Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

Fig. 338.—Philip II., King of Spain.—From the work of Cesare Vecellio: 8vo, 1590.

The Inquisition was less successful in the Netherlands, for the Protestant cause made great progress in Holland during the reign of Charles V. The nobility and the upper clergy, indignant at the rigorous measures adopted by Philip II. (Fig. 338) in his efforts to put down heresy, countenanced the general uprising against the Spaniards. Emboldened thereby, the Protestants flew to arms, the churches were burnt, the priests and monks were massacred, and the Catholic form of worship suppressed in many localities. Philip dispatched thither the notorious Duke of Alva, who, on assuming the command, instituted the council of troubles, which the people nicknamed the council of blood. The religious question resolved itself into a struggle for national independence. A bitter war resulted in the definite separation of the United Provinces, which afterwards became the kingdom of Holland. Belgium, created an independent province, was handed over with hereditary rights to Archduke Albert and his wife Isabella, daughter of Philip II.

Fig. 339.—Cruelties committed by the Gueux, in Holland. A. Master John Jerome, of Edam, and other Catholics of Hoorn, being put to the torture, at Scagen, in Northern Holland. Those who survive the first tortures are tied down upon their backs, a large cauldron turned upside down is placed upon their naked stomachs, with a number of large dormice underneath. A fire is lighted upon the top of the cauldron which enrages the dormice; and as they are unable to creep under the edges of the cauldron, they burrow into the entrails of the victim. B. Ursula Talèse, a nun of Haarlem, having refused to renounce her faith when made to stand beneath the gibbet upon which her father had been hung, is thrown into the water and drowned. C. Her sister, bewailing her fate and that of her father, also refuses to change her creed, and her skull is beaten in with a large stone.—Fac-simile of an Engraving on Copper in the “Theatrum Crudelitatum nostri Temporis” (4to, Antwerp, 1587); with a translation of the explanations given.

The United Provinces were no sooner constituted than, notwithstanding the Protestant principle of the liberty of free inquiry, they obeyed that instinct which impels all governments to religious unity—Spain was outdone in the refinement of punishments which they invented to use against the Catholics who refused to change their faith (Fig. 339). Nor was it against the Catholics only that the Protestant Inquisition exercised its rigorous authority. In countries where Calvinists and Lutherans were brought into juxtaposition, religious persecution broke out between the various reformed Churches, always, too, under the instinctive influence that religious unity was necessary to ensure the stability of the State. A distinguished writer, Menzel, in his “New History of the Germans since the Reformation,” gives some very interesting details concerning this internecine struggle. At the end of the sixteenth century, when, at the death of the Elector of Saxony, Christian I., on September 25th, 1591, the government of Saxony fell into the hands of Duke William of Altenburg, who was a rigid Lutheran, the Calvinist party in Germany thought that the golden age was about to return. Chancellor Crell, who in Christian’s lifetime had treated the Lutherans with slight show of mercy, was cast into prison, together with Gunderman, a Leipsic preacher. After five months’ incarceration, the latter signed the “Formula of Concord,” in order that he might be able to visit his wife, whom he had left enceinte, but he had no sooner appended his signature than he was told that she had hung herself in a fit of despair. The unfortunate man went out of his mind. Other preachers were treated with almost equal severity; and at Leipsic, in 1593, the Lutheran party set fire to the houses of the Calvinists, who had to fly from the city to escape assassination. Such was also the case in Silesia. Upon the 22nd of September, 1601, Chancellor Crell was condemned to death, after having been kept ten years in prison, and he was beheaded on the 10th of October.

At Brunswick, in 1603, the Lutheran preachers excommunicated the captain of the burghers, one Brabant; in 1604 it was rumoured that he had made a pact with the devil, and that the latter had been seen following them in the form of a crow. Brabant tried to escape, but broke his leg in the attempt. Brought back to Brunswick amidst the hootings of the populace, who regarded him as a traitor and a magician, he was three times put to the most cruel torture, to terminate which he avowed himself guilty of all the crimes laid to his charge. His companions in misfortune were treated with equal cruelty. While Zachary Druseman was suspended by the arms in the torture-chamber, his judges went off to their supper. The victim implored the executioner, by the wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, to let him down for a single moment and loosen the screws which were crushing his feet, but the latter replied that he must wait until the judges returned. When they came in an hour afterwards, completely intoxicated, Druseman was dead. Menzel goes on to tell us that on St. Michael’s Day the Lutheran preachers, at the request of the town council, undertook to justify from the pulpit the executions which had been incessantly going on, and that on the 9th of December a thanksgiving service was held in all the churches, in front of which the gibbets and scaffolds were still displayed.

Fig. 340.—Tortures inflicted upon Catholics by the Huguenots in the South of France.—Thirty Catholics, imprisoned at Augoulême, in the house of a burgher of the name of Papin, are tortured in various ways:—A. Some, deprived of food, are chained together in pairs, so that, becoming delirious through hunger, they may tear each other to pieces. B. Some are dragged naked along a tightly-drawn rope, which acts like a saw, cutting the body in two. C. Several are attached to stakes, and fires lighted a short distance behind them, so that their bodies may burn slowly.—Fac-simile of an Engraving on copper in the “Theatrum Crudelitatum nostri Temporis” (4to, Antwerp, 1587); with a translation of the explanations given.

In the southern provinces of France, where the party of the Reformation acquired the upper hand, excesses were committed which were as much reprobated by the more enlightened of the Protestants as by the Catholics. The town of Angoulême in particular was the scene of many such cruelties (Fig. 340).

The dominant party was everywhere guilty of extreme intolerance, but nowhere was the persecution carried on upon so large a scale as in unhappy England. Protestant writers cannot find expressions strong enough to characterize the unheard-of violence to which Henry VIII. had recourse with a view to establish religious unity in his kingdom.