Luther's journey from Wittenberg and his appearance in Worms were a demonstration of his popularity throughout Northern Germany. Charles V., youth as he was, was too clever a politician to offend too deeply at this outset of his reign a whole people whose services he might at any moment sorely need. He heard Luther with patience, he respected his safe-conduct, and let him return to Saxony in safety; but he published as the formal decision of the Diet the Edict of Worms, wherein Luther was declared in the ban of the Empire as he was already in the ban of the Church, and his books were condemned to be burned wherever found.
The Edict of Worms defined the official attitude of the Empire towards the reform from this time forth. It lacked nothing in clearness and finality. Henceforth, whoever within the limits of the Empire harboured either the man or his ideas was subject to immediate punishment. The question, however, still remained, how the Edict of Worms was to be enforced, and the answer to that question is the history of Germany and even of Europe for the next generation. Enough for our present purpose to say that the immediate pressure of political and military demands outside of Germany compelled the young emperor to postpone definite aggressive action against the Lutheran party until the course of events had separated the whole north of Germany from all but a nominal connection with the Empire. We are concerned with the action of Erasmus upon these events and their reaction upon his course of life.
Erasmus left Louvain in 1521. As to his motives in this change we are as much in the dark as about any of his former migrations. We know what his critics said about it and what he replied to their criticisms. They said he was afraid to stay in a country where heretics were being arrested every day and where, as he had all along been declaring, he was regarded as the head and front of this whole offending. He replied that this was pure nonsense, as could be clearly proved by the fact that after leaving Louvain he still lingered for several months in the Low Countries before taking up his journey to Basel. He went to Basel, he said, for the same reasons which had carried him thither before; namely, to superintend the publication of some of his works.
The most detailed account of this interval between Louvain and Basel is given in a long letter,[141] dated in 1523, to Marcus Laurinus, dean of St. Donatian at Bruges. The tone of this letter is that which had now become habitual with Erasmus, namely, of elaborate defence against all charges, no matter from what source, which could in any way affect his loyalty to the Roman Church on the one hand or to his own principle of free criticism on the other. His especial grievance is the charge of cowardice in leaving Louvain.
"As long as I was at Louvain," he writes, "whenever I went to Brussels or Mechlin, though I had promised to return within ten days, those people, who are ashamed of nothing, would spread a rumour that I had run away through fear. Then when I was taking a holiday for my health at Anderlech, a place close by Brussels, where the king's palace is, and often running back to Louvain,—why then, I was in hiding! Frequently, I was at the same moment down with a hopeless fever at Louvain and had fallen from my horse and died of apoplexy at Brussels; and this at a time when I was—thanks be to Christ!—never better in my life. It was not enough to have killed the hapless Erasmus once for all, but they must needs butcher him with so many diseases, slay him with such a variety of tortures!
"I did not go to the assembly at Worms,—or as learned men are now beginning to call it at 'Mutton-headtown,'—although I was invited, partly because I did not wish to be involved in the affair of Luther, which was then violently discussed; partly because I easily foresaw that in such a great sewage of princes and men of various races, the plague could not fail to appear as it did at Cologne when the emperor was first there.
"When the emperor came back to Brussels, there was scarcely a day that I did not ride through the market-place and past the court and often I was about the court; in fact, I was almost more a resident at Brussels than at Anderlech. I daily paid my compliments to the bishops, though ordinarily I was not overzealous in such matters. I dined with the cardinal. I conversed with both nuncios; I visited ambassadors and they called upon me at Anderlech. Never in my life was I less in concealment, never more openly before the eyes of all men. And meanwhile there were some among those babblers who wrote to Germany that Erasmus was somewhere in hiding,—which I never found out until I got here in Basel. And again when the emperor was at Brussels with the king of Denmark, and Thomas, cardinal of York, was there as ambassador of the king of England, you know yourself, even if I had kept myself to your house, how much in hiding I should have been; since you had all, or at least the chief dignitaries of the court at your table and I was sitting among them a welcome guest, as I believe, to them all. How often I lunched or dined with the foremost men, even with the king of Denmark, who wanted me as his daily table-companion! Where did I not go riding, often in company with you! At what festivity of the great people was I not present—now at the imperial court, now in the family of the cardinal of York, now at one house, now at another! Yet I often refused invitations; for I am by nature a home-lover and my studies require a home-keeping life.
"In the same way that I was then hiding, I afterward ran away! For six whole months I was getting ready for my journey to Basel and that openly before all men. Why, the emperor's treasurer paid over my pension before it was due, because I told him I was going to Basel! Nor was the reason for my journey unknown, it being the same for which I had already so often gone to Basel before I became afraid of those heroes!... I was all ready to start, waiting only to decide upon the road and to have a safe escort. Meanwhile I had to collect money in divers places and for this purpose spent six days at Louvain,—hiding there too, of course, as my custom was,—at an inn where no guests ever came, so that it is a most retired place! It is at the sign of The Savage. By the purest accident there was there at the time Jerome Aleander, with whom I lived on the most friendly terms, sometimes sitting with him over literary talk until far into the night. We agreed that if a safe escort should offer, we would journey together. Returning after a few days I found Aleander getting ready to start, just as I was.... It was my birthday and that of the apostles Simon and Jude."
Having thus proved that up to the very moment of his departure he was on the best of terms with everyone in the Low Countries from whom he could have anything to fear, even with Aleander, the archfiend of the Lutherans, Erasmus goes on to describe his journey. There is nothing especially noteworthy in this description. It is the same old story of dangers and wearinesses by the way, of German inns and German stoves and the troubles they brought him. Yet in the little notes of persons whom he met and how they received him we get some of the most significant and attractive glimpses of the widespread relations of Erasmus with every grade of scholarly activity. In these accounts of journeys occur frequently the words sodalitium and fraternitas. At Strassburg Jacob Spiegel, an imperial secretary, presented him to "the fraternity." From Schlettstadt "certain of the fraternity" escorted him to Colmar. These words seem to refer to the group of scholars in any city and give us a pleasant suggestion of the growing comradeship of learning all through the northern centres of culture.
He tells us how warmly he was received at Basel by the bishop, the magistrates, and other chief men of the church and the university. Everybody knew that he was there, and yet