I should be sorry for Lee, if he had not been so violent in the matter; so badly is he treated even by his own Englishmen. In Spain there is a second Lee. A certain Zuniga has, I hear, published a tolerably savage book against Faber and me. The late Cardinal of Toledo had prohibited it, but now that the cardinal is dead, he has given forth his poison. I have not seen the work, and let him beware that it does not come into my hands! I know not what will be the end of this disturbance. Everything points towards revolution, a thing I have always abhorred. If it must be that offences come, at any rate they shall [not] come from me. Those people are conspiring with all their might; they are besieging the courts of the most potent kings and I fear they will overcome them. All that I know about Philip and Œcolampadius I have learned from the letters of others. Both of your letters I have received.
Farewell, beloved in the Lord.
Your most devoted
ERASMUS.
Louvain, Aug. 2, [1521?].
The group of letters cited above reflect an agitated, nervous uncertainty of mind on Erasmus' part. They are filled largely with negations, so arranged as to balance each other with considerable success. They leave on our minds the impression of a dual personality: on the one hand a man childishly sensitive to abuse and fancying that every misdirected shaft of the popular wit or feeling was aimed at him; on the other hand, a man of wide and clear vision, with an outlook over the whole field of human interests and with a perfectly sound comprehension of the ultimate principles by which these interests must be regulated. His chief source of difficulty was his failure to admit the distinctions between the destructive and the constructive forces of the reform. While Luther was using all his energies to make clear to the world that what he aimed at was reconstruction, Erasmus persisted in confounding in one sweeping condemnation all the elements of disturbance he saw abroad in the world. As he had connected Luther and Reuchlin in his declarations of ignorance and hostility, so, as time went on, he mingled Lutherans, Anabaptists, Zwinglians, and all the swarm of popular agitators in his indictments. Yet he constantly lets it appear that he knew as well as anyone the deep-seated distinctions in the reforming groups. He chose to confuse them in his public utterances, in order to keep himself right with that great Establishment which was the mortal enemy of them all.
Meanwhile the practical problem of the Lutheran reform was shaping itself rapidly in accordance with the whole previous development of the German people. The death of the Emperor Maximilian was an event of slight importance, excepting as it opened the way for one of those great electoral contests, which from time to time came to remind the German nation of its own peculiar political character. We must dismiss once for all the fancy that the elected emperor resembled, except in the vaguest fashion, the great hereditary monarchs of England, France, or Spain. So far as his imperial quality was concerned, he had long since become the merest anachronism. He was emperor of nothing but a title; and he owed his title to a group of princes whose liberties he was bound to respect, even to the point of self-destruction. Territorially, he might be strong or weak, according to the personal sovereignty which he held before he became emperor. Politically he had as much weight as he could personally command, and no more. He might be a German or he might not.
The electoral canvass of 1519-20 was the most elaborate the empire had ever seen. The kings of Spain, France, and England were all, at one time or another, among the candidates. A German national party, which saw the hope of the nation in a policy of separation from all "imperial" interests, was eager for a purely German emperor and put forward as its candidate the venerable Frederic, Prince-Elector of Saxony, the immediate sovereign of Luther. If Frederic had acted promptly and put himself decidedly at the head of this German national party it seems as if he might have been elected. He hesitated, declined on grounds of personal distrust, and finally gave his electoral vote for that one among the foreign candidates who seemed least likely to abuse the constitutional privileges of the German princes.
Charles V., grandson of Maximilian through that Archduke Philip to whom Erasmus had written his panegyric in 1504, grandson also of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain through their daughter Joanna, grandson again of that Mary of Burgundy who had carried the Low Countries as her most precious dower to her husband Maximilian, was a youth of twenty, a German only by virtue of a strain of badly diluted Habsburg blood, educated under Spanish influence in the Low Countries, ignorant of the German tongue, and totally unsympathetic with the character and traditions of the German people. The very conception of the German state as a loose federation of practically independent principalities was utterly foreign to his training and his inheritance.
The election of Charles V. gave courage to all defenders of the existing church order. As to his personal orthodoxy there could be no question whatever. Nor was there any more reason to doubt his loyalty to the traditions of his family as to the duty of a Christian ruler toward the institutions of what passed for Christianity. If there had been any room for question on these points, it would have been removed by Charles's action in the Low Countries in the very first years of the Lutheran revolt. He had taken hold of the matter with a strong hand and demonstrated his loyalty by prompt action against heretical books and persons. His first great public declaration of policy, however, was at his first appearance on German soil at the famous Diet at Worms in 1521. It was, properly, regarded as a piece of liberality that Luther was invited to come personally to Worms and defend himself before the emperor and the legate of Pope Leo X., that same Aleander who had been a fellow-worker with Erasmus in the Aldine workshop at Venice. Luther was already a condemned heretic. The only question was whether the Empire as such would ratify the action of the pope and lend its arm to enforce the papal decrees.