One might be tempted to look upon this description as an exaggeration were it not for a letter from Wilibald Pirckheimer to Melanchthon, in which he describes the outrages to which the nuns were exposed in similar terms. ‘The preachers scream, swear, and storm, and do everything in their power to rouse the hatred of the masses against the poor nuns; they openly say that as words were of no avail, recourse should be had to force,’ and he wonders the cloister has not yet been attacked[1175].
Under the pressure of popular opinion and increasing restlessness the Austin monks gave over their house, and they were followed by the Carmelites, the Benedictines, and the Carthusians. The Dominicans hesitated; the Franciscans refused to go. Charitas expresses wonder that the ‘spiritual poison,’ as she calls it, which the preachers several times a week tried to infuse into the nuns, took no effect, and that none of them expressed a desire to leave the convent (p. 85).
Things had now come to such a pass that convents outside the city disbanded before the peasants’ rising; and nuns from Pillenreuth and Engelthal sought refuge in the town with the nuns of St Clara (p. 86). These lived in daily fear of their house being stormed, for the people shouted and swore at them from below, threw stones into the choir, smashed the church windows, and sang insulting songs in the churchyard outside. But the nuns, nothing daunted, continued to keep the hours and to ring the bells, though they were every moment prepared for the worst. Clara in a letter to Wilibald described her own and her sister’s fears in eloquent terms[1176]; and the nun Felicitas Grundherrin wrote to her father entreating him to abide by the old faith[1177]. In these days the nuns seem to have read a good deal of pamphlet literature, but they failed to see anything beyond an encouragement to violence and disorder in the whole Lutheran movement.
A further attempt was made by the council to coerce the convent. A number of injunctions were sent to the abbess which were to be carried out within a month (p. 88). The first of these commanded her to absolve the nuns from their vow that they might enjoy ‘Christian freedom’; another that she should send the young nuns home though they refused, ‘since children should obey their parents.’ The deputies who laid these injunctions before the abbess assured her that the council was prepared to restore to the nuns what they had brought to the convent; that they would give money to those who had brought nothing, and provide a dower for those who married. To these arguments Charitas replied that the nuns had made a vow not before her but before God, that it was not in her power to dispense them from it and that she would not urge them to disobedience. With a touch of bitterness she added that their mothers were continually at the convent grating urging them to go (p. 87). For the matrons of the town especially sided with the reformed preachers and cried shame on convent life. ‘If it were not for the women and the preachers things would not be so bad,’ Clara wrote on one occasion to Wilibald[1178], and on another she spoke of the sharp tongues and violent behaviour of the women.
The deputation further claimed that the nuns should take off their convent clothes (p. 93), the sight of which they said gave umbrage. ‘We are continually told,’ Charitas replied, ‘that our vows and our clothes threaten to cause a rising, but it is your preachers, to whom we are forced to listen, who try to provoke one by abusing and condemning us from the pulpit and charging us with vices and impurity to humour the people.’ The command was also given to do away with the convent grating; and it was backed by the threat that if Charitas failed to comply with it the town authorities would throw open the house to all visitors. The heaviness of this blow was such that after the deputation had left Charitas summoned the nuns and asked their intentions severally. In the eyes of the whole convent throwing open the house involved turning it into a public resort of bad character. They felt they must yield or leave the house altogether, but they promised to abide by the decision of Charitas if she would stay and advise them. The intrepid abbess decided to do away with the grating at one window, declaring that they acted against the rule under protest and only temporarily. On the other points she sought the advice of learned men outside, but they advised compromise, for, to give her own words (p. 95), ‘they said all chance was gone of gaining anything by opposition; we must yield if we did not want the house to go to ruin. People now did things by main force regardless of justice or equity, fearful neither of Pope nor Emperor, nor even of God except in word; things were such that these people said, What we will must be done, thus and not otherwise, declaring themselves more powerful than the Pope himself.’
In the meantime the feelings against the nunnery were by no means unanimous. Geuder, the brother-in-law of Charitas, was emphatic at the council meeting in denouncing the throwing open of convents, which in his eyes also meant turning them into disreputable houses[1179]. But no amount of opposition made by him and others could prevent a scene from being enacted in the convent chapel, which was afterwards looked upon as disgraceful, not only by those who provoked it, but by outsiders whether partisans of the Lutheran movement or not. The repeated attempts to persuade the nuns to leave having failed and Charitas refusing to bid them go, two of the chief councillors, one of them Nützel, the representative of the convent’s interests, and the widow of a councillor who had long clamoured for her daughter’s release, repaired to the convent with a number of other persons, claimed to be admitted, and declared they had come to fetch their daughters away. The three nuns, who were between nineteen and twenty-three years of age, tried to hide, but Charitas bade them come forth, and they then sought refuge with her in the convent chapel. She has described in full how the young women besought her to protect them, how their parents and others abused and reviled them, and how in spite of their protests, their indignation and their tears, their relations at last resorted to violence. Four persons seized each nun and dragged and pushed her out of the chapel, while the women present shouted approval, and once outside their convent clothes were torn off and others substituted in their stead. After a scuffle and a scramble in which one nun was knocked over and her foot injured, they were carried to a chariot waiting outside and conveyed away.
Charitas remained behind in grief and despair. ‘I and all my nuns are so distressed at all this,’ she wrote a few days later[1180], ‘that I have almost wept out my eyes.... Nothing ever so went to my heart.’ Indignation at the violence of the act became general in the town and spread beyond its confines. ‘I never could have imagined women acting in such a cruel manner,’ Sabina, the abbess of Bergen, wrote to Wilibald; and in another letter, apprehending the destruction of the convent at Nürnberg, she proposed that Charitas and her nuns should seek refuge with her[1181].
But Charitas persisted in holding her ground, though with an aching heart. When the men who had fetched away their daughters sent word offering to pay for their maintenance during the time they had lived with her, she refused. Her trials in one direction had reached their climax,—the councillor Nützel, who admitted that things had gone too far, henceforth acted in a conciliatory spirit, and some approximation took place between them. Not that he ever tired of urging Charitas to desert her convent and her cause, but he now confined himself to persuasion and argument, and when one of the young nuns who had been carried off was so far reconciled to the world that she came to the convent window and urged her step-sister to return home, pretending that Nützel had sent her (p. 123), the councillor disclaimed having done so. His correspondence with Charitas, which she has faithfully inserted in her memoir, shows that she patiently listened to every argument in favour of the new doctrines. She had a conversation with the preacher Osiander which lasted four hours (p. 128), she listened to over a hundred sermons preached by the Lutherans, and she read their writings, yet she could find nothing to her taste and it seemed easy to her to confound their arguments. Her letters show that her unhappiness was great, for on one occasion she went so far as to put before Nützel (p. 122) what the result would be if women like themselves, many of whom were over sixty and several over seventy, returned to the world and tried to earn their living, as everyone said they ought to do. She declared she detained no one, the nuns were at liberty to go if they chose; everyone was giving her advice, she said, but she saw no salvation in the new doctrines, which did not appeal to her. Her readiness to listen to argument caused Nützel to set his hopes on a conference between Melanchthon and her (p. 133), and probably at the instigation of Wilibald, who was deeply grieved at the injustice done to his sisters without being able to give them direct help, Melanchthon, who was well known for his uprightness and conciliatory influence, came to Nürnberg towards the close of the year 1525. ‘I am glad to hear Melanchthon is coming,’ Charitas wrote; ‘since I have heard he is an irreproachable, upright and justice-loving man, I do not suppose he can approve of what has been done here.’
Nützel at once (p. 149) brought him to the convent. ‘A few days later our representative came with Philip Melanchthon,’ Charitas wrote, ‘who spoke much about the new faith, but finding that we set our hopes more on the grace of God than on our works, he said we might as well seek our salvation in the cloister as in the world.’ They had a long talk together and agreed on all points except on the subject of vows, for these the reformer declared were not binding, while Charitas maintained that a promise made to God must be kept. She describes Melanchthon as more moderate in his speech than she had ever known a Lutheran to be. Melanchthon, on hearing the various points of the case, blamed the councillors for having forbidden the Franciscans to confer with the convent, and for forcibly taking the nuns out of the cloister. ‘I trust God has sent this Lutheran at the right hour,’ Charitas wrote, ‘for they were discussing whether or not to expel nuns generally, pull down their houses, and put the older inmates of those convents which would not surrender into one house, driving back the younger ones into the world’ (p. 171).
According to her account Melanchthon represented to the council that no convent at Wittenberg had been destroyed by force, and after a great deal of argument it was decreed to make one more effort to persuade the nuns to go, and failing this to leave them alone. No concessions were made with regard to the friars, the nuns remained without a minister to take their confessions and to administer the sacrament, but after all the nuns had been severally asked if they wished to stay or to go, and only one declared herself ready to leave the house, the rest were left in possession till the end of their days.