A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Even now the papacy, witless of new developments, could very well suppose the new heresy transient. Charles V, the new Emperor, was thoroughly orthodox; and not many of the German nobles were ostensibly otherwise. But Charles was under a deep obligation to Frederick the Elector of Saxony for his election; and Frederick was one of those who had begun, for racial and financial reasons, to contemplate “home rule” in matters ecclesiastical. Frederick accordingly was allowed to protect Luther, whose courage in going to the Diet of Worms, with Huss’s fate in common memory, further established his popular influence. Manhood always loves manhood. After 1526, however, the process of the Reformation in Germany was substantially one of wholesale confiscation of Church lands and goods by the nobles, who were thus irrevocably committed to the cause; and though Luther and his more single-minded colleagues were naturally disgusted, there was no other way in which they could have won, popular sympathy counting for nothing in such a matter without military force.

A rupture took place, finally, between the Emperor and the new Medicean pope, Clement VII, over the desperate politics of Italy, the papacy for once taking a national course in resisting an imperialist invasion. But the invaders triumphed; Italy was overrun anew; Rome was sacked (1527) with all the atrocity which historically distinguishes the Christian conquests of the city from those of the ancient Gauls and Goths; and during the critical years of the establishment of Protestantism the emperor was in no mood to quarrel with his German friends in the interests of a pope whose friendship he could not trust. All the political conditions were thus abnormally favourable to the Lutheran movement. At the same time, every menace from Rome led naturally to intensification of the Lutheran heresy; and though it always remained nearer Catholicism than did Calvinism, it emphasized more and more its differences.

In the meantime the success of the movement of Zwingli at Zurich had proved independently that the strength of the Reformation lay in its appeal to economic interest. Confiscation of the possessions of the Church by the municipal authorities was a first step, and one for which, once taken, the community would fight rather than revoke it. With signal unwisdom, the Roman curia had contrived to allot most of the Swiss town livings to Italians, so that the vested interests were alien and not local. The municipality, on the other hand, sagaciously pacified those interests by guaranteeing pensions or posts as teachers or preachers to the whole twenty-four cantons of the chapter; and there and in some other cantons the economic Reformation, thus effected, was permanent.

In the case of England, on the other hand, the primary factor in the repudiation of papal rule was the personal insistence of Henry VIII on a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the emperor, Charles V. Henry was so far from being inclined to Protestantism that he caused to be compiled by his bishops (1521) a treatise in reply to Luther, to which he put his name, thereupon receiving from Leo X the title of “Defender of the Faith.” To the very last, he burned doctrinal Protestants as heretics, and despite revival of the old Lollard propaganda the country remained substantially Catholic in creed. But when it came to the king’s demand for a divorce, the new pope, Clement VII, was in a hopeless dilemma, since if he granted the request, which he was personally and theologically not unwilling to do, he would exasperate the emperor Charles, of whom he dreaded to make an irreconcilable enemy, besides offending the whole Catholicism of Spain and even much of that of England. When once Henry decided to take ecclesiastical rule into his own hands he found that, little as he liked the new doctrines, he must in his own interest proceed to confiscate Church lands and bestow the bulk of them on adherents, thereby establishing a firm anti-papal interest. So little way did positive Protestant doctrine make that when his daughter Mary came to the throne, though she dared not try to resume the Church lands, the people were in substantial sympathy with her faith, and only her marriage with Philip and her persecution of heretics turned any large number against her. Even under Elizabeth it was the new national enmity to Spain, and not religious propaganda, that made the bulk of the people Protestant in creed and worship.

The process of the Reformation in Scotland clearly follows the economic law. So late as 1535 Scotland was so Catholic in belief, despite the usual grievances against priestly rapacity and luxury, that the parliament passed a law forbidding all importation of the writings of Luther, and all discussion of his “damnable opinions.” But as soon as the English king by his confiscation of the rich monastery lands (1536–39) showed the Scots nobles how they might enrich themselves by turning Protestant, they began to favour heresy; and from the death (1542) of the last Catholic king, James V, throughout the minority of his daughter Mary, they protected the reforming preachers. In 1543 began the wrecking of monasteries by mobs; in 1546 was assassinated Cardinal Beaton, who had taken active steps to destroy heresy; and though the ferocious war with England delayed developments, as did the regency of the Queen’s French mother, the preaching of Calvinism by John Knox and others carried enough of the townspeople to make easy the passing, in 1560, of an Act which made Protestantism the established religion of the country. As usual, by far the greater part of the plunder went to the landowning class, who brazenly broke all their promises of endowment to the preachers. But the latter had perforce to submit, indignant as they were; and when the young Catholic queen Mary arrived in 1561 she found a Protestant kingdom, in which the most powerful class was rich with church spoils. Again the political and the economic forces had been the obviously determining factors in the change.

Scandinavian Protestantism, in turn, moved on the same line of economic opportunity and pressure. A popular movement seems to have begun in Denmark, but it was favoured by the throne; and the nobles, seeing the possibilities of the case, soon followed; whereupon King Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, suppressed Catholicism with the nobles’ help, and confiscated the rich possessions of the bishops. In Sweden, on the other hand, Gustavus Vasa took the initiative against the clergy, who had supported the Danish rule which he succeeded in throwing off; and he naturally had with him the mass of the laity, especially when he gave the nobles leave to reclaim the lands that had been granted by their ancestors to the monasteries. Doctrinal Protestantism followed in the wake of confiscation.

The Protestantism of Holland, again, was plainly the result of the mismanagement of Philip II. When Protestantism had in other countries reached its fullest extension the Low Countries were still mainly Catholic, only a few of the poorer classes having changed, apart from the Anabaptist movement, which had a much larger following; and the slaughter of such heretics by the Inquisition went on for many years with the acquiescence of the middle and upper orders. In the Netherlands the local Inquisition, conducted by natives, was positively more cruel than that of Spain. It is thus clear that there was no special bias to Protestantism in the “Teutonic” races as such. The orthodox Protestant movement entered Holland not from the German but from the French side; and it needed not only the ferocity but the rapacity of Alva to create a permanent Protestant and rationalist movement among the needy nobility. When the Protestant mobs began to resort to image-breaking they put their cause in great peril. The real reason of the slowness of the nobles to turn Protestant was, doubtless, that they had little to gain from plunder of their Church in any case, it having long been abnormally poor by reason of the restrictive policy of the Flemish and Dutch feudal princes in the past. When the rupture with Spain was complete the Church estates were scrupulously disposed of in the public interest, Dutch Protestantism being thus exceptionally clean-handed.

Philip’s attempts to enrich the priesthood were certainly part of the provocation he gave his subjects in the Netherlands; but their resentment was at the outset strictly political, not religious; and it is reasonable to say that had he chosen to reside among them and conciliate them he could easily have kept them Catholic, while in that case Spain might very well have become Protestant, and Dutch and Flemish resources would have been turned against Spanish disaffection. Even in what remained the Spanish Netherlands Catholicism entirely recovered its ground. The Teutonic Charles V had been as rigidly Catholic as his predecessors on the Spanish throne, and for the same reasons, (1) that the Church in his dominions helped him and did not thwart him; and (2) that his large revenues from the Netherlands made it unnecessary for him to plunder the Church as did the Scandinavian kings and Henry VIII.

In the case of France, where Protestantism reached its highest development in point of intellectual and militant energy, but became stationary after a generation of desperate strife, and later decayed, the play of political and economic causation is little less clear. There, as has been said, there was much less ostensible pressure of wealth-seeking interest on the side of the Reformation than in Germany and elsewhere; yet so far as the nobles were concerned an economic motive was certainly at work. At the outset of his reign Francis I had won from the pope, practically at the sword’s point, the concession (1516) of the right to appoint bishops and abbots, the papacy in return receiving the annates, or first year’s revenue. The result was that the Gallican Church was at least as corrupt as any other section of the fold, its dignities being usually bestowed on court favourites, whose exactions exasperated the rural gentry as much as those of papal nominees would have done. The throne being strong, however, and the king having no special financial motive to go further, the cause of reform had no help from his side. Had he turned “reformer,” as he once had some thought of doing, he could probably have made France Protestant with less difficulty than Henry VIII met with in England; but in view of the political divisions set up by Lutheranism in Germany he decided against the new propaganda.

That, nevertheless, proceeded. There had always been keen criticism of the Church in France; and as early as 1512 there began at Meaux a reform movement on substantially Protestant lines, under the auspices of the local bishop. He, however, was put down by the threats of the college of the Sorbonne, the ecclesiastical faculty of the university of Paris; and the first notable signs of anti-Romanism came from the Vaudois of Provence, a small population who had been settled there after the virtual extermination of their predecessors of the same name and stock in the thirteenth century, and who were latterly found to have the same anti-clerical tendencies. Under Louis XII the Church had sought to punish them, but he refused to permit it, declaring them better people than the orthodox. Finding themselves in sympathy with the Reform movement, they sent some of their own preachers to Switzerland and Germany (1530) to learn from it, and began a similar propaganda. Decrees were issued against them in 1535 and 1540, but Francis proposed to spare them on condition that they should enter the Church of Rome. This policy failing, and Francis having made a treaty with Charles V, under which, on papal pressure, he agreed to put down heresy, the Vaudois were given up to coercion. There ensued a massacre so vile (1545) that the king, now near his end, was revolted by it, declaring that his orders had been grossly exceeded. A slow process of inquiry, left to his son, dragged on for years, but finally came to nothing.