There was, from the first, no prospect of the sentence being carried into effect. The hesitation of the German Princes of the Church to publish even the Bull of Excommunication had shown that they were not to be trusted to put the new measures into execution.
The thoughts of retaliation which were aflame in Luther, i.e. his expectation of a “Divine judgment” on his adversaries, he committed to writing in a letter which he forwarded to Franz von Sickingen on June 1, 1521, together with a little work dedicated to him, “Concerning Confession, whether the Pope has the power to decree it.”[164] In it he reminds Sickingen that God had slain thirty-one Kings in the land of Chanaan together with the inhabitants of their cities. “It was ordained by God that they should fight against Israel bravely and defiantly, that they should be destroyed and no mercy shown them. This story looks to me like a warning to our Popes, bishops, men of learning and other spiritual tyrants.” He feared that it was God’s work that they should feel themselves secure in their pride, “so that, in the end, they would needs perish without mercy.” Unless they altered their ways one would be found who “would teach them, not like Luther by word and letter, but by deeds.” We cannot here go into the question of why the revolutionary party in the Empire did not at that time proceed to “deeds.”
3. Legends
The beginning of the legends concerning the Diet of Worms can be traced back to Luther himself. He declared, only a year after the event, shortly after his departure from the Wartburg, in a letter of July 15, 1522, intended for a few friends and not for German readers: “I repaired to Worms although I had already been apprised of the violation of the safe-conduct by the Emperor Charles.”
He there says of himself, that, in spite of his timidity, he nevertheless ventured “within reach of the jaws of Behemoth [the monster mentioned in Job xl.]. And what did these terrible giants [my adversaries] do? During the last three years not one has been found brave enough to come forward against me here at Wittenberg, though assured of a safe-conduct and protection”; “rude and timorous at one and the same time” they would not venture “to confront him, though single-handed,” or to dispute with him. What would have happened had these weaklings been forced to face the Emperor and all-powerful foes as he had done at Worms? This he says to the Bohemian, Sebastian Schlick, Count of Passun, in the letter in which he dedicates to him his Latin work “Against Henry VIII of England.”[165] It is worth noting that Luther did not insert this dedication in the German edition, but only in the Latin one intended for Bohemia and foreign countries where the circumstances were not so well known.
Luther always adhered obstinately to the idea, which ultimately passed into a standing tradition with many of his followers, that no one had been willing to dispute with him at Worms or elsewhere during the period of his outlawry; that he had, in fact, been condemned unheard; that his opponents had sought to vanquish him by force, not by confronting him with proofs, and had obstinately shut their ears to his arguments from Holy Scripture. He finally came to persuade himself, that they were in their hearts convinced that he was right, but out of consideration for their temporal interests had not been willing or able to give in.
He expressly mentions Duke George of Saxony, as an opponent who had taken up the latter position, also the influential Archbishop Albrecht of Mayence, and, above all, Johann Eck. “Is it not obdurate wickedness,” he exclaims in one of his outbursts, “to be the enemy of, and withstand, what is known and recognised as true? It is a sin against the first Commandment and greater than any other. But because it is not their invention they look on it as nought! Yet their own conscience accuses them.”[166] In another passage, in 1528, he complains of the persecutors in Church and State who appealed to the edict of Worms; “they sought for an excuse to deceive the simple people, though they really knew better”; if they act thus, it must be right, “were we to do the same, it would be wrong.”[167]
Yet,even from the vainglorious so-called “Minutes of the Worms Negotiations” (“Akten der Wormser Verhandlungen”), published immediately after at Wittenberg with Luther’s assistance,[168] it is clear that the case was fully argued in his presence at Worms, and that he had every opportunity of defending himself, though, from a legal point of view, the Bull of Excommunication having already been promulgated, the question was no longer open to theological discussion. In these “Minutes” the speeches he made in his defence at Worms are quoted. Catholic contemporaries even reproached him with having allowed himself to be styled therein “Luther, the man of God”; his orations are introduced with such phrases as: “Martin replied to the rude and indiscreet questions with his usual incredible kindness and friendliness in the following benevolent words,” etc.[169]
In order still further to magnify the bravery he displayed at Worms, Luther stated later on that the Pope had written to Worms, “that no account was to be made of the safe-conduct.”[170] As a matter of fact, however, the Papal Nuncios at Worms had received instructions to use every effort to prevent Luther being tried in public, because according to Canon Law the case was already settled; if he refused to retract, and came provided with a safe-conduct, nothing remained but to send him home, and then proceed against him with the utmost severity.[171] It was for this reason, according to his despatches, that Aleander took no part in the public sessions at which Luther was present. Only after Luther, on the return journey, had sent back the herald who accompanied him, and had openly infringed the conditions of the Imperial safe-conduct, did Aleander propose “that the Emperor should have Luther seized.”[172]
Luther, from the very commencement, stigmatised the Diet of Worms as the “Sin of Wormbs, which rejected God’s truth so childishly and openly, wilfully and knowingly condemned it unheard”;[173] to him the members of the Diet were culpably hardened and obdurate “Pharaohs,” who thought Christ could not see them, who, out of “utterly sinful wilfulness,” were determined “to hate and blaspheme Christ at Wormbs,” and to “kill the prophets, till God forsook them”; he even says: “In me they condemned innocent blood at Wormbs; ... O thou unhappy nation, who beyond all others has become the lictor and executioner of End-Christ against God’s saints and prophets.”[174] An esteemed Protestant biographer of Luther is, however, at pains to point out, quite rightly, that the Diet could “not do otherwise than condemn Luther.” “By rejecting the sentence of the highest court he placed himself outside the pale of the law of the land. Even his very friends were unable to take exception to this.” It is, he says, “incorrect to make out, as so many do, that Luther’s opponents were merely impious men who obstinately withstood the revealed truth.” This author confines himself to remarking that, in his own view, it was a mistake to have “pronounced a formal sentence” upon such questions.[175]