In the Iberian peninsula the progress of Protestantism was so slight and so quickly crushed out that it played no part in the colonization of Portuguese or Spanish America. It is true that the somewhat outworn machinery of the Inquisition was rejuvenated in the sixteenth century, so as to reach a Protestant movement in Seville, the sailing-point for the American fleets; and this was made an excuse for the introduction of a stricter and more vigorous policy of orthodox uniformity in Spain. The Inquisition also found occupation in looking after heretic foreign merchants and sailors in Spanish seaports, and Jews and Protestant Germans in the American colonies; but no Spaniards ever emigrated to America to escape religious persecution.
As for France, the terrible religious wars of the sixteenth century weakened her projects of colonization, as they did all her other activities, and divided her people into two hostile parties, one of which must ultimately crush out the other. The short-lived colonies established in the middle years of the sixteenth century in Brazil and in Florida were due largely to the hope that they might be places of refuge for oppressed Huguenots. The first French colonies which had any successful outcome, however, were the creation of the other religious party; for Richelieu, when he took up the establishment of colonies in 1624, insisted on Catholic orthodoxy in the religion of the colonists. This precaution was doubtless due to the Huguenot efforts for independence and their treasonable negotiations in France. In founding distant colonies as extensions of the power of the home government, a minister could hardly permit the domination in the new colonies of a party with which he was in deadly conflict at home. Whatever his motive, orthodoxy was insisted on; and New France, like New Spain, became unbrokenly Catholic.
The English colonies, however, ultimately profited by what the French colonies had lost. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, persecution sent a stream of Huguenots to the various English colonies of America, and added thereby a valuable and interesting strain to the richly mingled blood of the American race.
CHAPTER X
RELIGIOUS WARS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND GERMANY
(1520-1648)
The revolt of the Netherlands, which created a new and vigorous European state in the sixteenth century, and a great commercial and colonizing world-power in the seventeenth, was as much a religious as a political movement. The centralizing, autocratic, and unconciliatory policy of Philip II. was probably enough in itself to have caused rebellion in the Netherlands; while the religious conflict was so bitter that it would almost certainly have caused a revolt, even if there had been no political friction. The revolt of 1568 and the war which lasted till 1609, as a matter of fact, turned on causes belonging equally to both fields.
When Charles V. visited the Netherlands in 1520, on his way to claim the imperial crown, the twenty-two provinces then gathered into his hands were all nominally Catholic; and the large majority of the population were sincerely attached to Rome. Yet reformed doctrines soon made their way into the country in several forms. In the southern and central states, Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, Holland, and Zealand, Calvinism entered from France; into Friesland and North Holland came many Mennonites; in some of the towns there were Anabaptists; in the great commercial cities, such as Antwerp and Amsterdam, Lutherans were numerous, some of them immigrants from Germany, some converted to that faith through the communications between lower Germany and the adjacent provinces of the Netherlands. [Footnote: Blok, Hist. of the People of the Netherlands (English trans), III., 22.] Even the Catholics of the Netherlands were not of a bigoted or militant type; heresy had been wide-spread there since the thirteenth century, and the inhabitants had not the horror of it that was felt in some more orthodox countries. [Footnote: Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, I., Introd, xii.]
Among the wealthy, turbulent, strong-minded, and patriotic Netherland burghers and peasantry Reformation doctrines and principles readily spread and gained acceptance; yet they were met by the most determined and harsh opposition from the government which now held the Netherlands in the hollow of its hand. In 1521 Charles V. issued from Worms an edict dooming to loss of property and death every Dutch, Flemish, or Walloon adherent of the teachings of Luther; and in 1523 two monks were burned at Brussels as first-fruits of the long and miserable harvest which was so abundantly reaped afterwards.
A series of edicts known as the "Placards" was now issued by Charles, prohibiting private meetings for religious worship, reading of the Scripture by laymen, discussions on questions of faith, the destruction of religious emblems, the harboring of heretics, the possession of heretical books, and, in general, all heretic or non-Catholic opinions and practices. These edicts were enforced by all the power of the civil government, and by the activity of four inquisitors. The "Placards" reached their culmination in the edict of 1550, renewing and making more severe all punishments for religious offences. When Charles, in 1556, laid down the burden of government in favor of his son, the persecutions had numbered their hundreds, if not thousands, of victims; but heresy had spread only the more widely, and Protestantism in its various forms had become only the stronger.