The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

§ 9. Dangers of the future.

Such a peace, acceptable as it was at the time, was pregnant with future evil. Owing its origin to a Diet in which everything was arranged by the princes and electors, it settled all questions as if nobody but princes and electors had any interest in the matter. And, besides this, there was a most unstatesmanlike want of provision for future change. The year 1552 was to give the line by which the religious institutions of Germany were to be measured for all time. There was nothing elastic about such legislation. It did not, on the one hand, adopt the religion of the vast majority as the established religion of the Empire. It did not, on the other hand, adopt the principle of religious liberty. In thinking of themselves and their rights, the princes had forgotten the German people.

§ 10. Fresh encroachments upon Church lands.

The barriers set up against Protestantism were so plainly artificial that they soon gave way. The princes claimed the right of continuing to secularize Church lands within their territories as inseparable from their general right of providing for the religion of their subjects. At all events they had might on their side. About a hundred monasteries are said to have fallen victims in the Palatinate alone, and an almost equal number, the gleanings of a richer harvest which had been reaped before the Convention of Passau, were taken possession of in Northern Germany.

§ 11. The Ecclesiastical Reservation.

The Ecclesiastical Reservation applied to a different class of property, namely, to the bishoprics and abbeys held immediately of the Empire. Here, too, the Protestants found an excuse for evading the Treaty of Augsburg. The object of the reservation, they argued, was not to keep the bishoprics in Catholic hands, but to prevent quarrels arising between the bishops and their chapters. If, therefore, a bishop elected as a Catholic chose to turn Protestant, he must resign his see in order to avoid giving offence to the Catholic chapter. But where a chapter, itself already Protestant, elected a Protestant bishop, he might take the see without hesitation, and hold it as long as he lived.

§ 12. The northern bishoprics Protestant.

In this way eight of the great northern bishoprics soon came under Protestant rule. Not that the Protestant occupant was in any real sense of the word a bishop. He was simply an elected prince, calling himself a bishop, or often more modestly an administrator, and looking after the temporal affairs of his dominions.

§ 13. Good and bad side of the arrangement.

In some respects the arrangement was a good one. The populations of these territories were mainly Protestant, and they had no cause to complain. Besides, if only a sufficient number of these bishoprics could be gained to Protestantism, the factitious majority in the Diet might be reversed, and an assembly obtained more truly representing the nation than that which was in existence. But it must be acknowledged that the whole thing had an ugly look; and it is no wonder that Catholics pronounced these administrators to be no bishops at all, and to have no right to hold the bishops' lands, or to take their seat as bishops in the Diet of the Empire.