Campeggio, like his predecessor, found that the German Nation was determinedly hostile to Rome. When he made his official entry into Augsburg, and raised his hands to give the usual benediction to the crowds of people, they received the blessing with open derision. He was so impressed with their attitude, that when he reached Nürnberg he doffed his official robes and entered the town as quietly as possible; indeed he received a message from the authorities asking him “to avoid making the sign of the cross, or using the benediction, seeing how matters then stood.” The presence of the Legate seemed to increase the anti-papal zeal of the people. The Pope was openly spoken of as Antichrist. Planitz, the energetic commissary of the Elector of Saxony, reckoned that nearly four thousand people in the city partook of the Sacrament of the Supper in both kinds, and informs us that among them were members of the Reichsregiment, and Isabella, Queen of Sweden, the sister of the Emperor.
Yet the experienced Italian diplomatist thought that he could discern signs more favourable to his master than [pg 323] the previous Diet had exhibited. The Reichsregiment, which had hitherto shielded the Lutheran movement, had lost the confidence of many classes of people, and was tottering to its fall. It had showed itself unable to enforce the Lands-Peace. It was the princes who had defeated the rising of the Free Nobles under Franz von Sickingen; it was the Swabian League, an association always devoted to the House of Austria, that had crushed the Franconian robber nobles; and both princes and League were irritated at the attempts of the Reichsregiment, which had endeavoured to rob them of the fruits of their successes. The cities had been made to bear all the taxation needed to support the central government, and the system of monopolies arising from combinations among the great commercial houses had been threatened. The cities and the capitalists had made a secret agreement with the Emperor, and von Hannart had been sent by the Emperor from Spain to the Diet of 1524 to work along with the towns for the overthrow of the central government. The Diet itself had passed a vote of no confidence in the government. In these troubled waters a crafty fisher might win some success.
His success was more apparent than real. The Diet of 1524 did not absolutely refuse to enforce the Edict of Worms against Luther and his followers; they promised to execute it “as well as they were able, and as far as was possible,” and the cities had made it plain that the enforcement was impossible. They renewed their demand for a General Council to meet in a suitable German town to settle the affairs of the Church in Germany, and again declared that meanwhile nothing should be preached contrary to the Word of God and the Holy Gospel. They went further, and practically resolved that a National Council, to deliberate on the condition of the Church in Germany, should meet at Speyer in November and make an interim settlement of its ecclesiastical affairs, to last until the meeting of a General Council. It is true that, owing to the exertions of the nuncio and of von Hannart, the phrase National Synod was omitted, and the meeting [pg 324] was to be one of the Estates of Germany at which the councillors and learned divines of the various princes were to formulate all the disputed points, and to consider anew the grievances of the German nation against the Papacy; but neither the nuncio nor von Hannart deceived themselves as to the real meaning of the resolution. “It will be a National Council for Germany,” said Hannart in his report. Nothing could be more alarming to the Pope. There was always a possibility of managing a General Council; but a German National Synod, including a large number of lay representatives, meeting in a German town, foreshadowed an independent National German Church which would insist on separation from the Roman See. The Pope wrote to Henry viii. of England asking him to harass the German merchants; he induced the Emperor to forbid the proposed meeting of the German States; and, what was more important, he instructed his nuncio to take steps secretly to form a league of German princes who were still favourable to maintaining the mediæval Church with its doctrines, ceremonies, and usages. This inaugurated the religious divisions of Germany.
§ 2. The beginnings of Division in Germany.
The Diet of Speyer (1524) may perhaps be taken as the beginning of the separation of Germany into two opposite camps of Protestant and Roman Catholic, although the real parting of the ways actually occurred after the Peasants' War. The overthrow, or at least discrediting of the Reichsregiment, placed the management of everything, including the settlement of the religious question, in the hands of the princes, none of whom, with the exception of the Elector of Saxony, cared much for the idea of nationality; while some of them, however anxious they were, or once had been, for ecclesiastical reforms, were genuinely afraid of the “tumult” which they believed might lurk behind any conspicuous changes in religious usages. Duke George of Saxony, who was keenly alive to [pg 325] the corruptions in the Church, dreaded above all things the beginnings of a Hussite movement in Germany. He knew that an assiduous, penetrating, secret Hussite, or rather Taborite propaganda had been going on in Germany for long. As early as the Leipzig Disputation (1519), when John Eck had skilfully forced Luther into the avowal that he approved of some things in the Hussite revolt, Duke George was seen to put his arms akimbo, to wag his long beard, and was heard to ejaculate, “God help us! The plague!” A fear of Hussite revolution displays itself in his correspondence, and very notably in his letters to Duke John of Saxony and to the Elector about the disturbances in Wittenberg. It was a triumph for the Roman Curia when its partisans, from Eck onwards, were able to fix the stigma of Hussitism on the Lutheran movement; and the career of the Zwickau Prophets, notwithstanding their suppression by Luther, was, to many, an indication of what might lie behind the new preaching. When the Peasants' War came in 1525, many of the earlier sympathisers with Luther saw in it an indication of the dangers into which they fancied that Luther was leading Germany. It is also to be noticed that many of the Humanists now began to desert the Lutheran cause; his Augustinian theology made them think that he was bent on creating a new Scholastic which seemed to them almost as bad as the old, which they had been delighted to see him attack.
The Roman Curia was quick to take advantage of all these alarms. Its efforts were so successful, that it was soon able to create a Roman Catholic Party among the South German princes, and to secure its steadfastness by promising a few concessions, and by permitting the authorities to retain for the secular uses of their States about one-fifth of the ecclesiastical revenues in each State. The leading States in this Roman Catholic federation were Austria and Bavaria, and so long as Duke George lived, Ducal Saxony in middle Germany. This naturally called forth a distinctly Lutheran party, no longer national, which included the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Margraf [pg 326] of Brandenburg, his brother Albert, and many others. Albert was at the head of the Teutonic Order in East Prussia. He secularised his semi-ecclesiastical principality, became the first Duke of Prussia, and his State from the beginning adopted the evangelical faith.
It was not until the Peasants' War was over that this division was clearly manifested. The Reformation had spread in simple natural fashion, without any attempt at concerted action, or any design to impose a new and uniform order of public worship, or to make changes in ecclesiastical government. Luther himself was not without hopes that the great ecclesiastical principalities might become secular lordships, that the bishops would assume the lead in ecclesiastical reform, and that there would be a great National Church in Germany, with little external change—enough only to permit the evangelical preaching and teaching. It is true that the Emperor had shown clearly his position by sending martyrs to the stake in the Netherlands, and that symptoms of division had begun to manifest themselves during 1524, as we have seen. Still these things did not prevent such an experienced statesman as the Elector of Saxony from confidently expecting a peaceful and, so far as Germany was concerned, a unanimous and hearty solution of the religious difficulties. The storm burst suddenly which was to shatter these optimistic expectations, and to change fundamentally the whole course of the Lutheran Reformation. This was the Peasants' War.