The imperial edict against Luther threatened all his sympathisers with extermination. It practically proclaimed an Albigensian war in Germany. Charles had handed it to Aleander with a smile. Aleander despatched the document to Rome with an exultation which could only find due expression in a quotation from Ovid's Art of Love. Pope Leo celebrated the arrival of the news by comedies and musical entertainments. But calm observers, foreigners in Germany, saw little cause for congratulation and less for mirth. Henry viii. wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz congratulating him on the overthrow of the “rebel against Christ”; but Wolsey's agent at the Diet informed his master that he believed there were one hundred thousand Germans who were still ready to lay down their lives in Luther's defence.[294] Velasco, who had struck down the Spanish rebels in the battle of Villalar, wrote to the Emperor that the victory was God's gratitude for his dealings with the heretic monk; but Alfonso de Valdès, the Emperor's secretary, said in a letter to a Spanish correspondent:
“Here you have, as some imagine, the end of this tragedy; but I am persuaded it is not the end, but the [pg 299]beginning of it. For I see that the minds of the Germans are greatly exasperated against the Roman See, and they do not seem to attach great importance to the Emperor's edicts; for since their publication, Luther's books are sold with impunity at every step and corner of the streets and market-places. From this you will easily guess what will happen when the Emperor leaves. This evil might have been cured with the greatest advantage to the Christian commonwealth, had not the Pope refused a General Council, had he preferred the public weal to his own private interests. But while he insists that Luther shall be condemned and burnt, I see the whole Christian commonwealth hurried to destruction unless God Himself help us.”
Valdès, like Gattinara and other councillors of Charles, was a follower of Erasmus. He lays the blame of all on the Pope. But what a disillusion this Diet of Worms ought to have been to the Erasmians! The Humanist young sovereigns and the Humanist Pope, from whom so much had been expected, congratulating each other on Luther's condemnation to the stake!
The foreboding of Alfonso de Valdès was amply justified. Luther's books became more popular than ever, and the imperial edict did nothing to prevent their sale either within Germany or beyond it. Aleander was soon to learn this. He had retired to the Netherlands, and busied himself with auto-da-fés of the prohibited writings; but he had to confess that they were powerless to prevent the spread of Luther's opinions, and he declared that the only remedy would be if the Emperor seized and burnt half a dozen Lutherans, and confiscated all their property.[295] The edict had been published or repeated in lands outside Germany and in the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. Henry viii. ordered Luther's books to be burnt in England;[296] the Estates of Scotland prohibited their introduction into the realm under the severest penalties in 1525.[297] But such [pg 300] edicts were easily evaded, and the prohibited writings found their way into Spain, Italy, France, Flanders, and elsewhere, concealed in bales of merchandise. In Germany there was no need for concealment; the imperial edict was not merely disregarded, but was openly scouted. The great Strassburg publisher, Gruniger, apologised to his customers, not for publishing Luther's books, but for sending forth a book against him; and Cochlæus declared that printers gladly accepted any MS. against the Papacy, printed it gratis, and spent pains in issuing it with taste, while every defender of the established order had to pay heavily to get his book printed, and sometimes could not secure a printer at any cost.
§ 9. Popular Literature.
The Reformation movement may almost be said to have created the German book trade. The earliest German printed books or rather booklets were few in number, and of no great importance—little books of private devotion, of popular medicine, herbals, almanacs, travels, or public proclamations. Up to 1518 they barely exceeded fifty a year. But in the years 1518-1523 they increased enormously, and four-fifths of the increase were controversial writings prompted by the national antagonism to the Roman Curia. This increase was at first due to Luther alone;[298] but from 1521 onwards he had disciples, fellow-workers, [pg 301] opponents, all using in a popular way the German language, the effective literary power of which had been discovered by the Reformer.[299] These writers spread the new ideas among the people, high and low, throughout Germany.[300]
There are few traces of combined action in the anti-Romanist writings in the earlier stages of the controversy; it needed literary opposition to give them a semblance of unity. Each writer looks at the general question from his own individual point of view. Luther is the hero with nearly all, and is spoken about in almost extravagant terms. He is the prophet of Germany, the Elias that was to come, the Angel of the Revelation “flying through the mid-heaven with the everlasting Gospel in his hands,” the national champion who was brought to Worms to be silenced, and yet was heard by Emperor, princes, and papal nuncios. Some of the authors were still inclined to make Erasmus their leader, and declared that they were fighting under the banner of that “Knight of Christ”; others looked on Erasmus and Luther as fellow-workers, and one homely pamphlet compares Erasmus to the miller who grinds the flour, and Luther to the baker who bakes it into bread to feed the people. Perhaps the most striking feature of [pg 302] the times was the appearance of numberless anonymous pamphlets, purporting to be written by the unlearned for the unlearned. They are mostly in the form of dialogues, and the scene of the conversations recorded was often the village alehouse, where burghers, peasants, weavers, tailors, and shoemakers attack and vanquish in argument priests, monks, and even bishops. One striking feature of this new popular literature is the glorification of the German peasant. He is always represented as an upright, simple-minded, reflective, and intelligent person skilled in Bible lore, and even in Church history, and knowing as much of Christian doctrine “as three priests and more.” He may be compared with the idealised peasant of the pre-revolution literature in France, although he lacks the refinement, and knows nothing of high-flown moral sentiment; but he is much liker the Jak Upland or Piers Plowman of the days of the English Lollards. Jak Upland and Hans Mattock (Karsthans), both hate the clergy and abominate the monks and the begging friars, but the German exhibits much more ferocity than the Englishman. The Lollard describes the fat friar of the earlier English days with his swollen dewlap wagging under his chin “like a great goose-egg,” and contrasts him with the pale, poverty-stricken peasant and his wife, going shoeless to work over ice-bound roads, their steps marked with the blood which oozed from the cut feet; the German pamphleteer pours out an endless variety of savage nicknames—cheese-hunters, sausage-villains, begging-sacks, sourmilk crocks, the devil's fat pigs, etc. etc. It is interesting to note that most of this coarse controversial literature, which appeared between 1518 and 1523, came from those regions in South Germany where the social revolution had found an almost permanent establishment from the year 1503. It was the sign that the old spirit of communist and religious enthusiasm, which had shown itself spasmodically since the movement under Hans Böhm, had never been extinguished, and it was a symptom that a peasants' war might not be far off. Very little was needed to [pg 303] kindle afresh the smouldering hatred of the peasant against the priests. When German patriots declaimed against the exactions of the Roman Curia, the peasant thought of the great and lesser tithes, of the marriage, baptismal, and burial fees demanded from him by his own parish priest. When Reformers and popular preachers denounced the scandals and corruptions in the Church, the peasant applied them to some drunken, evil-living, careless priest whom he knew. It should be remembered that the character Karsthans was invented in 1520, not by a Lutheran sympathiser, but by Thomas Murner, one of Luther's most determined opponents,[301] when he was still engaged in writing against the clerical disorders of the times. This virulent attack on priests and monks had other sources than the sympathy for Luther.[302] It was the awakening of old memories, prompted partly by an underground ceaseless Hussite propaganda, and partly, no doubt, by the new ideas so universally prevalent.
Some of this coarse popular literature had a more direct connection with the Lutheran movement. A booklet which appeared in 1521, entitled The New and the Old God, and which had an immense circulation, may be taken as an example. Like many of its kind, it had an illustrated title-page, which was a graphic summary of its contents. There appeared as the representatives of the New God, the Pope, some Church Fathers, and beneath them, Cajetan, Silvester Prierias, Eck, and Faber; over-against them were the Old God as the Trinity, the four Evangelists, St. Paul with a sword, and behind him Luther. It attacked the ceremonies, the elaborate services, the obscure doctrines which had been thrust on the Church by bloody persecutions, and had [pg 304] changed Christianity into Judaism, and contrasted them with the unchanging Word of the Old God, with its simple story of salvation and its simple doctrines of faith, hope, and love. To the same class belong the writings of the voluminous controversialist, John Eberlin of Günzburg, whom his opponents accused of seducing whole provinces, so effective were his appeals to the “common” man. He began by a pamphlet addressed to the young Emperor, and published, either immediately before or during the earlier sitting of the Diet of Worms in 1521, a daring appeal, in which Luther and Ulrich von Hutten are called the messengers of God to their generation. It was the first of a series of fifteen, all of which were in circulation before the beginning of November of the same year.[303] They were called the “Confederates” (Bundsgenossen). The contents of these and other pamphlets by Eberlin may be guessed from their titles—Of the forty days' fast before Easter and others which pitifully oppress Christian folk. An exhortation to all Christians that they take pity on Nuns. How very dangerous it is that priests have not wives (the frontispiece represents the marriage of a priest by a bishop, in the background the marriage of two monks, and two musicians on a raised seat). Why there is no money in the country. Against the false clergy, bare-footed monks, and Franciscans, etc., etc. He exposes as trenchantly as Luther did the systematic robbery of Germany to benefit the Roman Curia—300,000 gulden sent out of the country every year, and a million more given to the begging friars. He wrote fiercely against the monks who take to this life, because they were too lazy to work like honest people, and called them all sorts of nicknames—cloister swine, the Devil's landsknechts, etc., twenty-four thousand of them sponge on Germany and four hundred thousand on the rest of Europe. He tells of a parish priest who thought that he must really begin to read the Scriptures: his [pg 305] parishioners are reading it, the mothers to the children and the house-fathers to the household; they trouble him with questions taken from it, and he is often at his wit's end to answer; he asked a friend where he ought to begin, and was told that there was a good deal about priests and their duties in the Epistles to Timothy and Titus; he read, and was horrified to find that bishops and priests ought to be “husbands of one wife,” etc. Eberlin had been a Franciscan monk, and was true to the revolutionary traditions of his Order. He preached a social as well as an evangelical reformation. The Franciscan Order sent forth a good many Reformers: men like Stephen Kampen, who had come to adopt views like those of Eberlin without any teaching but the leadings of his heart; or John Brissmann, a learned student of the Scholastic Theology, who like Luther had found that it did not satisfy the yearnings of his soul; or like Frederick Mecum (Myconius), whose whole spiritual development was very similar to that of Luther. Pamphlets like those of Eberlin, and preaching like that of Kampen, had doubtless some influence in causing popular risings against the priests that were not uncommon throughout Germany in 1521, after the Diet of Worms had ended its sittings—the Erfurt tumult, which lasted during the months of April, May, June, and July, may be instanced as an example.