time, and made its way into popular speech as a
synonym for the simple and pious laborer.  Hutten took it up and urged
the people to seize flails and pitchforks and smite the clergy and the
pope as they would the devil.  [Sidenote: 1521]  Others preached hatred
of the Jews, of the rich, of lawyers.  Above all they appealed to the
Bible as the devine law, and demanded a religious reform as a condition
and preliminary to a thorough renovation of society.  Although Luther
himself from the first opposed all forms  of  violence, his clarion
voice rang out in protest against the injustice of the nobles.  "The
people neither can nor will endure your tyranny any longer," he said to
them in 1523, "God will not endure it; the world is not what it once
was when you drove and hunted men like wild beasts."

The rising began at Stuehlingen, not far from the Swiss frontier, in
June 1524, and spread with considerable rapidity northward, until the
greater part of Germany was in the throes of revolution.  The rebels
were able to make headway because most of the regular troops had been
withdrawn to the Turkish front or to Italy to fight the emperor's
battle against France.  In South Germany, during the first six months,
the gatherings of peasants and townsmen were eminently peaceable.  They
wished only to negotiate with their masters and to secure some
practical reforms.  But when the revolt spread to Franconia and Saxony,
a much more radically socialistic program was developed and the rebels
showed themselves readier to enforce their demands by arms.  For the
year 1524 there {92} was no general manifesto put forward, but there
were negotiations between the insurgents and their quondam masters.  In
this district or in that, lists of very specific grievances were
presented and redress demanded.  In some cases merely to gain time, in
others sincerely, the lords consented to reply to these petitions.
They denied this or that charge, and they promised to end this or that
form of oppression.  Neither side was prepared for civil war.  In all
it was more like a modern strike than anything else.

In the early months of 1525 several programs were drawn up of a more
general nature than those previously composed, and yet by no means
radical.  The most famous of these was called _The Twelve Articles_,
printed and widely circulated in February.  [Sidenote: _The Twelve
Articles_]  The exact place at which they originated is unknown.  The
authorship has been much disputed, and necessarily so, for they were
the work of no one brain, but were as composite a production as is the
Constitution of the United States.  The material in them is drawn from
the mouths of a whole people.  Far more than in other popular writings
one feels that they are the genuine expression of the public opinion of
a great class.  Probably their draftsman was Sebastian Lotzer, the
tanner who for years past had preached apostolic communism.  It is not
impossible that the Anabaptist Balthasar Huebmaier had a hand in them.
Their demands are moderate and would be considered matters of
self-evident justice to-day.  The first article is for the right of
each community to choose its own pastor.  The second protests against
the minor tithes on vegetables paid to the clergy, though expressly
admitting the legality of the tithes on grain.  The third article
demands freedom for the serfs, the fourth and fifth, ask for the right
to hunt and to cut wood in the forests.  The sixth, seventh and eighth
articles {93} protest against excessive forced labor, illegal payments
and exorbitant rents.  The ninth article denounces the new (Roman) law,
and requests the reestablishment of the old (German) law.  The tenth
article voices the indignation of the poor at the enclosure by the rich
of commons and other free land.  The eleventh demands the abolition of
the heriot, or inheritance-tax, by which the widow of a rustic was
obliged to yield to her lord the best head of cattle or other valuable
possession.  The final article expresses the willingness of the
insurgents to have all their demands submitted to the Word of God.
Both here and in the preamble the entire assimilation of divine and
human law is postulated, and the charge that the Lutheran Gospel caused
sedition, is met.

[Sidenote: Other manifestos]

Though the _Twelve Articles_ were adopted by more of the bands of
peasants than was any other program, yet there were several other
manifestos drawn up about the same time.  Thus, in the _Fifty-nine
Articles_ of the Stuehlingen peasants the same demands are put forth
with much more detail.  The legal right to trial by due process of law
is asserted, and vexatious payments due to a lord when his peasant
marries a woman from another estate, are denounced.  But here, too, and
elsewhere, the fundamental demands were the same: freedom from serfdom,
from oppressive taxation and forced labor, and for unrestricted rights
of hunting and woodcutting in the forests.  Everywhere there is the
same claim that the rights of the people are sanctioned by the law of
God, and generally the peasants assume that they are acting in
accordance with the new "gospel" of Luther.  The Swabians expressly
submitted their demands to the arbitration of a commission of four to
consist of a representative of the emperor, Frederic of Saxony, Luther
and either Melanchthon or Bugenhagen.

{94} When the revolt reached the central part of Germany it became at
once more socialistic and more bloody.  [Sidenote: Muenzer]  The baleful
eloquence of Thomas Muenzer was exerted at Muehlhausen to nerve the
people to strike down the godless with pitiless sword.  Already in
September 1524 he preached: "On! on! on!  This is the time when the
wicked are as fearful as hounds. . . .  Regard not the cries of the
godless. . . .  On, while the fire is hot.  Let not your swords be cold
from blood.  Smite bang, bang on the anvil of Nimrod; cast his tower to
the ground!"  Other leaders took up the message and called for the
extirpation of the tyrants, including both the clergy and the lords.
Communism was demanded as in the apostolic age; property was denounced
as wrong.  Regulation of prices was one measure put forward, and the
committing of the government of the country to a university another.

The propaganda of deeds followed close upon the propaganda of words.
During the spring of 1525 in central Germany forty-six cloisters and
castles were burned to the ground, while violence and rapine reigned
supreme with all the ferocity characteristic of class warfare.  On
Easter Sunday, April 16, one of the best-armed bands of peasants, under
one of the most brutal leaders, Jaecklein Rohrbach, attacked Weinsberg.
The count and his small garrison of eighteen knights surrendered and
were massacred by the insurgents, who visited mockery and insult upon
the countess and her daughters.  Many of the cities joined the
peasants, and for a short time it seemed as if the rebellion might be
successful.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the rising]

But in fact the insurgents were poorly equipped, untrained, without
cooeperation or leadership.  As soon as the troops which won the battle
of Pavia in Italy were sent back to Germany the whole movement
collapsed.  [Sidenote: February 24, 1525]  The Swabian League inflicted
decisive {95} defeats upon the rebels at Leipheim on April 4, and at
Wurzach ten days later.  Other blows followed in May.  In the center of
Germany the Saxon Electorate lay supine.  Frederic the Wise died in the
midst of the tumult [Sidenote: May 5, 1525] after expressing his
opinion that it was God's will that the common man should rule, and
that it would be wrong to resist the divine decree.  His young
neighbor, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, acted vigorously.  After coming
to terms with his own subjects by negotiations, he raised troops and
met a band of insurgents at Frankenhausen.  He wished to treat with
them also, but Muenzer's fanaticism, promising the deluded men
supernatural aid, nerved them to reject all terms.  In the very ancient
German style they built a barricade of wagons, and calmly awaited the
attack of the soldiers.  [Sidenote: May 15]  Undisciplined and poorly
armed, almost at the first shot they broke and fled in panic, more than
half of them perishing on the field.  Muenzer was captured, and, after
having been forced by torture to sign a confession of his misdeeds, was
executed.  After this there was no strength left in the peasant cause.
The lords, having gained the upper hand, put down the rising with great
cruelty.  The estimates of the numbers of peasants slain vary so widely
as to make certainty impossible.  Perhaps a hundred thousand in all
perished.  The soldiers far outdid the rebels in savage reprisals.  The
laborers sank back into a more wretched state than before; oppression
stalked with less rebuke than ever through the land.


SECTION 3.  THE FORMATION or THE PROTESTANT PARTY

[Sidenote: Defections from Luther]

In the sixteenth century politics were theological.  The groups into
which men divided had religious slogans and were called churches, but
they were also political parties.  The years following the Diet of {96}
Worms saw the crystallization of a new group, which was at first
liberal and reforming and later, as it grew in stability, conservative.
At Worms almost all the liberal forces in Germany had been behind
Luther, the intellectuals, the common people with their wish for social
amelioration, and those to whom the religious issue primarily appealed.
But this support offered by public opinion was vague; in the next years
it became, both more definite and more limited.  At the same time that
city after city and state after state was openly revolting from the
pope, until the Reformers had won a large constituency in the Imperial
Diets and a place of constitutional recognition, there was going on
another process by which one after another certain elements at first
inclined to support Luther fell away from him.  During these years he
violently dissociated himself from the extreme radicals and thus lost
the support of the proletariat.  In the second place the growing
definiteness and narrowness of his dogmatism and his failure to show
hospitality to science and philosophy alienated a number of
intellectuals.  Third, a great schism weakened the Protestant church.
But these losses were counterbalanced by two gains.  The first was the
increasing discipline and coherence of the new churches; the second was
their gradual but rapid attainment of the support of the middle and
governing classes in many German states.

[Sidenote: The Radicals]

Luther's struggle with radicalism had begun within a year after his
stand at Worms.  He had always been consistently opposed to mob
violence, even when he might have profited by it.  At Worms he
disapproved Hutten's plans for drawing the sword against the Romanists.
When, from his "watchtower," he first spied the disorders at
Wittenberg, he wrote that notwithstanding the great provocation given
to the common man by the clergy, yet tumult was the work of {97} the
devil.  When he returned home he preached that the only weapon the
Christian ought to use was the Word.  "Had I wished it," said he then,
"I might have brought Germany to civil war.  Yes, at Worms I might have
started a game that would not have been safe for the emperor, but it
would have been a fool's game.  So I did nothing, but only let the Word
act."  Driven from Wittenberg, the Zwickau prophets, assisted by Thomas
Muenzer, continued their agitation elsewhere.  As long as their
propaganda was peaceful Luther was inclined to tolerate it.  "Let them
teach what they like," said he, "be it gospel or lies."  But when they
began to preach a campaign of fire and sword, Luther wrote, in July
1524, to his elector begging him "to act vigorously against their
storming and ranting, in order that God's kingdom may be advanced by
word only, as becomes Christians, and that all cause of sedition may be
taken from the multitude [Herr Omnes, literally Mr. Everybody], more
than enough inclined to it already."

When the revolt at last broke out Luther was looked up to and appealed
to by the people as their champion.  In April 1525 he composed an
_Exhortation to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants_,
[Sidenote: Exhortation to Peace] in which he distributed the blame for
the present conditions liberally, but impartially, on both sides,
aristocrats and peasants.  To the former he said that their tyranny,
together with that of the clergy had brought this punishment on
themselves, and that God intended to smite them.  To the peasants he
said that no tyranny was excuse for rebellion.  Of their articles he
approved of two only, that demanding the right to choose their pastors
and that denouncing the heriot or death-duty.  Their second demand, for
repeal of some of the tithes, he characterized as robbery, and the
third, for freedom of the serf, as unjustified because it made
Christian {98} liberty a merely external thing, and because Paul had
said that the bondman should not seek to be free (I Cor. vii, 20 f).
The other articles were referred to legal experts.

Hardly had this pamphlet come from the press before Luther heard of the
deeds of violence of Rohrbach and his fellows.  Fearing that complete
anarchy would result from the triumph of the insurgents, against whom
no effective blow had yet been struck, he wrote a tract _Against the
Thievish, Murderous Hordes of Peasants_.  [Sidenote: The peasants
denounced]  In this he denounced them with the utmost violence of
language, and urged the government to smite them without pity.
Everyone should avoid a peasant as he would the devil, and should join
the forces to slay them like mad dogs.  "If you die in battle against
them," said he to the soldiers, "you could never have a more blessed
end, for you die obedient to God's Word in Romans 13, and in the
service of love to free your neighbor from the bands of hell and the
devil."  A little later he wrote: "It is better that all the peasants
be killed than that the princes and magistrates perish, because the
rustics took the sword without divine authority.  The only possible
consequence of their Satanic wickedness would be the diabolic
devastation of the kingdom of God."  And again: "One cannot argue
reasonably with a rebel, but one must answer him with the fist so that
blood flows from his nose."  Melanchthon entirely agreed with his
friend.  "It is fairly written in Ecclesiasticus xxxiii," said he,
"that as the ass must have fodder, load, and whip, so must the servant
have bread, work, and punishment.  These outward, bodily servitudes are
needful, but this institution [serfdom] is certainly pleasing to God."

Inevitably such an attitude alienated the lower classes.  From this
time, many of them looked not to {99} the Lutheran but to the more
radical sects, called Anabaptists, for help.  The condition of the
Empire at this time was very similar to that of many countries today,
where we find two large upper and middle-class parties, the
conservative (Catholic) and liberal (Protestant) over against the
radical or socialistic (Anabaptist).

[Sidenote: The Anabaptists]

The most important thing about the extremists was not their habit of
denying the validity of infant baptism and of rebaptizing their
converts, from which they derived their name.  What really determined
their view-point and program was that they represented the poor,
uneducated, disinherited classes.  The party of extreme measures is
always chiefly constituted from the proletariat because it is the very
poor who most pressingly feel the need for change and because they have
not usually the education to judge the feasibility of the plans, many
of them quack nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes.  A
complete break with the past and with the existing order has no terrors
for them, but only promise.

A radical party almost always includes men of a wide variety of
opinions.  So the sixteenth century classed together as Anabaptists men
with not only divergent but with diametrically opposite views on the
most vital questions.  Their only common bond was that they all alike
rejected the authoritative, traditional and aristocratic organization
of both of the larger churches and the pretensions of civil society.
It is easy to see that they had no historical perspective, and that
they tried to realize the ideals of primitive Christianity, as they
understood it, without reckoning the vast changes in culture and other
conditions, and yet it is impossible not to have a deep sympathy with
the men most of whose demands were just and who sealed their faith with
perpetual martyrdom.  {100} [Sidenote: Spread of radicalism]
Notwithstanding the heavy blow to reform given in the crushing of the
peasants' rising, radical doctrines continued to spread among the
people.  As the poor found their spiritual needs best supplied in the
conventicle of dissent, official Lutheranism became an established
church, predominantly an aristocratic and middle-class party of vested
interest and privilege.

It is sometimes said that the origin and growth of the Anabaptists was
due to the German translation of the Bible.  This is not true and yet
there is little doubt that the publication of the German version in
1522 and the years immediately following, stimulated the growth of many
sects.  The Bible is such a big book, and capable of so many different
interpretations, that it is not strange that a hundred different
schemes of salvation should have been deduced from it by those who came
to it with different prepossessions.  While many of the Anabaptists
were perfect quietists, preaching the duty of non-resistance and the
wickedness of bearing arms, even in self-defence, others found sanction
for quite opposite views in the Scripture, and proclaimed that the
godless should be exterminated as the Canaanites had been.  In ethical
matters some sects practised the severest code of morals, while others
were distinguished by laxity.  By some marriage was forbidden; others
wanted all the marriage they could get and advocated polygamy.  The
religious meetings were similar to "revivals," frequently of the most
hysterical sort.  Claiming that they were mystically united to God, or
had direct revelations from him, they rejected the ceremonies and
sacraments of historic Christianity, and sometimes substituted for them
practices of the most absurd, or most doubtful, character.  When
Melchior Rink preached, his followers howled like dogs, bellowed like
cattle, neighed like horses, and brayed like asses--some of them very
{101} naturally, no doubt.  In certain extreme cases the meetings ended
in debauchery, while we know of men who committed murder in the belief
that they were directed so to do by special revelation of God.  Thus at
St. Gall one brother cut another's throat, while one of the saints
trampled his wife to death under the influence of the spirit.  But it
is unfair to judge the whole movement by these excesses.

The new sectaries, of course, ran the gauntlet of persecution.  In 1529
the emperor and Diet at Spires passed a mandate against them to this
effect: "By the plenitude of our imperial power and wisdom we ordain,
decree, oblige, declare, and will that all Anabaptists, men and women
who have come to the age of understanding, shall be executed and
deprived of their natural life by fire, sword, and the like, according
to opportunity and without previous inquisition of the spiritual
judges."  Lutherans united with Catholics in passing this edict, and
showed no less alacrity in executing it.  As early as 1525 the
Anabaptists were persecuted at Zurich, where one of their earliest
communities sprouted.  Some of the leaders were drowned, others were
banished and so spread their tenets elsewhere.  Catholic princes
exterminated them by fire and sword.  In Lutheran Saxony no less than
thirteen of the poor non-conformists were executed, and many more
imprisoned for long terms, or banished.

And yet the radical sects continued to grow.  The dauntless zeal of
Melchior Hofmann braved all for the propagation of their ideas.  For a
while he found a refuge at Strassburg, but this city soon became too
orthodox to hold him.  He then turned to Holland, where the seed sowed
fell into fertile ground.  Two Dutchmen, the baker John Matthys of
Haarlem and the tailor John Beuckelssen of Leyden went to the episcopal
city of Muenster in Westphalia [Sidenote: Muenster] near the Dutch {102}
border, and rapidly converted the mass of the people to their own
belief in the advent of the kingdom of God on earth.  An insurrection
expelled the bishop's government and installed a democracy in February,
1534.  After the death of Matthys on April 5, a rising of the people
against the dictatorial power of Beucklessen was suppressed by this
fanatic who thereupon crowned himself king under the title of John of
Leyden.  Communism of goods was introduced and also polygamy.  The city
was now besieged by its suzerain, the Bishop of Muenster, and after
horrible sufferings had been inflicted on the population, taken by
storm on June 25, 1535.  The surviving leaders were put to death by
torture.

The defeat itself was not so disastrous to the Anabaptist cause as were
the acts of the leaders when in power.  As the Reformer Bullinger put
it: "God opened the eyes of the governments by the revolt at Muenster,
and thereafter no one would trust even those Anabaptists who claimed to
be innocent."  Their lack of unity and organization told against them.
Nevertheless the sect smouldered on in the lower classes, constantly
subject to the fires of martyrdom, until, toward the close of the
century, it attained some cohesion and respectability.  The later
Baptists, Independents, and Quakers all inherited some portion of its
spiritual legacies.  To the secular historian its chief interest is in
the social teachings, which consistently advocated tolerance, and
frequently various forms of anarchy and socialism.


[Sidenote: Defection of the humanists]

Next to the defection of the laboring masses, the severest loss to the
Evangelical party in these years was that of a large number of
intellectuals, who, having hailed Luther as a deliverer from
ecclesiastical bondage, came to see in him another pope, not less {103}
tyrannous than he of Rome.  Reuchlin the Hebrew scholar and Mutian the
philosopher had little sympathy with any dogmatic subtlety.  Zasius the
jurist was repelled by the haste and rashness of Luther.  The so-called
"godless painters" of Nuremberg, George Penz and the brothers Hans and
Bartholomew Beham, having rejected in large part Christian doctrine,
were naturally not inclined to join a new church, even when they
deserted the old.

But a considerable number of humanists, and those the greatest, after
having welcomed the Reformation in its first, most liberal and hopeful
youth, deliberately turned their backs on it and cast in their lot with
the Roman communion.  The reason was that, whereas the old faith
mothered many of the abuses, superstitions, and dogmatisms abominated
by the humanists, it had also, at this early stage in the schism,
within its close a large body of ripe, cultivated, fairly tolerant
opinion.  The struggling innovators, on the other hand, though they
purged away much obsolete and offensive matter, were forced, partly by
their position, partly by the temper of their leaders, to a raw
self-assertiveness, a bald concentration on the points at issue,
incompatible with winsome wisdom, or with judicial fairness.  How the
humanists would have chosen had they seen the Index and Loyola, is
problematical; but while there was still hope of reshaping Rome to
their liking they had little use for Wittenberg.

  I admit that for some years I was very favorably
  inclined to Luther's enterprise [wrote Crotus Rubeanus in
  1531] [Sidenote: Rubeanus], but when I saw that nothing
  was left untorn and undefiled . . . I thought the devil
  might bring in great evil in the guise of something good,
  using Scripture as his shield.  So I decided to remain
  in the church in which I was baptized, reared and taught.
  Even if some fault might be found in it, yet in time it
  {104}
  might have been proved, sooner, at any rate, than in the
  new church which in a few years has been torn by so many sects.


Wilibald Pirckheimer, the Greek scholar and historian of Nuremberg,
hailed Luther so warmly at first that he was put under the ban of the
bull _Exsurge Domine_.  By 1529, however, he had come to believe him
insolent, impudent, either insane or possessed by a devil.

  I do not deny [he wrote] that at the beginning all
  Luther's acts did not seem to be vain, since no good man
  could be pleased with all those errors and impostures that
  had accumulated gradually in Christianity.  So, with
  others, I hoped that some remedy might be applied to
  such great evils, but I was cruelly deceived.  For, before
  the former errors had been extirpated, far more intolerable
  ones crept in, compared to which the others seemed
  child's play.


[Sidenote: Appeal to Erasmus]

To Erasmus, the wise, the just, all men turned as to an arbiter of
opinion.  From the first, Luther counted on his support, and not
without reason, for the humanist spoke well of the Theses and
commentaries of the Wittenberger.  On March 28, 1519, Luther addressed
a letter to him, as "our glory and hope," acknowledging his
indebtedness and begging for support.  Erasmus answered in a friendly
way, at the same time sending a message encouraging the Elector
Frederic to defend his innocent subject.

Dreading nothing so much as a violent catastrophe, the humanist labored
for the next two years to find a peaceful solution for the threatening
problem.  Seeing that Luther's two chief errors were that he "had
attacked the crown of the pope and the bellies of the monks," Erasmus
pressed upon men in power the plan of allowing the points in dispute to
be settled by an impartial tribunal, and of imposing silence on both
parties.  At the same time he begged Luther to do nothing {105} violent
and urged that his enemies be not allowed to take extreme measures
against him.  But after the publication of the pamphlets of 1520 and of
the bull condemning the heretic, this position became untenable.
Erasmus had so far compromised himself in the eyes of the inquisitors
that he fled from Louvain in the autumn of 1521, and settled in Basle.
He was strongly urged by both parties to come out on one side or the
other, and he was openly taunted by Ulrich von Hutten, a hot Lutheran,
for cowardice in not doing so.  Alienated by this and by the dogmatism
and intolerance of Luther's writings, Erasmus finally defined his
position in a _Diatribe on Free Will_.  [Sidenote: 1524]  As Luther's
theory of the bondage of the will was but the other side of his
doctrine of justification by faith only--for where God's grace does all
there is nothing left for human effort--Erasmus attacked the very
center of the Evangelical dogmatic system.  The question, a deep
psychological and metaphysical one, was much in the air, Valla having
written on it a work published in 1518, and Pomponazzi having also
composed a work on it in 1520, which was, however, not published until
much later.  It is noticeable that Erasmus selected this point rather
than one of the practical reforms advocated at Wittenberg, with which
he was much in sympathy.  Luther replied in a volume on _The Bondage of
the Will_ reasserting his position more strongly than ever.  [Sidenote:
1525]  How theological, rather than philosophical, his opinion was may
be seen from the fact that while he admitted that a man was free to
choose which of two indifferent alternatives he should take, he denied
that any of these choices could work salvation or real righteousness in
God's eyes.  He did not hesitate to say that God saved and damned souls
irrespective of merit.  Erasmus answered again in a large work, the
_Hyperaspistes_ (_Heavy-Armed Soldier_), which came {106} out in two
parts.  [Sidenote: 1526-7]  In this he offers a general critique of the
Lutheran movement.  Its leader, he says, is a dogmatist, who never
recoils from extremes logically demanded by his premises, no matter how
repugnant they may be to the heart of man.  But for himself he is a
humanist, finding truth in the reason as well as in the Bible, and
abhorring paradoxes.

The controversy was not allowed to drop at this point.  Many a barbed
shaft of wit-winged sarcasm was shot by the light-armed scholar against
the ranks of the Reformers.  "Where Lutheranism reigns," he wrote
Pirckheimer, "sound learning perishes."  "With disgust," he confessed
to Ber, "I see the cause of Christianity approaching a condition that I
should be very unwilling to have it reach . . .  While we are
quarreling over the booty the victory will slip through our fingers.
It is the old story of private interests destroying the commonwealth."
Erasmus first expressed the opinion, often maintained since, that
Europe was experiencing a gradual revival both of Christian piety and
of sound learning, when Luther's boisterous attack plunged the world
into a tumult in which both were lost sight of.  On March 30, 1527, he
wrote to Maldonato:

  I brought it about that sound learning, which among
  the Italians and especially among the Romans savored of
  nothing but pure paganism, began nobly to celebrate
  Christ, in whom we ought to boast as the sole author of
  both wisdom and happiness if we are true Christians. . . .
  I always avoided the character of a dogmatist, except
  in certain _obiter dicta_ which seemed to me conducive
  to correct studies and against the preposterous judgments
  of men.

In the same letter he tells how hard he had fought the obscurantists,
and adds: "While we were waging a fairly equal battle against these
monsters, behold {107} Luther suddenly arose and threw the apple of
Discord into the world."

In short, Erasmus left the Reformers not because they were too liberal,
but because they were too conservative, and because he disapproved of
violent methods.  His gentle temperament, not without a touch of
timidity, made him abhor the tumult and trust to the voice of
persuasion.  In failing to secure the support of the humanists
Protestantism lost heavily, and especially abandoned its chance to
become the party of progress.  Luther himself was not only disappointed
in the disaffection of Erasmus, but was sincerely rebelled by his
rationalism.  A man who could have the least doubt about a doctrine was
to him "an Arian, an atheist, and a skeptic."  He went so far as to say
that the great Dutch scholar's primary object in publishing the Greek
New Testament was to make readers doubtful about the text, and that the
chief end of his _Colloquies_ was to mock all piety.  Erasmus, whose
services to letters were the most distinguished and whose ideal of
Christianity was the loveliest, has suffered far too much in being
judged by his relation to the Reformation.  By a great Catholic[1] he
has been called "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," by an
eminent Protestant scholar[2] "a John the Baptist and Judas in one."

[Sidenote: Sacramentarian schism]

The battle with the humanists was synchronous with the beginnings of a
fierce internecine strife that tore the young evangelical church into
two parts.  Though the controversy between Luther and his principal
rival, Ulrich Zwingli, was really caused by a wide difference of
thought on many subjects, it focused its rays, like a burning-glass,
upon one point, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood
of Christ in the {108} eucharist.  The explanation of this mystery
evolved in the Middle Ages and adopted by the Lateran Council of 1215,
was the theory, called "transubstantiation," that the substance of the
bread turned into the substance of the body, and the substance of the
wine into the substance of the blood, without the "accidents" of
appearance and taste being altered.  Some of the later doctors of the
church, Durand and Occam, opposed this theory, though they proposed a
nearly allied one, called "consubstantiation," that the body and blood
are present with the bread and wine.  Wyclif and others, among whom was
the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, proposed the theory now
held in most Protestant churches that the bread and wine are mere
symbols of the body and blood.

At the dawn of the Reformation the matter was brought into prominence
by the Dutch theologian Hoen, from whom the symbolic interpretation
[Sidenote: Symbolism] was adopted first by Carlstadt and then by the
Swiss Reformers Zwingli and Oecolampadius.  Luther himself wavered.  He
attacked the sacrifice of the mass, in which he saw a "good work"
repugnant to faith, and a great practical abuse, as in the endowed
masses for souls, but he finally decided on the question of the real
presence that the words "this is my body" were "too strong for him" and
meant just what they said.

After a preliminary skirmish with Carlstadt, resulting in the latter's
banishment from Saxony, there was a long and bitter war of pens between
Wittenberg and the Swiss Reformers.  Once the battle was joined it was
sure to be acrimonious because of the self-consciousness of each side.
Luther always assumed that he had a monopoly of truth, and that those
who proposed different views were infringing his copyright, so to
speak.  "Zwingli, Carlstadt and Oecolampadius would never have known
Christ's gospel rightly," he {109} opined, "had not Luther written of
it first."  He soon compared them to Absalom rebelling against his
father David, and to Judas betraying his Master.  Zwingli on his side
was almost equally sure that he had discovered the truth independently
of Luther, and, while expressing approbation of his work, refused to be
called by his name.  His invective was only a shade less virulent than
was that of his opponent.

The substance of the controversy was far from being the straight
alignment between reason and tradition that it has sometimes been
represented as.  Both sides assumed the inerrancy of Scripture and
appealed primarily to the same biblical arguments.  Luther had no
difficulty in proving that the words "hoc est corpus meum" meant that
the bread was the body, and he stated that this must be so even if
contrary to our senses.  Zwingli had no difficulty in proving that the
thing itself was impossible, and therefore inferred that the biblical
words must be explained away as a figure of speech.  In a long and
learned controversy neither side convinced the other, but each became
so exasperated as to believe the other possessed of the devil.  In the
spring of 1529 Lutherans joined Catholics at the Diet of Spires in
refusing toleration to the Zwinglians.  The division of Protestants of
course weakened them.  Their leading statesman, Philip, Landgrave of
Hesse, seeing this, did his best to reconcile the leaders.  For several
years he tried to get them to hold a conference, but in vain.  Finally,
he succeeded in bringing together at his castle at Marburg on the Lahn,
Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and a large number of
other divines.  [Sidenote: Marburg colloquy October 1-3, 1529]  The
discussion here only served to bring out more strongly the
irreconcilability of the two "spirits."  Shortly afterwards, when the
question of a political alliance came up, the Saxon theologians drafted
a memorial stating that {110} they would rather make an agreement with
the heathen than with the "sacramentarians."  [Sidenote: 1530]  The
same attitude was preserved at the Diet of Augsburg, where the
Lutherans were careful to avoid all appearance of friendship with the
Zwinglians lest they should compromise their standing with the
Catholics.  Zwingli and his friends were hardly less intransigeant.

[Sidenote: October 11, 1531]

When Zwingli died in battle with the Catholic cantons and when
Oecolampadius succumbed to a fever a few weeks later, Luther loudly
proclaimed that was a judgment of God and a triumph for his own party.
Though there was no hope of reconciling the Swiss, the South German
Zwinglians, headed by the Strassburg Reformers Bucer and Capito,
hastened to come to an understanding with Wittenberg, without which
their position would have been extremely perilous.  Bucer claimed to
represent a middle doctrine, such as was later asserted by Calvin.  As
no middle ground is possible, the doctrine is unintelligible, being, in
fact, nothing but the statement, in strong terms, of two mutually
exclusive propositions.  After much humiliation the divines succeeded,
however, in satisfying Luther, with whom they signed the Wittenberg
Concord on May 29, 1536.  The Swiss still remained without the pale,
and Luther's hatred of them grew with the years.  Shortly before his
death he wrote that he would testify before the judgment-seat of God
his loathing for the sacramentarians.  He became more and more
conservative, bringing back to the sacrament some of the medieval
superstitions he had once expelled.  He began again to call it an
offering and a sacrifice and again had it elevated in church for the
adoration of the faithful.  He wavered on this point, because, as he
said, he doubted whether it were more his duty to "spite" the papists
or the sacramentarians.  He finally decided on the latter, "and if
necessary," {111} continued he, "I will have the host elevated three,
seven, or ten times, for I will not let the devil teach me anything in
my church."

[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism in middle and upper classes]

Notwithstanding the bitter controversies just related Lutheranism
flourished mightily in the body of the people who were neither peasants
nor intellectuals nor Swiss.  The appeal was to the upper and middle
classes, sufficiently educated to discard some of the medievalism of
the Roman Church and impelled also by nationalism and economic
self-interest to turn from the tyranny of the pope.  City after city
and state after state enlisted under the banner of Luther.  He
continued to appeal to them through the press.  As a popular
pamphleteer he must be reckoned among the very ablest.  His faults,
coarseness and unbridled violence of language, did not alienate most of
his contemporaries.  Even his Latin works, too harshly described by
Hallam as "bellowing in bad Latin," were well adapted to the spirit of
the age.  But nothing like his German writings had ever been seen
before.  In lucidity and copiousness of language, in directness and
vigor, in satire and argument and invective, in humor and aptness of
illustration and allusion, the numerous tracts, political and
theological, which poured from his pen, surpassed all that had hitherto
been written and went straight to the hearts of his countrymen.  And he
won his battle almost alone, for Melanchthon, though learned and
elegant, had no popular gifts, and none of his other lieutenants could
boast even second-rate ability.

[Sidenote: German Bible, 1522-32]

Among his many publications a few only can be singled out for special
mention.  The continuation of the German Bible undoubtedly helped his
cause greatly.  In many things he could appeal to it against the Roman
tradition, and the very fact that he claimed to do so while his
opponents by their attitude seemed to {112} shrink from this test,
established the Protestant claim to be evangelical, in the eyes of the
people.  Next came his hymns, many popular, some good and one really
great.  [Sidenote: Hymns, 1528]  _Ein' feste Burg_ has been well called
by Heine the Marseillaise of the Reformation.  The Longer and Shorter
Catechisms [Sidenote: Catechisms, 1529] educated the common people in
the evangelical doctrine so well that the Catholics were forced to
imitate their enemy, though tardily, by composing, for the first time,
catechisms of their own.

Having overthrown much of the doctrine and discipline of the old church
Luther addressed himself with admirable vigor and great success to the
task of building up a substitute for it.  In this the combination of
the conservative and at the same time thoroughly popular spirit of the
movement manifested itself.  In divine service the vernacular was
substituted for Latin.  New emphasis was placed upon preaching,
Bible-reading and hymn-singing.  Mass was no longer incomprehensible,
but was an act of worship in which all could intelligently participate;
bread and wine were both given to the laity, and those words of the
canon implying transubstantiation and sacrifice were omitted.  Marriage
was relegated from the rank of a sacrament to that of a civil contract.
Baptism was kept in the old form, even to the detail of exorcizing the
evil spirit.  Auricular confession was permitted but not insisted upon.

[Sidenote: Church government]

The problems of church government and organization were pressing.  Two
alternatives, were theoretically possible, Congregationalism or state
churches.  After some hesitation, Luther was convinced by the
extravagances of Muenzer and his ilk that the latter was the only
practicable course.  The governments of the various German states and
cities were now given supreme power in ecclesiastical matters.  They
took over the property belonging to the old church and {113}
administered it generally for religious or educational or charitable
purposes.  A system of church-visitation was started, by which the
central authority passed upon the competence of each minister.  Powers
of appointment and removal were vested in the government.  The title
and office of bishop were changed in most cases to that of
"superintendent," though in some German sees and generally in Sweden
the name bishop was retained.

[Sidenote: Lutheran accessions]

How genuinely popular was the Lutheran movement may be seen in the fact
that the free cities, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strassburg, Ulm, Luebeck,
Hamburg, and many others were the first to revolt from Rome.  In other
states the government led the way.  Electoral Saxony evolved slowly
into complete Protestantism.  Though the Elector Frederic sympathized
with almost everything advanced by his great subject, he was too
cautious to interfere with vested interests of ecclesiastical property
and endowments.  On his death [Sidenote: May 5, 1525] his brother John
succeeded to the title, and came out openly for all the reforms
advocated at Wittenberg.  The neighboring state of Hesse was won about
1524, [Sidenote: 1424-5] though the official ordinance promulgating the
evangelical doctrine was not issued until 1526.  A very important
acquisition was Prussia.  [Sidenote: 1525]  Hitherto it had been
governed by the Teutonic Order, a military society like the Knights
Templars.  Albert of Brandenburg became Grand Master in 1511,
[Sidenote: Albert of Brandenburg, 1490-1568] and fourteen years later
saw the opportunity of aggrandizing his personal power by renouncing
his spiritual ties.  He accordingly declared the Teutonic Order
abolished and himself temporal Duke of Prussia, shortly afterwards
marrying a daughter of the king of Denmark.  He swore allegiance to the
king of Poland.

The growth of Lutheranism unmolested by the imperial government was
made possible by the {114} absorption of the emperor's energies in his
rivalry with France and Turkey and by the decentralization of the
Empire.  [Sidenote: Leagues]  Leagues between groups of German states
had been quite common in the past, and a new stimulus to their
formation was given by the common religious interest.  The first league
of this sort was that of Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1524] between Bavaria and
other South German principalities; its purpose was to carry out the
Edict of Worms.  This was followed by a similar league in North Germany
between Catholic states, known as the League of Dessau, [Sidenote:
1525] and a Protestant confederation known as the League of Torgau.

[Sidenote: The Diet of Spires, 1526]

The Diet held at Spires in the summer of 1526 witnessed the strength of
the new party, for in it the two sides treated on equal terms.  Many
reforms were proposed, and some carried through against the obstruction
by Ferdinand, the emperor's brother and lieutenant.  The great question
was the enforcement of the Edict of Worms, and on this the Diet passed
an act, known as a Recess, providing that each state should act in
matters of faith as it could answer to God and the emperor.  In effect
this allowed the government of every German state to choose between the
two confessions, thus anticipating the principle of the Religious Peace
of Augsburg of 1555.

The relations of the two parties were so delicate that it seemed as if
a general religious war were imminent.  In 1528, this was almost
precipitated by a certain Otto von Pack, who assured the Landgrave of
Hesse that he had found a treaty between the Catholic princes for the
extirpation of the Lutherans and for the expropriation of their
champions, the Elector of Saxony and Philip of Hesse himself.  This was
false, but the Landgrave armed and attacked the Bishops of Wuerzburg and
Bamberg, named by Pack as parties to the treaty, and he forced them to
pay an indemnity.

{115}

[Sidenote: Recess of Spires]

The Diet which met at Spires early in 1529 endeavored to deal as
drastically as possible with the schism.  The Recess passed by the
Catholic majority on April 7 was most unfavorable to the Reformers,
repealing the Recess of the last Diet in their favor.  Catholic states
were commanded to execute the persecuting Edict of Worms, although
Lutheran states were forbidden to abolish the office of the (Catholic)
mass, and also to allow any further innovations in their own doctrines
or practices until the calling of a general council.  The princes were
forbidden to harbor the subjects of another state.  The Evangelical
members of the Diet, much aggrieved at this blow to their faith,
published a Protest [Sidenote: Protest, April 19] taking the ground
that the Recess of 1526 had been in the nature of a treaty and could
not be abrogated without the consent of both parties to it.  As the
government of Germany was a federal one, this was a question of
"states' rights," such as came up in our own Civil War, but in the
German case it was even harder to decide because there was no written
Constitution defining the powers of the national government and the
states.  It might naturally be assumed that the Diet had the power to
repeal its own acts, but the Evangelical estates made a further point
in their appeal to the emperor, [Sidenote: April 25] by alleging that
the Recess of 1526 had been passed unanimously and could only be
repealed by a unanimous vote.  The Protest and the appeal were signed
by the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, a few smaller states,
and fourteen free cities.  From the Protest they became immediately
known as "the Protesting Estates" and subsequently the name Protestant
was given to all those who left the Roman communion.


[1] Alexander Pope.

[2] Walther Koehler.


{116}

SECTION 4.  THE GROWTH OF PROTESTANTISM UNTIL
            THE DEATH OF LUTHER

Certain states having announced that they would not be bound by the
will of the majority, the question naturally came up as to how far they
would defend this position by arms.  [Sidenote: March 6, 1530]
Luther's advice asked and given to the effect that all rebellion or
forcible resistance to the constituted authorities was wrong.  Passive
resistance, the mere refusal to obey the command to persecute or to
act, otherwise contrary to God's law, he thought was right but he
discountenanced any other measures, even those taken in self-defence.
All Germans, said he, were the emperor's subjects, and the princes
should not shield Luther from him, but leave their lands open to his
officers to do what they pleased.  This position Luther abandoned a
year later, when the jurists pointed out to him that the authority of
the emperor was not despotic but was limited by law.

The Protest and Appeal of 1529 at last aroused Charles, slow as he was,
to the great dangers to himself that lurked in the Protestant schism.
Having repulsed the Turk and having made peace with France and the pope
he was at last in a position to address himself seriously to the
religious problem.  Fully intending to settle the trouble once for all,
he came to Germany and opened a Diet at Augsburg [Sidenote: June 20,
1530] to which were invited not only the representatives of the various
states but a number of leading theologians, both Catholic and Lutheran,
all except Luther himself, an outlaw by the Edict of Worms.

The first action taken was to ask the Lutherans to state their position
and this was done in the famous Augsburg Confession, [Sidenote: June
25] read before the Diet by the Saxon Chancellor Brueck.  It had been
drawn up by {117} Melanchthon in language as near as possible to that
of the old church.  Indeed it undertook to prove that there was in the
Lutheran doctrine "nothing repugnant to Scripture or to the Catholic
church or to the Roman church."  Even in the form of the Confession
published 1531 this Catholicizing tendency is marked, but in the
original, now lost, it was probably stronger.  The reason of this was
not, as generally stated, Melanchthon's "gentleness" and desire to
conciliate all parties, for he showed himself more truculent to the
Zwinglians and Anabaptists than did Luther.  It was due to the fact
that Melanchthon [Sidenote: Melanchthon] was at heart half a Catholic,
so much so, indeed, that Contarini and others thought it quite possible
that he might come over to them.  In the present instance he made his
doctrine conform to the Roman tenets to such an extent that (in the
lost original, as we may judge by the Confutation) even
transubstantiation was in a manner accepted.  The first part of the
Confession is a creed: the second part takes up certain abuses, or
reforms, namely: the demand of the cup for the laity, the marriage of
priests, the mass as an _opus operatum_ or as celebrated privately,
fasting and traditions, monastic vows and the power of the pope.

But the concessions did not satisfy the Catholics.  A Refutation was
prepared by Eck and others, and read before the Diet on August 3.
Negotiations continued and still further concessions were wrung from
Melanchthon, concessions of so dangerous a nature that his
fellow-Protestants denounced him as an enemy of the faith and appealed
to Luther against him.  Melanchthon had agreed to call the mass a
sacrifice, if the word were qualified by the term "commemorative," and
also promised that the bishops should be restored to their ancient
jurisdictions, a measure justified by him as a blow at turbulent
sectaries but one also most {118} perilous to Lutherans.  On the other
hand, Eck made some concessions, mostly verbal, about the doctrine of
justification and other points.

That with this mutually conciliatory spirit an agreement failed to
materialize only proved how irreconcilable were the aims of the two
parties.  [Sidenote: September 22]  The Diet voted that the Confession
had been refuted and that the Protestants were bound to recant.  The
emperor promised to use his influence with the pope to call a general
council to decide doubtful points, but if the Lutherans did not return
to the papal church by April 15, 1531, they were threatened with
coercion.

[Sidenote: League of Schmalkalden]

To meet this perilous situation a closer alliance was formed by the
Protestant states at Schmalkalden in February 1531.  This league
constantly grew by the admission of new members, but some attempts to
unite with the Swiss proved abortive.

On January 5, 1531, Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans--the title
taken by the heir to the Empire--by six of the electors against the
vote of Saxony.  Three months later when the time granted the Lutherans
expired, the Catholics were unable to do anything, and negotiations
continued.  [Sidenote: July 23, 1532]  These resulted in the Peace of
Nuremberg, a truce until a general council should be called.  It was an
important victory for the Lutherans, who were thus given time in which
to grow.

The seething unrest which found expression in the rebellion of the
knights, of the peasants and of the Anabaptists at Muenster, has been
described.  One more liberal movement, which also failed, must be
mentioned at this time.  It was as little connected with religion as
anything in that theological age could be.  [Sidenote: Luebeck, 1533-35]
The city of Luebeck, under its burgomaster George Wullenwever, tried to
free itself from the influence of Denmark and at the same time to get a
more popular {119} government.  In 1536 it was conquered by Christian
III of Denmark, and the old aristocratic constitution restored.  The
time was not ripe for the people to assert its rights in North Germany.

[Sidenote: May 1534]

The growth of Protestantism was at times assisted by force of arms.
Thus, Philip of Hesse restored the now Protestant Duke Ulrich of
Wurttemberg, who had been expelled for his tyranny by the Swabian
League fifteen years before.  This triumph was the more marked because
the expropriated ruler was Ferdinand, King of the Romans.  If in such
cases it was the government which took the lead, in others the
government undoubtedly compelled the people to continue Catholic even
when there was a strongly Protestant public opinion.  Such was the case
in Albertine Saxony,[1] whose ruler, Duke George, though an estimable
man in many ways, was regarded by Luther as the instrument of Satan
because he persecuted his Protestant subjects.  When he died, his
brother, [Sidenote: April, 1539] the Protestant Henry the Pious,
succeeded and introduced the Reform amid general acclamation.  Two
years later this duke was followed by his son, the versatile but
treacherous Maurice.  In the year 1539 a still greater acquisition came
to the Schmalkaldic League in the conversion of Brandenburg and its
Elector Joachim II.

[Sidenote: Philip of Hesse, 1504-67]

Shortly afterwards the world was scandalized by the bigamy of Philip of
Hesse.  This prince was utterly spoiled by his accession to the
governing power at the age of fifteen.  Though he lived in flagrant
immorality, his religion, which, soon after he met Luther at Worms,
became the Evangelical, was real enough to make his sins a burden to
conscience.  Much attracted {120} by the teachings of some of the
Anabaptists and Carlstadt that polygamy was lawful, and by Luther's
assertion in the _Babylonian Captivity_ that it was preferable to
divorce, [Sidenote: 1526] he begged to be allowed to take more wives,
but was at first refused.  His conscience was quickened by an attack of
the syphilis in 1539, and at that time he asked permission to take a
second wife and received it on December 10, from Luther, Melanchthon,
and Bucer.  His secret marriage to Margaret von der Saal [Sidenote:
March 4, 1540] took place in the presence of Melanchthon, Bucer, and
other divines.  Luther advised him to keep the matter secret and if
necessary even to "tell a good strong lie for the sake and good of the
Christian church."  Of course he was unable to conceal his act, and his
conduct, and that of his spiritual advisers, became a just reproach to
the cause.  As no material advantages were lost by it, Philip might
have reversed the epigram of Francis I and have said that "nothing was
lost but honor."  Neither Germany nor Hesse nor the Protestant church
suffered directly by his act.  [Sidenote: 1541]  Indeed it lead
indirectly to another territorial gain.  Philip's enemy Duke Henry of
Brunswick, though equally immoral, attacked him in a pamphlet.  Luther
answered this in a tract of the utmost violence, called _Jack Sausage_.
Henry's rejoinder was followed by war between him and the Schmalkaldic
princes, in which he was expelled from his dominions and the
Reformation introduced.

[Sidenote: 1541]

Further gains followed rapidly.  The Catholic Bishop of Naumburg was
expelled by John Frederic of Saxony, and a Lutheran bishop instituted
instead.  About the same time the great spiritual prince, Hermann von
Wied, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, became a Protestant, and invited
Melanchthon and Bucer to reform his territories.  One of the last
gains, before the Schmalkaldic war, was the Rhenish Palatinate, under
{121} its Elector Frederic III.  [Sidenote: 1545]  His troops fought
then on the Protestant side, though later he turned against that church.

The opportunity of the Lutherans was due to the engagements of the
emperor with other enemies.  In 1535 Charles undertook a successful
expedition against Tunis.  The war with France simmered on until the
Truce of Nice, intended to be for ten years, signed between the two
powers in 1538.  In 1544 war broke out again, and fortune again favored
Charles.  He invaded France almost to the gates of Paris, but did not
press his advantage and on September 18 signed the Peace of Crepy
giving up all his conquests.

Unable to turn his arms against the heretics, Charles continued to
negotiate with them.  The pressure he brought to bear upon the pope
finally resulted in the summoning by Paul III of a council to meet at
Mantua the following year.  [Sidenote: June 2, 1536]  The Protestants
were invited to send delegates to this council, and the princes of that
faith held a congress at Schmalkalden to decide on their course.
[Sidenote: February 1537]  Hitherto the Lutherans had called themselves
a part of the Roman Catholic church and had always appealed to a future
oecumenical or national synod.  They now found this position untenable,
and returned the papal citation unopened.  Instead, demands for reform,
known as the Schmalkaldic Articles, were drawn up by Luther.  The four
principal demands were (1) recognition of the doctrine of justification
by faith only, (2) abolition of the mass as a good work or _opus
operatum_, (3) alienation of the foundations for private masses, (4)
removal of the pretentions of the pope to headship of the universal
church.  As a matter of fact the council was postponed.

[Sidenote: April 19, 1539]

Failing to reach a permanent solution by this method, Charles was again
forced to negotiate.  The {122} Treaty of Frankfort agreed to a truce
varying in length from six to fifteen months according to
circumstances.  This was followed by a series of religious conferences
with the purpose of finding some means of reconciling the two
confessions.  [Sidenote: Religious Colloquies]  Among the first of
these were the meetings at Worms and Hagenau.  Campeggio and Eck were
the Catholic leaders, Melanchthon the spokesman for the Lutherans.
[Sidenote: 1540-1]  Each side had eleven members on the commission, but
their joint efforts were wrecked on the plan for limiting the papal
power and on the doctrine of original sin.  When the Diet of Ratisbon
was opened in the spring of 1541 a further conference was held at which
the two parties came closer to each other than they had done since
Augsburg.  The Book of Ratisbon was drawn up, emphasizing the points of
agreement and slurring over the differences.  Contarini made wide
concessions, later condemned by the Catholics, on the doctrine of
justification.  Discussion of the nature of the church, the power of
the pope, the invocation of saints, the mass, and sacerdotal celibacy
seemed likely to result in some _modus vivendi_.  What finally
shattered the hopes of union was the discussion of transubstantiation
and the adoration of the host.  As Contarini had found in the
statements of the Augsburg Confession no insuperable obstacle to an
understanding he was astonished at the stress laid on them by the
Protestants now.

[Sidenote: 1542]

It is not remarkable that with such results the Diet of Spires should
have avoided the religious question and have devoted itself to more
secular matters, among them the grant to the emperor of soldiers to
fight the Turk.  Of this Diet Bucer wrote "The Estates act under the
wrath of God.  Religion is relegated to an agreement between
cities. . . .  The cause of our evils is that few seek the Lord
earnestly, but {123} most fight against him, both among those who have
rejected, and of those who still bear, the papal yoke."  At the Diet of
Spires two years later the emperor promised the Protestants, in return
for help against France, recognition until a German National Council
should be called.  For this concession he was sharply rebuked by the
pope.  [Sidenote: 1545]  The Diet of Worms contented itself with
expressing its general hope for a "Christian reformation."

[Sidenote: 1545]

During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged.  His last book,
_Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil_, surpassed Cicero
and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of
its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III"
and his "hellish Roman church."  "One would like to curse them," he
wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn
them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and
all diseases attack them"--and so on for page after page.  Of course
such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends.  The Swiss
Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which
he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent."  Our judgment of
it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his
last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due
partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quantities of
alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.

Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones.
His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him
much happiness.  Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty of openings
for reviling him as an apostate, [Sidenote: June 13, 1525] and though
it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that what had begun as a tragedy
ended as a comedy, it {124} crowned his career, symbolizing the return
from medieval asceticism to modern joy in living.  Dwelling in the fine
old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality many poor relatives,
famous strangers, and students, notwithstanding unremitting toil and
not a little bodily suffering, he expanded in his whole nature,
mellowing in the warmth of a happy fireside climate.  His daily routine
is known to us intimately through the adoring assiduity of his
disciples, who noted down whole volumes of his _Table Talk_.

[Sidenote: Death and character of Luther]

On February 18, 1546, he died.  Measured by the work that he
accomplished and by the impression that his personality made both on
contemporaries and on posterity, there are few men like him in history.
Dogmatic, superstitious, intolerant, overbearing, and violent as he
was, he yet had that inscrutable prerogative of genius of transforming
what he touched into new values.  His contemporaries bore his invective
because of his earnestness; they bowed to "the almost disgraceful
servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he imposed upon his followers,
because they knew that he was leading them to victory in a great and
worthy cause.  Even so, now, many men overlook his narrowness and
bigotry because of his genius and bravery.

His grandest quality was sincerity.  Priest and public man as he was,
there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being.  A sham
was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it
ought not.  Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and
of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all
cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and
hell."  Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring and his
strength to labor for it must command our respect.

Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a {125} wonderful gift
of language that made him the tongue, as well as the spear-point, of
his people.  [Sidenote: His eloquence]  In love of nature, in wonder,
in the power to voice some secret truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he
was a poet.  He looked out on the stars and considered the "good
master-workman" that made them, on the violets "for which neither the
Grand Turk nor the emperor could pay," on the yearly growth of corn and
wine, "as great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on the
"pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowler's net, or holding a
Diet "in a hall roofed with the vault of heaven, carpeted with the
grass, and with walls as far as the ends of the earth."  Or he wrote to
his son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where good children
eat apples and pears and cherries and plums, and where they ride on
pretty ponies with golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day
and play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows.

Luther's character combined traits not usually found in the same
nature.  He was both a dreamy mystic and a practical man of affairs; he
saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a
God-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for
results.  His faith was as simple and passionate as his dogmatic
distinctions were often sophistical and arid.  He could attack his foes
with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a
woman can.  His hymns soar to heaven and his coarse jests trail in the
mire.  He was touched with profound melancholy and yet he had a
wholesome, ready laugh.  His words are now brutal invectives and again
blossom with the most exquisite flowers of the soul--poetry, music,
idyllic humor, tenderness.  He was subtle and simple; superstitious and
wise; limited in his cultural sympathies, but very great in what he
achieved.


[1] Saxony had been divided in 1485 into two parts, the Electorate,
including Wittenberg, Weimar and Eisenach, and the Duchy, including
Leipzig and Dresden.  The former was called after its first ruler
Ernestine, the latter Albertine.


{126}

SECTION 5.  THE RELIGIOUS WAR AND THE RELIGIOUS PEACE

[Sidenote: The Schmalkaldic War, 1546-7]

Hardly had Luther been laid to rest when the first general religious
war broke out in Germany.  There had been a few small wars of this
character before, such as those of Hesse against Bamberg and Wurzburg,
and against Wuerttemberg, and against Brunswick.  But the conflicts had
been successfully "localized."  Now at last was to come a general
battle, as a foretaste of the Thirty Years War of the next century.

It has sometimes been doubted whether the Schmalkaldic War was a
religious conflict at all.  The emperor asserted that his sole object
was to reduce rebellious subjects to obedience.  Several Protestant
princes were his allies, and the territories he conquered were not, for
the most part, forced to give up their faith.  Nevertheless, it is
certain that the fundamental cause of the strain was the difference of
creed.  A parallel may be found in our own Civil War, in which Lincoln
truly claimed that he was fighting only to maintain the union, and yet
it is certain that slavery furnished the underlying cause of the appeal
to arms.

It has recently been shown that the emperor planned the attack on his
Protestant subjects as far back, at least, as 1541.  All the
negotiations subsequent to that time were a mere blind in disguise his
preparations.  For he labored indefatigably to bring about a condition
in which it would be safe for him to embark on the perilous enterprise.
Though he was a dull man he had the two qualities of caution and
persistence that stood him in better stead than the more showy talents
of other statesmen.  If, with his huge resources, he never did anything
brilliant, still less did he ever take a gambler's chance of failing.

{127} The opportune moment came at last in the spring of 1546.  Two
years before, he had beaten France with the help of the Protestants,
and had imposed upon her as one condition of peace that she should make
no allies within the Empire.  In November of the same year he made an
alliance with Paul III, receiving 200,000 ducats in support of his
effort to extirpate the heresy.

Other considerations impelled him to attack at once.  The secession of
Cologne and the Palatinate from the Catholic communion gave the
Protestants a majority in the Electoral College.  Still more decisive
was it that Charles was able at this time by playing upon the
jealousies and ambitions of the states, to secure important allies
within the Empire, including some of the Protestant faith.  First,
Catholic Bavaria forgot her hatred of Austria far enough to make common
cause against the heretics.  Then, two great Protestant princes,
Maurice of Albertine Saxony and John von Kuestrin--a brother of Joachim
II, Elector of Brandenburg--abandoned their coreligionists and bartered
support to the emperor in return for promises of aggrandizement.

[Sidenote: January 1546]

A final religious conference held at Ratisbon demonstrated more clearly
than ever the hopelessness of conciliation.  Whereas a semi-Lutheran
doctrine of justification was adopted, the Protestants prepared two
long memoirs rejecting the authority of the council recently convened
at Trent.  And then, in the summer, war broke out.  At this moment the
forces of the Schmalkaldic League were superior to those of its
enemies.  But for poor leadership and lack of unity in command they
would probably have won.

Towards the last of August and early in September the Protestant troops
bombarded the imperial army at Ingolstadt, but failed to follow this up
by a decisive {128} attack, as was urged by General Schaertlin of
Augsburg.  Lack of equipment was partly responsible for this failure.
When the emperor advanced, the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of
Hesse retired each to his own land.  Another futile attempt of the
League was a raid on the Tyrol, possibly influenced by the desire to
strike at the Council of Trent, certainly by no sound military policy.
The effect of these indecisive counsels was that Charles had little
trouble in reducing the South German rebels, Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremberg,
and Wuerttemberg.  The Elector Palatine hastened to come to terms by
temporarily abandoning his religion.  [Sidenote: February, 1547]  A
counter-reformation was also effected in Cologne.  Augsburg bought the
emperor's pardon by material concessions.

[Sidenote: October 1546]

In the meantime Duke Maurice of Albertine Saxony, having made a bargain
with the emperor, attacked his second cousin the Elector.  Though
Maurice was not obliged to abjure his faith, his act was naturally
regarded as one of signal treachery and he was henceforth known by the
nickname "Judas."  Maurice conquered most of his cousin's lands, except
the forts of Wittenberg and Gotha.  Charles's Spanish army under Alva
now turned northward, forced a passage of the Elbe and routed the
troops of John Frederic at the battle of Muelberg, near Torgau, on April
24, 1547.  John Frederic was captured wounded, and kept in durance
several years.  Wittenberg capitulated on May 19, and just a month
later Philip of Hesse surrendered at Halle.  He also was kept a
prisoner for some years.  Peace was made by the mediation of
Brandenburg.  The electoral vote of Saxony was given to Maurice, and
with it the best part of John Frederic's lands, including Wittenberg.
No change of religion was required.  The net result of the war was to
{129} increase the imperial power, but to put a very slight check upon
the expansion of Protestantism.

And yet it was for precisely this end that Charles chiefly valued his
authority.  Immediately, acting independently of the pope, he made
another effort to restore the confessional unity of Germany.  The Diet
of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1547-8] accepted under pressure from him a
decree called the Interim because it was to be valid only until the
final decisions of a general council.  Though intended to apply only to
Protestant states--the Catholics had, instead, a _formula
reformationis_--the Interim [Sidenote: The Interim, June 30, 1548],
drawn up by Romanist divines, was naturally Catholic in tenor.  The
episcopal constitution was restored, along with the canon of the mass,
the doctrine of the seven sacraments, and the worship of saints.  On
some doctrinal points vagueness was studied.  The only concessions made
to the Reformation were the _pro tempore_ recognition of the marriage
of the clergy and the giving of the cup to the laity.  Various other
details of practical reform were demanded.  The Interim was intensely
unpopular with both parties.  The pope objected to it and German
Catholics, especially in Bavaria, strongly opposed it.  The South
German Protestant states accepted it only under pressure.  Maurice of
Saxony adopted it in a modified form, known as the Leipzig Interim, in
December 1548.  The assistance rendered him by Melanchthon caused a
fierce attack on the theologian by his fellow-Lutherans.  In enforcing
the Interim Maurice found his own profit, for when Magdeburg won the
nickname of "our Lord God's pulpit" by refusing to accept it, Maurice
was entrusted with the execution of the imperial ban, and captured the
city on November 9, 1551.

Germany now fell into a confused condition, every state for itself.
The emperor found his own {130} difficulties in trying to make his son
Philip successor to his Brother Ferdinand.  His two former Protestant
allies, Maurice and John von Kuestrin, made an alliance with France and
with other North German princes and forced the emperor to conclude the
Convention of Passau.  [Sidenote: 1552]  This guaranteed afresh the
religious freedom of the Lutherans until the next Diet and forced the
liberation of John Frederic and Philip of Hesse.  Charles did not
loyally accept the conditions of this agreement, but induced Albert,
Margrave of Brandenburg-Culmbach, to attack the confederate princes in
the rear.  After Albert had laid waste a portion of North Germany he
was defeated by Maurice at the battle of Sievershausen.  [Sidenote:
July 9, 1553]  Mortally wounded, the brilliant but utterly unscrupulous
victor died, at the age of thirty-two, soon after the battle.  As the
conflict had by this time resolved itself into a duel between him and
Charles, the emperor was now at last able to put through, at the Diet
of Augsburg, a settlement of the religious question.

[Sidenote: Religious Peace of Augsburg, September 25, 1555]

The principles of the Religious Peace were as follows:

(1) A truce between states recognizing the Augsburg Confession and
Catholic states until union was possible.  All other confessions were
to be barred--a provision aimed chiefly at Calvinists.

(2) The princes and governments of the Free Cities were to be allowed
to choose between the Roman and the Lutheran faith, but their subjects
must either conform to this faith--on the maxim famous as _cujus regio
ejus religio_--or emigrate.  In Imperial Free Cities, however, it was
specially provided that Catholic minorities be tolerated.

(3) The "ecclesiastical reservation," or principle that when a Catholic
spiritual prince became Protestant he should be deposed and a successor
appointed {131} so that his territory might remain under the church.
In respect to this Ferdinand privately promised to secure toleration
for Protestant subjects in the land of such a prince.  All claims of
spiritual jurisdiction by Catholic prelates in Lutheran lands were to
cease.  All estates of the church confiscated prior to 1552 were to
remain in the hands of the spoliators, all seized since that date to be
restored.

The Peace of Augsburg, like the Missouri Compromise, only postponed
civil war and the radical solution of a pressing problem.  But as we
cannot rightly censure the statesmen of 1820 for not insisting on
emancipation, for which public opinion was not yet prepared, so it
would be unhistorical and unreasonable to blame the Diet of Augsburg
for not granting the complete toleration which we now see was bound to
come and was ideally the right thing.  Mankind is educated slowly and
by many hard experiences.  Europe had lain so long under the domination
of an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization that the possibility of
complete toleration hardly occurred to any but a few eccentrics.  And
we must not minimize what the Peace of Augsburg actually accomplished.
It is true that choice of religion was legally limited to two
alternatives, but this was more than had been allowed before.
[Sidenote: Actual results]  It is true that freedom of even this choice
was complete only for the rulers of the territories or Free Cities;
private citizens might exercise the same choice only on leaving their
homes.  The hardship of this was somewhat lessened by the consideration
that in any case the nonconformist would not have to go far before
finding a German community holding the Catholic or Lutheran opinions he
preferred.  Finally, it must be remembered that, if the Peace of
Augsburg aligned the whole nation into two mutually hostile camps, it
at least kept them from war for more than {132} half a century.  Nor
was this a mere accident, for the strain was at times severe.  When the
imperial knight, Grumbach, broke the peace by sacking the city of
Wuerzburg, [Sidenote: 1563-7] he was put under the ban, captured and
executed.  His protector, Duke John Frederic of Saxony, was also
captured and kept in confinement in Austria until his death.

Notwithstanding such an exhibition of centralized power, it is probable
that the Peace of Augsburg increased rather than diminished the
authority of the territorial states at the expense of the imperial
government.  Charles V, worn out by his long and unsuccessful struggle
with heresy, after giving the Netherlands to his son Philip in 1555,
abdicated the crown of the Empire to his brother Ferdinand in 1556.
[Sidenote: Ferdinand, 1556-64]  He died two years later in a monastery,
a disappointed man, having expressed the wish that he had burned Luther
at Worms.  The energies of Ferdinand were largely taken up with the
Turkish war.  His son, Maximilian II, [Sidenote: Maximilian II,
1564-76] was favorably inclined to Protestantism.

[Sidenote: Catholic reaction]

Before Maximilian's death, however, a reaction in favor of Catholicism
had already set in.  The last important gains to the Lutheran cause in
Germany came in the years immediately following the Peace of Augsburg.
Nothing is more remarkable than the fact that practically all the
conquests of Protestantism in Europe were made within the first half
century of its existence.  After that for a few years it lost, and
since then has remained, geographically speaking, stationary in Europe.
It is impossible to get accurate statistics of the gains and losses of
either confession.  The estimate of the Venetian ambassador that only
one-tenth of the German empire was Catholic in 1558 is certainly wrong.
In 1570, at the height of the Protestant tide, probably 70 per cent. of
Germans--including Austrians--were Protestant.  In 1910 the Germans of
the {133} German Empire and of Austria were divided thus: Protestants
37,675,000; Catholics 29,700,000.  The Protestants were about 56 per
cent., and this proportion was probably about that of the year 1600.

[Sidenote: Lutheran schisms]

Historically, the final stemming of the Protestant flood was due to the
revival of energy in the Catholic Church and to the internal weakness
and schism of the Protestants.  Even within the Lutheran communion
fierce conflicts broke out.  Luther's lieutenants fought for his
spiritual heritage as the generals of Alexander fought for his empire.
The center of these storms was Melanchthon until death freed him from
"the rage of the theologians."  [Sidenote: April 19, 1560]  Always half
Catholic, half Erasmian at heart, by his endorsement of the Interim,
and by his severe criticisms of his former friends Luther and John
Frederic, he brought on himself the bitter enmity of those calling
themselves "Gnesio-Lutherans," or "Genuine Lutherans."  Melanchthon
abolished congregational hymn-singing, and published his true views,
hitherto dissembled, on predestination and the sacrament.  He was
attacked by Flacius the historian, and by many others.  The dispute was
taken up by still others and went to such lengths that for a minor
heresy a pastor, Funck, was executed by his fellow-Lutherans in
Prussia, in 1566.  "Philippism" as it was called, at first grew, but
finally collapsed when the Formula of Concord was drawn up in 1580 and
signed by over 8000 clergy.  This document is to the Lutheran Church
what the decrees of Trent were to the Catholics.  The "high" doctrine
of the real presence was strongly stated, and all the sophistries
advanced to support it canonized.  The sacramental bread and wine were
treated with such superstitious reverence that a Lutheran priest who
accidentally spilled the latter was punished by having his fingers cut
off.  Melanchthon was against such "remnants of {134} papistry" which
he rightly named "artolatry" or "bread-worship."

But the civil wars within the Lutheran communion were less bitter than
the hatred for the Calvinists.  By 1550 their mutual detestation had
reached such a point that Calvin called the Lutherans "ministers of
Satan" and "professed enemies of God" trying to bring in "adulterine
rites" and vitiate the pure worship.  The quarrel broke out again at
the Colloquy of Worms.  Melanchthon and others condemned Zwingli, thus,
in Calvin's opinion, "wiping off all their glory."  Nevertheless Calvin
himself had said, in 1539, that Zwingli's opinion was false and
pernicious.  So difficult is the path of orthodoxy to find!  In 1557
the Zwinglian leader M. Schenck wrote to Thomas Blaurer that the error
of the papists was rather to be borne than that of the Saxons.
Nevertheless Calvinism continued to grow in Germany at the expense of
Lutheranism.  Especially after the Formula of Concord the "Philippists"
went over in large numbers to the Calvinists.

[Sidenote: Effect on the nation]

The worst thing about these distressing controversies was that they
seemed to absorb the whole energies of the nation.  No period is less
productive in modern German history than the age immediately following
the triumph of the Reformation.  The movement, which had begun so
liberally and hopefully, became, temporarily at least, narrower and
more bigoted than Catholicism.  It seemed as if Erasmus had been quite
right when he said that where Lutheranism reigned culture perished.  Of
these men it has been said--and the epigram is not a bad one--that they
made an intellectual desert and called it religious peace.

And yet we should be cautious in history of assuming _post hoc propter
hoc_.  That there was nothing {135} necessarily blighting in
Protestantism is shown by the examples of England and Poland, where the
Reform was followed by the most brilliant literary age in the annals of
these peoples.  [Sidenote: 16th century literature]  The latter part of
the sixteenth century was also the great period of the literature of
Spain and Portugal, which remained Catholic, whereas Italy, equally
Catholic, notably declined in artistic production and somewhat also in
letters.  The causes of the alterations, in various peoples, of periods
of productivity and of comparative sterility, are in part inscrutable.
In the present case, it seems that when a relaxation of intellectual
activity is visible, it was not due to any special quality in
Protestantism, but was rather caused by the heat of controversy.


SECTION 7.  NOTE ON SCANDINAVIA, POLAND, AND HUNGARY

[Transcriber's note: The above section number is what appears in the
original book, but it is a case of misnumbering, and is actually the
chapter's sixth section.]

A few small countries bordering on the Empire, neither fully in the
central stream of European culture, nor wholly outside of it, may be
treated briefly.  All of them were affected by the Protestant
revolution, the Teutonic peoples permanently, the others transiently.

Scandinavia looms large in the Middle Ages as the home of the teeming
multitudes of emigrants, Goths and Vandals, who swarmed over the Roman
Empire.  Later waves from Denmark and the contiguous portion of Germany
flooded England first in the Anglo-Saxon conquest and then in the
Danish.  The Normans, too, originally hailed from Scandinavia.  But
though the sons of the North conquered and colonized so much of the
South, Scandinavia herself remained a small people, neither politically
nor intellectually of the first importance.  The three kingdoms of
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden became one in 1397; and, after Sweden's
temporary separation from the other two, were again united.  The
fifteenth century saw the {136} great aggrandizement of the power of
the prelates and of the larger nobles at the expense of the _boender_,
who, from a class of free and noble small proprietors degenerated not
only into peasants but often into serfs.  [Sidenote: 1513]  When
Christian II succeeded to the throne, it was as the papal champion.
His attempt to consolidate his power in Sweden by massacring the
magnates under the pretext that they were hostile to the pope,
[Sidenote: November 8-11, 1520] an act called the "Stockholm bath of
blood," aroused the people against him in a war of independence.

[Sidenote: Denmark]

Christian found Denmark also insubordinate.  It is true that he made
some just laws, protecting the people and building up their prosperity,
but their support was insufficient to counterbalance the hatred of the
great lords spiritual and temporal.  He was quick to see in the
Reformation a weapon against the prelates, and appealed for help to
Wittenberg as early as 1519.  His endeavors throughout 1520 to get
Luther himself to visit Denmark failed, but early in 1521 he succeeded
in attracting Carlstadt for a short visit.  This effort, however, cost
him his throne, for he was expelled on April 13, 1523, and wandered
over Europe in exile until his death.  [Sidenote: 1559]

The Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, to whom the crown was offered, reigned
for ten years as Frederic I.  Though his coronation oath bound him to
do nothing against the church, he had only been king for three years
before he came out openly for the Reformation.  In this again we must
see primarily a policy, rather than a conviction.  He was supported,
however, by the common people, who had been disgusted by the
indulgences sold by Arcimboldi [Sidenote: 1516-19] and by the constant
corruption of the higher clergy.  The cities, as in Germany, were the
strongest centers of the movement.  The Diet of 1527 decreed that
Lutherans should be recognized on equal terms with Catholics, that
marriage of priests {137} and the regular clergy be allowed.  In 1530 a
Lutheran confession was adopted.

Christian III, who reigned until 1559, took the final step, though at
the price of a civil war.  His victory enabled him to arrest all the
bishops, August 20, 1536, and to force them to renounce their rights
and properties in favor of the crown.  Only one, Bishop Roennow of
Roskilde, refused, and was consequently held prisoner until his death.
The Diet of 1536 abolished Catholicism, confiscated all church property
and distributed it between the king and the temporal nobles.
Bugenhagen was called from Wittenberg to organize the church on
Lutheran lines.  [Sidenote: 1537-9]  In the immediately following years
the Catholics were deprived of their civil rights.  The political
benefits of the Reformation inured primarily to the king and
secondarily to the third estate.

[Sidenote: Norway]

Norway was a vassal of Denmark from 1380 till 1814.  At no time was its
dependence more complete than in the sixteenth century.  Frederic I
introduced the Reformation by royal decree as early as 1528, and
Christian III put the northern kingdom completely under the tutelage of
Denmark, [Sidenote: 1536] in spiritual as well as in temporal matters.
The adoption of the Reformation here as in Iceland seemed to be a
matter of popular indifference.

[Sidenote: Sweden]

After Sweden had asserted her independence by the expulsion of
Christian II, Gustavus Vasa, an able ruler, ascended the throne.
[Sidenote: Gustavus Vasa, 1523-60]  He, too, saw in the Reformation
chiefly an opportunity for confiscating the goods of the church.  The
way had, indeed, been prepared by a popular reformer, Olaus Petri, but
the king made the movement an excuse to concentrate in his own hands
the spiritual power.  The Diet of Westeras [Sidenote: 1527] passed the
necessary laws, at the same time expelling the chief leader of the
Romanist party, John Brask, {138} Bishop of Linkoeping.  The Reformation
was entirely Lutheran and extremely conservative.  Not only the
Anabaptists, but even the Calvinists, failed to get any hold upon the
Scandinavian peoples.  In many ways the Reformation in Sweden was
parallel to that in England.  Both countries retained the episcopal
organization founded upon the "apostolical succession." Olaus Magni,
Bishop of Westeras, had been ordained at Rome in 1524, and in turn
consecrated the first Evangelical Archbishop, Lawrence Petri,
[Sidenote: Petri 1499-1573] who had studied at Wittenberg, and who
later translated the Bible into Swedish [Sidenote: 1541] and protected
his people from the inroads of Calvinism.  The king, more and more
absolutely the head of the church, as in England, did not hesitate to
punish even prominent reformers when they opposed him.  The reign of
Gustavus's successor, Eric XIV, [Sidenote: Eric XIV, 1560-8] was
characterless, save for the influx of Huguenots strengthening the
Protestants.  King John III [Sidenote: John III, 1569-92] made a final,
though futile, attempt to reunite with the Roman Church.  As Finland
was at this time a dependency of Sweden, the Reformation took
practically the same course as in Sweden itself.

[Sidenote: Poland]

A complete contrast to Sweden is furnished by Poland.  If in the former
the government counted for almost everything, in the latter it counted
for next to nothing.  The theater of Polish history is the vast plain
extending from the Carpathians to the Duena, and from the Baltic almost
to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.  This region, lacking natural
frontiers on several sides, was inhabited by a variety of races: Poles
in the west, Lithuanians in the east, Ruthenians in the south and many
Germans in the cities.  The union of the Polish and Lithuanian states
was as yet a merely personal one in the monarch.  Since the fourteenth
century the crown of Poland had been elective, but the grand-ducal
crown of Lithuania was {139} hereditary in the famous house of
Jagiello, and the advantages of union induced the Polish nobility
regularly to elect the heir to the eastern domain their king.  Though
theoretically absolute, in practice the king had been limited by the
power of the nobles and gentry, and this limitation was given a
constitutional sanction in the law _Nihil novi_, [Sidenote: 1505]
forbidding the monarch to pass laws without the consent of the deputies
of the magnates and lesser nobles.

The foreign policy of Sigismund I [Sidenote: Sigismund I, 1506-1548]
was determined by the proximity of powerful and generally hostile
neighbors.  It would not be profitable in this place to follow at
length the story of his frequent wars with Muscovy and with the Tartar
hordes of the Crimea, and of his diplomatic struggles with the Turks,
the Empire, Hungary, and Sweden.  On the whole he succeeded not only in
holding his own, but in augmenting his power.  He it was who finally
settled the vexatious question of the relationship of his crown to the
Teutonic Order, which, since 1466, had held Prussia as a fief, though a
constantly rebellious and troublesome one.  The election of Albert of
Brandenburg as Grand Master of the Order threatened more serious
trouble, [Sidenote: 1511] but a satisfactory solution of the problem
was found when Albert embraced the Lutheran faith and secularized
Prussia as an hereditary duchy, at the same time swearing allegiance to
Sigismund as his suzerain.  [Sidenote: 1525]  Many years later
Sigismund's son conquered and annexed another domain of the Teutonic
order further north, namely Livonia.  [Sidenote: 1561]  War with Sweden
resulted from this but was settled by the cession of Esthonia to the
Scandinavian power.

Internally, the vigorous Jagiello strengthened both the military and
financial resources of his people.  To meet the constant inroads of the
Tartars he established the Cossacks, a rough cavalry formed of the
hunters, {140} fishers, and graziers of the Ukraine, quite analogous to
the cowboys of the American Wild West.  From being a military body they
developed into a state and nation that occupied a special position in
Poland and then in Russia.  Sigismund's fiscal policy, by recovering
control of the mint and putting the treasury into the hands of capable
bankers, effectively provided for the economic life of the government.

[Sidenote: Reformation]

Poland has generally been as open to the inroads of foreign ideas as to
the attacks of enemies; a peculiar susceptibility to alien culture, due
partly to the linguistic attainments of many educated Poles and partly
to an independent, almost anarchical disposition, has made this nation
receive from other lands more freely than it gives.  Every wave of new
ideas innundates the low-lying plain of the Vistula.  So the
Reformation spread with amazing rapidity, first among the cities and
then among the peasants of that land.  In the fifteenth century the
influence of Huss and the humanists had in different ways formed
channels facilitating the inrush of Lutheranism.  The unpopularity of a
wealthy and indolent church predisposed the body politic to the new
infection.  Danzig, that "Venice of the North," had a Lutheran preacher
in 1518; while the Edict of Thorn, intended to suppress the heretics,
indicates that as early as 1520 they had attracted the attention of the
central government.  But this persecuting measure, followed thick and
fast by others, only proved how little the tide could be stemmed by
paper barriers.  The cities of Cracow, Posen, and Lublin, especially
susceptible on account of their German population, were thoroughly
infected before 1522.  Next, the contagion attacked the country
districts and towns of Prussia, which had been pretty thoroughly
converted prior to its secularization.

The first political effect of the Reformation was to {141} stimulate
the unrest of the lower classes.  Riots and rebellions, analogous to
those of the Peasants' War in Germany, followed hard upon the preaching
of the "gospel."  Sigismund could restore order here and there, as he
did at Danzig in 1526 by a military occupation, by fining the town and
beheading her six leading innovators, but he could not suppress the
growing movement.  For after the accession of the lower classes came
that of the nobles and gentry who bore the real sovereignty in the
state.  Seeing in the Reformation a weapon for humiliating and
plundering the church, as well as a key to a higher spiritual life,
from one motive or the other, they flocked to its standard, and, under
leadership of their greatest reformer, John Laski, organized a powerful
church.

The reign of Sigismund II [Sidenote: Sigismund II, 1548-1572] saw the
social upheaval by which the nobility finally placed the power firmly
in their own hands, and also the height of the Reformation.  By a law
known as the "Execution" the assembly of nobles finally got control of
the executive as well as of the legislative branch of the government.
At the same time they, with the cordial assistance of the king, bound
the country together in a closer bond known as the Union of Lublin.
[Sidenote: 1569]  Though Lithuania and Prussia struggled against
incorporation with Poland, both were forced to submit to a measure that
added power to the state and opened to the Polish nobility great
opportunity for political and economic exploitation of these lands.
Not only the king, but the magnates and the cities were put under the
heel of the ruling caste.  This was an evolution opposite to that of
most European states, in which crown and bourgeoisie subdued the once
proud position of the baronage.  But even here in Poland one sees the
rising influence of commerce and the money-power, in that the Polish
nobility was largely composed of small {142} gentry eager and able to
exploit the new opportunities offered by capitalism.  In other
countries the old privilege of the sword gave way to the new privilege
of gold; in Poland the sword itself turned golden, at least in part;
the blade kept its keen, steel edge, but the hilt by which it was
wielded glittered yellow.

[Sidenote: Protestantism]

Unchecked though they were by laws, the Protestants soon developed a
weakness that finally proved fatal to their cause, lack of organization
and division into many mutually hostile sects.  [Sidenote: 1537]  The
Anabaptists of course arrived, preached, gained adherents, and were
suppressed.  [Sidenote: 1548]  Next came a large influx of Bohemian
Brethren, expelled from their own country and migrating to a land of
freedom, where they soon made common cause with the Lutherans.
[Sidenote: 1558]  Calvinists propagated the seeds of their faith with
much success.  Finally the Unitarians, led by Lelio Sozini, found a
home in Poland and made many proselytes, at last becoming so powerful
that they founded the new city of Racau, whence issued the famous
Racovian Catechism.  At one time they seemed about to obtain the
mastery of the state, but the firm union of the Trinitarian Protestants
at Sandomir [Sidenote: 1570] checked them until all of them were swept
away together by the resurging tide of Catholicism.  Several versions
of the Bible, Lutheran, Socinian, and Catholic, were issued.

So powerful were the Evangelicals that at the Diet of 1555 they held
services in the face of the Catholic king, and passed a law abolishing
the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts.  This measure, of
course, allowed freedom of all new sects, both those then in control of
the Diet and the as yet unfledged Antitrinitarians.  Nevertheless a
strong wish was expressed for a national, Protestant church, and had
Sigismund had the advantages, as he had the matrimonial difficulties,
of Henry VIII, he might have {143} established such a body.  But he
never quite dared to take the step, dreading the hostility of Catholic
neighbors.  Singularly enough the championship of the Catholic cause
was undertaken by Greek-Catholic Muscovy, [Sidenote: 1562] whose Czar,
Ivan, represented his war against Poland as a crusade against the new
iconoclasts.  Unable to act with power, Sigismund cultivated such means
of combating Protestantism as were ready to his hand.  His most
trenchant weapon was the Order of Jesuits, who were invited to come in
and establish schools.  Moreover, the excellence of their colleges in
foreign lands induced many of the nobility to send their sons to be
educated under them, and thus were prepared the seeds of the
Counter-Reformation.

The death of Sigismund without an heir left Poland for a time
masterless.  During the interregnum the Diet passed the Compact of
Warsaw by which absolute religious liberty was granted to all
sects--"Dissidentes de Religione"--without exception.  [Sidenote:
January 28, 1573]  But, liberal though the law was, it was vitiated in
practice by the right retained by every master of punishing his serfs
for religious as well as for secular causes.  Thus it was that the
lower classes were marched from Protestant pillar to Catholic post and
back without again daring to rebel or to express any choice in the
matter.

The election of Henry of Valois, [Sidenote: Henry, May 11, 1573] a
younger son of Catharine de' Medici, was made conditional on the
acceptance of a number of articles, including the maintenance of
religious liberty.  The prince acceded, with some reservations, and was
crowned on February 21, 1574.  Four months later he heard of the death
of his brother, Charles IX, making him king of France.  Without daring
to ask leave of absence, he absconded from Poland on June 18, thereby
abandoning a throne which was promptly declared vacant.

The new election presented great difficulties, and {144} almost led to
civil war.  While the Senate declared for the Hapsburg Maximilian II,
the Diet chose Stephen Bathory, prince of Transylvania.  [Sidenote:
Stephen Bathory, 1576-86]  Only the unexpected death of Maximilian
prevented an armed collision between the two.  Bathory, now in
possession, forced his recognition by all parties and led the land of
his adoption into a period of highly successful diplomacy and of
victorious war against Muscovy.  His religious policy was one of
pacification, conciliation, and of supporting inconspicuously the
Jesuit foundations at Wilna, Posen, Cracow, and Eiga.  But the full
fruits of their propaganda, resulting in the complete reconversion of
Poland to Catholicism were not reaped until the reign of his successor,
Sigismund III, a Vasa, of Sweden.  [Sidenote: Sigismund III, 1586-1632]

[Sidenote: Bohemia]

Bohemia, a Slav kingdom long united historically and dynastically with
the Empire, as the home of Huss, welcomed the Reformation warmly, the
Brethren turning first to Luther and then to Calvin.  After various
efforts to suppress and banish them had failed of large success, the
Compact of 1567 granted toleration to the three principal churches.  As
in Poland, the Jesuits won back the whole land in the next generation,
so that in 1910 there were in Bohemia 6,500,000 Catholics and only
175,000 Protestants.

[Sidenote: Hungary, 1526]

Hungary was so badly broken by the Turks at the battle of Mohacs that
she was able to play but little part in the development of Western
civilization.  Like her more powerful rival, she was also distracted by
internal dissention.  After the death of her King Lewis at Mohacs there
were two candidates for the throne, Ferdinand the Emperor's brother and
John Zapolya, [Sidenote: Zapolya, 1526-40] "woiwod" or prince of
Transylvania.  Protestantism had a considerable hold on the nobles,
who, after the shattering of the national power, divided a portion of
the goods of the church between them.  {145} The Unitarian movement was
also strong for a time, and the division this caused proved almost
fatal to the Reformation, for the greater part of the kingdom was won
back to Catholicism under the Jesuits' leadership.  [Sidenote:
1576-1612]  In 1910 there were about 8,600,000 Catholics in Hungary and
about 3,200,000 Protestants.

[Sidenote: Transylvania]

Transylvania, though a dependency of the Turks, was allowed to keep the
Christian religion.  The Saxon colonists in this state welcomed the
Reformation, formally recognizing the Augsburg Confession in a synod of
1572.  Here also the Unitarians attained their greatest strength, being
recruited partly from those expelled from Poland.  They drew their
inspiration not merely from Sozini, but from a variety of sources, for
the doctrine appeared simultaneously among certain Anabaptist and
Spiritualist sects.  Toleration was granted them on the same terms as
other Christians.  The name "Unitarian" first appears in a decree of
the Transylvania Diet of the year 1600.  An appreciable body of this
persuasion still remains in the country, together with a number of
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Romanists, but the large majority of the
people belong to two Greek Catholic churches.




{146}

CHAPTER III

SWITZERLAND

SECTION 1.  ZWINGLI

[Sidenote: The Swiss Confederation]

Amid the snow-clad Alps and azure lakes of Switzerland there grew up a
race of Germans which, though still nominally a part of the Empire,
had, at the period now considered, long gone on its own distinct path
of development.  Politically, the Confederacy arose in a popular revolt
against the House of Austria.  The federal union of the three forest
cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, first entered into in 1291 and
made permanent in 1315, was strengthened by the admission of Lucerne
(1332), Zug (1352), Glarus (1351) and of the Imperial Cities of Zurich
(1351) and Berne (1353).  By the admission of Freiburg and Solothurn
(1481), Basle (1501), Schaffhausen (1501) and Appenzell (1513) the
Confederacy reached the number of thirteen cantons at which it remained
for many years.  By this time it was recognized as a practically
independent state, courted by the great powers of Europe.  Allied to
this German Confederacy were two Romance-speaking states of a similar
nature, the Confederacies of the Valais and of the Grisons.

The Swiss were then the one free people of Europe.  Republican
government by popular magistrates prevailed in all the cantons.
Liberty was not quite democratic, for the cantons ruled several subject
provinces, and in the cities a somewhat aristocratic electorate held
power; nevertheless there was no state in Europe approaching the Swiss
in self-government.  Though they were generally accounted the best
soldiers of the {147} day, their military valor did not redound to
their own advantage, for the hardy peasantry yielded to the
solicitations of the great powers around them to enter into foreign,
mercenary service.  The influential men, especially the priests, took
pensions from the pope or from France or from other princes, in return
for their labors in recruiting.  The system was a bad one for both
sides.  Swiss politics were corrupted and the land drained of its
strongest men; whereas the princes who hired the mercenaries often
found to their cost that such soldiers were not only the most
formidable to their enemies but also the most troublesome to
themselves, always on the point of mutiny for more pay and plunder.
The Swiss were beginning to see the evils of the system, and prohibited
the taking of pensions in 1503, though this law remained largely a dead
letter.  [Sidenote: September 13-14, 1515]  The reputation of the
mountaineers suffered a blow in their defeat by the French at
Marignano, followed by a treaty with France, intended by that power to
make Switzerland a permanent dependency in return for a large annual
subsidy payable to each of the thirteen cantons and to the Grisons and
Valais as well.  The country suffered from faction.  The rural or
"Forest" cantons were jealous of the cities, and the latter, especially
Berne, the strongest, pursued selfish policies of individual
aggrandizement at the expense of their confederates.

As everywhere else, the cities were the centers of culture and of
social movements.  Basle was famous for its university and for the
great printing house of Froben.  Here Albert Duerer had stayed for a
while during his wandering years.  Here Sebastian Brant had studied and
had written his famous satire.  Here the great Erasmus had come to
publish his New Testament.

But the Reformation in Switzerland was only in [Sidenote: 1521-9] {148}
part a child of humanism.  Nationalism played its role in the revolt
from Rome, memories of councils lingered at Constance and Basle, and
the desire for a purer religion made itself felt among the more
earnest.  Switzerland had at least one great shrine, that of
Einsiedeln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in hopes of the
plenary indulgence, expressly promising forgiveness of both guilt and
penalty of sin.  Berne was the theater of one of the most reverberating
scandals enacted by the contemporary church.  [Sidenote: The Jetzer
scandal]  A passionately contested theological issue of the day was
whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived.  This was denied by
the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans.  Some of the Dominicans
of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair
was to have a direct revelation.  For their fraudulent purposes they
conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died
after 1520.  Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an
imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the
Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception
sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not
in the immaculate, manner.  [Sidenote: 1509]  When the fraud was at
last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved
were burnt at the stake.

But the vague forces of discontent might never have crystallized into a
definite movement save for the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli.
[Sidenote: Zwingli]  He was born January 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg,
amidst the lofty mountains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and
beauty from the first.  As he wandered in the wild passes he noticed
how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of danger, and how the
squirrel crossed the stream on a chip.  When he returned to the home of
his father, a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard {149}
stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that planted in his
soul a deep love of his native land.  The religion he learned was good
Catholic; and the element of popular superstition in it was far less
weird and terrible than in Northern Germany.  He remembered one little
tale told him by his grandmother, how the Lord God and Peter slept
together in the same bed, and were wakened each morning by the
housekeeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside man.

Education began early under the tuition of an uncle, the parish priest.
At ten Ulrich was sent to Basle to study.  Here he progressed well,
becoming the head scholar, and here he developed a love of music and
considerable skill in it.  Later he went to school at Berne, where he
attracted the attention of some friars who tried to guide him into
their cloister, an effort apparently frustrated by his father.  In the
autumn of 1498 he matriculated at Vienna.  For some unknown cause he
was suspended soon afterwards, but was readmitted in the spring of
1500.  Two years later he went to Basle, where he completed his studies
by taking the master's degree.  [Sidenote: 1506]  While here he taught
school for a while.  Theology apparently interested him little; his
passion was for the humanities, and his idol was Erasmus.  Only in 1513
did he begin to learn Greek.

If, at twenty-two, before he had reached the canonical age, Zwingli
took orders, and became parish priest at Glarus, it was less because of
any deep religious interest than because he found in the clerical
calling the best opportunity to cultivate his taste for letters.  He
was helped financially by a papal pension of fifty gulden per annum.
His first published work was a fable.  [Sidenote: 1510]  The lion, the
leopard, and the fox (the Emperor, France, and Venice) try to drive the
ox {150} (Switzerland) out of his pasture, but are frustrated by the
herdsman (the pope).  The same tendencies--papal, patriotic, and
political--are shown in his second book, [Sidenote: 1512] an account of
the relations between the Swiss and French, and in _The Labyrinth_,
[Sidenote: 1516] an allegorical poem.  The various nations appear again
as animals, but the hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne
thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the monsters of sin, shame,
and vice.  Zwingli's natural interest in politics was nourished by his
experiences as field chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of
Novara [Sidenote: 1513] and Marignano.  [Sidenote: 1515]

Was he already a Reformer?  Not in the later sense of the word, but he
was a disciple of Erasmus.  Capito wrote to Bullinger in 1536: "While
Luther was in the hermitage and had not yet emerged into the light,
Zwingli and I took counsel how to cast down the pope.  For then our
judgment was maturing under the influence of Erasmus's society and by
reading good authors."  Though Capito over-estimated the opposition of
the young Swiss to the papacy, he was right in other respects.
Zwingli's enthusiasm for the prince of humanists, perfectly evident in
his notes on St. Paul, stimulated him to visit the older scholar at
Basle in the spring of 1516.  Their correspondence began at the same
time.  Is it not notable that in _The Labyrinth_ the thread of Ariadne
is not religion, but reason?  His religious ideal, as shown by his
notes on St. Paul, was at this time the Erasmian one of an ethical,
undogmatic faith.  He interpreted the Apostle by the Sermon on the
Mount and by Plato.  He was still a good Catholic, without a thought of
breaking away from the church.

[Sidenote: October, 1516-December, 1518]

From Glarus Zwingli was called to Einsiedeln, where he remained for two
years.  Here he saw the superstitious absurdities mocked by Erasmus.
Here, too, {151} he first came into contact with indulgences, sold
throughout Switzerland by Bernard Samson, a Milanese Franciscan.
Zwingli did not attack them with the impassioned zeal of Luther, but
ridiculed them as "a comedy."  His position did not alienate him from
the papal authorities, [Sidenote: September 1, 1516] for he applied
for, and received, the appointment of papal acolyte.  How little
serious was his life at this time may be seen from the fact that he
openly confessed that he was living in unchastity and even joked about
it.

Notwithstanding his peccadillos, as he evidently regarded them, high
hopes were conceived of his abilities and independence of character.
When a priest was wanted at Zurich, [Sidenote: January 1, 1519] Zwingli
applied for the position and, after strenuous canvassing, succeeded in
getting it.

Soon after this came the turning-point in Zwingli's life, making of the
rather worldly young man an earnest apostle.  Two causes contributed to
this.  The first was the plague.  Zwingli was taken sick in September
and remained in a critical condition for many months.  As is so often
the case, suffering and the fear of death made the claims of the other
world so terribly real to him that, for the first time, he cried unto
God from the depths, and consecrated his life to service of his Saviour.

[Sidenote: 1519]

The second influence that decided and deepened Zwingli's life was that
of Luther.  He first mentions him in 1519, and from that time forth,
often.  All his works and all his acts thereafter show the impress of
the Wittenberg professor.  Though Zwingli himself sturdily asserted
that he preached the gospel before he heard of Luther, and that he
learned his whole doctrine direct from the Bible, he deceived himself,
as many men do, in over-estimating his own originality.  He was truly
able to say that he had formulated some {152} of his ideas, in
dependence on Erasmus, before he heard of the Saxon; and he still
retained his capacity for private judgment afterwards.  He never
followed any man slavishly, and in some respects he was more radical
than Luther; nevertheless it is true that he was deeply indebted to the
great German.

Significantly enough, the first real conflict broke out at Zurich early
in 1520.  Zwingli preached against fasting and monasticism, and put
forward the thesis that the gospel alone should be the rule of faith
and practice.  He succeeded in carrying through a practical reform of
the cathedral chapter, but was obliged to compromise on fasting.  Soon
afterwards Zurich renounced obedience to the bishop.  The Forest
Cantons, already jealous of the prosperity of the cities, endeavored to
intervene, but were warned by Zwingli not to appeal to war, as it was
an unchristian thing.  Opposition only drove his reforming zeal to
further efforts.

In the spring of 1522 Zwingli formed with Anna Reinhard Meyer a union
which he kept secret for two years, when he married her in church.  In
the marriage itself, though it was by no means unhappy, there was
something lacking of fine feeling and of perfect love.

[Sidenote: Reformation in Zurich]

As the reform progressed, the need of clarification was felt.  This was
brought about by the favorite method of that day, a disputation.  The
Catholics tried in vain to prevent it, and it was actually held in
January, 1523, on 67 theses drawn up by Zwingli.  Here, as so often, it
was found that the battle was half won when the innovators were heard.
They themselves attributed this to the excellence of their cause; but,
without disparaging that, it must be said that, as the psychology of
advertising has shown, any thesis presented with sufficient force to
catch the public ear, is {153} sure to win a certain number of
adherents.  [Sidenote: October 27, 1523]  The Town Council of Zurich
ordered the abolition of images and of the mass.  The opposition of the
cathedral chapter considerably delayed the realization of this program.
In December the Council was obliged to concede further discussion.  It
was not until Wednesday, April 12, 1525, that mass was said for the
last time in Zurich.  Its place was immediately taken, the next day,
Maundy Thursday, by a simple communion service.  At the same time the
last of the convents were suppressed, or put in a condition assuring
their eventual extinction.  Other reforms included the abolition of
processions, of confirmation and of extreme unction.  With homely
caution, a large number of simple souls had this administered to them
just before the time allotted for its last celebration.  Organs were
taken out of the churches, and regular lectures on the Bible given.

Alarmed by these innovations the five original cantons,--Unterwalden,
Uri, Schwyz, Lucerne and Zug,--formed a league in 1524 to suppress the
"Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian heresies."  For a time it looked like
war.  Zwingli and his advisers drew up a remarkably thorough plan of
campaign, including a method of securing allies, many military details,
and an ample provision for prayer for victory.  War, however, was
averted by the mediation of Berne as a friend of Zurich, and the
complete religious autonomy of each canton was guaranteed.

The Swiss Reformation had to run the same course of separation from the
humanists and radicals, and of schism, as did the German movement.
Though Erasmus was a little closer to the Swiss than he had been to the
Saxon Reformers, he was alienated by the outrageous taunts of some of
them and by the equally unwarranted attempts of others to show that he
agreed {154} with them.  "They falsely call themselves evangelical," he
opined, "for they seek only two things: a salary and a wife."

Then came the break with Luther, of which the story has already been
told.  The division was caused neither by jealousy, nor by the one
doctrine--that of the real presence--on which it was nominally fought.
There was in reality a wide difference between the two types of
thought.  The Saxon was both mystic and a schoolman; to him religion
was all in all and dogma a large part of religion.  Zwingli approached
the problem of salvation from a less personal, certainly from a less
agonized, and from a more legal, liberal, empiric standpoint.  He felt
for liberty and for the value of common action in the state.  He
interpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his reason under the
tuition of the Bible in its apparent meaning.

[Sidenote: Anabaptists, 1522]

Next came the turn of the Anabaptists--those Bolsheviki of the
sixteenth century.  Their first leaders appeared at Zurich and were for
a while bosom friends of Zwingli.  But a parting of the ways was
inevitable, for the humanist could have little sympathy with an
uncultured and ignorant group--such they were, in spite of the fact
that a few leaders were university graduates--and the statesman could
not admit in his categories a purpose that was sectarian as against the
state church, and democratic as against the existing aristocracy.

[Sidenote: 1523]

His first work against them shows how he was torn between his desire to
make the Bible his only guide and the necessity of compromising with
the prevailing polity.  As he was unable to condemn his opponents on
any consistent grounds he was obliged to prefer against them two
charges that were false, though probably believed true by himself.  As
they were {155} ascetics in some particulars he branded them as
monastic; for their social program he called them seditious.

The suppression of the Peasants' Revolt had the effect in Switzerland,
as elsewhere, of causing the poor and oppressed to lose heart, and of
alienating them from the cause of the official Protestant churches.  A
disputation with the Anabaptist leaders was held at Zurich; [Sidenote:
November 6-8, 1525] they were declared refuted, and the council passed
an order for all unbaptized children to be christened within a week.
The leaders were arrested and tried; Zwingli bearing testimony that
they advocated communism, which he considered wrong as the Bible's
injunction not to steal implied the right of private property.  The
Anabaptists denied that they were communists, but the leaders were
bound over to keep the peace, some were fined and others banished.  As
persecuting measures almost always increase in severity, it was not
long before the death penalty was denounced against the sectaries, and
actually applied.  In a polemic against the new sect entitled _In
Catabaptistarum Strophas Elenchus_, [Sidenote: July 1527] Zwingli's
only argument is a criticism of some inconsistencies in the
Anabaptists' biblicism; his final appeal is to force.  His strife with
them was harder than his battle with Rome.  It seems that the reformer
fears no one so much as him who carries the reformer's own principles
to lengths that the originator disapproves.  Zwingli saw in the
fearless fanatics men prepared to act in political and social matters
as he had done in ecclesiastical affairs; he dreaded anarchy or, at
least, subversion of the polity he preferred, and, like all the other
men of his age, he branded heresy as rebellion and punished it as crime.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

By this time Zurich had become a theocracy of the same tyrannical type
as that later made famous by {156} Geneva.  Zwingli took the position
of an Old Testament prophet, subordinating state to church.  At first
he had agreed with the Anabaptists in separating (theoretically) church
and state.  But he soon came to believe that, though true Christians
might need no government, it was necessary to control the wicked, and
for this purpose he favored an aristocratic polity.  All matters of
morals were strictly regulated, severe laws being passed against
taverns and gambling.  The inhabitants were forced to attend church.
After the suppression of the Catholics and the radicals, there
developed two parties just as later in Geneva, the Evangelical and the
Indifferent, the policy of the latter being one of more freedom, or
laxity, in discipline, and in general a preference of political to
religious ends.

[Sidenote: Basle November, 1522]

The Reformation had now established itself in other cities of German
Switzerland.  Oecolampadius coming to Basle as the bearer of
Evangelical ideas, won such success that soon the bishop was deprived
of authority, [Sidenote: 1524] two disputations with the Catholics were
held, [Sidenote: 1525] and the monasteries abolished.  [Sidenote: 1527]
Oecolampadius, after taking counsel with Zwingli on the best means of
suppressing Catholic worship, branded the mass as an act worse than
theft, harlotry, adultery, treason, and murder, called a meeting of the
town council, and requested them to decree the abolition of Catholic
worship.  [Sidenote: October 27, 1527]  Though they replied that every
man should be free to exercise what religion he liked, on Good Friday,
1528, the Protestants removed the images from Oecolampadius's church,
and grumbled because their enemies were yet tolerated.  Liberty of
conscience was only assured by the fairly equal division of the
membership of the town council.  On December 23, 1528, two hundred
citizens assembled and presented a petition, drawn up by Oecolampadius,
for the suppression of {157} the mass.  On January 6, 1529, under
pressure from the ambassadors of Berne and Zurich, the town council of
Basle decreed that all pastors should preach only the Word of God, and
asked them to assemble for instruction on this point.  The compromise
suited no one and on February 8 the long prepared revolution broke out.
Under pretence that the Catholics had disobeyed the last decree, a
Protestant mob surrounded the town hall, planted cannon, and forced the
council to expel the twelve Catholic members, meanwhile destroying
church pictures and statues.  "It was indeed a spectacle so sad to the
superstitious," Oecolampadius wrote to Capito, "that they had to weep
blood. . . .  We raged against the idols, and the mass died of sorrow."

A somewhat similar development took place in Berne, St. Gall,
Schaffhausen, and Glarus.  The favorite instrument for arousing popular
interest and support was the disputation.  Such an one was held at
Baden in May and June, 1526.  Zwingli declined to take part in this and
the Catholics claimed the victory.  This, however, did them rather harm
than good, for the public felt that the cards had been stacked.  A
similar debate at Berne in 1528 turned that city completely to the
Reformation.  A synod of the Swiss Evangelical churches was formed in
1527.  This made for uniformity.  The publication of the Bible in a
translation by Leo Jud and others, with prefaces by Zwingli, proved a
help to the Evangelical cause.  [Sidenote: 1530]  This translation was
the only one to compete at all successfully with Luther's.

The growing strength of the Protestant cantons encouraged them to carry
the reform by force in all places in which a majority was in favor of
it.  Zwingli's far-reaching plans included an alliance with Hesse and
with Francis I to whom he dedicated his {158} two most important
theological works, _True and False Religion_ and _An Exposition of the
Christian Faith_.  [Sidenote: April, 1529]  The Catholic cantons
replied by making a league with Austria.  War seemed imminent and
Zwingli was so heartily in favor of it that he threatened resignation
if Zurich did not declare war.  This was accordingly done on June 8.
Thirty thousand Protestant soldiers marched against the Catholic
cantons, which, without the expected aid from Austria, were able to put
only nine thousand men into the field.  Seeing themselves hopelessly
outnumbered, the Catholics prudently negotiated a peace without risking
a battle.  [Sidenote: First Peace of Cappel]  The terms of this first
Peace of Cappel forced the Catholics to renounce the alliance with
Austria, and to allow the majority of citizens in each canton to decide
the religion they would follow.  Toleration for Protestants was
provided for in Catholic cantons, though toleration of the old religion
was denied in the Evangelical cantons.

This peace marked the height of Zwingli's power.  He continued to
negotiate on equal terms with Luther, and he sent missionaries into
Geneva to win it to his cause and to the Confederacy.  The Catholic
cantons, stung to the quick, again sought aid from Austria and raised
another and better army.  [Sidenote: Defeat of Zwingli]  Zwingli heard
of this and advocated a swift blow to prevent it--the "offensive
defence."  Berne refused to join Zurich in this aggression, but agreed
to bring pressure to bear on the Catholics [Sidenote: May 1531] by
proclaiming a blockade of their frontiers.  An army was prepared by the
Forest Cantons, but Berne, whose entirely selfish policy was more
disastrous to the Evangelical cause than was the hostility of the
league, still refused to engage in war.  Zurich was therefore obliged
to meet it alone.  An army of only two thousand Zurichers marched out,
accompanied by Zwingli as field chaplain.  Eight thousand Catholic
troops attacked, utterly defeated them, and {159} killed many on the
field of battle.  [Sidenote: October 11, 1531]  Zwingli, who, though a
non-combatant, was armed, was wounded and left on the field.  Later he
was recognized by enemies, killed, and his body burned as that of a
heretic.

The defeat was a disaster to Protestant Switzerland not so much on
account of the terms of peace, which were moderate, as because of the
loss of prestige and above all of the great leader.  His spirit
however, continued to inspire his followers, and lived in the Reformed
Church.  Indeed it has been said, though with exaggeration, that Calvin
only gave his name to the church founded by Zwingli, just as Americus
gave his name to the continent discovered by Columbus.  In many
respects Zwingli was the most liberal of the Reformers.  In his last
work he expressed the belief that in heaven would be saved not only
Christians and the worthies of the Old Testament but also "Hercules,
Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and
Scipios. . . .  In a word no good man has ever existed, nor shall there
exist a holy mind, a faithful soul, from the very foundation of the
world to its consummation, whom you will not see there with God."
Nevertheless, Zwingli was a persecutor and was bound by many of the
dogmatic prepossessions of his time.  But his religion had in it less
of miracle and more of reason than that of any other founder of a
church in the sixteenth century.  He was a statesman, and more willing
to trust the people than were his contemporaries, but yet he was ready
to sacrifice his country to his creed.

For a short time after the death of so many of its leading citizens in
the battle of Cappel, Zurich was reduced to impotence and despair.  Nor
was she much comforted or assisted by her neighbors.  Oecolampadius
died but a few weeks after his friend; while {160} Luther and Erasmus
sang paeans of triumph over the prostration of their rivals.  Even
Calvin considered it a judgment of God.  Gradually by her own strength
Zurich won her way back to peace and a certain influence.  [Sidenote:
Bullinger, 1504-75]  Zwingli's follower, Henry Bullinger, the son of a
priest, was a remarkable man.  He not only built up his own city but
his active correspondence with Protestants of all countries did a great
deal to spread the cause of the Evangelical religion.  In conjunction
with Myconius, he drew up the first Swiss confession, [Sidenote: 1536]
accepted by Zurich, Berne, Basle, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, Muelhausen and
Biel; [Sidenote: 1549] and later he made the agreement with Calvin
known as the Consensus Tigurinus.  In this the Zwinglian and
Calvinistic doctrines of the eucharist were harmonized as far as
possible.  But while the former decreased the latter increased, and
Geneva took the place of Zurich as the metropolis of the Reformed faith.


SECTION 2.  CALVIN

On January 15, 1527, Thomas von Hofen wrote Zwingli from Geneva that he
would do all he could to exalt the gospel in that city but that he knew
it would be vain, for there were seven hundred priests working against
him.  This letter gives an insight into the methods by which new
territory was evangelized, the quarters whence came the new influences,
and the forces with which they had to contend.

Among the early missionaries of "the gospel" in French-speaking lands,
one of the most energetic was William Farel.  [Sidenote: Farel,
1489-1565]  He had studied at Paris under Lefevre d'Etaples, and was
converted to Lutheranism as early as 1521.  He went first to Basle,
where he learned to know Erasmus.  Far from showing respect to the
older and more famous man, he scornfully told him to his face that
Froben's wife knew more theology than {161} did he.  Erasmus's
resentment showed itself in the nickname Phallicus that he fastened on
his antagonist.  From Basle Farel went to Montbeliard and Aigle,
preaching fearlessly but so fiercely that his friend Oecolampadius
warned him to remember rather to teach than to curse.  [Sidenote: 1528]
After attending the disputation at Berne he evangelized western
Switzerland.  His methods may be learned from his work at Valangin on
August 15, 1530.  He attended a mass, but in the midst of it went up to
the priest, tore the host forcibly from his hands, and said to the
people: "This is not the God whom you worship: he is above in heaven,
even in the majesty of the Father."  In 1532 he went to Geneva.
Notwithstanding the fact that here, as often elsewhere, he narrowly
escaped lynching, he made a great impression.  His red hair and hot
temper evidently had their uses.

[Sidenote: Calvin, 1509-64]

_The_ Reformer of French Switzerland was not destined to be Farel,
however, but John Calvin.  Born at Noyon, Picardy, his mother died
early and his father, who did not care for children, sent him to the
house of an aristocratic friend to be reared.  In this environment he
acquired the distinguished manners and the hauteur for which he was
noted.  When John was six years old his father, Gerard, had him
appointed to a benefice just as nowadays he might have got him a
scholarship.  At the age of twelve Gerard's influence procured for his
son another of these ecclesiastical livings and two years later this
was exchanged for a more lucrative one to enable the boy to go to
Paris.  Here for some years, at the College of Montaigu, Calvin studied
scholastic philosophy and theology under Noel Beda, a medieval
logic-chopper and schoolman by temperament.  At the university Calvin
won from his fellows the sobriquet of "the accusative case," on account
of his censorious {162} and fault-finding disposition.  At his father's
wish John changed from theology to law.  For a time he studied at the
universities of Orleans and Bourges.  At Orleans he came under the
influence of two Protestants, Olivetan and the German Melchior Volmar.
On the death of his father, in 1531, he began to devote himself to the
humanities.  His first work, a commentary on Seneca's _De Clementia_,
witnesses his wide reading, his excellent Latin style, and his ethical
interests.

It was apparently through the humanists Erasmus and Lefevre that he was
led to the study of the Bible and of Luther's writings.  Probably in
the fall of 1533 he experienced a "conversion" such as stands at the
head of many a religious career.  A sudden beam of light, he says, came
to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him
in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living.  He
thereupon abandoned his former life with tears.

In the spring of 1534 Calvin gave up the sinecure benefices he had
held, and towards the end of the year left France because of the
growing persecution, for he had already rendered himself suspect.
After various wanderings he reached Basle, where he published the first
edition of his _Institutes of the Christian Religion_.  [Sidenote:
Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536]  It was dedicated, like two
of Zwingli's works, to Francis I, with a strong plea for the new faith.
It was, nevertheless, condemned and burnt publicly in France in 1542.
Originally written in Latin it was translated by the author into French
in 1541, and reissued from time to time in continually larger editions,
the final one, of 1559, being five times as bulky as the first
impression.  The thought, too, though not fundamentally changed, was
rearranged and developed.  Only in the redaction of 1541 was {163}
predestination made perfectly clear.  The first edition, like Luther's
catechism, took up in order the Decalogue, the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Sacraments.  To this was added a section on Christian
liberty, the power of the church, and civil government.  In the last
edition the arrangement followed entirely the order of articles in the
Apostles' Creed, all the other matter being digested in its relation to
faith.

[Sidenote: A system of theology]

In the _Institutes_ Calvin succeeded in summing up the whole of
Protestant Christian doctrine and practice.  It is a work of enormous
labor and thought.  Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity
have secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches that the
_Summa_ of Aquinas has in the Roman theology.  It is like the _Summa_,
in other ways, primarily in that it is an attempt to derive an
absolute, unchangeable standard of dogma from premises considered
infallible.  Those who have found great freshness in Calvin, a new life
and a new realism, can do so only in comparison with the older
schoolmen.  Calvin simply went over their ground, introducing into
their philosophy all the connotations that three centuries of progress
had made necessary.  This is not denying that his work was well written
and that it filled a need urgently felt at the time.  Calvin cultivated
style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he saw its immense
utility for propaganda.  He studied especially brevity, and thought
that he carried it to an extreme, though the French edition of the
_Institutes_ fills more than eight hundred large octavo pages.
However, all things are relative, and compared to many other
theologians Calvin is really concise and readable.

There is not one original thought in any of Calvin's works.  I do not
mean "original" in any narrow sense, for to the searcher for sources it
seems that {164} there is literally nothing new under the sun.  But
there is nothing in Calvin for which ample authority cannot be found in
his predecessors.  Recognizing the Bible as his only standard, he
interpreted it according to the new Protestant doctors.  First and
foremost he was dependent on Luther, and to an extent that cannot be
exaggerated.  Especially from the _Catechisms_, _The Bondage of the
Will_, and _The Babylonian Captivity of the Church_, Calvin drew all
his principal doctrines even to details.  He also borrowed something
from Bucer, Erasmus and Schwenckfeld, as well as from three writers who
were in a certain sense his models.  Melanchthon's _Commonplaces of
Theology_, Zwingli's _True and False Religion_, and Farel's _Brief
Instruction in Christian Faith_ had all done tentatively what he now
did finally.

[Sidenote: Theocentric character]

The center of Calvin's philosophy was God as the Almighty Will.  His
will was the source of all things, of all deeds, of all standards of
right and wrong and of all happiness.  The sole purpose of the
universe, and the sole intent of its Creator, was the glorification of
the Deity.  Man's chief end was "to glorify God and enjoy him forever."
God accomplished this self-exaltation in all things, but chiefly
through men, his noblest work, and he did it in various ways, by the
salvation of some and the damnation of others.  And his act was purely
arbitrary; he foreknew and predestined the fate of every man from the
beginning; he damned and saved irrespective of foreseen merit.  "God's
eternal decree" Calvin himself called "frightful." [1]  The outward
sign of election to grace he thought was moral behavior, and in this
respect he demanded the uttermost from himself and from his followers.
The elect, he thought, were certain of salvation.  The highest virtue
was faith, a matter more {165} of the heart than of the reason.  The
divinity of Christ, he said, was apprehended by Christian experience,
not by speculation.  Reason was fallacious; left to itself the human
spirit "could do nothing but lose itself in infinite error, embroil
itself in difficulties and grope in opaque darkness."  But God has
given us his Word, infallible and inerrant, something that "has flowed
from his very mouth."  "We can only seek God in his Word," he said,
"nor think of him otherwise than according to his Word."

Inevitably, Calvin sought to use the Bible as a rigid, moral law to be
fulfilled to the letter.  His ethics were an elaborate casuistry, a
method of finding the proper rule to govern the particular act.  He
preached a new legalism; [Sidenote: Legalism] he took Scripture as the
Pharisees took the Law, and Luther's sayings as they took the Prophets,
and he turned them all into stiff, fixed laws.  Thus he crushed the
glorious autonomy of his predecessor's ethical principles.  It was
Kant, who denied all Luther's specific beliefs, but who developed his
idea of the individual conscience, that was the true heir of his
spirit, not Calvin who crushed the spirit in elaborating every jot and
tittle of the letter.  In precisely the same manner Calvin killed
Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.  To Calvin the
church was a sacramental, aristocratic organization, with an
authoritative ministry.  The German rebelled against the idea of the
church as such; the Frenchman simply asked what was the true church.
So he brought back some of the sacramental miracle of baptism and the
eucharist.  In the latter he remained as medieval as Luther, never
getting beyond the question of the mode of the presence of the body and
blood of Christ in the bread and wine.  His endeavor to rationalize the
doctrine of Augsburg, especially with reference to the Zwinglians, had
disastrous results.  Only two {166} positions were possible, that the
body and blood were present, or that they were not.  By endeavoring to
find some middle ground Calvin upheld a contradiction in terms: the
elements were signs and yet were realities; the body was really there
when the bread was eaten by a believer, but really not there when the
same bread was eaten by an infidel.  The presence was actual, and yet
participation could only occur by faith.  While rejecting some of
Luther's explanations, Calvin was undoubtedly nearer his position than
that of Zwingli, which he characterized as "profane."

As few instructed and thinking persons now accept the conclusions of
the _Institutes_, it is natural to underestimate the power that they
exercised in their own day.  This book was the most effective weapon of
Protestantism.  This was partly because of the style, but, still more
because of the faultless logic.  [Sidenote: His logic]  The success of
an argument usually depends far less on the truth of the premises than
on the validity of the reasoning.  And the premises selected by Calvin
not only seemed natural to a large body of educated European opinion of
his time, but were such that their truth or falsity was very difficult
to demonstrate convincingly.  Calvin's system has been overthrown not
by direct attack, but by the flank, in science as in war the most
effective way.  To take but one example out of many that might be
given: what has modern criticism made of Calvin's doctrine of the
inerrancy of Scripture?  But this science was as yet all but unknown:
biblical exegesis there was in plenty, but it was only to a minute
extent literary and historical; it was almost exclusively philological
and dogmatic.

Calvin's doctrine of the arbitrary dealing out of salvation and
damnation irrespective of merit has often excited a moral rather than
an intellectual revulsion.  To his true followers, indeed, like
Jonathan {167} Edwards, it seems "a delightful doctrine, exceeding
bright, pleasant and sweet."  [Sidenote: Eternal damnation]  But many
men agree with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious tyrant
and with William James that it is sovereignly irrational and mean.
Even at that time those who said that a man's will had no more to do
with his destiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose where to
strike or than a saddled beast could choose its rider, aroused an
intense opposition.  Erasmus argued that damnation given for inevitable
crimes would make God unjust, and Thomas More blamed Luther for calling
God the cause of evil and for saying "God doth damn so huge a number of
people to intolerable torments only for his own pleasure and for his
own deeds wrought in them only by himself."  An English heretic, Cole
of Faversham, said that the doctrine of predestination was meeter for
devils than for Christians.  "The God of Calvin," exclaimed Jerome
Bolsec, "is a hypocrite, a liar, perfidious, unjust, the abetter and
patron of crimes, and worse than the devil himself."

But there was another side to the doctrine of election.  There was a
certain moral grandeur in the complete abandon to God and in the
earnestness that was ready to sacrifice all to his will.  And if we
judge the tree by its fruits, at its best it brought forth a strong and
good race.  The noblest examples are not the theologians, Calvin and
Knox, not only drunk with God but drugged with him, much less
politicians like Henry of Navarre and William of Orange, but the rank
and file of the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England, "the
choice and sifted seed wherewith God sowed the wilderness" of America.
These men bore themselves with I know not what of lofty seriousness,
and with a matchless disdain of all mortal peril and all earthly
grandeur.  Believing themselves chosen vessels and elect instruments of
grace, they could neither {168} be seduced by carnal pleasure nor awed
by human might.  Taught that they were kings by the election of God and
priests by the imposition of his hands, they despised the puny and
vicious monarchs of this earth.  They remained, in fact, what they
always felt themselves to be, an elite, "the chosen few."

Having finished his great work, Calvin set out on his wanderings again.
For a time he was at the court of the sympathetic Renee de France,
Duchess of Ferrara.  When persecution broke out here, he again fled
northward, and came, by chance, to Geneva.  [Sidenote: Geneva]  Here
Farel was waging an unequal fight with the old church.  Needing
Calvin's help he went to him and begged his assistance, calling on God
to curse him should he not stay.  "Struck with terror," as Calvin
himself confessed, he consented to do so.

Beautifully situated on the blue waters of Lake Leman in full view of
Mont Blanc, Geneva was at this time a town of 16,000 inhabitants, a
center of trade, pleasure, and piety.  The citizens had certain
liberties, but were under the rule of a bishop.  As this personage was
usually elected from the house of the Duke of Savoy, Geneva had become
little better than a dependency of that state.  The first years of the
sixteenth century had been turbulent.  The bishop, John, had at one
time been forced to abdicate his authority, but later had tried to
resume it.  The Archbishop of Vienne, Geneva's metropolitan, had then
excommunicated the city and invited Duke Charles III of Savoy to punish
it.  The citizens rose under Bonivard, renounced the authority of the
pope, expelled the bishop and broke up the religious houses.  To guard
against the vengeance of the duke, a league was made with Berne and
Freiburg.

On October 2, 1532, William Farel arrived from Berne.  At Geneva as
elsewhere tumult followed his {169} preaching, but it met with such
success that by January, 1534, he held a disputation which decided the
city to become evangelical.  The council examined the shrines
[Sidenote: 1535] and found machinery for the production of bogus
miracles; provisionally abolished the mass; [Sidenote: May 21, 1536]
and soon after formally renounced the papal religion.

At this point Calvin arrived, and began preaching and organizing at
once.  He soon aroused opposition from the citizens, galled at his
strictness and perhaps jealous of a foreigner.  [Sidenote: Calvin
expelled, February 1538]  The elections to the council went against
him, and the opposition came to a head shortly afterwards.  The town
council decided to adopt the method of celebrating the eucharist used
at Rome.  For some petty reason Calvin and Farel refused to obey, and
when a riot broke out at the Lord's table, the council expelled them
from the city.

Calvin went to Strassburg, where he learned to know Bucer and
republished his _Institutes_.  Here he married Idelette de Bure, the
widow of an Anabaptist, [Sidenote: August, 1540] who was never in
strong health and died, probably of consumption, on March 29, 1549.
Calvin's married life lacked tenderness and joy.  The story that he
selected his wife because he thought that by reason of her want of
beauty she would not distract his thoughts from God, is not well
founded, but it does illustrate his attitude towards her.  The one or
more children born of the union died in infancy.

Calvin attended the Colloquy at Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1541] in the
result of which he was deeply disappointed.  In the meantime he had not
lost all interest in Geneva.  When Cardinal Sadoleto wrote, in the most
polished Latin, an appeal to the city to return to the Roman communion,
Calvin answered it.  [Sidenote: September 1, 1539]  The party opposed
to him discredited itself by giving up the city's rights to Berne, and,
was therefore overthrown.  The perplexities presenting themselves to
the council were {170} beyond their powers to solve, and they felt
obliged to recall Calvin, [Sidenote: Calvin returns, 1541] who returned
to remain for the rest of his life.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

His position was so strong that he was able to make of Geneva a city
after his own heart.  The form of government he caused to prevail was a
strict theocracy.  The clergy of the city met in a body known as the
Congregation, a "venerable company" that discussed and prepared
legislation for the consideration of the Consistory.  In this larger
body, besides the clergy, the laity were represented by twelve elders
chosen by the council, not by the people at large.  The state and
church were thus completely identified in a highly aristocratic polity.

"The office of the Consistory is to keep watch on the life of every
one."  Thus briefly was expressed the delegation of as complete powers
over the private lives of citizens as ever have been granted to a
committee.  The object of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances was to create a
society of saints.  The Bible was adopted as the norm; all its
provisions being enforced except such Jewish ceremonies as were
considered abrogated by the New Testament.  The city was divided into
quarters, and some of the elders visited every house at least once a
year and passed in review the whole life, actions, speech, and opinions
of the inmates.  The houses of the citizens were made of glass; and the
vigilant eye of the Consistory, served by a multitude of spies, was on
them all the time.  In a way this espionage but took the place of the
Catholic confessional.  A joke, a gesture was enough to bring a man
under suspicion.  The Elders sat as a regular court, hearing complaints
and examining witnesses.  It is true that they could inflict only
spiritual punishments, such as public censure, penance,
excommunication, or forcing the culprit to demand pardon in church on
his knees.  But when {171} the Consistory thought necessary, it could
invoke the aid of the civil courts and the judgment was seldom
doubtful.  Among the capital crimes were adultery, blasphemy,
witchcraft, and heresy.  Punishments for all offences were
astonishingly and increasingly heavy.  During the years 1542-6 there
were, in this little town of 16,000 people, no less than fifty-eight
executions and seventy-six banishments.

In judging the Genevan theocracy it is important to remember that
everywhere, in the sixteenth century, punishments were heavier than
they are now, and the regulation of private life minuter.[2]
Nevertheless, though parallels to almost everything done at Geneva can
be found elsewhere, it is true that Calvin intensified the medieval
spirit in this respect and pushed it to the farthest limit that human
nature would bear.

First of all, he compelled the citizens to fulfil their religious
duties.  He began the process by which later the Puritans identified
the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's Day.  Luther had thought the
injunction to rest on the Seventh Day a bit of Jewish ceremonial
abrogated by the new dispensation and that, after attending church, the
Christian might devote the day to what work or pleasure he thought
proper.  Calvin, however, forbade all work and commanded attendance on
sermons, of which an abundance were offered to the devout.  In addition
to Sunday services there were, as in the Catholic church, morning
prayers every work day and a second service three days a week.  All
ceremonies with a vestige of popery about them were forbidden.
[Sidenote: 1555]  The keeping of Christmas was prohibited under pain of
fine and imprisonment.

"As I see that we cannot forbid men all diversions," sighed Calvin, "I
confine myself to those that are really bad."  This class was
sufficiently large.  The {172} theater was denounced from the pulpit,
especially when the new Italian habit of giving women's parts to
actresses instead of to boys was introduced.  According to Calvin's
colleague Cop, "the women who mount the platform to play comedies are
full of unbridled effrontery, without honor, having no purpose but to
expose their bodies, clothes, and ornaments to excite the impure
desires of the spectators. . . .  The whole thing," he added, "is very
contrary to the modesty of women who ought to be shamefaced and shy."
Accordingly, attendance on plays was forbidden.

[Sidenote: Supervision of conduct]

Among other prohibited amusements was dancing, especially obnoxious as
at that time dances were accompanied by kisses and embraces.  Playing
cards, cursing and swearing were also dealt with, as indeed they were
elsewhere.  Among the odd matters that came before the Consistory were:
attempted suicide, possessing the _Golden Legend_ (a collection of
saints' lives called by Beza "abominable trash"), paying for masses,
betrothing a daughter to a Catholic, fasting on Good Friday, singing
obscene songs, and drunkenness.  A woman was chastized for taking too
much wine even though it did not intoxicate.  Some husbands were mildly
reprimanded, not for beating their wives which was tolerated by
contemporary opinion, but for rubbing salt and vinegar into the wales.
Luxury in clothing was suppressed; all matters of color and quality
regulated by law, and even the way in which women did their hair.  In
1546 the inns were put under the direct control of the government and
strictly limited to the functions of entertaining--or rather of
boarding and lodging--strangers and citizens in temporary need of them.
Among the numerous rules enforced within them the following may be
selected as typical:

[Sidenote: Rules for inns]

If any one blasphemes the name of God or says, "By {173} the body,
'sblood, zounds" or anything like, or who gives himself to the devil or
uses similar execrable imprecations, he shall be punished. . . .

If any one insults any one else the host shall be obliged to deliver
him up to justice.

If there are any persons who make it their business to frequent the
said inns, and there to consume their goods and substance, the host
shall not receive them.

Item the host shall be obliged to report to the government any insolent
or dissolute acts committed by the guests.

Item the host shall not allow any person of whatever quality he be, to
drink or eat anything in his house without first having asked a
blessing and afterwards said grace.

Item the host shall be obliged to keep in a public place a French
Bible, in which any one who wishes may read, and he shall not prevent
free and honest conversation on the Word of God, to edification, but
shall favor it as much as he can.

Item the host shall not allow any dissoluteness like dancing, dice or
cards, nor shall he receive any one suspected of being a debauche or
ruffian.

Item he shall only allow people to play honest games without swearing
or blasphemy, and without wasting more time than that allowed for a
meal.

Item he shall not allow indecent songs or words, and if any one wishes
to sing Psalms or spiritual songs he shall make them do it in a decent
and not in a dissolute way.

Item nobody shall be allowed to sit up after nine o'clock at night
except spies.


Of course, such matters as marriage were regulated strictly.  When a
man of seventy married a girl of twenty-five Calvin said it was the
pastor's duty to reprehend them.  The Reformer often selected the women
he thought suitable for his acquaintances who wanted wives.  He also
drew up a list of baptismal names which he thought objectionable,
including the names of "idols,"--_i.e._ saints venerated near
Geneva--the names of kings and offices to whom God alone {174}
appoints, such as Angel or Baptist, names belonging to God such as
Jesus and Emanuel, silly names such as Toussaint and Noel, double names
and ill-sounding names.  Calvin also pronounced on the best sort of
stoves and got servants for his friends.  In fact, there was never such
a busy-body in a position of high authority before nor since.  No
wonder that the citizens frequently chafed under the yoke.

If we ask how much was actually accomplished by this minute regulation
accompanied by extreme severity in the enforcement of morals, various
answers are given.  When the Italian reformer Bernardino Occhino
visited Geneva in 1542, he testified that cursing and swearing,
unchastity and sacrilege were unknown; that there were neither lawsuits
nor simony nor murder nor party spirit, but that universal benevolence
prevailed.  Again in 1556 John Knox said that Geneva was "the most
perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the
apostles.  In other places," he continued, "I confess Christ to be
truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have
not yet seen in any place besides."  But if we turn from these personal
impressions to an examination of the acts of the Consistory, we get a
very different impression.  [Sidenote: Morals of Geneva]  The records
of Geneva show more cases of vice after the Reformation than before.
The continually increasing severity of the penalties enacted against
vice and frivolity seem to prove that the government was helpless to
suppress them.  Among those convicted of adultery were two of Calvin's
own female relatives, his brother's wife and his step-daughter Judith.
What success there was in making Geneva a city of saints was due to the
fact that it gradually became a very select population.  The worst of
the incorrigibles were soon either executed or banished, and their
places taken by a large influx of {175} men of austere mind, drawn
thither as a refuge from persecution elsewhere, or by the desire to sit
at the feet of the great Reformer.  Between the years 1549 and 1555 no
less than 1297 strangers were admitted to citizenship.  Practically all
of these were immigrants coming to the little town for conscience's
sake.

[Persecution]

Orthodoxy was enforced as rigidly as morality.  The ecclesiastical
constitution adopted in 1542 brought in the Puritan type of divine
service.  Preaching took the most important place in church,
supplemented by Bible reading and catechetical instruction.  Laws were
passed enforcing conformity under pain of losing goods and life.  Those
who did not expressly renounce the mass were punished.  A little girl
of thirteen was condemned to be publicly beaten with rods for saying
that she wanted to be a Catholic.  Calvin identified his own wishes and
dignity with the commands and honor of God.  One day he forbade a
citizen, Philibert Berthelier, to come to the Lord's table.  Berthelier
protested and was supported by the council.  "If God lets Satan crush
my ministry under such tyranny," shrieked Calvin, "it is all over with
me."  The slightest assertion of liberty on the part of another was
stamped out as a crime.  Sebastian Castellio, a sincere Christian and
Protestant, but more liberal than Calvin, fell under suspicion because
he called the Song of Songs obscene, and because he made a new French
version of the Bible to replace the one of Olivetan officially
approved.  He was banished in 1544.  Two years later Peter Ameaux made
some very trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he was
forced to fall on his knees in public and ask pardon.

But opposition only increased.  The party opposing Calvin he called the
Libertines--a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and
gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as
the word "miscreant" had formerly done.  [Sidenote: January, 1547]  One
of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's church
at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the
city.  He was at once arrested and a house to house search made for his
accomplices.  This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet
had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his
judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a
whole month.  The frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate
anyone else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy.  He was charged
with "disparaging authors like Moses, who by the Spirit of God wrote
the divine law, saying that Moses had no more power than any other
man. . . .  He also said that all laws, human and divine, were made at
the pleasure of man."  He was therefore sentenced to death for
blasphemy and beheaded on July 26, 1547, "calling on God as his Lord."
After his death one of his books was found and condemned.  To justify
this course Calvin alleged that Gruet said that Jesus Christ was a
good-for-nothing, a liar, and a false seducer, and that he (Gruet)
denied the existence of God and immortality.  Evangelical freedom had
now arrived at the point whore its champions first took a man's life
and then his character, merely for writing a lampoon!

Naturally such tyranny produced a reaction.  The enraged Libertines
nicknamed Calvin Cain, and saved from his hands the next personal
enemy, Ami Perrin, whom he caused to be tried for treason.  [Sidenote:
October 16, 1551]  A still more bitter dose for the theocrat was that
administered by Jerome Bolsec, who had the audacity to preach against
the doctrine of predestination.  Calvin and Farel refuted him on the
spot and had him arrested.  Berne, Basle and Zurich intervened and,
when solicited for {177} an expression on the doctrine in dispute,
spoke indecisively.  The triumph of his enemies at this rebuke was hard
for Calvin to bear and prepared for the commission of the most
regrettable act of his career.

[Sidenote: Servetus, 1531]

The Spanish physician Michael Servetus published, in Germany, a work on
the _Errors concerning the Trinity_.  His theory was not that of a
modern rationalist, but of one whose starting point was the authority
of the Bible, and his unitarianism was consequently of a decidedly
theological brand, recalling similar doctrines in the early church.
Leaving Germany he went to Vienne, [Sidenote: 1553] in France, and got
a good practice under an assumed name.  He later published a work
called, perhaps in imitation of Calvin's _Institutio, The Restitution
of Christianity_, setting forth his ideas about the Trinity, which he
compared to the three-headed monster Cerberus, but admitting the
divinity of Christ.  He also denied the doctrine of original sin and
asserted that baptism should be for adults only.  He was poorly advised
in sending this book to the Reformer, with whom he had some
correspondence.  With Calvin's knowledge and probably at his
instigation, though he later issued an equivocating denial, William
Trie, of Geneva, denounced Servetus to the Catholic inquisition at
Vienne and forwarded the material sent by the heretic to Calvin.  On
June 17, 1553, the Catholic inquisitor, expressly stating that he acted
on this material, condemned Servetus to be burnt by slow fire, but he
escaped and went to Geneva.

Here he was recognized and arrested.  Calvin at once appeared as his
prosecutor for heresy.  The charges against him were chiefly concerned
with his denial of the Trinity and of infant baptism, and with his
attack on the person and teaching of Calvin.  As an example of the
point to which Bibliolatry could suppress candor it may be mentioned
that one of the {178} charges against him was that he had asserted
Palestine to be a poor land.  This was held to contradict the
Scriptural statement that it was a land flowing with milk and honey.
The minutes of the trial are painful reading.  It was conducted on both
sides with unbecoming violence.  Among other expressions used by
Calvin, the public prosecutor, were these: that he regarded Servetus's
defence as no better than the braying of an ass, and that the prisoner
was like a villainous cur wiping his muzzle.  Servetus answered in the
same tone, his spirit unbroken by abuse and by his confinement in a
horrible dungeon, where he suffered from hunger, cold, vermin, and
disease.  He was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to be burnt with
slow fire.  Calvin said that he tried to alter the manner of execution,
but there is not a shred of evidence, in the minutes of the trial or
elsewhere, that he did so.  Possibly, if he made the request, it was
purely formal, as were similar petitions for mercy made by the Roman
inquisitors.  At any rate, while Calvin's alleged effort for mercy
proved fruitless, he visited his victim in prison to read him a
self-righteous and insulting lecture.  Farel, also, reviled him on the
way to the stake, at which he perished on October 26, 1553, [Sidenote:
Death of Servetus] crying, "God preserve my soul!  O Jesus, Son of the
eternal God, have mercy on me!"  Farel called on the bystanders to
witness that these words showed the dying man to be still in the power
of Satan.

This act of persecution, one of the most painful in the history of
Christianity, was received with an outburst of applause from almost all
quarters.  Melanchthon, who had not been on speaking terms with Calvin
for some years, was reconciled to him by what he called "a signal act
of piety."  Other leading Protestants congratulated Calvin, who
continued persecution systematically.  Another victim of his was
Matthew {179} Gribaldi, whom he delivered into the hands of the
government of Berne, with a refutation of his errors.  [Sidenote:
1564.]  Had he not died of the plague in prison he would probably have
suffered the same fate as Servetus.

[Sidenote: Complete theocracy, 1555]

Strengthened by his victory over heresy, Calvin now had the chance to
annihilate his opponents.  On May 15, 1555, he accused a number of them
of treason, and provided proof by ample use of the rack.  With the
party of Libertines completely broken, Calvin ruled from this time
forth with a rod of iron.  The new Geneva was so cowed and subservient
that the town council dared not install a new sort of heating apparatus
without asking the permission of the theocrat.  But a deep rancor
smouldered under the surface.  "Our incomparable theologian Calvin,"
wrote Ambrose Blaurer to Bullinger, "labors under such hatred of some
whom he obscures by his light that he is considered the worst of
heretics by them."  Among other things he was accused of levying
tribute from his followers by a species of blackmail, threatening
publicly to denounce them unless they gave money to the cause.

[Sidenote: International Calvinism]

At the same time his international power and reputation rose.  Geneva
became the capital of Protestantism, from which mandates issued to all
the countries of Western Europe.  Englishmen and Frenchmen, Dutchmen
and Italians, thronged to "this most perfect school of Christ since the
apostles" to learn the laws of a new type of Christianity.  For
Calvin's Reformation was more thorough and logical than was Luther's.
The German had regarded all as permitted that was not forbidden, and
allowed the old usages to stand in so far as they were not repugnant to
the ordinances of the Bible.  But Calvin believed that all was
forbidden save what was expressly allowed, and hence abolished as
superstitious accretions all the elements of the medieval cult that
could find no warrant in the {180} Bible.  Images, vestments, organs,
bells, candles, ritual, were swept away in the ungarnished
meeting-house to make way for a simple service of Bible-reading,
prayer, hymn and sermon.  The government of the church was left by
Calvin in close connection with the state, but he apparently turned
around the Lutheran conception, making the civil authority subordinate
to the spiritual and not the church to the state.

Whereas Lutheranism appealed to Germans and Scandinavians, Calvinism
became the international form of Protestantism.  Even in Germany Calvin
made conquests at the expense of Luther, but outside of Germany, in
France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, he moulded the type of reformed
thought in his own image.  It is difficult to give statistics, for it
is impossible to say how far each particular church, like the Anglican
for example, was indebted to Calvin, how far to Luther, and how far to
other leaders, and also because there was a strong reaction against
pure Calvinism even in the sixteenth century.  But it is safe to say
that the clear, cold logic of the _Institutes_, the good French and
Latin of countless other treatises and letters, and the political
thought which amalgamated easily with rising tides of democracy and
industrialism, made Calvin the leader of Protestantism outside of the
Teutonic countries of the north.  His gift for organization and the
pains he took to train ministers and apostles contributed to this
success.

[Sidenote: Death of Calvin, May 27, 1564]

On May 27, 1564 Calvin died, worn out with labor and ill health at the
age of fifty-five.  With a cold heart and a hot temper, he had a clear
brain, an iron will, and a real moral earnestness derived from the
conviction that he was a chosen vessel of Christ.  Constantly tortured
by a variety of painful diseases, he drove himself, by the demoniac
strength of his will, to perform labor that would have taxed the
strongest.  {181} The way he ruled his poor, suffering body is symbolic
of the way he treated the sick world.  To him the maladies of his own
body, or of the body politic, were evils to be overcome, at any cost of
pain and sweat and blood, by a direct effort of the will.  As he never
yielded to fever and weakness in himself, so he dealt with the vice and
frivolity he detested, crushing it out by a ruthless application of
power, hunting it with spies, stretching it on the rack and breaking it
on the wheel.  But a gentler, more understanding method would have
accomplished more, even for his own purpose.

[Sidenote: Beza, 1519-1605]

His successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, was a man after his own heart
but, as he was far weaker, the town council gradually freed itself from
spiritual tyranny.  Towards the end of the century the pastors had been
humbled and the questions of the day were far less the dogmatic
niceties they loved than ethical ones such as the right to take usury,
the proper penalty for adultery, the right to make war, and the best
form of government.



[1] "Decretum Dei aeternum horribile."

[2] See below.  Chapter X, section 3.




{182}

CHAPTER IV

FRANCE

SECTION 1.   RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

[Sidenote: France]

Though, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the French may have
attained to no greater degree of national self-consciousness than had
the Germans, they had gone much farther in the construction of a
national state.  The significance of this evolution, one of the
strongest tendencies of modern history, is that it squares the outward
political condition of the people with their inward desires.  When once
a nation has come to feel itself such, it cannot be happy until its
polity is united in a homogeneous state, though the reverse is also
true,--that national feeling is sometimes the result as well as the
cause of political union.  With the growth of a common language and of
common ideals, and with the improvement of the methods of
communication, the desire of the people for unity became stronger and
stronger, until it finally overcame the centrifugal forces of feudalism
and of particularism.  These were so strong in Germany that only a very
imperfect federation could be formed by way of national government, but
in France, though they were still far from moribund, external pressure
and the growth of the royal power had forged the various provinces into
a nation such as it exists today.  The most independent of the old
provinces, Brittany, was now united to the crown by the marriage of its
duchess Anne to Louis XII.  [Sidenote: Louis XII, 1498-1515]

{183}

  Anne       ==_Louis XII_            Charles, Count==Louise
  Duchess of | _1498-1515_            of Angouleme  |  of Savoy
  Brittany   |                                      |
             |                                      |
             |                                      |
             |                                      |
   +---------+-------------+                        |
   |2                     1|                        |
 Renee==Hercules II,   Claude==(1)_Francis I_    Margaret==(1)Charles,
        Duke of              |    _1515-47_                   Duke of
        Ferrara              | (2)==Eleanor,                  Alencon
                             |    sister of              ==(2)Henry II,
                             |    Emperor                |    King of
                             |    Charles V              |    Navarre
                             |                           |
                         _Henry II_==Catharine de'       |
                         _1547-59_ | Medici d. 1589     Joan  ==Anthony
                                   |                  d'Albret| of
                                   |                          | Bourbon
                                   |                          | Duke of
                                   |                          | Vendome
       +--------+------+------+----+-+----------------+       |
       |        |      |      |      |                |       |
 _Francis II_,  | _Henry III_ |  Elizabeth       (1)Margaret==_Henry IV_,
  _1559-60_     |  _1574-89_  |  ==(3)Philip II  (2)Mary de'  1589-1610
 ==Mary, Queen  |             |  King of Spain      Medici
    of Scots    |             |
                |             |
           _Charles IX_   Francis, Duke
            _1560-74_     of Alencon and
                          Anjou, d. 1584


 [Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute
  for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the
  person's year of death.]

Geographically, France was nearly the same four hundred years ago as it
is today, save that the eastern {184} frontier was somewhat farther
west.  The line then ran west of the three Bishoprics, Verdun, Metz and
Toul, west of Franche Comte, just east of Lyons and again west of Savoy
and Nice.

Politically, France was then one of a group of semi-popular,
semi-autocratic monarchies.  The rights of the people were asserted by
the States General which met from time to time, usually at much longer
intervals than the German Diets or the English Parliaments, and by the
Parlements of the various provinces.  These latter were rather high
courts of justice than legislative assemblies, but their right to
register new laws gave them a considerable amount of authority.  The
Parlement of Paris was the most conspicuous and perhaps the most
powerful.

[Sidenote: Concordat, 1516]

The power of the monarch, resting primarily on the support of the
bourgeois class, was greatly augmented by the Concordat of 1516, which
made the monarch almost the supreme head of the Gallican church.  For
two centuries the crown had been struggling to attain this position.
It was because so large a degree of autonomy was granted to the
national church that the French felt satisfied not to go to the extreme
of secession from the Roman communion.  It was because the king had
already achieved a large control over his own clergy that he felt it
unnecessary or inadvisable to go to the lengths of the Lutheran princes
and of Henry VIII.  In that one important respect the Concordat of
Bologna took the place of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Francis I, 1515-47]

Francis I was popular and at first not unattractive.  Robust, fond of
display, ambitious, intelligent enough to dabble in letters and art, he
piqued himself on being chivalrous and brave.  But he wasted his life
and ruined his health in the pursuit of pleasure.  His face, as it has
come down to us in contemporary paintings, is disagreeable.  He was, as
with unusual candor a {185} contemporary observer put it, a devil even
to the extent of considerably looking it.

While to art and letters Francis gave a certain amount of attention, he
usually from mere indolence allowed the affairs of state to be guided
by others.  Until the death of his mother, Louise of Savoy, [Sidenote:
1531] he was ruled by her.  Thereafter the Constable Anne de
Montmorency was his chief minister.  The policy followed was the
inherited one which was, to a certain point, necessary in the given
conditions.  In domestic affairs, the king or his advisors endeavored
to increase the power of the crown at the expense of the nobles.  The
last of the great vassals strong enough to assert a quasi-independence
of the king was Charles of Bourbon.  [Sidenote: 1523-4]  He was
arrested and tried by the Parlement of Paris, which consistently
supported the crown.  Fleeing from France he entered the service of
Charles V, [Sidenote: 1526] and his restoration was made an article of
the treaty of Madrid.  His death in the sack of Rome closed the
incident in favor of the king.  [Sidenote: May, 1527]

The foreign policy of France was a constant struggle, now by diplomacy,
now by arms, with Charles V.  The principal remaining powers of Europe,
England, Turkey and the pope, threw their weight now on one side now on
the other of the two chief antagonists.  Italy was the field of most of
the battles.  Francis began his reign by invading that country and
defeating the Swiss at Marignano, thus conquering Milan.  [Sidenote:
September 14-15, 1515]  The campaigns in Italy and Southern France
culminated in the disastrous defeat of the French at Pavia.  [Sidenote:
February 24, 1525]  Francis fought in person and was taken prisoner.
"Of all things nothing is left me but honor and life," he wrote his
mother.

Francis hoped that he would be freed on the payment of ransom according
to the best models of chivalry.  He found, however, when he was removed
to {186} Madrid in May, that his captor intended to exact the last
farthing of diplomatic concession.  Discontent in France and the ennui
and illness of the king finally forced him to sign a most
disadvantageous treaty, [Sidenote: January 14, 1526] renouncing the
lands of Burgundy, Naples and Milan, and ceding lands to Henry VIII.
The king swore to the document, pledged his knightly honor, and as
additional securities married Eleanor the sister of Charles and left
two of his sons as hostages.

Even when he signed it, however, he had no intention of executing the
provisions of the treaty which, he secretly protested, had been wrung
from him by force.  The deputies of Burgundy refused to recognize the
right of France to alienate them.  Henry VIII at once made an alliance
against the "tyranny and pride" of the emperor.  Charles was so
chagrined that he challenged Francis to a duel.  This opera bouffe
performance ended by each monarch giving the other "the lie in the
throat."

Though France succeeded in making with new allies, the pope and Venice,
the League of Cognac, [Sidenote: May, 1526] and though Germany was at
that time embarrassed by the Turkish invasion, the ensuing war turned
out favorably to the emperor.  The ascendancy of Charles was so marked
that peace again had to be made in his favor in 1529.  The treaty of
Cambrai, as it was called, was the treaty of Madrid over again except
that Burgundy was kept by France.  She gave up, however, Lille, Douai
and other territory in the north and renounced her suzerainty over
Milan and Naples.  Francis agreed to pay a ransom of two million crowns
for his sons.  Though he was put to desperate straits to raise the
money, levying a 40 per cent. income tax on the clergy and a 10 per
cent. income tax on the nobles, he finally paid the money and got back
his children in 1530.

By this time France was so exhausted, both in {187} money and men, that
a policy of peace was the only one possible for some years.
Montmorency, the principal minister of the king, continued by an active
diplomacy to stir up trouble for Charles.  While suppressing Lutherans
at home he encouraged the Schmalkaldic princes abroad, going to the
length of inviting Melanchthon to France in 1535.  With the English
minister Cromwell he came to an agreement, notwithstanding the
Protestant tendencies of his policy.  An alliance was also made with
the Sultan Suleiman, secretly in 1534, and openly proclaimed in 1536.
In order to prepare for the military strife destined to be renewed at
the earliest practical moment, an ordinance of 1534 reorganized and
strengthened the army.

Far more important for the life of France than her incessant and
inconclusive squabbling with Spain was the transformation passing over
her spirit.  It is sometimes said that if the French kings brought
nothing else back from their campaigns in Italy they brought back the
Renaissance.  [Sidenote: Reformation]  There is a modicum of truth in
this, for there are some traces of Italian influence before the reign
of Francis I.  But the French spirit hardly needed this outside
stimulus.  It was awakening of itself.  Scholars like William Bude and
the Estiennes, thinkers like Dolet and Rabelais, poets like Marot, were
the natural product of French soil.  Everywhere, north of the Alps no
less than south, there was a spontaneous efflorescence of intellectual
activity.

The Reformation is often contrasted or compared with the Renaissance.
In certain respects, where a common factor can be found, this may
profitably be done.  But it is important to note how different in kind
were the two movements.  One might as well compare Darwinism and
Socialism in our own time.  The one was a new way of looking at things,
a fresh {188} intellectual start, without definite program or
organization.  The other was primarily a thesis: a set of tenets the
object of which was concrete action.  The Reformation began in France
as a school of thought, but it soon grew to a political party and a new
church, and finally it evolved into a state within the state.

[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]

Though it is not safe to date the French Reformation before the
influence of Luther was felt, it is possible to see an indigenous
reform that naturally prepared the way for it.  Its harbinger was
Lefevre d'Etaples.  This "little Luther" wished to purify the church,
to set aside the "good works" thereof in favor of faith, and to make
the Bible known to the people.  He began to translate it in 1521,
publishing the Gospels in June 1523 and the Epistles and Acts and
Apocalypse in October and November.  The work was not as good as that
of Luther or Tyndale.  It was based chiefly on the Vulgate, though not
without reference to the Greek text.  Lefevre prided himself on being
literal, remarking, with a side glance at Erasmus's _Paraphrases_, that
it was dangerous to try to be more elegant than Scripture.  He also
prided himself on writing for the simple, and was immensely pleased
with the favorable reception the people gave his work.  To reach the
hearts of the poor and humble he instituted a reform of preaching,
instructing his friends to purge their homilies of the more grossly
superstitious elements and of the scholastic theology.  Instead of this
they were to preach Christ simply with the aim of touching the heart,
not of dazzling the mind.

Like-minded men gathering around Lefevre formed a new school of
thought.  It was a movement of revival within the church; its leaders,
wishing to keep all the old forms and beliefs, endeavored to infuse
into them a new spirit.  To some extent they were in conscious reaction
against the intellectualism of Erasmus {189} and the Renaissance.  On
the other hand they were far from wishing to follow Luther, when he
appeared, in his schism.

Among the most famous of these mystical reformers were William
Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, and his disciple, Margaret d'Angouleme,
sister of Francis I.  Though a highly talented woman Margaret was weak
and suggestible.  She adored her dissolute brother and was always, on
account of her marriages, first with Charles, duke of Alencon,
[Sidenote: 1509] and then with Henry d'Albret, king of Navarre,
[Sidenote: 1527] put in the position of a suppliant for his support.
She carried on an assiduous correspondence with Briconnet as her
spiritual director, being attracted first by him and then by Luther,
chiefly, as it seems, through the wish to sample the novelty of their
doctrines.  She wrote _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_ in the best style
of penitent piety.  [Sidenote: 1531]  Its central idea is the love of
God and of the "debonnaire" Jesus.  She knew Latin and Italian, studied
Greek and Hebrew, and read the Bible regularly, exhorting her friends
to do the same.  She coquetted with the Lutherans, some of whom she
protected in France and with others of whom in Germany she
corresponded.  She was strongly suspected of being a Lutheran, though a
secret one.  Capito dedicated to her a commentary on Hosea; Calvin had
strong hopes of winning her to an open profession, but was
disappointed.  Her house, said he, which might have become the family
of Jesus Christ, harbored instead servants of the devil.  Throughout
life she kept the accustomed Catholic rites, and wrote with much
respect to Pope Paul III.  But fundamentally her religious idealism was
outside of any confession.

This mystically pious woman wrote, in later life, the _Heptameron_, a
book of stories published posthumously.  Modelled on the _Decameron_,
it consists {190} almost entirely of licentious stories, told without
reprobation and with gusto.  If the mouth speaketh from the fullness of
the heart she was as much a sensualist in thought as her brother was in
deed.  The apparent contradictions in her are only to be explained on
the theory that she was one of those impressionable natures that,
chameleon-like, always take on the hue of their environment.

But though the work of Lefevre and of Briconnet, who himself gave his
clergy an example of simple, biblical preaching, won many followers not
only in Meaux but in other cities, it would never have produced a
religious revolt like that in Germany.  The Reformation was an
importation into France; "The key of heresy," as John Bouchet said in
1531, "was made of the fine iron of Germany."  At first almost all the
intellectuals hailed Luther as an ally.  Lefevre sent him a greeting in
1519, and in the same year Bude spoke well of him.  His books were at
this time approved even by some doctors of the Sorbonne.  But it took a
decade of confusion and negation to clarify the situation sufficiently
for the French to realize the exact import of the Lutheran movement,
which completely transformed the previously existing policy of Lefevre.
The chief sufferer by the growth of Lutheranism was not at first the
Catholic church but the party of Catholic reform.  The schism rent the
French evangelicals before it seriously affected the church.  Some of
them followed the new light and others were forced back into a
reactionary attitude.

[Sidenote: Luther's books.]

The first emissaries of Luther in France were his books.  Froben
exported a volume containing nearly all he had published up to October,
1518, immediately and in large quantities to Paris.  In 1520 a student
there wrote that no books were more quickly bought.  At first only the
Latin ones were intelligible to the {191} French, but there is reason
to believe that very early translations into the vernacular were made,
though none of this period have survived.  It was said that the books,
which kept pouring in from Frankfort and Strassburg and Basle, excited
the populace against the theologians, for the people judged them by the
newly published French New Testament.  A bishop complained that the
common people were seduced by the vivacity of the heretic's style.
[Sidenote: 1523]

It did not take the Sorbonne long to define its position as one of
hostility.  The university, which had been lately defending the
Gallican liberties and had issued an appeal from pope to future
council, was one of the judges selected by the disputants of the
Leipzig debate.  Complete records of the speeches, taken by notaries,
were accordingly forwarded to Paris by Duke George of Saxony, with a
request for an opinion.  After brief debate the condemnation of Luther
by the university was printed.  [Sidenote: April 15, 1521]

Neither was the government long in taking a position.  That it should
be hostile was a foregone conclusion.  Francis hated Lutheranism
because he believed that it tended more to the overthrow of kingdoms
and monarchies than to the edification of souls.  He told Aleander, the
papal nuncio, that he thought Luther a rascal and his doctrine
pernicious.  [Sidenote: March, 1521]

[Sidenote: April 1523]

The king was energetically seconded by the Parlement of Paris.  A royal
edict provided that no book should be printed without the imprimatur of
the university.  The king next ordered the extirpation of the errors of
Martin Luther of Saxony, and, having begun by burning books, continued,
as Erasmus observed was usually the case, by burning people.  The first
to suffer was John Valliere.  At the same time Briconnet was summoned
to Paris, [Sidenote: 1523] sharply reprimanded for leniency to heretics
and fined two hundred livres, in {192} consequence of which he issued
two decrees against the heresy, charging it with attempting to subvert
the hierarchy and to abolish sacerdotal celibacy.  [Sidenote: 1524]
When Lefevre's doctrines were condemned, he submitted; those of his
disciples who failed to do so were proscribed.  But the efforts of the
government became more strenuous after 1524.  Francis was at this time
courting the assistance of the pope against the emperor, and moreover
he was horrified by the outbreak of the Peasants' War in Germany.
Convinced of the danger of allowing the new sect to propagate itself
any further he commanded the archbishops and bishops of his realm to
"proceed against those who hold, publish and follow the heresies,
errors and doctrines of Martin Luther."  [Sidenote: 1525]  Lefevre and
some of his friends fled to Strassburg.  Arrests and executions against
those who were sometimes called "heretics of Meaux," and sometimes
Lutherans, followed.

The theologians did not leave the whole burden of the battle to the
government.  A swarm of anti-Lutheran tracts issued from the press.
Not only the heresiarch, but Erasmus and Lefevre were attacked.  Their
translations of the Bible were condemned as blasphemies against Jerome
and against the Holy Ghost and as subverting the foundations of the
Christian religion.  Luther's sacramental dogmas and his repudiation of
monastic vows were refuted.

Nevertheless the reform movement continued.  At this stage it was
urban, the chief centers being Paris, Meaux, and Lyons.  Many merchants
and artisans were found among the adherents of the new faith.  While
none of a higher rank openly professed it, theology became, under the
lead of Margaret, a fashionable subject.  Conventicles were formed to
read the Bible in secret not only among the middle classes but also at
court.  Short tracts continued to be the best {193} methods of
propaganda, and of these many were translations.  Louis de Berquin of
Artois, [Sidenote: Berquin, 1490-1529] a layman, proved the most
formidable champion of the new opinions.  Though he did little but
translate other men's work he did that with genius.  His version of
Erasmus's _Manual of a Christian Knight_ was exquisitely done, and his
version of Luther's _Tesseradecas_ did not fall short of it.  Tried and
condemned in 1523, he was saved by the king at the behest of Margaret.
[Sidenote: 1526]  The access of rigor during the king's captivity gave
place to a momentary tolerance.  Berquin, who had been arrested, was
liberated, and Lefevre recalled from exile.  But the respite was brief.
Two years later, Berquin was again arrested, tried, condemned, and
executed speedily to prevent reprieve on April 17, 1529.  But the
triumph of the conservatives was more apparent than real.  Lutheranism
continued to gain silently but surely.

While the Reformation was growing in strength and numbers, it was also
becoming more definite and coherent.  Prior to 1530 it was almost
impossible to tell where Lutheranism began and where it ended.  There
was a large, but vague and chaotic public opinion of protest against
the existing order.  But after 1530 it is possible to distinguish
several parties, three of which at first reckoned among the supporters
of the Reformation, now more or less definitely separated themselves
from it.  The first of these was the party of Meaux, the leaders of
which submitted to the government and went their own isolated way.
Then there was a party of Erasmian reform, mainly intellectual but
profoundly Christian.  Its leader, William Bude, felt, as did Erasmus,
that it was possible to unite the classical culture of the Renaissance
with a purified Catholicism.  Attached to the church, and equally
repelled by some of the dogmas and by the apparent {194} social effects
of the Reformation, Bude, who had spoken well of Luther in 1519,
repudiated him in 1521.

[Sidenote: Humanists]

Finally there was the party of the "Libertines" or free-thinkers, the
representatives of the Renaissance pure and simple.  Revolutionaries in
their own way, consciously rebels against the older culture of the
Middle Ages, though prepared to canvass the new religion and to toy
with it, even to use it as an ally against common enemies, the interest
of these men was fundamentally too different from that of the Reformers
to enable them to stand long on the same platform.  There was Clement
Marot, [Sidenote: Marot] a charming but rather aimless poet, a protege
of Margaret and the ornament of a frivolous court.  Though his poetic
translation of the Psalms became a Protestant book, his poetry is often
sensual as well as sensuous.  Though for a time absenting himself from
court he re-entered it in 1536 at the same time "abjuring his errors."

[Sidenote: Rabelais]

Of the same group was Francis Rabelais, whose _Pantagruel_ appeared in
1532.  Though he wrote Erasmus saying that he owed all that he was to
him, he in fact appropriated only the irony and mocking spirit of the
humanist without his deep underlying piety.  He became a universal
skeptic, and a mocker of all things.  The "esprit gaulois," beyond all
others alive to the absurdities and inconsistency of things, found in
him its incarnation.  He ridiculed both the "pope-maniacs" and the
"pope-phobes," the indulgence-sellers and the inquisitors, the
decretals "written by an angel" and the Great Schism, priests and kings
and doubting philosophers and the Scripture.  Paul III called him "the
vagabond of the age."  Calvin at first reckoned him among those who
"had relished the gospel," but when he furiously retorted that he
considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva
loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} _Treatise on
Offences_.  Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic
fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life
eternal."  William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from
the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when
he wrote Calvin on May 25, 1553: "I fear that avarice, that root of
evil, has extinguished all faith and piety in the poets of Margaret.
Judas, having sold Christ and taken the biretta, instead of Christ has
that hard master Satan." [1]

[Sidenote: Catholic reform]

The stimulus given by the various attacks on the church, both
Protestant and infidel, showed itself promptly in the abundant spirit
of reform that sprang up in the Catholic fold.  The clergy and bishop
braced themselves to meet the enemy; they tried in some instances to
suppress scandals and amend their lives; they brushed up their theology
and paid more attention to the Bible and to education.

But the "Lutheran contagion" continued to spread and grow mightily.  In
1525 it was found only at Paris, Meaux, Lyons, Grenoble, Bourges, Tours
and Alencon.  Fifteen years later, though it was still confined largely
to the cities and towns, there were centers of it in every part of
France except in Brittany.  The persecution at Paris only drove the
heretics into hiding or banished them to carry their opinions broadcast
over the land.  The movement swept from the north and east.  The
propaganda was not the work of one class but of all save that of the
great nobles.  It was not yet a social or class affair, but a purely
intellectual and religious one.  It is impossible to {196} estimate the
numbers of the new sect.  In 1534 Aleander said there were thirty
thousand Lutherans in Paris alone.  On the contrary Rene du Bellay said
that there were fewer in 1533 than there were ten years, previous.
[Sidenote: Protestant progress]  True it is that the Protestants were
as yet weak, and were united rather in protest against the established
order than as a definite and cohesive party.  Thus, the most popular
and successful slogans of the innovators were denunciation of the
priests as anti-Christs and apostates, and reprobation of images and of
the mass as idolatry.  Other catchwords of the reformers were, "the
Bible" and "justification by faith."  The movement was without a head
and without organization.  Until Calvin furnished these the principal
inspiration came from Luther, but Zwingli and the other German and
Swiss reformers were influential.  More and more, Lefevre and his
school sank into the background.

For a time it seemed that the need of leadership was to be supplied by
William Farel.  His learning, his eloquence, and his zeal, together
with the perfect safety of action that he found in Switzerland, were
the necessary qualifications.  The need for a Bible was at first met by
the version of Lefevre, printed in 1532.  But the Catholic spirit of
this work, based on the Vulgate, was distasteful to the evangelicals.
Farel asked Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new version,
which was completed by February 1535.  Calvin wrote the preface for it.
It was dedicated to "the poor little church of God."  In doctrine it
was thoroughly evangelical, replacing the old "eveques" and "pretres"
by "surveillants" and "anciens," and omitting some of the Apocrypha.

Encouraged by their own growth the Protestants became bolder in their
attacks on the Catholics.  The situation verged more and more towards
violence; {197} neither side, not even the weaker, thought of tolerance
for both.  On the night of October 17-18 some placards, written by
Anthony de Marcourt, were posted up in Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Tours and
Blois and on the doors of the king's chamber at Amboise.  They
excoriated the sacrifice of the mass as a horrible and intolerable
abuse invented by infernal theology and directly counter to the true
Supper of our Lord.  The government was alarmed and took strong steps.
Processions were instituted to appease God for the sacrilege.  Within a
month two hundred persons were arrested, twenty of whom were sent to
the scaffold and the rest banished after confiscation of their goods.

But the government could not afford to continue an uninterruptedly
rigorous policy.  The Protestants found their opportunity in the
exigencies of the foreign situation.  In 1535 Francis was forced by the
increasing menace of the Hapsburgs to make alliance not only with the
infidel but with the Schmalkaldic League.  He would have had no
scruples in supporting abroad the heresy he suppressed at home, but he
found the German princes would accept his friendship on no terms save
those of tolerance to French Protestants.  Accordingly on July 16,
1535, Francis was obliged to publish an edict ordering persecution to
cease and liberating those who were in prison for conscience's sake.

But the respite did not last long.  New rigors were undertaken in April
1538.  Marot retracted his errors, and Rabelais, while not
fundamentally changing his doctrine, greatly softened, in the second
edition of his _Pantagruel_, [Sidenote: 1542] the abusive ridicule he
had poured on the Sorbonne.  But by this time a new era was
inaugurated.  The deaths of Erasmus and Lefevre in 1536 gave the _coup
de grace_ to the party of the Christian {198} Renaissance, and the
publication of Calvin's _Institutes_ in the same year finally gave the
French Protestants a much needed leader and standard.


[1] _Harvard Theological Review_, 1919, p. 209.  Margaret had died
several years before, but Rabelais was called her poet because he had
claimed her protection and to her wrote a poem in 1545.  _Oeuvres de
Rabelais_, ed. A. Lefranc, 1912, i, pp. xxiii, cxxxix.  _Cf_. also
Calvin's letter to the Queen of Navarre, April 28, 1545.  _Opera_, xii,
pp. 65 f.


SECTION 2.  THE CALVINIST PARTY.  1536-1559

[Sidenote: Truce of Nice, 1538]

The truce of Nice providing for a cessation of hostilities between
France and the Hapsburgs for ten years, was greeted with much joy in
France.  Bonfires celebrated it in Paris, and in every way the people
made known their longing for peace.  Little the king cared for the
wishes of his loyal subjects when his own dignity, real or imagined,
was at stake.  The war with Charles, that cursed Europe like an
intermittent fever, broke out again in 1542.  Again France was the
aggressor and again she was worsted.  The emperor invaded Champagne in
person, arriving, in 1544, at a point within fifty miles of Paris.  As
there was no army able to oppose him it looked as if he would march as
a conqueror to the capital of his enemy.  But he sacrificed the
advantage he had over France to a desire far nearer his heart, that of
crushing his rebellious Protestant subjects.  Already planning war with
the League of Schmalkalden he wished only to secure his own safety from
attack by his great rival.  [Sidenote: Treaty of Crepy, 1544]  The
treaty made at Crepy was moderate in its terms and left things largely
as they were.

[Sidenote: Henry II, 1547-59]

On March 31, 1547, Francis I died and was succeeded by his son, Henry
II, a man of large, strong frame, passionately fond of all forms of
exercise, especially of hunting and jousting.  He had neither his
father's versatility nor his fickleness nor his artistic interests.
His policy was influenced by the aim of reversing his father's wishes
and of disgracing his father's favorites.

[Sidenote: 1533]

While his elder brother was still alive, Henry had married Catharine
de' Medici, a daughter of Lorenzo {199} II de' Medici of Florence.  The
girl of fourteen in a foreign country was uncomfortable, especially as
it was felt, after her husband became Dauphin, that her rank was not
equal to his.  The failure to have any children during the first ten
years of marriage made her position not only unpleasant but precarious,
but the birth of her first son made her unassailable.  In rapid
succession she bore ten children, seven of whom survived childhood.
Though she had little influence on affairs of state during her
husband's reign, she acquired self-confidence and at last began to talk
and act as queen.

[Sidenote: Diana of Poitiers]

At the age of seventeen Henry fell in love with a woman of thirty-six,
Diana de Poitiers, to whom his devotion never wavered until his death,
when she was sixty.  Notwithstanding her absolute ascendancy over her
lover she meddled little with affairs of state.

[Sidenote: Admiral Coligny, 1519-72]

The direction of French policy at this time fell largely into the hands
of two powerful families.  The first was that of Coligny.  Of three
brothers the ablest was Gaspard, Admiral of France, a firm friend of
Henry's as well as a statesman and warrior.  Still more powerful was
the family of Guise, the children of Claude, Duke of Guise, who died in
1527.  [Sidenote: Francis of Guise]  The eldest son, Francis, Duke of
Guise, was a great soldier.  His brother, Charles, Cardinal of
Lorraine, won a high place in the councils of state, and his sister
Mary, by her marriage with James V of Scotland, brought added prestige
to the family.  The great power wielded by this house owed much to the
position of their estates, part of which were fiefs of the French king
and part subject to the Empire.  As suited their convenience they could
act either as Frenchmen or as foreign nobles.

[Sidenote: Expansion]

Under Henry France enjoyed a period of expansion such as she had not
had for many years.  The {200} perpetual failures of Francis were at
last turned into substantial successes.  This was due in large part to
the civil war in Germany and to the weakness of England's rulers,
Edward VI and Mary.  It was due in part to the irrepressible energy of
the French bourgeois and gentlemen, in part to the genius of Francis of
Guise.  The co-operation of France and Turkey, rather an identity of
interests than a formal alliance, a policy equally blamed by
contemporaries and praised by historians, continued.  But the successes
achieved were due most of all to the definite abandonment of the hope
of Italian conquests and to the turning of French arms to regions more
suitable for incorporation under her government.

War having been declared on Charles, the French seized the Three
Bishoprics, at that time imperial fiefs, Metz, Verdun, and Toul.  A
large German army under Alva besieged Metz, but failed to overcome the
brilliant defence of Francis of Guise.  Worn by the attrition of
repulsed assaults and of disease the imperial army melted away.  When
the siege was finally raised Guise distinguished himself as much by the
humanity with which he cared for wounded and sick enemies as he had by
his military prowess.

Six years later Guise added fresh laurels to his fame and new
possessions to France by the conquest of Calais and Guines, the last
English possessions in French territory.  The loss of Calais, which had
been held by England since the Hundred Years War, was an especially
bitter blow to the islanders.  These victories were partly
counterbalanced by the defeats of French armies at St. Quentin on the
Somme [Sidenote: 1557] and by Egmont at Gravelines.  [Sidenote: 1558]
When peace was signed at Cateau-Cambresis, [Sidenote: Peace of
Cateau-Cambresis, 1559] France renounced all her conquests in the
south, but kept the Three Bishoprics and Calais, all of which became
her permanent possessions.

[Sidenote: Calvinism]

{201} While France was thus expanding her borders, the internal
revolution matured rapidly.  The last years of Francis and the reign of
Henry II saw a prodigious growth of Protestantism.  What had begun as a
sect now became, by an evolution similar to that experienced in
Germany, a powerful political party.  It is the general fate of new
causes to meet at first with opposition due to habit and the
instinctive reaction of almost all minds against "the pain of a new
idea."  But if the cause is one suited to the spirit and needs of the
age, it gains more and more supporters, slowly if left to itself,
rapidly if given good organization and adequate means of presenting its
claims.  The thorough canvassing of an idea is absolutely essential to
win it a following.  Now, prior to 1536, the Protestants had got a
considerable amount of publicity as well through their own writings as
through the attacks of their enemies.  But not until Calvin settled at
Geneva and began to write extensively in French, was the cause
presented in a form capable of appealing to the average Frenchman.
Calvin gave not only the best apology for his cause, but also furnished
it with a definite organization, and a coherent program.  He supplied
the dogma, the liturgy, and the moral ideas of the new religion, and he
also created ecclesiastical, political, and social institutions in
harmony with it.  A born leader, he followed up his work with personal
appeals.  His vast correspondence with French Protestants shows not
only much zeal but infinite pains and considerable tact in driving home
the lessons of his printed treatises.

Though the appeal of Calvin's dogmatic system was greater to an age
interested in such things and trained to regard them as highly
important, than we are likely to suppose at present, this was not
Calvinism's only or even its main attraction to intelligent people.
Like {202} every new and genuine reform Calvinism had the advantage of
arousing the enthusiasm of a small but active band of liberals.  The
religious zeal as well as the moral earnestness of the age was
naturally drawn to the Protestant side.  As the sect was persecuted, no
one joined it save from conscientious motives.  Against the laziness or
the corruption of the prelates, too proud or too indifferent to give a
reason for their faith, the innovators opposed a tireless energy in
season and out of season; against the scandals of the court and the
immorality of the clergy they raised the banner of a new and stern
morality; to the fires of martyrdom they replied with the fires of
burning faith.

The missionaries of the Calvinists were very largely drawn from
converted members of the clergy, both secular and regular, and from
those who had made a profession of teaching.  For the purposes of
propaganda these were precisely the classes most fitted by training and
habit to arouse and instruct the people.  Tracts were multiplied, and
they enjoyed, notwithstanding the censures of the Sorbonne, a brisk
circulation.  The theater was also made a means of propaganda, and an
effective one.

Picardy continued to be the stronghold of the Protestants throughout
this period, though they were also strong at Meaux and throughout the
north-east, at Orleans, in Normandy, and in Dauphine.  Great progress
was also made in the south, which later became the most Protestant of
all the sections of France.

[Sidenote: Catholic measures]

Catholics continued to rely on force.  There was a counter-propaganda,
emanating from the University of Paris, but it was feeble.  The
Jesuits, in the reign of Henry II, had one college at Paris and two in
Auvergne; otherwise there was hardly any intellectual effort made to
overcome the reformers.  Indeed, the Catholics hardly had the munitions
for such a combat.  {203} Apart from the great independents, holding
themselves aloof from all religious controversy, the more intelligent
and enterprising portion of the educated class had gone over to the
enemy.

But the government did its best to supply the want of argument by the
exercise of authority.  New and severe edicts against "the heresies and
false doctrines of Luther and his adherents and accomplices" were
issued.  The Sorbonne prohibited the reading and sale of sixty-five
books by name, including the works of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin,
Dolet, and Marot, and all translations of the Bible issued by the
publishing house of Estienne.

The south of France had in earlier centuries been prolific in sects
claiming a Protestantism older than that of Augsburg.  Like the
Bohemian Brethren they eagerly welcomed the Calvinists as allies and
were rapidly enrolled in the new church.  Startled by the stirring of
the spirit of reform, the Parlement of Aix, acting in imitation of
Simon de Monfort, [Sidenote: 1540] ordered two towns, Merindol and
Cabrieres, destroyed for their heresy.  The sentence was too drastic
for the French government to sanction immediately; it was therefore
postponed by command of the king, but it was finally executed, at least
in part.  [Sidenote: 1545]  A ghastly massacre took place in which
eight hundred or more of the Waldenses perished.  A cry of horror was
raised in Germany, in Switzerland, and even in France, from which the
king himself recoiled in terror.

Only a few days after his accession Henry issued an edict against
blasphemy, and this was followed by a number of laws against heresy.  A
new court of justice was created to deal with heretics.  [Sidenote:
October 8, 1547]  From its habit of sending its victims to the stake it
soon became known as the Chambre Ardente.  Its powers were so extensive
that the clergy protested against them as {204} infringements of their
rights.  In its first two years it pronounced five hundred
sentences,--and what sentences!  Even in that cruel age its punishments
were frightful.  Burning alive was the commonest.  If the heretic
recanted on the scaffold he was strangled before the fire was lit; if
he refused to recant his tongue was cut out.  [Sidenote: June, 1551]
Those who were merely suspected were cast into dungeons from which many
never came out alive.  Torture was habitually used to extract
confession.  For those who recanted before sentence milder, but still
severe, punishments were meted out: imprisonment and various sorts of
penance.  By the edict of Chateaubriand a code of forty-six articles
against heresy was drawn up, and the magistrate empowered to put
suspected persons under surveillance.

In the face of this fiery persecution the conduct of the Calvinists was
wonderfully fine.  They showed great adroitness in evading the law by
all means save recantation and great astuteness in using what poor
legal means of defence were at their disposal.  On the other hand they
suffered punishment with splendid constancy and courage, very few
failing in the hour of trial, and most meeting death in a state of
exaltation.  Large numbers found refuge in other lands.  During the
reign of Henry II fourteen hundred fled to Geneva, not to mention the
many who settled in the Netherlands, England, and Germany.

[Sidenote: Protestant growth]

Far from lying passive, the Calvinists took the offensive not only by
writing and preaching but by attacking the images of the saints.  Many
of these were broken or defaced.  One student in the university of
Paris smashed the images of the Virgin and St. Sebastian and a stained
glass window representing the crucifixion, and posted up placards
attacking the cult of the saints.  For this he was pilloried three
times and then shut into a small hole walled in on all sides {205} save
for an aperture through which food was passed him until he died.

Undaunted by persecution the innovators continued to grow mightily in
numbers and strength.  The church at Paris, though necessarily meeting
in secret, was well organized.  The people of the city assembled
together in several conventicles in private houses.  By 1559 there were
forty fully organized churches (_eglises dressees_) throughout France,
and no less than 2150 conventicles or mission churches (_eglises
plantees_).  Estimates of numbers are precarious, but good reason has
been advanced to show that early in the reign of Henry the Protestants
amounted to one-sixth of the population.  Like all enthusiastic
minorities they wielded a power out of proportion to their numbers.
Increasing continually, as they did, it is probable, but for the
hostility of the government, they would have been a match for the
Catholics.  At any rate they were eager to try their strength.  A new
and important fact was that they no longer consisted entirely of the
middle classes.  High officers of government and great nobles began to
join their ranks.  In 1546 the Bishop of Nimes protected them openly,
being himself suspected, probably with justice, of Calvinism.  In 1548
a lieutenant-general was among those prosecuted for heresy.  Anthony of
Bourbon, a descendant of Louis IX, a son of the famous Charles,
Constable of France, and husband of Joan d 'Albret, queen of Navarre,
who was a daughter of Margaret d'Angouleme, became a Protestant.
[Sidenote: 1555]  About the same time the great Admiral Coligny was
converted, though it was some years before he openly professed his
faith.  His brother, d'Andelot, also adhered to the Calvinists but was
later persuaded by the king and by his wife to go back to the Catholic
fold.

So strong had the Protestants become that the {206} French government
was compelled against its will to tolerate them in fact if not in
principle, and to recognize them as a party in the state with a
quasi-constitutional position.  The synod held at Paris in May, 1559,
was evidence that the first stage in the evolution of French
Protestantism was complete.  This assembly drew up a creed called the
_Confessio Gallicana_, setting forth in forty articles the purest
doctrine of Geneva.  Besides affirming belief in the common articles of
Christianity, this confession asserted the dogmas of predestination,
justification by faith only, and the distinctive Calvinistic doctrine
of the eucharist.  The worship of saints was condemned and the
necessity of a church defined.  For this church an organization and
discipline modelled on that of Geneva was provided.  The country was
divided into districts, the churches within which were to send to a
central consistory representatives both clerical and lay, the latter to
be at least equal in number to the former.  Over the church of the
whole nation there was to be a national synod or "Colloque" to which
each consistory was to send one clergyman and one or two lay elders.

Alarmed by the growth of the Protestants, Henry II was just preparing,
after the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, to grapple with them more
earnestly than ever, when he died of a wound accidentally received in a
tournament.  [Sidenote: July 10, 1559]  His death, hailed by Calvin as
a merciful dispensation of Providence, conveniently marks the ending of
one epoch and the beginning of another.  For the previous forty years
France had been absorbed in the struggle with the vast empire of the
Hapsburgs.  For the next forty years she was completely occupied with
the wars of religion.  Externally, she played a weak role because of
civil strife and of a contemptible government.  Indeed, all her
interests, both foreign and domestic, were from this {207} time
forgotten in the intensity of the passions aroused by fanaticism.  The
date of Henry's demise also marks a change in the evolution of the
French government.  Hitherto, for some centuries, the trend had been
away from feudalism to absolute monarchy.  The ideal, "une foi, une
loi, un roi" had been nearly attained.  But this was now checked in two
ways.  The great nobles found in Calvinism an opportunity to assert
their privileges against the king.  The middle classes in the cities,
especially in those regions where sectionalism was still strong, found
the same opportunity but turned it to the advantage of republicanism.
A fierce spirit of resistance not only to the prelates but to the
monarch, was born.  There was even a considerable amount of democratic
sentiment.  The poor clergy, who had become converted to Calvinism,
were especially free in denouncing the inequalities of the old regime
which made of the higher clergy great lords and left the humbler
ministers to starve.  The fact is that the message of Calvinism was
essentially democratic in that the excellence of all Christians and
their perfect equality before God was preached.  [Sidenote: Equality
preached]  Interest in religion and the ability to discuss it was not
confined to a privileged hierarchy, but was shared by the humblest.  In
a ribald play written in 1564 it is said:[1]

  If faut que Jeanne [a servant] entre les pots
  Parle de reformation;
  La nouvelle religion
  A tant fait que les chambrieres,
  Les serviteurs et les tripieres
  En disputent publiquement.

But while the gay courtier and worldling sneered at the religion of
market women and scullerymaids, he had little cause to scoff when he
met the Protestants {208} in debate at the town hall of his city, or on
the field of battle.

Finally, the year 1559 very well marks a stage in the development of
French Protestantism.  Until about 1536 it had been a mere unorganized
opinion, rather a philosophy than a coherent body.  From the date of
the publication of the _Institutes_ to that of the Synod of 1559 the
new church had become organized, self-conscious, and definitely
political in aims.  But after 1559 it became more than a party; it
became an _imperium in imperio_.  There was no longer one government
and one allegiance in France but two, and the two were at war.

[Sidenote: The Huguenots]

It was just at this time that the name of Huguenot applied to the
Protestants, hitherto called "Lutherans," "heretics of Meaux" and, more
rarely, "Calvinists."  The origin of the word, first used at Tours in
1560, is uncertain.  It may possibly come from "le roi Huguet" or
"Hugon," a night spectre; the allusion then would be to the ghostly
manner in which the heretics crept by night to their conventicles.
Huguenot is also found as a family name at Belfort as early as 1425.
It may possibly come from the term "Hausgenossen" as used in Alsace of
those metal-workers who were not taken into the gild but worked at
home, hence a name of contempt like the modern "scab."  It may also
come from the name of the Swiss Confederation, "Eidgenossen," and
perhaps this derivation is the most likely, though it cannot be
considered beyond doubt.  Whatever the origin of the name the picture
of the Huguenot is familiar to us.  Of all the fine types of French
manhood, that of the Huguenot is one of the finest.  Gallic gaiety is
tempered with earnestness; intrepidity is strengthened with a new moral
fibre like that of steel.  Except in the case of a few great lords, who
joined the party without serious conviction, the high standard of the
Huguenot morals was recognized even by their enemies.  In an age of
profligacy the "men of the religion," as they called themselves, walked
the paths of rectitude and sobriety.


[1] Remy Belleau: _La Reconnue_, act 4, scene 2.


{209}

                          Charles, Duke of Bourbon,
                         Constable of France, d. 1527
                                       |
                                       |
             +-------------------------+-----+------------------+
             |                               |                  |
        Anthony, Duke of Vendome     Charles, Cardinal    Louis, Prince
        ==Joan d'Albret, Queen of       of Bourbon           of Conde
        |  Navarre, d. 1562
        |
        |
     _Henry IV_
     _1589-1610_
   ==(1)Margaret of France
   ==(2)Mary de' Medici

 ______________________________________________________________________


                          Claude, Duke of Guise, d. 1527
                                        |
                                        |
            +------------------------+--+------------+
            |                        |               |
            |                        |               |
 Francis, Duke of Guise      Charles, Cardinal      Mary==James V
       d. 1563                 of Lorraine              | of Scotland
          |                                             |
          |                                           Mary, Queen
          |                                            of Scots
          |
    +-----------------------+--------------------+
    |                       |                    |
 Henry, Duke of Guise    Charles, Duke of      Louis, Cardinal of
       d. 1588              Mayenne              Guise, d. 1588


 [Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute
  for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the
  person's year of death.]


{210}

SECTION 3.  THE WARS OF RELIGION.  1559-1598

[Sidenote: Francis II, 1559-60]

Henry II was followed by three of his sons in succession, each of them,
in different degrees and ways, a weakling.  The first of them was
Francis II, a delicate lad of fifteen, who suffered from adenoids.
Child as he was he had already been married for more than a year to
Mary Stuart, a daughter of James V of Scotland and a niece of Francis
of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine.  As she was the one passion of
the morose and feeble king, who, being legally of age was able to
choose his own ministers, the government of the realm fell into the
strong hands of "the false brood of Lorraine."  Fearing and hating
these men above all others the Huguenots turned to the Bourbons for
protection, but the king of Navarre was too weak a character to afford
them much help.  Finding in the press their best weapon the Protestants
produced a flood of pamphlets attacking the Cardinal of Lorraine as
"the tiger of France."

A more definite plan to rid the country of the hated tyranny was that
known as the Conspiracy of Amboise.  Godfrey de Barry, Sieur de la
Renaudie, pledged several hundred Protestants to go in a body to
present a petition to the king at Blois.  How much further their
intentions went is not known, and perhaps was not definitely formulated
by themselves.  The Venetian ambassador spoke in a contemporary
dispatch of a plot to kill the cardinal and also the king if he would
not assent to their counsels, and said that the conspirators relied, to
justify this course, on the {211} declaration of Calvin that it was
lawful to slay those who hindered the preaching of the gospel.  Hearing
of the conspiracy, Guise and his brother were ready.  They transferred
the court from Blois to Amboise, by which move they upset the plans of
the petitioners and also put the king into a more defensible castle.
Soldiers, assembled for the occasion, met the Huguenots as they
advanced in a body towards Amboise, [Sidenote: The tumult of Amboise,
March 1560] shot down La Renaudie and some others on the spot and
arrested the remaining twelve hundred, to be kept for subsequent trial
and execution.  The suspicion that fastened on the prince of Conde, a
brother of the king of Navarre, was given some color by his frank
avowal of sympathy with the conspirators.  Though the Guises pressed
their advantage to the utmost in forbidding all future assemblies of
heretics, the tumult of Amboise was vaguely felt, in the sultry
atmosphere of pent-up passions, to be the avant-courier of a terrific
storm.

The early death of the sickly king left the throne to his brother
Charles IX, a boy of nine.  [Sidenote: Charles IX, 1560-74]  As he was
a minor, the regency fell to his mother, Catharine de' Medici, who for
almost thirty years was the real ruler of France.  [Sidenote: Policy of
Catharine de' Medici]  Notwithstanding what Brantome calls "ung
embonpoint tres-riche," she was active of body and mind.  Her large
correspondence partly reveals the secrets of her power: much tact and
infinite pains to keep in touch with as many people and as many details
of business as possible.  Her want of beauty was supplied by gracious
manners and an elegant taste in art.  As a connoisseur and an
indefatigable collector she gratified her love of the magnificent not
only by beautiful palaces and gorgeous clothes, but in having a store
of pictures, statues, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, silver, books,
and manuscripts.

A "politique" to her fingertips, Catharine had neither sympathy nor
patience with the fanatics who {212} would put their religion above
peace and prosperity.  Surrounded by men as fierce as lions, she showed
no little of the skill and intrepidity of the tamer in keeping them,
for a time, from each others' throats.  Soon after Charles ascended the
throne, she was almost hustled into domestic and foreign war by the
offer of Philip II of Spain to help her Catholic subjects against the
Huguenots without her leave.  She knew if that were done that, as she
scrawled in her own peculiar French, "le Roy mon fils nave jeames
lantyere aubeysance," [1] and she was determined "que personne ne pent
nous brouller en lamitie en la quele je desire que set deus Royaumes
demeurent pendant mauye." [2]  Through her goggle eyes she saw clearly
where lay the path that she must follow.  "I am resolved," she wrote,
"to seek by all possible means to preserve the authority of the king my
son in all things, and at the same time to keep the people in peace,
unity and concord, without giving them occasion to stir or to change
anything."  Fundamentally, this was the same policy as that of Henry
IV.  That she failed where he succeeded is not due entirely to the
difference in ability.  In 1560 neither party was prepared to yield or
to tolerate the other without a trial of strength, whereas a generation
later many members of both parties were sick of war.

[Sidenote: December 13, 1560]

Just as Francis was dying, the States General met at Orleans.  This
body was divided into three houses, or estates, that of the clergy,
that of the nobles, and that of the commons.  The latter was so
democratically chosen that even the peasants voted.  Whether they had
voted in 1484 is not known, but it is certain that they did so in 1560,
and that it was in the interests of the crown to let them vote is shown
by the increase in {213} the number of royal officers among the
deputies of the third estate.  The peasants still regarded the king as
their natural protector against the oppression of the nobles.

The Estates were opened by Catharine's minister, Michael de L'Hopital.
Fully sympathizing with her policy of conciliation, he addressed the
Estates as follows: [Sidenote: February 24, 1561] "Let us abandon those
diabolic words, names of parties, factions and seditions:--Lutherans,
Huguenots, Papists; let us not change the name of Christians."
Accordingly, an edict was passed granting an amnesty to the Huguenots,
nominally for the purpose of allowing them to return to the Catholic
church, but practically interpreted without reference to this proviso.

But the government found it easier to pass edicts than to restrain the
zealots of both parties.  The Protestants continued to smash images;
the Catholics to mob the Protestants.  Paris became, in the words of
Beza, "the city most bloody and murderous among all in the world."
Under the combined effects of legal toleration and mob persecution the
Huguenots grew mightily in numbers and power.  Their natural leader,
the King of Navarre, indeed failed them, for he changed his faith
several times, his real cult, as Calvin remarked, being that of Venus.
His wife, Joan d'Albret, however, became an ardent Calvinist.

At this point the government proposed a means of conciliation that had
been tried by Charles V in Germany and had there failed.  The leading
theologians of both confessions were summoned to a colloquy at Poissy.
[Sidenote: Colloquy of Poissy, August, 1561]  Most of the German
divines invited were prevented by politics from coming, but the noted
Italian Protestant Peter Martyr Vermigli and Theodore Beza of Geneva
were present.  The debate turned on the usual points at issue, and was
of course indecisive, {214} though the Huguenots did not hesitate to
proclaim their own victory.

[Sidenote: January, 1562]

A fresh edict of toleration had hardly been issued when civil war was
precipitated by a horrible crime.  Some armed retainers of the Duke of
Guise, coming upon a Huguenot congregation at Vassy in Champagne,
[Sidenote: Massacre of Vassy, March 1, 1562] attacked them and murdered
three hundred.  A wild cry of fury rose from all the Calvinists;
throughout the whole land there were riots.  At Toulouse, for example,
fighting in the streets lasted four days and four hundred persons
perished.  It was one of the worst years in the history of France.  A
veritable reign of terror prevailed everywhere, and while the crops
were destroyed famine stalked throughout the land.  Bands of robbers
and ravishers, under the names of Christian parties but savages at
heart, put the whole people to ransom and to sack.  Indeed, the Wars of
Religion were like hell; the tongue can describe them better than the
imagination can conceive them.  The whole sweet and pleasant land of
France, from the Burgundian to the Spanish frontier, was widowed and
desolated, her pride humbled by her own sons and her Golden Lilies
trampled in the bloody mire.  Foreign levy was called in to supply
strength to fratricidal arms.  The Protestants, headed by Conde and
Coligny, raised an army and started negotiations with England.  The
Catholics, however, had the best of the fighting.  They captured Rouen,
defended by English troops, and, under Guise, defeated the Huguenots
under Coligny at Dreux.  [Sidenote: December 19, 1562]

[Sidenote: February 18, 1563]

Two months later, Francis of Guise was assassinated by a Protestant
near Orleans.  Coligny was accused of inciting the crime, which he
denied, though he confessed that he was glad of it.  [Sidenote: Edict
of Amboise March 19, 1563]  The immediate beneficiary of the death of
the duke was not the Huguenot, {215} however, so much as Catharine de'
Medici.  Continuing to put into practise her policy of tolerance she
issued an edict granting liberty of conscience to all and liberty of
worship under certain restrictions.  Great nobles were allowed to hold
meetings for divine service according to the reformed manner in their
own houses, and one village in each bailiwick was allowed to have a
Protestant chapel.

How consistently secular was Catharine's policy became apparent at this
time when she refused to publish the decrees of the Council of Trent,
fearing that they might infringe on the liberties of the Gallican
church.  In this she had the full support of most French Catholics.
She continued to work for religious peace.  One of her methods was
characteristic of her and of the time.  She selected "a flying
squadron" of twenty-four beautiful maids of honor of high rank and low
principles to help her seduce the refractory nobles on both sides.  In
many cases she was successful.  Conde, in love with one--or possibly
with several--of these sirens, forgot everything else, his wife, his
party, his religion.  His death in 1569 threw the leadership of the
Huguenots into the steadier and stronger grasp of Coligny.

But such means of dealing with a profoundly dangerous crisis were of
course but the most wretched palliatives.  The Catholic bigots would
permit no dallying with the heretics.  In 1567 they were strong enough
to secure the disgrace of L'Hopital and in the following year to extort
a royal edict unconditionally forbidding the exercise of the reformed
cult.  The Huguenots again rebelled and in 1569 suffered two severe
defeats [Sidenote: Huguenots defeated] at Jarnac and at Moncontour.
The Catholics were jubilant, fully believing, as Sully says, that at
last the Protestants would have to submit.  But nothing is more
remarkable than the apparently slight effect of military success or
failure on the {216} strength and numbers of the two faiths.  "We had
beaten our enemies over and over again," cried the Catholic soldier
Montluc in a rage, "we were winning by force of arms but they triumphed
by means of their diabolical writings."

The Huguenots, however, did not rely entirely on the pen.  Their
stronghold was no longer in the north but was now in the south and
west.  The reason for this may be partly found in the preparation of
the soil for their seed by the medieval heresies, but still more in the
strong particularistic spirit of that region.  The ancient provinces of
Poitou and Guienne, Gascony and Languedoc, were almost as conscious of
their southern and Provencal culture as they were of their French
citizenship.  The strength of the centralizing tendencies lay north of
the Loire; in the south local privileges were more esteemed and more
insisted upon.  While Protestantism was persecuted by the government at
Paris it was often protected by cities of the south.  [Sidenote: La
Rochelle]  The most noteworthy of these was La Rochelle on the Atlantic
coast near Bordeaux.  Though coming late to the support of the
Reformation, its conversion was thorough and lasting.  To protect the
new religion it successfully asserted its municipal freedom almost to
the point of independence.  Like the Dutch Beggars of the Sea its armed
privateers preyed upon the commerce of Catholic powers, a mode of
warfare from which the city derived immense booty.

The Huguenots tried but failed to get foreign allies.  Neither England
nor Germany sent them any help.  [Sidenote: Battle of Mons, July 17,
1572]  Their policy of supporting the revolt of the Low Countries
against Spain turned out disastrously for themselves when the French
under Coligny were defeated at Mons by the troops of Philip.

The Catholics now believed the time ripe for a decisive blow.  Under
the stimulus of the Jesuits they {217} had for a short time been
conducting an offensive and effective propaganda.  Leagues were formed
to combat the organizations of the Huguenots, armed "Brotherhoods of
the Holy Spirit" as they were called.  The chief obstacle in their path
seemed to be a small group of powerful nobles headed by Coligny.
Catharine and the Guises resolved to cut away this obstacle with the
assassin's knife.  Charles, who was personally on good terms with
Coligny, hesitated, but he was too weak a youth to hold out long.
There seems to be good reason to believe that all the queen dowager and
her advisers contemplated was the murder of a few leaders and that they
did not foresee one of the most extensive massacres in history.

Her first attempt to have Coligny assassinated [Sidenote: August 22,
1572] aroused the anger of the Huguenot leaders and made them more
dangerous than before.  A better laid and more comprehensive plan was
therefore carried out on the eve of St. Bartholomew's day.  [Sidenote:
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, August 24, to October 3]  Early in the
evening of August 23, Henry of Guise, a son of Duke Francis, and
Coligny's bitterest personal enemy, went with armed men to the house of
the admiral and murdered him.  From thence they proceeded to the houses
of other prominent Huguenots to slay them in the same manner.  News of
the man-hunt spread through the city with instant rapidity, the mob
rose and massacred all the Huguenots they could find as well as a
number of foreigners, principally Germans and Flemings.  De Thou says
that two thousand were slain in Paris before noon of August 24.  A
general pillage followed.

The king hesitated to assume responsibility for so serious a tumult.
His letters of August 24 to various governors of provinces and to
ambassadors spoke only of a fray between Guise and Coligny, and stated
that he wished to preserve order.  But with these very {218} letters he
sent messengers to all quarters with verbal orders to kill all the
leading Protestants.  On August 27 he again wrote of it as "a great and
lamentable sedition" originating in the desire of Guise to revenge his
father on Coligny.  The king said that the fury of the populace was
such that he was unable to bring the remedy he wished, and he again
issued directions for the preservation of order.  But at the same time
he declared that the Guises had acted at his command to punish those
who had conspired against him and against the old religion.  In fact,
he gave out a rapid series of contradictory accounts and orders, and in
the meantime, from August 25 to October 3 terrible series of massacres
took place in almost all the provinces.  [Sidenote: Other massacres]
Two hundred Huguenots perished at Meaux, from 500 to 1000 at Orleans, a
much larger number at Lyons.  It is difficult to estimate the total
number of victims.  Sully, who narrowly escaped, says that 70,000 were
slain.  Hotman, another contemporary, says 50,000.  Knowing how much
figures are apt to be exaggerated even by judicious men, we must assume
that this number is too large.  On the other hand the lowest estimate
given by modern Catholic investigators, 5000, is certainly too small.
Probably between 10,000 and 20,000 is correct.  Those who fell were the
flower of the party.

Whatever may have been the precise degree of guilt of the French
rulers, which in any case was very grave, they took no pains to conceal
their exultation over an event that had at last, as they believed,
ground their enemies to powder.  In jubilant tone Catharine wrote to
her son-in-law, Philip of Spain, that God had given her son the king of
France the means "of wiping out those of his subjects who were
rebellious to God and to himself."  Philip sent his hearty
congratulations and heard a Te Deum sung.  The pope struck a medal
{219} with a picture of an avenging angel and the legend, "Ugonotorum
strages," and ordered an annual Te Deum which was, in fact, celebrated
for a long time.  But on the other hand a cry of horror arose from
Germany and England.  Elizabeth received the French ambassador dressed
in mourning and declared to him that "the deed had been too bloody."

Though the triumph of the Catholics was loudly shouted, it was not as
complete as they hoped.  The Huguenots seemed cowed for a moment, but
nothing is more remarkable than the constancy of the people.
Recantations were extremely few.  The Reformed pastors, nourished on
the Old Testament, saw in the affliction that had befallen them nothing
but the means of proving the faithful.  Preparations for resistance
were made at once in the principal cities of the south.  [Sidenote:
Siege of La Rochelle]  La Rochelle, besieged by the royal troops,
evinced a heroism worthy of the cause.  While the men repulsed the
furious assaults of the enemy the women built up the walls that
crumbled under the powerful fire of the artillery.  A faction of
citizens who demanded surrender was sternly suppressed and the city
held out until relief came from an unhoped quarter.  The king's
brother, Henry Duke of Anjou, was elected to the throne of Poland on
condition that he would allow liberty of conscience to Polish
Protestants.  In order to appear consistent the French government
therefore stopped for the moment the persecution of the Huguenots.  The
siege of La Rochelle was abandoned and a treaty made allowing liberty
of worship in that city, in Nimes and Montauban and in the houses of
some of the great nobles.

In less than two years after the appalling massacre the Protestants
were again strong and active.  A chant of victory sounded from their
dauntless ranks.  More than ever before they became republican in
principle.  {220} Their pamphleteers, among them Hotman, fiercely
attacked the government of Catharine, and asserted their rights.

Charles was a consumptive.  The hemorrhages characteristic of his
disease reminded him of the torrents of blood that he had caused to
flow from his country.  Broken in body and haunted by superstitious
terrors the wretched man died on May 30, 1574.  [Sidenote: Henry III,
1547-89]  He was succeeded by his brother, Henry III, recently elected
king of Poland, a man of good parts, interested in culture and in
study, a natural orator, not destitute of intelligence.  His mother's
pet and spoiled child, brought up among the girls of the "flying
squadron," he was in a continual state of nervous and sensual
titillation that made him avid of excitement and yet unable to endure
it.  A thunderstorm drove him to hide in the cellar and to tears.  He
was at times overcome by fear of death and hell, and at times had
crises of religious fervour.  But his life was a perpetual debauch,
ever seeking new forms of pleasure in strange ways.  He would walk the
streets at night accompanied by gay young rufflers in search of
adventures.  He had a passion for some handsome young men, commonly
called "the darlings," whom he kept about him dressed as women.

His reign meant a new lease of power to his mother, who worshipped him
and to whom he willingly left the arduous business of government.  By
this time she was bitterly hated by the Huguenots, who paid their
compliments to her in a pamphlet entitled _A wonderful Discourse on the
Life, Deeds and Debauchery of Catharine de' Medici_, perhaps written in
part by the scholar Henry Estienne.  She was accused not only of crimes
of which she was really guilty, like the massacre of St. Bartholomew,
but of having murdered {221} the dauphin Francis, her husband's elder
brother, and others who had died natural deaths, and of having
systematically depraved her children in order to keep the reins of
authority in her own hands.

Frightened by the odium in which his mother was held, Henry III thought
it wise to disavow all part or lot in St. Bartholomew and to concede to
the Huguenots liberty of worship everywhere save in Paris and in
whatever place the court might be for the moment.

So difficult was the position of the king that by this attempt to
conciliate his enemies he only alienated his friends.  The bigoted
Catholics, finding the crown impotent, began to take energetic measures
to help themselves.  In 1576 they formed a League to secure the benefit
of association.  [Sidenote: The League]  Henry Duke of Guise drew up
the declaration that formed the constituent act of the League.  It
proposed "to establish the law of God in its entirety, to reinstate and
maintain divine service according to the form and manner of the holy,
Catholic and apostolic church," and also "to restore to the provinces
and estates of this kingdom the rights, privileges, franchises, and
ancient liberties such as they were in the time of King Clovis, the
first Christian king."  This last clause is highly significant as
showing how the Catholics had now adopted the tactics of the Huguenots
in appealing from the central government to the provincial privileges.
It is exactly the same issue as that of Federalism versus States'
Rights in American history; the party in power emphasizes the national
authority, while the smaller divisions furnish a refuge for the
minority.

The constituency of the League rapidly became large.  The declaration
of Guise was circulated throughout the country something like a monster
petition, and those who wished bound themselves to support it.  The
{222} power of this association of Catholics among nobles and people
soon made it so formidable that Henry III reversed his former policy,
recognized the League and declared himself its head.

[Sidenote: Estates General of Blois]

The elections for the States General held at Blois in 1576 proved
highly favorable to the League.  The chief reason for their
overwhelming success was the abstention of the Protestants from voting.
In continental Europe it has always been and is now common for
minorities to refuse to vote, the idea being that this refusal is in
itself a protest more effective than a definite minority vote would be.
To an American this seems strange, for it has been proved time and
again that a strong minority can do a great deal to shape legislation.
But the Huguenots reasoned differently, and so seated but one
Protestant in the whole assembly, a deputy to the second, or noble,
estate.  The privileged orders pronounced immediately for the
enforcement of religious unity, but in the Third Estate there was a
warm debate.  John Bodin, the famous publicist, though a Catholic,
pleaded hard for tolerance.  As finally passed, the law demanded a
return to the old religion, but added the proviso that the means taken
should be "gentle and pacific and without war."  So impossible was this
in practice that the government was again obliged to issue a decree
granting liberty of conscience and restricted liberty of worship.
[Sidenote: 1577]

Under the oppression of the ruinous civil wars the people began to grow
more and more restless.  The king was extremely unpopular.  Perhaps the
people might have winked even at such outrages against decency as were
perpetrated by the king had not their critical faculties been sharpened
by the growing misery of their condition.  The wars had bankrupted both
them and the government, and the desperate expedients of the latter to
raise money only increased the poverty {223} of the masses.  Every
estate, every province, was urged to contribute as much as possible,
and most of them replied, in humble and loyal tone, but firmly, begging
for relief from the ruinous exactions.  The sale of offices, of
justice, of collectorships of taxes, of the administration, of the
army, of the public domain, was only less onerous than the sale of
monopolies and inspectorships of markets and ports.  The only
prosperous class seemed to be the government agents and contractors.
In fact, for the first time in the history of France the people were
becoming thoroughly disaffected and some of them semi-republican in
feeling.

[Sidenote: 1584]

The king had no sons and when his only remaining brother died a new
element of discord and perplexity was introduced in that the heir to
the throne, Henry of Navarre, was a Protestant.  Violent attacks on him
were published in the pamphlet press.  The League was revived in
stronger form than before.  Its head, Guise, selected as candidate for
the throne the uncle of Henry of Navarre, Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon,
a stupid and violent man of sixty-four.  The king hastened to make
terms with the League and commanded all Protestants to leave the
country in six months.  At this point the pope intervened to strengthen
his cause by issuing the "Bull of Deprivation" [Sidenote: 1585]
declaring Henry of Navarre incapable, as a heretic, of succeeding to
the throne.  Navarre at once denounced the bull as contrary to French
law and invalid, and he was supported both by the Parlement of Paris
and by some able pamphleteers.  Hotman published his attack on the
"vain and blind fulmination" of the pontiff.

[Sidenote: Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587]

An appeal to arms was inevitable.  At the battle of Coutras, the
Huguenots, led by Henry of Navarre, won their first victory.  While
this increased {224} Navarre's power and his popularity with his
followers, the majority of the people rallied to the League.  In the
"war of the three Henrys" as it was called, the king had more to fear
from Henry of Guise than from the Huguenot.  Cooped up at the Tuileries
the monarch was under so irksome a restraint that he was finally
obliged to regain freedom by flight, on May 12, 1588.  The elections
for the States General gave an enormous majority to the League.  In an
evil hour for himself the king resorted again to that much used weapon,
assassination.  By his order Guise was murdered.  "Now I am king," he
wrote with a sigh of relief.  But he was mistaken.  The League, more
hostile than ever, swearing to avenge the death of its captain, was now
frankly revolutionary.

It continued to exercise its authority under the leadership of a
Committee of Sixteen.  These gentlemen purged the still royalist
Parlement of Paris.  By the hostility of the League the king was forced
to an alliance with Henry of Navarre.  This is interesting as showing
how completely the position of the two leading parties had become
reversed.  The throne, once the strongest ally of the church, was now
supported chiefly by the Huguenots who had formerly been in rebellion.
Indeed by this time "the wars of religion" had become to a very large
extent dynastic and social.

On August 1, 1589, the king was assassinated by a Dominican fanatic.
His death was preceded shortly by that of Catharine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Henry IV, 1589-1610]

Henry IV was a man of thirty-five, of middle stature, but very hardy
and brave.  He was one of the most intelligent of the French kings,
vigorous of brain as of body.  Few could resist his delicate
compliments and the promises he knew how to lavish.  The glamour of his
personality has survived even until now.  In a song still popular he is
called "the gallant king who knew {225} how to fight, to make love and
to drink."  He is also remembered for his wish that every peasant might
have a fowl in his pot.  His supreme desire was to see France, bleeding
and impoverished by civil war, again united, strong and happy.  He
consistently subordinated religion to political ends.  To him almost
alone is due the final adoption of tolerance, not indeed as a natural
right, but as a political expedient.

The difficulties with which he had to contend were enormous.  The
Catholics, headed by the Duke of Mayenne, a brother of Guise, agreed to
recognize him for six months in order that he might have the
opportunity of becoming reconciled to the church.  But Mayenne, who
wished to be elected king by the States General, soon commenced
hostilities.  The skirmish at Arques between the forces of Henry and
Mayenne, resulting favorably to the former, was followed by the battle
of Ivry.  [Sidenote: Battle of Ivry, March 14, 1590]  Henry, with two
thousand horse and eight thousand foot, against eight thousand horse
and twelve thousand foot of the League, addressed his soldiers in a
stirring oration: "God is with us.  Behold his enemies and ours; behold
your king.  Charge!  If your standards fail you, rally to my white
plume; you will find it on the road to victory and honor."  At first
the fortune of war went against the Huguenots, but the personal courage
of the king, who, with "a terrible white plume" in his helmet led his
cavalry to the attack, wrested victory from the foe.

[Sidenote: Siege of Paris]

From Ivry Henry marched to Paris, the headquarters of the League.  With
thirteen thousand soldiers he besieged this town of 220,000
inhabitants, garrisoned by fifty thousand troops.  With their usual
self-sacrificing devotion, the people of Paris held out against the
horrors of famine.  The clergy aroused the fanaticism of the populace,
promising heaven to those who died; women protested that they would eat
{226} their children before they would surrender.  With provisions for
one month, Paris held out for four.  Dogs, cats, rats, and grass were
eaten; the bones of animals and even of dead people were ground up and
used for flour; the skins of animals were devoured.  Thirteen thousand
persons died of hunger and twenty thousand of the fever brought on by
lack of food.  But even this miracle of fanaticism could not have saved
the capital eventually, but for the timely invasion of France from the
north by the Duke of Parma, who joined Mayenne on the Marne.  Henry
raised the siege to meet the new menace, but the campaign of 1591 was
fruitless for both sides.

[Sidenote: Anarchy]

France seemed to be in a state of anarchy under the operation of many
and various forces.  Pope Gregory XIV tried to influence the Catholics
to unite against Henry, but he was met by protests from the Parlements
in the name of the Gallican Liberties.  The "Politiques" were ready to
support any strong _de facto_ government, but could not find it.  The
cities hated the nobles, and the republicans resented the "courteous
warfare" which either side was said to wage on the other, sparing each
other's nobles and slaughtering the commons.

[Sidenote: 1593]

At this point the States General were convoked at Paris by the League.
So many provinces refused to send deputies that there were only 128
members out of a normal 505.  A serial publication by several authors,
called the _Satyre Menippee_, poured ridicule on the pretentious of the
national assembly.  Various solutions of the deadlock were proposed.
Philip II of Spain offered to support Mayenne as Lieutenant General of
France if the League would make his daughter, as the heiress through
her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, queen.  This being refused, Philip
next proposed that the young Duke of Guise should marry his daughter
{227} and become king.  But this proposal also won little support.  The
enemies of Henry IV were conscious of his legitimate rights and jealous
of foreign interference; the only thing that stood in the way of their
recognizing him was his heresy.

[Sidenote: Henry's conversion]

Henry, finding that there seemed no other issue to an intolerable
situation, at last resolved, though with much reluctance, to change his
religion.  On July 25, 1593, he abjured the Protestant faith, kneeling
to the Archbishop of Bourges, and was received into the bosom of the
Roman church.  That his conversion was due entirely to the belief that
"Paris was worth a mass" is, of course, plain.  Indeed, he frankly
avowed that he still scrupled at some articles, such as purgatory, the
worship of the saints, and the power of the pope.  And it must be
remembered that his motives were not purely selfish.  The alternative
seemed to be indefinite civil war with all its horrors, and Henry
deliberately but regretfully sacrificed his confessional convictions on
the altar of his country.

The step was not immediately successful.  The Huguenots were naturally
enraged.  The Catholics doubted the king's sincerity.  At Paris the
preachers of the League ridiculed the conversion from the pulpit.  "My
dog," sneered one of them, "were you not at mass last Sunday?  Come
here and let us offer you the crown."  But the "politiques" rallied to
the throne and the League rapidly melted away.  The _Satyre Menippee_,
supporting the interests of Henry, did much to turn public opinion in
his favor.

A further impression was made by his coronation at Chartres in 1594.
When the surrender of Paris followed, the king entered his capital to
receive the homage of the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris.  The
superstitious were convinced of Henry's sincerity when he touched some
scrofulous persons and they {228} were said to be healed.  Curing the
"king's evil" was one of the oldest attributes of royalty, and it could
not be imagined that it would descend to an impostor.

Henry showed the wisest statesmanship in consolidating his power.  He
bought up those who still held out against him at their own price,
remarking that whatever it cost it would be cheaper than fighting them.
He showed a wise clemency in dealing with his enemies, banishing only
about 130 persons.  Next came absolution by Pope Clement VIII, who,
after driving as hard a bargain as he could, finally granted it on
September 17, 1595.

But even yet all danger was not past.  Enraged at seeing France escape
from his clutches, Philip of Spain declared war, and he could still
count on the support of Mayenne and the last remnant of the League.
The daring action of Henry at Fontaine-Francaise on June 5, 1595, where
with three hundred horse he routed twelve hundred Spaniards, so
discouraged his enemies that Mayenne hastened to submit, and peace was
signed with Spain in 1598.  The finances of the realm, naturally in a
chaotic state, were brought to order and solvency by a Huguenot noble,
the Duke of Sully, Henry's ablest minister.

The legal status of the Protestants was still to be settled.  It was
not changed by Henry's abjuration, and the king was determined at all
costs to avoid another civil war.  [Sidenote: Edict of Nantes, April
13, 1598]  He therefore published the Edict of Nantes, declared to be
perpetual and irrevocable.  By it liberty of conscience was granted to
all "without being questioned, vexed or molested," and without being
"forced to do anything contrary to their religion."  Liberty of worship
was conceded in all places in which it had been practised for the last
two years; _i.e._ in two places in every bailiwick except large towns,
where services were to be held outside the walls, and {229} in the
houses of the great nobles.  Protestant worship was forbidden at Paris
and for five leagues (twelve and one-half miles) outside the walls.
Protestants had all other legal rights of Catholics and were eligible
to all offices.  To secure them in these rights a separate court of
justice was instituted, a division of the Parlement of Paris to be
called the Edict Chamber and to consist of ten Catholic and six
Protestant judges.  But a still stronger guarantee was given in their
recognition as a separately organized state within the state.  The king
agreed to leave two hundred towns in their hands, some of which, like
Montpellier, Montauban, and La Rochelle, were fortresses in which they
kept garrisons and paid the governors.  As they could raise 25,000
soldiers at a time when the national army in time of peace was only
10,000, their position seemed absolutely impregnable.  So favorable was
the Edict to the Huguenots that it was bitterly opposed by the Catholic
clergy and by the Parlement of Paris.  Only the personal insistence of
the king finally carried it.

[Sidenote: Reasons for failure of French Protestantism]

Protestantism was stronger in the sixteenth century in France than it
ever was thereafter.  During the eighty-seven years while the Edict of
Nantes was in force it lost much ground, and when that Edict was
revoked by a doting king and persecution began afresh, the Huguenots
were in no condition to resist.  [Sidenote: 1685]  From a total
constituency at its maximum of perhaps a fifth or a sixth of the whole
population, the Protestants have now sunk to less than two per cent.
(650,000 out of 39,000,000).  The history of the rise and decline of
the Huguenot movement is a melancholy record of persecution and of
heroism.  How great the number of martyrs was can never be known
accurately.  Apart from St. Bartholomew there were several lesser
massacres, the wear and tear of a generation of war, and {230} the
unremitting pressure of the law that claimed hundreds of victims a year.

[Sidenote: Hostility of government]

Three principal causes can be assigned for the failure of the
Reformation to do more than fight a drawn battle in France.  The first
and least important of these was the steady hostility of the
government.  This hostility was assured by the mutually advantageous
alliance between the throne and the church sealed in the Concordat of
Bologna of 1516.  But that the opposition of the government, heavily as
it weighed, was not and could not be the decisive force in defeating
Protestantism is proved, in my judgment, by the fact that even when the
Huguenots had a king of their own persuasion they were unable to obtain
the mastery.  Had their faith won the support not only of a
considerable minority, but of the actual majority of the people, they
could surely at this time have secured the government and made France a
Protestant state.

[Sidenote: Protestantism came too late]

The second cause of the final failure of the Reformation was the
tardiness with which it came to France.  It did not begin to make its
really popular appeal until some years after 1536, when Calvin's
writings attained a gradual publicity.  This was twenty years later
than the Reformation came forcibly home to the Germans, and in those
twenty years it had made its greatest conquests north of the Rhine.  Of
causes as well as of men it is true that there is a tide in their
affairs which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but which, once
missed, ebbs to defeat.  Every generation has a different interest; to
every era the ideals of that immediately preceding become stale and
old-fashioned.  The writings of every age are a polemic against those
of their fathers; every dogma has its day, and after every wave of
enthusiam [Transcriber's note: enthusiasm?] a reaction sets in.  Thus
it was that the Reformation {231} missed, though it narrowly missed,
the propitious moment for conquering France.  Enough had been said of
it during the reign of Francis to make the people tired of it, but not
enough to make them embrace it.  By the time that Calvin had become
well known, the Catholics had awakened and had seized many of the
weapons of their opponents, a fresh statement of belief, a new
enthusiasm, a reformed ethical standard.  The Council of Trent, the
Jesuits, the other new orders, were only symptoms of a still more
widely prevalent Catholic revival that came, in France, just in the
nick of time to deprive the Protestants of many of their claims to
popular favor.

[Sidenote: Beaten by the Renaissance]

But probably the heaviest weight in the scale against the Reformation
was the Renaissance--far stronger in France than in Germany.  The one
marched from the north, while the other was wafted up from Italy.  They
met, not as hostile armies but rather--to use a humble, commercial
illustration--as two competing merchants.  The goods they offered were
not the same, not even similar, but the appeal of each was of such a
nature that few minds could be the whole-hearted devotees of both.  The
new learning and the beauties of Italian art and literature sapped away
the interest of just those intelligent classes whose support was needed
to make the triumph of the Reformation complete.  Terrible as were the
losses of the Huguenots by fire and sword, considerable as were the
defections from their ranks of those who found in the reformed Catholic
church a spiritual refuge, still greater was the loss of the Protestant
cause in failing to secure the adherence of such minds as Dolet and
Rabelais, Ronsard and Montaigne, and of the thousands influenced by
them.  And a study of just these men will show how the Italian
influence worked and how it grew stronger in its rivalry with the
religious interest.  {232} Whereas Marot had found something to
interest him in the new doctrines, Ronsard bitterly hated them.
Passionately devoted, as he and the rest of the Pleiade were, to the
sensuous beauties of Italian poetry, he had neither understanding of
nor patience with dogmatic subtleties.  In the Huguenots he saw nothing
but mad fanatics and dangerous fomentors of rebellion.  In his
_Discourses on the Evils of the Times_, he laid all the woes of France
at the door of the innovators.  And powerfully his greater lyrics
seduced the mind of the public from the contemplation of divinity to
the enjoyment of earthly beauty.

The same intensification of the contrast between the two spirits is
seen in comparing Montaigne with Rabelais.  It is true that Rabelais
ridiculed all positive religion, but nevertheless it fascinated him.
His theological learning is remarkable.  But Montaigne ignored religion
as far as possible.  [Sidenote: Montaigne's aloofness]  Nourished from
his earliest youth on the great classical writers, he had no interest
apart from "the kingdom of man."  He preferred to remain in the old
faith because that course caused him the least trouble.  He had no
sympathy with the Protestants, but he did not hate them, as did
Ronsard.  During the wars of religion, he maintained friendly relations
with the leaders of both parties.  And he could not believe that creed
was the real cause of the civil strife.  "Take from the Catholic army,"
said he, "all those actuated by pure zeal for the church or for the
king and country, and you will not have enough men left to form one
company."  It is strange that beneath the evil passions and
self-seeking of the champions of each party he could not see the fierce
flame of popular heroism and fanaticism; but that he, and thousands of
men like him, could not do so, and could not enter, even by
imagination, into the causes {233} which, but a half century earlier,
had set the world on fire, largely explains how the religious issue had
lost its savour and why Protestantism failed in France.


[1] "The king my son will never have entire obedience."

[2] "That no one may embroil us in the friendship in which I desire
that these two kingdoms shall remain during my lifetime."




{234}

CHAPTER V

THE NETHERLANDS

SECTION 1.  THE LUTHERAN REFORM

[Sidenote: The Netherlands]

The Netherlands have always been a favorite topic for the speculation of
those philosophers who derive a large part of national character from
geographical conditions.  A land that needed reclaiming from the sea by
hard labor, a country situated at those two great outlets of European
commerce, the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt, a borderland between
German and Latin culture, naturally moulded a brave, stubborn, practical
and intelligent people, destined to play in history a part seemingly
beyond their scope and resources.

The people of the Netherlands became, to all intents, a state before they
became a nation.  The Burgundian dukes of the fourteenth and fifteenth
century added to their fiefs counties, dukedoms and bishoprics, around
the nucleus of their first domain, until they had forged a compact and
powerful realm.  [Sidenote: Philip the Good, 1419-67]  Philip the Good,
Duke of Burgundy and lord, under various titles, of much of the
Netherlands, deserved the title of _Conditor Belgii_ by his successful
wars on France and by his statesmanlike policy of centralization.  To
foster unity he created the States General--borrowing the name and
function thereof from France--in which all of the seventeen provinces[1]
of the Netherlands were represented on great occasions.  Continually
increasing {235} in power with reference to the various localities, it
remained subordinate to the prince, who had the sole right of initiating
legislation.  At first it met now in one city, then in another, but after
1530 always convened at Brussels, and always used the French language
officially.

[Sidenote: Charles the Bold, 1467-77]

Charles the Bold completed and yet endangered the work of Philip, for he
was worsted in mortal strife with Louis XI of France and, dying in
battle, left his dominions to his daughter, Mary.  [Sidenote: Maximilian,
1477-93]  Her husband, the Emperor Maximilian, and her son, Philip the
Handsome, [Sidenote: Philip the Handsome, 1493-1506] added to her realms
those vast dominions that made her grandson, Charles, the greatest
potentate in Europe.  Born in Ghent, reared in the Netherlands, and
speaking only the French of the Walloons, Charles was always regarded by
his subjects as one of themselves.  He almost completed the unification
of the Burgundian state by the conquest of Tournay from France (1521),
and the annexation of the independent provinces of Friesland (1523),
Overyssel and Utrecht (1528), Groningen (1536) and Guelders (1543).
Liege still remained a separate entity under its prince-bishops.  But
even under Charles, notwithstanding a general feeling of loyalty to the
house of Hapsburg, each province was more conscious of its own
individuality than were the people as a whole of common patriotism.  Some
of the provinces lay within the Empire, others were vassals of France, a
few were independent.  Dutch was regarded as a dialect of German.  The
most illustrious Netherlander of the time, Erasmus, in discussing his
race, does not even contemplate the possibility of there being a nation
composed of Dutch and Flemish men.  The only alternative that presents
itself to him is whether he is French or German and, having been born at
Rotterdam, he decides in favor of the latter.

{236}

[Sidenote: Classes]

The Burgundian princes found their chief support in the nobility, in a
numerous class of officials, and in the municipal aristocracies.  The
nobles, transformed from a feudal caste to a court clique, even though
they retained, as satellites of the monarch, much wealth and power, had
relatively lost ground to the rising pretensions of the cities and of the
commercial class.  The clergy, too, were losing their old independence in
subservience to a government which regulated their tithes and forbade
their indulgence-trade.  In 1515 Charles secured from Leo X and again in
1530 from Clement VII the right of nomination to vacant benefices.  He
was able to make of the bishops his tools and to curtail the freedom,
jurisdiction, and financial privileges of the clergy considerably because
the spiritual estate had lost favor with the people and received no
support from them.

As the two privileged classes surrendered their powers to the monarch,
the third estate was coming into its own.  Not until the war of
independence, however, was it able to withstand the combination of
bureaucracy and plutocracy that made common cause with the central
government against the local rights of the cities and the customary
privileges of the gilds.  Almost everywhere the prince was able, with the
tacit support of the wealthier burghers, to substitute for the officers
elected by the gilds his own commissioners.  [Sidenote: Revolt of Ghent]
But this usurpation, together with a variety of economic ills for which
the commoners were inclined, quite wrongly, to blame the government,
caused general discontent and in one case open rebellion.  The gilds of
Ghent, a proud and ancient city, suffering from the encroachments of
capitalism and from the decline of the Flemish cloth industry, had long
asserted among their rights that of each gild to refuse to pay one of the
taxes, any one it chose, levied by the government.  [Sidenote: 1539]  The
attempt {237} of the government to suppress this privilege caused a
rising which took the characteristically modern form of a general strike.
The regent of the Netherlands, Mary, yielded at first to the demands of
the gilds, as she had no means of coercion convenient.  Charles was in
Spain at the time, but hurried northward, being granted free passage
through France by the king who felt he had an interest in aiding his
fellow monarch to put down rebellious subjects.  Early in 1540 Charles
entered Ghent at the head of a sufficient army.  He soon meted out a
sanguinary punishment to the "brawlers" as the strikers were called,
humbled the city government, deprived it of all local privileges,
suppressed all independent corporations, asserted the royal prerogative
of nominating aldermen, and erected a fortress to overawe the burghers.
Thus the only overt attempt to resist the authority of Charles V, apart
from one or two insignificant Anabaptist riots, was crushed.

In matters of foreign policy the people of the Netherlands naturally
wished to be guided in reference to their own interests and not to the
larger interests of the emperor's other domains.  Wielding immense
wealth--during the middle decades of the sixteenth century Antwerp was
both the first port and the first money-market of Europe--and cherishing
the sentiment that Charles was a native of their land, they for some time
sweetly flattered themselves that their interests were the center around
which gravitated the desires and needs of the Empire and of Spain.
Indeed, the balance of these two great states, and the regency of
Margaret of Austria, [Sidenote: Margaret of Austria, Regent, 1522-31] a
Hapsburg determined to give the Netherlands their due, for a time allowed
them at least the semblance of getting their wishes.  But when Charles's
sister, Mary of Hungary, succeeded Margaret as regent, she was too
entirely {238} dependent on her brother, and he too determined to consult
larger than Burgundian interests, to allow the Netherlands more than the
smallest weight in larger plans.  The most that she could do was to
unify, centralize and add to the provinces, and to get what commercial
advantages treaties could secure.  Thus, she redeemed Luxemburg from the
Margrave of Baden to whom Maximilian had pawned it.  Thus, also, she
negotiated fresh commercial treaties with England and unified the
coinage.  But with all these achievements, distinctly advantageous to the
people she governed, her efforts to increase the power of the crown and
the necessity she was under of subordinating her policy to that of
Germany and Spain, made her extremely unpopular.

The relationship of the Netherlands to the Empire was a delicate and
important question.  Though the Empire was the feudal suzerain of most of
the Burgundian provinces, Charles felt far more keenly for his rights as
an hereditary, local prince than for the aggrandizement of his Empire,
and therefore tried, especially after he had left Austria to his brother
Ferdinand, [Sidenote: September 7, 1522] to loosen rather than to
strengthen the bond.  Even as early as 1512, when the Imperial Diet
demanded that the "common penny" be levied in the Netherlands, Charles's
council aided and abetted his Burgundian subjects in refusing to pay it.
In 1530 the Netherlands, in spite of urgent complaints from the Diet,
completely freed itself from imperial jurisdiction in the administration
of justice.  Matters became still more complicated when Utrecht,
Friesland, Groningen and Guelders, formerly belonging to the Westphalian
district of the Empire, were annexed by Charles as Burgundian prince.
Probably he would not have been able to vindicate these acts of power,
had not his victory at Muehlberg [Sidenote: 1547] freed him from the {239}
restraints of the imperial constitution.  A convention was made at the
next Diet of Augsburg, [Sidenote: Convention of June 26, 1548] providing
that henceforth the Netherlands should form a separate district, the
"Burgundian circle," of the Empire, and that their prince, as such,
should be represented in the Diet and in the Imperial Supreme Court.
Taxes were so apportioned that in time of peace the Netherlands should
contribute to the imperial treasury as much as did two electors, and in
time of war as much as three.  This treaty nominally added to the Empire
two new counties, Flanders and Artois, and it gave the whole Netherlands
the benefit of imperial protection.  But, though ratified by the States
General promptly, the convention remained almost a dead letter, and left
the Netherlands virtually autonomous.  As long as they were unmolested
the Netherlands forgot their union entirely, and when, under the pressure
of Spanish rule, they later remembered and tried to profit by it, they
found that the Empire had no wish to revive it.


[Sidenote: Reformation]

The general causes of the religious revolution were the same in the Low
Countries as in other lands.  The ground was prepared by the mystics of
the earlier ages, by the corruption of and hatred for the clergy, and buy
the Renaissance.  The central situation of the country made it especially
open to all currents of European thought.  Printing was early introduced
from Germany and expanded so rapidly in these years [Sidenote: 1525-55]
that no less than fifty new publishing houses were erected.  As Antwerp
was the most cosmopolitan of cities, so Erasmus was the most nearly the
citizen of the world in that era.  The great humanist, who did so much to
prepare for the Reformation, spent in his native land just those early
years of its first appearance when he most favored Luther.

{240} A group to take up with the Wittenberg professor's doctrines were
the Augustinians, many of whom had been in close relations with the Saxon
friaries.  One of them, James Probst, had been prior of Wittenberg where
he learned to know Luther well [Sidenote: 1515] and when he became prior
of the convent at Antwerp he started a rousing propaganda in favor of the
reform.  [Sidenote: 1518]  Another Augustinian, Henry of Zuetphen, made
his friary at Dordrecht the center of a Lutheran movement.  Hoen at the
Hague, Hinne Rode at Utrecht, Gerard Lister at Zwolle, Melchior Miritzsch
at Ghent, were soon in correspondence with Luther and became missionaries
of his faith.  His books, which circulated among the learned in Latin,
were some of them translated into Dutch as early as 1520.

The German commercial colony at Antwerp was another channel for the
infiltration of the Lutheran gospel.  [Sidenote: 1520-1]  The many
travelers, among them Albert Duerer, brought with them tidings of the
revolt and sowed its seeds in the soil of Flanders and Holland.
Singularly enough, the colony of Portuguese Jews, the Marranos as they
were called, became, if not converts, at least active agents in the
dissemination of Lutheran works.

[Sidenote: Catholic answers]

A vigorous counter-propaganda was at once started by the partisans of the
pope.  This was directed against both Erasmus and Luther and consisted
largely, according to the reports of the former, in the most violent
invective.  Nicholas of Egmont, "a man with a white pall but a black
heart" stormed in the pulpit against the new heretics.  Another man
interspersed a sermon on charity with objurgations against those whom he
called "geese, asses, stocks, and Antichrists."  [Sidenote: 1533]  One
Dominican said he wished he could fasten his teeth in Luther's throat,
for he would not fear to go to the Lord's supper with that blood on his
{241} mouth.  It was at Antwerp, a little later, that were first coined,
or at least first printed, the so celebrated epigrams that Erasmus was
Luther's father, that Erasmus had laid the eggs and Luther had hatched
the chickens, and that Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Erasmus were
the four soldiers who had crucified Christ.

The principal literary opposition to the new doctrines came from the
University of Louvain.  Luther's works were condemned by Cologne, and
this sentence was ratified by Louvain.  [Sidenote: August 30, 1519]  A
number of the leading professors wrote against him, [Sidenote: November
7] among them the ex-professor Adrian of Utrecht, recently created Bishop
of Tortosa and cardinal, and soon to be pope.

The conservatives, however, could do little but scold until the arrival
of Charles V in June 1520, and of the papal nuncio Aleander in September.
The latter saw Charles immediately at Antwerp and found him already
determined to resist heresy.  Acting under the edict procured at that
time, though not published until the following March 22, Aleander busied
himself by going around and burning Lutheran works in various cities and
preaching against the heresy.  [Sidenote: October, 1520]  He found far
more opposition than one would think probable, and the burning of the
books, as Erasmus said, removed them from the bookstores only, not from
the hearts of the people.  The nuncio even discovered, he said, at this
early date, heretics who denied the real presence in the eucharist:
evidently independent spirits like Hoen who anticipated the doctrine
later taken up by Carlstadt and Zwingli.

The validity of the Edict of Worms was affirmed for the Burgundian
provinces.  The edict was read publicly at Antwerp [Sidenote: July 13,
1521] while four hundred of Luther's books were burnt, three hundred
confiscated from the shops and one hundred brought by the people.  {242}
Whereas spiritual officers were at first employed, civil magistrates now
began to act against the innovators.  In the beginning, attention was
paid to municipal privileges, but these soon came to be disregarded, and
resistance on any pretext was treated as rebellion and treason.  The
first persons to be arrested were the Prior of Antwerp, Probst,
[Sidenote: 1522] who recanted, but later escaped and relapsed, and two
other intimate friends of Erasmus.

[Sidenote: The Inquisition]

Charles wished to introduce the Spanish inquisition, but his councillors
were all against it.  Under a different name, however, it was exactly
imitated when Francis van der Hulst was appointed chief inquisitor by the
state, [Sidenote: April 23, 1522] and was confirmed by a bull of Adrian
VI.  [Sidenote: June 1, 1523]  The original inquisitorial powers of the
bishops remained, and a supreme tribunal of three judges was appointed in
1524.

[Sidenote: Martyrs, July 1, 1523]

The first martyrs, Henry Voes and John Esch of Brussels, said Erasmus,
made many Lutherans by their death.  Luther wrote a hymn on the subject
and published an open letter to the Christians of the Netherlands.
[Sidenote: 1524]  Censorship of the press was established in Holland in
vain, for everything goes to show that Lutheranism rapidly increased.
Popular interest in the subject seemed to be great.  Every allusion to
ecclesiastical corruption in speeches or in plays was applauded.
Thirty-eight laborers were arrested at Antwerp for assembling to read and
discuss the gospel.  [Sidenote: 1525]  Iconoclastic outbreaks occurred in
which crucifixes were desecrated.  In the same year an Italian in Antwerp
wrote that though few people were openly Lutheran many were secretly so,
and that he had been assured by leading citizens that if the revolting
peasants of Germany approached Antwerp, twenty thousand armed men would
rise in the city to assist them.  [Sidenote: July 31]  When a Lutheran
was drowned in the Scheldt, {243} the act precipitated a riot.  In 1527
the English ambassador wrote Wolsey from the Netherlands that two persons
out of three "kept Luther's opinions," and that while the English New
Testament was being printed in that city, repeated attempts on his part
to induce the magistrates to interfere came to nothing.  Protestant works
also continued to pour from the presses.  The Bible was soon translated
into Dutch, and in the course of eight years four editions of the whole
Bible and twenty-five editions of the New Testament were called for,
though the complete Scriptures had never been printed in Dutch before.

[Sidenote: October 14, 1529]

Alarmed by the spread of heresy, attributed to too great mildness, the
government now issued an edict that inaugurated a reign of terror.  Death
was decreed not only for all heretics but for all who, not being
theologians, discussed articles of faith, or who caricatured God, Mary,
or the saints, and for all who failed to denounce heretics known to them.
While the government momentarily flattered itself that heresy had been
stamped out, at most it had been driven under ground.  One of the effects
of the persecution was to isolate the Netherlands from the Empire
culturally and to some small extent commercially.

But heresy proved to be a veritable hydra.  From one head sprang many
daughters, the Anabaptists, [Sidenote: Anabaptists] harder to deal with
than their mother.  For while Lutheranism stood essentially for passive
obedience, and flourished nowhere save as a state church, Anabaptism was
frankly revolutionary and often socialistic.  Melchior Hoffmann, the most
striking of their early leaders, a fervent and uneducated fanatic, driven
from place to place, wandered from Sweden and Denmark to Italy and Spain
[Sidenote: 1530-1533] preaching chiliastic and communistic ideas.  Only
for three years was he much in the Netherlands, but it was there that he
won his greatest {244} successes.  Appealing, as the Anabaptists always
did, to the lower classes, he converted thousands and tens of thousands
of the very poor--beggars, laborers and sailors--who passionately
embraced the teaching that promised the end of kings and governments and
the advent of the "rule of the righteous."  Mary of Hungary was not far
wrong when she wrote that they planned to plunder all churches, nobles,
and wealthy merchants, in short, all who had property, and from the spoil
to distribute to every individual according to his need.  [Sidenote:
October 7, 1531]  A new and severer edict would have meant a general
massacre, had it been strictly enforced, but another element entered into
the situation.  The city bourgeoisies that had previously resisted the
government, now supported it in this one particular, persecution of the
Anabaptists.  When at Amsterdam [Sidenote: 1534] the sectaries rose and
very nearly mastered the city, death by fire was decreed for the men, by
water for the women.  From Antwerp they were banished by a general edict
especially aimed at them supplemented by massacres in the northern
provinces.  [Sidenote: June 24, 1535]  After the crisis at Muenster,
though the Anabaptists continued to be a bugbear to the ruling classes,
their propaganda lost its dangerously revolutionary character.  Menno
Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, became the leader of
the movement and succeeded in gathering the smitten people into a large
and harmless body.  The Anabaptists furnished, however, more martyrs than
did any other sect.

Lutheranism also continued to spread.  The edict of 1540 confesses as
much while providing new and sterner penalties against those who even
interceded for heretics.  The fact is that the inquisition as directed
against Lutherans was thoroughly unpopular and was resisted in various
provinces on the technical ground of local privileges.  The Protestants
managed {245} to keep unnoticed amidst a general intention to connive at
them, and though they did not usually flinch from martyrdom they did not
court it.  The inquisitors were obliged to arrest their victims at the
dead of night, raiding their houses and hauling them from bed, in order
to avoid popular tumult.  [Sidenote: 1543]  When Enzinas printed his
Spanish Bible at Antwerp the printer told him that in that city the
Scriptures had been published in almost every European language,
doubtless an exaggeration but a significant one.  Arrested and imprisoned
at Brussels for this cause, Enzinas received while under duress visits
from four hundred citizens of that city who were Protestants.  To control
the book trade an oath was exacted of every bookseller [Sidenote: 1546]
not to deal in heretical works and the first "Index of prohibited books,"
drawn up by the University of Louvain, was issued.  A censorship of plays
was also attempted.  This was followed by an edict of 1550 requiring of
every person entering the Netherlands a certificate of Catholic belief.
As Brabant and Antwerp repudiated a law that would have ruined their
trade, it remained, in fact, a dead letter.

Charles's policy of repression had been on the whole a failure, due
partly to the cosmopolitan culture of the Netherlands and their
commercial position making them open to the importation of ideas as of
merchandise from all Europe.  It was due in part to the local jealousies
and privileges of the separate provinces, and in part to the strength of
certain nobles and cities.  The persecution, indeed, had a decidedly
class character, for the emperor well knew Protestant nobles whom he did
not molest, while the poor seldom failed to suffer.  And yet Charles had
accomplished something.  Even the Protestants were loyal, strange to say,
to him personally.  The number of martyrs in his reign has been estimated
at barely one thousand, {246} but it must be remembered that for every
one put to death there were a number punished in other ways.  And the
body of the people was still Catholic, even in the North.  It is
noteworthy that the most popular writer of this period, as well as the
first to use the Dutch tongue with precision and grace, was Anna Bijns, a
lay nun, violently anti-Lutheran in sentiment.  [Sidenote: Anna Bijns,
1494-1575]


[1] Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, Guelders, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut,
Holland, Zeeland, Malines, Namur, Lille, Tournay, Friesland, Utrecht,
Overyssel and Groningen.


SECTION 2.  THE CALVINIST REVOLT

When Charles V, weary of the heaviest scepter ever wielded by any
European monarch from Charlemagne to Napoleon, sought rest for his soul
in a monk's cell, he left his great possessions divided between his
brother Ferdinand and his son Philip.  To the former went Austria and
the Empire, to the latter the Burgundian provinces and Spain with its
vast dependencies in the New World.

[Sidenote: Spain and the Netherlands]

The result of this was to make the Netherlands practically a satellite
of Spain.  Hitherto, partly because their interests had largely
coincided with those of the Empire, partly because by balancing Germany
against Spain they could manage to get their own rights, they had found
prosperity and had acquired a good deal of national power.  Indeed,
with their wealth, their central position, and growing strength as
province after province was annexed, and their consciousness that their
ruler was a native of Flanders, their pride had been rather gratified
than hurt by the knowledge that he possessed far larger dominions.
[Sidenote: Abdication of Charles]  But when Charles, weeping copiously
and demanding his subjects' pardon, descended from the throne supported
by the young Prince of Orange, [Sidenote: October 25, 1555] and when
his son Philip II had replied to his father in Spanish, even those
present had an uneasy feeling that the situation had changed for the
worse, and that the Netherlands were being handed over from a
Burgundian to a Spanish ruler.  From {247} this time forth the
interests and sentiments of the two countries became more and more
sharply divergent, and, as the smaller was sacrificed to the larger, a
conflict became inevitable.  The revolt that followed within ten years
after Philip had permanently abandoned the Netherlands to make his home
in Spain [Sidenote: 1559] was first and foremost a nationalist revolt.
Contrasted with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the
enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a national
self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces.

[Sidenote: Religious issue]

But though the catastrophe was apparently inevitable from political
grounds, it was greatly complicated and intensified by the religious
issue.  Philip was determined, as he himself said, either to bring the
Netherlands back to the fold of Rome or "so to waste their land that
neither the natives could live there nor should any thereafter desire
the place for habitation."  And yet the means he took were even for his
purpose the worst possible, a continual vacillation between timid
indulgence and savage cruelty.  Though he insisted that his ministers
should take no smallest step without his sanction, he could never make
up his mind what to do, waited too long to make a decision and then,
with fatal fatuity, made the wrong one.

[Sidenote: Calvinism]

At the same time the people were coming under the spell of a new and to
the government more dangerous form of Protestantism.  Whereas the
Lutherans had stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for
revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent
middle classes and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure
martyrdom but also--what the others had lacked--the will and the power
to resist tyranny by force.  Calvin's polity, as worked out in Geneva,
was a subordination of the state to the church.  His reforms were
thorough and consciously social and political.  Calvinism in all lands
aroused {248} republican passions and excited rebellion against the
powers that be.  This feature was the more prominent in the Netherlands
[Sidenote: 1545] in that its first missionaries were French exiles who
irrigated the receptive soil of the Low Countries with doctrines
subversive of church and state alike.  The intercourse with England,
partly through the emigration from that land under Mary's reign, partly
through the coming and going of Flemings and Walloons, also opened
doors to Protestant doctrine.

At first the missionaries came secretly, preaching to a few specially
invited to some private house or inn.  People attended these meetings
disguised and after dark.  First mentioned in the edict of 1550, nine
years later the Calvinists drew up a _Confessio Belgica_, as a sign and
an aid to union.  Calvin's French writings could be read in the
southern provinces in the original.  Though as early as 1560 some
nobles had been converted, the new religion undoubtedly made its
strongest appeal, as a contemporary put it, "to those who had grown
rich by trade and were therefore ready for revolution."  It was among
the merchants of the great cities that it took strongest root and from
the middle class spread to the laborers; influenced not only by the
example of their masters, but sometimes also by the policy of
Protestant employers to give work only to co-religionists.  In a short
time it had won a very considerable success, though perhaps not the
actual majority of the population.  Many of the poor, hitherto
Anabaptists, thronged to it in hopes of social betterment.  Many
adventurers with no motive but to stir the waters in which they might
fish joined the new party.  But on the whole, as its appeal was
primarily moral and religious, its constituency was the more
substantial, progressive, and intelligent part of the community.

The greatest weakness of the Protestants was their {249} division.
Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist continued to compete for the
leadership and hated each other cordially.  The Calvinists themselves
were divided into two parties, the "Rekkelijken" or "Compromisers" and
the "Preciesen" or "Stalwarts."  Moreover there were various other
shades of opinion, not amounting quite to new churches.  The pure
Erasmians, under Cassander, advocated tolerance.  More pronounced was
the movement of Dirck Volckertszoon Coornheert [Sidenote: Coornheert,
1522-90] a merchant of Amsterdam who, in addition to advising his
followers to dissimulate their views rather than to court martyrdom,
rejected the Calvinist dogma of predestination and tried to lay the
emphasis in religion on the spirit of Jesus rather than on either dogma
or ritual.

Though the undertow was slowly but surely carrying the Low Countries
adrift from Spain, for the moment their new monarch, then at the age of
twenty-eight, seemed to have the winds and waves of politics all in his
favor.  He was at peace with France; he had nothing to fear from
Germany; his marriage with Mary of England made that country, always
the best trader with the Netherlands, an ally.  His first steps were to
relieve Mary of Hungary of her regency and to give it to Emanuel
Philibert, to issue a new edict against heresy and to give permission
to the Jesuits to enter the Low Countries.  [Sidenote: 1556]

The chief difficulties were financial.  The increase in the yield of
the taxes in the reign of Charles had been from 1,500,000 guilders[1]
to 7,000,000 guilders.  In addition to this, immense loans had
exhausted the credit of the government.  The royal domain was
mortgaged.  As the floating debt of the Provinces rose rapidly the
{250} government was in need of a grant to keep up the army.  The only
way to meet the situation was to call the States General.  [Sidenote:
March, 1556]  When they met, they complained that they were taxed more
heavily than Spain and demanded the removal of the Spanish troops, a
force already so unpopular that William of Orange refused to take
command of it.  In presenting their several grievances one province
only, Holland, mentioned the religious question to demand that the
powers of the inquisitors be curtailed.  To obtain funds Philip was
obliged to promise, against his will, to withdraw the soldiers.  This
was only done, under pressure, on January 10, 1561.

[Sidenote: 1559]

Philip had left the Netherlands professing his intention of returning,
but hoping and resolving in his heart never to do so.  His departure
made easier the unavoidable breach, but the struggle had already begun.
Wishing to leave a regent of royal blood Philip appointed Margaret of
Parma, a natural daughter of Charles V.  Born in 1522, she had been
married at the age of fourteen to Alexander de' Medici, a nephew of
Clement VII; becoming a widow in the following year she was in 1538
married to Ottavio Farnese, a nephew of Paul III, at that time only
fourteen years old.  Given as her dower the cities of Parma and
Piacenza, she had become thoroughly Italian in feeling.

[Sidenote: Anthony Perrenot Cardinal Granvelle, 1517-86]

To guide her Philip left, besides the Council of State, a special
"consulta" or "kitchen cabinet" of three members, the chief of whom was
Granvelle.  The real fatherland of this native of the Free County of
Burgundy was the court.  As a passionate servant of the crown and a
clever and knowing diplomat, he was in constant correspondence with
Philip, recommending measures over the head of Margaret.  His acts made
her intensely unpopular and her attempts to coax and cozen public
opinion only aroused suspicion.

{251}

[Sidenote: Egmont, 1522-68]

Three members in the Council of State, Granvelle and two others, were
partisans  of the crown; three other members may be said to represent
the people.  One of them was Lamoral Count of Egmont, the most
brilliant and popular of the high nobility.  Though a favorite of
Charles V on account of his proved ability as a soldier, his frankness
and generosity, he was neither a sober nor a weighty statesman.  The
popular proverb, "Egmont for action and Orange for counsel," well
characterized the difference between the two leading members of the
Council of State.  William, prince of Orange, lacking the brilliant
qualities of Egmont, far surpassed him in acumen and in strength of
character.  From his father, William Count of Nassau-Dillenburg,
[Sidenote: William the Silent, 1533-84] he inherited important estates
in Germany near the Netherlands, and by the death of a cousin he
became, at the age of eleven, Prince of Orange--a small, independent
territory in southern France--and Lord of Breda and Gertruidenberg in
Holland.  With an income of 150,000 guilders per annum he was by far
the richest man in the Netherlands, Egmont coming next with an income
of 62,000.  William was well educated.  Though he spoke seven languages
and was an eloquent orator, he was called "the Silent" because of the
rare discretion that never revealed a secret nor spoke an imprudent
word.  In religion he was indifferent, being first a Catholic, then a
Lutheran, then a Calvinist, and always a man of the world.  His broad
tolerance found its best, or only, support in the Erasmian tendencies
of Coornheert.  His second wife, Anne of Saxony, having proved
unfaithful to him, he married, while she was yet alive, Charlotte of
Bourbon.  This act, like the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, was approved by
Protestant divines.  Behind them Egmont and Orange had the hearty
support of the patriotic and well educated native nobility.  {252} The
rising generation of the aristocracy saw only the bad side of the reign
of Charles; they had not shared in his earlier victories but had
witnessed his failure to conquer either France or Protestantism.

[Sidenote: New bishoprics]

In order to deal more effectively with the religious situation
Granvelle wished to bring the ecclesiastical territorial divisions into
harmony with the political.  Hitherto the Netherlands had been partly
under the Archbishop of Cologne, partly under the Archbishop of Rheims.
But as these were both foreigners Granvelle applied for and secured a
bull creating fourteen new bishoprics and three archbishoprics,
[Sidenote: March 12, 1559] Cambrai, Utrecht, and Malines, of which the
last held the primacy.  His object was doubtless in large part to
facilitate the extirpation of heresy, but it was also significant as
one more instance of the nationalization of the church, a tendency so
strong that neither Catholic nor Protestant countries escaped from it.
In this case all the appointments were to be made by the king with
consent of the pope.  The people resented the autocratic features of a
plan they might otherwise have approved; a cry was raised throughout
the provinces that their freedom was infringed upon, and that the plan
furnished a new instrument to the hated inquisition.

[Sidenote: February, 1561]

Granvelle, more than ever detested when he received the cardinal's hat,
was dubbed "the red devil," "the archrascal," "the red dragon," "the
Spanish swine," "the pope's dung."  In July Egmont and Orange sent
their resignations from the Council of State to Philip, saying that
they could no longer share the responsibility for Granvelle's policy,
especially as everything was done behind their backs.  Philip, however,
was slow to take alarm.  For the moment his attention was taken up with
the growth of the Huguenot party in France and his efforts centered on
helping the French Catholics against them.  But the Netherlands were
{253} importunate.  In voicing the wishes of the people the province of
Brabant, with the capital, Brussels, the metropolitan see, Malines, and
the university, Louvain, took as decided a lead as the Parlement of
Paris did in France.  The estates of Brabant demanded that Orange be
made their governor.  The nobles began to remember that they were
legally a part of the Empire.  The marriage of Orange, on August 26,
1561, with the Lutheran Anne of Saxony, was but one sign of the
_rapprochment_.  Though the prince continued to profess Catholicism, he
entertained many Lutherans and emphasized as far as possible his
position as vassal of the Empire.  Philip, indeed, believed that the
whole trouble came from the wounded vanity of a few nobles.

But Granvelle saw deeper.  [Sidenote: 1561]  When the Estates of
Brabant stopped the payment of the principal tax or "Bede," [2] and
when the people of Brussels took as a party uniform a costume derived
from the carnival, a black cloak covered with red fool's heads, the
cardinal, whose red hat was caricatured thereby, stated that nothing
less than a republic was aimed at.  This was true, though in the
anticipation of the nobles, at least, the republic should have a
decidedly aristocratic character.  But Granvelle had no policy to
propose but repression.  In order to prevent condemned heretics from
preaching and singing on the scaffold a gag was put into their mouths.
How futile a measure!  The Calvinists no longer disguised, but armed--a
new and significant fact--thronged to their conventicles.  Emigration
continued on a large scale.  By 1556 it was estimated that thirty
thousand Protestants from the Low Countries were settled in or near
London.  Elizabeth encouraged them to come, assigning them {254}
Norwich as a place of refuge.  [Sidenote: 1563]  She also began to tax
imports from the Netherlands, a blow to which Philip replied by
forbidding all English imports.

[Sidenote: Revolt]

Hitherto the resistance to the government had been mostly passive and
constitutional.  But from 1565 may be dated the beginning of the revolt
that did not cease until it had freed the northern provinces forever
from Spanish tyranny.  The rise of the Dutch Republic is one of the
most inspiring pages in history.  Superficially it has many points of
resemblance with the American War of Independence.  In both there was
the absentee king, the national hero, the local jealousies of the
several provinces, the economic grievances, the rising national feeling
and even the religious issue, though this had become very small in
America.  But the difference was in the ferocity of the tyranny and the
intensity of the struggle.  The two pictures are like the same
landscape as it might be painted by Millet and by Turner: the one is
decent and familiar, the other lurid and ghastly.  With true
Anglo-Saxon moderation the American war was fought like a game or an
election, with humanity and attention to rules; but in Holland and
Belgium was enacted the most terrible frightfulness in the world; over
the whole land, mingled with the reek of candles carried in procession
and of incense burnt to celebrate a massacre, brooded the sultry miasma
of human blood and tears.  On the one side flashed the savage sword of
Alva and the pitiless flame of the inquisitor Tapper; on the other were
arrayed, behind their dykes and walls, men resolved to win that freedom
which alone can give scope and nobility to life.

[Sidenote: The Intellectuals]

And in the melee those suffered most who would fain have been
bystanders, the humanists.  Persecuted by both sides, the
intellectuals, who had once deserted the Reform now turned again to it
as the lesser of the two {255} evils.  They would have been glad to
make terms with any church that would have left them in liberty, but
they found the whips of Calvin lighter than the scorpions of Philip.
Even those who, like Van Helmont, wished to defend the church and to
reconcile the Tridentine decrees with philosophy, found that their
labors brought them under suspicion and that what the church demanded
was not harmony of thought but abnegation of it.

The first act of the revolt may be said to be a secret compact, known
as the Compromise, [Sidenote: The Compromise, 1565] originally entered
into by twenty nobles at Brussels and soon joined by three hundred
other nobles elsewhere.  The document signed by them denounced the
Edicts as surpassing the greatest recorded barbarity of tyrants and as
threatening the complete ruin of the country.  To resist them the
signers promised each other mutual support.  In this as in subsequent
developments the Calvinist minority took the lead, but was supported by
strong Catholic forces.  Among the latter was the Prince of Orange, not
yet a Protestant.  His conversion really made little difference in his
program; both before and after it he wanted tolerance or reconciliation
on Cassander's plan of compromise.  He would have greatly liked to have
seen the Peace of Augsburg, now the public law of the Empire, extended
to the Low Countries, but this was made difficult even to advocate
because the Peace of Augsburg provided liberty only for the Lutheran
confession, whereas the majority of Protestants in the Netherlands were
now Calvinists.  For the same reason little help could be expected from
the German princes, for the mutual animosity that was the curse of the
Protestant churches prevented their making common cause against the
same enemy.

As the Huguenots--for so they began to be called in Brabant as well as
in France--were as yet too few {256} to rebel, the only course open was
to appeal to the government once more.  A petition to make the Edicts
milder was presented to Margaret in 1566.  One of her advisers bade her
not to be afraid of "those beggars."  Originating in the scorn of
enemies, like so many party names, the epithet "Beggars" (Gueux)
presently became the designation and a proud one, of the nobles who had
signed the Compromise and later of all the rebels.

Encouraged by the regent's apparent lack of power to coerce them, the
Calvinist preachers became daily bolder.  Once again their religion
showed its remarkable powers of organization.  Lacking nothing in
funds, derived from a constituency of wealthy merchants, the preachers
of the Reformation were soon able to forge a machinery of propaganda
and party action that stood them in good stead against the greater
numbers of their enemies.  Especially in critical times, discipline,
unity, and enthusiasm make headway against the deadly hatred of enemies
and the deadlier apathy and timidity of the mass of mankind.  It is
true that the methods of the preachers often aroused opposition.

[Sidenote: Iconoclasm]

The zeal of the Calvinists, inflamed by oppression and encouraged by
the weakness of the government, burst into an iconoclastic riot,
[Sidenote: August 11, 1566] first among the unemployed at Armentieres,
but spreading rapidly to Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and then to the
northern provinces, Holland and Zeeland.  The English agent at Brussels
wrote: "Coming into Oure Lady Church, yt looked like hell wher were
above 1000 torches brannyng and syche a noise as yf heven and erth had
gone together with fallyng of images and fallyng down of costly works."
Books and manuscripts as well as pictures were destroyed.  The cry
"Long live the Beggars" resounded from one end of the land to the {257}
other.  But withal there was no pillage and no robbery.  The gold in
the churches was left untouched.  Margaret feared a _jacquerie_ but,
lacking troops, had to look on with folded hands at least for the
moment.  By chance there arrived just at this time an answer from
Philip to the earlier petition of the Beggars.  The king promised to
abolish the Spanish inquisition and to soften the edicts.  Freedom of
conscience was tacitly granted, but the government made an exception,
as soon as it dared, of those who had committed sacrilege in the recent
riots.  These men were outlawed.

[Sidenote: Civil war]

No longer fearing a religious war the Calvinists started it themselves.
Louis of Nassau, a brother of Prince William, hired German mercenaries
and invaded Flanders, where he won some slight successes.  In Amsterdam
the great Beggar Brederode entered into negotiations with Huguenots and
English friends.  The first battle between the Beggars and the
government troops, [Sidenote: March 13, 1567] near Antwerp, ended in a
rout for the former.

Philip now ordered ten thousand Spanish veterans, led by Alva, to march
from Italy to the Netherlands.  Making their way through the Free
County of Burgundy and Lorraine they entered Brussels on August 9,
1567.  [Sidenote: Alva 1508-83]  Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of
Alva, had won experience and reputation as a soldier in the German
wars.  Though self-controlled and courtly in manner, his passionate
patriotism and bigotry made him a fit instrument to execute Philip's
orders to make the Netherlands Spanish and Catholic.  He began with no
uncertain hand, building forts at Antwerp and quartering his troops at
Brussels where their foreign manners and Roman piety gave offence to
the citizens.  On September 9 he arrested the counts of Egmont and
Horn, next to Orange the chief leaders of the patriotic party.  Setting
up a tribunal, called the Council of {258} Troubles, to deal with cases
of rebellion and heresy, he inaugurated a reign of terror.  He himself
spent seven hours a day in this court trying cases and signing
death-warrants.  Not only heretics were punished but also agitators and
those who had advocated tolerance.  Sincere Catholics, indeed, noted
that the crime of heresy was generally the mere pretext for dealing
with patriots and all those obnoxious to the government.  [Sidenote:
Executions]  For the first time we have definite statistics of the
numbers executed.  For instance, on January 4, 1568, 48 persons were
sentenced to death, on February 20, 37; on February 21, 71; on March
20, 55; and so on for day after day, week in and week out.  On March 3
at the same hour throughout the whole land 1500 men were executed.  The
total number put to death during the six years of Alva's administration
has been variously estimated at from 6,000 to 18,000.  The lower number
is probably nearer the truth, though not high enough.  Emigration on a
hitherto unknown scale within the next thirty or forty years carried
400,000 persons from the Netherlands.  Thousands of others fled to the
woods and became freebooters.  The people as a whole were prostrated
with terror.  The prosperity of the land was ruined by the wholesale
confiscations of goods.  Alva boasted that by such means he had added
to the revenues of his territories 500,000 ducats per annum.

William of Orange retired to his estates at Dillenburg not to yield to
the tyrant but to find a _point d'appui_ from which to fight.  Wishing
to avoid anything that might cause division among the people he kept
the religious issue in the background and complained only of foreign
tyranny.  He tried to enlist the sympathies of the Emperor Maximilian
II and to collect money and men.  William's friend Villiers invaded the
Burgundian State near Maastricht and Louis of Nassau marched with
troops into Friesland.  {259} [Sidenote: April, 1568]  By this time
Alva had increased his army by 10,000 German cavalry and both the rebel
leaders were severely defeated.

This triumph was followed by an act of power and defiance on Alva's
part sometimes compared to the execution of Louis XVI by the French
Republicans.  Hitherto the sufferers from his reign of blood had not in
any case been men of the highest rank.  The first execution of nobles
took place at Brussels on June 1, that of the captured Villiers
followed on June 2, and that of Egmont and Horn on June 5.

Orange himself now took the field with 25,000 troops, a motley
aggregate of French, Flemish, and Walloon Huguenots and of German
mercenaries.  But he had no genius for war to oppose to the veterans of
Alva.  Continually harassed by the Spaniards he was kept in fear for
his communications, dared not risk a general engagement and was
humiliated by seeing his retreat, in November, turned into a rout.

[Sidenote: July 16, 1570]

Finding that severity did not pacify the provinces, Alva issued a
proclamation that on the face of it was a general amnesty with pardon
for all who submitted.  But he excepted by name several hundred
emigrants, all the Protestant clergy, all who had helped them, all
iconoclasts, all who had signed petitions for religious liberty, and
all who had rebelled.  As these exceptions included the greater portion
of those who stood in need of pardon the measure proved illusory as a
means of reconciliation.  Coupled with it were other measures,
including the prohibition to subjects to attend foreign universities,
intended to put a check on free trade in ideas.

[Sidenote: Taxation]

Alva's difficulties and the miseries of the unhappy land entrusted to
his tender mercies were increased by want of money.  Notwithstanding
the privilege of {260} granting their own taxes the States General were
summoned [Sidenote: March 21, 1569] and forced to accept new imposts of
one per cent. on all property real and personal, ten per cent. on the
sale of all movable goods and five per cent. on the sale of real
estate.  These were Spanish taxes, exorbitant in any case but
absolutely ruinous to a commercial people.  A terrible financial panic
followed.  Houses at Antwerp that had rented for 300 gulden could now
be had for 50 gulden.  Imports fell off to such an extent that at this
port they yielded but 14,000 gulden per annum instead of 80,000 as
formerly.  The harbor was filled with empty boats; the market drugged
with goods of all sorts that no one would buy.

[Sidenote: Beggars of the Sea]

The cause of the patriots looked hopeless.  Orange, discredited by
defeat, had retired to Germany.  At one time, to avoid the clamors of
his troops for pay, he was obliged to flee by night from Strassburg.
But in this dark hour help came from the sea.  Louis of Nassau, not
primarily a statesman like his brother but a passionate crusader for
Protestantism, had been at La Rochelle and had there seen the excellent
work done by privateers.  In emulation of his French brethren he
granted letters of marque to the sailors of Holland and Zeeland.
Recruits thronged to the ships, Huguenots, men from Liege, and the
laborers of the Walloon provinces thrown out of work by the commercial
crisis.  These men promptly won striking successes in preying on
Spanish commerce.  Their many and rich prizes were taken to England or
to Emden and sold.  Often they landed on the coasts and attacked small
Catholic forces, or murdered priests.  On the night of March 31-April
1, 1572, these Beggars of the Sea seized the small town of Brielle on a
large island at the mouth of the Meuse not far from the Hague.  This
success was immediately followed by the insurrection of Rotterdam and
Flushing.  The war was conducted with combined {261} heroism and
frightfulness.  Receiving no quarter the Beggars gave none, and to
avenge themselves on the unspeakable wrongs committed by Alva they
themselves at times massacred the innocent.  But their success spread
like wildfire.  The coast towns "fell away like beads from a rosary
when one is gone."  Fortifications in all of them were strengthened
and, where necessary, dykes were opened.  Reinforcements also came from
England.

[Sidenote: Revolution]

By this time the revolt had become a veritable revolution.  It found
its battle hymn in the Wilhelmuslied and its Washington in William of
Orange.  As all the towns of Holland save Amsterdam were in his hands,
in June the provincial Estates met--albeit illegally, for there was no
one authorized to convene them--assumed sovereign power and made
William their Stat-holder.  They voted large taxes and forced loans
from rich citizens, and raised money from the sale of prizes taken at
sea.  All defect in prescriptive and legal power was made up by the
popularity of the prince, deeply loved by all classes, not only on
account of his affability to all, even the humblest, but still more
because of confidence in his ability.  Never did his versatility,
patience and skill in management shine more brightly.  Among the troops
raised by the patriots he kept strict discipline, thus making by
contrast more lurid the savage pillage by the Spaniards.  He kept far
from fanatics and swashbucklers of whom there were plenty attracted to
the revolt.  His master idea was to keep the Netherlands together and
to free them from the foreigner.  Complete independence of Spain was
not at first planned, but it soon became inevitable.

For a moment there was a prospect of help from Coligny's policy of
prosecuting a war with Spain, but these hopes were destroyed by the
defeat of the French Huguenots near Mons [Sidenote: July 17, 1572] and
by the massacre of Saint {262} Bartholomew.  [Sidenote: August 24,
1572]  Freed from menace in this quarter and encouraged by his
brilliant victory, Alva turned north with an army now increased to
40,000 veterans.  First he took Malines and delivered it to his
soldiers for "the most dreadful and inhuman sack of the day" as a
contemporary wrote.  The army then marched to Guelders and stormed
Zutphen under express orders from their general "not to leave one man
alive or one building unburnt."  "With the help of God," as Alva
piously reported, the same punishment was meted out to Naarden.  Then
he marched to the still royalist Amsterdam from which base he proceeded
to invest Haarlem.  The siege was a long and hard one for the
Spaniards, harassed by the winter weather and by epidemics.  Alva wrote
Philip that it was "the bloodiest war known for long years" and begged
for reinforcements.  [Sidenote: July 12, 1573]  At last famine overcame
the brave defenders of the city and it capitulated.  Finding that his
cruelty had only nerved the people to the most desperate resistance,
and wishing to give an example of clemency to a city that would
surrender rather than await storming, Alva contented himself with
putting to death to the last man 2300 French, English, and Walloon
soldiers of the garrison, and five or six citizens.  He also demanded a
ransom of 100,000 dollars[3] in lieu of plunder.  Not content with this
meager largess the Spanish troops mutinied, and only the promise of
further cities to sack quieted them.  The fortunes of the patriots were
a little raised by the defeat of the Spanish fleet in the Zuiderzee by
the Beggars on October 12, 1573.

[Sidenote: Requesens]

For some time Philip had begun to suspect that Alva's methods were not
the proper ones to win back the affectionate loyalty of his people.
Though he hesitated long he finally removed him late in 1573 and {263}
appointed in his stead Don Louis Requesens.  Had Philip come himself he
might have been able to do something, for the majority professed
personal loyalty to him, and in that age, as Shakespeare reminds us,
divinity still hedged a king.  But not having the decision to act in
person Philip picked out a favorite, known from his constant attendance
on his master as "the king's hour-glass," in whom he saw the slavishly
obedient tool that he thought he wanted.  The only difference between
the new governor and the old was that Requesens lacked Alva's ability;
he had all the other's narrowly Spanish views, his bigotry and
absolutism.

Once arrived in the provinces committed to his charge, he had no choice
but to continue the war.  But on January 27, 1574, Orange conquered
Middelburg and from that date the Spanish flag ceased to float over any
portion of the soil of Holland or Zeeland.  In open battle at Mook,
however, [Sidenote: April 14, 1574] the Spanish veterans again achieved
success, defeating the patriots under Louis of Nassau, who lost his
life.  The beginning of the year saw the investment of Leyden in great
force.  The heroism of the defence has become proverbial.  When, in
September, the dykes were cut to admit the sea, so that the vessels of
the Beggars were able to sail to the relief of the city, the siege was
raised.  It was the first important military victory for the patriots
and marks the turning-point of the revolt.  Henceforth the Netherlands
could not be wholly subdued.

Requesens summoned the States General and offered a pardon to all who
would submit.  But the people saw in this only a sign of weakness.  A
flood of pamphlets calling to arms replied to the advances of the
government.  Among the pamphleteers the ablest was Philip van Marnix,
[Sidenote: Marnix, 1538-98] a Calvinist who turned his powers of satire
against Spain and the Catholic {264} church.  William of Orange, now a
Protestant, living at Delft, inspired the whole movement.  Requesens,
believing that if he were out of the way the revolt would collapse,
like Alva offered public rewards for his assassination.  That there was
really no common ground was proved at a conference between the two
foes, broken off without result.  In the campaign of 1575 the Spanish
army again achieved great things, taking Oudewater, Schoonhoven and
other places.  But the rebels would not give up.

[Sidenote: March 5, 1576]

The situation was changed by the death of Requesens.  Before his
successor could be appointed events moved rapidly.  After taking
Zierikzee on June 29, the Spanish army turned to Aalst, quartered the
soldiers on the inhabitants, and forced the loyal city to pay the full
costs of their maintenance.  If even the Catholics were alienated by
this, the Protestants went so far as to preach that any Spaniard might
be murdered without sin.  In the concerted action against Spain the
Estates of Brabant now took the leading part; meeting at Brussels they
intimidated the Council of State and raised an army of 3000 men.  By
this time Holland and Zeeland were to all intents and purposes an
independent state.  The Calvinists, strong among the native population,
were recruited by a vast influx of immigrants from other Provinces
until theirs became the dominant religion.  Holland and Zeeland pursued
a separate military and financial policy.  Alone among the provinces
they were prosperous, for they had command of the rich sea-borne
commerce.

The growth of republican theory kept pace with the progress of the
revolt.  Orange was surrounded by men holding the free principles of
Duplessis-Mornay and corresponding with him.  Dutchmen now openly
voiced their belief that princes were made for the sake of their
subjects and not subjects for the sake {265} of princes.  Even though
they denied the equal rights of the common people they asserted the
sovereignty of the representative assembly.  The Council of State,
having assumed the authority of the viceroy during the interim, was
deluged with letters petitioning them to shake off the Spanish yoke
entirely.  But, as the Council still remained loyal to Philip, on
September 4 its members were arrested, a _coup d'etat_ planned in the
interests of Orange and doubtless with his knowledge.  It was, of
course, tantamount to treason.  The Estates General now seized
sovereign powers.  Still protesting their loyalty to the monarch's
person and to the Catholic religion, they demanded virtual independence
and the withdrawal of the Spanish troops.  To enforce their demands
they collected an army and took possession of several forts.  But the
Spanish veterans never once thought of giving way.  Gathering at
Antwerp where they were besieged by the soldiers of the States General,
[Sidenote: November 4, 1576] they attacked and then scattered the bands
sent against them and proceeded to sack Antwerp like a captured town.
In one dreadful day 7000 of the patriots, in part soldiers, in part
noncombatants, perished.  The wealth of the city was looted.  The army
of occupation boasted as of a victory of this deed of blood, known to
the Netherlanders as "the Spanish fury."

Naturally, such a blow only welded the provinces more firmly together
and steeled their temper to an even harder resistance.  Its immediate
result was a treaty, known as the Pacification of Ghent, between the
provinces represented in the States General on the one hand and Holland
and Zeeland on the other, for the purposes of union and of driving out
the foreigner.  The religious question was left undecided, save that
the northern provinces agreed to do nothing for the present against the
Roman church.  But, as {266} heretofore, the Calvinists, now inscribing
"Pro fide et patria" on their banners, were the more active and
patriotic party.

[Sidenote: Don John, 1547-78]

On May 1, 1577, the new Governor-General, Don John of Austria, entered
Brussels.  A natural son of Charles V, at the age of twenty-four he had
made himself famous by the naval victory of Lepanto, and his name still
more celebrated in popular legend on account of his innumerable amours.
That he had some charm of manner must be assumed; that he had ability
in certain directions cannot be denied; but his aristocratic hauteur,
his contempt for a nation of merchants and his disgust at dealing with
them, made him the worst possible person for the position of Governor.
Philip's detailed instructions left nothing to the imagination: the
gist of them was to assure the Catholic religion and obedience of his
subjects "as far as possible," to speak French, and not to take his
mistresses from the most influential families, nor to alienate them in
any other way.  After force had been tried and failed the effect of
gentleness was to be essayed.  Don John was to be a dove of peace and
an angel of love.

But even if a far abler man had been sent to heal the troubles in the
Netherlands, the breach was now past mending.  In the States General,
as in the nation at large, there were still two parties, one for Orange
and one for Philip, but both were determined to get rid of the devilish
incubus of the Spanish army.  The division of the two parties was to
some extent sectional, but still more that class division that seems
inevitable between conservatives and liberals.  The king still had for
him the clergy, the majority of the nobles and higher bourgeoisie; with
William were ranged the Calvinists, the middle and lower classes and
most of the "intellectuals", lawyers, men of learning and those
publicists known as the "monarchomachs."  Many of {267} these were
still Catholics who wished to distinguish sharply between the religious
and the national issue.  At the very moment of Don John's arrival the
Estates passed a resolution to uphold the Catholic faith.

[Sidenote: February, 1577]

Even before he had entered his capital Don John issued the "Perpetual
Edict" agreeing to withdraw the Spanish troops in return for a grant of
600,000 guilders for their pay.  He promised to respect the privileges
of the provinces and to free political prisoners, including the son of
Orange.  In April the troops really withdrew.  The small effect of
these measures of conciliation became apparent when the Estates General
voted by a majority of one only to recognize Don John as their
Statholder.  [Sidenote: May 12]  So little influence did he have that
he felt more like a prisoner than a governor; he soon fled from his
capital to the fortress of Namur whence he wrote urging his king to
send back the troops at once and let him "bathe in the blood of the
traitors."

William was as much pleased as John was enraged at the failure of the
policy of reconciliation.  While the majority of the states still hoped
for peace William was determined on independence at all costs.  In
August he sent a demand to the representatives to do their duty by the
people, for he did not doubt that they had the right to depose the
tyrant.  Never did his prospects look brighter.  Help was offered by
Elizabeth and the tide of republican feeling began to rise higher.  In
proportion as the laborers were drawn to the party of revolt did the
doctrine of the monarchomachs become liberal.  No longer satisfied with
the democracy of corporations and castes of the Middle Ages, the people
began to dream of the individualistic democracy of modern times.

The executive power, virtually abandoned by Don John, now became
centered in a Committee of {268} Eighteen, nominally on fortifications,
but in reality, like the French Committee of Public Safety, supreme in
all matters.  This body was first appointed by the citizens of
Brussels, but the States General were helpless against it.  It was
supported by the armed force of the patriots and by the personal
prestige of Orange.  His power was growing, for, with the capitulation
of the Spanish garrison at Utrecht he had been appointed Statholder of
that province.  When he entered Brussels on September 23, he was
received with the wild acclamations of the populace.  Opposition to him
seemed impossible.  And yet, even at this high-water mark of his power,
his difficulties were considerable.  Each provi