A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

In 1513, Christian ii., the nephew of the Elector of Saxony, and the brother-in-law of the Emperor Charles v. (1515), came to the throne, and his accession marks the beginning of the new era which was to end with the triumph of the Reformation in all three countries. Christian was a man of great natural abilities, with a profound sense of the miserable condition of the common people within his realms, caused by the petty tyrannies of the nobles, ecclesiastical and secular. No reigning prince, save perhaps George, Duke of Saxony, could compete with him in learning; but he was cruel, partly from nature and partly from policy. He had determined to establish his rule over the three kingdoms whose nominal king he was, and to free the commonalty from their oppression by breaking the power of the nobles and of the great Churchmen. The task was one of extreme difficulty, and he was personally unsuccessful; but his efforts laid the foundation on which successors were able to build securely.

He began by conquering rebellious Sweden, and disgraced his victory by a treacherous massacre of Swedish notables at Stockholm (1520),—a deed which, in the end, led to the complete separation of Sweden from Denmark. [pg 419] After having thus, as he imagined, consolidated his power, he pressed forward his schemes for reform. He took pains to encourage the trade and agriculture of Denmark; he patronised learning. He wrote to his uncle (1519), Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, to send him preachers trained by Luther; and, in response to his appeal, received first Martin Reinhard, and then Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt. These foreigners, who could only address the people through interpreters, did not make much impression; but reformation was pushed forward by the king. He published, on his own authority, two sets of laws dealing with the nobles and the Church, and subjecting both to the sovereign. He enacted that all convents were to be under episcopal inspection. Non-resident and unlettered clergy were legally abolished. A species of kingly consistorial court was set up in Copenhagen, and declared to be the supreme ecclesiastical judicature for the country; and appeals to Rome were forbidden. It can scarcely be said that these laws were ever in operation. A revolt by the Jutlanders gave a rallying point to the disaffection caused by the proposed reforms. Christian fled from Denmark (1523), and spent the rest of his life in exile or in prison. His law-books were burnt.

The Jutlanders had called Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, Christian's uncle, to the throne, and he was recognised King of Denmark and of Norway in 1523. He had come to the kingdom owing to the reaction against the reforms of his nephew, but in his heart he knew that they were necessary. He promised to protect the interests of the nobles, and to defend the Church against the advance of Lutheran opinions; but he soon endeavoured to find a means of evading his pledges. He found it when he pitted the nobles against the higher clergy, and announced that he had never promised to support the errors of the Church of Rome. At the National Assembly (Herredag) at Odense he was able to get the marriage of priests permitted, and a decree that bishops were in the future to apply to the king and not to the Pope for their Pallium. The Reformation [pg 420] had now native preachers to support it, especially Hans Tausen, who was called the Danish Luther, and they were encouraged by the king. At the Herredag at Copenhagen in 1530, twenty-one of these Lutheran preachers were summoned, at the instigation of the bishops, and formal accusations were made against them for preaching heresy. Tausen and his fellows produced a confession of faith in forty-three articles, all of which he and his companions offered to defend. A public disputation was proposed, which did not take place because the Romanist party refused to plead in the Danish language. This refusal was interpreted by the people to mean that they were afraid to discuss in a language which everyone understood. Lutheranism made rapid progress among all classes of the population.

On Frederick's death there was a disputed succession, which resulted in civil war. In the end Frederick's son ascended the throne as Christian iii., King of Denmark and Norway (1536). The king, who had been present at the Diet of Worms, and who had learned there to esteem Luther highly, was a strong Lutheran, and determined to end the authority of the Romish bishops. He proposed to his council that bishops should no longer have any share in the government, and that their possessions should be forfeited to the Crown. This was approved of not merely by the council, but also at a National Assembly which met at Copenhagen (Oct. 30th, 1536), where it was further declared that the people desired the holy gospel to be preached, and the whole episcopal authority done away with. The king asked Luther to send him some one to guide his people in their ecclesiastical matters. Bugenhagen was despatched, came to Copenhagen (1537), and took the chief ecclesiastical part in crowning the king. Seven superintendents (who afterwards took the title of bishops) were appointed and consecrated. The Reformation was carried out on conservative Lutheran lines, and the old ritual was largely preserved. Tausen's Confession was set aside in favour of the Augsburg Confession and Luther's [pg 421] Small Catechism, and the Lutheran Reformation was thoroughly and legally established.

The Reformation also became an accomplished fact in Norway and Iceland, but its introduction into these lands was much more an act of kingly authority.

After the massacre of Swedish notables in Stockholm (Nov. 1520), young Gustaf Ericsson, commonly known as Gustaf Vasa, from the vasa or sheaf which was on his coat of arms, raised the standard of revolt against Denmark. He was gradually able to rally the whole of the people around him, and the Danes were expelled from the kingdom. In 1521, Gustaf had been declared regent of Sweden, and in 1523 he was called by the voice of the people to the throne. He found himself surrounded by almost insuperable difficulties. There had been practically no settled government in Sweden for nearly a century, and every great landholder was virtually an independent sovereign. The country had been impoverished by long wars. Two-thirds of the land was owned by the Church, and the remaining third was almost entirely in the hands of the secular nobles. Both Church and nobles claimed exemption from taxation. The trade of the country was in the hands of foreigners—of the Danes or of the Hanse Towns. Gustaf had borrowed money from the town of Lübeck for his work of liberation. The city was pressing for repayment, and its commissioners followed the embarrassed monarch wherever he went. It was hopeless to expect to raise money by further taxation of the already depressed and impoverished peasants.

In these circumstances the king turned to the Church. He compelled the bishops to give him more than one subsidy (1522, 1523); but this was inadequate for his needs. The Church property was large, and the king planned to overthrow the ecclesiastical aristocracy by the help of the Lutheran Reformation.

Lutheranism had been making progress in Sweden. Two brothers, Olaus and Laurentius Petri, sons of a blacksmith at Orebro, had been sent by their father to study [pg 422] in Germany. They had meant to attend the University of Leipzig; but, attracted by the growing fame of Luther, they had gone to Wittenberg, and had become enthusiastic disciples of the Reformer. On their return to Sweden (1519) they had preached Lutheran doctrine, and had made many converts—among others, Laurentius Andreæ, Archdeacon at Strengnäs. In spite of protests from the bishops, these three men were protected by the king. Olaus Petri was especially active, and made long preaching tours, declaring that he taught the pure gospel which “Ansgar, the apostle of the North, had preached seven hundred years before in Sweden.”

Gustaf brought Olaus to Stockholm (1524), and made him town-clerk of the city; his brother Laurentius was appointed professor of theology at Upsala; Laurentius Andrew was made Archdeacon of Upsala and Chancellor of Sweden. When the bishops demanded that the Reformers should be silenced, Olaus challenged them to a public disputation. The challenge was refused; but in 1524 a disputation was arranged in the king's palace in Stockholm between Olaus and Dr. Galle, who supported the old religion. The conference, which included discussion of the doctrines of Justification by Faith, Indulgences, the Mass, Purgatory, and the Temporal Power of the Pope, had the effect of strengthening the cause of the Reformation. In 1525, Olaus defied the rules of the mediæval Church by publicly marrying a wife. The same year the king called for a translation of the Scriptures into Swedish, and in 1526 Laurentius Petri published his New Testament. A translation of the whole Bible was edited by the same scholar, and published 1540-1541. These translations, especially that of the New Testament, became very popular, and the people with the Scripture in their hands were able to see whether the teaching of the preachers or of the bishops was most in accordance with the Holy Scriptures.

There is no reason to believe that the king did not take the side of the Lutheran Reformation from genuine [pg 423] conviction. He had made the acquaintance of the brothers Petri before he was called to be the deliverer of his country. But it is unquestionable that his financial embarrassment whetted his zeal for the reformation of the Church in Sweden. Matters were coming to a crisis, which was reached in 1527. At the Diet in that year, the Chancellor, in the name of the king, explained the need for an increased revenue, and suggested that ecclesiastical property was the only source from which it could be obtained. The bishops, Johan Brask, Bishop of Linkoeping, at their head, replied that they had the Pope's orders to defend the property of the Church. The nobles supported them. Then Gustaf presented his ultimatum. He told the Diet plainly that they must submit to the proposals of the Chancellor or accept his resignation, pay him for his property, return him the money he had spent in defence of the kingdom, and permit him to leave the country never to return. The Diet spent three days in wrangling, and then submitted to his wishes. The whole of the ecclesiastical property—episcopal, capitular, and monastic—which was not absolutely needed for the support of the Church was to be placed in the hands of the king. Preachers were meanwhile to set forth the pure gospel, until a conference held in presence of the Diet would enable that assembly to come to a decision concerning matters of religion. The Diet went on, without waiting for the conference, to pass the twenty-four regulations which made the famous Ordinances of Vesteräs, and embodied the legal Reformation. They contained provisions for secularising the ecclesiastical property in accordance with the previous decision of the Diet; declared that the king had the right of vetoing the decisions of the higher ecclesiastics; that the appointment of the parish clergy was in the hands of the bishops, but that the king could remove them for inefficiency; that the pure gospel was to be taught in every school; and that auricular confession was no longer compulsory.